Gossamer Axe Read Online Free PDF

the magic slowly clearing from her head.
    When she felt she could walk, she set Ceis back on its stand and made her way shakily to the bathroom mirror.
    She was almost shocked: she had not been this young in a long time, not since she had stumbled out of the Realm and into France of 1782.
    “Old friend,” she said, “what have you done? I hardly look eighteen.”
    *good*
    “But why?”
    Ceis was silent. The doorbell rang: her first student of the day. Hoping that Susan would not comment on her appearance, she threw the drape over the Sidh harp and ran for the door. Her steps were light, youthful, as though she were, once again, the young woman who knew nothing of Sidh palaces or American cities, but only the green meadows and pastures of Eriu.

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CHAPTER THREE
    « ^ »
    The morning sun topped the peaks on the east side of the valley and splashed its light across the meadows around Kevin’s house. Indian paintbrush glowed red-orange on rocky slopes that led up to pine forest, columbine was a blue and white maiden in the shade of aspen trees, wild roses twined along the split-rail fence beside the road.
    Kevin washed his face in the kitchen sink to clear away the sleep and looked out from his front door while he dried off. Saturday morning in the Rockies. Blue sky. Yellow sun. Green fields. Old Wester’s mare had foaled that spring, and now the mother and child were having a fine run along the stretch of pastureland that ran beside the big pond where birch and cottonwood grew. The foal slowed near the fence and prepared, his forelegs beating the air and his hooves flashing in the new light.
    “Hey, dude,” said Kevin. He smiled and waved at the animals. Bless them, he thought. They’ve got nothing more to do than be horses.
    While his eggs were cooking, he wandered into the living room and picked up the old slide guitar that he had brought back from the school. Since the night he had been given it in a dressing room in Cincinnati, it had always been with him; and every scratch and dent in its battered body was a story about the long-dead bluesman who had once played it. A chip on the neck came from a rickety stage in Detroit where the old man had played nearly doubled over from the ulcer that had killed him a few years later. And there was a burn in the headstock from the time that Frankie had shoved the filter end of his cigarette under the taut strings behind the nut—
Just a minute, Kevvy: gotta show you something
.—while he demonstrated some old lick, forgetting, as he showed the skinny white boy how to play the blues, that the cigarette was there until it had burned down and scarred the finish with a brown smear the color of old coffee.
    Kevin took up what had once been a bottle of Coricidin, fitted the empty glass cylinder onto the little finger of his left hand, and lightly touched the strings with it while he picked, scraping short, taut glissandos out of the old guitar. Blind Frankie. No one could play the blues like Frankie. No one. Not B.B. Not Clapton. Not Duane. No one. It was one of the incredible but unremarkable ironies of the music business that Frankie had died in a slum bar on the outskirts of Cincinnati, unknown, unrecognized.
    Kevin scraped away at the strings, searching for the same response, the same feeling that had sprung so effortlessly from the hands of the old black man. This guitar had cried, wailed, wept when Frankie had played; and in the dim corners of smoky bars from Harlem to New Orleans, bars ripe with the odors of whiskey and cheap cologne, people had cried, wailed, and wept along with it, bright tears starting from dark eyes, running down ebony cheeks.
    Frankie had always played the same songs, but they had nonetheless always been different, changing in a thousand different ways that Kevin still could scarcely name. Now and again, the old man had shoved the guitar and slide into Kevin’s hands, and there had been indulgent smiles throughout the bar at the sight of the white