A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  390. This was a good story. May it keep you warm for years to come. He did bring you out of the dark and back into the world, and that’s . . . well. That was his one little thing, wasn’t it? Even if he spoiled everything else. Even if nothing else was worth remembering—and here I mean “remembering” in the way that Chants mean it, carrying it in your heart from place to place and giving it away again and again so it stays strong, so it survives.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Well. There’s nothing left in this city, I guess. Sterre sold the flower I gave her for a paltry twelve guilders, and she dumped all of it into buying a few shares of an overland trade caravan to Ancoux, the capital of Vinte—her friend van Vlymen, the tailor, whispered to her that he’s planning on bringing silk jacquard back into fashion next year.

  It’s all just as I told her. Maybe not everyone will forgive her, but she strengthened bonds with her closest allies, and they’ll see that she gets back on her feet.

  So I’m done with Sterre, and my lover is gone, and . . . why was I here? Why did I stop, here of all places?

  It’s a beautiful city. I can see that now, easily. There are cascades of flowers and trailing vines hanging from every window box and balcony, and here and there, in unexpected corners of the canals, you’ll find little lush floating gardens of lilies and rushes and all manner of water plants. There are trees, carefully tended, that shade some of the streets and overhang the canals, and in some places people have hung ribbons and lanterns from their branches. The canals are like veins—they’re as alive as the streets in any other city, with people paddling about or poling boats of all sizes.

  I’m about to leave it. I keep putting it off—tomorrow, then the next day, or next week. There’s nowhere in particular that I desperately need to go, and I’m . . . You know what? I’m enjoying seeing the city for myself. My lover and I used to go on walks, but everything was hazy and rosy-colored around the edges when I was with him. It’s different when it’s just me.

  Yesterday, I sat on the Swordfish Bridge with a bag full of sweet-cheese pastries from the Vintish bakery down the street from the Sun’s Rest, and I just watched the traffic on the canal and the people walking by, and practiced seeing again. When I was an apprentice, Chant used to send me out to wander a new city alone, noticing things and getting to know the streets, feeling out its pulse. In the evening, I’d come back to wherever he was, loaded down with little scraps of gossip, and sometimes he could quilt them together into a whole pattern—“Mm,” he’d grunt. “So they don’t like the prime minister at the moment,” even though I hadn’t mentioned anything about prime ministers or government at all. It was amazing at the time.

  I’ll stay a few days more. Just a few. It’s time to move on. I’ve done what I can here, and I think I learned almost everything I needed to. I’ll just stay a few more days, and then I’ll go visit you, Sister-Chant, to say farewell, and to give you this story.

  It was as true as I could manage—truer than I’d like, actually. I know there are things in here that I don’t much want you to see, but it would take too long to go through all these papers to find them, dispose of them, and then disguise the omission. The only things I’m leaving out are the things I promised other people that I wouldn’t speak of—and not for money, either, so you can relax. I daresay you’d see through any attempts I made to disguise things anyway, and that wasn’t the promise.

  One story, whole and true and real.

  And that’s where you end it.

  That was not as entirely useless as I was expecting, Brother-Chant. It’s a ridiculous mountain of paper, and I’m not sure what to do with it, but without a proper ending it’s . . . pointless. If you set out to tell a story, you owe your audience some kind of resolution. Or else they think that you’ve just wasted their time with anticlimactic babble.

  Strangely . . . I don’t feel like I wasted my time. If your purpose was to explain yourself, then I suppose you succeeded. My anger is quenched, and I . . . understand, at least partially.

  I suppose that I see a possibility here. What am I to do with this mountain of paper? You must have known, when you handed it to me, that I’d be unable to just destroy it, whatever my threats were. It is a story, even if the ending is nonexistent, and I’m bound and sworn to keep stories and pass them along. I don’t know who would be interested in this—maybe the people of Heyrland themselves? Perhaps they’d like a chronicle of what happened these past few months. Perhaps they’d like the perspective of someone intimately involved with that fiasco. Maybe I’ll track down Sterre and dump it on her. Perhaps she’d like to branch out into a printing business.

