Slowly, I realized that none of this mattered. At most, it simply raised the stakes for tonight. Ambrose wouldn’t be able to do anything to disrupt my playing. He would be forced to watch and listen. Listen to me playing “The Lay of Sir Savien Traliard,” because now there was no question as to what I would be performing tonight.
The evening’s entertainment was led by one of the talented musicians from the crowd. He had a lute and showed that he could play it as well as any Edema Ruh. His second song was even better, one that I’d never heard before.
There was a gap of about ten minutes before another talented musician was called onto the stage to sing. This man had a set of reed pipes and played them better than anyone I had ever heard. He followed by singing a haunting eulogy in a minor key. No instrument, just his high clear voice that rose and flowed like the pipes he had played before.
I was pleased to find the skill of the talented musicians to be everything it was rumored to be. But my anxiety increased a proportionate amount. Excellence is excellence’s only companion. Had I not already decided to play “The Lay of Sir Savien Traliard” for purely spiteful reasons, these performances would have convinced me.
There followed another period of five or ten minutes. I realized that Stanchion was deliberately spacing things out to give the audience a chance to move about and make noise between the songs. The man knew his business. I wondered if he had ever been a trouper.
Then we had our first trial of the night. A bearded man of thirty years or so was brought onto the stage by Stanchion and introduced to the audience. He played flute. Played it well. He played two shorter songs that I knew and a third I didn’t. He played for perhaps twenty minutes in all, only making one small mistake that I could hear.
After the applause, the flutist remained on stage while Stanchion circulated in the crowd, gathering opinions. A serving boy brought the flutist a glass of water.
Eventually Stanchion came back onto the stage. The room was quiet as the owner drew close and solemnly shook the man’s hand. The musician’s expression fell, but he managed a sickly smile and a nod to the audience. Stanchion escorted him off the stage and bought something that came in a tall tankard.
The next to try her talent was a young woman, richly dressed with golden hair. After Stanchion introduced her, she sang an aria in a voice so clear and pure that I forgot my anxiety for a while and was ensnared by her song. For a few blessed moments I forgot myself and could do nothing but listen.
Too soon it was over, leaving me with a tender feeling in my chest and a vague prickling in my eyes. Simmon sniffled a little and rubbed selfconsciously at his face.
Then she sang a second song while accompanying herself on a half-harp. I watched her intently, and I will admit that it was not entirely for her musical ability. She had hair like ripe wheat. I could see the clear blue of her eyes from where I sat some thirty feet away. She had smooth arms and small delicate hands that were quick against the strings. And the way she held the harp between her legs made me think of … well, the things that every boy of fifteen thinks about incessantly.
Her voice was as lovely as before, enough to set a heart aching. Unfortunately, her playing could not match it. She struck wrong notes halfway through her second song, faltered, then recovered before she made it to the end of her performance.
There was a longer pause as Stanchion circulated this time. He milled through the three levels of the Eolian, talking with everyone, young and old, musician and not.
As I watched, Ambrose caught the eye of the woman on stage and gave her one of his smiles that seem so greasy to me and so charming to women. Then, looking away from her, his gaze wandered to my table and our eyes met. His smile faded, and for a long moment we simply watched each other, expressionless. Neither of us smiled mockingly, or mouthed small insulting nothings to the other. Nevertheless, all our smoldering enmity was renewed in those few minutes. I cannot say with certainty which of us looked away first.
After nearly fifteen minutes of gathering opinions, Stanchion mounted the stage again. He approached the golden-haired woman and took her hand as he had the previous musician’s. The woman’s face fell in much the same way his had. Stanchion led her from the stage and bought her what I guessed was the consolation tankard.
Closely on the heels of this failure was another talented musician who played fiddle, excellent as the two before him. Then an older man was brought onto stage by Stanchion as if he were trying for his talent. However the applause that greeted him seemed to imply that he was as popular as any of the talented musicians who had played before him.
