The Piper's Price

by Audrey Greathouse

  “If it’s alright… I’m just going to go to bed.”

  “Very reasonable.” Tiger Lily took the kettle off the stove, topping off her own cup of tea instead. “I might go back and get a few more hours myself. Was the mission successful though?”

  Gwen smiled and pulled the music box out of her satchel.

  Tiger Lily’s lips lifted and uttered the single, happy word, “Wonderful.” Gwen trudged off to the spare bedroom, but before she could close the door behind her. Tiger Lily asked, “What comes next?”

  “We wait for further orders.” Gwen shrugged. “Foxglove returned last night to tell Peter we have everything we needed to gather. He promised to send my sister once it was time to begin the search for the Piper.”

  “Sleep well then,” Tiger Lily advised. “It sounds like this adventure is just getting started.”

  Gwen didn’t need to be told to sleep well. Exhausted and delirious, she collapsed on the bed. It took effort to crawl under the covers. She couldn’t be bothered with changing into pajamas—she fell asleep in the alien apparel Dawn had bought for her. Her sleep-deprived flight home melted away in her memory until she felt she must still be at Jay’s house, cuddled against him on the couch. She fell in and out of the dream through the early hours of the morning, and then dipped into a heavy sleep that lasted until the afternoon gave way to evening.

  She awoke, again, with a tiny hand’s ecstatic shaking and whispered excitement. “Gwen, Gwen!”

  There was no use pretending not to notice. Too much energy was launching itself at her. Gwen stirred, flailing in an attempt to deter the stimulus. In response, her awakener climbed on top of her.

  “Ooph.” She groaned, feeling winded as a child sprawled out on top of her.

  “Gwen!” Rosemary cried, her voice no longer even trying to be quiet. She knew her sister was awake. She’d seen this trick before.

  As Gwen opened her eyes and met Rosemary’s overwhelming stare, she heard laughter in the doorway. “I tried to let you sleep,” Tiger Lily apologized. “But after a while, she just couldn’t be contained.”

  “Tiger Lily made me spaghetti—only the noodles were all curly!”

  “There’s still some warm on the stove if you want dinner,” their hostess offered.

  Gwen ignored these details, if she even heard them. “Hey there, Rosemary.” She slumped the girl aside on the bed as she sat up, and then gave her a big hug, burying her face in her voluminous hair. She smelled like sun-warmed mud and dandelion milk. Their mother would have had a heart attack if she saw the dirt-smudged girl who was once her pristine little daughter.

  It felt good to have Rosemary back. It was easier to feel comfortable when her little sister was safe and in sight. “Did Peter come back with you?”

  Rosemary shook her head. “No, but I brought Foxglove and Hawkbit.”

  Hearing their names, the two fairies flew into the room—abandoning the tea leaves they’d been chewing together—corkscrewing through the air and blurring their purple and yellow streams of fairy dust.

  “They’re going to help us. Peter and I figured everything out—I know how to find Piper!”

  Foxglove and Hawkbit began explaining all the intricacies of the plan, their words all running together as they rushed out of their mouths. Tiger Lily listened to their trills, slumped against the doorway. She knew the fairy language backward and forward. Gwen, however, had to wait for Rosemary’s version in English.

  “You have the patch and the music box that plays Piper’s song, right?” She didn’t even wait for her sister to get a full syllable out of her mouth. “Great! Then we can start tonight. Right now!”

  “Right now?” she echoed, skeptical and groggy. “How long is this going to take us?”

  “Three nights,” Rosemary told her, holding up three fingers for clarity’s sake. “So we should definitely start tonight.”

  “Okay,” Gwen announced, rubbing her eyes. “Let me get some dinner and we can head out.”

