The bridge creaked and crunched again, struggling to hold itself upright against the rising floodwaters.
If the bridge falls, it’ll fall on the docks, she thought. It’ll fall on the cage. Even if Mother doesn’t drown in the flooding, she’ll be crushed by the falling bridge. We have to hold the bridge together.
She stood in Grandfather’s place and tried to steady her own breathing. She would need a steady breath to play.
Wait, Shade whispered.
“Wait?” Kaile asked, incredulous. “You rush me out here, onto a bridge that will probably collapse and kill us both, and now you tell me to wait? There’s no time for waiting!”
The music isn’t working, you silly sack of guzzard gizzards. Shade sharpened each word and poked them at Kaile. I can hear how it isn’t working. I can hear why. Listen. Not to me. Don’t listen to me. Listen!
Kaile listened. She heard musicians of every kind. She heard them sing and play to the north and the south. She heard them struggle with a song whose separate fragments stubbornly refused to combine into a single piece of music.
Then she heard discord. She heard one strain of the song work against the others, forcing them apart. And she heard what direction that discord was coming from.
“There,” she said, pointing at a rough and battered house across the street. It looked abandoned. The door and the windows were all boarded up.
There, Shade agreed.
The doorway had been sealed a very long time ago, and not very well. Rotting boards crumbled when Kaile pulled them away, and rusty nails broke in half. The latch also broke when she shoved hard against the door with her shoulder.
Kaile crossed the threshold.
The flute flinched in her hand.
She looked around, startled. The inside of the house was flame-charred and empty.
“The flute knows this place,” she said.
Light the lantern, Shade whispered behind her. It’s too dark in there for me.
Kaile fiddled with the lantern flint. “Not much oil left from last night,” she said, worried. The wick still caught. Shadow puppets leaped out across the soot-stained walls.
One shadow stepped out of the dark and stood separate in front of them, confronting them both.
You have a piece of her, this shadow whispered. You’re carrying a piece of her.
“Who are you?” Kaile whispered back—but it was Shade who answered.
That’s Iren’s shadow. “The lovelorn girl from the long bridge fell,” and her bones washed up on the Kneecap. You’re holding one of them. She left her shadow behind, in this place, when she fell.
The shadow shouted back at them. Iren wasn’t lovelorn! No broken heart ever broke her head. There was fire. The house burned. She jumped from a high window. She risked drowning rather than let herself burn. She jumped, and she sang as she jumped. She was a Fiddleway singer. She sang to bind her own courage together, but the song broke mine. I was scared. I let her voice cut us apart, so she fell without me. She drowned without me. I stayed. I’m still here. I’m always here.
“I’m sorry,” Kaile whispered. “I’m so sorry.” She was relieved to hear this version of the story. The flute and its music had always felt stronger to her than a girl who died of heartbreak.
You’ve brought a piece of her back, Iren’s shadow whispered, sounding hopeful. She’s still trying to sing for the bridge.
We all have to hold the bridge together, Shade insisted, or else there won’t be a here for very much longer. Both of you follow me.
Shade moved between charred and ruined pieces of furniture, found a staircase, and began to climb by lantern light.
Kaile hurried behind.
Iren’s lost shadow came last.
They followed the sound of discord up to the very highest room.
The ghoul crouched there beneath a shattered window frame.
It stood. It had grown huge and hulking since Kaile had seen it last. Rags of riverweed and rotting sails trailed behind it and caught in the glass shards of the ruined window.
It climbed up here, Kaile realized. It’s made of people who fell off the bridge—or who jumped off the bridge, or were pushed off the bridge—and now it’s clawed its way back on.
The ghoul filled the room with itself and its singing.
Fifteenth Verse
THOUSANDS OF DROWNED BONES fit themselves together to form a single figure, using the song as both muscle and sinew. Claws of carved fishhooks made deep grooves in the wooden floor. Several skulls sat on its wide shoulders, each jaw open, each one singing.
The ghoul paid no mind to its new audience. It went on singing its own discordant version of the flood song. The sound scraped the ceiling and tumbled across the floor. It spread across the bridge to strike sideways at all other Fiddleway music.
There must be several former bridge musicians in there, Shade whispered. They all know the song. They know how to sing it. They know how to twist it.
“Why?” Kaile whispered back. “Why would it want to bring down the Fiddleway?”
Listen, Shade insisted. There’s pain and grief and despair and regret all jumbled into those notes, and now it wants to share that misery. It wants the rest of the bridge to drown with it, and feel all the pain that it can still remember feeling. Can’t you hear it? Listen! The same music can bind or break. This song holds the ghoul together, and it will shake the bridge apart.
Kaile heard it. She did not want to hear it, but she did. The sound of raw and open pain surrounded her.
Not her, the other shadow said. Not Iren. She isn’t in there. She never despaired.
“We could try to drive it away again with ‘The Counting Song,’ ” Kaile suggested, her voice very small. “One for the buns now overdone ...” But this time it was the ghoul’s voice that drove her own away. She faltered and fell silent.
That won’t be enough, Shade whispered.
