Ballad

by Maggie Stiefvater

  The last time I had seen the name “Gregory Normandy” it was on the bottom of a business card in my Thornking-Ash acceptance packet, with the word “President” underneath it. I felt like a cat presented with a full bathtub. “Can’t I just write out ‘I will never again miss class’ one million times?”

  Sullivan shook his head. “What a waste of your highly trained fingers, James. Go find Normandy. He’s expecting you. In the admin offices. Try and keep your vitriol to a manageable low. He’s on your side.”

  I had actually been looking forward to Hamlet as a low-stress introduction to the morning. I thought it was pretty unfair of Sullivan to deliver me to an authority figure before lunch.

  I found Gregory Normandy in McComas Hall, a small, octagon-shaped building with windows on every single side. Inside, my sneakers squeaked on the wood floors of the octagon-shaped entry hall. Eight men and women with varying degrees of frowning and baldness looked down at me from portraits on each wall. Possibly founders of this proud institution. The whole place smelled of flowers and mint, though I couldn’t see evidence of either.

  I checked the brown plastic nameplates on each of the seven doors until I found Normandy’s name. I knocked.

  “It’s open.”

  I pushed the door open and blinked in the sunlight; Normandy’s office faced east, and the morning sun was blinding through the wall of windows behind his desk. When my eyes adjusted, I found Gregory Normandy sitting behind a desk adorned with stacks of paper and two vases of daisies. I was a little surprised, especially given the daisies, to see that his head was shaved close and that his arm and chest muscles looked like he could kick my ass without breaking a sweat. Even with a dress shirt and tie on, he didn’t exactly look presidential, unless we were talking president of Fight Club.

  Normandy’s eyes lingered just above my ear; it took me a moment to realize he was looking at the scar. “You must be James Morgan. It’s nice to meet you in person. Have a seat.”

  I took a seat across from him and promptly sank two inches into the plush cushion. Out the window, behind Normandy, I could see the satyr fountain. “Thanks,” I said, cautious.

  “How are you doing here at Thornking-Ash?”

  “I’m very much enjoying the ability to order take-out every night,” I replied.

  Normandy made a face that I wasn’t sure I liked. It was a knowing face, like either Sullivan had warned him I was a smart-ass or that I was otherwise fulfilling some expectation he had of me as a smart-ass. I didn’t quite care for it.

  “So you’ve discovered that our piping instructor wasn’t up to par,” he said.

  I contemplated several answers, and in the end just sort of shrugged.

  Normandy unscrewed the top of a Coke bottle and took a swig before placing the bottle on his desk. “Which of course has you wondering why we bothered inviting you to Thornking-Ash.”

  I felt my eyes narrowing without meaning for them to. “As a matter of fact, I was wondering that very thing. Not that I’m not flattered.”

  “How do you think your friend Deirdre is doing here?”

  My arms erupted into goose bumps, and my voice was sharper than I intended. “Is she why I’m here?”

  Normandy used his middle fingers to push some of his papers back and forth on his desk; it was a strangely delicate-looking gesture. “What sort of a school do you think we are, James?”

  “Music school,” I said, knowing as I said it that it wasn’t the right answer.

  He kept pushing the papers around, not looking at me. “We’re interested in music in the way that doctors are interested in fevers. When they see a fever, they’re pretty sure there’s an infection. When we see kids with outstanding musical talent, we’re pretty sure there’s … ”

  Normandy looked up at me, waiting for me to finish the sentence.

  I just held his gaze. It was hard to imagine that he was really talking about what I thought he was talking about. What was it Sullivan had said—there was more to the teachers than it seemed?

  “What do you expect me to say?” I said.

  Normandy answered with another question. “Who gave you that scar? It’s a beauty by any standards. Your ‘accident’ was in the newspaper. I have the clipping in your application file.”

  I swallowed, and when I spoke, I was surprised to hear that I sounded guarded. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to tell me if you see anything strange. I want you especially to tell me if Deirdre Monaghan sees anything strange. We’re here”—he stabbed his finger on his desk emphatically when he said here—“for a reason. And we want to make sure kids like you and Deirdre make it successfully to college. Without … interference.”

  I rubbed my palms over my goose bumps. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Mr. Sullivan heard you play. He thinks you’re good enough to attract the wrong sort of attention. And I already heard Deirdre play, so I know how good she is.”

  It was weird hearing him call her Deirdre so much, instead of Dee. How could someone who didn’t even know to call her Dee know anything about her problems? “I’ll let you know,” I said. There was a long pause. “Is that all?”

  Normandy sort of nodded, and I stood up. He looked up. “I know you don’t want to talk about Them. And you shouldn’t. I don’t have to tell you it’s bad to mention Them out loud. But please, tell Patrick—Mr. Sullivan—if you see him.”

  I didn’t tell him what I was thinking. Which was not that I didn’t trust him, but that I didn’t trust him to be useful. The adults who had known about the faeries this summer hadn’t done anything, except possibly make things worse.

  “Thanks for your concern,” I said politely.

  That was the first and only time I went to his office.

