“Possum can see. Froggit can talk. I thought this would make me walk again. I thought…”
“No.” He touched the neck of the bone fiddle thoughtfully. “I could pipe Maurice’s broken bones together, but I cannot pipe the rats of Amandale back to life. What’s gone is gone. Your legs. Froggit’s tongue. Possum’s eyes. They are gone.”
Huge tears rolled down her face. She did not speak.
He continued, “Fiddle music, my dear Miss Greenpea, compels a body, willy-nilly, to movement. More so than the pipe, I think—and I do not say that lightly, Master Piper that I am. Your fiddle may not make you walk again. But once you learn to play, the two of you together will make the world dance.”
“Will we?” Greenpea spat bitterly. “Why should the world dance and not I?”
Bowing his head, Nicolas dropped to one knee, and set a hand on each of her armrests. When he spoke again, his voice was low. I had to strain all my best eavesdropping capabilities to listen in.
“Listen. In the Realms Under the Hill, my silver pipe is the merest pennywhistle. It has no power of compulsion or genius. I am nothing but a tin sparrow when I play for the Faerie Queen; it amuses Her to hear me chirp and peep. Yet you saw what I did with my music today, up here in the Realms Above. Now…”
His breath blew out in wonder. “Now,” the Pied Piper told her, “if ever you found yourself in Her court, with all the Lords and Ladies of Faerie arrayed against you, fierce in their wisdom, hideous in their beauty, and pitiless, pitiless as starlight—and you played them a tune on this bone fiddle of yours, why…”
Nicolas smiled. It was as feral a grin as the one he’d worn on the steps of Brotquen Cathedral, right before he enchanted the entire town of Amandale. “Why, Miss Greenpea, I reckon you could dance the Immortal Queen Herself to death, and She powerless to stop you.”
“Oh,” Greenpea sighed. She caressed the white fiddle, the silver strings. “Oh.”
“But.” Nicolas sprang up and dusted off his patched knees. “You have to learn how to play it first. I doubt a few paltry scrapes would do more than irritate Her. And then She’d break you, make no doubt. Ulia Gol at her worst is a saint standing next to Her Most Gracious Majesty.”
Taking up his cloak from the spot where Dora Rose had dropped it, Nicolas swirled it over his shoulders. He stared straight ahead, his face bleak and his eyes blank, as though we were no longer standing there.
“I am very tired now,” he said, “and very sad. I want to go home and sleep until I forget if I have lived these last three days or merely dreamed them. I have had stranger and more fell dreams than this. Or perhaps”—he shuddered—“perhaps I was awake then, and this—this is the dream I dreamed to escape my memories. In which case, there is no succor for me, not awake or asleep, and I can only hope for that ultimate oblivion, and to hasten it with whatever implements I have on hand. If you have no further need of me, I will bid you adieu.”
Alarmed at this turn, I scrambled to tug his coattails. “Hey, Nico! Hey, Nicolas, wait a minute, twinkle toes. Nicolas, you bastard, you promised me almonds!”
“Did I?” He looked up brightly, and blasted me with his smile, and it was like a storm wrack had blown from his face. “I did, Maurice! How could I have forgotten? Come along, then, with my sincerest apologies. Allow me to feed you, Maurice. How I love to feed my friends when they are hungry!”
Greenpea wheeled her chair about to block his way. “Teach me,” she demanded.
He blinked at her as if he had never seen her face before. “Your pardon?”
She held out her bone fiddle. “If what you say is true, this gift is not just about music; it’s about magic, too. And unless I’m wrong, Amandale won’t have much to do with either in years to come.”
I snorted in agreement.
“Teach me.” Greenpea pointed with bow and fiddle to her two friends. “Them too. Teach all of us. We need you.”
Please, Froggit tapped out on his bone drum. We can’t go home.
“Of course you can!” Nicolas assured him, stricken. “They’ll welcome you, Master Froggit. They probably think you are dead. How beautiful they shall find it that you are not! Think—the number of Cobblersawls has been halved at least; you shall be twice as precious…”
Possum shook her head. “They’ll see only the ones they lost.”
Once more she slipped the goggles on. Whatever she foresaw as she peered through the bone lenses at Nicolas, she did not flinch. But I watched him closely, the impossible radiance that rose up in him, brighter than his silver pipe, brighter than his broken edges, and he listened to Possum’s prophecy in rapturous terror, and with hope. I’d never seen the Pied Piper look anything like hopeful before, in all the years I’d known him.
“We are coming with you,” Possum prophesied. No one gainsaid her. No one even tried. “We are going to your cottage. You will teach us how to play music. We will learn many songs from you, and…and make up even more! When the first snow falls, we four shall venture into the Hill. And under it. Deep and wide, word will spread of a band of strange musicians: Nicolas and the Oracles. Lords and Ladies and Dragons and Sirens, they will all invite us to their courts and caves and coves to play for them. Froggit on the drums. Greenpea on her fiddle. You on your pipe. And I?”
Greenpea began to laugh. The sound was rusty, but true. “You’ll sing, of course, Possum! You have the truest voice. Ulia Gol was so mad when you wouldn’t sing up the bones for her!”
“Yes,” Possum whispered, “I will sing true songs in the Realm of Lies, and all who hear me will listen.”
All right. Enough of this yammering. My guts were cramping.
“Great!” I exclaimed. “You guys’ll be great. Musicians get all the girls anyway. Or, you know”—I nodded at Greenpea and Possum—“the dreamy-eyed, long-haired laddies. Or whatever. The other way around. However you want it. Always wanted to learn guitar myself. I’d look pretty striking with a guitar, don’t you think? I could go to the lake and play for Dora Rose. She’d like that about as much as a slap on the…Anyway, it’s a thought.”
“Maurice.” Nicolas clapped his hand to my shoulder. “You are hungry. You always babble when you are hungry. Come. Eat my food and drink my Faerie ale, and I shall spread blankets enough on the floor for all of us.” He beamed around at the three children, at me, and I swear his face was like a bonfire.
“My friends,” he said. “My friends. How merry we shall be.”
Later that night, when they were all cuddled up and sleeping the sleep of the semi-innocent, or at least the iniquitously fatigued, I crept out of that cottage in the lee of the Hill and snuck back to the Heart Glade.
Call it a hunch. Call it ants in my antsy pants. I don’t know. Something was going on, and I had to see it. So what? So I get curious sometimes.
Wouldn’t you know it? I made it through the Maze Wood only to find I was right yet again! They weren’t kidding when they called me Maurice the Incomparable. (And by “they,” I mean “me,” of course.) Sometimes I know things. My whiskers twitch, or maybe my palms itch, and I just know.
What hung from the juniper tree in that gray light before full dawn wasn’t nearly as pretty as a Swan Princess or as holy and mysterious as a clutch of silver watermelon eggs.
Nope. This time the ornaments swinging from the branches were much plainer and more brutal. The juniper tree itself, decked out in its new accessories, looked darker and squatter than I’d ever beheld it, and by the gratified jangling in its blackly green needles, seemed very pleased with itself.