“Guess not,” Kaile whispered back.
She looked at the flute in her hand. You jumped from here, she thought. Maybe you jumped from this room and this window. But it wasn’t for grief and heartbreak. You made a choice, a horrible choice. Stay and burn, or jump and probably drown—but maybe not. Maybe live. I’m sorry that you didn’t.
The ghoulish thing raised its arms, and it raised up the agony and violence of its voice. Robes of cloth and weeds billowed around and behind it as though underwater and moved by rough currents. Kaile cowered at the sound and shape of it.
“I can’t fight that,” she told Shade, her own voice hushed and hardly there.
You don’t have to, Shade told her. Redirect it. Guide it sideways. Make it a part of everything else.
Kaile took up the flute and played.
It was the same song, always the same song. She played a duet with the ghoul, and tried to make the music match all the sounds that bridge and River made.
Not enough, Shade whispered. Still not enough. Bind or break. Bind us together, or break the whole bridge down.
Kaile felt a shiver. It traveled up from her feet to the tips of her hair.
She poured more of herself and her breath into the music.
She heard the fluid strength of floodwaters roaring, and that became part of the song.
She heard the bridge shift the weight of its stones, and that became part of the song.
She heard strains of music from each and every musician on the Fiddleway, passed through the air and between shadows. She heard Iren’s lost shadow singing nearby. Kaile played alongside all of them.
Separate threads of sound braided together. The River and the city and the bridge in between, the drums and the strings and the voices and the footfalls all became one song—and that song swelled to include the ghoul.
Kaile held the bridge together. The dead thing fell apart.
It screamed, shrieked, and collapsed as thousands of separate bones fell. Skulls and ribs, combs and dice, fishhooks and finger bones clattered at Kaile’s feet and were finally still.
* * *
Kaile kept playing. The song held for as long as the flood lasted—which wasn’t very long. The River’s force ebbed, slowed, and finally passed downstream. The danger faded. The bridge stood.
She lowered her flute. Then she raised it again and tried the first few notes of “The Counting Song.” The flute played it willingly, no longer bound to a single piece of music.
“Oh good,” Kaile said, relieved. “I was hoping you’d let me play something else.”
She looked for the shadows, and saw neither one of them. The lantern had already burned out. The only light streamed in through the broken window.
“Shade?” Kaile asked the empty room.
She heard nothing. A long and silent moment passed before Shade whispered back.
I’m here.
“Where?” Kaile asked. “I can’t see you. And where is Iren’s shadow?”
Gone, said Shade. The word sounded like a closed door, or the closing note of a song. It sounded like good-bye. Kaile didn’t ask where the lost shadow had gone.
“I still can’t see you,” she said, looking around.
You have to let me lead sometimes, Shade told her.
Kaile remembered the shiver in her feet, just before the music wove itself together into one solid thing, and she began to understand.
“I will,” she said. Her voice caught in her throat and stumbled a little.
You have to listen, Shade whispered.
“I know.”
And try not to drag me through oily puddles in the road, or over dung piles.
“I’ll try. I will. I promise.”
Good.
Kaile stepped away from the fallen bones. She saw her shadow stretched out across the floor, moving when she moved, tied to her own two feet.
“Thank you,” she said. She tucked lantern and flute into her satchel, and went downstairs.
* * *
All of the Fiddleway music-makers stood outside the wreck of a house, waiting for Kaile.
Luce stood with them, leaning casually against a lamppost and grinning wide.
Master Nibbledy stepped forward. He took Kaile’s hand in both of his own.
“Musician,” he said in his high, solemn voice.
Sixteenth Verse
KAILE RODE A SOUTHSIDE carriage to Broken Wall in the early evening, pushed along by no one she knew. Luce Strumgut rode beside her. Bombasta the singer had a carriage all to herself, and sat upright and regal as though she rode in an actual carriage instead of a repurposed wheelbarrow.
“We could have just walked,” Kaile said. She was nervous, doubtful, and in no hurry to actually arrive.
“Her ladyship the singer would not have walked,” said Luce, waving one hand at Bombasta’s carriage. “Bad for the vocal cords, or some such thing.”
“Did she have to come with us?” Kaile asked. “Does it have to be her?”
“Yes,” said Luce. “It does. This is her way of apologizing to you, and to me. If you don’t let her apologize, then her disgruntlement will grow and she’ll hate you forever. She might hate you forever anyway, of course, and for no reason in particular—but she is also our very best singer. You’ll want to have our best singer for this, to make sure that it sticks.”
“I suppose,” said Kaile.
This is going to work, Shade whispered in her ear. This is going to stick.
Kaile wasn’t nearly so sure. Her hand touched her shadow’s hand where it rested on the bench.
She looked around to see several familiar places: Miss Mullusk’s house, and Doctor Boggs’s office clinic on Borrow Street, and the little lump of ground that everyone still called Watchtower Hill—even though it wasn’t much of a hill, and no towers had actually stood on it for longer than anyone remembered. She watched the winding, dusty roadways of Southside as the wheelbarrows drew closer to Broken Wall.
