The Ballad of the Pipe Player
Kate Siedel
Copyright©Kate Siedel 2012
It was getting to be evening time in the woods, and this was the time the little boy had to be in bed. The Thieves’ Wood darkened fast, and yet the father and son had not reached home. It was too dark to see much, and relying only on memory the father navigated the murky woods. The stars had yet to come out, and the young boy’s frantic breathing could be heard over the whirring and clicks from the other inhabitants of the woodland. Clutching his father’s hand, the boy whimpered,
“Daddy, I’m scared…”
The father stopped walking and turned to his son, merely a large shadow turning to a small one in a practically opaque wood.
“Why are you scared?” the father inquired. The little boy shuddered.
“It’s scary out here…what if a cave goblin tries to get us? What if a dragon tries to get us? What if a murderer tries to kill us?”
The father smiled in the gloom and began to walk again, much slower and with a leisurely stance. The boy followed beside him.
“I am going to tell you a story,” announced the father. The little boy looked up at him.
“A story?” he asked. “What kind of story?”
“A story of great heroes,” replied the father, “A story with a brave warrior, a sly witch, and a beautiful princess.”
The little boy seemed to brighten, although only ever so slightly.
“I want to hear this story,” he decided. After a pause, the boy added, a tinge of fear creeping back into his voice, “Is it scary?”
The father sighed.
“A little,” he admitted, “But the heroes always win against the scary things.”
The boy and father walked in silence for a moment. Then the boy exclaimed,
“Please tell me the story, Daddy, please!”
The father chuckled.
“As you wish, my son. Once upon a time…”
Prologue Part One: Violet Haze
In the town of Witchmount, a child entered the world. At precisely three thirty-three in the morning, a baby boy bundled in a black cloth appeared in the town square. He had dark brown hair in a tousled fashion covering his head and olive skin, but he had no eyes whatsoever. Nothing was there. The child floated through a series of hills with doors built into them. Finally he reached a door in the larger of the hills there, and hovered there. A couple, mid-thirties maybe, opened the door. They didn’t see a floating boy, but a shadow in the midst of a dark violet fog. The two were unfazed. After all, Witchmount is a town of witches, and this was the standard birth procedure. But when the fog cleared and the parents could see the boy, two eyes, narrow and mischievous, glinted a deep indigo. Without a word, the father scooped up the boy and carried him into their glowing green home. An old man with good posture, a long white beard, and red and green clothes sat on a richly made leather chair, smiling.
“Who are you?” the mother asked hesitantly. Wizards, as all witches know, weren’t people to be trifled with. The wizard stood.
“Names are nothing.”
The father placed the child, who was apparently named Emrys, in his mother’s arms. Emrys rested there calmly, taking in the situation.
“You are a soothsayer?” the father asked.
The wizard smiled. “You could call me that, and so now I can get to my…soothsaying, hmm?”
Both parents nodded slowly. Then Emrys looked across the room into the wizard’s own brown orbs. The wizard looked down into Emrys’ eyes. Emrys intensified his stare, scrunching up his eyes so they looked even squinter than they were. The wizard did the same. This went on for a while, until only indigo and brown slits were to be seen amongst an avalanche of fleshy eyelid. Finally the wizard looked away, and Emrys smirked, a funny expression to see on a baby.
“This child, Emrys will grow to be seventeen and then be called away on important duties.”
The parents did nothing. Witches, while training, often went off on quests to enhance their abilities. This was nothing major.
“Is that it, soothsayer?” the father asked. The wizard chuckled.
“Almost, my good witchy fellow. Your son will then meet the first and last love of his life. Whether he succeeds in his endeavors of courtship I have no clue.”
The parents smiled. Emrys looked utterly confused.
“Farewell, witches, and good night, young Emrys. I shall see you, on this day, in seventeen years.”
Prologue Part Two: Birth of Royalty
After thirteen hours of strenuous labor on a tropical island off the coast of Naessa, Queen Gust was cradling a baby girl swathed in faintly glowing gold silk.
Twilight was setting in. Two men stood on her right side, peering curiously at the child. One of them was Queen Gust’s husband, King Claw. He was a ferocious leader and an expert in war. Children were something brand new, and his narrow green eyes were widened. The other was a gnarled man with a red cloak and a green robe. He had a long braided beard and brown eyes that shone. He had the look of a psychic on his face. Both king and queen looked at the man reverently. The little girl, however, snuggled up closer to her mother and kept her eyes closed.
“Well?” the king demanded, in a language most would find foreign. “What is her future, Wizard?”
The wizard closed his eyes for a moment. Frown lines deepened on his forehead. After what seemed like forever his eyes opened again. “She will…grow to be sixteen…”
The queen was horrified. “Only sixteen? Please say that is not true, Wizard!”