  Nuala

  Sleep has its own cadence, its own melody

  Like death, sometimes silent, sometimes rising

  In a beautiful harmony not quite remembered

  When from one or the other you’re flying.

  —from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

  James slept a lot. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that he slept when he was bored or unhappy or convincing himself that he wasn’t unhappy. He slept at stupid times of the day, too, like halfway through a morning class or really late in the afternoon so that he ended up wide awake when the rest of the world was sleeping. His casual sleep-any-old-time attitude had his silly roommate Roundhead firmly convinced of James’ confidence, but I knew James’ self-screwing for what it really was.

  It was the end of a cool day and James was sleeping now, tightly curled on his bed while Roundhead was off doing something having to do with an oboe. I sat at the end of James’ bed and watched him sleep. James slept like he did everything else: totally intense, like it was a competition and he couldn’t let down his guard for a minute. His scribbled hands were pulled up to his face, his wrists turned to face each other in a sort of weird, beautiful knot. His knuckles were white.

  I slid a little closer and hovered one of my hands a few inches above his bare arm. Beneath my fingers, goose bumps raised on his skin in response to my presence, and my teeth appeared from behind my lips, a smile despite myself.

  James shivered but didn’t wake up. He was having some sort of dream about flying—typical. Didn’t dreaming about flying mean you were a self-loving little shit? I thought I remembered reading something about that somewhere.

  Well. I could give him a dream he wouldn’t forget. I shifted to the other side of the bed, dancing on the line between invisibility and visibility so that I wouldn’t wake him, and looked into his frowning face. Really what I wanted to do was give him a dream about accidentally crapping himself in front of a lot people or something equally weenie-shrinking, but the truth was, I had no talent for causing embarrassing dreams.
It was easiest for me to send an agonizingly beautiful dream—something so breathtaking that the dreamer was absolutely bereft upon waking. I’d learned the hard way that a little went a long way—one of my early pupils had killed himself after waking from one of my creations. Seriously. Some people had absolutely no capacity for suffering.

  I laid my hands carefully on James’ head and began to stroke his hair. He shivered under my touch, whether from cold or because he knew what was coming, I didn’t know. I inserted myself into his dream, looking, as I had been lately, revoltingly gorgeous, and called his name.

  In his dream, James jerked. “Dee?” His voice was plaintive.

  I was really beginning to hate that girl.

  I stopped stroking his hair and smacked his head instead, becoming visible so fast that my head pounded. “Wake up, maggot.”

  James winced under my hand. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Nuala.”

  I glared at him. “Otherwise known as the only female who will ever be in your bed, loser.”

  He flopped his hands over his face. “God have mercy, my head feels like hell. Kill me now, evil creature, and put me out of my mercy.”

  I pressed a finger against his windpipe, just hard enough that he’d have to ask me for a hall pass to be able to swallow. “Don’t tempt me.”

  James rolled out from under my finger, shoving his face into his blue-checked pillow. His voice was muffled. “You have such a winning way about you, Nuala. Tell me, how long have you been gracing God’s green earth with your positively incandescent personality?” In his head, I saw him guessing one hundred years, two hundred years, a thousand years. He thought I was like the rest of them.

  “Sixteen,” I snapped. “Didn’t you ever hear it wasn’t nice to ask?”

  James turned his face so that he could look at me. He was frowning. “I’m not a very nice person. Sixteen doesn’t seem very long to me. We are talking years, right, not centuries?”

  I didn’t have to tell him anything, but I did anyway. Scornfully, I said, “Not centuries.”

  James rubbed his face on his pillow as if he could rub drowsiness off. He glanced back at me and raised an eyebrow. He kept his eyes on my face, but his expression was distinctly suggestive when he spoke. “Faeries must, um, develop a lot faster than humans.”

  I slid off the bed and crouched beside it so that we were eye to eye, inches apart. “Would you like to hear a charming bedtime story, human?”

  “Is it free?”

  I hissed at him, teeth clenched.

  He yawned and made a hand gesture to indicate that he didn’t care either way what I did with myself.

  “Once upon a time, sixteen years ago, a faerie appeared in Virginia. Fully developed and fully aware, but with shit-for-brains. She couldn’t remember anything about how she got there except for something about fire. She went on her merry way, met other faeries, and figured out pretty fast that, like other faeries, she was vaguely eternal. And that unlike other faeries, every sixteen years on Halloween, she somehow gets the crap burnt out of her and then she oh-so-magically reappears again, no memories, brand new, for another sixteen years, rinse and repeat. The fricking end.”

  I turned my face away from him. I hadn’t meant to say so much.

  James was silent a long moment, and then he said, “You called them ‘faeries.’”

  I don’t know what I’d expected, but that wasn’t it. “So?”

  “So I thought They—you—hated to be called that.” James sat up. “I thought we were supposed to refer to you by delightful euphemisms like ‘the good folk’ and ‘he who must not be named.’ Shit. I think I’m getting my folklore mixed up.”

  I jumped up and stormed restlessly around the small dorm room, looking for something heavy or pointy to hurl at his head. “Well, I’m not exactly one of Them, am I? Whatever. Whatever. I don’t know why I told you. You’re too totally self-involved to give a rat’s smelly ass about anything except yourself.”

