by Paula Guran
We Folk don’t truck much with Faerie. We belong to earth, wind, water, and sun just as much as mortals do, and with better right. For my part, anything that stinks of that glittering, glamorous Hillstuff gives me the heebie-jeebies. With the exception of Nicolas.
I left Dora Rose (not without her vociferous protestations) hiding in some shrubbery, and approached the cottage at a jaunty swagger. I didn’t bang. That would be rude, and poor Nicolas was so easily startled. Merely, I scratched at the door with my fine black nails. At the third scratch, Nicolas answered. He was dressed only in his long red underwear, his red-and-black hair standing all on end. He was sleepy-eyed and pillow-marked, but he smiled when he saw me and opened wide his door.
“Maurice, Maurice!” he cried in his voice that would strike the sirens dumb. “But I did not expect this! I do not have a pie!” and commenced bustling about his larder, assembling a variety of foods he thought might please me.
He knew me so well! The vittles consisted of a rind of old cheese, a heel of hard bread, the last of the apple preserves, and a slosh of sauerkraut. Truly a feast! Worthy of a Rat King! (If my Folk had kings. We don’t. Just as all swans are royalty, we rats are every last one of us a commoner and godsdamned proud of it.) Salivating with delight, I dove for the proffered tray. There was only one chair at the table. Leaving it to me, Nicolas sank to a crouch by the hearth. I grazed with all the greed of a man-and-rat who’s breakfasted solely on a single caramel. He watched with a sweet smile on his face, as if nothing had ever given him more pleasure than to feed me.
“Nicolas, my friend,” I told him, “I’m in a spot of trouble.”
The smile vanished in an instant, replaced by a look of intent concern. Nicolas hugged his red wool-clad knees to his chest and cocked his head, bright black eyes inquiring.
“See,” I said, “a few weeks back, I noticed something weird happening in the Maze Wood just south of town? Lots of mortal children trooping in and out of the corridors, dressed fancy. Two scent hounds. A wagon. All led by Henchman Hans and no less a person than the Mayor of Amandale herself. I got concerned, right? I like to keep an eye on things.”
Nicolas’s own concern darkened to a frown, a sadness of thunderclouds gathering on his brow. But all he said was, “You were snooping, Maurice!”
“All right, all right, Nicolas, so what if I was? Do you have any ale?”
Nicolas pulled a red-and-black tuft of his hair. “Um, I will check! One moment, Maurice!” He sprang off the ground with the agility of an eight-year-old and scurried for a small barrel in a corner by the cellar door. He set his ear to it as if listening for the spirit within.
“It’s from the Hill,” he warned softly.
I smacked my lips. “Bring it on!”
Faerie ale was the belchiest. Who said I wasn’t musical? Ha! Dora Rose’d never heard me burp out “The Lay of Kate and Fred” after bottoms-upping a pint of this stuff. Oh, crap. Dora Rose. She was still outside, awaiting my signal. Never keep a Swan Princess in the bushes. She’d be bound to get antsy and announce herself with trumpets. I accepted the ale and sped ahead with my tale.
“So I started camping out in that old juniper tree, right? You know the one? The juniper tree. In the Heart Glade.”
“Oh, yes.” Nicolas lowed that mournful reply, half-sung, half-wept. “The poor little ghost in the tree. He was too long trapped inside it. The tree became his shrine, and the ghost became a god. That was in the long, long ago. But I remember it all like yesterday. I go to play my pipe for him when I get too lonely. Sometimes, if the moon is right, he sings to me.”
Awright! Now we were getting somewhere! Dora Rose should be hearing this, she really should. But if I brought her in now, poor Nicolas’d clam up like a corpse on a riverbank.
“Hey, Nicolas?” I gnawed into a leathery apple. “You have any idea why Ulia Gol’d be burying a bunch of murdered Swan Folk out by the juniper tree, singing a ditty over the bodies, and digging them up again? Or why they should arise thereafter as self-playing instruments?”
Nicolas shook his head, wide-eyed. “No. Not if Ulia Gol did it. She’d have no power there.”
I spat out an apple seed. It flew across the room, careening off a copper pot. “Oh, right. Uh, I guess what I meant was . . . if she got a child to do it. A child with a shovel. First to bury the corpse, then weep over it, then dig it up again. While a chorus of twenty kiddlings sang over the grave.”
