Wolf Notes and Other Musical Mishaps (18 page)

She swallowed the fizzing taste in her mouth, opened the door, and said loudly, “Let’s go and do our worst!”

She felt the night air lifted by a sigh of relief, and heard feet, hooves, claws and paws moving back into the dark.

As everyone got out of the minibus and took their instruments out of their cases, tall cloaked figures came out of the forest, with high torches flaming above them.

“Front of house?” enquired Dr Lermontov.

Helen watched as the summer school students filed after the torch-bearing faeries. Then she reached into the minibus, to pull out the sword and the spanner it had clanged against. She had recognised the sound of bronze hitting iron.

She whispered into the darkness as she followed the line of torches, “Bye, Sapphire. I’ll be back out before your tail grows longer or your fire burns hotter.”

Then she spoke to the silvery figure walking on her left.

“Sylvie, the wolves I hurt with the sword. Do they need any first aid?”

“We have our own healers. You have done enough to them.”

There was an awkward silence.

Helen spoke again. “Thanks for trusting me and for saving me from your brother.”

Sylvie growled. “Now repay that trust and drive the faeries away, or my brothers will never listen to another word I say!” She faded into the darkness.

There was a swish of scented velvet to Helen’s right.

“Lee. Here’s your sword back. I didn’t really like using it.”

“You wielded it well, Helen, and you will wield your bow well in there too. I’m sure your plan will work. I trust you. And thank you for trusting me, when no one else did.”

The velvet swirled away, but Helen heard a whisper, “Please remember, you’d be foolish to trust me any other time …”

Then Helen felt a light touch on her shoulder.

“Bye, Lavender. See you soon.”

“I’m coming in with you, Helen. Sitting on your shoulder, as usual.”

Helen laughed nervously. “You can’t sit on my shoulder when I’m playing. If you sit on my left shoulder, I’ll crush you with the fiddle; if you sit on my right shoulder, I’ll jerk you off as I move my bow arm. And if the Faery Queen saw you, she would eat you up like a party snack! Stay out here
and wait for me. I won’t be long. I promise. You know I try to keep my promises.”

Lavender flew off her shoulder, whispering, “Please be careful, Helen.”

Then she felt the sudden warm bulk of Yann overtaking her.

“I wish I was coming in with you, Helen.”

“You can’t, Yann. I have to do this task all on my own. You will take James home safely, won’t you? If I know I can trust you with that, then I can
concentrate
on getting everyone else out.”

“Of course you can trust me.”

“I know that,” she said. “I’ve always known that.”

She walked away from her friends towards the long dark hump of the faery mound.

The tall torch bearers stood by the hill, a wide arch opened and golden light flooded out.

Everyone else stepped in confidently and
happily
, with no idea of where they were heading. Helen hesitated. If she walked in, would she ever walk out again?

She waited in the shadows until even the torch bearers were inside. As she stepped into the mound, she punched the spanner into the side of the arch. Then she walked into the Faery Queen’s midsummer revels.

Helen walked into a huge feasting hall.

The students ahead of her were staring at the room. The domed ceiling was hung with huge circles of wood, candles burning on their upper rims. The walls were decorated with tapestries of hunts, feasts and dances, framed by bone-white antlers and embossed bronze shields.

The students looked hungrily at tables covered in ashets of roast meat, poached fruit, honeycombs and warm bread, jugs of ale and steaming cogs of mead.

Helen thought she’d better get them playing before they were tempted to eat anything.

Then she noticed the guests. As the students stared at the faery splendour, the guests at the revels stared just as hard at their musical
entertainment
. Their shining cloaks flung over chairs and stools, their smooth skin pale in the
candlelight
, their beautiful faces gazing in wonder at the young musicians in the centre of the hall.

Helen looked at the audience. Where was the Professor?

She couldn’t see her, but she could see so many other welcoming enthusiastic faces. Hands applauding encouragingly as the summer school students got their instruments ready.

Suddenly Helen wondered what harm it could do to play properly
first
. Surely they could show their skills first, then do the appalling music later, to drive the faeries away at the end. Then the faeries would know what they were missing, and Helen could hear, the students could hear, the applause and encores they deserved.

Helen smiled at the audience, and tapped her toes on the floor, in the rhythm of the Professor’s music. The faeries began to clap along. Helen pulled her fiddle case off her shoulders. If the Professor wasn’t here, the Professor couldn’t stop her
playing
a solo, just a quick one, all on her own.

Then she heard a voice. “Are you the sandwich lady?”

She spun round, and saw a small boy at the end of the hall, sitting below two tall golden thrones. Both thrones were covered with feathery canopies, thatched with wings of all colours: blue, red,
yellow
, white, purple.

Helen moved closer. She recognized the
overlapping
arrangement of the feathers. They weren’t bird wings. They were flower fairy wings.

These faeries decorated their thrones with flower fairy wings!

Helen swallowed the sour taste in her mouth and put her fiddle away. They didn’t deserve her music. She must drive these faeries away, before their cruelty spread further through the forest.