The wizard smiled. “But you did not let me finish, my dear. She will grow to be sixteen and then be called away on very important duties.”
The king looked confused, a first for him.
“Where? The town of Japuku, on the northern side of the jungle? The city of Oxi, the western side of the jungle? Or even the city of Anapba, the gorilla town on the eastern side of the jungle? Or is she just going somewhere in this city of Elnoc?”
The wizard shook his head, smiling merrily. Both king and queen suddenly looked disgusted, scared, and suspicious at once.
“You don’t mean…the mainland?” Queen Gust whispered.
The wizard nodded.
“The princess of this entire island will not go frolicking about on the mainland! She could be killed, and leave this island without a ruler!” the king yelled. The queen started weeping, holding the princess closer.
The wizard shrugged. “It is the way it is, Claw. I do not write it, I just tell it.”
King Claw shouted, “Guards! Take him away!”
Two guards pulled open the bamboo door, revealing the queen, the king, the princess, and the wizard.
The wizard was gone before the guards could touch him.
In his place hovered a silver rope, thin as a spider’s thread. On it hung a crescent moon.
The king nor the guards nor the queen saw it. But the princess did. She opened her eyes, revealing silver-gray irises, and she reached towards the moon, trying to point out the similarities. For in Naessa, due to a wizard’s spell, babies born when twilight comes will be unusually intelligent. The queen saw the child’s finger point to the full moon floating in the sky.
“Moon is her name.” Queen Gust murmured.
The king grunted his assent. The necklace, unseen, flew to the Princess Moon and knotted itself around her neck, hanging as a necklace.
Unnoticed, the invisible wizard smiled.
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Prologue Part Three: Aria
In a small village near a river and a year after the birth of the Princess Moon and the Witch-Child Emrys, a baby arrived in the way babies should: by stork. Just like in normal stories, the boy was carried in a white cotton cloth and placed on the doorstep of an orderly cottage with a thatched roof, a wooden door, and ivy winding up the walls. It was early in the morning, six to be exact, but a man with brown hair and a kind look to him was already up and about, digging in the dirt alongside the house. He did not see the stork; nobody ever does. But he did see the baby resting on his doorstep, and instantly stopped his digging to bring the child inside. The man’s wife was still sleeping, so the child was placed on the table.
The child himself had light brown hair and, when he opened his eyes, dark blue irises. He looked more like his mother than his father. And when an old man with a long white beard and green and red clothes poofed into the room, the baby simply smiled. The father was startled, but so he did not wake his sleeping wife, he whispered, “Be you a wizard?”
The wizard nodded.
The father asked the wizard, “Be you a prophecy maker?”
The wizard nodded again. “This lad shall grow to fifteen and then be called away on important duties. Raise him well, my good fellow, so when your son Coju is fifteen he is not a raging monster.”
The father looked confused, but he nodded. “He shall be raised as…the best….”
The wizard turned to go, but then stopped and whispered to the man, “Beware, in the future, of wizards robed in blue.”
The man looked at him funny, but then nodded again. Then the wizard was gone, done with his three duties. He would not do anymore of great importance until all three prophesized children were grown. As the wizard magicked himself to his tower, he heard the simple, high melody of a pipe player.
Chapter One: Coju
A sullen hand steadily shredded the grass. This hand belonged to a fifteen-year-old boy with ink black hair, tan skin and deep blue eyes. This boy was distraught. Well, I think you’d be distraught if you just found out you had to be, say, an accountant, when the world knew you stunk at math, and for that matter, hated it. This very thing was happening to Coju, except he was rather good at math, and he wasn’t going off to be an accountant. He was going off to be a wizard.
Now, if you were given the chance to go zap people with interestingly colored lightning, I should think you’d go. But the idea of wielding the same sort of power that killed your parents wouldn’t be fun, would it? This is what Coju was facing. Coju sat in a field in the bustling, riverside town of Orlyn. He was fully intent on staying there.
“Boy! Erm…Coju! The wizard’s here to getja!” a hoarse voice yelled. Coju stayed put. He knew full well that Aettas, the farmer who had been his father since his actual parents were murdered, would just keep calling. When Coju was ready, he’d go greet the wizard. Both farmer and boy knew that that day would be when hell froze over.
Coju couldn’t have predicted a wizard wearing red and green robes with a long white beard to appear right in front of him.
“Waagh!” Coju shouted, stumbling back from his seat in the painstakingly managed fields he sat in.
“Hello, Apprentice Coju. I am a wizard, soon to be your advisor and mentor,” the wizard said cheerily. Coju regained his leftover dignity and stood up, putting him an inch taller than the wizard, who was already rather tall.
