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

Nicolas sat in the mud again. This made Froggit, still standing, the taller of the two, and Nicolas gazed up at him with childlike eyes.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s my silver pipe. Magic, you see. Given me by Her Gracious Majesty, Empress of Faerie, Queen of the Realms Beneath the Hill. It imparts upon me power over the creatures of land, sea, air, and fire. Folk and fixed, and everything between. But when I pass into the Hill, my pipe has no power. Under the Hill it is not silver but bone that sings to the wild blood of the Faerieborn. Had I a bone pipe, I might dance them all to their deaths, those Shining Ones who cannot die. But I have no pipe of bone. Just this.”

Nicolas’s face took on a taut look. Almost, I thought, one of unbearable longing. His knuckles whitened on his pipe. Then he shook himself and dredged up a smile from unfathomable depths, though it was a remote, pathetic, tremulous thread of a thing.

“But here, above the Hill,” he continued as if he’d never paused, “it is silver that ensorcels. Silver that enspells. I could pipe my friend the rat Maurice into the Drukkamag River and drown him. See that Swan Princess over there? Her I could pirouette right off a cliff, and not even her swanskin wings could save her. You, little boy, I could jig you up onto a rooftop and thence into the sky, whence you’d fall, fall, fall. But I will not!” Nicolas added as Froggit’s round brown eyes flashed wider. “Destroy an artist such as yourself? Shame on me! How could I even think it? I have the greatest respect for you, Master Froggit!”

But Froggit, after that momentary alarm, seemed unafraid. In fact, he began to look envious. He pointed first to the silver pipe, then to his charcoal caricature of Mayor Ulia Gol, dripping gore and missing a few key limbs.

His wide mouth once more woebegone, Nicolas burst out, “Oh, but she is wicked! Wicked! She has an ogre’s heart and a giant’s greed. She is a monster, and we must rid this world of monsters. For what she did to the juniper tree, that alone deserves a pair of iron shoes baked oven-bright, and four and twenty blackbirds to pluck out her eyes. But for what she has done to you …and to the swans and the foxes and the trout. Oh! I would break my pipe upon her throat if I…But.”

Drawing a shaky breath, Nicolas hid his thin face in rigid hands.

“No. I shall not be called upon for that. Not this time. Not today. No. No, Nicolas, you may stay your hand and keep to your music for now. Maurice the Incomparable has a plan. The role of Nicolas promises to be quite small this time. Just a song. Just the right little song. Or the wrong one. The wrongest song of all.”

Froggit sat beside Nicolas and touched a trembling hand to his shoulder. Nicolas didn’t take his hands from his face, but suddenly bright black eyes peeped between his fingers.

“Your part is bigger than mine, Master Froggit. If you’ll play it. Throw in with us. You have no tongue to speak, but you have hands to help, and we’d be proud to have your help.”

Froggit stared. At the huddled Piper. At proud Dora Rose standing like a silver statue in the small courtyard. At my grin that had the promise of carnage behind it. Back to Nicolas, whose hands fell away to reveal an expression so careworn and sorrowful and resolute that it terrified me, who knew what it meant. I rubbed my hands together, licking my lips. The boy took up his charcoal stub and wrote two words on the outhouse boards.

One was “Greenpea.” The other “Possum.”

I stepped in, before Nicolas asked if this were a recipe for the boy’s favorite stew and spun off on another tangent about the virtues of Faerie spices versus mortal.

“Of course your friends are invited, Master Froggit!” I said. “Couldn’t do it without ’em! You three and we three, all together now.” I hooked Dora Rose’s elbow and drew her nearer. She complied, but not without a light kick to my ankle. “Your job today, Master Froggit, is to take our resident Swan Princess around to meet Miss Greenpea and Miss Possum. They’ve sacrificed a pair of legs and eyes between them, haven’t they, by refusing to help murder swans?”

Froggit nodded, his soft jaw clenching. What with the swelling of his truncated tongue, that must’ve meant a whopping mouthful of pain. Boy should’ve been born a rat!

“You’re just what we need. Old enough to know the town, young enough to be ignored. Embittered, battle-scarred, ready for war. Listen up, Master Froggit. You and your friends and Dora Rose are gonna be the ones to, uh, liberate those pretty bone instruments from Orchestra Hall. You must do this, and you must return them to the Maze Wood tonight. It all has to be timed perfectly. Dora Rose will tell you why. Can you do this thing?”

Dora Rose put her hand on Froggit’s shoulder when his panicked glance streaked to her. “Fear not, princeling,” she said, as though soothing a cygnet. “Have not we wings and wits enough between us?”

Before the kid could lose his nerve, I sped on, “Me and Nicolas will be the distraction. We’re gonna set Amandale hopping, starting this afternoon. No one will have time to sniff you out, I promise—no matter what shenanigans you four get up to. We’ll meet you back in the Maze Wood in three nights’ time, with the rest of…of what we need. You know where. The juniper tree.”

Froggit nodded. His brown eyes filled with tears, but they did not fall. I looked at Dora Rose, who was twisting her hair back up under my wharf boy’s cap and refreshing the dirt on her face.

“Help her,” I told the kid, too quietly for Dora Rose to overhear. “She’ll need you. Tonight most of all.”

Froggit watched my face a moment more, then nodded with firm decision. His excitement smelled like ozone. He shoved his charcoal stub into his pocket and stood up, wiping his palms on his cutoff trousers. Solemnly, he offered his hand to Nicolas, who clasped it in both of his, then transferred it over to Dora Rose. She smiled down, and Froggit’s gaze on her became worshipful, if worship could hold such bitter regret. I knew that look.

Stupid to be jealous of a tongueless, tousled, char-smudged bed wetter. Bah.

“Take care of each other,” Nicolas admonished them.

And so, that Cobblersawl kid and my friend the Swan Princess-in-disguise made their way down a dark alley that teemed with the sort of refuse I relished. Until they disappeared from my sight.

“Shall we?” Nicolas’s voice was soft and very dreadful behind me.

“Play on, Pied Piper,” said I.

Nicolas set silver lip to scarlet mouth and commenced the next phase of our plan.

Have you ever seen a rat in a waste heap? The rustle of him, the nibble, the nestle, the scrabble and scrape. How he leaps, leaps straight up as if jerked by a string from the fathoms of that stinking stuff should a clamor startle him? How swift he is. How slinking sly. Faster than a city hawk who makes her aerie in the clock towers and her dinner of diseased pigeons. A brief bolt of furry black lightning he is, with onyx for eyes and tiny red rubies for pupils.

Now imagine this natty rat, this rattiest of rats, with his broken tail, his chewed-looking fur, imagine him as he often is, with a scrap of something vile in his mouth, imagine him right in front of you, sitting on your pillow and watching you unblinkingly as you yawn yourself awake in the morning.

Imagine him.

Then multiply him.

There is a reason more than one of us is called a swarm.

Amandale, there will be no Swan Hunt for you today.

Nor will bread be baked, nor cakes be made, nor cookies, biscuits, doughnuts, nor pies. The smell arising from your ovens, Amandale, is singed fur and seared rodent meat, and all your dainty and delectable desserts bear teeth marks.