I couldn’t help myself. I collapsed, laughing.
“Maurice!” Dora Rose snapped. “Stop cackling at once!”
“Oh!” I howled. “And you a new mama twenty times over! Betcha the juniper tree didn’t whisper that about your fate in all the time you hung. You’d’ve lit outta the Heart Glade so fast…Oh, my heart! Oh, Dora Rose! Queen Mother and all…”
Dora Rose’s eyes burned to do horrible things to me. How I wished she would! At the moment though, a bunch of mutely ardent cygnets besieged her on all sides, and she had no time for me. Captured God knew they’d start demanding food soon, like all babies. Wiping my eyes, I advised Dora Rose to take her bevy of bony swanlets back to Lake Serenus and teach them to bob for stonewort before they mistook strands of her hair for widgeon grass.
Tee hee.
Shooting one final glare my way, Dora Rose said, “You. I’ll deal with you later.”
“Promise?”
“I…” She hesitated. Scowled. Then reached her long silver fingers to grab my nose and tweak it. Hard. Hard enough to ring bells in my ears and make tears spurt from my eyes. The honk and tug at the end were especially malevolent. I grinned all over my face, and my heart percussed with bliss. Gesture like that was good as a pinkie swear in Rat Folk parlance—and didn’t she know it, my own dear Dora Rose!
Out of deference, I “made her a leg”—as a Swan Prince might say. But my version of that courtly obeisance was a crooked, shabby, insolent thing: the only kind of bow a rat could rightly make to a swan.
“So long then, Ladybird.”
Dora Rose hesitated, then said, “Not so long as last time—my Incomparable Maurice.”
Blushing ever so palely and frostily (I mean, it was practically an invitation, right?), she downed herself for flight. A beautiful buffeting ruckus arose from her wings as she rocketed right out of the Heart Glade. Twenty bone swans followed her, changing from human to bird more quickly than my eye could take in. White wind. Silver wings. Night sky. Moonlight fractured as they flew toward Lake Serenus.
Heaving a sigh, I looked around. Nicolas and the three children were all staring up at the tree.
“Now what? Did we forget something?”
The juniper tree’s uppermost branches trembled. Something glimmered high above, in the dense green of those needles. The trembling became a great shaking, and like meteors, three streaks of silver light fell to the moss and smoked thinly on the ground. I whistled.
“Three more melons! Can’t believe we missed those.”
“You didn’t,” Nicolas replied, in that whisper of his that could break hearts. “Those are for the children. Their reward.”
“I could use a nice, juicy reward about now.”
He smiled distractedly at me. “You must come to my house for supper, Maurice. I have a jar of plum preserves that you may eat. And a sack of sugared almonds, although they might now be stale.”
How freely does the drool run after a day like mine!
“Nicolas!” I moaned. “If you don’t have food on your person, you have to stop talking about it. It’s torture.”
“I was only trying to be hospitable, Maurice. Here you go, Master Froggit. This one’s singing your song.”
I couldn’t hear anything. Me, who has better hearing than anyone I know! But Nicolas went over, anyway, and handed the first of the silver eggs to Froggit. It was big enough that Froggit had to sit down to hold it in his lap. He shuddered and squirmed, but his swollen eyes, thank the Captured God, didn’t fill up and spill over again.
To Possum, Nicolas handed a second egg. This one was small enough to fit in her palms. She smoothed her hands over the silver shell. Lifting it to her face, she sniffed delicately.
Into Greenpea’s hands, Nicolas placed the last egg. It was curiously flat and long. She frowned down at it, perplexed and a bit fearful, but did not cast it from her.
Each of the shells shivered to splinters before Nicolas could step all the way back from Greenpea’s chair.
Possum was the first to speak. “I don’t understand,” she said, fingering her gift.
“Hey, neat!” I said, bending down for a look. “Goggles! Hey, but don’t see why you need ’em, Miss Possum. Not having, you know, eyes anymore. Can’t possibly wanna shield them from sunlight, or saltwater, or whatever. For another, even if you did, these things are opaque as a prude’s lingerie. A god couldn’t see through them.”
“That is because they are made of bone, Maurice,” Nicolas said. “Try them on, Miss Possum. You will see.”
Her lips flattened at what she took to be his inadvertent slip of the tongue. But she undid the bandage covering her eyes and guided the white goggles there. She raised her head to look at me. An unaccountable dread seized me at the expression on her face.
“Oh!” Possum gasped and snatched the goggles from her head, backhanding them off her lap like they were about to grow millipede legs and scuttle up her sleeve. “I saw—I saw—!”
Greenpea grabbed her hand. “They gave you back your eyes? But isn’t that…?”
“I saw him,” Possum sobbed, pointing in my direction. “I saw him tomorrow. And the next day. And the day he dies. His grave. It overlooks a big blue lake. I saw…”
Nicolas crouched to inspect the goggles, poking at them with a slender finger. “The juniper didn’t give you the gift of sight, Miss Possum—but of foresight. How frightening for you. But very beautiful, and very rare, too. You are to be congratulated. I think.”
A sharp, staccato sound tapped out an inquiry. Froggit was exploring his own gift: a small bone drum, with a shining white hide stretched over it. I wondered if the skin had come from one of his siblings.
Best not to muse about such things aloud, of course. Might upset the boy.
Froggit banged on the hide with a drumstick I was pretty sure was also made of bone.
What does the drum do? asked the banging. Is there a trick in it?
“Froggit!” Possum cried out, laughing a little. “You’re talking!”
A short, startled tap in response. I am?
“Huh,” I muttered. “Close enough for Folk music, anyway.”
Flushed with her own dawning excitement, Greenpea brought the bone fiddle in her lap to rest under her chin. She took a bone bow strung with long black hair and set it to the silver strings.
The fiddle wailed like a slaughtered rabbit.
She looked at her legs. They didn’t move. She tried the bow again.
Cats brawling. Tortured dogs. That time in the rat-baiting arena I almost died. I put my hands to my ears. “Nicolas! Please! Make her stop.”
“Hush, Maurice. We all sound like that when we first start to play.” Nicolas squatted before Greenpea’s chair to meet her eyes. She kept on sawing doggedly at the strings, her face set with harrowing determination, until at last the Pied Piper put his hand on hers. The diabolical noise stopped.
“Miss Greenpea. Believe me, it will take months, maybe years, of practice before you’ll be able to play that fiddle efficiently. Longer before you play it well. But perhaps we can start lessons tomorrow, when we’re all better rested and fed.”
“But,” she asked, clutching it close, “what does it do?”
“Do?” Nicolas inquired. “In this world, nothing. It’s just a fiddle.”
Greenpea’s stern lips trembled. She looked mad enough to break the fiddle over his head.