They walked past the convulsing dancers, taking care to swerve away from hands and feet that were flung every which way with an almost vengeful, raging delight. A purple fabric flap separated the hallway from the room that the dancing trail led to. Percy could not hear music yet, but he could feel it, crawling under his skin like a restless creature. But he still had The Rabble-rousers' tune mercilessly stuck in his head. If he was not careful, he would start humming any moment now. Valeria lifted the flap and held it up for them to walk through.

They stood motionless, mesmerized by the sight before them. The circular space was filled to burst with dancing bodies. The colours in the room fumed like incense, sandalwood red and rose petal mauve. There was a madness draped over it all like crumpled silk. The floor was covered in thick dark carpets, and the walls were of a rich purple and burgundy. From the beams that supported the ceiling hung mismatched lanterns, pooling an orange-glow through coloured stained glass. Percy felt he was engulfed in the folds of a great perfumed robe. It did not feel claustrophobic, as it had back in Astred's tent; but everything was steeped in scents and colours, and it made breathing and looking a heady business.

Even the fabric on the walls seemed to stir with a feverish urge for pleasure. Percy was swimming in a strange wine, warm and spiced and lush. He could not tell where sound ended and colour began. The strumming of a lute reached him clad in gold, and a light jingling of bells sounded in his mind like treasure. He couldn't yet see who was playing. And still, despite everything, that stupid tune from earlier nested in his mind.

Around him glistened the scented sweat of the dancers, their arms thrashing like branches in a shared storm. This was nothing like the dances Percy had learned for formal occasions. A minuet would have run screaming. Those dances had steps, and partners: they were a body made polite. This had the crook of chaos and misrule: it was a body made fever.

The music inched closer now, reaching for him past the sweat-knit bodies of the dancers. The clearer he heard it, the stronger grew in him an urge like he had never felt: an urge to free his arms and hands and legs and feet, as though he was at last uprooted and offered to the scattered winds. A dancer's face twisted just an inch from his, and he was stunned by their haggard expression.

"This Tombert must be quite something, if they command such a following" he said. "I mean, they look like they'd rather drop dead than keep dancing, and yet they're still going. Evans?"

When he turned, his friends where nowhere to be seen.

As a child, he had been fiercely guarded at every market-stall and packed square he had been to, and thus had never undergone the necessary rite of passage of getting misplaced by his carers and tugging at the wrong sleeve.

"Valeria? Myrtle?" he squeaked, wishing he could sound a little more dignified.

He saw at last Valeria's tall blond head bobbing above the others.

"There you are, I was – "

A ludicrous painting unveiled before him. Valeria's arms were lifted limply above her head, hoisted by a strength that was not her own. She fanned her hands about in a breezy joy that was completely misplaced in her; a boulder could hardly make for a good kite. A horrified grimace twisted about her face.

"In all my years" she babbled, "I have never – "

Next to her, Evans's arms were wrapped around Myrtle in an intricate net of swirls and twirls, their legs swivelling and swaying in half-circles, dangerously close to getting tangled together. Evans danced as he laughed: with a complete disregard for grace and a thorough enjoyment of his gracelessness. As for Myrtle, she was all of her sharp angles and rough edges, and her blundering energy was in full sway as she bumped against the dancers around her. They were wordless, with a forced rictus trapped on their lips.

"Am... am I missing something?" Percy asked, staring down despondently at his own inert hands.

He was anxious to belong to the tortured and the tormented, if there was no one else to belong to, as long as he belonged somewhere.

"You!" came a voice to his right with a commanding softness.

He turned. Between two pairs of spinning dancers, he saw at last the source of the music. Sat on a small dais, on an abundance of purples and reds, was a musician with short hair of young bright white. Their appearance escaped any rigid definition with indifferent grace. From a wax-soft ear dangled a single pearl earring. They wore linen trousers and a vivid blue tunic that was half-open at their chest, offering their skin to the glow of the oil lamps above. Their features had the making of coral, sharp and brittle. On their lap was a silver lyre which they strummed with a disconcerting idleness, no more invested in the task than if they were merely flipping through the pages of a book known by heart.