She looked down from the canopies to the people seated on the thrones. She saw the Faery King’s stern face, asking a question with his raised
eyebrows
. Helen nodded, once. He smiled.

Then she looked straight at the Faery Queen, seeing her for the first time without a veil of
distance
.

The Queen, dressed in pure radiant white, held out her slim hands. “Helen. You have provided music for me. How kind. You may start now.”

“Not yet.”

Helen looked down at the floor below the Queen’s throne. There was James, sitting on a cushion, pale, grubby and bleary.

“Come on, James. Time to go home.”

“What a shame,” crooned the Queen. “Do let him stay for just one tune.”

“No,” said Helen. “No music until he has gone. Bedtime, James. Off you go. My friend Yann will take you home. Go home and give Emma a cuddle.”

James stood up and repeated, “Are you the sandwich lady?”

Helen grinned. “Yes. Did you like them?”

“Not really. I like sandwiches with crusts, they’re chewier.” He trotted across the hall, towards the arched exit.

Helen shook her head. Even her picnics had been a failure this week.

Then she stared in surprise at the Queen. Now that James had moved away, Helen could see the Queen’s feet for the first time. Her pointy, stiletto shoes; bright white with gold heels, perfectly
polished
and free of dust.

At last, Helen realized that the Faery Queen had organized the summer school herself. She had written the music for her revels with her own fair hands. Of course.

“Hello, Professor,” she said to the Queen.

“Hello, Helen,” the Queen answered. “Aren’t you slow to catch on? Time for my revels. We are all waiting.”

“I hope you think it’s worth waiting for.”

Helen grabbed her fiddle and joined the huddle of musicians.

She heard the pulse of hoof beats outside and grinned. James was going home.

Then she licked her lips. Her tongue was no longer fizzing. Her words would have no special power. Would the musicians still agree to play their worst?

“Remember …” she whispered. “Play your wolf notes. Your sharps and flats. Play backwards. And whatever you do, don’t play along with the person next to you. Do your worst! And have fun!”

They all nodded, as sure as they had been when they left the bus that this was what the Professor wanted them to do, what they wanted to do.

So when Dr Lermontov lifted his baton,
everyone
played a note. Not one of them played the note the music was meant to begin with, but very few had the courage to play a second note after it, and no one played a third note. There was a pause. How could you play out of tune and out of time with everyone else, when you didn’t know what they were going to play next?

He waved again, and everyone played another note, but several of them actually harmonized, completely by accident.

Helen gasped. Failing was harder than she thought. Particularly when you were trying to fail.

So she grasped her bow firmly and started to play into the silence. She played “Pop goes the Weasel.”

She heard a giggle, and someone next to her started “Humpty Dumpty,” then a drummer started banging out “A Shave and a Haircut”. A flautist played “Mary Mary Quite Contrary” in a gratingly minor key, and Zoe laughed and played “Jack and Jill” purely on harmonics.

Suddenly they were all picking a different simple tune and playing it again and again, fast and slow, sharp and flat, loud and soft, minor and major, mangling it and murdering it, and it sounded …

Awful!

Helen lifted her head for a moment to look at the audience.

Their gleaming white faces were turning green.

They had their hands clasped to their ears.

They were screaming silently.

Once the bagpipers found their true volume and started playing tunes from
Mary Poppins
backwards, the faeries started to leave. They held each other up, swaying and wobbling, then they fled, pushing aside the golden tapestries and slipping into the dark tunnels hidden behind them.

“Keep it up,” yelled Helen, switching to the duck-swallowing music from
Peter and the Wolf
.

Some hardier faeries, with caps pulled down over their ears, were throwing food and drink towards the musicians, trying to shut them up. But the food turned into bunches of grass and handfuls of nuts as it flew through the air, and
the ale and mead became raindrops, drizzling onto their heads.

The students laughed, playing louder and faster, and the food-throwing faeries gagged and fled.

The King and Queen were still there, surrounded by an angry group of guests pulling their cloaks up round their ears.

So Helen looked up at the ceiling and, judging the acoustics as she stepped forward, she started to play her wolf note. The note she avoided as much as she could, the note which set up such a vibration in the fiddle that it was hard to keep the bow on the string.

The wolf note howled wildly round the room. Helen played it again and again and again, and as she stood under the centre of the dome, the echoes crashed round the hall, torturing the air.

The last of the faery guests, moaning with pain, slid out round a tapestry of a hound bringing down a deer.

“March out, but keep playing,” Helen yelled, so Tommy led the way, beating a stuttering mix of salsa and waltz on his bodhran that made
everyone
trip over each other’s feet.

Helen finally stopped playing her screaming wolf note, and joined the end of the procession, turning back to look at the thrones.

The Queen was shrieking, her face red, her hair falling out of its bun, just as it always had in lessons. “How dare you! How dare you ruin my revels!”

“I promised I would provide music,” Helen shouted back. “I didn’t promise it would be any good!”

