Bone Swans: Stories Read online

  You should’ve seen me. Tail dragging. Whiskers drooping. Sniveling into my fur. Talk about heinously repellent. I couldn’t’ve been gladder my friends had all scampered over to the new necropolis, living it up among the corpses of Doornwold. By the time they returned, I had a handle on myself. Started up a dialogue with a nice, fat rat girl. We had some good times. Her name was Moira. That day on the docks was the last I saw Dora Rose up close for fifteen years.

  Until today.

  Soft as I was, by the time the last of the Swan Hunters trotted clear of the Heart Glade on their ponies, I’d decided to take Dora Rose back to my nest in Amandale. I had apartments in a warren of condemned tenements by the Drukkamag River docks. Squatters’ paradise. Any female should rightly have spasmed at the chance; my wainscoted walls were only nominally chewed, my furniture salvaged from the alleyways of Merchant Prince Row, Amandale’s elite. The current mode of decoration in my neighborhood was shabby chic. Distressed furniture? Mine was so distressed, it could’ve been a damsel in a past life.

  But talking Dora Rose down from the juniper tree proved a trifle dicey. She wanted to return to Lake Serenus right away and search for survivors.

  “Yeah, you and Huntsman Hans,” I snorted. “He goes out every night with his nets, hoping to bag another of your Folk. Think he’ll mistake you, with your silver gown and your silver skin, for a ruddy-kneed mortal milkmaid out for a skinny dip? Come on, Dora Rose! You got more brains than that, even if you are a bird.”

  I was still in my rat skin when I told her this. She turned on me savagely, grabbing me by the tail, and shook me, hissing as only swans and cobras can hiss. I’d’ve bitten her, but I was laughing too hard.

  “Do you have a better idea, Maurice? Maybe you would be happiest if I turned myself in to Ulia Gol right now! Is that what I should do?”

  I fleshed myself to man-shape right under her hands. She dropped me quickly, cheeks burning. Dora Rose did not want to see what she’d’ve been holding me by once I changed form. I winked at her.

  “I got a lot of ideas, Dora Rose, but they all start with a snack and a nap.”

  Breathing dangerously, she shied back, deeper into the branches. Crossed her arms over her chest. Narrowed her lake-blue eyes. For a swan, you’d think her mama was a mule.

  “Come on, Ladybird,” I coaxed, scooting nearer—but not too near—my own dear Dora Rose. “You’re traumatized. That’s not so strong a word, is it, for what you’ve been through today?”

  Her chin jutted. Her gaze shifted. Her lips were firm, not trembling. Not a trembler, that girl. I settled on a nice, thick branch, my legs dangling in the air.

  “Damn it, Dora Rose, your twin sister’s just been turned into a harp! Your family, your friends, your Folk—all killed and buried and dug back up again as bone instruments. And for what?” I answered myself, since she wouldn’t. “So that Mayor Ulia Gol, that skinflint, can cheat Amandale’s Guild of Musicians of their entertainment fees. She wants an orchestra that plays itself—so she’s sacrificing swans to the juniper tree.”

  Her mouth winced. She was not easy to faze, my Dora Rose. But hey, she’d had a tough day, and I was riding her hard.

  “You’d be surprised,” I continued, “how many townspeople support Mayor Gol and her army of Swan Hunters. Everyone likes music. So what’s an overextended budget to do?”

  Dora Rose unbent so far as to roll her eyes. Taking this as a sign of weakening, I hopped down from the juniper tree.

  “Come home with me, Ladybird,” I called up. “There’s a candy shop around the corner from my building. I’ll steal you enough caramels to make you sick. You can glut your grief away, and then you can sleep. And in the morning, when you’ve decided it’s undignified to treat your only ally—no matter his unsavory genus—so crabbily, we’ll talk again.”

  A pause. A rustle. A soundless silver falling. Dora Rose landed lightly on her toe-tips. Above us, an uneasy breeze jangled the dark green needles of the juniper tree. There was a sharp smell of sap. The tree seemed to breathe. It did that, periodically. The god inside its bark did not always sleep.

  Dora Rose’s face was once more inscrutable, all grief and rage veiled behind her pride. “Caramels?” she asked.

  Dora Rose once told me, years ago, that she liked things to taste either very sweet or very salty. Caramels, according to her, were the perfect food.

