Listening to her was like finding a piece of my soul I didn’t know I was missing. It replaced pain with pleasure and sorrow with joy.
Time blurred.
The room vanished.
Emotion overwhelmed me.
The end came too soon.
I launched myself to my feet, tears running down my cheeks, clapping with everything I had. I did not want this angel to doubt how much I worshipped her. Nothing back home could compare with what she had just done.
It was magic.
More powerful than anything I had seen.
Even the toilet.
Silver coins began to appear in small flashes of light, falling to her feet around her, bathing her in wealth. Whatever promotion she possessed to create the wealth would have to be a high level for so much to appear. It still hurt me to see that it wasn’t gold. She deserved gold.
A smile touched her beautiful lips, and she gave me a bow I didn’t deserve. “Sir, you are too kind.” Her powerful voice crossed the distance between us effortlessly.
“And you are too generous,” I said. She laughed. Even that was musical. “Would you take pity on this poor soul and allow me to stay, listen, and know your name, so I never miss an opportunity to hear you perform?”
I didn’t dare analyse her. It was sacrilege to take the name of an angel without her permission.
Her laughter died off, but the smile remained. “I am Master Bard Ilia, and you may stay, though I can spare little time for practicing my craft today. However, if you would continue playing as you were when I arrived while my student practices, that would help me greatly. A distraction would do her good. Help her deal with a crowd that is not attentive to her needs.”
I was enchanted.
She could have asked anything of me right now, and I would have agreed. The urge to hear her sing again was more potent than anything I had ever experienced. “I’d be happy to help.”
Look, I’m not exactly proud of my reaction. You could fairly call it “screaming fangirl meeting Elvis” and I would consider it kind. Actually, I would probably thank you for not being meaner.
However, in this moment, I didn’t care.
She smiled once more, nodded her head and began to sing. The world around me shrunk until it was just me, her voice, and the joy I had been missing all my life.
Time wandered freely, until Ilia stopped singing.
Heaven fell away, thrusting me back into reality. Ilia stood on the stage, looking to her right. I followed the angel's gaze, searching for the snake in my Eden. A guardswoman held open a door near the side of the stage.
Jeric’s daughter entered the music hall.
I blinked, thinking I was seeing things. But she remained. I’d only ever seen the painting in Jeric’s parlour, which was several years out of date, but she looked enough like her mother that I knew it had to be her. It simply couldn’t have been anyone else.
Emily glided forward with her chin up and shoulders straight, entering like she expected all the eyes in the world to be on her. It was the kind of entrance you expected royalty would have. It was regal in every sense and meaning of the word.
However, Emily disappeared from my thoughts as the second girl walked in behind her.
She was at most 11 years old, but she was like those models in magazines, the ones that were already extremely photogenic who were then put in front of an exceptional photographer who managed to luck out and catch just the right angle at the right moment to create an image that ends up part of history—only she was walking and talking without breaking that look.
Put more simply, she looked the way Ilia sang.
Dark blonde hair tumbled past her waist in tight little ringlets. She had a white angelic face with eyes that held the green of an entire meadow in summer. The colour was so vibrant it made the distance between us irrelevant. Feeling uncomfortable, I eventually forced my gaze away to stop myself from staring.
Jeric’s daughter, who had surprised me with her sense of presence, now looked plain. Oh, she was still beautiful in her own right, Jeric and his wife were rather attractive people after all, but it’s hard to find amazement in a campfire when there is a bonfire only a few feet away.
As I watched them make their way to the stage, switching my gaze between them, the sight of the younger girl began to upset me. Her every movement was perfect and proper. Her dress likely cost more than a hundred farmers’ annual taxes. It was like she had been put beside Emily to make her look inferior.
I began to frown as that thought played through my head. That’s exactly what it looked like. And if that was what it looked like, then it was probably what was going on.
The second armed female guard stepped into the room and then they both took up a position by the door. They scanned the room, locked eyes with me and scowled, but didn’t leave their post.
I ignored them and looked back at the younger girl. Within moments I began to feel pity.
Her features couldn’t be natural, just like the Ilia’s voice. Salem had warned me that people stopped looking human when their charisma became extremely high. It had to be what I was looking at. No child looked like that. Someone had somehow given her so much charisma that it had turned her into this ethereal haunting beauty.
An ugly feeling twisted my gut.
It seemed wrong to do that to a child.
A conversation I’d had with Jeric months ago came back to me. He’d talked about the harshness of the noble class. The clawing and fighting required to make sure their children retained it. The lengths they had to go to keep their children from becoming adventurers—this was what I was looking at.
It left a foul taste in my mouth.
The two noble girls separated.
To my surprise, Emily climbed onto the stage and went over to Ilia. They talked for a few moments, and then Ilia turned to me and mimed me strumming, reminding me of our agreement.
