One in obedience, twenty young Swan Hunters lifted up their voices in wobbly chorus. The hounds bayed mournfully along. I hummed, too, under my breath.
When they’d started the Swan Hunt a few weeks ago, the kids used to join hands and gambol around the juniper tree all maypole-like at Ulia Gol’s urging. But the Mayor since discovered that her transformation spell worked just as well if they all stood still. Pity. I missed the dancing. Used to give the whole scene a nice theatrical flair.
The music cut off with an abrupt slash of Ulia Gol’s hands. She nodded once in curt approval. “Go on!” she told Froggit Cobblersawl. “Dig her back up again!”
But here Froggit’s courage failed him. Or perhaps found him. For he scrubbed his naked face of tears, smearing worse things there, and stared up with big brown eyes that hated only one thing worse than himself, and that was Ulia Gol.
“No,” he said.
“Hans,” said Ulia Gol, “we have another rebel on our hands.”
Hans stepped forward and drew from its sheath that swell knife I’d be stealing later. Ulia Gol beamed down at Froggit, foxtails falling to frame her face.
“Master Cobblersawl.” She clucked her tongue. “Last week, we put out little Miss Possum’s eyes when she refused to sing up the bones. Four weeks before that, we lamed the legs of young Miss Greenpea. A cousin of yours, I think? On our first hunt, she threw that shovel right at Hans and tried to run away. But we took that shovel and we made her pay, didn’t we, Master Cobblersawl? And with whom did we replace her to make my hunters twenty strong again? Why, yourself, Master Cobblersawl. Now what, pray, Master Cobblersawl, do you think we’ll do to you?”
Froggit did not answer, not then. Not ever. The next sound he made was a wail, which turned into a shriek, which turned into a swoon. “No” was the last word Froggit Cobblersawl ever spoke, for Hans put his tongue to the knife.
After this, they corked up the swooning boy with moss to soak the blood, and called upon young Ocelot to dig the bones. They’d have to replace the boy later, as they’d replaced Greenpea and Possum. Ulia Gol needed twenty for her sorceries. A solid twenty. No more, no less.
Good old Ocelot. The sort of girl who, as exigency demanded, bathed in mare’s milk every night there was a bit of purifying moonlight handy. Her father was Chief Gravedigger in Amandale. She, at the age of thirteen and a half, was his apprentice. Of all her fellow Swan Hunters, Ocelot had the cleanest and most callused hands. Ulia Gol’s favorite.
She never flinched. Her shovel scraped once, clearing some of the carelessly spattered dirt from the corpse. The juniper tree glowed silver.
Scraped twice. The green ground roiled white as boiling milk.
Scraped thrice.
It was not a dead girl Ocelot freed from the dirt, after all. Not even a dead swan.
I glanced at Dora Rose to see how she was taking it. Her blue eyes were wide, her gaze fixed. No expression showed upon it, though. No sorrow or astonishment or rage. Nothing in her face was worth neglecting the show below us for, except the face itself. I could drink my fill of that pool and still die of thirst.
But I’d gone down that road once already. What separated us rats from other Folk was our ability to learn.
I returned my attention to the scene. When Ocelot stepped back to dust off her hands on her green cape, the exhumed thing that had been Elinore flashed into view.
It was, as Hans had earlier predicted, a harp.
And a large harp it was, of shining white bone, strung with black strings fine as hair, which Ulia Gol bent to breathe upon lightly. Shimmering, shuddering, the harp repeated back a refrain of Elinore’s last song.
“It works,” Ulia Gol announced with tolling satisfaction. “Load it up on the cart, and we’ll take it back to Orchestra Hall. A few more birds in the bag and my automatized orchestra will be complete!”
Back in our budding teens, I’d elected to miss a three-day banquet spree with my rat buddies in post-plague Doornwold, Queen’s City. (A dead city now, like the Queen herself.) Why? To attend instead at Dora Rose’s invitation a water ballet put on by the Swan Folk of Lake Serenus.
I know, right? The whole affair was dull as a tidy pantry, lemme tell you. When I tried to liven things up with Dora Rose a little later, just a bit of flirt and fondle on the silver docks of Lake Serenus, I got myself soundly slapped. Then the Swan Princess of my dreams told me that my attentions were not only unsolicited and unwelcome but grossly, criminally, heinously repellent—her very words—and sent me back to sulk in my nest in Amandale.
You should’ve seen me. Tail dragging. Whiskers drooping. Sniveling into my fur. Talk about heinously repellent. I couldn’t’ve been gladder my friends had all scampered over to the new necropolis, living it up among the corpses of Doornwold. By the time they returned, I had a handle on myself. Started up a dialogue with a nice, fat rat girl. We had some good times. Her name was Moira. That day on the docks was the last I saw Dora Rose up close for fifteen years.
Until today.
Soft as I was, by the time the last of the Swan Hunters trotted clear of the Heart Glade on their ponies, I’d decided to take Dora Rose back to my nest in Amandale. I had apartments in a warren of condemned tenements by the Drukkamag River docks. Squatters’ paradise. Any female should rightly have spasmed at the chance; my wainscoted walls were only nominally chewed, my furniture salvaged from the alleyways of Merchant Prince Row, Amandale’s elite. The current mode of decoration in my neighborhood was shabby chic. Distressed furniture? Mine was so distressed, it could’ve been a damsel in a past life.
But talking Dora Rose down from the juniper tree proved a trifle dicey. She wanted to return to Lake Serenus right away and search for survivors.
“Yeah, you and Huntsman Hans,” I snorted. “He goes out every night with his nets, hoping to bag another of your Folk. Think he’ll mistake you, with your silver gown and your silver skin, for a ruddy-kneed mortal milkmaid out for a skinny dip? Come on, Dora Rose! You got more brains than that, even if you are a bird.”
I was still in my rat skin when I told her this. She turned on me savagely, grabbing me by the tail, and shook me, hissing as only swans and cobras can hiss. I’d’ve bitten her, but I was laughing too hard.
“Do you have a better idea, Maurice? Maybe you would be happiest if I turned myself in to Ulia Gol right now! Is that what I should do?”
I fleshed myself to man-shape right under her hands. She dropped me quickly, cheeks burning. Dora Rose did not want to see what she’d’ve been holding me by once I changed form. I winked at her.
“I got a lot of ideas, Dora Rose, but they all start with a snack and a nap.”
Breathing dangerously, she shied back, deeper into the branches. Crossed her arms over her chest. Narrowed her lake-blue eyes. For a swan, you’d think her mama was a mule.
“Come on, Ladybird,” I coaxed, scooting nearer—but not too near—my own dear Dora Rose. “You’re traumatized. That’s not so strong a word, is it, for what you’ve been through today?”
Her chin jutted. Her gaze shifted. Her lips were firm, not trembling. Not a trembler, that girl. I settled on a nice, thick branch, my legs dangling in the air.