by Lari Don
“I am Sylvie’s big brother and I am here to drive you away. All of you. First the musicians, then the faeries.” He took a step towards her.
Helen lifted the heavy sword and pointed it at him. The first time she had pointed it at a person. It wobbled in her hand. “Don’t come any closer.”
He looked at the sword and smiled cynically. “You’re more afraid of that sword than I am! It’s useless in your hands.”
He looked over her shoulder at the laughing students squashed in the minibus, and grinned more widely. “Like baby rabbits in a burrow. Easy prey, trapped in a small space.”
“How are you going to drive them away?” Helen wanted to keep him talking.
“Faeries can’t dance to slashed pipes, splintered fiddles, ripped drums and bent flutes. Children can’t play with bitten fingers and mangled hands. I will use my teeth and my claws to kill your concert.”
He walked forward.
Helen swung the sword at him clumsily.
“Sylvie!” she called again. “Sylvie! I have a plan!”
In the circling pack, a wolf laughed.
“Sylvie, please listen to my plan!”
“Sylvie is not listening to you.” The boy took another step. “Now, human girl. Which hand do you play with?” He licked his lips. “Which hand do I bite to stop you playing ever again?”
“I need both my hands to drive the faeries away.”
He raised his black eyebrows.
“I need both my hands, and all those hands in the minibus, to drive them away forever.
“If you send us away, scared and bleeding, the faeries will just find more musicians. You know they will. You can’t injure every fiddler in Scotland, not without someone noticing.
“But if I drive the faeries away completely, then you can enjoy your forest again.
“Sylvie! Listen to my plan!”
Yann’s voice came breathless from the other side of the bus. “Helen, just tell everyone your plan! Sylvie’s listening, even if she isn’t answering.”
“Alright. This is what we do. The wolves back off and let me talk to the students, then we get safely out of the bus and into the mound, and James leaves the mound.”
“No. I will let none of that happen.” Sylvie’s brother smiled with all his long white teeth and shook his shaggy dark head.
“Yes,” Helen insisted. “You let us in, and him out. Then we fail.”
“You what?”
“We fail. Just like we have all along. Sylvie will understand.”
“How do you fail?”
“We play really badly. We embarrass the Queen, we annoy her guests, we drive them away … with dreadful music. If they’re the best audience in the world, then they must hate bad music as much as they love good music. The Professor even said they would leave the revels if we didn’t make a good impression.”
“I like it,” said Lee, who was breathing lightly in the welcome break as everyone round the bus listened to Helen. “Faeries are an audience worth playing to for a hundred years, because we are so sensitive to good music. But we are just as sensitive to bad music. Her plan could work. Let her do it, fur-boy.”
The wolf boy snarled.
“I don’t like it,” called Yann. “How do you get out?”
“We use iron to stop the door closing behind us, and when the faeries leave in disgust, so do we.”
“No,” said the wolf brother, stalking towards her. Running his long fingers though his black hair, pulling it forward over his forehead and cheeks. “No musician goes in there tonight. Not with all their fingers and ears.” He began to flicker.
“No!” said Sylvie suddenly, walking into the dim edge of the light. “The human girl could be right. If we drive away these few musicians, the Queen will find more; if we humiliate her and drive away her guests, she won’t come back for years. Let the human girl try.”
But the wolf was on all fours now, stalking low to the ground, towards Helen.
Helen couldn’t back off, she’d fall into the bright light round the minibus, and it seemed very important to keep this terror private. So she stood still and tried to hold her gaze steady on his green eyes.
He moved closer, and lower.
Then Sylvie leapt on her brother. She knocked him to the ground as a girl, but by the time she got her teeth round his muzzle, she was a wolf.
They wrestled for a moment, then both leapt up. They stood stiff-legged, ears up and hackles bristling, with their two tails, one silver, one black, curled right over their backs. They stared at each other, battling silently and unmoving for dominance. Sylvie was much smaller than her brother, but she refused to cringe to the ground in front of him.
Helen took her chance. She spoke to the darkness, to the rest of the pack. “Sylvie supports me. Listen to your sister. Let me talk to the musicians and tell them how to defeat the Faery Queen.
“While I talk to them, you keep to the shadows. If you scare them, it will be harder to control them.”
“Like sheep or deer, you mean?” the wolf boy sneered, as he flickered back up onto his human legs, still glaring at his sister.
“No. Like ordinary people, who don’t expect to find wolves or faeries or dragons on their door-steps.”
She stared at him, waiting for his agreement. He licked his lips, then nodded.
Helen moved into the light, and opened the door of the minibus.
She climbed in, closed the door, then realized she was still holding a sword. She pushed it hastily under a seat, with a familiar jarring clang.
“Was that a playground joke, primary girl?” Zoe said. “Trapping us all in this smelly bus while you wander about outside?”
Helen shook her head. “The Professor’s venue staff are on their way. We’re nearly ready.
“First, I have a message from the Professor. Tonight, she wants us to play our absolute worst.”
“What?” a dozen voices asked in surprise.
“She knows we can play well, so tonight, she wants us to play our worst.”
“Why?”
Helen took a deep breath.
