“I’m gonna ask you something.” I drew closer, taking her slack silver hand in mine. I even pressed it between my itching palms. “If it were me, Dora Rose, if I’d come to Lake Serenus before your courtly bevy and said to you, ‘Dear Princess, Your Highness, my best old pal! Mayor Ulia Gol’s exterminating the Rat Folk of Amandale. She’s trapping us and torturing us and making bracelets of our tails. Won’t you help me stop her? For pity’s sake? For what I once was to you, even if that was only a pest?’
“What would you have said to me, Dora Rose, if I had come to you so?”
Dora Rose turned her face away, but did not remove her hand. “I would have said nothing, Maurice. I would have driven you off. Do you not know me?”
“Yes, Dora Rose.” I squeezed her hand, happy that it still held mine. Was it my imagination, or did she squeeze back? Yup. That was definitely a squeeze. More like a vise, truth be told. I loved a vise. Immediately I began feeling more charitable. That was probably her intention.
“Elinore now,” I reflected, “Elinore would’ve intervened on my behalf.” Dora Rose’s head turned cobra-quick. Had she fangs enough and time, I’d be sporting several new apertures in my physiognomy. I went on anyway. “The nice sister, that Elinore. Always sweet as a Blood Haven peach—for all she loathed me tail to toe. You Swan Folk would’ve come to our aid on Elinore’s say so, mark my words, Dora Rose.”
“Then,” said Dora Rose with freezing slowness, her grip on my hand yet sinewy and relentless, “you will help me for the sake of my dead twin, Maurice? For the help my sister Elinore would have given you had our places been reversed?”
I sighed. “Don’t you know me, Ladybird? No. I wouldn’t do it for Elinore. Not for gold or chocolate. Not for a dozen peachy swan girls and their noblesse oblige. I’ll do it for you, of course. Always did like you better than Elinore.”
“You,” scoffed Dora Rose with a curling lip, flinging my hand from hers, “are the only one who ever did, Maurice.”
I shrugged. It was true.
“As a young cygnet, I feared this was because our temperaments were too alike.”
I snorted, inordinately pleased. “Yeah, well. Don’t go telling my mama I act like a Swan Princess. She’ll think she didn’t raise me right.”
From his place near the juniper tree, Nicolas cleared his throat. “Are we, are we all friends again? Please?” He smoothed one of his long brown hands over the bark. “There’s so much to be done, and all of it so dark and sad. Best to do it quickly, before we drown in sorrow.”
Dora Rose dropped him a curtsy and included me in it with a dip of her chin. My heart leapt in my chest. Other parts of me leapt, too, but I won’t get into that.
“At your convenience, Master Piper,” said she. “Maurice.”
“Dark work? Sad?” I cried. “No such thing! Say, rather, a lark! The old plague days of Doornwold’ll be nothing to it! My Folk scurry at the chance to run amuck. If you hadn’t’ve happened along, Dora Rose, with your great tragedy and all, I’d’ve had to invent an excuse to misbehave. Of such stuff is drama made! Come on, you two. I have a plan.”
We threw Nicolas’s old tattercoat over Dora Rose’s silver gown and urchined up her face with mud. I stuffed her pale-as-lace hair under my wharf boy’s cap and didn’t even mind when she turned and pinched me for pawing at her too ardently. Me in the lead, Dora Rose behind, Nicolas bringing up the rear, we marched into Amandale like three mortal-born bumpkins off for a weekend in the big city.
Dwelling by the Hill, Nicolas had lived as near neighbor to Amandale for I don’t know how many years. But he was so often gone on his tours, in cities under the Hill that made even the Queen’s City seem a hermit’s hovel, that he wandered now through Amandale’s busy gates with widening and wonder-bright eyes. His head swiveled like it sat on an owl’s neck. The woebegone down-bend of his lips began a slow, gladdening, upward trend that was heartbreaking to watch. So I stole only backward glances, sidelong like.
“Maurice.” He hurried to my side as we passed a haberdashery.
“Yes, Nicolas?”
“You really live here?”
“All my life.”
“Does it,” he stooped to speak directly in my ear, “does it ever stop singing?”
I grinned over at Dora Rose, who turned her face away to smile. “If by singing you mean stinking, then no. This is a typical day in Amandale, my friend. A symphony of odors!” He looked so puzzled that I took pity and explained, “According to the princess over there, I’m one who can only ever hear music through my nose.”
“Ah!” Nicolas’s black eyes beamed. “I see. Yes! You’re a synesthete!”
Before I could reply, a fire-spinner out front of Cobblersawl’s Cakes and Comfits caught his eye, and Nicolas stopped walking to burst into wild applause. The fire-spinner grinned and embarked upon a particularly intricate pattern of choreography.
No one was exempt, I realized. Not me, and not the pretty fire-spinner. Not even Dora Rose. Plainly it was impossible to keep from smiling at Nicolas when Nicolas was pleased about something. I nudged Dora Rose.
“Hear that, Ladybird? I’m a synesthete!”
“Maurice, if you ever met a synesthete, you’d probably try to eat it.”
“Probably. Would it look anything like you?”
Dora Rose did not dignify this with a response but whacked the back of my head, and her tiny smile twisted into something perilously close to a grin. We ducked into the bakery, pulling Nicolas after us so he wouldn’t start piping along to the fire-spinner’s sequences, sending her off to an early death by flaming poi.
One of the elder Cobblersawl children—Ilse, her name was—stood at the bread counter, looking bored but dutiful. A softhearted lass, our Ilse. Good for a scrap of cheese on occasion. Not above saving a poor rodent if said rodent happened to be trapped under her big brother’s boot. She’d not recognize me in this shape, of course, but she might have a friendly feeling for me if I swaggered up to her with a sparkle in my beady little eyes and greeted her with a wheedling, “Hallo, Miss…”
She frowned. “No handouts. Store policy.”
“No, you misunderstand. We’re looking for…for Froggit? Young Master Froggit Cobblersawl? We have business with him.” Dora Rose poked me between my shoulder blades. Her nails were as sharp as mine. “If you please?” I squeaked.
Ilse’s frown deepened to a scowl. “Froggit’s sick.”
I bet he was. I’d be sick too if I’d swallowed half my tongue.
“Sick of…politics maybe?” I waggled my eyebrows.
A smell came off the girl like vaporized cheddar. Fear. Sweaty, stinky, delicious fear.
“If you’re from the Mayor,” Ilse whispered, “tell her that Mama spanked Froggit for not behaving as he ought. We know we’re beholden. We know we owe the fancy new shop to her. And—and our arrangement to provide daily bread to the houses on Merchant Prince Row is entirely due her benevolence. Please, Papa cried so hard when he heard how Froggit failed us. We were so proud when his name came up in the Swan Hunter lottery. Really, it’s such an honor, we know it’s an honor, to work for the Mayor on our very own orchestra, but—it’s just he’s so young. He didn’t understand. Didn’t know, didn’t know better. But I’m to take his place next hunt. I will be the twentieth hunter. I will do what he couldn’t. I promise.” She unfisted her hands and opened both palms in supplication. “Please don’t take him to prison. Don’t disappear him like you did…”