“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 of 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:
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.
The light disappeared. The juniper sagged and seemed to sigh.
Nicolas put his pipe away and bowed his head.
Dora Rose turned to me, fierceness shining from her.
“Maurice,” she said, “you heard the tree. We must bring the bones here. I must hang for three days. You must keep Ulia Gol and Hans away from the Heart Glade for that time, and bring those twenty young Swan Hunters to me. Quickly! We have no time to waste.”
And here the heart-stricken and love-sore child I once was rose up from the depths of me like its very own bone instrument.
“Must I, Ladybird?”
Did I sound peevish? I hardly knew. My voice cracked like a boy soprano whose balls’d just dropped, thus escaping the castrating knife and opium bath and a life of operatic opulence. Peevish, yes. Peevish it was.
“Must I really? So easy, don’t you think, to steal an orchestra right out from under an ogre’s nose? To keep Ulia Gol from tracking it back here. To lure twenty children all into the Maze Wood without a mob of parents after us. That’ll take more than wiles, Princess. That’ll take tactics. And why should I do any of this, eh? For you, Dora Rose? For the sake of a friend? What kind of friend are you to me?”
Nicolas stared from me to Dora Rose, wide-eyed. He had placed a hand over his pipe and kneaded it nervously against his chest. Dora Rose also stared, her face draining of excitement, of grief nearly avenged, of bright rage barely contained. All I saw looking into that shining oval was cool, contemptuous royalty. That was fine. Let her close herself off to me. See if that got her my aid in this endeavor.