A Sleeping Good-Looker.
Women aren’t fools.
He’d sleep and sleep forever.
The Best Boy, the Brightest Boy
Megan Engelhardt
Once, at the beginning, you asked me why you were brought here. This is what I told you: your parents, your town, made a deal. I would rid them of their plague of rats, and they would pay me. I cleared the town of pests, easily done, and returned for my payment. They laughed at me and tried to send me on my way with far, far less than they promised. Money is not important. Deals are. That is why I took you.
One hundred and thirty children I led from the town, across the bridge the villagers named Death of Pests, across the fields all chewed and fallow, into the mountains that closed behind us with a snap like the jaws of a good rat terrier. And you were there, my last boy, the least boy, the leaping boy who danced and twirled with the others in your magical ecstasy.
That is where the story ends, with the mountains closed and the town waking in weeping and sorrow. That is where their story ends, with no rats and no children and no future. But that is where our story starts, child, in the halls of the underground king. In my home of cobwebs and chimes, chimes, always chimes, we played our games, do you remember? Fun games: games of running and hiding and choices and death. Oh, what games we played! Recall, sweet child, the shouts and cries in the tunnels and catacombs! Gleeful cacophony echoing back and forth, day and night, night and forever—sweet hymns to my ears.
One hundred and thirty children I took into my maze, into my playground of red dirt and bones left to rot in the dark. Five crawled out again. One carried another in his arms. Pity has no place in my palace of pain. I killed them where they stood. One crept into my room as I slept and tried to steal my magic pipe. He burned, flames from the wards of protection creeping into his eyes. One tried to charm me, the beautiful little wench, but I am uncharmable, I am the charmer of stars and worlds and rats and children, and she was clumsy and young and when I kissed her forehead she shrieked and fell and fell and fell and died from the fall that I placed into her mind.
And then there was one.
Did I not take you in my arms and tend to your wounds? Did I not taste your ensorcelled blood? Did I not reach into your chest with my music, my magic, and burn on your heart the runes that claimed you as my own? Did I not name you Piper’s Boy, Heir Under the Mountain, Victor of the Maze?
Did I not make you my son?
Your past life: gone. Your brothers and sisters: dead. Your town: left with only the stigma of greed as a fairytale moral. I was all you had: I, the musical mage, the maledict merchant. I was your father and mother and master and friend, and you learned to love me.
I taught you the way of the music, as I was once taught, in my infancy, in the caves of the dead by brave foolish love-struck Orpheus. I wove the spells around you as they had been woven around me by a beautiful white kitsune, nine tails flowing around me like snow—spells of protection, of long life, of shrewdness. I taught you the magic of calling, of binding, of controlling. You followed me, small child, smart child, savvy child, down the tunnels and through the mountains and into the other worlds where I taught you how to ply my—our—trade.
Did I not clothe you in the colors of the rainbow, my bright boy, my best boy, my bang on the drum boy? You knew the truth of the magic lay in the beat more than the music, the rhythm that pounds in their hearts and souls and blood. I played my pipe but the pipe is not magic itself—when we toured the mystical goblin markets of the Summerlands, you beat the drum and gathered swarms of pixies, bands of banshees, gobs and orcs and Redcaps and nixes. Do you remember, Piper’s Boy, my boy, how sad you were when the Fair Folk ignored your drum and turned you away from their doors? I told you not to worry. The Good Ones know me and my piping well. They are beyond our power, and none has ever followed the calling of the Piper.
But goblins are easy and pixies will follow anyone who favors them with a smile and a laugh. Even then you had both, my joyful powerful child, you smiled and laughed when the magic danced through your bones. I smiled with you, for I knew how it felt, the red hot power of the calling curse pounding in your veins. I was so proud of you that day, my good son, when you drowned the pixies in the rivers of molten gold that flow through our kingdom and lured the goblins into fields of prickly vines that ate their green skin in strips. And you smiled and smiled and laughed at their screams, and you were then the true Heir Under the Mountain.
Such years we had together, piper and son, drummer and father. We picked our targets well: those who would not pay the price we asked, the centers of greed and hubris in the human world. Oh, what rivers of blood we drew from men and beasts! The pain we caused! The treasures we took! They called us plagues, they called us crusades, they called us sickness and abduction. Never could they catch us, and never did they learn their lessons.
And we obeyed the rules, did we not, obedient child? For there are rules. We cannot break the deal. We cannot refuse the payment. We cannot play our fiercest tunes where loyalty, honesty, lawfulness live. But lucky us! Man never keeps his word. Man never pays his fees. And when they broke the deals, we took what we wanted.
Your desires were powerful and foreign to me. I wanted nothing more than revenge, than justice—and, once in a while, to play in my maze. But you wanted more, my human child, my hungry child, my happy grinning deadly child. You chose playmates from your wages, brought them to the maze, ran them around and around like mice with missing tails. When you caught them, they sang like nothing ever before had sung under the mountain.
