Pay the Piper: A Rock 'n' Roll Fairy Tale

by Jane Yolen

Ruined. Like a cracked pillar thrown down in the wood.

  He almost smiled. Thinking of lyrics at a time like this!

  Wynne looked at him with honest compassion.

  If you only knew, Gringras screamed at him silently before stumbling silently and dramatically out the throne room door.

  I need air. I need room to think. Perhaps he could go back in time and undo this disaster. Surely there was a spell for that. He looked down at his ring, hopefully.

  Reaching the castle’s main door, he threw it open. The sun was just lowering in a blaze of red and yellow and Tormalas’ pyre was silhouetted against the bloody sky. Suddenly, all of Gringras’ fears and regret turned to anger. He no longer cared what happened to him; he needed to punish someone for his misfortunes. And Tormalas was a handy and helpless target.

  He marched straight for the thirty-foot tower, on top of which lay his brother’s funeral pyre. Spectators and mourners crowded the square. Brownies, red caps, boogies, and peris, who in life never associated, now stood elbow to elbow waiting for the spectacle of the prince’s funeral fire.

  Ignoring their disapproving stares, Gringras bulled his way through. As he edged closer to the pyre, the way became too crowded for mere physical blows to clear it. Thrusting his hand forward, ring outward, Gringras uttered a word of power. A blast of wind threw aside any creatures in his path.

  Mounting the steps three at a time, he came to the bier where his brother lay. Drawing out his sword, Gringras lifted it high over his head two-handed. The crowd gasped and the door to the castle burst open once more, this time spewing forth Alabas, the king, and the new heir, all running toward the pyre.

  “Gringras!” Alabas shouted. “It’s over!”

  The sun finally dipped below the horizon. Gringras turned, sword still raised, and looked back toward the castle. The courtyard was lit now by faerie fires in four corners, the magical glow washing the color from faces, making the onlookers look as dead as Tormalas.

  Alabas spoke once more, softly, for now he was on the tower, too, close enough to touch Gringras, though even he knew better than to dare any such thing. “Don’t add murder to our crimes.”

  Our crimes, repeated Gringras to himself. It was that phrase that finally stopped him. Whatever happened now, at least he would share it with one other. The other conspirator. His one true friend.

  The anger drained from him and he lowered his sword.

  The sun set.

  Tormalas sat up.

  20 · Trail of Sweets

  For a long while Callie buried her face in Scott’s leather jacket, shutting out the Halloween dark. That way she could concentrate on sounds: the high temptations of the flute, the ground bass of the motorcycle, the moaning of the wind as it whistled past her ears.

  When Scott suddenly slowed the bike to a stop and cut the engine, she looked up, startled.

  “Why have we…”

  He pointed to the roadside. “Look.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  He got off and—after a minute—she did, too.

  “Give me my guitar,” he said, stabilizing the bike with its kickstand, then holding out his hand.

  She swung the guitar off her back and gave it to him.

  He strummed his fingers across the strings. The sound seemed to light up the roadside, because suddenly Callie saw what he saw. There were four discarded wizards’ hats, a set of Velcroed fairy wings, and seven light-saber wands. Dozens of plastic orange jack-o’-lanterns filled with candy lay on their sides, scattering Hershey bars and lollipops, candy kisses and Baby Ruths, candy corn and Almond Joys on the grassy verge.

  “It looks like a Halloween graveyard,” she burst out, not meaning to be funny, yet both of them broke into nervous laughter at her observation. The laughter was liberating, and not just because it exorcised some of the dread of the night. It also seemed to have cut through the incessant piping of the flute.

  Scott stopped laughing first. Kneeling down by the discarded costumes, he stroked the silken inlay of the fairy wings with his right hand, his expression somewhere between anger and relief.

  “How did you see these things?” Callie asked.

  He paused as if considering. “I guess I’ve been with Gringras and his music too long.”

  She nodded. That made a kind of sense. “So how come I didn’t?”

  “Glamour.”

