And the children leapt the bones.
Once inside the circle, the twenty of them linked wrists and danced rings around the juniper tree, as they used to do in the beginning, when the first of the Swan Folk were hunted and changed. As they whirled, a fissure opened in the juniper’s trunk. Red-gold fire flickered within. Like a welcoming hearth. Like a threshold to a chamber of magma.
The children, spurred by Nicolas’s piping, began to jump in.
They couldn’t reach the fissure fast enough. Ocelot, by dint of shoving the littler ones out of her way, was first to disappear into the bloody light. And when she screamed, the harp that had been Elinore burst into silver-and-red flame, and disappeared. The first silver bloom erupted from the branches of the juniper tree.
Dora Rose shuddered where she hung.
A second child leapt through the crack. Ilse Cobblersawl. The bone trumpet vanished. A second silver bloom appeared. Then little Pearl the Chandler’s daughter shouldered her way into the tree. Her agonized wail cut off as a bone cymbal popped into nothingness. Another silver bud flowered open.
When all twenty instruments had vanished, when all twenty Swan Hunters had poured themselves into the tree, when the trunk of the tree knit its own bark back over the gaping wound of its molten heart, then twenty silver blooms opened widely on their branches. The blooms gave birth to small white bees that busied themselves in swirling pollinations. Petals fell, leaving silver fruit where the flowers had been. The branches bent to the ground under the colossal weight of that fruit and heaved Dora Rose from their tree. Into the moss she tumbled, like so much kindling, a heap of ragged feathers, shattered flesh, pale hair.
Nicolas stopped piping. He wiped his mouth as if it had gone numb. He looked over at Froggit, who’d been screaming wordlessly ever since waking to the sight of his siblings feeding themselves to the tree. Nicolas held Froggit in his dense black gaze, the enormity of his sadness and regret etching his face ancient.
For myself, I couldn’t care less about any of them.
I rushed to Dora Rose and shook her. Nothing happened. No response. Reaching out, I tackled Nicolas at the knees, yanking him to the ground and pinning him down.
“Is she dead, Nicolas?” I seized the lapels of his motley coat and shook. “Nicolas, did you kill her?”
“I?” he asked, staring at me in that dreadfully gentle way of his. “Perhaps. It sounds like something I might do. This world is so dangerous and cruel, and I am what it makes me. But I think you’ll find she breathes.”
He was correct, although how he could see so slight a motion as her breath by that weird fruity light, I couldn’t say. I, for one, couldn’t see a damn thing. But when I got near enough, I could smell the life of her. Not yet reduced to so much swan meat. Not to be salted and parboiled, seasoned with ginger, larded up and baked with butter yet. Not yet.
Oh, no, my girl. Though filthy and broken, you remain my Dora Rose.
“Come on, Ladybird. Come on. Wake up. Wake up now.” I jostled her. I chafed her ragged wrists. I even slapped her face. Lightly. Well, not so hard as I might’ve.
“Maybe she’s under a spell,” Possum’s scratchy voice suggested. “She told us it might happen. She’s a Princess, she says. She has to play her part.”
“Oh, yeah?” I might have known my present agony was due to Dora Rose’s inflexible adherence to tradition. Stupid swan girl. I could wring her white neck, except I loved her so. “What are we supposed to do about it, eh?”
I glanced over my shoulder in time to see the blind girl shrug. She did not move from the shadows of the Heart Glade into the juniper’s feral light. Froggit at her feet sobbed like he would never stop.
Greenpea rolled her wheelchair closer to us.
“She said that Nicolas would know what to do.”
I looked down again at Nicolas, who blinked at me. “Well?”
“Oh. That. Well.” His face went like a red rose on fire. “You know, Maurice.”
I’d had it. Time to show my teeth. “What, Nicolas?” I hissed. “Spit it out, wouldja? We’re working within a three-day time frame here, okay? If today turns into tomorrow, she’ll be gone. And what’ll all this be for? So say it. How do we wake her?”
“True love’s k-kiss,” Nicolas answered, blushing more deeply and unable to meet my gaze. “It’s pretty standard when one is dealing with, with…royalty.”
“Oh.” I sat back on my heels. A mean roil of jealousy and bile rose up inside me, but my next words, I’m proud to say, came out flat and even. Who said I couldn’t control my basest urges? “Okay then, Nico, hop to it. But no tongue, mind, or I’ll have it for my next meal.”
Nicolas scooted away from me, scraping up moss in his haste. “Maurice, you cannot mean it.” He ran nervous brown fingers through his hair.
“Nicolas,” said I, “I’ve never been more serious. No tongue—or you’ll be sleeping with one eye open and a sizeable club under your pillow the rest of your days.”
“No, no!” He held up his hands, blocking me and Dora Rose from his view. “That’s not what I meant at all. I only meant—I can’t.”
“You…what?”
“I can’t k-ki…Do that. What you’re saying.” Nicolas shook his head back and forth like a child confronted with a syrupy spoonful of ipecac. His hair stood on end. His skin was sweaty and ashen. “Not on your life. Or mine. Or—or hers. Never.” He paused. “Sorry.”
I sprang to my feet. Wobbled. Sat down promptly. Limbs, don’t fail me now. Grabbing him by the hem of his muddy trousers, I yanked him back toward me and pounced again, my hands much nearer his throat this time. “Nicolas, by the Captured God, if you don’t kiss her right this instant, I’ll…”
“He can’t, Maurice,” Greenpea said unexpectedly. She fisted my collar and pulled me off him, wheeling backward in her chair until she could deposit me, still flailing, at Dora Rose’s side. That girl had an arm on her—even after fishing drowned rats out of the Drukkamag all day. Her parents were both smiths: she, their only child. “He can’t even say the word without choking. You want someone to kiss her, you do it yourself. Leave him alone.”
Nicolas turned his head and stared up at her, glowing at this unexpected reprieve. If he could have bled light onto his rescuer, I don’t think Greenpea’d ever get the stains out.
“We’ve not been introduced, Miss…? You are Master Froggit’s cousin, I believe.”
“Greenpea Margissett.”
“Nicolas of the Hill.” His mouth quirked. “Nicolas of Nowhere.”
She frowned fiercely at him. She looked just like a schoolmarm I once knew, who laid a clever trail of crumbs right up to a rattrap that almost proved my undoing. She’s how I ended up in that pickle jar, come to think of it. Unnerving to see that same severe expression on so young a face.
“Nicolas,” she said, very sternly, “I am not happy about the rats.”
All that wonderful light snuffed right out of his face. Nicolas groaned. “Neither am I.” He slapped a hand hard against his chest, driving the pipe against his breastbone. “I am not happy.” Slap. “I will never be happy again.” Slap.
With that, he crumpled on the ground next to Froggit and Dora Rose and began to retch, tearing at his hair by the fistful. Me and Greenpea watched him a while. Froggit, meanwhile, crawled over to the juniper tree and hunkered down by the roots to cry more quietly. Nothing from Possum, lost behind us in the darkness.