Nicolas hugged himself harder, shivering. “Maurice! They are not doing this? Maurice—they would not use the poor tree so!”
I leaned in, heel of bread in one hand, rind of cheese in the other. “Nicolas. Ulia Gol’s murdered most of a bevy of Swan Folk. You know, the one that winters at Lake Serenus? Cygnet, cob, and pen—twenty of them, dead as dead can be. She’s making herself an orchestra of bone instruments that play themselves so she won’t have to shell out for professional musicians. Or at least that’s her excuse this time. But you remember last year, right? With the foxes?”
Nicolas flinched.
“And before that,” I went on, “didn’t she go fishing all the talking trout from every single stream and wishing well? Are you sensing a pattern? ’Cause no one else seems to be—except for yours truly, the Incomparable Maurice. Now there’s only one swan girl left. One out of a whole bevy. And she’s . . . she’s my . . . The point is, Nicolas, we must do something.”
Nearly fetal in his corner by the ale barrel, Nicolas hid his face, shaking his head behind his hands. Before I could press him further, a silvery voice began to sing from the doorway.
“The nanny-goat said to the little boy
Baa-baa, baa-baa I’m full
I’m a bale of hay and a grassy glade
All stuffed, all stuffed in wool
I can eat no more, kind sir, kind sir
Baa-baa, baa-baa my song
Not a sock, not a rock, not a fiddle-fern
I’ll be full all winter long.”
By the end of the first verse, Nicolas had lifted his head. By the end of the second, he’d drawn a lanyard out of the collar of his long underwear. From this lanyard hung a slender silver pipe that dazzled the eye, though no sun shone in that corner of the cottage. When Dora Rose got to the third verse, he began piping along.
“The little boy said to the nanny goat
Baa-baa, baa-baa all day
You’ll want to be fat as all of that
When your coat comes off in May!”
By the time they reached the bridge of their impromptu set, I was dancing around the cottage in an ecstatic frenzy. The silver pipe’s sweet trills drove my limbs to great leaps and twists. Dora Rose danced, too, gasping for breath as she twirled and sang simultaneously. Nicolas stood in the center of the cottage, tapping his feet in time. The song ended, and Nicolas applauded, laughing for joy. Dora Rose gave him a solemn curtsy, which he returned with a shy bow. But as he slipped the silver pipe back beneath his underwear, I watched him realize that underwear was all he wore. Shooting a grey and stricken look my way, pretty much making me feel like I’d betrayed him to the headsman, he jumped into his tiny cot and pulled a ratty blanket over his head. Dora Rose glanced at me.
“Uh, Nicolas?” I said. “Me and Dora Rose’ll just go wait outside for a few minutes. You come on out when you got your clothes on, okay?”
“She’s a swan!” Nicolas called from under his cover. I patted a lump that was probably his foot.
“She needs your help, Nicolas. Her sister got turned into a harp yesterday. All her family are dead now. She’s next.”
At that point, Dora Rose took me by the ear and yanked me out of the cottage. I cringed—but not too much lest she loosen her grip. Dora Rose rarely touched me of her own volition.
“How dare you?” she whispered, the flush on her face like a frosted flower. “The Pied Piper? He could dance any Folk he pleased right to the death and you pushed him? Maurice!”
“Aw, Dora Rose,” I wheedled, “he’s just a little sensiti
ve is all. But he’s a good friend—the best! He’d never hurt me. Or mine.” She glared at me. I help up my hands. “My, you know, friends. Or whatever.”
Dora Rose shook her head, muttering, “I am friendly with a magical musician, he tells me. Who’s familiar with Faerie. Who knows about the Folk. He’ll help us, he tells me.” Her blue eyes blazed, and I quivered in the frenzy of her full attention. “You never said he was the Pied Piper, Maurice!”
I set my hands on my hips and leaned away. Slightly. She still had a grip on my ear, after all. “Because I knew you’d react like this! Completely unreasonable! Nicolas wouldn’t hurt a fly half-drowned in a butter dish! So he’s got a magic pipe, so what? The Faerie Queen gave it to him. Faerie Queen says, ‘Here, darling, take this; I made it for you,’ you don’t go refusing the thing. And once you have it, you don’t leave it lying around the house for someone else to pick up and play. It’s his livelihood, Dora Rose! And it’s a weapon, too. We’ll use it to protect you, if you’ll let us.”
