“Soon. Very soon,” I replied, hardly able to keep from dancing. Lo, I’d had enough dancing for a lifetime, thanks. Still, I couldn’t help but wriggle a bit.
“Citizens of Amandale,” announced the Pied Piper, “although it causes me pangs of illimitable dolor to leave you thus, I must, as a law-abiding alien to your environs, make my exit gracefully. But to thank you for your hospitality and to delight your beautiful children, I propose to play you one last song.”
“Time to put that cotton in your ears,” I warned my recruits. Froggit and Possum obeyed. I don’t think Greenpea even heard me; she was that focused on the motley figure poised on the steps of Brotquen Cathedral.
My caution turned out to be unnecessary. Nicolas was, indeed, a Master Piper. He could play tunes within tunes. Tunes piled on tunes, and tunes buried under them. His music came from the Hill, from Her, the Faerie Queen, and there was no song Nicolas could not play when he flung himself open to the sound.
First he played a strand of notes that froze the adults where they stood. Second, a lower, darker line strong enough to paralyze the ogre in her place. Then he played three distinct trills that sounded like names—Froggit, Possum, Greenpea—exempting them from his final spell. Greenpea licked her lips and looked almost disappointed.
Last came the spell song. The one we’d worked so hard for these three days. A song to lure twenty little Swan Hunters into the trap a Swan Princess had set. A song to bring the children back to Dora Rose.
I don’t think, in my furry shape, I’d’ve given the tune more than passing heed. But I was full-fleshed right now, with all the parts of a man. The man I was had been a child once, sometimes still behaved like one, and the tune Nicolas played was tailor-made for children. It made the tips of my toes tingle and my heels feel spry. Well within control, thank the Captured God.
You know who couldn’t control it though?
Ocelot, the Gravedigger’s daughter. Ilse Cobblersawl, her brothers Frank, Theodore and James, her sweet sister Anabel, and the nine-year-old twins Hilde and Gretel. Pearl, the chandler’s eldest daughter, who let her sister Ruby slip from her arms, to join hands with Maven Chain, the goldsmith’s girl. Charles the Chimneysweep. Kevin the Gooseboy. Those twelve and eight more whose names I did not know.
Heads haloed in circles of silver fire that cast a ghostly glow about them, these twenty children shoved parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, teachers, employers, out of the way. Those too small to keep pace were swept up and carried by their fellow hunters. Still playing, Nicolas sprinted down the steps of the cathedral and sprang right into that froth of silver-lit children.
All of them danced. Then the tune changed, and they ran instead.
Light-footed, as though they wore wings on their feet, they fled down Kirkja Street and onto Maskmakers Boulevard. This, I knew, ended in a cul-de-sac abutting a town park, which sported in its farthest shrubbery a rusted gate leading into the Maze Wood.
“Step lively, soldiers,” I barked to my three recruits. “Don’t wanna get caught staring when the thrall fades from this mob. Gonna get ugly. Lots of snot and tears and torches. Regardless, we should hie ourselves on over to the Heart Glade. Wouldn’t want to miss the climax now, would we?”
Froggit shook his head and Possum looked doubtful, but Greenpea was already muscling her chair toward the corner of Kirkja and Maskmakers. We made haste to follow.
Dora Rose, here we come.
I’d seen Dora Rose as a swan, and I’d seen her as a woman, but I’d never seen her both at once. Or so nakedly.
I confess, I averted my eyes. No, I know, I know. You think I should’ve taken my chance. Looked my fill. Saved up the sweet sight of her to savor all those lonely nights in my not-so-distant future. (Because, let’s be honest here, my love life’s gonna be next to nonexistent from this point on. Most of the nice fixed does I know are bloating gently in the Drukkamag, and any Folk doe who scampered off to save herself from the Pied Piper is not going to be speaking to me. Who could blame her, really?) But, see, it wasn’t like that. It was never like that, with Dora Rose.
Sure, I curse by the Captured God. But Dora Rose is my religion.
It was as much as I could bear just to glance once and see her arms outstretched, elongated, mutated, jointed into demented angles that human bones are not intended for, pure white primary feathers bursting from her fingernails, tertials and secondaries fanning out from the soft torn flesh of her underarms. Her long neck was a column of white, like a feathered python, and her face, though mostly human, had become masklike, eyes and nose and mouth black as bitumen, hardening into the shining point of a beak.
That’s all I saw, I swear.
After that I was kneeling on the ground and hiding my face, like Nicolas under his covers. In that darkness, I became aware of the music in the Heart Glade. Gave me a reason to look up again.
What does a full bone orchestra look like? First the woodwinds: piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon. Then the brass: horn, trumpet, cornet, tenor trombone, bass trombone, tuba (that last must’ve been Dasher—he was the biggest cob on the lake). Percussion: timpani, snare, cymbals (those cygnets, I’d bet). And the strings. Violin. Viola. Violoncello. Double bass. And the harp. One white harp, with shining black strings.
Elinore, Dora Rose’s twin sister.
All of them, set in a circle around the juniper tree, glowed in the moonlight. They played softly by themselves, undisturbed, as if singing lullabies to the tree and she who hung upon it.
I’d heard the tune before. It was the same phrase of music the tiny firebird had sung, which later the tree itself repeated in its seismic voice. Beneath the full sweep of the strings and hollow drumbeats and bells of bone, I seemed to hear that tremulous boy soprano sobbing out his verse with the dreary repetition of the dead.
Only then—okay, so maybe I took another quick glance—did I see the red tracks that stained the pale down around Dora Rose’s eyes. By this I knew she had been weeping all this while.
She, who never wept. Not once. Not in front of me.
I’d thought swans didn’t cry. Not like rats and broken pipers and little children. Not like the rest of us. Stupid to be jealous of a bunch of bones. That they merited her red, red tears, when nothing else in the world could or would. Least of all, yours truly, Maurice the Incomparable.
Me and my three comrades loitered in the darkness outside that grisly bone circle. Greenpea, confined to her wheelchair; Possum, sitting quietly near her feet; a tired Froggit sprawled beside her, his head in her lap. Possibly he’d fallen into a restive sleep. They’d had a tough few days, those kids.
We’d come to the Heart Glade by a shortcut I knew, but it wasn’t long till we heard a disturbance in one of the maze’s many corridors. In the distance, Nicolas’s piping caught the melody of the bone orchestra and countered it, climbing an octave higher and embroidering the somber fabric of the melody with sharp silver notes. The twenty children he’d enchanted joined in, singing:
In a rowdiness of music making, they spilled into the Heart Glade. Ocelot was yipping, “Kywitt! Kywitt! Kywitt!” at the tops of her lungs, while Ilse and Maven flapped their arms like wings and made honking noises. A flurry of chirps and whistles and shrieks of laughter from the other children followed in cacophony. Nicolas danced into the glade after them, his pipe wreathed in silver flames. Hopping nimbly over a small bone cymbal in the moss, he faced the Heart Glade, faced the children, and his tune changed again.