I happily nodded, picked up the guitar, and began to play some Johnny Cash, singing along. My fingers fumbled across the strings as I snuck glances at Ilia to see if she was happy with me. By the end of the first minute, I decided that in order to fulfil her request, I needed to turn away. Without the distraction, my fingers immediately found their rhythm. Not having Ilia in sight helped me focus on the music. Half a song went by and then Emily began to sing. Even while playing and singing, I could tell she had a lovely voice. But it was a far cry from the enchantment Ilia had laid on me.
One song turned into two and then three. Emily kept stopping and starting, practicing and repeating herself to get things perfect.
A dozen more songs and I was nearing the end of “A Boy Named Sue” when a fit of musical giggles erupted from close behind me. I was grinning myself. I’d always loved this song, but I’d never been able to do it justice. I still wasn’t, but I was no longer committing a crime.
I played the song to its end.
The girl who had entered with Emily walked around me and stopped in front of me. She had a big smile on her face. It was a child’s smile full of delight, happiness, and open curiosity. It cracked the mask she was forced to wear. “Pardon me, sir, did you write that yourself?”
I started playing a purely instrumental piece of music as I shook my head. The half-hour break had given me a chance to work on my self-control, letting me view her as a kid and not some transcendent beauty. “No, sadly, I’m just a poser playing another’s music. That song was written by a man called Johnny Cash.”
She giggled again. “He has two names?”
“Well, he’s from a different world.”
“Is he incarnate?”
“No, I am.”
Her face somehow lit up even more. “You’re incarnate? I’ve only met one incarnate. My father invited her to dinner last year. Did you have four arms in your world too?”
I paused, nearly to the point of stopping playing, thrown by the bizarreness of her statement. “No, just the two,” I said.
Now that I thought about it, th
ere had been a couple of instruments that looked like they needed four arms to play. I’d thought they might just require high agility, but maybe that wasn’t true.
“Tell me everything,” she said, her enthusiasm honest and earnest as she dragged over the nearest chair and sat on it in front of me. “What is your name? I can’t see it for some reason.”
That was because I’d blocked everything by using my privacy mark.
“Arnold.”
“Nice to meet you, Incarnate Arnold. I am Cassandra.”
I’d had this conversation dozens of times over the past year. It was usually easier to answer people’s questions than try to talk around the subject. “What do you want to know, Cassandra?”
“What’s different?”
“Well to start with, we have no magic or monsters.”
Her excited happiness was basically what I had come to expect from that answer, only turned up to eleven. She giggled with delight. “So what do your adventurers do?”
“We don’t have adventurers or classes. We don’t gain experience either. We do everything the slow way.”
Her eyes went wide. “That must take forever.”
“It did for thousands of years, but we eventually worked out how to do things faster. We discovered a different type of magic called electronics. In my world, almost everyone had access to it. I could talk to people on the other side of the world through illusions of light and sound. I could watch plays that were performed decades before I was born by actors who were long dead and listen to music by singers that have come and gone the same way. I used to walk around with a device that fit into my pocket and held every library in our world.”
“Can you try to teach us how to do this magic? Lots of incarnated bring new discoveries to our world.”
They did. And I had wanted to be one of them. In my first six months, I’d tried to make a small electromagnetic generator like the one my father made with me as a kid. The first time, the plant in my room at Gretel’s inn caught on fire. The second time, it was my bed. I hadn’t listened to Salem when he said I was dealing with forces I didn’t understand. I finally quit after the third try when the thing that caught on fire was me.
“I’ve heard that,” I said. “And I did try to do some basic experiments, but the fact that you have magic seems to change the way some things work.”
Cassandra frowned and scratched the end of her perfect nose. “So you can’t teach us anything?”
“I taught you that song.”
“I meant anything that could change our world. Have you heard of bicycles? I’ve got one. I can go so fast. It’s amazing.”
“I have heard of bicycles. We had them too.”
“Hmmm, so you have bicycles and no classes. That could be nice. I wouldn’t have to wear dresses all the time and I could climb trees. Do you have trees?”
“We do.”
“Sometimes I hide from the servants in trees. I tried to hide this morning, but they found me.”
“Why were you hiding?”
She sighed, looking upset in the way only children can. “My mother wanted me to keep Emily company. She’s nice, but she cries a lot, and I feel bad for her. Her father’s the mayor of some tiny village. He found a way to make lots of noble experience, enough to get her to her threshold. When my grandmother found out, she decided to be real nice and throw an ascendance ball for her. Emily can present herself very well, and she dances beautifully, but she’s not going to impress anyone with her singing. She hasn’t practiced for an ascendance ball. She won’t pass through her threshold without amazing everyone, and she knows that, which is why she cries, I think.”
I turned and listened to Emily’s singing. It was a song similar to the one Ilia sung. She was nice to listen to, but there was none of the enchantment that the older woman offered. She was singing a song that was frankly much too difficult for her. With her control, she needed something more straightforward.
I turned back to Cassandra. Another idea was forming. “So, Emily’s not going to pass through her threshold unless she improves her singing.”
