Ballad

by Maggie Stiefvater

  She had to loop it between my arm and my body to keep from getting in the way of the bag, but she managed to get her fingers on top of my other hand. Her ridiculous giant cork heels made her tall enough to rest her chin on my shoulder.

  My voice came out a little low. “Jig first, then your tune?”

  “You’re in charge,” she said.

  “Oh how I long for those days,” I replied, and started to play.

  No crap this time. It was like everything I’d been thinking about, except for the music and Nuala’s arms wrapped around me, was gone. The jig felt light as a helium balloon, the high notes soaring off into the sky and the low notes tugging it down toward the ground before letting it bounce back up again. And my fingers—they were working again. Snapping up and down across the chanter like well-oiled pistons, every note perfect and even and clean. The tiny grace notes bubbled out like laughter between the huge round notes on the beat.

  I silenced the pipes—absolutely silent, absolutely right—and grinned down the hill.

  Nuala said, “Yeah, so now you’re done showing off. Do you want my help or not?”

  “I—what?” I tried to turn my head to see her, but her chin on my shoulder was too close to see her face. I struggled to remember if I could sense her lending her musely power to me, but all I could remember was the music and the feel of her fingertips on top of mine. And then nothing but the utter joy of the jig. “I thought you were.”

  “Whatever. Never mind. Can we just play?”

  “You’re in charge,” I said sarcastically.

  “Oh how I long for those days,” she mocked me. I started the drones up, waiting for her to tell me what to do. This time I felt it—first, the sort of silence that trickled through me, and then the heat of golden inspiration coursing through me in long strands that came out my fingers. The tune I’d played on the piano became a tidy entity in my head, a little box that I could mentally turn this way and that to see how it was made and what made it beautiful and where I could eliminate notes and add others to make it suit the pipes.

  Nuala’s breath was hot on my neck and her fingers were tight on mine, as if she could force the pipes to play for her, and I let the tune out. I heard the riffs from before, the bulk of the melody, the way I could let the sustain of the pipes make up for the lack of the high notes. The tune ached and breathed and twisted and shone and it hurt just to play it because it was what the pipes had been made for. Maybe what I had been made for. To play this tune with Nuala’s summer-thick breath on my face and this stillness in my heart and nothing more important than this music right now.

  I could almost hear Nuala’s voice, humming the tune into my ear, and when I half-turned my head, I saw that her eyes were closed and she was smiling the most beautiful smile in the world, her face freckled and joyful.

  This was the whole world, this moment. The wind beat the golden grass to the ground and back up again, and above us, the deep, pure blue of the sky was the only thing that pressed us to the earth. Without the weight of that clarion sky, we would’ve soared into the towering white clouds and away from this imperfect place.

  Nuala dropped her arms from mine and stepped back.

  I let the pipes sigh to a stop and turned to face her.

  I was this close to saying, Please give me the deal. Don’t let me say no. Don’t let me be a shooting star burning out in a cubicle somewhere. But her expression stopped me cold.

  “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I take it back. I won’t make a deal with you.”

  Nuala

  This is my fall, my autumn, my end of year,

  My desperate memory of summer

  This is how I tell her who I am.

  This is how far I am from the beginning

  This is how I want everything, this is how I want what I was, this is how I want her

  This is my fall, my stumble,

  my descent into this darkening fling.

  —from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

  I was brilliant as a flame when I was first born, this time around. I didn’t quite remember my first pupil, but I remember that his paintings were huge and yellow, and that his death was violent and very fast.

  The second guy lasted a little longer. I thought maybe almost six months, but maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better now, remembering. He had wanted me so badly; he had been so tormented by the dreams I sent him and the words I whispered in his ear, he’d not even waited for his body to give up on him. I just sort of felt—hungry—in the middle of the night, and when I found him, he was hanging like a dead pig in a butcher’s.