  She looked puzzled. “What do you mean, glamour? Like Hollywood? That kind of glamour?”

  He shook his head slowly, then stood up and, turning toward her, started singing one of the songs from the concert the night before. Not full out, as if in performance, but in a strange, whispery voice which made it even more powerful. She hadn’t caught all the lyrics when they’d played at Greene Hall, surrounded as they’d been, drowned by the hard-driving guitar, the bass, the heavy drums. But now she understood every single word.

  “I put the glamour on this space,

  Transforming every human face,

  And leaving nothing left to trace

  When morning finally comes.

  “I put the magic on this spot

  So what you see and think you’ve got,

  And what you fear is what is not,

  When morning finally comes.

  “When morning comes

  The mundane morn

  When magic is

  No longer worn.

  “When morning comes

  The killer dawn

  When spells are done

  And magic gone.

  “So stand upon my sacred ground

  For what you hold’s not what you’ve found,

  And to this glamour you’ll be bound

  When morning finally comes.”

  “That kind of glamour,” Scott added.

  “I still don’t get it.” In the moonlight Callie’s face was creased with doubt.

  “Magic. Enchantment. Putting a glamour on something or someone means to change it by magic, alter it in some subtle way so it’s no longer what it once was. At least that’s what Gringras says it means. What Alabas says about it, I can’t tell you.”

  Callie put her hands on her hips. “I’m fourteen, you know. In high school. Don’t condescend to me.” Suddenly she hated him, wondered what she was doing out at night, here, with a stranger. Suddenly worried that all the things her parents had been guarding her against might come true, here, by the mountain. With a guy who wasn’t exactly the sixteen he seemed to be.

  “I mean, I can’t tell you because I don’t actually know. And Alabas doesn’t talk much. When he does, it’s often in some old language the two of them speak together,” he said. “I only know a few of the words—teind and byre and…”

  “Breeks and gyre?” She remembered the curse that Alabas had called down on the manager’s head. “Is it magic? Some of it sounds like my Scottish grandmother talking.” She suddenly remembered something Alison had said. “And some comes from an old folk song.”

  He shrugged. “Beats me. Breeks means pants and gyre a kind of … of turning thing.” For a moment, his hand looked like it was stirring some sort of batter. “Like a whirlwind.”

  “Pants and a whirlwind? Now that really doesn’t make any sense.” But she smiled to take away the sting of what she was saying.

  He didn’t smile back. Instead he turned, and in an attitude of listening, stared across the street toward Mt. Holyoke, the small mountain in the center of the range.

  Callie imitated him, but she couldn’t hear anything. So she took off her helmet, holding it by the strap, and tried again.

  Silence.

  No wind. No road sounds. No birds. No flute. The unnaturalness of it made her shiver. Again, she thought of her parents.

  Wanting to get Scott talking again, if only to cut through the eerie quiet, she said, “So you think the reason I didn’t see this stuff—this trail of Halloween sweets and hats and wings and all—was that it had a glamour on it? An enchantment?”

  The moonlight cast his hair
in silver, yet still he looked no more than sixteen years old.

  “Right.”

  “So the police wouldn’t have seen anything either.”

  He nodded, leaning forward as if paying attention to something else, something beyond her ken.

  “Scott, look at me.”

  He didn’t move, only leaned even further into whatever it was that had caught his attention.

  “Please.” She hated the whine in her voice. Controlled it. Spoke again, this time without the whine, but in a whisper. “Please.”

  Slowly he turned back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Listening to the flute.”

  “But it’s gone.”

  “No, it’s not. Not entirely.”

  Once again she listened hard, heard nothing. “Yes it…”

  He picked up her hand and put it on the strings of his guitar. She could feel them vibrate under her palm. The vibration traveled along the top of her skin, all the way up her arm, along her neck, and curled up and into her ear.

  It was as if a layer of that dreadful silence had been peeled away. As if she’d been asleep before and was now suddenly totally awake.

