by Paula Guran
“As you see,” he announced, “the rats of Amandale are drowned.”
“Mmn,” said Ulia Gol.
Most of the town—myself and my three comrades included—had gathered below the cathedral on Kirkja Street to gawk at the inconceivability of a thousand bright canaries stacked in a small leather chest right there in the open. The coins cast a golden glitter in that last lingering caress of sunset, and reflected onto the reverent faces of Amandale’s children, who wore flowers in their hair and garlands ’round their necks. All of Amandale had been feasting and carousing since the rats began their death march at dawn that morning. Many of the older citizens now bore the flushed, aggressive sneers of the pot-valiant. In the yellow light of all that dying sun and leaping gold, they, too, looked new-minted, harder and glintier than they’d been before.
Nicolas did not notice them. His gaze never left Ulia Gol’s shrewd face. She blocked his path to the gold. Hand over heart, he tried again.
“From the oldest albino to the nakedest newborn, Madame Mayor, the rats are drowned one and all. I have come for my payment.”
But she did not move. “Your payment,” she purred, “for what?”
Nicolas inhaled deeply. “I played my pipe, and I made them dance, and they danced themselves to drowning.”
“Master Piper . . . ” Ulia Gol oozed closer to him. I could see Nicolas stiffen in an effort not to back away.
I must say, the Mayor of Amandale had really gussied herself up for this occasion. Her pink wig was caught up in a sort of birdcage, all sorts of bells and beads hanging off it. The bone-paneled brocade of her crimson dress was stiff enough to stand up by itself, and I imagined it’d require three professional grave robbers with shovels to exhume her from her maquillage. She smelled overpoweringly of rotten pears and sour grapes. Did I say so before? At the risk of repeating myself, then: a magnificent woman, Ulia Gol.
“I watched you all day, Master Piper,” she told Nicolas. “I strained my ears and listened closely. You put your pipe to your lips, all right, my pretty perjurer, and fabricated a haggard verisimilitude, but never a note did I hear you play.”
“No,” Nicolas agreed. “You would not have. I did not play for you, Ulia Gol.”
“Prove it.”
He pointed at the soggy canvas. “There is my proof.”
Ulia Gol shrugged. Her stiff lace collar barely moved. “I see dead rats, certainly. But they might have come from anywhere, drowned in any number of ways. The Drukkamag River runs clean and clear, and Amandale is much as it ever was. Yes, there were rats. Now there are none.” She opened her palms. “Who knows why? Perhaps they left us of their own accord.”
Most of the crowd rustled in agreement. Sure, you could tell a few wanted to mutter in protest, but pressed tight their lips instead. Fresh black bruises adorned the faces of many of these. What were the odds that Ulia Gol’s main detractors had been made an example of since last night’s town meeting in Orchestra Hall? Not long, I’d say. Not long at all.
Ulia Gol swelled with the approval of her smitten constituents. Their adoration engorged her. Magic coursed through her. There was no mistaking what she was if you knew to look out for it. She stank like an ogre and grinned like a giant, and all that was missing was a beanstalk and a bone grinder and a basket for her bread. She loomed ever larger, swamping Nicolas in her shadow.
“Master Piper—if a Master indeed you are—you cannot prove that your alleged playing had aught to do with the rats’ disappearance. Perhaps they decamped due to instinct. Migration. After all, their onset was as sudden as their egress. Perhaps you knew this. Did you really come to Amandale to aid us, or were you merely here by happenstance? Seeing our dismay and our disarray, did you seek to take advantage of us, to ply your false trade, and cheat honest citizens of their hard-earned coin?”
The Mayor of Amandale was closer to the truth than she realized—ha! But that didn’t worry me. Ulia Gol, after all, wasn’t interested in truth. The only thing currently absorbing her was her intent to cheat the man who’d refused her bed the night before. It never occurred to her that the plague of rats was a misdirection of Amandale’s attention during the theft of the bone orchestra. Okay, and part of its punishment for the murdered swans.
“Look at the color of his face,” Greenpea whispered. “Is the piper all right?”
“Well . . . er.” I squirmed. “It’s Nicolas, right? He’s never all the way all right.”