Her eyebrows winged up, two perfect, pale arches. Her clutch on my ear began to twist. I squeaked out, “On another note, Dora Rose, forgive the pun”—she snorted as I’d meant her to, and I assumed my most earnest expression, which on my face could appear just a trifle disingenuous—“I have to say, your idea about singing nursery rhymes to calm him down was pretty great! Poor Nicolas! All he sees whenever he looks at a woman is the Faerie Queen. Scares him outta his wits. Can’t hardly speak, after. He’s good with kids, though. Kid stuff. Kid songs. You were right on track with that baa-baa tune of yours. He’s like a child himself, really . . . ”
Dora Rose released my ear. More’s the pity.
“Maurice!” She jabbed a sharp finger at my nose, which was sharp enough to jab back. “One of these days!”
That was when Nicolas tiptoed from the cottage, sort of slinky-bashful. He was dressed in his usual beggar’s box motley, with his coat of bright rags and two mismatched boots. He had tried to flatten his tufted hair, but it stuck up defiantly all around his head. His black eyes slid to the left of where Dora Rose stood.
“Hi,” he said, scuffing the ground.
“It is a fine thing to meet you, Master Nicolas,” she returned with courtly serenity. “Bevies far and wide sing of your great musicianship. My own mother”—I saw a harsh movement in her pale throat as she swallowed—“watched you play once, and said she never knew such joy.”
“I’m sorry about your family,” Nicolas whispered. “I’m sure the juniper tree didn’t want to do it. It just didn’t understand.” His eyes met mine briefly, pleading. I gave him an encouraging go-ahead nod. Some of this story I knew already, but Nicolas could tell it better. He’d been around before it was a story, before it was history. He’d been alive when it was a current event.
Nicolas straightened his shoulders and cleared his throat.
“Your Folk winters at Lake Serenus. But perhaps, keeping mostly to yourselves, you do not know the story of the Maze Wood surrounding the lake. The tree at the center of the wood is also . . . also at the center of, of your family’s slaughter . . . You see, before he was the god in the tree, he was only a small boy. His stepmother murdered him. His little stepsister buried his bones at the roots of a sapling juniper and went every day to water his grave with her tears.
“To comfort her, the boy’s ghost and the juniper tree became one. The young tree was no wiser than the boy—trees understand things like rain and wind and birds. So the ghost and the tree together transformed the boy’s bones into a beautiful bird, hoping this would lighten his sister’s heart and fly far to sing of his murder.
“That was in the long, long ago. Later, but still long ago, the villagers of what was then a tiny village called Amandale began to worship the ghost in the tree. The ghost became a god. Those whose loved ones had been murdered would bring their bones there. The god would turn these wretched bones to instruments that sang the names of their murderers so loudly, so relentlessly, that the murderers were brought to justice just to silence the music.
“Many generations after this, these practices and even the god itself were all but forgotten. The juniper tree’s so old now all it remembers are bones and birds, tears and songs. But the Mayor of Amandale must have read the story somewhere in the town archives. Learned of this old magic, the miracle. And then the Mayor, then she . . . she . . . ”
A small muscle in Nicolas’s jaw jumped. Suddenly I saw him in a different light, as if he, like his silver pipe, had an inner dazzle that needed no sunlight to evoke it. That dazzle had an edge on it like a broken bottle. Handle this man wrong, and he would cut you, though he wept to do it.
“The Mayor,” said the Pied Piper, “is abusing the juniper tree’s ancient sorrow. It is wrong. Very wrong.”
This time he met Dora Rose’s gaze directly, his black eyes bright and cold. “She is no better than the first little boy’s killer. She has hunted your Folk to their graves. As birds and murder victims in one, they make the finest instruments. The children of Amandale helped her to do this while their parents stood by. They are all complicit.”
“Not all,” I put in. Credit where it’s due. “Three children stood against her. Punished for it, of course.”
Nicolas gave me a nod. “They will be spared.”