Their eyes brightened with surprise upon spotting Percy, and they stopped playing the lyre for a moment. As the sound faded, the dancers froze halfway through their steps: they seemed plunged in amber, held together in a thick stillness. The musician's fingers soon resumed their absent-minded task, returning the music and the dancers' swaying with it.

"Well, fuck me sideways" said Tombert de L'Isle, as Percy guessed them to be. "How are you doing that?"

Percy blinked. Whatever precarious hold he had had on the present situation escaped him entirely now.

"Doing what?"

"That" came a sharp, incisive cut of a word.

"I'm not doing anything!"

"Precisely!" Tombert exclaimed, their fingers still playing a repetitive tune, but their mind elsewhere entertained. "Never in my life have I been so charmed by idleness. Please, good sir, whatever you do, continue to do nothing; you cannot imagine how refreshing it is."

Their voice sang as they spoke, tilting into half-formed melodies here and there. Percy was inexplicably drawn to the thought of pleasing that glittering stranger. He held himself very still, lest he unwittingly do something.

"I'm guessing you're Tombert de L'Isle?"

"What gave it away?" the musician grinned. "No, but really, you must tell me how you do it. Or not do it, I suppose."

They leaned forward eagerly, one hand coaxing Percy closer, the other still untangling a twisting melody from the lyre. Percy stepped onto the dais, fighting an urge to bow. Tombert rested their fingers under Percy's chin, tilting his head gently this way and that as they studied it. There was a cat-like playfulness to them, as though the only thing stopping them from pawing at Percy was a current disinclination to do anything too tiring.

"You look normal" they declared. "Oh? I see that offends you somewhat."

"No" Percy managed a mumbled lie. "And if you mean, why am I not dancing, I'm not sure why."

"Well, let's indulge in a few conjectures, shall we? Does my music not please you?"

"It does" Percy replied right away, though he had an odd feeling, grating at the back of his mind, that he had no choice but to think so. "But I have this... other tune I heard earlier stuck in my head..."

"Ah! Now that's something. So it's not your doing, then."

"Well, maybe it is as well" Percy countered. He wouldn't give up without a fight the possibility that he might, perhaps, be special after all. "Maybe I'm somehow... resistant to all this."

He turned back to throw a harried glance at the trio of Evans, Valeria and Myrtle, who now held hands and formed a bouncing circle. It was too disconcerting a sight, and he quickly faced Tombert again.

"Could you please stop playing? It's hard to focus when my friends are being forced into a pavane."

The musician reclined on their cushioned seat, dangling a long, reed-slender leg on the chair's right arm.

"Must I?" they asked, their melodious voice pinched by a playful grin. "It's just, you have no idea how much trouble it was to get all these people, these people specifically, into this room. It was like herding cats. And I'm allergic."

"To cats?"

"No, to these people."

"Who are they?"

"Braggarts and snobs, the very worst that come to this festival. All they do is prance about despising this and that. They say they're connoisseurs, and then they don't know their own arse from their mouth, telling from the shit that comes out of it. Do you know the dreadful things they say about all-girl bard bands? I wouldn't have minded, usually, it's their own business if they die stupid. But some sweethearts around here started caring about what these idiots say, so here we are. And then they played their music so loudly, you couldn't hear yourself think. No regard for others whatsoever. Some people think of themselves so highly it makes me want to wave at them as they float away into the sky, never to be seen again. I must say, it is satisfying to watch them all dance to something they consider beneath them. They look like they can't think of anything worse. I can."

Percy stared at the squirming and writhing crowd. Was it ever really a dance if it was forced? He could think of a time, not so long ago, when he claimed he would never play or dance anything so common as an estampie. He swallowed a little.

"We're here to talk about your curse" he tried.

Tombert shot back forward in their chair.

"Curse? Who said anything about a curse?" they asked, their voice broken into syncopated rhythms.

"Your friend Armand. He sent us to help you."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

At the mention of Armand, Tombert relaxed, though their feline limbs did not lose the tautness of surprise.