  “Dark chocolate sea-salt caramels,” I expounded with only minimal drooling. “Made by a witch named Fetch. These things are to maim for, Dora Rose.”

  “You remembered.” She sounded surprised. If I’d still been thirteen (Captured God save me from ever being thirteen again), I might’ve burst into tears to be so doubted. Of course I remembered! Rats have exceptional memories. Besides—in my youth, I’d kept a strict diary. Mortal-style.

  I was older now. I doffed my wharf boy’s cap and offered my elbow. In my best Swan Prince imitation, I told her, “Princess, your every word is branded on my heart.”

  I didn’t do it very well; my voice is too nasal, and I can’t help adding overtones of innuendo. But I think Dora Rose was touched by the effort. Or at least, she let herself relax into the ritual of courtesy, something she understood in her bones. Her bones. Which Ulia Gol wanted to turn into a self-playing harpsichord to match Elinore’s harp.

  Over. My. Dead. Body.

  Oh, all right. My slightly dented body. Up to and no further than a chunk off the tail. After that, Dora Rose would be on her own.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  She took my elbow. She even leaned on it a smidge, which told me how exhausted and stricken she was beneath her feigned indifference. I refrained from slavering a kiss upon her silver knuckles. Just barely.

  * * *

  The next morning, thanks to a midnight raid on Hans’s wardrobe, I was able to greet Dora Rose at my dapper best. New hose, new shining thigh-high boots, new scarlet jerkin, green cape and linen sark. New curved dagger with serrated edge, complete with flecks of Froggit Cobblersawl’s drying tongue meat on it.

  I’d drawn the line at stealing Hans’s blond goatee, being at some loss as how best to attach it to my own chin. But I did not see why he should have one when I couldn’t. I had, therefore, left it at the bottom of his chamber pot should he care to seek it there.

  Did the Swan Princess gaze at me in adoration? Did she stroke my fine sleeve or fondle my blade? Not a bit of it. She sat on the faded cushion of my best window seat, playing with a tassel from the heavy draperies and chewing on a piece of caramel. Her blue stare went right through me. Not blank, precisely. Meditative. Distant. Like I wasn’t important enough to merit even a fraction of her full attention.

  “What I cannot decide,” she said slowly, “is what course I should take. Ought I to fly at Ulia Gol in the open streets of Amandale and dash her to the ground? Ought I to forsake this town entirely, and seek shelter with some other royal bevy? If,” she added with melancholy, “they would have me. This I doubt, for I would flee to them with empty hands and under a grave mantle of sorrow. Ought I to await at the lake for Hans’s net and Hans’s knife and join my Folk in death, letting my transformation take me at the foot of the juniper tree?”

  That’s swans for you. Fraught with “oughts.” Stop after three choices, each bleaker and more miserably elegant than the last. Vengeance, exile, or suicide. Take your pick. I sucked my tongue against an acid reply, taking instead a cube of caramel and a deep breath. Twitched my nose. Smoothed out the wrinkles of distaste. Went to crouch on the floor by the window seat. (This was not, I’ll have you know, the same as kneeling at her feet. For one thing, I was balancing on my heels, not my knees.)

  “Seems to me, Dora Rose,” I suggested around a sticky, salty mouthful, “that what you want in a case like this—”

  “Like this?” she asked, and I knew she was seeing her sister’s hair repurposed for harp strings. “There has never been a case like mine, Maurice, so do not dare attempt to eclipse the magnitude of my
despair with your filthy comparisons!”

  I loved when she hissed at me. No blank stare now. If looks could kill, I’d be skewered like a shish kebab and served up on a platter. I did my best not to grin. She’d’ve taken it the wrong way.

  Smacking my candy, I said in my grandest theatrical style, even going so far as to roll my R’s, “In a case, Dora Rose, where magic meets music, where both are abused and death lacks dignity, where the innocent suffer and a monster goes unchecked, it seems reasonable, I was going to say, to consult an expert. A magical musician, perhaps, who has suffered so much himself he cannot endure to watch the innocent undergo like torment.”

  Ah, rhetoric. Swans, like rats, are helpless against it. Dora Rose twisted the braid at her shoulder, and lowered her ivory lashes. Early morning light wormed through my dirty windowpane. A few gray glows managed to catch the silver of her skin and set it gleaming.