But seeing his sick pallor, I wasn’t sure Nicolas remembered that all this was part of a bigger plan. He looked near to swooning. Not good. We needed him for this next bit.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please . . . just pay me and I’ll be on my way.”
“I am sorry, Master Piper.” Ulia Gol laughed at him, her loud and lovely laugh. “But I cannot pay you all this gold for an enterprise you cannot prove you didn’t engineer. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky if you leave Amandale in one piece.”
The crowd around us tittered and growled. The children drew closer together, far less easy with the atmosphere of ballooning tension than were their parents. It was the adults whose eyes narrowed, whose flushed faces had empurpled and perspired until they looked all but smaller models of their Mayor. Nicolas took a step nearer Ulia Gol, though what it cost him, I do not know. He was a smallish man, and had to look up to her. Nicolas only sometimes seemed tall because of his slender build.
“Please,” he begged her again. “Do not break your word. Have I not done as I promised?”
I leaned in for a closer look, brushing off Possum’s anxious hand when it plucked my elbow.
“What’s he doing?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, kid.”
How Nicolas planned to act if Ulia Gol suddenly discovered within her scrumdiddlyumptious breast a thimble’s worth of honor, compassion, or just plain sense, I do not know.
But she wouldn’t. She was what she was, and behaved accordingly.
If she could but smell the furious sorrow on him, as I could . . . scent that destroying wind, the storm that had no center, the magic in his pipe that would dance us all to the grave, then perhaps even Ulia Gol might have flung herself to her knees and solicited his forgiveness. Did she think his music only worked on rats? That, because he trembled at her triumph and turned, in that uncertain twilight, an exquisite shade of green, he would not play a song Amandale would remember for a hundred years?
“Please,” the Pied Piper repeated.
Something in Ulia Gol’s face flickered.
I wondered if, after all, the Mayor would choose to part with her gold, and Nicolas to spare her. Never mind that it would leave Dora Rose pinioned to a juniper tree, the swans only partly avenged, and all my stylish stratagems and near-drowning in vain. Oh, he . . . naw, he . . . Surely Nicolas—even he!—wouldn’t be so, so criminally virtuous!
Voice breaking and black eyes brimming, he appealed to her for a third and final time.
“Please.”
The flickering stilled. I almost laughed in relief.
“It’s gonna be fine,” I told my comrades. “Watch closely. Be ready.”
“Henceforth,” purred the Mayor, “I banish you, Master Piper, from the town of Amandale. If ever you set foot inside my walls again, I will personally hang you from the bell tower of Brotquen Cathedral. There you will rot, until nothing but your bones and that silver pipe you play are left.”
Ow. Harsh. Fabulous.
Nicolas nodded heavily, as if a final anvil had descended upon his brow.
Then.
To my great delight, to my pinkest tickly pleasure, his posture subtly shifted. Yes, altered and unbent, the sadness swept from him like a magician’s tablecloth right from beneath the cutlery. Nicolas was totally bare now, with only the glitter of glass and knives left to him.
He sprang upright. And grinned. At the sharp gleam of that grin, even I shivered.
“Here we go,” I breathed.
Beside me, Greenpea leaned fo
rward in her wheelchair, grey eyes blazing. “Yes, yes, yes!” she whispered. “Get this over with, piper. Finish it.”
Solemnly, Froggit took Possum’s hand in his and squeezed. She lifted her chin, face pale behind her ragged blindfold, and asked, “Is it now, Mister Maurice?”
“Soon. Very soon,” I replied, hardly able to keep from dancing. Lo, I’d had enough dancing for a lifetime, thanks. Still, I couldn’t help but wriggle a bit.
“Citizens of Amandale,” announced the Pied Piper, “although it causes me pangs of illimitable dolor to leave you thus, I must, as a law-abiding alien to your environs, make my exit gracefully. But to thank you for your hospitality and to delight your beautiful children, I propose to play you one last song.”
“Time to put that cotton in your ears,” I warned my recruits. Froggit and Possum obeyed. I don’t think Greenpea even heard me; she was that focused on the motley figure poised on the steps of Brotquen Cathedral.