She shrugged. “She has a better chance if she can sing. If it were a presentation ball, all she would have to worry about is her manner, her poise, and dancing to gain experience.” She counted each one off on a finger. “But with an ascendance ball, she has to showcase her skills at art, poetry, and singing. She needs to impress enough people with all of those if she wants to have a chance at passing through her threshold. She can’t with her singing. Even after she gains her levels, she still won’t be good enough.”
This girl was an absolute fountain of information—and a lot of it was negative. “Does Emily have to sing well, or does she have to impress people while singing? Because those two aren’t technically the same. For example, can she put on a show to improve her performance?”
She nodded glumly. “My mother and her mother thought she should, but they couldn’t come up with anything good enough with so little time and the best instructors are touring outside of the city.”
“Okay, I’ve got one more question. How impressed were you by the song I was singing when you came over? Were you more impressed because you’ve never heard it before, or simply because of my average singing? I know a few songs that I could teach her that no one at the ball will have ever heard.”
Her eyes lit up. “That might work. You were terrible, but I couldn’t stop listening.”
“You didn’t have to be that honest.”
“Do you like gambling with others’ lives, Arnold?” Ilia asked me, hours later, as we waited for Emily to appear for the ascendance ball.
Ilia’s arm was threaded through my own as we stood in the perfumed crowd, staring past the staircase and upper balcony to the double doors Emily would enter through. There were hundreds of people present, possibly a thousand. Not everyone could fit in this room. Others had spilled out into the surrounding rooms to stop overcrowding while they waited for the belle of the ball to arrive.
It was easy to tell the nobles from the few non-nobles in attendance. The nobles had a control over their movements that didn’t allow them to be anything less than regal. Watching them fawn for attention and try to impress each other was somehow distasteful.
“No. And I don’t consider this a gamble. Neither do you, or you would never have gone along with my suggestion.”
“Perhaps I was charmed by your good looks.”
I snorted. “You introduced me to your husband, remember. Without another 50 points in charisma, I’m not close to handsome enough to tempt you.”
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“You’re dodging.”
“Fine…your song was beautiful in its simplicity and your idea for the presentation was unique enough to impress me. But that does not mean it will work.”
“No, but she has more of a chance this way.”
“Agreed. Now, I feel it is my duty to warn you that word of your wealth has already begun to circulate. Be wary of young noblewomen. Wealth like yours is more attractive than a handsome face.”
“That’s why I have you by my side. One look at your beauty and they will realise any effort is pointless.”
A small smile pulled at her large cheeks. “You, sir, are much better at flattery than I am.”
“Honestly, between you and me, it’s all the charisma. I was never this good before raising it.”
Her smile turned into a quiet laugh. “You do yourself a disservice. You are only putting words to the thoughts you used to have. This flattery was in you, only waiting and biding its time to come out and shine. Many bards in this city have higher charisma than my own, but none can best my skill. Attributes are nothing but an enhancement of what lies underneath.”
I fell silent thinking about her words.
Her opinion on attributes was vastly different from Salem’s.
A woman walked past that would make a Victoria’s Secret model look like a two and my head began to turn.
Ilia
gave my arm a squeeze and whispered in my ear. “You are ogling again.”
It physically pained me to turn away, but I did. A few hours ago, poor Cassandra had been the most attractive person I’d ever seen. Now, she wasn’t even in the top ten. If I had come here first, her looks wouldn’t have thrown me nearly as much as they had.
“Thank you. I think it’s getting easier not to stare.”
She patted my arm understandingly. “The mind was never intended to witness such beauty. It takes time and work to control your reactions or high charisma if you want to cheat.”
“How high?”
“Depends upon how susceptible you are to beauty, but triple digits is usually where most stop being swayed by its effect.”
I frowned. “So, if my charisma gets high enough, I’ll stop being enchanted by your singing? I feel like I have to rethink how I will spend my attributes in the future.”
Ilia laughed. “You will still enjoy beauty, but you will no longer feel the compulsion to serve it.”
“In what way?”
Ilia smirked. “I would like a glass of white wine.”
I hurriedly let go of her arm, found a servant, and collected a glass of white wine from his tray. I was back with the drink as quickly as I could be without causing a scene that might embarrass Ilia.
She took the wine with the same smirk on her cheeks. “If your charisma was high enough, you would have been able to fight the compulsion to get me that drink.”
“But I wanted to get you that drink.”
“Don’t make me ask you for money just to prove a point, Arnold.”
“How much do you need? My bank purse is in my room, but I can be back shortly.” Hopefully, I would have enough to please her.
Ilia took my arm and wove it back into hers. “Arnold, try to remember you are charmed. Think about what you just said. Play it over in your mind. Question whether or not you wanted to say those words. Do it for me.”
It was the “do it for me” that made me really try. I started thinking about what I had said. It wasn’t until about the twentieth repetition that I started to question why I had said what I had said, and it took another twenty more before I realised I didn’t want to give her my money. Not unless I could hear her sing some more. It took another twenty repetitions before even that compulsion lessened.
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 30
