“Damn it, Dora Rose, your twin sister’s just been turned into a harp! Your family, your friends, your Folk—all killed and buried and dug back up again as bone instruments. And for what?” I answered myself, since she wouldn’t. “So that Mayor Ulia Gol, that skinflint, can cheat Amandale’s Guild of Musicians of their entertainment fees. She wants an orchestra that plays itself—so she’s sacrificing swans to the juniper tree.”
Her mouth winced. She was not easy to faze, my Dora Rose. But hey, she’d had a tough day, and I was riding her hard.
“You’d be surprised,” I continued, “how many townspeople support Mayor Gol and her army of Swan Hunters. Everyone likes music. So what’s an overextended budget to do?”
Dora Rose unbent so far as to roll her eyes. Taking this as a sign of weakening, I hopped down from the juniper tree.
“Come home with me, Ladybird,” I called up. “There’s a candy shop around the corner from my building. I’ll steal you enough caramels to make you sick. You can glut your grief away, and then you can sleep. And in the morning, when you’ve decided it’s undignified to treat your only ally—no matter his unsavory genus—so crabbily, we’ll talk again.”
A pause. A rustle. A soundless silver falling. Dora Rose landed lightly on her toe-tips. Above us, an uneasy breeze jangled the dark green needles of the juniper tree. There was a sharp smell of sap. The tree seemed to breathe. It did that, periodically. The god inside its bark did not always sleep.
Dora Rose’s face was once more inscrutable, all grief and rage veiled behind her pride. “Caramels?” she asked.
Dora Rose once told me, years ago, that she liked things to taste either very sweet or very salty. Caramels, according to her, were the perfect food.
“Dark chocolate sea-salt caramels,” I expounded with only minimal drooling. “Made by a witch named Fetch. These things are to maim for, Dora Rose.”
“You remembered.” She sounded surprised. If I’d still been thirteen (Captured God save me from ever being thirteen again), I might’ve burst into tears to be so doubted. Of course I remembered! Rats have exceptional memories. Besides—in my youth, I’d kept a strict diary. Mortal-style.
I was older now. I doffed my wharf boy’s cap and offered my elbow. In my best Swan Prince imitation, I told her, “Princess, your every word is branded on my heart.”
I didn’t do it very well; my voice is too nasal, and I can’t help adding overtones of innuendo. But I think Dora Rose was touched by the effort. Or at least, she let herself relax into the ritual of courtesy, something she understood in her bones. Her bones. Which Ulia Gol wanted to turn into a self-playing harpsichord to match Elinore’s harp.
Over. My. Dead. Body.
Oh, all right. My slightly dented body. Up to and no further than a chunk off the tail. After that, Dora Rose would be on her own.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
She took my elbow. She even leaned on it a smidge, which told me how exhausted and stricken she was beneath her feigned indifference. I refrained from slavering a kiss upon her silver knuckles. Just barely.
The next morning, thanks to a midnight raid on Hans’s wardrobe, I was able to greet Dora Rose at my dapper best. New hose, new shining thigh-high boots, new scarlet jerkin, green cape and linen sark. New curved dagger with serrated edge, complete with flecks of Froggit Cobblersawl’s drying tongue meat on it.
I’d drawn the line at stealing Hans’s blond goatee, being at some loss as how best to attach it to my own chin. But I did not see why he should have one when I couldn’t. I had, therefore, left it at the bottom of his chamber pot should he care to seek it there.
Did the Swan Princess gaze at me in adoration? Did she stroke my fine sleeve or fondle my blade? Not a bit of it. She sat on the faded cushion of my best window seat, playing with a tassel from the heavy draperies and chewing on a piece of caramel. Her blue stare went right through me. Not blank, precisely. Meditative. Distant. Like I wasn’t important enough to merit even a fraction of her full attention.
“What I cannot decide,” she said slowly, “is what course I should take. Ought I to fly at Ulia Gol in the open streets of Amandale and dash her to the ground? Ought I to forsake this town entirely, and seek shelter with some other royal bevy? If,” she added with melancholy, “they would have me. This I doubt, for I would flee to them with empty hands and under a grave mantle of sorrow. Ought I to await at the lake for Hans’s net and Hans’s knife and join my Folk in death, letting my transformation take me at the foot of the juniper tree?”
That’s swans for you. Fraught with “oughts.” Stop after three choices, each bleaker and more miserably elegant than the last. Vengeance, exile, or suicide. Take your pick. I sucked my tongue against an acid reply, taking instead a cube of caramel and a deep breath. Twitched my nose. Smoothed out the wrinkles of distaste. Went to crouch on the floor by the window seat. (This was not, I’ll have you know, the same as kneeling at her feet. For one thing, I was balancing on my heels, not my knees.)
“Seems to me, Dora Rose,” I suggested around a sticky, salty mouthful, “that what you want in a case like this—”
“Like this?” she asked, and I knew she was seeing her sister’s hair repurposed for harp strings. “There has never been a case like mine, Maurice, so do not dare attempt to eclipse the magnitude of my despair with your filthy comparisons!”
I loved when she hissed at me. No blank stare now. If looks could kill, I’d be skewered like a shish kebab and served up on a platter. I did my best not to grin. She’d’ve taken it the wrong way.
Smacking my candy, I said in my grandest theatrical style, even going so far as to roll my R’s, “In a case, Dora Rose, where magic meets music, where both are abused and death lacks dignity, where the innocent suffer and a monster goes unchecked, it seems reasonable, I was going to say, to consult an expert. A magical musician, perhaps, who has suffered so much himself he cannot endure to watch the innocent undergo like torment.”
Ah, rhetoric. Swans, like rats, are helpless against it. Dora Rose twisted the braid at her shoulder, and lowered her ivory lashes. Early morning light wormed through my dirty windowpane. A few gray glows managed to catch the silver of her skin and set it gleaming.
My hands itched. In this shape, what I missed most was the sensitivity of my whiskers; my palms kept trying to make up for it. I leaned against the wall and scratched each palm vigorously in their turn with my dandy nails. Even in mortal form, these were sharp and black. I was vain about my nails and kept them polished. I wanted to run them though that fine, pale Swan Princess hair.
“Maurice.” Miraculously, Dora Rose was smiling. A contemptuous smile, yes, but a smile nonetheless. “You’re not saying you know a magical musician? You?”
Implicit in her tone: You wouldn’t know music if a marching band dressed ranks right up your nose.
I drew myself to my not very considerable height, and I tugged my scarlet jerkin straight, and I said to her, I said to Dora Rose, I said, “He happens to be my best friend!”
“Ah.”
“I saved his life down in Doornwold five years ago. The first people to repopulate the place were thieves and brigands, you know, and he wasn’t at all equipped to deal with…Well. That’s how I met Nicolas.”
She cocked an eyebrow.
“And then we met again out back of Amandale, down in the town dump. He, uh, got me out of a pickle. A pickle jar, rather. One that didn’t have air holes. This was in my other shape, of course.”