"I would hardly call him a friend. He's a professional hazard, someone I must deal with in my line of work. If only he sang about wine, cabbages and fucking in haystacks, like I do, then we might be friends. But as he is now... he's become one of these fuckers. Someone I would have gladly lured to this room for the same comeuppance."

"I wouldn't give up on him so quickly, if I were you. He might go back to writing about wine, cabbages and... haystacks, sooner than you might think."

"Oh? Well that's a start. Does he still have whiskers?"

"Not when I last saw him."

"That's a shame. I thought they suited him. But what do I know of fashion? I am but a humble bard."

Percy squinted, and a grin took shape on his lips.

"You don't believe a word of that" he smirked.

"Of course I don't. But humbleness is part of the act, and I want you to have all of the act. You look like the type who thinks they're entitled to everything. I love it; I love you, whoever you are."

"Percival" he grumbled, as though his name alone was a confession of a fault.

"Percival? I knew it" Tombert had a grin as finely tuned as their lyre.

They raised their right hand in a theatrical flourish, flashing their long fingers in the lamplight, and ripped two final chords out of the instrument.

"There! I've sent them on their way, we'll be more comfortable now."

Like old dry leaves swept by a gust of wind, the wearied dancers crackled and creaked out of the room. Percy watched them go, wincing as he noticed their expressions, emptied by exhaustion. Only Evans, Valeria and Myrtle, who were newcomers to the ordeal, had a fresh bounce to their step as they hippety-hopped out of the room, grimacing at Percy.

"No, wait! Not them!" he cried, tripping down from the dais as he rushed to them.

"Oh? Well, you should have said lad, how was I to guess" Tombert shrugged.

Their fingers plucked two lyre strings repeatedly, weaving a fishing line of a melody. It reeled in the escaping trio. Percy watched, dumbfounded, as the three of them shuffled their feet in an orderly line of swaying hips, just as the remaining dancers left. The thick fabric flap fell behind them, closing the room off from the hallway.

Tombert jumped from the dais and strode towards Percy. The bard stood behind him, wrapping one arm around his shoulders to encircle him, and moving their other arm up to keep playing the lyre in front of Percy's chest. Their head rested on his shoulder, cocked to the side with a little wry grin.

"Right, if these folks here were ever nasty to you, now's the time to have some fun at their expense" Tombert said, their fingers strumming the lyre. "I can make them hop about, do a little twirl... maybe a bow?"

Percy stared past his friends, dazed. There was no helping it: the mere mention of Evans twirling about and bowing was enough to draw the image out in Percy's mind. But the worst of it, he thought, was that he could easily imagine Evans twirling and bowing for him, if he simply asked. An unhelpful corner of Percy's mind pointed out that he hadn't yet avenged the mud ditch incident, and that, in all honour, he should. But then he caught Valeria's expression – or rather, it caught him, a hawk with talons drawn sharp.

"No – no no, I would never even consider it" he hurried the words past his lips.

"No? Ah well, we all have our limits, and we should never be ashamed of that."

Tombert stopped their playing abruptly. It sounded like the whole world had just choked halfway through the telling of a secret. Evans, Valeria and Myrtle staggered as their bungling dance stopped, their arms and legs sagging a little, as though they had forgotten how to hold them up without the puppet threads of music. Evans looked like he had thoroughly enjoyed being made a fool of. Myrtle confined herself to a dumbstruck silence. Valeria dragged her own hand, still shimmying slightly, to the pommel of her sword.

"If we kill you, I suppose we solve your curse, in a roundabout way" she turned to Tombert.

The musician leaped back, their hands holding up the lyre above their head, as if that would be enough to keep it from Valeria's fury.

"I can play this again faster than you can reach me with your sword. You'll be dancing a minuet before you get anywhere near me. You'll see."

"Sweetheart, the entire peer pressure of a palace court couldn't make me dance a minuet. You think you could?"