“She has a theory. Anyone can play music badly. If I picked up your flute, Juliet, I could miss notes, fumble a melody, play out of tune, and it would be bad, but it would be unspectacular and uninteresting. The Professor has a theory that the best players can play the absolute worst. If we put our musical minds to it, we can play really badly; painfully and ear-rattlingly badly. So she wants us to play our worst this evening.”
Helen thought she’d explained her plan convincingly and persuasively, but from the shocked faces and shaking heads around her, it was clear she had failed.
“She can’t have meant that.”
“You must have misunderstood, Helen.”
“She wants us to play our best, not our worst, primary girl.”
“We can’t throw away all that rehearsing!”
Some of them started to get off their seats, picking up their instrument cases.
Helen rubbed her hands nervously on her dusty old jeans. What else could she do?
Then she remembered what was in the pocket of these jeans.
She half stood up, so she could fit her fingers into the tiny pocket, and pulled out the one remaining thread of the Fairy Flag.
She looked at it. Pale and very fragile, it had worked, briefly, on her eyes. Did it have any other powers?
She opened her mouth and laid the thread on her tongue.
She felt an immediate fizzing behind her teeth.
She spoke again. “You are the best musicians the Professor has ever heard.”
Her voice rolled round her mouth, it bounced round her skull, it echoed round the minibus. All the students turned to look at her.
“You are the only musicians she would challenge to do this.”
Everyone sat down, eyes wide, mouths closed, listening to Helen’s voice.
“You are the only musicians she would trust to give their best skills to playing the worst music ever.�
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They were nodding, smiling.
All except Zoe at the back, who was frowning, and struggling to speak. “No. Just because you didn’t get to play a solo … you don’t get to ruin it for the rest of us.
“Dr Lermontov,” Zoe appealed in a faint voice, “Dr Lermontov, you won’t let her do this, will you?”
Helen turned round, to see a puzzled Dr Lermontov in the driver’s seat, pulling a furry hat down over his ears.
He looked hard at Helen, and at the bus full of smiling students. “I’m not sure. But I do know that I heard noises tonight, just before we got back in the bus, which I haven’t heard since my childhood in Russia. I remember that my grandmother believed if strange little people give you strange advice on the edge of the forest, it is wise to follow it. So I think we will indeed see how badly we can play. I shall conduct you in the worst concert of our lives!”
The rest of the bus cheered, but Zoe still shook her head.
Helen ran her tongue over the roof of her mouth, and aimed a warm stream of words at the back of the bus. “Zoe, you can play a solo if you like. Improvise your own answer to the Professor’s challenge.”
Zoe smiled and nodded, slowly.
Helen grinned. “We can all come up with our own ways to play the worst music ever. The Professor is interested in our original ideas. She will be listening very carefully!”
“We could all play different tunes at once,” suggested Alice.
“We could use different tempos, starting and finishing separately,” offered Amelia.
“Or play a tune backwards?” Catriona wondered.
There were giggles at that suggestion, then lots more students started having ideas.
“Play in the style of an old man farting, or a baby burping,” Tommy laughed.
“Or play your wolf note, Helen,” offered Juliet.
“Yes! Play the notes you know your instrument hates,” agreed Zoe.
Now everyone was laughing, and everyone had ideas of the best ways to play horrible music. All shouting out at once.
Helen sighed in relief. The students might be enchanted, but at least they were having fun …
She swallowed the fizzing taste in her mouth, opened the door, and said loudly, “Let’s go and do our worst!”
She felt the night air lifted by a sigh of relief, and heard feet, hooves, claws and paws moving back into the dark.
As everyone got out of the minibus and took their instruments out of their cases, tall cloaked figures came out of the forest, with high torches flaming above them.
“Front of house?” enquired Dr Lermontov.
Helen watched as the summer school students filed after the torch-bearing faeries. Then she reached into the minibus, to pull out the sword and the spanner it had clanged against. She had recognised the sound of bronze hitting iron.
She whispered into the darkness as she followed the line of torches, “Bye, Sapphire. I’ll be back out before your tail grows longer or your fire burns hotter.”
Then she spoke to the silvery figure walking on her left.
“Sylvie, the wolves I hurt with the sword. Do they need any first aid?”
“We have our own healers. You have done enough to them.”
There was an awkward silence.
Helen spoke again. “Thanks for trusting me and for saving me from your brother.”
Sylvie growled. “Now repay that trust and drive the faeries away, or my brothers will never listen to another word I say!” She faded into the darkness.
There was a swish of scented velvet to Helen’s right.
“Lee. Here’s your sword back. I didn’t really like using it.”
“You wielded it well, Helen, and you will wield your bow well in there too. I’m sure your plan will work. I trust you. And thank you for trusting me, when no one else did.”
The velvet swirled away, but Helen heard a whisper, “Please remember, you’d be foolish to trust me any other time …”
Then Helen felt a light touch on her shoulder.
“Bye, Lavender. See you soon.”
“I’m coming in with you, Helen. Sitting on your shoulder, as usual.”
