Pay the Piper: A Rock 'n' Roll Fairy Tale

by Jane Yolen

  “Hame again ye’ll ne’er be

  Till a mortal kens what faeries see,

  Till a charmed soul stays of its own free will

  And a mortal knows ye and loves ye still.”

  He was about to explain it further, when Alabas spoke up.

  “Your father approaches.”

  Gringras nodded and stood.

  Reluctantly, Callie followed suit. If Gringras couldn’t think of an answer, perhaps his father could. She was surprised that the faeries were so close. She’d been concentrating so hard on questioning Gringras that she hadn’t noticed that the music and laughter had gotten nearer. Now she could hear thundering drums and bleating horns as a strange procession crested a small hill.

  Callie stared, agog, at the faerie court. Some of them walked, some flew, and others rode creatures as bizarre as themselves. The leading courtiers carried multi-colored banners on which things were written in an old-fashioned script. Several of them had musical instruments. Besides the drums and horns, there were long wooden flutes, an odd hand harp, and a kind of small bagpipes. One stork-legged man juggled balls of fire and two of the winged fairies had crystal balls floating before them.

  And then there were the children—human children. Dozens of them, like little forlorn ghosts, white-faced, the sun shining right through them. They were dressed in rags of old-fashioned costumes, some clearly peasants wearing clogs. Several seemed highborn, in tattered velvet jackets and high leather boots that were scuffed and worn. Two little boys in silken nightshirts and nightcaps held hands and danced along barefooted.

  The entire troop gamboled and sang, their approach a directionless, chaotic ramble that still brought them closer and closer to where Callie and the others waited.

  In the center of this mad throng, astride a huge black horse, rode an older version of Gringras. The same thin face, the same piercing eyes, the same high cheekbones and mirthless smile. He wore robes of royal purple and a white ermine cloak. Atop his head perched a silver jeweled crown. By his side, on a gray mare, was a woman whose hair was bound up in ribbons and jewels.

  That must be King Merrias, Callie thought. And the queen.

  When they got within ten yards, the king raised his hand and the parade halted as one. The music died, juggling balls disappeared, and flag-posts were planted into the ground. Even the wind seemed to obey and the banners fell slack as the wind died.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” breathed Scott, lifting his eyes from the ground for the first time in an hour.

  Callie took a closer look. There were small, warty creatures with red hats, and lithe humanoids who almost disappeared when they turned sideways. There were tall, slim folk with white hair and violet eyes, as well as hummingbird-sized fairies with translucent wings. Small, naked brownies stood side by side to giraffe-high trolls with slack jaws and too many teeth. Living balls of light illuminated the craggy faces of deformed dwarfish brutes. Normal-looking men and women suddenly turned into dogs and back again at the blink of an eye, and one even flopped around as a seal for a moment before thinking better of it and popping back into human form.

  In a movie, Callie thought, they might be fascinating. Great action figures for a Happy Meal. But here, up close, and way too personal, they’re something out of a nightmare.

  Even the king, who, at first glance, was as good-looking as his son, seemed cold and distant and much too inhuman to be considered beautiful.

  “No,” Callie said, turning to Scott, “they aren’t beautiful at all. They’re mean and old and ugly. And they want to keep us here forever.” Forever, she thought. And if I don’t figure out this curse now, I might—like Gringras—just give up.

  Scott didn’t seem to hear her. He kept staring, rapt.

  However, Gringras did hear, and he spun Callie around by her shoulders to face him. He said, with a strange wild hope, “What did you say?”

  Callie, confused, answered, “They aren’t beautiful.”

  “What do you see?” Gringras asked.

  So, as King Merrias and his queen looked imperiously down at them, Callie described the court as best she could—the small warty folk and the large troll men, the winged fairies and the rest.

  “You see them as I do!” Gringras said excitedly when she’d finished. He let out a long breath. “Reporter Callie,” he continued, his eyes alarmingly wide, “if it meant that your brother could go free, would you stay here in Faerie voluntarily?”