Evans stepped in between them, holding the same peace-making gesture and appeasing smile that Percy had seen in him before. Evans neither made himself look small, nor did he puff out his chest to make himself look big as only small men knew how. He remained reassuringly true to himself: he both looked like he might at any moment grab Tombert's lyre and smash it on his knee, and like he very much did not want to.

"You have nothing to fear from us, if we have nothing to fear from you" he said.

"I would hardly call a minuet something to fear. What?" Tombert frowned at Valeria.

"I may have escaped minuets, but I never escaped embroidery" she smiled nastily. "It's given me a good aim with sharp things and an appreciation of fine craftsmanship, and I would hate to ruin that fine tapestry behind you when I run you through."

Tombert held her in an inscrutable stare.

"You, madam, are terrifying, and I respect that. I will avert my gaze from yours for the next five minutes, or for however long it takes me to recover from that."

To Percy's surprise, there was no hint of flippancy to Tombert's voice: they sounded perfectly earnest.

"Please, sit down – anywhere" they invited, gesturing at the pillows strewn about the floor. "Would you like a glass of claret? My friend Percival tells me you're here about the curse, and that Armand sent you."

Evans sat down on a sequined cushion that was far too small for him, and that hardly afforded him the dignity Percy would have preferred to see. But dignity, he supposed, had long packed its bags and left, and had probably been run over on the road, for good measure.

"We would like to try and break your curse, if you'll allow us" Evans said.

"And I suppose you would require me to pay handsomely for this service."

"Not at all."

Tombert seared them with a look of undistilled suspicion.

"Oh, no, please don't tell me I'm the object of charity. I should warn you, while I have my talents, as we all do, being grateful is not one of them. I have been told more than once that I am thankless and unappreciative, and I have left a trail of frustrated philanthropists and patrons in my wake."

"We accept tips, if it would make you feel comfortable" Evans said with an amused smile. "Could you please tell us a little more about how it started?"

Tombert sat facing them, ignoring the surrounding tide of pillows and choosing instead the carpeted floor.

"It wasn't that long ago. I was just a humble bard then – and I mean it now, I promise I do – just doing my rounds: taverns, festivals, parties in castles, the usual. I was starting to build a reputation, too. Some people loved me back then already, but healthy-like. Nothing surprising about that. I am good, in my own right, and this world still has people of good taste left in it. One night, there was this place I played in... I felt something a bit funny, but I didn't think anything of it. I feel funny all the time. But the following day..."

Their words trailed off. They tossed their white head back and spoke upwards, to the stained-glass lanterns pouring down coloured lights.

"The following day, I was hired for this gig to play for some local children. I like children, even if they don't always like me, but that's their right. It started off fine. Then it got bloody weird. Let me tell you, if you've ever played 'if you're happy and you know it clap your hands' for five year olds and they all follow your instructions and clap, instead of feasting on the contents of their nostrils, or enacting ruthless playground politics – then something sinister's afoot. I sing jump, they jump. I sing shimmy, they shimmy. All forty of them! So, naturally, I get to wondering. Start trying out a few things. I sing 'run outside', they all run outside. I sing 'jump into the lake', they... look, no need to make that face, I sang for them to swim to shore right afterwards. I only had to go rescue little Bertie, who doesn't know how to swim, and doesn't know when to give up either. So yes, that's when it all began. They started calling me 'the pied piper', though thankfully it didn't catch on. I mean, 'pied', really – I wore that outfit once! Twice, maybe."

Evans nodded, at times resting his gaze on small things: a cushion, a loose thread on a tapestry, a wine stain on the carpet.

"And... that strange control you have over others through your music. It hasn't stopped since?"

"It only got worse, as I learned the very next day. I played at this tavern, right, and by then, the incident from the day before had drawn quite a lot of attention. There were some song requests, and, well... it's weird to sing 'hit me lady one more time' to a roomful of people and have them all take you literally. Not pleasant. I mean, it can be, in the right circumstances. But it wasn't the right circumstances. After that, I wandered off to other towns, but I had these... fanatics following me everywhere. Couldn't get rid of them no matter what I tried. I always wanted admirers, of course I did, but not like this. Every time I thought I was clever and found a way to send ten of them away, twenty others turned up. So here we are" Tombert sighed, glancing about the room with a resigned look.