I nudged Simmon. “Who’s this?” I asked, as the grey-bearded man tuned his lyre.
“Threpe,” Simmon whispered back at me. “Count Threpe, actually. He plays here all the time, has for years. Great patron of the arts. He stopped trying for his pipes years ago. Now he just plays. Everyone loves him.”
Threpe began to play and I could see immediately why he had never earned his pipes. His voice cracked and wavered as he plucked his lyre. His rhythm varied erratically and it was hard to tell if he struck a wrong note. The song was obviously of his own devising, a rather candid revelation about the personal habits of a local nobleman. But in spite of its lack of classic artistic merit, I found myself laughing along with the rest of the crowd.
When he was done everyone applauded thunderously, some people pounding on the tables or stamping as well. Stanchion went directly onto the stage and shook the count’s hand, but Threpe didn’t seem disappointed in the least. Stanchion pounded him enthusiastically on the back as he led him down to the bar.
It was time. I stood and gathered up my lute.
Wilem clapped my arm and Simmon grinned at me, trying not to look almost sick with friendly worry. I nodded silently to each of them as I walked over to Stanchion’s vacant seat at the end of the bar where it curved toward the stage.
I fingered the silver talent in my pocket, thick and heavy. Some irrational part of me wanted to clutch it, hoard it for later. But I knew that in a few more days a single talent wouldn’t do me a bit of good. With a set of talent pipes I could support myself playing at local inns. If I was lucky enough to attract the attention of a patron, I could earn enough to square my debt to Devi and pay my tuition as well. It was a gamble I had to take.
Stanchion came ambling back to his spot at the bar.
“I’ll go next, sir. If it’s all right with you.” I hoped I didn’t look as nervous as I felt. My grip on the lute case was slippery from my sweating palms.
He smiled at me and nodded. “You’ve got a good eye for a crowd, boy. This one’s ripe for a sad song. Still planning on doing ‘Savien’?”
I nodded.
He sat down and took a drink. “Well then, let’s just give them a couple minutes to simmer and get their talking over with.”
I nodded and leaned against the bar. I took the time to fret uselessly about things I had no control over. One of the pegs on my lute was loose and I didn’t have the money to fix it. There had not been any talented women on stage yet. I felt a twinge of unease at the thought of this being the odd night where the only talented musicians at the Eolian were men, or women who didn’t know Aloine’s part.
It seemed only a short time before Stanchion stood and raised a questioning eyebrow at me. I nodded and picked up my lute case. It suddenly looked terribly shabby to me. Together we walked up the stairs.
As soon as my foot touched the stage the room hushed to a murmur. At the same time, my nervousness left me, burned away by the attention of the crowd. It has always been that way with me. Offstage I worry and sweat. Onstage I am calm as a windless winter night.
Stanchion bade everyone consider me as a candidate for my talent. His words had a soothing, ritual feel. When he gestured to me, there was no familiar applause, only an expectant silence. In a flash, I saw myself as the audience must see me. Not finely dressed as the others had been, in fact only one step from being ragged. Young, almost a
child. I could feel their curiosity drawing them closer to me.
I let it build, taking my time as I unclasped my battered secondhand lute case and removed my battered secondhand lute. I felt their attention sharpen at the homely sight of it. I struck a few quiet chords, then touched the pegs, tuning it ever so slightly. I fingered a few more light chords, testing, listened, and nodded to myself.
The lights shining onto the stage made the rest of the room dim from where I sat. Looking out I saw what seemed to be a thousand eyes. Simmon and Wilem, Stanchion by the bar. Deoch by the door. I felt a vague flutter in my stomach as I saw Ambrose watching me with all the menace of a smoldering coal.
I looked away from him to see a bearded man in red, Count Threpe, an old couple holding hands, a lovely dark-eyed girl… .
My audience. I smiled at them. The smile drew them closer still, and I sang.
