Pay the Piper (14 page)

What she wanted to do was to sit back down on the bank of the river of blood and cry or yell or scream. She wanted to wake up at her desk and have this all be a bad dream. Most of all she wanted to give up. To throw her hands in the air and say, “Okay! You win!” But she couldn't. The kids might not know it, but she was their best hope. The only way she could think of to save them, though, was to ask more questions. The more she knew about the situation, the better chance she had—if there
was
a better chance! She bit her lip and tried to think of what else she needed to know.

At last she asked, “Why does the king sit there, not speaking?” and waited for Alabas to get his laughter under control.

“We have to send our teind to him by nightfall. It has become a game to Gringras. He waits till the last minute to see if he can get the king to speak to him.” Alabas shrugged. “They are a stubborn family. Eight hundred earth years and the old man has never said a word to Gringras, though the queen blanches at the silence and tears drop from her eyes like rain.”

“And what happens if you don't pay up by nightfall?”

“‘As a mortal man draw yer final breath,'”
Alabas answered with a line from the curse. “We become like you. Mortal.”

Callie had run out of questions.

And the sun, once high in the sky, was finally growing lower.

She knew she was running out of time as well.

25 · Curses

Callie drew in a deep breath and walked away from Gringras and Alabas. She wanted to think about curses, and being next to the two of them seemed to keep her from thinking clearly, as if her mind were becoming increasingly foggy.

She found a rock, gray, solid, shaped like a sofa, and sat down.

In her world curses were swears, words that got you sent to your room. But here, in Faerie, curses were the real thing. something that could condemn you to a kind of living death, or a death in life. She shuddered.

Then she remembered Granny Kirkpatrick's stories again. About how there was always another way out. She thought it must be true. It
had
to be true—or there was no hope.

And a mortal knows ye and loves ye still.

Surely she wasn't the only mortal who had ever known Gringras. There were all those band members over the centuries. But had they been part of the glamour or apart from it?

She looked around. Scott and Nick and all the kids from the neighborhood were as bespelled as before. It must have always been like that. No mortal ever really had a chance to know the faerie prince. They would have been glamoured, mesmerized, hypnotized, glazed. Men, women, children—Gringras had used them but had never let them get close. Close was dangerous. But, Callie knew this with sudden and utter certainty, close was also the only way to be saved.

As if they knew what she was thinking, the little ghostly children of the Seelie Court suddenly surrounded her rock, speaking to her in wispy voices, more like the sound of wind through leaves than any real conversation. They plucked at her hair and clothes, as if assuring themselves that she was human and not fey.

She let them pick at her, because she hardly felt a thing. Their touch was like little summer breezes brushing her face, her hair, her jeans, not like human fingers at all.

The children spoke as if out of storybooks, the kinds of stories with kings and knights and lonely princesses casked up in towers awaiting rescue. She heard, “My liege,” and “ladykins,” “God's wounds” and “S'blood,” and “canst thou, canst thou not” and “zounds!” The words were odd, old-fashioned, foreign-sounding. She heard “kith and kin,” “converse,” “fortnight,” and “teind.”

“Teind!” she said aloud. That one, at least, made sense to her.

The ghost children buzzed and plucked about her even more till the tallest of the nightshirt boys, standing behind the rest, raised his hand.

“Silence!” he said clearly and with authority, though still in a whispery voice. He was a handsome boy, about her age, his fair hair a lighter gray and pushed back from his eyes.

The ghost children stood still, quiet, waiting.

Coming forward, the boy stared down at Callie. “Canst see us true?”

She nodded. “If you're a boy in a nightshirt and bare feet I can.”

He drew himself up and said in his wind-voice, “I am a
prince
in a nightshirt and bare feet.”

She nodded. “I can see that now, your majesty.”

“And wilt thou make obeisance to me?”

This,
she thought,
is the oddest conversation I've ever had.
But the whole night had been odd. So she said matter-of-factly, “If you mean will I bow to you, the answer is no, because I'm an American. We don't have royalty here.”

“Here,” he said, just as matter-of-factly, “be Faerie.”

“Ah.…” She bowed at the waist.

“Hast come, lady, to break the spell and take us home?” It was the smaller nightshirted boy, coming forward, and slipping his hand in his brother's.

Callie wondered if she was to bow to him, too. But before she could attempt any such thing, all the ghost children gathered around again, touching her—though this time their touches seemed different somehow: pleading, begging, desperate.

“I have told thee and told thee,” the prince said, turning to them, “that though we mayhap be freed someday, none of us will be vouchsafed a journey home.”

“Why not?” Callie asked aloud.

“What the year, lady?” the boy asked in return.

“Two thousand and…” Callie began but the gray children did not let her finish. Some of them screamed, little tatters of sound, others put their hands to their ears. Still others turned to their neighbors, asking frantic questions in their strange, foreign languages.

Finally the prince said, “I am Edward, lady, prince of Wales. I was to have been king after my father, who died in the year of Our Lord 1483. Murdered, so I wot. But I was stolen from my bed in the Tower along with my younger brother, Dickie here.”

Callie nodded.

“It was the piper and his man, hired by that rogue Richard to play at his usurped coronation.”

Callie leaned forward. “Hired to kill you?”

The little prince nodded. “But he did not, lady. The faerie prince does not hold with murder.”

“Except of his own brother,” Callie said.

The young prince nodded. “So thou seest true.”

She saw even more than that. “1483? You would be long…” She couldn't say more, trying desperately to disguise the horror and sadness she suddenly felt.

The older prince nodded. “I have tried to explain to these peasants, but none of them is bright enough to truly understand—once we set foot back on the soil of earth, we will no longer be bespelled by Faerie. We will become our proper ages.”