  “Nuala.” James didn’t raise his voice, but the intensity of it changed in such a way that he might as well have shouted. “Let me tell you a charming bedtime story. It’s been barely two months since I got out of the hospital. I spent my summer getting my head nailed back together and my lungs stitched up.” My eyes went to the scar above his ear, new and barely disguised in his hair, and my mind thought of the meaningless scar on my hipbone—not meaningless to James, or it wouldn’t be there.

  James continued. “They crushed my car, my amazing car that I spent every summer of my teenage life fixing until it was perfect. They ruined my best friend’s life, they damn near killed me, and we’ve got nothing to show for it but scars and you sitting next to my bed.”

  I stared at him.

  He stood up, looked me straight in the eye, and crossed his arms. He was so tragically brave; the gold sparks inside him were so bright that I almost stumbled with wanting. “So yeah. Tell me, Nuala, why I should give ‘a rat’s smelly ass’ about anything other than myself right now?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  He turned around and grabbed a brown hoodie from the end of his bed, a dismissive gesture.

  I blurted out, “Because I can see Them and you can’t.”

  James stopped moving. Just like that. He didn’t jerk or react in anyway: he just stopped. A long, long pause. By the time he turned around to face me, tugging the hoodie over his head, he was himself again. “One of your many talents. I think I’ve seen enough of y’all to last a lifetime. No offense to you and your”—he gestured toward me—“developments.”

  My lip curled. “I’d argue the opposite. Where is it you’re running to so fast?”

  James jammed on his sneakers, his face rueful. We both knew he was running out to see the thorn king.

  “I don’t know what you want from me.” James brushed past me as if I was nothing. Like I was just one of the other people in his life. He didn’t care about any of them but stupid Dee, who didn’t give a crap about him. “I’m never going to say yes.”

  He opened the door and pulled it shut behind him. Softly. I would’ve slammed it. I wanted to slam it now. For several long minutes I stood in his room, imagining him following his nightly routine of sneaking out through one of the first floor windows so that he didn’t have to pass by Sullivan’s room.

  I could give up. I could find some other boy who glowed with golden promise and steal life from him, but what good would it do? I only had until Halloween anyway. Even if I didn’t find another boy, I probably wouldn’t die before then; it hadn’t been that long since the last one, right? The fact was, I had absolutely nothing to lose. The fact was, I wanted him.

  I whirled out the window into the dark blue sky, floated along on the abstract thoughts of humans, and found James, a small warm glow crouching in the dry golden grass of the hills. He must’ve felt me as I knelt quietly beside him, but he didn’t say anything as I slowly became visible, the cold evening air biting at my skin as I did.

  Angrily, I ripped up a big handful of grass and began to tear the blades into small pieces. I had once watched a faerie pull a human apart, back when I was younger. Or newer, anyway. The human had drained a marsh behind his house and inadvertently killed the faeries who lived in the water. The faerie who lived in his well had come out long enough to drag the human to the old marsh and tear him apart. I’d asked what his crime was, if he hadn’t known the faeries were in the marshes? Ignorance is no defense for a crime, the faerie had hissed at me, all gills and hair. That was when I first realized that I was different from other faeries.

  Mercy, that was what they called it, what I had and other faeries didn’t. It was the beginning of a long list.

  I threw down the rest of the grass. “Can I even ask why you bother coming out here every night? Don’t you have some sort of, you know, self-shrine you can be building in t
his time instead?”

  James grunted. Very distantly, I heard the first few notes of the song begin. He closed his eyes as if the sound itself caused him physical pain. His voice was barely above a whisper and was deeply sarcastic. “I find the daring of sneaking out every night physically thrilling. I am seriously titillated right now. Feel my nipples. Hard as rocks.”

  I winced. “As long as it’s good for you.”

  “Oh baby.” His eyes were on the horizon, waiting for the antlered head to appear.

  “You do know this isn’t safe, right?” I asked. “You remember when I said there was worse than me about? This is one of the worse things I was talking about. Are you dumber than a dog pile?”

  James didn’t answer, but I knew the danger was part of the appeal.

  I saw the massive dark spread of thorns a second before James did, and I grabbed him, pulling him down farther into the grass until both of us were huddled, concealed. We were curled into small balls beside each other, knees tucked up to chin, my arm against his arm, my head against his head. I felt him shivering again and again with my strangeness, his strange seer’s body warning him of my presence, but he didn’t move.

  I whispered in his ear, my mouth right against it, “Cernunnos. Gwyn ap Nudd. Hades. Hermes. King of the dead.”

  The song was loud, now, wailing, keening, and I felt James fighting against the pull of it. He whispered to me, not even audible, maybe realizing finally that I read his thoughts as much as his words, “What is he singing?”

  I translated—voice quiet, for his ears only:

  I keep the dead and the dead keep me.

  We are cold and dark, we are one and we are many,

  we wait and we wait, so sing the dead.

  So sing I: grow, rise, follow.

  So sing I: those not of heaven, those not of hell,

  grow, rise, follow.

  Unbaptized and unblessed, come to me from where you flutter in the branches of the oaks.