  Eating by herself while Rosemary talked was one of the subtler pleasures of life for Gwen. When they ate together, Rosemary was distracted by her meal and spun back into the conversation on different tangents, intermittently playing with her food. Worse, she expected Gwen to keep pace with her conversation. When she had nothing in front of her, however, Rosemary found the longest and most ridiculous stories to tell, expecting little more than mumbled affirmations and intrigued face expressions. While Rosemary recounted every inconsequential thing that had happened to her the past two days in Neverland, Gwen made faces and nodded, enjoying her pasta.

  Tiger Lily had already heard the whole story, but mixed chocolate milk for the girls and listened to it all again. As Rosemary wound down, she had the presence of mind to request, “Tell her about the melody of the lamb and death.”

  “Oh yeah,” Rosemary announced, happy for the reminder. She leapt out of her chair, her energy making it look like she was flying even when she wasn’t. From the picnic basket she’d brought with her, she pulled out a translucent coiled cord. “It’s from a harp!”

  She handed it to Gwen, and the older girl held it taut, feeling the strength of the amber-colored string as she wound it around her fingers like floss. Her sister reached over and plucked it. The noise was muted and dim, but there was a musical quality to the sound it made.

  “We had to talk to the mermaids,” Rosemary told her. “We couldn’t tell them what we needed it for. I don’t know why. Peter pretended like he wanted a harp, just for playing. They went down to the bottom of the ocean and found one aboard a sunken ship! Most of its strings were all broken and rotted, but we got one!”

  “I don’t understand.” She looked closely at the twisted substance of the string. “What would the Piper want with this? What does a harp string have to do with lambs or death?”

  Rosemary pouted and made sad eyes. Tiger Lily answered for her. “Sheep’s gut—it’s what they used to make all music strings from.”

  “Poor little sheep,” Rosemary mewed, before continuing, “Peter said Piper was famous for making music even more pretty than harps. I don’t know why it was harps. There’s lots of pretty things he could have been better than.”

  Gwen held the string up, looking at it against the kitchen light. “So now it’s part of his calling card.” Rosemary had already shown her the round, golden guilder Peter had fetched, and so this was the last piece of the puzzle.

  The sheep’s gut string was a different feel than any nylon or metal string she had ever encountered. It was undoubtedly a rare artifact, to be fetched from the ocean floor by mermaids. If they could get it in the Piper’s hands, he would know that someone had begun a serious search for him.

  The girls waited until it was late enough that all the shops in the town center would be closed. Rosemary was emphatic about this. They had to start the hunt there. As was the norm these days, Gwen followed her little sister’s bigger sense of confidence.

  With Foxglove and Hawkbit tucked away, the girls shot up into the sky until they were high enough not to register on any officer’s radar. Gwen was confident that after her father and Officer Harris had investigated Tiger Lily’s home that any trace amounts of magic they left behind would be attributed to standard anomalous fluctuation surrounding Tiger Lily and her home.

  They made it to the town center, a tiny outdoor mall with Spanish architecture, landing on the synthetic clay shingles of the red roof. Checking first to make sure there was no one in the shopping plaza, they dropped down to the ground in front of a dry cleaner and scampered over to the fountain in the middle of its mock courtyard. “Are you sure this is where we want to be?” Gwen asked, watching a rat scamper away from a trash bin by the light of one of the few old street lamps.

  “This is the best place,” Rosemary announced. Foxglove and Hawkbit hummed in agreement, darting out of the concealing pouches and dancing over to the three-tiered fountain, still bubbling and gurgling in the night. They stayed hovering over it, where their f
airy dust would dissolve into the water. Gwen let go of her fears and embraced the odd setting. Everything from the mission-style roofs to the brick ground felt like an homage to something older. Maybe that was exactly the sort of place to coax a man from fairy tales back into the world.

  “Okay,” Rosemary announced, taking a fighting stance against the darkness and unknown. “First, we need the song.”

  Gwen pulled the music box out of her satchel and sat down on the edge of the clay fountain. She wound the ceramic carousel, and then set it down beside her. It was obvious from the first few notes that the song had reverted back to the original, unremarkable waltz. “Foxglove, can you come sprinkle some dust on this again?”