My caution turned out to be unnecessary. Nicolas was, indeed, a Master Piper. He could play tunes within tunes. Tunes piled on tunes, and tunes buried under them. His music came from the Hill, from Her, the Faerie Queen, and there was no song Nicolas could not play when he flung himself open to the sound.
First he played a strand of notes that froze the adults where they stood. Second, a lower, darker line strong enough to paralyze the ogre in her place. Then he played three distinct trills that sounded like names—Froggit, Possum, Greenpea—exempting them from his final spell. Greenpea licked her lips and looked almost disappointed.
Last came the spell song. The one we’d worked so hard for these three days. A song to lure twenty little Swan Hunters into the trap a Swan Princess had set. A song to bring the children back to Dora Rose.
I don’t think, in my furry shape, I’d’ve given the tune more than passing heed. But I was full-fleshed right now, with all the parts of a man. The man I was had been a child once, sometimes still behaved like one, and the tune Nicolas played was tailor-made for children. It made the tips of my toes tingle and my heels feel spry. Well within control, thank the Captured God.
You know who couldn’t control it, though?
Ocelot, the Gravedigger’s daughter. Ilse Cobblersawl, her brothers Frank, Theodore and James, her sweet sister Anabel, and the nine-year-old twins Hilde and Gretel. Pearl, the chandler’s eldest daughter, who let her sister Ruby slip from her arms, to join hands with Maven Chain, the goldsmith’s girl. Charles the Chimneysweep. Kevin the Gooseboy. Those twelve and eight more whose names I did not know.
Heads haloed in circles of silver fire that cast a ghostly glow about them, these twenty children shoved parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, teachers, employers, out of the way. Those too small to keep pace were swept up and carried by their fellow hunters. Still playing, Nicolas sprinted down the steps of the cathedral and sprang right into that froth of silver-lit children.
All of them danced. Then the tune changed, and they ran instead.
Light-footed, as though they wore wings on their feet, they fled down Kirkja Street and onto Maskmakers Boulevard. This, I knew, ended in a cul-de-sac abutting a town park, which sported in its farthest shrubbery a rusted gate leading into the Maze Wood.
“Step lively, soldiers,” I barked to my three recruits. “Don’t wanna get caught staring when the thrall fades from this mob. Gonna get ugly. Lots of snot and tears and torches. Regardless, we should hie ourselves on over to the Heart Glade. Wouldn’t want to miss the climax now, would we?”
Froggit shook his head and Possum looked doubtful, but Greenpea was already muscling her chair toward the corner of Kirkja and Maskmakers. We made haste to follow.
Dora Rose, here we come.
I’d seen Dora Rose as a swan, and I’d seen her as a woman, but I’d never seen her both at once. Or so nakedly.
I confess, I averted my eyes. No, I know, I know. You think I should’ve taken my chance. Looked my fill. Saved up the sweet sight of her to savor all those lonely nights in my not-so-distant future. (Because, let’s be honest here, my love life’s gonna be next to nonexistent from this point on. Most of the nice fixed does I know are bloating gently in the Drukkamag, and any Folk doe who scampered off to save herself from the Pied Piper is not going to be speaking to me. Who could blame her, really?) But, see, it wasn’t like that. It was never like that, with Dora Rose.
Sure, I curse by the Captured God. But Dora Rose is my religion.
It was as much as I could bear just to glance once and see her arms outstretched, elongated, mutated, jointed into demented angles that human bones are not intended for, pure white primary feathers bursting from her fingernails, tertials and secondaries fanning out from the soft torn flesh of her underarms. Her long neck was a column of white, like a feathered python, and her face, though mostly human, had become masklike, eyes and nose and mouth black as bitumen, hardening into the shining point of a beak.
That’s all I saw, I swear.
After that I was kneeling on the ground and hiding my face, like Nicolas under his covers. In that darkness, I became aware of the music in the Heart Glade. Gave me a reason to look up again.
What does a full bone orchestra look like? First the woodwinds: piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon. Then the brass: horn, trumpet, cornet, tenor trombone, bass trombone, tuba (that last must’ve been Dasher—he was the biggest cob on the lake). Percussion: timpani, snare, cymbals (those cygnets, I’d bet). And the strings. Violin. Viola. Violoncello. Double bass. And the harp. One white harp, with shining black strings.