“Still! Sit! For though you listen long
Long would you wait without the hope of song
So sweet as this. As Illien himself set down
An age ago. Master work of a master’s life
Of Savien, and Aloine the woman he would take to wife.”
I let the wave of whisper pass through the crowd. Those who knew the song made soft exclamation to themselves, while those who didn’t asked their neighbors what the stir was about.
I raised my hands to the strings and drew their attention back to me. The room stilled, and I began to play.
The music came easily out of me, my lute like a second voice. I flicked my fingers and the lute made a third voice as well. I sang in the proud powerful tones of Savien Traliard, greatest of the Amyr. The audience moved under the music like grass against the wind. I sang as Sir Savien, and I felt the audience begin to love and fear me.
I was so used to practicing the song alone that I almost forgot to double the third refrain. But I remembered at the last moment in a flash of cold sweat. This time as I sang it I looked out into the audience, hoping at the end I would hear a voice answering my own.
I reached the end of the refrain before Aloine’s first stanza. I struck the first chord hard and waited as the sound of it began to fade without drawing a voice from the audience. I looked calmly out to them, waiting. Every second a greater relief vied with a greater disappointment inside me.
Then a voice drifted onto stage, gentle as a brushing feather, singing… .
“Savien, how could you know
It was the time for you to come to me?
Savien, do you remember
The days we squandered pleasantly?
How well then have you carried what
Have tarried in my heart and memory?”
She sang as Aloine, I as Savien. On the refrains her voice spun, twinning and mixing with my own. Part of me wanted to search the audience for her, to find the face of the woman I was singing with. I tried, once, but my fingers faltered as I searched for the face that could fit with the cool moonlight voice that answered mine. Distracted, I touched a wrong note and there was a burr in the music.
A small mistake. I set my teeth and concentrated on my playing. I pushed my curiosity aside and bowed my head to watch my fingers, careful to keep them from slipping on the strings.
And we sang! Her voice like burning silver, my voice an echoing answer. Savien sang solid, powerful lines, like branches of a rock-old oak, all the while Aloine was like a nightingale, moving in darting circles around the proud limbs of it.
I was only dimly aware of the audience now, dimly aware of the sweat on my body I was so deeply in the music that I couldn’t have told you where it stopped and my blood began.
But it did stop. Two verses from the end of the song, the end came. I struck the beginning chord of Savien’s verse and I heard a piercing sound that pulled me out of the music like a fish dragged from deep water.
A string broke. High on the neck of the lute it snapped and the tension lashed it across the back of my hand, drawing a thin, bright line of blood.
I stared at it numbly. It should not have broken. None of my strings were worn badly enough to break. But it had, and as the last notes of the music faded into silence I felt the audience begin to stir. They began to rouse themselves from the waking dream that I had woven for them out of strands of song.
In the silence I felt it all unraveling, the audience waking with the dream unfinished, all my work ruined, wasted. And all the while burning inside me was the song, the song. The song!
Without knowing what I did, I set my fingers back to the strings and fell deep into myself. Into years before, when my hands had calluses like stones and my music had come as easy as breathing. Back to the time I had played to make the sound of Wind Turning a Leaf on a lute with six strings.
And I began to play. Slowly, then with greater speed as my hands remembered. I gathered the fraying strands of song and wove them carefully back to what they had been a moment earlier.
It was not perfect. No song as complex as “Sir Savien” can be played perfectly on six strings instead of seven. But it was whole, and as I played the audience sighed, stirred, and slowly fell back under the spell that I had made for them.
I hardly knew they were there, and after a minute I forgot them entirely. My hands danced, then ran, then blurred across the strings as I fought to keep the lute’s two voices singing with my own. Then, even as I watched them, I forgot them, I forgot everything except finishing the song.
The refrain came, and Aloine sang again. To me she was not a person, or even a voice, she was just a part of the song that was burning out of me.