  My hands itched. In this shape, what I missed most was the sensitivity of my whiskers; my palms kept trying to make up for it. I leaned against the wall and scratched each palm vigorously in their turn with my dandy nails. Even in mortal form, these were sharp and black. I was vain about my nails and kept them polished. I wanted to run them though that fine, pale Swan Princess hair.

  “Maurice.” Miraculously, Dora Rose was smiling. A contemptuous smile, yes, but a smile nonetheless. “You’re not saying you know a magical musician? You?”

  Implicit in her tone: You wouldn’t know music if a marching band dressed ranks right up your nose.

  I drew myself to my not very considerable height, and I tugged my scarlet jerkin straight, and I said to her, I said to Dora Rose, I said, “He happens to be my best friend!”

  “Ah.”

  “I saved his life down in Doornwold five years ago. The first people to repopulate the place were thieves and brigands, you know, and he wasn’t at all equipped to deal with...Well. That’s how I met Nicolas.”

  She cocked an eyebrow.

  “And then we met again out back of Amandale, down in the town dump. He, uh, got me out of a pickle. A pickle jar, rather. One that didn’t have air holes. This was in my other shape, of course.”

  “Of course,” she murmured, still with that trenchant silver smile.

  “Nicolas is very shy,” I warned her. “So don’t you go making great big swan eyes at him or anything. No sudden movements. No hissing or flirting or swooning over your sweet little suicide plans. He had a rough childhood, did Nicolas. Spent the tenderest years of his youth under the Hill, and part of him never left it.”

  “He has lived in Faerie but is not of it?” Now both Dora Rose’s eyebrows arched, winging nigh up to her hairline. “Is he mortal or not?”

  I shrugged. “Not Folk, anyway—or not entirely. Maybe some blood from a ways back. Raven, I think. Or Crow. A drop or two of Fox. But he can’t slip a skin to scale or down or fur. Not Faerieborn, either, though from his talk it seems he’s got the run of the place. Has more than mortal longevity, that’s for sure. Among his other gifts. Don’t know how old he is. Suspect even he doesn’t remember, he’s been so long under the Hill. What he is, is bright to my nose, like a perfumery or a field of wildflowers. Too many scents to single out the source. But come on, Dora Rose; nothing’s more boring than describing a third party where he can’t blush to hear! Meet him and sniff for yourself.”

  * * *

  Nicolas lived in a cottage in the lee of the Hill.

  I say Hill, and I mean Hill. As fairy mounds go, this was the biggest and greenest, smooth as a bullfrog and crowned at the top with a circle of red toadstools the size of sycamores that glowed in the dark.

  It’s not an easy Hill. You don’t want to look at it directly. You don’t want to stray too near, too casually, or you’ll end up asleep for a hundred years, or vanished out of life for seven, or tithed to the dark things that live under the creatures living under the Hill.

  But Nicolas dwelled there peaceably enough, possibly because no one who ever goes there by accident gets very far before running off in the opposite direction, shock-haired and shrieking. Those who approach on purpose sure as hellfowl aren’t coming to bother the poor musician who lives in the Hill’s shadow. They come because they want to go under, to seek their fortunes, to beg of the Faerie Queen some boon (poor sops), or to exchange the dirt and drudgery of their mortal lives for some otherworldly dream.

  We Folk don’t truck much with Faerie. We belong to earth, wind, water, and sun just as much as mortals do, and with better right. For my part, anything that stinks of that glittering, glamorous Hillstuff gives me the heebie-jeebies. With the exception of Nicolas.

  I left Dora Rose (not without her vociferous protestations) hiding in some shrubbery, and approached the cottage at a jaunty swagger. I didn’t bang. That would be rude, and poor Nicolas was so easily startled. Merely, I scratched at the door with my fine black nails. At the third scratch, Nicolas answered. He was dressed only in his long red underwear, his red-and-black hair standing all on end. He was sleepy-eyed and pillow-marked, but he smiled when he saw me and opened wide his door.

  “Maurice, Maurice!” he cried in his voice that would strike the sirens dumb. “But I did not expect this! I do not have a pie!” and commenced bustling about his larder, assembling a variety of foods he thought might please me.

