She swallowed whatever she was about to say when Dora Rose stepped forward. Removing my cap, she shook out that uncanny hair of hers and held Ilse’s gaze. Silence swamped the bakery as Ilse realized we weren’t Ulia Gol’s not-so-secret police.
“I want to thank him,” Dora Rose said. “That is all. The last swan they killed was my sister.”
“Oh,” Ilse whimpered. “Oh, you shouldn’t be here. You really shouldn’t be here.”
“Please,” said Dora Rose.
Her shaking fingers glimmering by the light pouring off the swan girl’s hair, Ilse pointed out a back door. We left the bakery as quickly as we could, not wanting to discomfit her further, or incite her to rouse the alarm.
The exit led into a private courtyard behind the bakery. Froggit was back by the whitewashed outhouse, idly sketching cartoons upon it with a stubby bit of charcoal. Most of these involved the Mayor and Hans in various states of decay, although in quite a few of them, the Swan Huntress Ocelot played a putrescent role. Froggit’s shoulder blades scrunched when our shadows fell over him, but he did not turn around.
I opened my mouth to speak, but it was Nicolas who dropped to the ground at Froggit’s side, crossing his legs like a fortune-teller and studying the outhouse wall with rapt interest.
“But this is extraordinary! It must be preserved! They will have to remove this entire apparatus to a museum. What, in the meantime, is to be done about waterproofing?” Nicolas examined the art in minute detail, his nose almost touching the graffitied boards. “What to do, what to do,” he muttered.
Taking his charcoal stub, Froggit scrawled, “BURN IT!” in childish writing over his latest cartoon. Then he scowled at Nicolas, who widened his eyes at him. Nicolas began nodding, at first slowly, then with increasing vigor.
“Oh, yes! Indeed! Yes, of course! Art is best when ephemeral, don’t you think? How your admirers will mourn its destruction. How they will paint their faces with the ashes of your art. And you will stand so”—Nicolas hopped up to demonstrate—“arms crossed, with your glare that is like the glare of a tiger, and they will sob and wail and beg you to draw again—just once more please, Master Froggit—but you shall break your charcoal and their hearts in one snap. Yes! You will take all this beauty from them, as they have taken your tongue. I see. It is stunning. I salute you.”
So saying, Nicolas drew out his pipe and began a dirge.
When he finished many minutes later, me and Dora Rose collapsed on the ground, sweating from the excruciatingly stately waltz we’d endured together. Well, she’d endured. I rather enjoyed it, despite never having waltzed in my life, least of all in a minor key.
Froggit himself, who much to his consternation had started waltzing with an old rake, let it fall against the outhouse wall and eyeballed the lot of us with keen curiosity and not a little apprehension. What did he see when he looked at us, this little boy without a tongue?
Nicolas sat in the mud again. This made Froggit, still standing, the taller of the two, and Nicolas gazed up at him with childlike eyes.
“Don’t be afraid. It’s my silver pipe. Magic, you see. Given me by Her Gracious Majesty, Empress of Faerie, Queen of the Realms Beneath the Hill. It imparts upon me power over the creatures of land, sea, air, and fire. Folk and fixed, and everything between. But when I pass into the Hill, my pipe has no power. Under the Hill it is not silver but bone that sings to the wild blood of the Faerieborn. Had I a bone pipe, I might dance them all to their deaths, those Shining Ones who cannot die. But I have no pipe of bone. Just this.”
Nicolas’s face took on a taut look. Almost, I thought, one of unbearable longing. His knuckles whitened on his pipe. Then he shook himself and dredged up a smile from unfathomable depths, though it was a remote, pathetic, tremulous thread of a thing.
“But here, above the Hill,” he continued as if he’d never paused, “it is silver that ensorcels. Silver that enspells. I could pipe my friend the rat Maurice into the Drukkamag River and drown him. See that Swan Princess over there? Her I could pirouette right off a cliff, and not even her swanskin wings could save her. You, little boy, I could jig you up onto a rooftop and thence into the sky, whence you’d fall, fall, fall. But I will not!” Nicolas added as Froggit’s round brown eyes flashed wider. “Destroy an artist such as yourself? Shame on me! How could I even think it? I have the greatest respect for you, Master Froggit!”
But Froggit, after that momentary alarm, seemed unafraid. In fact, he began to look envious. He pointed first to the silver pipe, then to his charcoal caricature of Mayor Ulia Gol, dripping gore and missing a few key limbs.
His wide mouth once more woebegone, Nicolas burst out, “Oh, but she is wicked! Wicked! She has an ogre’s heart and a giant’s greed. She is a monster, and we must rid this world of monsters. For what she did to the juniper tree, that alone deserves a pair of iron shoes baked oven-bright, and four and twenty blackbirds to pluck out her eyes. But for what she has done to you…and to the swans and the foxes and the trout. Oh! I would break my pipe upon her throat if I…But.”
Drawing a shaky breath, Nicolas hid his thin face in rigid hands.
“No. I shall not be called upon for that. Not this time. Not today. No. No, Nicolas, you may stay your hand and keep to your music for now. Maurice the Incomparable has a plan. The role of Nicolas promises to be quite small this time. Just a song. Just the right little song. Or the wrong one. The wrongest song of all.”
Froggit sat beside Nicolas and touched a trembling hand to his shoulder. Nicolas didn’t take his hands from his face, but suddenly bright black eyes peeped between his fingers.
“Your part is bigger than mine, Master Froggit. If you’ll play it. Throw in with us. You have no tongue to speak, but you have hands to help, and we’d be proud to have your help.”
Froggit stared. At the huddled Piper. At proud Dora Rose standing like a silver statue in the small courtyard. At my grin that had the promise of carnage behind it. Back to Nicolas, whose hands fell away to reveal an expression so careworn and sorrowful and resolute that it terrified me, who knew what it meant. I rubbed my hands together, licking my lips. The boy took up his charcoal stub and wrote two words on the outhouse boards.
One was “Greenpea.” The other “Possum.”
I stepped in, before Nicolas asked if this were a recipe for the boy’s favorite stew and spun off on another tangent about the virtues of Faerie spices versus mortal.
“Of course your friends are invited, Master Froggit!” I said. “Couldn’t do it without ’em! You three and we three, all together now.” I hooked Dora Rose’s elbow and drew her nearer. She complied, but not without a light kick to my ankle. “Your job today, Master Froggit, is to take our resident Swan Princess around to meet Miss Greenpea and Miss Possum. They’ve sacrificed a pair of legs and eyes between them, haven’t they, by refusing to help murder swans?”
Froggit nodded, his soft jaw clenching. What with the swelling of his truncated tongue, that must’ve meant a whopping mouthful of pain. Boy should’ve been born a rat!
“You’re just what we need. Old enough to know the town, young enough to be ignored. Embittered, battle-scarred, ready for war. Listen up, Master Froggit. You and your friends and Dora Rose are gonna be the ones to, uh, liberate those pretty bone instruments from Orchestra Hall. You must do this, and you must return them to the Maze Wood tonight. It all has to be timed perfectly. Dora Rose will tell you why. Can you do this thing?”