  The flute was singing. Only this time she heard it plain, without its glamour, without its sensuous beckoning. Now the tune was a darker, more sinister sound, the kind of music that—in a movie—would have warned that the monster was near. For a moment she hesitated, shivering. Then she pointed to the sign that said SKINNER STATE PARK.

  “That way.” Toward the road that wound around the volcanic rock, and to the Summit House, the big white building that perched like an eagle’s nest at the very top.

  “Don’t be scared,” Scott said, but his voice trembled a bit.

  “I’m not scared,” Callie lied.

  She put on the helmet and Scott got back on the motorcycle. Jamming down with his foot to start the bike, he held out a hand to Callie. She climbed up behind him again and they headed on to the winding road. There they climbed steadily beneath overlaced branches of maple, oak, and pine, black against the moon-lightened sky.

  All the way up, Callie was thinking: This is wrong. This is a bad idea. Mom and Dad are right. Her head kept sending her warnings: Turn around. Go home. But they kept on going, because it was, after all, the only thing they could do. The only way they could find Gringras. And Nicky. And the children. And all the answers.

  Every now and then, when she lost the thread of the flute song, Callie put her hand over her shoulder and touched the strings of Scott’s guitar. Each time the music would travel up her arm, across her shoulder, up her neck, and into her ear, calling to that other music.

  Ahead, always ahead.

  The flute and its master were up at the top. And where Gringras was, Callie knew the children would be, too.

  What she didn’t know was whether any of them were still alive.

  21 · Reunion

  Tormalas had looked up quizzically and Gringras shrugged, sheathing his sword. Then offering his left hand, Gringras spoke, his voice calm though his stomach was roiling. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Brother.”

  Tormalas said nothing but took in the entire scene: the pyre, the crowd, Alabas, his brother’s so-recently sheathed sword. He remembered having dinner with Gringras and then nothing more. Tormalas had been trained since childhood to be a master politician, a nimble thinker. Gringras could see him putting it all together.

  “I assume it has been three days,” Tormalas said, taking the proffered hand.

  Gringras nodded and pulled Tormalas to his feet. He was half a head taller than the younger prince.

  “Father does not suspect you?”

  Gringras shook his head, shrugged.

  “He always had a blind spot where you were concerned.” Tormalas stated this as fact. There was no blame in his voice.

  “He passed me over.” They could have been talking about a dinner menu or a planned ball.

  Alabas cleared his throat, but they ignored him.

  For a long moment, Tormalas considered his younger brother with a kind of seasoned affection before saying, “Then you are not the heir, which means it is treason you committed.”

  Gringras grinned defiantly. “It would not have been if it had worked.”

  Tormalas chuckled. “That is debatable, Gringras. And that kind of thinking is why I am to be king, not you.”

  Gringras laughed. “Neither me nor you, Brother. Father has chosen Wynn now.”

  Momentarily disconcerted, Tormalas was silent. Then he put his right hand on Gringras’ shoulder and, bending a little, stared into his eyes, searching them. “I can find precedence to overturn that decision. Wynn will do my bidding. He always has. But you, Gringras—you I can no longer trust. I may have to see you hang.”

  “Well, if you see me hang,” Gringras replied, “it will be through just one eye.”

  Before Tormalas could ask him what he meant, or Alabas could stop him, Gringras lashed out, intending merely to black his brother’s eye. It was one last defiant act, one salve to his wounded pride. But, as luck would have it, Tormalas—who was well trained in the warrior’s art—ducked to one side. Instead of hitting him in the eye, Gringras punched Tormalas square in the temple. His signet ring, sorcerously forged and full of powerful magicks, connected with the soft spot on Tormalas’ skull.

  Already weakened from three days near death, and suddenly suffering a savage and unexpected blow that was both physical and magical, Tormalas collapsed backwards. He fell off the pyre and hit the ground thirty feet below.

  This time he was, in fact, stone-dead. Both dead and, as the magic willed it, stone as well.

  22 · Trail of Tears

  The higher they went, the louder the flute got. On a final turn, Callie saw the park gates ahead of them with the empty parking lot looking like a dark cave.