She glanced at the King, who had his golden cloak stuffed into his ears. He gave her a cheerful wink.

Then she noticed Lee, standing in the shadow behind his King, staring at her hands on her
fiddle
with the same glittering hunger she had seen when she whistled in the forest.

Lee looked up to her face and smiled, as brightly and beautifully as ever. He held out a hand to her. Helen shook her head, then ran through the arched doorway, pulling the spanner from the earth as she passed.

The door clanged shut behind her; a hollow echo, as if the mound was already empty … and would stay empty for a hundred years.

Helen tripped over a heap of musicians lying on the black midnight grass, laughing.

“I hope someone was recording that!”

“It was horrible!”

“I sounded appalling! Worse than a six-year-old learning the chanter!”

“That was so much fun!”

“Do you think the Professor will write a paper on it? Will she mention our names?”

Over the giggles, Helen heard hoof beats getting closer and, in the distance, triumphant howls.

She raised her voice. “Shall we play
properly
now? To prove that we really are the best musicians in Scotland!”

“Who would we be playing for?” asked Zoe.

“For ourselves,” said Helen, “and for anyone listening in the forest.”

“There’s no one listening in the forest.”

Helen just grinned, and put her fiddle to her shoulder.

And they played.

They played Professor Fay Greenhill’s magical music, at midnight on midsummer night, to anyone listening in the forest.

Only Helen knew who was listening.

Only Helen heard the whispers of “encore” in that moment of silence when the music finally stopped.

Read on for your sneak preview of the next in the
First Aid for Fairies
series,
Storm Singing and other Tangled Tasks
.

Clip clop clip … splash!

“Stop giggling!”

“We’re not giggling.”

“Yes, you are! Walking on seaweed with
hooves
isn’t easy, you know.”

Helen tried not to laugh as Yann slithered over another wet rock.

“Come on, Rona,” she whispered, “let’s walk in front of him so we’re not watching him slip and slide. He gets so grumpy when he’s embarrassed.”

Clatter
…
splash!

“Don’t look back,” muttered Rona.

“Why not?”

“He’s just landed on his rear end in a rockpool!”

Helen couldn’t help looking. When she saw Yann floundering in a deep pool, she took a couple of steps back, grabbed his hand and tried to pull him out.

“Don’t be foolish, human child. You can’t lift a horse’s weight! Back off, so I don’t stand on you.”

With an inelegant lurch, he jumped out. Water ran down his boy’s back and off his chestnut horse’s body. He shook his long auburn hair and flicked a tiny crab off his withers.

“Stop staring! Just leave me alone to go at my own pace over this horrible beach.”

Yann moved his front left hoof gingerly forward,
aiming for a small flat patch of sand, but his back hooves slipped, and he splashed into a shallower pool.

“For goodness sake!” Rona marched off, her smooth hair bouncing against the furry rucksack on her shoulders, her ankle-length dress trailing in the rockpools.

Helen watched Rona walking away, then glanced at Yann, who might break a leg if he went too fast. There weren’t any splints long enough for a horse’s leg in the first aid kit hanging from Helen’s right shoulder. Should she chase after Rona, or follow behind at Yann’s pace?

Yann yelled suddenly, “Rona! Come back!”

“No! I can’t be late!”

“Come and look at this!”

“Look at what, the seaweed in your tail?”

“Rona Grey, I’m serious. Come here!” Rona turned back, glancing up at the sun in the same irritated way Helen’s mum checked her watch when she had to get Helen to school, Nicola to nursery and already had animals queuing outside her vet’s surgery.

“What?” Rona demanded.

“Look at that sand …” The centaur pointed between his front hooves.

Both girls stared at a clear patch of sand.

“There’s nothing there!” they said at the same time.

“Precisely. There’s nothing there. It’s completely smooth. Something has been rubbed out.”

Helen peered closer. The stretch of sand
was
utterly smooth. She looked at other patches of sand between the rocks. They were marked with bird footprints and the soft lines of the last tide.

Rona knelt down and sniffed. “You’re right. No windblown grains. No salty crust. Someone has brushed this.”

“Someone has covered their traces,” insisted Yann. “Someone who doesn’t want anyone to know they’ve been here.”

“Who?” asked Rona, her irritation turning to worry.

Yann shrugged. “Someone spying on the Storm Singer competition?”

“But it’s a public event. Any sea being or fabled beast is welcome to watch. And humans don’t know about it.”

“I know about it,” said Helen.

“Only because I invited you.”

“We can’t tell who it is unless we track them,” said Yann. “We can’t tell what they want unless we ask them.” He cracked his knuckles and grinned.

Helen sighed, and Rona shook her head.

“It’s a peaceful competition, Yann, not a battle,” said Rona. “I’m sure someone brushed the sand for a perfectly sensible reason.”

“I’ll investigate,” announced Yann.

“
You?
” snorted Rona. “
You
are struggling to walk in a straight line on this beach. I suppose I’d better go.” She looked at the sun again.