Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

“Is he in trouble?” Megan had been babbling about British swear words, but she broke off to observe us.

“No more than usual.” Sullivan didn’t wait for an answer; he took my cereal and headed back toward an empty table, as if certain I would follow my breakfast.

“It appears my presence is desired by an authority figure.” I shrugged. I didn’t think they’d miss me; I was being terrible company anyway. “See you guys in class.”

I joined Sullivan and sat across from him. I wasn’t about to eat my pasty cereal, so I watched him carefully pick the nuts out of his. He had very long fingers with knobby joints. He was a very long person in general, with a rumpled appearance like he’d been thrown in the drier and then worn without ironing. This close, I could see that he was quite young. Thirties, tops.

“I heard about your piping instructor,” Sullivan said. The neat pile of nuts on his napkin toppled as he added another. “Or should I say, ‘ex-piping instructor’?” He lifted an eyebrow but didn’t look up from his careful sorting.

“Probably more appropriate,” I agreed.

“So, how are you liking Thornking-Ash?” He finally took a spoonful of cereal and began to eat. I could hear him crunching from where I sat; there wasn’t any milk in his bowl.

“Beats Chinese water torture.” Inexplicably, my eyes focused on the hand he held the spoon with. On one of his knobby fingers was a wide metallic ring, scratched with shapes. Ugly and dull, like the band on my wrist.

Sullivan caught my gaze. His eyes dropped briefly to my wrist and then back to his own ring. “Would you like to see it closer?” He put down his spoon and began twisting his ring, working it over a knuckle.

A sick, uncertain melody sang in my ears, and in front of me Sullivan fell to the floor, then pushed himself onto his hands and knees, vomiting flowers and blood.

I squeezed my eyes shut for a second and then opened them. Sullivan was still working the ring off.

I shook my head. “No. Actually, I’d rather not. Please leave it on.”

The words were out before I could think of whether they sounded normal. In retrospect, they sounded like I was a head case, but Sullivan didn’t seem to notice. In any case, he kept the ring on.

“Well, you’re not an idiot,” Sullivan said. “I’m sure you know why I called you over here. We’re a music school, and you’ve basically graduated with honors before you’ve started. I looked up your stats. You had to know that we couldn’t possibly have an instructor of your level here.”

If I hadn’t confessed to my own flesh and blood why I’d come here, I wasn’t about to try it out on a random teacher. “Maybe I am an idiot.”

Sullivan shook his head. “I’ve seen enough to know what they look like.”

I wanted to grin. Sullivan was all right.

“Okay, so let’s assume I’m not an idiot.” I pushed my cereal out of the way and leaned on my arms. “Let’s assume I knew that I wasn’t going to find the piping equivalent of Obi-Wan here. Let’s also assume, for convenience’s sake, that I’m not going to tell you why I came, assuming I even had a good reason.”

“Let’s do that.” Sullivan glanced at the clock and then back at me. He had an intensity to his eyes that I was unfamiliar with in teachers; he wasn’t just another runner on the giant treadmill of adult life. “I’ve asked Bill what he thought I should do with you.”

It took me a moment to remember that Bill was the piping instructor.

“He thought I should just leave you be. You know, let you practice whenever you’d normally be taking your lesson, and leave it at that. But I think that sort of perverts the whole idea of having you come to a music school. Do you concur?”

“It does seem vaguely wrong,” I agreed. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say perverts—”

Sullivan interrupted. “So I thought we’d set you up with some other sort of instrument. Nothing woodwind or reed-like. You’d pick that up too fast. Guitar maybe, or piano. Something that will take you longer than five minutes to master.”

“In the interests of full disclosure,” I said, “I play some guitar.”

“In the interests of full disclosure,” Sullivan echoed my words, “so do I. But I’m better at piano. Do you play that at all?”

“I’ll be taking lessons from you?”

“The real piano teachers have the lesson slots more than filled with real pianists. But because I don’t want to see you wasting your time here, I’ll find some time between grading horrendous English essays to give you lessons. And it can count toward your music credit. If that is agreeable to you.”

People being nice for no apparent reason always made me suspicious. People being nice to me with no apparent reason made me even more suspicious. “I can’t help but feel that I’m some sort of science experiment or penance.”

“Yes,” Sullivan said, standing up with his mostly empty bowl of rabbit food. “You’re fulfilling my ‘helping students who remind me of myself when I was young and stupid’ quota. Thanks for that. I’d like to start this week but we’ve got the D.C. trip, so I’ll see you next Friday at five in the practice rooms. Oh, and unless you need it to feel comfortable, you can leave your ego in your room; you won’t be needing it.”

He smiled pleasantly at me and inclined his head like those people who nod their heads when they say good-bye. The Japanese?

I pulled a pen out of my pocket and wrote fri 5 piano on my hand, so that I wouldn’t forget. But I didn’t think I would.

The practice rooms that filled Chance Hall felt like holding cells. They were tiny, perfectly square rooms just big enough to hold an upright piano and two music stands and smelled like one thousand years of body odor. I cast a scornful look at the music stands—pipers memorize everything—and set my pipe case down by the piano bench. I took out my practice chanter and sat down; the bench creaked like a fart.

My piano lesson wasn’t for days, but I hadn’t been to the practice rooms before, and I wanted to see what they were like before Friday.

It wasn’t exactly a room built for inspiration. A practice chanter doesn’t have a beautiful tone to start with—the words “dying goose” come to mind—and I didn’t expect that the crap acoustics of the room would improve it.