Elinore, Dora Rose’s twin sister.
All of them, set in a circle around the juniper tree, glowed in the moonlight. They played softly by themselves, undisturbed, as if singing lullabies to the tree and she who hung upon it.
I’d heard the tune before. It was the same phrase of music the tiny firebird had sung, which later the tree itself repeated in its seismic voice. Beneath the full sweep of the strings and hollow drumbeats and bells of bone, I seemed to hear that tremulous boy soprano sobbing out his verse with the dreary repetition of the dead.
Only then—okay, so maybe I took another quick glance—did I see the red tracks that stained the pale down around Dora Rose’s eyes. By this I knew she had been weeping all this while.
She, who never wept. Not once. Not in front of me.
I’d thought swans didn’t cry. Not like rats and broken pipers and little children. Not like the rest of us. Stupid to be jealous of a bunch of bones. That they merited her red, red tears, when nothing else in the world could or would. Least of all, yours truly, Maurice the Incomparable.
Me and my three comrades loitered in the darkness outside that grisly bone circle. Greenpea, confined to her wheelchair; Possum, sitting quietly near her feet; a tired Froggit sprawled beside her, his head in her lap. Possibly, he’d fallen into a restive sleep. They’d had a tough few days, those kids.
We’d come to the Heart Glade by a shortcut I knew, but it wasn’t long till we heard a disturbance in one of the maze’s many corridors. In the distance, Nicolas’s piping caught the melody of the bone orchestra and countered it, climbing an octave higher and embroidering the somber fabric of the melody with sharp silver notes. The twenty children he’d enchanted joined in, singing:
“Day and night Stepsister weeps
Her grief like blood runs red, runs deep
Kywitt! Kywitt! Kywitt! I cry
What a beautiful bird am I!”
In a rowdiness of music making, they spilled into the Heart Glade. Ocelot was yipping, “Kywitt! Kywitt! Kywitt!” at the tops of her lungs, while Ilse and Maven flapped their arms like wings and made honking noises. A flurry of chirps and whistles and shrieks of laughter from the other children followed in cacophony. Nicolas danced into the glade after them, his pipe wreathed in silver flames. Hopping nimbly over a small bone cymbal in the moss, he faced the Heart Glade, faced the children, and his tune changed again.
And the children leapt the bone
s.
Once inside the circle, the twenty of them linked wrists and danced rings around the juniper tree, as they used to do in the beginning, when the first of the Swan Folk were hunted and changed. As they whirled, a fissure opened in the juniper’s trunk. Red-gold fire flickered within. Like a welcoming hearth. Like a threshold to a chamber of magma.
The children, spurred by Nicolas’s piping, began to jump in.
They couldn’t reach the fissure fast enough. Ocelot, by dint of shoving the littler ones out of her way, was first to disappear into the bloody light. And when she screamed, the harp that had been Elinore burst into silver-and-red flame, and disappeared. The first silver bloom erupted from the branches of the juniper tree.
Dora Rose shuddered where she hung.
A second child leapt through the crack. Ilse Cobblersawl. The bone trumpet vanished. A second silver bloom appeared. Then little Pearl the Chandler’s daughter shouldered her way into the tree. Her agonized wail cut off as a bone cymbal popped into nothingness. Another silver bud flowered open.
When all twenty instruments had vanished, when all twenty Swan Hunters had poured themselves into the tree, when the trunk of the tree knit its own bark back over the gaping wound of its molten heart, then twenty silver blooms opened widely on their branches. The blooms gave birth to small white bees that busied themselves in swirling pollinations. Petals fell, leaving silver fruit where the flowers had been. The branches bent to the ground under the colossal weight of that fruit and heaved Dora Rose from their tree. Into the moss she tumbled, like so much kindling, a heap of ragged feathers, shattered flesh, pale hair.
Nicolas stopped piping. He wiped his mouth as if it had gone numb. He looked over at Froggit, who’d been screaming wordlessly ever since waking to the sight of his siblings feeding themselves to the tree. Nicolas held Froggit in his dense black gaze, the enormity of his sadness and regret etching his face ancient.
For myself, I couldn’t care less about any of them.