  So for their benefit, I’ll do your work for you, Chant-called-Ylfing. I’ll finish it properly.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  A Proper Ending

  The evening was young, the light not yet entirely faded from the western sky. I was plying my trade in the inn where I was staying with my apprentices. Lanh Chau had convinced a pair of musicians in the corner to sing for him, and he was sitting perfectly still on a stool in front of them, watching and listening with the entirety of his attention bent on them. Arenza was doing as an apprentice does, circling the room and talking to people, making friends and scraping up trinkets of information. And I, I was lounging comfortably by the hearth and trading gossip and news with a pair of sailors, one from Cormerra and one from N’gaka.

  It was then that my brother-Chant appeared in the room, carrying a hefty parcel tied up with string.

  I knew as soon as I laid eyes on him that something had changed. There was a look to him then, the look of a man who has made a decision and intends to embark upon it. I knew, too, that he must have come looking for me—he knew that inn was where I was staying, and he had come to see me before. He had no business there except with me.

  I braced myself for another fight. Every time we spoke, we fell into one sooner or later. I couldn’t help but snipe and pick at him. I nodded at him and gestured towards an empty chair. He perched on it and set the parcel on his knees, folded his hands neatly on top of it, and waited.

  I’d been in the middle of something with those two sailors, entertaining them with amusing stories and weaving throughout anecdotes of my travels, the news of far-off lands, and the sort of advice that all travelers share freely with each other—have you heard the Warden of the Marches is doing something about those highwaymen on the mountain road? That sort of thing.

  My brother-Chant waited politely until I was finished. I gave him opportunities to step in, to take part, to contribute to the banter that I had going with my little audience. We could have had a bit of a double act, if he’d taken the cues, but he just sat and waited.

  When I excused myself to refill my beer, he got up and followed me. “Hello,” he said. “I thought you’d be happy to know—the whole thing is over. I fixed it.”

  “So I heard,” I said. “Do you expect me to give you a little sugar-cake and a pat on the head?”

  “No.”

  “Good. You did the bare minimum required by moral duty. You undid as much of the mess as you could.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I tried. I suppose that’s all I can do.” I snorted, and he gave me some kind of reproachful look. “I’ll do better next time, you know. I’m only human. I made a mistake.”

  “Our ways will part sooner or later, and that will be the end of our acquaintanceship. But before that, you have a debt to repay. You said you wouldn’t forget.”

  “Actually, that’s part of why I came to see you,” he said.

  I knew then: he was planning to take leave. It relieved me at the same time as it pained me. I’ve never met a Chant other than the one who taught me, and I’d known her all my life.

  She’d gotten footsore, as Chants sometimes do, and she’d come to rest in my village in the mountains of Qeteren, meaning only to stay for a year or so. But people have a way of putting down roots when they stay too long in one place, and my Chant’s roots took hold firmly. I met her fi
rst when I was four or five years old, and if you believe her stories, I hounded her daily, appearing at the window of her little cottage where she brewed medicine for the villagers. Everyone knew what she was—she’d explained it when she first arrived.

  She always had the best stories out of anyone. She had seen more of the world than anybody in the village could believe, and there were plenty who didn’t believe her. But I did. She was kind to me. She never tried to chase me away, except when the shadows grew long in the evening and it was time for me to run down the big hill to my mother again. She taught me all there was of the ways of the Chants by the time I was twelve years old. I knew I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to see the world as she had. We had a few spats about it, then, because she wouldn’t apprentice me unless she was going to do it properly, and doing it properly meant tearing up her roots, putting her traveling shoes back on, and going once more into the wide world. She was still footsore in her heart, even after more than a decade. I was sixteen when she finally agreed, making me promise that I would learn as ardently and quickly as I could so that she could return to her cottage in the mountains. We went home again when I was twenty-two, and her cottage was still there, tenderly cared for by my parents. I sank my homeland beneath the waves of the little brook that trickled past not a stone’s throw from her front steps, and I stayed for a year, and then off I went, to be a Chant properly, as she’d taught me. Before I left, she told me that I’d probably never meet another of our kind, but if I did, I must greet them as a long-lost sibling and open my arms in embrace to them, and offer them blessings and hospitality.