  And then there was the first one who I could remember really well. I had better control then, and I knew how to make them last. Jack Killian was his name, and he had been a brilliant fiddler. He made me think of James now, recalling how much he’d wanted more. He didn’t even know what more was, he just knew he wanted to be more, that there must be more to life, that if he didn’t find this more, life was only a terrible trick played on him by nature.

  Two years. I made his fiddle sound so lovely that onlookers wept. The tunes he wrote had a stranglehold on tradition but reached out to grab what they needed from contemporary music. He was dynamite. Killian toured and toured and sold albums and wanted more more more more and I took more more more more until one day he looked at me and said, “Brianna”—I’d told him my name was Brianna—“I think I’m dying.”

  That was a long time ago. Now, I sat in the theater seat the way they told you not to at the beginning of every reel, my feet resting on the seat in front of me, trying not to think about it. There weren’t enough people in the theater to care about my feet being up; it was only a matinee in tiny Gallon, Virginia after all.

  The movie was an action adventure that swept across three different continents. It bristled with action scenes and tension and all kinds of crap that should’ve held my attention, but all I could think about was James looking at me on the hill, about to beg me for the deal.

  I closed my eyes, but I saw Killian’s face. I thought I had forgotten it long ago. I thought I’d forgotten all of them long ago.

  “Let’s blow this place,” said the ruggedly handsome hero on the big screen, and I opened my eyes. He had his finger on some sort of detonator; he didn’t realize that somewhere offscreen, his dewy-eyed love interest was trapped inside the building he was about to blow up. She was calling him on his cell phone, and the camera angle showed that it was set on vibrate so that he didn’t hear it over the legions of helicopters floating around him. Idiot. Morons like that deserved to die alone.

  I wasn’t supposed to care about my marks. How could I care about them and live?

  In front of me, the Rugged-Faced Hero pushed the red button on the detonator. The screen filled with a giant fireball that took out two helicopters in an intensely unrealistic way.

  If I’d been directing, I would’ve cut back to the heroine’s face one second before the explosion, just as her muscles tensed, right when she realized I’m trapped. There’s no way out of this.

  I was so hungry. I’d never gone this long without making a deal before.

  In my head, I thought of Killian again, looking at me, and I heard his voice—I thought I’d forgotten that too. But this time, when I saw the scene, it was me, and I was looking at James.

  “James,” I said, “I’m dying.”

  James

  “The inner sanctum,” Paul said, voice reverent, as I knocked on the door to Sullivan’s room.

  I gave Paul a withering look but the truth was I was curious as hell. First of all, to find out what Sullivan wanted. And second, to see what a teacher’s room looked like. I’d always sort of figured they came out during the day to teach classes and then got stored in shoe boxes under someone’s bed until they were needed again.

 
“What do you think he wants?” Paul asked for the hundredth time since we’d gotten the note on our door.

  “Whoever knows what Sullivan wants?” I replied.

  Sullivan’s voice sounded from inside. “It’s unlocked.”

  Paul just looked at me, eyeballs round, so I pushed the door open and went in first.

  Being in Sullivan’s room was … weird. Because it looked like our room. The same old, high ceilings painted in white-that-was-not-really-white (“bird-poop white,” Paul had called it, but I’d ignored him, because I was supposed to be the sarcastic one) and the little bunk with the drawers underneath it and the creaky, pitted wooden floors. One drafty window looked out on the parking area beside the dorm.

  The biggest difference between our rooms was that Sullivan’s had a tiny kitchen area tucked next to a bathroom all his own. And unlike our room, which smelled sort of like Doritos and unwashed laundry and shoes, Sullivan’s smelled like cinnamon from a candle on his nightstand (very Martha Stewart) and like flowers. There was a big vase of daisies sitting on his miniature kitchen table, which I guessed was the source of the floriferous odor.

  Paul and I looked at the daisies and then at each other. Dude. Flowers were awfully … pretty.