And then it was done. Raising my head to look at the room was like breaking the surface of the water for air. I came back into myself, found my hand bleeding and my body covered in sweat. Then the ending of the song struck me like a fist in my chest, as it always does, no matter where or when I listen to it.
I buried my face in my hands and wept. Not for a broken lute string and the chance of failure. Not for blood shed and a wounded hand. I did not even cry for the boy who had learned to play a lute with six strings in the forest years ago. I cried for Sir Savien and Aloine, for love lost and found and lost again, at cruel fate and man’s folly. And so, for a while, I was lost in grief and knew nothing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Flame and Thunder
I held all of my mourning for Savien and Aloine to a few moments. Knowing I was still on display, I gathered myself and straightened in my chair to look out at my audience. My silent audience.
Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician’s curse. Even as I sat, the ending I had improvised was fading from my memory. Then came doubt. What if it hadn’t been as whole as it had seemed? What if my ending hadn’t carried the terrible tragedy of the song to anyone but myself? What if my tears seemed to be nothing more than a child’s embarrassing reaction to his own failure?
Then, waiting, I heard the silence pouring from them. The audience held themselves quiet, tense, and tight, as if the song had burned them worse than flame. Each person held their wounded selves closely, clutching their pain as if it were a precious thing.
Then there was a murmur of sobs released and sobs escaping. A sigh of tears. A whisper of bodies slowly becoming no longer still.
Then the applause. A roar like leaping flame, like thunder after lightning.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Patrons, Maids and Metheglin
I restrung my lute. It was a fair distraction while Stanchion gathered opinions from the crowd. My hands went through the routine motions of stripping the broken string away while I fretted to myself. Now that the applause had died, my doubts had come to plague me again. Was one song enough to prove my skill? What if the audience’s reaction had been due to the power of the song, rather than my playing of it? What of my improvised ending? Perhaps the song had only seemed whole to me… .
As I finished removing the broken string I gave it an idle look and all my thoughts fell to a jumble at my feet.
&n
bsp; It wasn’t worn or flawed as I had thought it would be. The broken end was clean, as if it had been cut with a knife or snipped with a pair of scissors.
For a while I simply stared at it dumbly. My lute had been tampered with? Impossible. It was never out of my sight. Besides, I had checked the strings before I left the University, and again before I had come on stage. Then how?
I was running the thought in circles in my head when I noticed the crowd quieting. I looked up in time to see Stanchion take the last step onto the stage. I hurriedly got to my feet to face him.
His expression was pleasant but otherwise unreadable. My stomach tied a knot as he walked toward me, then it fell as he held out his hand the same way he had held it out for the other two musicians who had been found wanting.
I forced my best smile onto my face and reached to take his hand. I was my father’s son and a trouper. I would take my refusal with the high dignity of the Edema Ruh. The earth would crack and swallow this glittering, self-important place before I would show a trace of despair.
And somewhere in the watching audience was Ambrose. The earth would have to swallow the Eolian, Imre, and the whole Centhe Sea before I gave him a grain of satisfaction over this.
So I smiled brightly and took Stanchion’s hand in my own. As I shook it, something hard pressed into my palm. Looking down I saw a glimmer of silver. My talent pipes.
My expression must have been a delight to watch. I looked back up at Stanchion. His eyes danced and he winked at me.
I turned and held my pipes aloft for everyone to see. The Eolian roared again. This time it roared a welcome.
“You’ll have to promise me,” a red-eyed Simmon said seriously, “That you will never play that song again without warning me first. Ever.”
“Was it that bad?” I smiled giddily at him.
“No!” Simmon almost cried out. “It’s … I’ve never—” He struggled, wordless for a moment, then bowed his head and began to cry hopelessly into his hands.
Wilem put a protective arm around Simmon, who leaned unashamedly against his shoulder. “Our Simmon has a tender heart,” he said gently. “I imagine he meant to say that he liked it very much.”
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