Luce and Bombasta intended to perform a nameday song—the sort of song that tells newborn infants their names, and also tells the world.
“Do we have to do this tonight?” Kaile asked.
Luce looked down at her with a rough sort of sympathy. “It doesn’t have to be tonight,” the sailor said. “We could wait until tomorrow. We could wait until your old nameday, so the new one would match.”
Kaile shook her head. “My old nameday is months from now. I don’t want to wait that long. I should just insist on getting presents both days—the old one and the new one.”
The sailor grinned. “That’s a fine plan, that is.”
Kaile tried to smile. She almost managed. Then she gave up.
“I don’t really think this is going to work,” she admitted. “My family sang my funeral. The funeral’s already over and sung. There’s no taking that back—so they won’t ever take me back.”
“Wrong,” said the sailor. “One ceremony trumps another. A divorce trumps a misguided wedding. A second bottle of fizzy wine smashed against the prow of a barge can rename it if the old name proved to be unlucky. We could even give you a new name tonight, if you like.”
“No,” said Kaile. “I like my name. And I’m not a barge.”
“True enough,” said Luce. “You aren’t a barge. But you are getting a new nameday.”
The wheelbarrow went over a bump in the road. The sailor cursed. Kaile just tried to hold on.
She still didn’t know what had happened to the Baker’s Cage. Maybe it had remained suspended above the rising waters. The flood had subsided quickly, and it hadn’t climbed nearly so high as everyone had feared. Maybe Mother had been fine inside the cage. Or maybe it had toppled over and sunk to the very bottom of the River, drowning Mother inside it. Kaile still didn’t know. Her thoughts burned with not knowing. But she was also afraid to finally find out.
The wheelbarrows stopped beside the alehouse.
Kaile didn’t move. She didn’t want to go in. If she went inside, then she might interrupt Mother’s own funeral song.
Luce jumped down and hoisted her lute case. Shells woven into her braids clinked together. “Come on, girl,” she said. “We have a gig to play.”
This will work, Shade whispered again.
Kaile took a breath, and then another one. She climbed down from the wheelbarrow, her movements matched by her shadow.
* * *
The public room was full of patrons. Dozens of faces turned to look at them as they stood in the doorway.
Kaile noticed only one.
Mother’s hair was still a mess. Her eyes looked shadowed and swollen, and she had ash stains rubbed over her cheekbones to show that she was in mourning—but she stood tall behind the counter, commanding the room. This place was a barge, and she the skipper of it, competent above all other things.
Mother wasn’t drowned. She wasn’t dead.
“I had to stay in the cage for hours longer than I was supposed to, dangling over the washed-out docks,” she told the customers up at the counter. “I don’t suppose I’ll have to go back tomorrow, though, and that’s a small blessing.”
Then she saw Kaile in the doorway. Her swollen eyes grew wide. She looked away. She looked down at the counter. She would not look at her daughter. Kaile’s heart sank and drifted downstream.
Voices began whispering.
“Don’t look.”
“Don’t catch her attention.”
“Don’t encourage her haunting.”
“This is what comes of feeding a dead girl. They come back inside when they shouldn’t ever, and they don’t fade away when they should.”
“Why don’t they put louder charms over the threshold?”
“Don’t look.”
“Don’t anybody look at her.”
Kaile became the center of an empty space, a hole in the room that everyone ignored—everyone except the Snotfish, who stared at her from underneath a table.
He waved. Kaile waved back.
“She’s got a shadow,” the Snotfish pointed out. “She’s got her shadow back.”
People began
to steal sideways looks at Kaile, and the floor at her feet.
Luce opened her lute case and tuned up her instrument.
Bombasta cleared her throat with a scornful sound.
“This is Kaile’s nameday,” the singer announced, and made it true by saying it aloud.
She sang. Luce played. The music had much the same shape and movement as a funerary song, but used here to say hello rather than good-bye.
Other voices started to pick up the song. Other patrons joined in. The four domini players sang with reedy voices. The Snotfish sang, loud and out of tune. Father stood in the kitchen doorway and sang.
Mother looked up from behind the counter. She looked at Kaile. She looked directly at Kaile with guarded hope. She let her own voice join the music—even though she almost never sang anything.
Everyone in the room gave voice to a song of hello and of welcoming home.
Kaile stood with her shadow and listened.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my childhood music teachers, for their patience (I wasn’t much of a musician). Thanks to Ivan, Nathan, Melon, and Jon, for their great love of song and karaoke. Thanks to my writing group, Symbolical Head, for their surgical workshopping skills; to Joe and Barry, for all their advice; and to Karen and Emily, for their editorial wisdom. Thanks to Zoe Keating, for the music I used as my writing soundtrack.
About William Alexander
William Alexander is the author of Goblin Secrets, which Kirkus Reviews called “both gripping and tantalizing” in a starred review. He studied theater and folklore at Oberlin College and English at the University of Vermont, and currently lives, writes, and teaches in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His short stories have been published in many magazines and anthologies, including Weird Tales, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Interfictions 2, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition. Visit him at willalex.net.
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