“But you'd be…” Callie gasped, trying to figure out how old he was. She knew it had to be hundreds.

He said it for her. “We'd be hundreds of years old and turned to dust, free only to become motes of sunlight, shards of memory, floating to Heaven,” the little prince said, “for none of us be old enough or evil enough to be flung down to perdition.”

“But not go home?” Dickie asked, his lower lip trembling. “Not to see mother again?” Tears shimmered in his eyes.

“Then I stay!” a girl cried out from the crowd of gray children, shaking her head which set her little braids swinging. “Better here alive in death than a dust mote on earth.”

“And I!” another called, a boy, raising his hand.

“And I.…” An agreement rang all around the grey mob.

The prince of Wales turned to them, and this time his voice was almost full strength. “And let Faerie win? Never! We must leave, and God will speed us on our way to Heaven.”

“Wait,” Callie said, “I don't understand. If I stay to love Gringras, to sacrifice myself, will I have actually saved anyone? I mean, my brother, my neighbors…” She pointed over to them. “Or will they be dust motes, too?”

“The river of time runs differently here,” the young prince said. “But this place on which we now stand is not yet Faerie proper where time stops altogether. Once thee leaves
this
place, lady, this borderlands, mayhap a day has become a year, an afternoon a lifetime. But I cannot say for certain.”

Which means,
Callie thought,
I have to figure out things now. Before midnight. Before we are taken into Faerie proper.

At that moment, Alabas came over and the gray children scattered before him, like little mice before the cat. “So you have met them, the teinds. What do you think of them?” His eyes were hooded now and she felt he was toying with her.

“Is it true that if they leave, they will be dust motes?” she asked.

“What is true is that they are hundreds of years old.” He had the grace not to smile. “But here in Faerie they stay young forever. Is that not a boon?”

Callie thought a minute. “But
you
have grown up, Alabas.
You
haven't stayed young forever. Gringras' brother died. Someone will succeed the king.”

Now Alabas smiled, his teeth small and even and very white. “You are quick, little reporter. Yes, we of the Seelie Court age in Faerie, but at a rate much slower than folk in the outside world. Accidents can happen here. And murder. Even war. But those on whom we put a glamour, do not change at all as long as they remain. They cannot change. The magic will not let them. The energy of their human youth is what keeps Faerie going. It is a kind of power. It works as electricity does in your world.”

“And you want me here as well.”

Callie wasn't asking a question, but he answered anyway, shaking his finger at her. “We
have
you here as well.”

“
You
don't,” she told him. “The king does.
You
are doomed to live in my world.”

He laughed. “It has its advantages.”

“Name one.”

“It has Gringras.”

And then she knew. The back door. The escape. The answer. Granny Kirkpatrick had been right. There was one.

It had been there all along. Only it was so simple, Gringras and Alabas had never thought of it. Or they had been too selfish, too sure of themselves, too focused on being saved by some mortal, who they would despise because—after all—they were of Faerie. But the solution was so far-fetched and so … she chuckled to herself … near-fetched, they'd never even considered it.

Callie leaned forward and said softly, “You love him. You love Gringras.”

“He is my prince,” Alabas said carefully. “My liege.”

“He's your best friend.”

“My
only
friend.”

For the first time since this awful evening had begun, Callie smiled.

26 · Revenge

Gringras crouched on his heels and fumed, vainly trying to get his temper under control. The human girl humiliating him in front of his father was bad enough, but it was Alabas' laughter that had really stung him. He hadn't heard his friend laugh freely like that in
—
literally
—
centuries and he certainly hadn't expected to be the target of it when it finally came.

When had Alabas turned so serious?
Gringras thought
. For that matter, when did I?

He recalled them laughing all the time in the days of their youth. Childhood is long in the land of the Ever Fair, and they had taken full advantage of it, torturing their nannies and tutors with pranks. Even their plan to overthrow Tormalas
—
before its tragic end
—
had seemed the grandest prank of all.
And
a tweak on the nose for Gringras' dour father.

Gringras glanced at the king sitting stone-faced and motionless on his horse. Suddenly he had an odd thought:
Father was once a child like me.
It was an uncomfortable thought.
Before he became the gargoyle he is now, Father must have run and laughed and played like any child.

As often happens when such a thought presented itself, Gringras immediately put it to song. He chanted aloud:

“Unmoving, unchanging, a statue alone,

No wind nor weather, can alter the stone.”

As he nodded in cadence to the brand-new lines, the thrill he still got from putting together a rhyme almost broke him out of his bleak mood. But another thought struck him.
And now, I have become him.

Staring at his father, Gringras had the urge to pluck a piece of grass and chew it on it as he used to do when he was much younger. If only because it was something he couldn't picture his father ever doing.

No,
he thought, reconsidering,
I have not become him. I have become worse.
His throat felt tight, as if at any moment he might weep.

“For stone cannot weep, and stone cannot feel,

Emotions are left to the mortal and real.”

He smiled bitterly at the irony. For now he was almost mortal himself, and almost overwhelmed with feelings. Most of what he felt, though, was fury. At his father and at himself.

My father,
he thought,
may be a humorless, vicious, stone statue of a king, but everything he does, he does for one reason: the kingdom. Me? Everything I do is for myself.
His thoughts came tumbling out in a frenzy.

I am selfish and weak.
He very nearly began ticking off his faults on his fingers like Callie had done but caught himself and clenched his fists instead.
My fear of my father and my fear of becoming mortal have turned me into a coward.
His mouth twisted with self-loathing.
I am more than a coward. I am evil. I can try to blame my actions on the curse, but the fact remains: I do evil things. Therefore I must be evil.