“I don’t want you to be my mentor,” Coju stated. The wizard continued looking cheery.
“Would you prefer a different wizard, then?”
Coju started shouting. “I don’t want to be a wizard! You wretches killed my parents!”
The wizard looked very solemn. “Alas, wizards did kill your parents. But it was not the red and green wizards, it was the blue wizards.” Coju didn’t care. He was too angry.
“All you wizards are the same!”
Now, this was the worst insult a wizard could receive. Wizards of the red and green and the wizards of the yellow and purple pride themselves most on their creativity. Uniqueness was all, which was their motto. The blue wizards were an army of mindless robots. But we’ll get to that later.
The wizard seemed to grow as tall as a tree. The sky turned stormy and the wizard’s eyes flashed with lightning. I don’t mean his eyes were angry. Literal flashes of lightning sizzled the grass around Coju’s feet.
“APPRENTICE COJU YOU WILL NOT TALK TO ME THAT WAY! YOU ARE COMING ALONG WITH ME TO BE A WIZARD! THAT’S FINAL!”
The wizard shrank to his less intimidating size and strode into the endless fields of waving grass. Coju, shaken but still standing proud, followed.
After they had successfully reached the middle of nowhere and tired Coju out considerably, the wizard muttered something that sounded like “Drysshirik” and then Coju disappeared. A moment before he transported himself to the Roverdio Tower where Coju no doubt had just arrived, he smiled.
“He’s certainly ready for his quest. I wonder how he’ll react to his companions.”
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Coju stumbled out of midair to find himself on top of a mountain, in the well-manicured garden of a stone tower. “What the…?”
“This is the Roverdio Tower, home of all red and green robed wizards. The proper name is Roverdio wizards, but not many know this.”
Coju whirled around to see the wizard standing there calmly. A blue and gold butterfly rested on his long index finger. Coju swiped irritatedly at the butterfly, which promptly grew five-inch fangs and bit him.
“Ow!” Coju gasped, staring at the four small punctures on his finger. The wizard laughed, and the butterfly let out some strange hissing cackle and then fluttered innocently away.
“Adorable, aren’t they?” the wizard commented.
Coju answered by an oath that resulted in a red robed wizard to scowl at him.
“Come, let us call your fellow questers,” the wizard said.
This took Coju aback. “Quest? People?”
“Yes, Apprentice Coju, you’re going on a quest. Most young wizards do before they train.”
Coju did not like the sound of this. But in case any more biting butterflies came out, he shut his mouth. The wizard led Coju into a clear field that seemed to have been used for target practice, judging from the burnt blue grass. The wizard whistled. Two people fell a few feet out of the sky. The girl landed lightly, but still hit the ground on her back. The boy, however, slammed onto his stomach, rattling his glasses. The girl hopped to her feet the second she saw the wizard.
“You demon! You kidnapped me from my home! On my sixteenth birthday as well!” she shouted. Coju noted her very pretty gray eyes and her strange red and brown hair. Her skin was tan like his. The boy looked nothing like either of them, except for hair. He had pale olive skin, and dark brown hair that was in a tiny ponytail on the side of his head. He had thin glasses on, and behind that, eerie violet eyes. They were narrow and cruel. Coju instantly disliked him.
The boy just stood and smirked at him and the wizard.
“This young maiden is Princess Moon of the Island,” the wizard announced.
Coju shook her hand overexcitedly. She seemed slightly weirded out but then she smiled warmly.
“You are Coju the Pipe Player? Myself and Emrys here have heard much stories about you.”
Coju flushed. Nobody but him knew about the only thing he had left of his family:
a pipe that he’d learned how to play soon after the deaths. He wondered what other private things this meddlesome wizard had told the boy he disliked, the one named Emrys.
“This lad is Emrys the Witch-Child. He’s from Witchmount, and they say he’s a cat within human body,” the wizard explained.
Coju had to snicker. There weren’t many male witches, only wizards and warlocks. Witch boys usually ended up being burned because of the trouble they caused to stereotypes.
“What’s so amusing, Music Man?” Emrys drawled, with a slow, silky voice that instantly set Coju on edge.
“Witch-Child? I’ll bet your parents mistook you for a girl and put you in skirts, with that hair,” Coju snarled. Emrys did nothing, and then made a swinging motion at Coju. At first nothing seemed to happen.
“Epic failure, Witch-Boy,” Coju laughed. Emrys just smirked. Moon made motions to his head. Coju disregarded her. Nothing was wrong. His head just felt a bit warm, that was all. He put a hand to his hair to push it back attractively, to impress the princess.
That was when he realized his hair was on fire.