“Spared?” Dora Rose echoed. But Nicolas was already striding off toward the Maze Wood with his pace that ate horizons. Me and Dora Rose, we had to follow him at a goodly clip.
“This,” I whispered to her from one corner of my grin, “is gonna be good.”
The maze part of the Maze Wood is made of these long and twisty walls of thorn. It’s taller than the tallest of Amandale’s four watchtowers and thicker than the fortress wall, erected a few hundred years ago to protect the then-new cathedral of Amandale. But Brotquen, the jolly golden Harvest Goddess in whose honor the cathedral had been built, went out of style last century. Now Brotquen Cathedral is used to store grain—not so big a step down from worshipping it, if you ask me—and I’m quite familiar with its environs. Basically the place is a food mine for yours truly and his pack, Folk and fixed alike. And the stained glass windows are pretty, too.
Like Nicolas said, the Maze Wood’s been there before Brotquen, before her cathedral, before the four towers and the fortress wall. It was sown back in the olden days when the only god in these parts was the little one in the juniper tree. I don’t know if the maze was planted to honor that god or to confuse it, keep its spirit from wandering too far afield in the shape of a fiery bird, singing heartbreaking melodies of its murder. Maybe both.
Me and the Maze Wood get along all right. Sure, it’s scratched off some of my fur. Sure, its owls and civets have tried making a meal of me. But nothing under these trees has got the better of me yet. I know these woods almost as well as I know the back streets of Amandale. I’m a born explorer, though at heart I’m city rat, not woodland. That’s what squirrels are for. “Think of us as rats in cute suits,” a squirrel friend of mine likes to say. Honestly, I don’t see that squirrels are all that adorable myself.
But as well as I knew the Maze Wood, Nicolas intuited it.
He moved through its thorny ways like he would the “Willful Child’s Reel,” a song he could play backwards and blindfolded. Nicolas took shortcuts through corridors I’d never seen and seemed to have some inner needle pointing always to the Heart Glade the way some people can find true north. In no time at all, we came to the juniper tree.
Nicolas went right up to it and flung himself to the ground, wrapping his arms as far about the trunk as he could reach. There he sobbed with all the abandon of a child, like Froggit had sobbed right before they cut out his tongue.
Dora Rose hung back. She looked impassive, but I thought she was embarrassed. Swans don’t cry.
After several awkward minutes of this, Nicolas sat up. He wiped his face, drew the silver pipe from his shirt, and played a short riff as if to calm himself. I jittered at the sound, and Dora Rose jumped, but neither o
f us danced. He didn’t play for us that time but for the tree.
The juniper tree began to glow, as it had glowed yesterday when the Swan Hunters sang up Elinore’s bones. The mossy ground at the roots turned white as milk. Then a tiny bird, made all of red-and-gold fire, shot out of the trunk to land on Nicolas’s shoulder. Nicolas stopped piping but did not remove the silver lip from his mouth. Lifting its flickering head, the bird opened its beak and began to sing in a small, clear, plaintive voice:
“Stepmother made a simple stew
Into the pot my bones she threw
When father finished eating me
They buried my bones at the juniper tree
Day and night stepsister weeps
Her grief like blood runs red, runs deep
Kywitt! Kywitt! Kywitt! I cry
What a beautiful bird am I!”
Nicolas’s expression reflected the poor bird’s flames. He stroked its tiny head, bent his face, and whispered something in its ear. “He’s telling the god about your dead Folk,” I said to Dora Rose with satisfaction. “Now we’ll really see something!”
I should’ve been born a prophet, for as soon as Nicolas stopped speaking, the bird toppled from his shoulder into his outstretched palm and lay there in a swoon for a full minute before opening its beak to scream. Full-throated, human, anguished.
I covered my ears, wishing they really had been made of tin. But Dora Rose stared as if transfixed. She nodded once, slowly, as if the ghost bird’s scream matched the sound she’d been swallowing all day.
The juniper tree blazed up again. The glowing white ground roiled like a tempest-turned sea. Gently, so gently, Nicolas brought his cupped hands back up to the trunk, returning the bird to its armor of shaggy bark. As the fiery bird vanished into the wood, the tree itself began to sing. The Heart Glade filled with a voice that was thunderous and marrow-deep.