  “How could they have gotten this far without cars?” Callie asked. But her heart answered her. Magic. Black and wicked. And suddenly, it wasn’t just that her mom and dad were right, but that Granny Kirkpatrick was right, too. I should have paid more attention to her stories, Callie thought.

  Scott eased the bike into the darkness, turning off the lights and the engine. “Stay close,” he said unnecessarily, holding out his hand.

  Callie took it like a lifeline. His hand was cold in hers.

  She pointed ahead of them. “That’s where Summit House is. We’ve had picnics there. It used to be…” How could she say it used to be an old hotel, where the famous opera singer Jenny Lind had stayed? What did it matter what it was then? The question was—What is it now?

  Callie knew there was a trail that went from the parking lot, passing along several rock cliffs that overlooked the Connecticut River and the whole Valley. It opened into a terrace called Titan’s Piazza. Nicky used to call it Titan’s Pizza, which always made Mars laugh. She gulped, thinking of them both, her little brother, her older brother. How often she’d complained about being the middle child. The midden child, she’d called it, when she discovered that midden meant “a garbage dump.” She’d give anything to be in the middle, the meat in the family sandwich, to have both of them here and safe right now. Sudden tears sprang into her eyes. Knuckling them away with one hand, she followed after Scott.

  “Do you think…?” she began, and couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Don’t think,” he whispered. “And don’t talk.”

  She shut her lips together tight and stumbled after him.

  Now she could hear the flute again, full and clear, and below it, a kind of muffled sound. It took her a moment to realize it was the sound of children whimpering.

  She didn’t take in that they were unhappy, cold, tired, scared. What Callie heard was that they were alive.

  Alive!

  Letting go of Scott’s hand, she plunged ahead, up onto the cliff’s edge where the Summit House stood, white in the moonlight.

  * * *

  GRINGRAS SAT ON THE PORCH railing playing hi
s flute. When he saw Callie, he took the flute from his lips, and smiled. It was a smile that seemed compounded of sadness and delight.

  “The little reporter,” he cried out as if genuinely happy to see her. “Who saw the rats dance to my piping. Look, Alabas, we have an extra. Do you think my father will give me credit against my next teind?”

  Standing with his back to a door, Alabas didn’t bother to answer. He looked bored, or tired, or both.

  Callie took a deep breath, rehearsing what she needed to say before actually saying it. “Peter Piper,” she cried at last, “I’ve come to take the children home.”

  If she had expected shock, horror, annoyance, magic, she got none of them. Gringras simply threw his head back and laughed. It was not a wicked laugh, which made it all the harder to bear.

  “I mean it,” Callie shouted.

  Gringras stopped laughing. “I’m sure you do, my little reporter, but I have no choice. Really. Gold or silver or souls, you see. And the manager of the concert stole all my gold and silver, so I am—as you say in this century—stuck. But no one will be hurt. I promise.”

  Callie stared into the gloom behind him and could see nothing but darkness. Yet she could hear voices, sad little voices. Sad little lost voices.

  “Nicky!” she cried.

  The only answer she got was a wave of sound, like weeping, but no one came forward out of the darkness.

  “Nicky,” she cried again.

  Then Alabas leaped over the side of the porch, his face the color of old porcelain in the moonlight. Shaking his head, he came over and put his hand on her arm. “You’ll like it in Faerie,” he said. “It’s always the weekend, never school. There’s laughter and music, dancing and wine and…”

  “I’m not old enough for wine,” Callie said, trying to look over his shoulder to the weeping blackness behind Gringras. All the while she thought, Faerie? We’re going to Faerie? She tried to remember what Granny Kirkpatrick said about them. “The People of Peace,” she called them. “Though they are hardly that.”

  Just then Scott stepped into the clearing.

  “Ah.” Gringras shifted around so that both his feet dangled over the side of the railing. He held the flute loosely in his right hand. “Scott, come to find the truth after all these years?”