  The fairy was happy to comply, and Gwen wound it further before setting it down and letting Foxglove dance over the contraption. Hawkbit joined her in this prancing fun, neither of them worried about the dust they dropped as it was absorbed by the music box.

  As they had the previous night, the horses reversed and came to life in their porcelain forms. As they pranced around in the opposite direction to a new tune, Gwen was about to ask, “What now?”

  Rosemary was faster to react. “Why didn’t the song change?”

  “What?”

  The younger girl crouched down and stared at the music box inches from her face. She was enchanted by the animated pony figurines, but on the whole disappointed in the music. “It’s still the same song. Doesn’t it need to change?”

  “It did—can you not hear it?”

  “Nope,” Rosemary answered. “What does it sound like now?”

  “I don’t know… Like the Piper’s song.”

  Her sister scanned the courtyard, looking in all directions for any sign of life, magic, or motion. “I don’t think it works like that. Peter said you’d have to do the song.”

  “What do you mean—do the song?”

  Rosemary shrugged. “Like play it on an instrument, or sing it I guess. The music box is only reminding you, Gwen.”

  The older girl buried her face in her hand. Her, sing? She’d lasted a whole of two weeks in junior high choir. This was not going to be a fun experience, and she didn’t know what would happen if she butchered the melody. “I can’t sing it,” she countered. “There aren’t lyrics.”

  “Make some words up,” Rosemary suggested. “They don’t even have to be real words.” The fairies gave her words of encouragement, which only worsened the pressure she felt. Everyone in high school knew you didn’t make people sing if they didn’t want to sing. There were some unspoken rules like that. If someone didn’t sing, you let it go. It was so ingrained in her that it seemed shocking Rosemary’s naivety could not fathom the inherent humiliation.

  Rosemary was a child though, unaware and uncritical in many social and aesthetic regards. She gazed up at her sister with adoring eyes. Swallowing her pride, Gwen knew a foolish display would do nothing to diminish her from her sister’s perspective. “Okay,” she agreed.

  She listened for a moment more, waiting for the tune to loop back to its starting point on the music box. Hawkbit bobbed up and down with her voice, trying to encourage her. She sang gibberish, the way she used to when she had wanted to give the music box’s original song lyrics.

  Tepper tepper yolen and teaming tull,

  Swanning sing-swim and afterall again,

  Gilly groat and vinder much wrote annul

  Addle pie, perfect sky, pota po hunch.

  She continued, growing more precise as she attempted to hit the notes of the song circling through the music box. She felt like a fool and her face burned with the absurd embarrassment her voice caused her. As the music box wound down, Rosemary picked it up and spun the crank again, whispering, “Keep going,” to encourage her sister. A moment later, she squealed, “It’s working!”

  Gwen almost screamed when she saw the first rat. Instead, she only overshot one note, and continued singing to the best of her ability. She pulled her legs up off the ground and onto the fountain seat, as if that would keep her safe from the rats on the bricks two feet below.

  Rosemary was not afraid of them. They drew closer with a steady, plodding gait of their paws. Once her initial shock wore away, Gwen could see how strange and mesmerized they behaved. The rodents paused in intervals and rose on their haunches, standing in spellbound attention to her before meandering even closer. By the time the music box came to a slow finish, there were six of them, waiting with patient and tiny eyes, at the foot of the fountain.

  They stared at each other, the Neverlandians and their audience of rats. The fairies stayed high in the air, leery of creatures with claws, despite their hypnotized state. Gwen was at a loss, but Rosemary’s startling adaptability kicked into gear. Reaching into her sister’s satchel, her motions slow as to not disrupt the spell, she pulled out the ancient, coiled harp string.

  Trying to reach down and lean back away at the same time, she held the loops of twisted string with two fingers and extended it toward the largest of the rats. He took it in his mouth, his two minuscule front teeth trapping it in place. “Take this to Piper,” Rosemary told him.