I hunt rarely, once in a hundred years or more, but you left often—fifty years between, twenty years between, five years between. You brought back more—ten children, thirty children, one hundred children. You threatened the sanctuary of the world under the mountain. I loved you, child of Hamelin, child of hunting, child of harm, but no magic could bind you. You had taken too many of my charms from me.
I cast you out. O woe and darkness under the mountain! I raged for days—years—generations at the loss, for you had been my pride and joy, my malicious son, my macabre son, my missing son. You begged to stay, of course you wished to stay with your maze and your playmates, but under the mountain is still my place of power. Your borrowed and stolen magic could not oppose me there. The dark welcomed you when I opened up the mountain and banished you away.
I watch you sometimes. You beat your drum still, on stages small and large. They love you, you know. They follow you and you catch them, just as you always did. You took the magic from me, and put it into the music you learned, and then you gave it a name. When you named it, I knew you had not forgotten me. For what else would you have been thinking of when you named your musical trap? Clear in your mind were the mountains that moved to bring you into your once kingdom. When they scream the words of your songs, loving you and your music magic even as you kill them, they pay homage to me, and my pipe, and the rocks that rolled away to trap the children of Hamelin.
You and your music, my rock star, my raw star, my raging star. You and your rock and roll magic.
Lure
Amanda C. Davis
My mother told us the story that all the water mothers tell.
There once was a water maid. She was bright as the shimmering surface and dark as the sandy deeps.
(We sighed to imagine ourselves so bright and dark.)
One day, as the water maid rode the white crest of waves, she saw an island man walking the shore, casting his line. He was fine and handsome in all the ways men can be. She thought she would die unless she knew him. So she swam closer to the shore where he fished.
(My mother’s eyes grew wide here in warning. We giggled with horror at the water maid’s incaution.)
His hook fell near her in the water. She called for a fish, caught its lip on the hook, and let him reel it in. He rejoiced and she glowed in his rejoicing. She did the same for the next cast and the next. But soon there were no more fish to come
for him. He decided to leave, and cast once more.
The water maid couldn’t bear to lose him. So she put the hook in her own mouth and let him reel her to shore. As she slid from cool sea to hot sand she gazed into his face and he stared at her shimmer, at her depth. His face filled her with such joy that she died there under the sun. She drowned happily in air, for she knew that every moment they were together, they had been in love.
(Love, we said. Drowning, we said. We whispered their merits at night, crammed together into seaweed-beds as if we were still eggs. We all wanted to see island sons, if only to spurn them.)
So we did not swim too close to the shore.
Most of us.
A strange thing: advancing upon hidden knowledge often reveals other truths you do not expect. I knew, from stories, I would find the island sons casting far, standing in waves that slap their hips like sharp flashing fins. I did not know that the island fathers tell their sons of the bright, dark, deep and shimmering thing they might snag on their lines. They whisper this story by night in land-homes near the shore. I have swum to the wave-breaking cliffs beneath their windows. I, a water maid, have listened and heard.
And I have watched.
One of the island sons casts farther, stands deeper in the waves. I watch him every day. He catches his family a bounty, and glows like sunken gold. He listens hard to the stories. He watches the waves with a hope I know well. He is fine and handsome in all the ways a man can be.
I know the stories of land and sea. I have made my choice.
Loving. Drowning. The brights and darks of my life crowd out the caution. Tomorrow I will meet the island son. I will let him see my face. I would rather drown for loving, and love deeply for a moment, than continue to love day after day after day and watch him walk away each night, alone and glowing gold, like the last sunlight over the ocean.
Diamond and Toad
A Poem for Two Voices
Megan Engelhardt
Diamond
Toad
We needed food, clean water, firewood
For this winter that never ends.
Someone had to go.
I went.
Took the biosuit into the wilderness
And headed for town—
What’s left of it.
The old woman was outside
Without a suit.
I thought she was an angel.
Precious jewels
Tumbling from her mouth with every word
Fresh flowers untainted by radiation
Filling up the house
with the saintfresh smell of roses.
I asked her how.
She told me not to worry,
Asked for food and drink.
She was going to die anyway
Out there without a suit
So I gave her a last meal.
A few bites and sips:
All I could spare.
More, really.
The old woman thanked me,
Called me
Beautiful, but not practical
She left the old woman
And came running home
With rubies clinking inside her helmet
And no supplies.
You can’t eat jewels and lilies are poison
And the winter never ends.
So I went.
I didn’t want
Diamonds and rubies
Knocking against my teeth
Roses and thorns
Scratching my lips
Blood on the petals
Beautiful, but not practical.
I wish I was like my sister
Practical, not beautiful
For all I tried to change before,
So I only gave her exactly what I could spare
And no more
(On the way back from town
With supplies in my sack)
The old woman smiled
Like she knew what I had done
And seen my calculations in her head
She said she had a gift for me.
I protested, not wanting to add
To the piles of jewels we could not use.