  Callie glanced over at Nicky. He still looked so lost and frightened, his wizard robe covered with dirt and fall leaves. She remembered suddenly the time when he’d been barely a year old and had come down with a fever. Though just eight herself, she hadn’t let her mother take her from his room. She’d slept on the floor next to his crib all that night and the next until he was better. Just as Mars had done the time she’d gotten the chicken pox. Then she remembered how Nicky had looked in his Batman jammies on the morning before he was taken. She regretted all the mean or petty things she’d said to him over the past few days. She couldn’t remember now why she had been so angry with him—he was her only little brother and she loved him. Had loved him from the moment he’d been born.

  “Yes,” she answered at last. “Yes, I would stay.”

  Gringras was visibly shaking now and his grip on her shoulders was almost painful. “C-C-Cal … lie,” he stuttered, “do you love me?”

  “What?” Callie replied, shocked. She shook his hands off with an angry shudder, then loudly, definitely, even defiantly she added, “Of course not!”

  Gringras’ face fell and his pale complexion reddened.

  Callie began ticking things off on her fingers. “One … you kidnapped me, my brother, and all our neighbors and friends. Two … you’re responsible for the abduction of who knows how many children over the years. Three … you killed your own brother.”

  His face completely red now and his lips white as he pressed them together, Gringras turned his back on her.

  “Four—you aren’t even human. And,” Callie said and she poked him in the back with her four outstretched fingers, “you’re nearly eight hundred years old. I’m fourteen. That’s sick.”

  Gringras seemed ready to expire from acute embarrassment. He shook his head and waved his left hand at her, trying to stop the onslaught.

  About to come up with some more pointed things to say about his character, Callie stopped when she heard laughter.

  It was Alabas. He was laughing, laughing from the belly, loud and raucously. Each time he seemed about to catch his breath, he would look up and see Gringras standing, red-faced, and he would burst into another fit.

  “What’s got into him?” Callie asked.

  Gringras didn’t reply but, giving a cold glare to Alabas, he stomped off down the riverbank.

  On his horse, King Merrias watched this whole display without any visible emotions. Not a sparkle of amusement or anger dented his stone-like visage. Taking their cue from him, his entourage shuffled about a little but said nothing. Only the queen looked different, a spasm of something like grief passing over her beautiful face.

  Alabas finally got his laughter under control and wandered up to Callie.

  “Little reporter,” he told her, “all my many years I have never heard anyone talk to Gringras in that way. Even his mother did not scold him like that when he was a boy.” He chuckled again and seemed in danger of resuming his laughing fit. “Though it might have done him good.”

  “But why would he ask me those things?”

  “It is the curse,” said Alabas, and he chanted four lines from the now-familiar verse:

  “Hame again ye’ll ne’er be

  Till a mortal kens what faeries see,

  Till a charmed soul stays of its own free will

  And a mortal knows ye and loves ye still.”

  “I can make sense of most of it,” Callie said, “but what is hame? And kens?”

  “Hame is home. ‘Home again you’ll never be.’ And kens means know
s or understands. Apparently you can see through the glamour the Seelie Court have cast about themselves. You see them as we do. You ‘ken what faeries see,’ though I wonder how you do it.”

  She thought a minute. “Maybe…” she said slowly, “maybe it was the music.” Then she added, “Scott’s guitar.”

  Alabas nodded. “Of course.”

  Thinking so hard her forehead furrowed, Callie suddenly said, “So, the charmed soul is me?” She nodded to herself with understanding. “He thinks if I volunteer to stay that would count as staying of my own free will? But there’s nothing free about it. It’s a will forced upon me. I doubt that would save him.”

  Alabas nodded back. “As for the third clause, Gringras told you his life story. You know him now—as a mortal. If you could only love him, he believes it would break the curse. This is as close as we have come since we were exiled to finding a way out of this impasse. But, judging by the look on your face when he asked, it is as close as we will get today.” And Alabas broke into a fresh bout of laughing.

  Callie didn’t feel like laughing. She was tired and scared and now she was beginning to get angry as well. Was there nothing she could do? She didn’t know much about love—had never even had a crush till Scott had come along—but she was pretty sure she couldn’t make herself love someone. And certainly not the fairy prince, for all his unearthly beauty.

  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 peasant
s, 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.