  The rat gave no sign of acknowledgement, but her instruction seemed to break the enchantment. The rats went scurrying in every direction, fleeing from the girls. The largest of them kept the string tight in his teeth and dashed off, galloping on short legs into the night.

  The hanging mobile swung over Rosemary, the savanna animals seeming to race across an invisible landscape. The little girl murmured and sighed with dreamy aspiration as she pushed through unconscious adventures in one of Tiger Lily’s spare beds. Gwen was still wide awake.

  With her pillow propped up against the wall, she slouched back and waited for something to strike her. She had no feeling of accomplishment from handing off the harp string to the rat earlier in the night. She didn’t even feel sleepy after spending the whole day in bed recovering from her night with Jay. While Rosemary was still falling asleep, Gwen had hidden under her covers and surreptitiously texted Jay. They’d gone back and forth, each new text lighting up her phone and smile in equal parts. He had spent his day sleeping late and finishing homework. Gwen’s heart constricted with joy as he told her how much fun he’d had last night, and asked, Do you want to meet up tonight?

  Gwen had hesitated before responding. She wasn’t the least bit sleepy and had no intention of staying trapped in Tiger Lily’s guest bedroom listening to her little sister dream. However, she felt a new rush of nerves concerning Jay. The past two nights she’d seen him had been fantastic, but had left her head spinning.

  Sorry, she wrote, there’s somebody else I have to see tonight.

  They exchanged adorable goodnights, and she set her phone aside. She paused, staring out into the darkness of the room and feeling her heartbeat’s subtle thumps in her chest. She didn’t know if she’d meant that, or if it was just an excuse. She wanted to see Jay, desperately in some ways, but she couldn’t account for the nagging intimidation that drew her away from that desire.

  Not committing one way or another, Gwen pulled on real clothes again and laced up her shoes, careful not to make any noise that would disturb the sleeping fairies or her little sister. She slipped out of the trailer as quietly as she had her first night, and started on her way to Lake Agana. The night was peaceful. After a few days of successful sneaking around, Gwen experienced no apprehensions about being caught. She was even bold enough to fly over the very tops of the forest’s trees and skirt through the air in half the time it would have taken her to weave through it. She hovered down to the edge of the still lake, digging through her satchel even before she’d landed. In the dark, she depended on her fingers to find and recognize the glossy, cool feel of the mermaid scale. She chucked it into the water like a stone and waited.

  In a moment’s time, a head bobbed to the surface and shattered the still surface with minuscule ripples. Eyes, colorless in the moonlight, peered upward as Lasiandra approached the shore. At first Gwen, thought she w
as looking to the treetops, but it soon occurred to her Lasiandra was watching the stars. “A very long way from home tonight, Gwen,” she announced.

  “Actually, closer than I’ve been in a long time.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the sky. “Such strange stars you grew up under. No wonder you are such an odd girl.”

  “What makes them strange?”

  “They’re full of old constellations. The constellations in Neverland and over the sea never stay constant so long. But look there, that is still Orion, as he has been in this world for thousands of years. It must be so tedious to live where stars cling to the names they’ve been given by men so long dead.” She at last unlocked her gaze from the sky and looked to Gwen, her eyes twinkling as if they’d swallowed the stars. “But they look after you. They tell me Piper is on his way to you now.”

  “Already?” Gwen asked. “Rosemary says we still have two more nights of summoning him.”

  “Oh, that’s true,” Lasiandra admitted, finally handing back the scale. As Gwen tucked it in her satchel, her fingers found the spool of invisible thread and began nervously playing with it while Lasiandra continued, “He won’t be here soon. He has thousands of miles to go first. But he is coming.” There was a sharpness to her grin that possessed her eyes as well.

  “You look so happy about that. Everyone else I’ve talked to is scared by the thought of calling the Piper back.”

  “Is it so strange to think that I might have confidence in you?” Lasiandra announced, as if defending herself. “Mermaids aren’t afraid of Piper; why should you be? He’s powerful, but like all land-bound, he has his weaknesses.”