C.S.E. Cooney - Bone Swans - Stories

But as well as I knew the Maze Wood, Nicolas intuited it.

He moved through its thorny ways like he would the “Willful Child’s Reel,” a song he could play backwards and blindfolded. Nicolas took shortcuts through corridors I’d never seen and seemed to have some inner needle pointing always to the Heart Glade the way some people can find true north. In no time at all, we came to the juniper tree.

Nicolas went right up to it and flung himself to the ground, wrapping his arms as far about the trunk as he could reach. There he sobbed with all the abandon of a child, like Froggit had sobbed right before they cut out his tongue.

Dora Rose hung back. She looked impassive, but I thought she was embarrassed. Swans don’t cry.

After several awkward minutes of this, Nicolas sat up. He wiped his face, drew the silver pipe from his shirt, and played a short riff as if to calm himself. I jittered at the sound, and Dora Rose jumped, but neither of us danced. He didn’t play for us that time but for the tree.

The juniper tree began to glow, as it had glowed yesterday when the Swan Hunters sang up Elinore’s bones. The mossy ground at the roots turned white as milk. Then a tiny bird, made all of red-and-gold fire, shot out of the trunk to land on Nicolas’s shoulder. Nicolas stopped piping but did not remove the silver lip from his mouth. Lifting its flickering head, the bird opened its beak and began to sing in a small, clear, plaintive voice:

Nicolas’s expression reflected the poor bird’s flames. He stroked its tiny head, bent his face, and whispered something in its ear.

“He’s telling the god about your dead Folk,” I said to Dora Rose with satisfaction. “Now we’ll really see something!”

I should’ve been born a prophet, for as soon as Nicolas stopped speaking, the bird toppled from his shoulder into his outstretched palm and lay there in a swoon for a full minute before opening its beak to scream. Full-throated, human, anguished.

I covered my ears, wishing they really had been made of tin. But Dora Rose stared as if transfixed. She nodded once, slowly, as if the ghost bird’s scream matched the sound she’d been swallowing all day.

The juniper tree blazed up again. The glowing white ground roiled like a tempest-turned sea. Gently, so gently, Nicolas brought his cupped hands back up to the trunk, returning the bird to its armor of shaggy bark. As the fiery bird vanished into the wood, the tree itself began to sing. The Heart Glade filled with a voice that was thunderous and marrow-deep.

The light disappeared. The juniper sagged and seemed to sigh.

Nicolas put his pipe away and bowed his head.

Dora Rose turned to me, fierceness shining from her.

“Maurice,” she said, “you heard the tree. We must bring the bones here. I must hang for three days. You must keep Ulia Gol and Hans away from the Heart Glade for that time, and bring those twenty young Swan Hunters to me. Quickly! We have no time to waste.”

And here the heart-stricken and love-sore child I once was rose up from the depths of me like its very own bone instrument.

“Must I, Ladybird?”

Did I sound peevish? I hardly knew. My voice cracked like a boy soprano whose balls’d just dropped, thus escaping the castrating knife and opium bath and a life of operatic opulence. Peevish, yes. Peevish it was.

“ Must I really? So easy, don’t you think, to steal an orchestra right out from under an ogre’s nose? To keep Ulia Gol from tracking it back here. To lure twenty children all into the Maze Wood without a mob of parents after us. That’ll take more than wiles, Princess. That’ll take tactics . And why should I do any of this, eh? For you, Dora Rose? For the sake of a friend? What kind of friend are you to me ?”

Nicolas stared from me to Dora Rose, wide-eyed. He had placed a hand over his pipe and kneaded it nervously against his chest. Dora Rose also stared, her face draining of excitement, of grief nearly avenged, of bright rage barely contained. All I saw looking into that shining oval was cool, contemptuous royalty. That was fine. Let her close herself off to me. See if that got her my aid in this endeavor.

“I’m gonna ask you something.” I drew closer, taking her slack silver hand in mine. I even pressed it between my itching palms. “If it were me , Dora Rose, if I’d come to Lake Serenus before your courtly bevy and said to you, ‘Dear Princess, Your Highness, my best old pal! Mayor Ulia Gol’s exterminating the Rat Folk of Amandale. She’s trapping us and torturing us and making bracelets of our tails. Won’t you help me stop her? For pity’s sake? For what I once was to you, even if that was only a pest?’

“What would you have said to me , Dora Rose, if I had come to you so?”

Dora Rose turned her face away, but did not remove her hand. “I would have said nothing, Maurice. I would have driven you off. Do you not know me?”

“Yes, Dora Rose.” I squeezed her hand, happy that it still held mine. Was it my imagination, or did she squeeze back? Yup. That was definitely a squeeze. More like a vise, truth be told. I loved a vise. Immediately I began feeling more charitable. That was probably her intention.

“Elinore now,” I reflected, “ Elinore would’ve intervened on my behalf.” Dora Rose’s head turned cobra-quick. Had she fangs enough and time, I’d be sporting several new apertures in my physiognomy. I went on anyway. “The nice sister, that Elinore. Always sweet as a Blood Haven peach—for all she loathed me tail to toe. You Swan Folk would’ve come to our aid on Elinore’s say so, mark my words, Dora Rose.”

“Then,” said Dora Rose with freezing slowness, her grip on my hand yet sinewy and relentless, “you will help me for the sake of my dead twin, Maurice? For the help my sister Elinore would have given you had our places been reversed?”

I sighed. “Don’t you know me, Ladybird? No. I wouldn’t do it for Elinore. Not for gold or chocolate. Not for a dozen peachy swan girls and their noblesse oblige. I’ll do it for you , of course. Always did like you better than Elinore.”

“You,” scoffed Dora Rose with a curling lip, flinging my hand from hers, “are the only one who ever did, Maurice.”

I shrugged. It was true.

“As a young cygnet, I feared this was because our temperaments were too alike.”

I snorted, inordinately pleased. “Yeah, well. Don’t go telling my mama I act like a Swan Princess. She’ll think she didn’t raise me right.”

From his place near the juniper tree, Nicolas cleared his throat. “Are we, are we all friends again? Please?” He smoothed one of his long brown hands over the bark. “There’s so much to be done, and all of it so dark and sad. Best to do it quickly, before we drown in sorrow.”

Dora Rose dropped him a curtsy and included me in it with a dip of her chin. My heart leapt in my chest. Other parts of me leapt, too, but I won’t get into that.