  “Do you want an omelet?” Sullivan asked from the kitchen area. It was weird to see him without his teacher uniform on. He was wearing a black hooded Juilliard sweatshirt and jeans that seemed suspiciously trendy for an authority figure, and he was holding a spatula. “I can’t cook anything but omelets.”

  “We just came from dinner,” Paul said. He looked a little scared of Sullivan, as if discovering that he was a real person and not that much older than us was something terrifying.

  I walked over and looked into the skillet. “It looks like scrambled eggs.”

  “It’s an omelet,” Sullivan insisted.

  “It still looks like scrambled eggs. Smells like them too.”

  “I assure you, it’s an omelet.”

  I pulled out one of the mismatched chairs at the round table and sat down. Paul hurried to follow my example. “You can assure me it’s a suckling pig if you like,” I said, “but I still think it’s scrambled eggs.”

  Sullivan grimaced at me and performed the elaborate ritual necessary to transfer scrambled eggs to a pan while still allowing them to maintain an omelet shape. “Well, I’m going to eat while we talk, if that doesn’t bother you guys.”

  “I would hate to see you wither away on our behalf. Are we in trouble?”

  Sullivan dragged his desk chair into the kitchen and sat down with his eggs. “You are always in some kind of trouble, James. Paul never is. How long is it until sundown, anyway?”

  “Thirty-two minutes,” said Paul, and Sullivan and I both looked at him. I realized in that moment that I’d never really looked at Paul since the first time I’d seen him. I’d just sort of formed a first impression of him based upon round eyes behind round glasses and a round face on a round head, and just kept accessing that first round image every time I looked at him since then. It seemed strange that I hadn’t really noticed how sharp the expression in his eyes was, or how worried the line of his mouth was, until we were sitting under a little florescent light at Sullivan’s kitchen table, weeks after we’d spent every night in the same room. I wondered if he’d changed, or if I had.

  “You’re a regular meteorologist,” I said, a little pissed at him for showing Sullivan he cared about when the sun went down, and also for somehow changing his round demeanor while I wasn’t watching. “Or whoever it is who knows when the sunrise and sunset and moon phases are.”

  “No harm to being informed,” Sullivan said, and shot me a look as if the statement was supposed to make me feel guilty. It didn’t. He took a bite of eggs and spoke around them. “So I heard from Dr. Linnet today.”

  Paul and I snorted, and I said, “What’s she a doctor of? Ugly?”

  “Weak, James. She’s got a PhD in some sort of English or psychology or something like that. All you need to know is that those three letters after her name—P. H. D.—mean that she has the power to make our lives excruciatingly difficult if she wants to, because I have only two letters after mine—M. A. Which at this school, translates into ‘low man on the totem pole.’” Sullivan swallowed some more egg and pointed with his fork to a folder on the table. “She brought me your outlines. Apparently they made a deep impression on her.”

  “Yeah. She shared some of her impressions with us during class.” I opened the folder. Our duplicate outlines were tucked neatly inside, one of the corners still crinkly where Linnet had bent it back and forth. That still pissed me off.

  “She brought up several … weighty points.” Sullivan set his plate down on the table and rested his feet next to them. “First of all, she noted that your outline seemed to interpret my assignment rather loosely. She thought my approach to my class in general had been lax. And she also seemed to think that James showed quite a bit of attitude in her class.”

  I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like any of her weighty points were particularly untrue.

  “She recommended—let me see. Hand me that folder. I wrote them down, because I didn’t want to forget them.” Sullivan stretched out his hand and Paul gingerly placed the folder in it. Sullivan pulled out a sheet of paper from behind our outlines. “Let’s see. Recommendations. ‘One. Establish narrow rules for your assignments and be prepared to enforce them diligently, particularly with difficult students, of which you have at least one. Two. Maintain strict teacher-student relationship to engender respect. Three. Be particularly unforgiving when grading difficult students; attitude problems arise from a lack of respect and excess of ego on their part.’”