"Here?" Evans nudged with a gentle smile.

"This was just a small festival to start with. It only had a handful of tents. Terrible management, really, and most people were sleeping out in the cold. Look, maybe – maybe I wouldn't have done it now, but I was bored, and I wanted to see how far this new... power, curse, thing, went. And all these buggers that kept following me just waited around uselessly for me to sing, and I thought... since I couldn't stop it, I might as well try to get something useful out of it. So I sang work-songs for the better part of, oh, I don't know, several days, and they built this tent. Most of them are nobles or wealthy merchants who wouldn't know hard work if it tripped them over in the street, so it took a few tries. But with enough perseverance, we got there in the end. Isn't it marvellous?"

Tombert met their astonished stares head-on and chin raised, unafraid of the coming onslaught.

"A slave-driver and a child-drowner" Valeria decreed placidly, crossing her arms.

"Now look here, if you want to condemn me right off the bat – you won't have to look very far, granted, but you might do me the courtesy of not looking at all. Couldn't you focus instead on all the good things this brought to all concerned? We have this lovely, warm, obscenely comfortable tent for the festival, and little Bertie has, I am told, finally learned to swim. How's that for silver linings? And the point is, I didn't want any of this anyway. Not like this."

Tombert leaned back and melted their slender frame onto the cushions behind them.

"Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to curse you?" Evans asked.

"I'm as likeable and unlikeable as anyone else. There's always someone who wants to curse you. But I don't think there was ever anyone who could. If I crossed paths with someone capable of that, they certainly didn't introduce themselves."

Percy glanced at Evans. He was frowning at a spot on the dark red carpet that dozens of reluctantly dancing feet had worn pale.

"What is it?" Percy murmured.

"It's unusual to have a fae place a curse and not announce it. Not take credit for it. A lot of the time, the point isn't even the curse itself, or the person they cursed. They don't always matter – no offence" he added in a hurry when he saw Tombert's head springing up from the cushions, visibly outraged at the notion that they weren't the protagonists of their own misfortune. "What I mean is that often, the main point of placing a curse is that they'll be known for it."

"Maybe I'm still a work in progress. Maybe I'm marinating. Maybe they'll come and claim me once I'm properly and thoroughly a hot mess" Tombert speculated, throwing their white hair back in a flourish.

"Yeah, well, they can take a long time to show up" Myrtle muttered.

"I'm about to play one of the sets here, on the lake stage. Do you want to come and see, in case you catch anything I haven't noticed?" Tombert asked, swooping up from the pillows. "I can tell you're still a little suspicious. I understand. I'll play anything you tell me – you choose. And you'll see the effect it has on people, even when I don't plan any of it. So, what do you think I should play?"

"Those songs that are always played in wedding receptions" Myrle answered without hesitation.

A stunned silence stared straight at her.

"What? They're pretty thoroughly hated. The only reason everyone puts up with them is because everyone puts up with them. And there's always that one aunt who doesn't know the steps. Honestly, if you play some of those and everyone still adores you and does everything you say, then I'll believe there's magic at work."

"That settles it. Wedding receptions 'best-ofs' it is. And, really – I don't want to come across like I don't appreciate your help. I act flippant and all, but it's just to distract from a deep-set insecurity and fear."

"I understand" Evans smiled.

No, you don't, Percy thought, pursing his lips.

"We'll go to your concert, but I'd rather break my own legs than be made to dance like that again" said Valeria.

"Oh, that's fine. We can find something for you to stuff your ears with" Tombert replied, still averting their gaze from her. "Or, you know, you could ask Percival here how he managed to be the only person I've seen so far who's immune to it."

Percy soaked luxuriously in the awed looks he received then. But his enjoyment was cut short by the realization that the Rabble-Rouser's tune was gone from his mind at last, and that he was now in just as much risk of a forced minuet as anyone else.