  He knew me so well! The vittles consisted of a rind of old cheese, a heel of hard bread, the last of the apple preserves, and a slosh of sauerkraut. Truly a feast! Worthy of a Rat King! (If my Folk had kings. We don’t. Just as all swans are royalty, we rats are every last one of us a commoner and godsdamned proud of it.) Salivating with delight, I dove for the proffered tray. There was only one chair at the table. Leaving it to me, Nicolas sank to a crouch by the hearth. I grazed with all the greed of a man-and-rat who’s breakfasted solely on a single caramel. He watched with a sweet smile on his face, as if nothing had ever given him more pleasure than to feed me.

  “Nicolas, my friend,” I told him, “I’m in a spot of trouble.”

  The smile vanished in an instant, replaced by a look of intent concern. Nicolas hugged his red wool-clad knees to his chest and cocked his head, bright black eyes inquiring.

  “See,” I said, “a few weeks back, I noticed something weird happening in the Maze Wood just south of town? Lots of mortal children trooping in and out of the corridors, dressed fancy. Two scent hounds. A wagon. All led by Henchman Hans and no less a person than the Mayor of Amandale herself. I got concerned, right? I like to keep an eye on things.”

  Nicolas’s own concern darkened to a frown, a sadness of thunderclouds gathering on his brow. But all he said was, “You were snooping, Maurice!”

  “All right, all right, Nicolas, so what if I was? Do you have any ale?”

  Nicolas pulled a red-and-black tuft of his hair. “Um, I will check! One moment, Maurice!” He sprang off the ground with the agility of an eight-year-old and scurried for a small barrel in a corner by the cellar door. He set his ear to it as if listening for the spirit within.

  “It’s from the Hill,” he warned softly.

  I smacked my lips. “Bring it on!”

  Faerie ale was the belchiest. Who said I wasn’t musical? Ha! Dora Rose’d never heard me burp out “The Lay of Kate and Fred” after bottoms-upping a pint of this stuff. Oh, crap. Dora Rose. She was still outside, awaiting my signal. Never keep a Swan Princess in the bushes. She’d be bound to get antsy and announce herself with trumpets. I accepted the ale and sped ahead with my tale.

  “So I started camping out in that old juniper tree, right? You know the one? The juniper tree. In the Heart Glade.”

  “Oh, yes.” Nicolas lowed that mournful reply, half-sung, half-wept. “The poor little ghost in the tree. He was too long trapped inside it. The tree became his shrine, and the ghost became a god. That was in the long, long ago. But I remember it all like yesterday. I go to play my pipe for him when I get too lonely. Sometimes, if the moon is right, he sings to me.”

  Awright! No
w we were getting somewhere! Dora Rose should be hearing this, she really should. But if I brought her in now, poor Nicolas’d clam up like a corpse on a riverbank.

  “Hey, Nicolas?” I gnawed into a leathery apple. “You have any idea why Ulia Gol’d be burying a bunch of murdered Swan Folk out by the juniper tree, singing a ditty over the bodies, and digging them up again? Or why they should arise thereafter as self-playing instruments?”

  Nicolas shook his head, wide-eyed. “No. Not if Ulia Gol did it. She’d have no power there.”

  I spat out an apple seed. It flew across the room, careening off a copper pot. “Oh, right. Uh, I guess what I meant was, if she got a child to do it. A child with a shovel. First to bury the corpse, then weep over it, then dig it up again. While a chorus of twenty kiddlings sang over the grave.”

  Nicolas hugged himself harder, shivering. “Maurice! They are not doing this? Maurice—they would not use the poor tree so!”

  I leaned in, heel of bread in one hand, rind of cheese in the other. “Nicolas. Ulia Gol’s murdered most of a bevy of Swan Folk. You know, the one that winters at Lake Serenus? Cygnet, cob, and pen—twenty of them, dead as dead can be. She’s making herself an orchestra of bone instruments that play themselves so she won’t have to shell out for professional musicians. Or at least that’s her excuse this time. But you remember last year, right? With the foxes?”

  Nicolas flinched.

  “And before that,” I went on, “didn’t she go fishing all the talking trout from every single stream and wishing well? Are you sensing a pattern? ’Cause no one else seems to be—except for yours truly, the Incomparable Maurice. Now there’s only one swan girl left. One out of a whole bevy. And she’s...she’s my...The point is, Nicolas, we must do something.”