Practical, not beautiful,
She assured me,
And the toads began to fall from my lips.
We live in a palace of rubies
With diamond windows
And floors strewn with fresh rose petals
And rooms full of snakes,
Toads, lizards—
Food for us and food for others who would trade
Dresses of snakeskin, tools of diamond
Beautiful and practical
And we will never go hungry again
Until the end of the endless winter.
For Taylor, On the Occasion of Her Fourteenth Birthday, with Love
Megan Engelhardt
This world is a fairytale place
more than you know.
Not the pink bubble frilly tulle dancing on a cloud land.
Not the singing mice magic coach bibbidy-bobbidy-boo land.
This is the shadowland far from home full of wonder and peril kind.
Still, there are magic words that work here.
“Please” and “thank you” and “I’m sorry” and “Amen.”
“Can you come get me?” and “I love you”—
but be careful with that last one.
There are rules that will serve you well
in city streets and suburban cul-de-sacs and country lanes
as well as enchanted forests and fairy castles.
Share your food with the hungry
and your drink with those who thirst.
Be polite to strangers.
Sometimes you’ll entertain angels
and never know until it’s over.
Spindles prick unwary fingers
so practice your sewing now
before your hands are shaky and uncertain.
Thorn hedges can be fought through,
but make sure it’s worth it,
because you will get scratched on the way.
Laughter scares the night away and can be
a light in dark places.
Swords cut both ways:
so do words.
Use each with care.
Some beasts are princes inside
and some princes are beasts.
You can see the difference if you look.
And you should look.
Rule like the queen you are,
dance like the princess you are,
work like the peasant you are.
Say your prayers and listen to your parents
even when you think they’re speaking nonsense.
Fools were once revered as holy, and anyway,
your parents aren’t fools.
Look up. The sun is there. I promise.
Never forget, in your time of need,
where home is
and who you can run to
to keep the monsters at bay.
Above all—
beyond all else—
remember this:
Fairy tales have happy endings,
and yours?
As a daughter of the King?
As a princess of another world—
the true shining no more darkness beyond the veil world,
the sweet water lion’s mane of lilies never ending country—
your ending is the happiest.
Questing for Princesses
Amanda C. Davis
Prince Harold swore off marriage at the age of six, when his older brother Yancey came riding home with a new bride and a waterfall of half-healed scars along his right side that he called “the unexpected bonus for winning a princess from a fire-breathing dragon.”
Harold eyed the puckered skin on Yancey’s neck and cheek. “Does it hurt?”
“Sure,” said Yancey, tugging Harold’s earlobe until he flinched. “But finding the right princess is hard stuff. You have to take the risk
if you want the reward. Anyway, just wait ‘til you meet Celiura. She’s amazing. Totally worth it. She’s going to be your new sister, you know.”
Harold carried the ring at the royal wedding. Immediately afterward he ran back to the chapel, where he threw himself on his knees and prayed that he wouldn’t mind not getting married if it meant he never ever ever had to fight a fire-breathing dragon.
“Not everyone has to fight a dragon,” said a girl’s voice from nearby.
He turned. Behind him was a ward of the chapel, little older than he, sweeping up rose petals and dove-feathers and confetti left over from the wedding. Or at least, she had been sweeping; now she seemed content to watch the prince and thread an unbroken feather into her hair.
“Are you sure?” said Harold.
She nodded solemnly. “Sometimes it’s a giant.”
“A giant,” Harold wheezed. He imagined toy soldiers rent limb from limb, then himself in the same sad state. He ran back out to the feast in the courtyard, hid under the table, and was only lured out again by the promise of wedding cake.
Not long after came the start of school, where Harold’s decision was reinforced by bloodcurdling tales from his schoolmates about the trials their brothers and cousins and fathers had undergone in bringing their princesses home. Griffins! Sea monsters! Poisons and pirates and demons and witches who rode cauldrons and walking houses! He told Yancey’s story, of course, but while the boys were duly impressed, it made Harold’s stomach turn to think of all those dangerous deeds, all those wounded princes.
On the night of his sixteenth birthday, his party (the official one, in the banquet hall, not the unmonitored afterparty with his six best schoolmates later that night in a forgotten tower) was interrupted by a knock on the door. It was a bedraggled beggar-woman, shrouded in her squalor, who entreated him for a night of shelter, though all she had to offer was a single rose. Harold shrugged and agreed, and had her led to the kitchen for a warm meal and lodgings. The woman looked surprised. He stuck the rose into the bouquet at the head table and forgot about it.
When the castle awoke the next morning, the woman was gone. In her place was a caged dove cooing merrily under a lance of sunlight. Harold (bleary-eyed, feeling, in the afterparty’s aftereffects, both like a full man and a very foolish boy) took the cage to his room and let the dove fly out the window. He’d never felt quite right about caged birds. He gave the empty cage to the chapel girl, Bess, to hang herbs in.
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