Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

I set the chanter back down in my case. The humble practice chanter is a slender plastic version of the chanter on the full-sized pipes, and its primary virtue is that it’s one thousand times quieter than the actual pipes—making you one thousand times less likely to be stoned to death while practicing indoors. It’s also a heck of a lot easier to play, physically—none of that huffing-puffing-blow-your-bag-in thing. It also sounds like a dying goose; for sheer impressiveness, you really need the actual pipes. So that’s what I reached for now. “Um. Do you mind if I play a tune on my pipes, instead? It’s hard to find a place to practice on campus, and it feels like it’s been ages since they were out of this box.”

Bill looked a little surprised, but shrugged. “Sure, there’s no other students right now. Whatever you’re most comfortable with. What are you going to play?”

“Not sure yet.” I took my pipes out; the smell of leather and wood was as familiar to me as my own. The drones fit neatly onto my shoulder as I filled the bag; the moment the drones began to sound, I realized just how loud they were going to be in this tiny room. Should’ve brought my ear plugs.

Bill watched me tune for about twenty seconds, observing my posture, listening to how even I kept the tone while I tuned. My original plan had been to start off slow and then end with a tune so transcendent he kissed my shoes, but the pipes were so loud in the room that I just wanted to get it over with. I ripped into one of my favorite reels, an impossible, finger-twisting, minor-key thing that I could’ve played in my sleep. Fast. Clean. Perfect.

Bill’s face was blank. Like, no expression whatsoever. Like I had blown his expression away with the sheer decibel level of the pipes. I took the pipes from my shoulder.

“I have nothing to teach you.” He shook his head. “But you knew that when you came here, didn’t you? There couldn’t possibly be anyone in this entire county that could teach you anything. Maybe not in the state. Do you compete?”

“Up until this summer.”

“Why’d you stop?”

I shrugged. For some reason, it gave me no pleasure to tell him. “Hit the top. Seemed boring after that.”

Bill shook his head again. His eyes were studying my face, and I could guess what he was thinking, because it was what they always thought: you’re so young (and I’m so old). His voice was flat. “I’ll get in touch with the school, I guess. Let them know so they can figure out what to do. But they knew all this before they took you on, didn’t they?”

I lowered my pipes to my side. “Yeah.”

“You ought to apply to Carnegie Mellon. They have a piping program.”

“I never thought of that,” I said. He missed my sarcasm.

“You should consider it, after you’re done here.” Bill watched me put my pipes away. “It’s a waste for you to just go to a conservatory.”

I nodded thoughtfully and let him make more intelligent remarks, and then I shook his hand and left the room behind. I felt disappointed, though really, I shouldn’t be. I’d gotten just what I’d expected.

There was a girl sitting on the curb when I emerged from the music store. In my fairly foul mood, I wouldn’t have given her a second thought if she hadn’t been sitting two inches from my car. Even with her back to me, everything about her groaned bored.

I put my pipes in the backseat with much noise and scuffle, thinking she’d get the picture—you know, that I’d drive over her if she didn’t move by the time I tried to leave my parking spot.

But she hadn’t moved by the time I’d finished my scuffling, so I came around the car and stood in front of her. She was still sitting motionless, chin tilted up, her eyes closed against the afternoon sun, pretending not to notice that I was standing there.

Maybe she was from one of my classes and I was supposed to recognize her. If she was a student, she was definitely not within the dress code—she wore a skin-tight shirt with cursive handwriting printed all over it and bell-bottomed jeans with giant platform clogs poking out from the cuffs. Still, her hair was very distinctive: sort of crumpled, or curly, blonde hair that was long in the front but cut short and edgy in the back.

“M’dear,” I said in a cordial way, “Your butt’s blocking my bumper. Do you think you might move your loitering five feet to the south and let me leave?”

Her eyes flicked open.

It was like I was drowning in icy water. Goose bumps immediately rippled along every bit of my skin and my head sang with an eerie melody of not normal. The events of last summer came rushing into my head unbidden.

The girl—if that was even what she was—flicked her incandescent blue eyes, made even more brilliant by the dusky shadows beneath them, toward my face, looking intensely bored. “I’ve been waiting for you forever.”

When she spoke, the smell of her breath clouded around me, all drowsy nodding wildflowers and recent rain and distant wood smoke. Danger prickled softly around the region of my belly button. I hazarded a question. “‘Forever’ as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, and stood up, brushing the dust off her hands on her butt. She was enormously tall with the platform heels on; she looked right into my eyes. This close, I could almost fall into the smell of her. “Only a half hour, though it felt like several hundred years. Come on.”

“Whoa. What?”

“Give me a ride to the school.”

Okay. So maybe I did know her. Somehow. I tried to picture her in a class, any class, anywhere on campus, and failed miserably. I pictured her frolicking in a forest glade around some guy she’d just sacrificed to a heathen god. That image worked way better. “Uh. Thornking-Ash?”

She gave me a withering look.

I looked pointedly at her bell bottoms. “I just don’t remember seeing a fascinating creature such as yourself amongst the student body.”

The girl smiled at the word “creature” and tugged open the passenger-side door. “No shit. Come on.”

I stared at the car as she slammed the door shut after herself. I was used to being the brazen one who caught people off guard. The girl made an impatient gesture at me through the window.

I considered whether getting in the car with her was a bad idea. After a summer of intrigue, car crashes, and faeries, it probably was.

I got in.

The radio hummed to life as soon as I started the ignition, and the girl made a face. “Wow. You listen to crap.” She punched one of the preset buttons and some sort of dizzyingly fast reel came on. The radio’s dim display read 113.7. I’m not a rocket scientist (only because rockets don’t interest me), but I didn’t think radios were supposed to do that.