Helen laughed nervously. “You can’t sit on my shoulder when I’m playing. If you sit on my left shoulder, I’ll crush you with the fiddle; if you sit on my right shoulder, I’ll jerk you off as I move my bow arm. And if the Faery Queen saw you, she would eat you up like a party snack! Stay out here and wait for me. I won’t be long. I promise. You know I try to keep my promises.”
Lavender flew off her shoulder, whispering, “Please be careful, Helen.”
Then she felt the sudden warm bulk of Yann overtaking her.
“I wish I was coming in with you, Helen.”
“You can’t, Yann. I have to do this task all on my own. You will take James home safely, won’t you? If I know I can trust you with that, then I can concentrate on getting everyone else out.”
“Of course you can trust me.”
“I know that,” she said. “I’ve always known that.”
She walked away from her friends towards the long dark hump of the faery mound.
The tall torch bearers stood by the hill, a wide arch opened and golden light flooded out.
Everyone else stepped in confidently and happily, with no idea of where they were heading. Helen hesitated. If she walked in, would she ever walk out again?
She waited in the shadows until even the torch bearers were inside. As she stepped into the mound, she punched the spanner into the side of the arch. Then she walked into the Faery Queen’s midsummer revels.
Chapter 23
Helen walked into a huge feasting hall.
The students ahead of her were staring at the room. The domed ceiling was hung with huge circles of wood, candles burning on their upper rims. The walls were decorated with tapestries of hunts, feasts and dances, framed by bone-white antlers and embossed bronze shields.
The students looked hungrily at tables covered in ashets of roast meat, poached fruit, honeycombs and warm bread, jugs of ale and steaming cogs of mead.
Helen thought she’d better get them playing before they were tempted to eat anything.
Then she noticed the guests. As the students stared at the faery splendour, the guests at the revels stared just as hard at their musical entertainment. Their shining cloaks flung over chairs and stools, their smooth skin pale in the candlelight, their beautiful faces gazing in wonder at the young musicians in the centre of the hall.
Helen looked at the audience. Where was the Professor?
She couldn’t see her, but she could see so many other welcoming enthusiastic faces. Hands applauding encouragingly as the summer school students got their instruments ready.
Suddenly Helen wondered what harm it could do to play properly first. Surely they could show their skills first, then do the appalling music later, to drive the faeries away at the end. Then the faeries would know what they were missing, and Helen could hear, the students could hear, the applause and encores they deserved.
Helen smiled at the audience, and tapped her toes on the floor, in the rhythm of the Professor’s music. The faeries began to clap along. Helen pulled her fiddle case off her shoulders. If the Professor wasn’t here, the Professor couldn’t stop her playing a solo, just a quick one, all on her own.
Then she heard a voice. “Are you the sandwich lady?”
She spun round, and saw a small boy at the end of the hall, sitting below two tall golden thrones. Both thrones were covered with feathery canopies, thatched with wings of all colours: blue, red, yellow, white, purple.
Helen moved closer. She recognized the overlapping arrangement of the feathers. They weren’t bird wings. They were flower fairy wings.
These faeries decorated their thrones with flower fairy wings!
Helen swallowed the sour taste in her mouth and put her fiddle away. They didn’t deserve her music. She must drive these faeries away, before their cruelty spread further through the forest
.
She looked down from the canopies to the people seated on the thrones. She saw the Faery King’s stern face, asking a question with his raised eyebrows. Helen nodded, once. He smiled.
Then she looked straight at the Faery Queen, seeing her for the first time without a veil of distance.
The Queen, dressed in pure radiant white, held out her slim hands. “Helen. You have provided music for me. How kind. You may start now.”
“Not yet.”
Helen looked down at the floor below the Queen’s throne. There was James, sitting on a cushion, pale, grubby and bleary.
“Come on, James. Time to go home.”
“What a shame,” crooned the Queen. “Do let him stay for just one tune.”
“No,” said Helen. “No music until he has gone. Bedtime, James. Off you go. My friend Yann will take you home. Go home and give Emma a cuddle.”
James stood up and repeated, “Are you the sandwich lady?”
Helen grinned. “Yes. Did you like them?”
“Not really. I like sandwiches with crusts, they’re chewier.” He trotted across the hall, towards the arched exit.
Helen shook her head. Even her picnics had been a failure this week.
Then she stared in surprise at the Queen. Now that James had moved away, Helen could see the Queen’s feet for the first time. Her pointy, stiletto shoes; bright white with gold heels, perfectly polished and free of dust.
At last, Helen realized that the Faery Queen had organized the summer school herself. She had written the music for her revels with her own fair hands. Of course.
“Hello, Professor,” she said to the Queen.
“Hello, Helen,” the Queen answered. “Aren’t you slow to catch on? Time for my revels. We are all waiting.”
“I hope you think it’s worth waiting for.”
Helen grabbed her fiddle and joined the huddle of musicians.
She heard the pulse of hoof beats outside and grinned. James was going home.
Then she licked her lips. Her tongue was no longer fizzing. Her words would have no special power. Would the musicians still agree to play their worst?
“Remember …” she whispered. “Play your wolf notes. Your sharps and flats. Play backwards. And whatever you do, don’t play along with the person next to you. Do your worst! And have fun!”