  Sullivan lowered the paper and looked from me to Paul. “Then she recommended that I tell you”—he nodded toward Paul—“to redo your outline, within the limits of the assignment, before Monday’s class for a chance to improve your grade from a C to an B, and to give you”—he looked at me—“a C and tell you to redo your outline before Monday to keep it from being an F.”

  Paul’s mouth made a round shape that I’m sure he wasn’t aware of. I crossed my arms across my chest and didn’t say anything. Whatever Sullivan was going to do, he’d already made up his mind—a blind monkey could figure that out. And I wasn’t about to beg for a better grade anyway. Screw that.

  Sullivan slid the folder onto the table and crossed his arms, mirroring me. “So I have just one question, James.”

  “Go for it.”

  He jerked his chin toward the outlines. “Who do you have to play Blakeley’s character? I think I would make an excellent Blakeley.”

  Paul grinned and I let one side of my mouth smile. “So does this mean I’m not getting a C for the outline?”

  Sullivan dropped his feet off the table. “It means I don’t do well with rules. It means some bitter drama teacher isn’t going to tell me how to teach my class. This play burns, guys. Even in the outline, I can see it. It could be wickedly self-deprecating satire and I don’t see why you guys shouldn’t do your best and get a grade for it. But you’re going to have to work harder for it than the rest of the class—they only have to write a paper.”

  “We don’t care,” Paul said immediately. “This is way cooler.”

  “It is. Where are you going to rehearse?”

  But neither of us answered right away, because in the distance, the antlered king began to sing, slow and entreating.

  With some effort, I spoke over the top of the song. “Brigid Hall.”

  “Interesting choice,” Sullivan said. He slid his gaze over to Paul, who was drumming his fingers on the table in a manic, caffeine-inspired way and blinking a lot. Paul wasn’t out-and-out singing along with the king of the dead, but he might as well have put out a big neon sign saying “How’s My Driving? Ask Me About My Nerves: 1-800-WIG-N-
OUT.”

  I glared at him.

  “Something wrong, Paul?” Sullivan asked.

  “He—” I started.

  “I hear the king of the dead,” Paul blurted out.

  Well, that was just ace. I put my chin in my hand and tapped my fingers on the side of my face.

  Sullivan glanced at me and back at Paul. “What’d he say?”

  “It’s a list of the dead,” Paul said. With just his fingertips, he held onto the edge of table, white knuckled. He squeezed his fingers like he was playing a tune on the table. “Not the currently dead. The futurely dead. Do you think I’m, like, certifiable now?”

  “No.” Sullivan went to the window and heaved his shoulder against it. It creaked and then gave. He slid it up a few inches; cold air rushed in along with the song. It tugged at my bones, urging me to rise up and follow. It took all my willpower not to jump up and run outside. “Lots of people—well, not lots—many people hear him in October, up until Halloween.”

  “Why?” Paul asked. “Why do I have to hear it?”

  Sullivan shook his head. “I don’t know. He says different things to different people. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy.” Somehow, though, it wasn’t reassuring. He said it like being crazy might be a more appealing alternative. He went to his counter and got a notepad; he laid it down in front of Paul’s face.

  Paul obediently picked up the pen from next to our papers. “What’s this for?”

  Sullivan shifted the window open a bit more and looked at me again before he answered Paul. “I’d be very grateful if you’d write down the names he’s telling you.”

  James

  The lobby of Seward was an immensely safe sort of space, and I was definitely needing womb-like security in a major way by that point. It had four of the world’s most comfortable chairs, which is important in a safe space, and four squashy ottomans to go with each of them. It also had four alcoves in each of the corners, each containing a wonder of the world. North corner: a piano older than Moses, that sounded like a calliope. South corner: a reproduction of a Greek statue—some headless chick with perfect boobs. East corner: a bookshelf with every piece of Important Fiction That You’ll Never Read in Impressive Hardcover. West corner: vending machine (because sometimes Doritos were all the breakfast you were going to get).