  And here I was, facing the only other Chant I’d ever met, standing by a pillar on one side of the room and looking like two very awkward people attempting to pass by each other in a narrow corridor. I thought then that he would have been such a disappointment to my teacher. I was glad to know we were going to part. And I wished with all my heart that he’d been different. I wished I could have embraced him as a true brother.

  “I’m leaving,” he said, which was both belated and redundant, as far as I was concerned. But there were things to say. It was my duty to offer him blessings. “So yes, as you said, the debt. I know we’ve had our differences,” he said awkwardly. “Even without the debt, I . . . I wouldn’t have wanted to leave without explaining myself. A Chant seeks understanding, and I thought I’d leave you with the opportunity to understand me. If you wanted. You don’t have to take it. But here’s the story I have to tell you.” He held out his parcel. “This is for you. For the debt. I’ve been writing a lot of my thoughts down since . . . well, since I got the job with Sterre.”

  “Your thoughts?” I said. My skin prickled with suspicion.

  “Yes. At first I was just talking to myself, or to someone I didn’t know. I was seeking my own understanding. I thought if I wrote it all down, it might get out of my head and be easier to deal with when it was in front of my eyes. So this is the whole story. It’s about what happened to me, and what happened with the flowers. Whole and real and true.”

  “No,” I said, stunned. “No, this wasn’t the deal.”

  “The deal had nothing to do with how I’d give it to you. All you said was that you wanted the entire thing. I can guarantee you anything I told you in words would be less entire than this.”

  “So you wrote down the story?” I hissed.

  I expected him to flinch. He’d flinched at my rebukes a dozen times. But this time . . . This time he met my eyes seriously. “Yes,” he said. “I did. It was what I needed to do. I see nothing wrong with it, but if you feel strongly about it, then I’ll hear your arguments.” He smiled a little then. “But before you say anything, you should know that this particular heresy is one I made up myself. I didn’t get it from my Chant. He would have been appalled at me for it. So if you’d like to scold me, you may, but it ought to be specific to me as an individual. My line has no part in this.”

  “Well, it’s too late to undo it,” I snapped at him.

  “Yep,” he said, entirely too cheerful. “And now I’m leaving, and what I wrote down is yours to do with as you like. You can keep it, or burn it, or read it, or dump it in the canal. It’s out of my hands. It doesn’t belong to me anymore. You can read Xerecci, can’t you?”

  “Can I read Xerecci,” I scoffed. “What do you take me for?” I confess, I was curious. Dead curious. A Chant has to be curious—without that, they’re barely a Chant at all. I did want to understand him, and I wanted him to prove me wrong. Prove that he had methods that were worthy of respect, if not imitation. “Where will you go next?” I said. I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t meet each other on the road.

  He brightened at my question. “I’m going to Xereccio. I’m going to see the dragons hatch again—there’s something about that in there,” he said, nodding to the bundle on the table. “And after that . . .” He looked away. “I think I might go to the Issili Islands. To the Jewel Coast.”

  “What in the world? What for?” At the time, of course, it meant nothing to me. I didn’t know about his dreams, about the whisper of power that the stars-in-the-marsh had brought with them.

  All he said was “Personal reasons.”

  “There’s nearly nothing there. They’re barely more than sand and palm trees.”

  “Have you been there?” he asked. I had to admit that I hadn’t. “Then how do you know there’s nothing?” And he asked it so reasonably that I couldn’t be offended. “I want to go. Even if there’s nothing there, it doesn’t mean I won’t find something else.”

  “Find something? Are you looking for something?”

  “Maybe. I just want to stand there and look at the ocean.”

  “You can go out to the dikes and look at the ocean all you want from here.”

  “It’s not the same ocean,” he countered. “I want to look at that ocean.”

  “Oceans look much the same wherever you go.”

  “They don’t,” he said, still so reasonable and calm. “The Sea of Serpents is aptly named, and likewise the Sea of Storms and the Amethyst Sea. The Unending Ocean is an exaggeration, admittedly, but if the stories are right then not by much. My master had maritime stories from his master. She loved the sea. It seemed to be her area of expertise.”

  “Then what’s so special about that particular bit of ocean that makes you so keen to look at it?”

  “The ancient Chants,” he said, and . . . I was floored. “Right? Arthwend was somewhere to the south of the Jewel Coast before it sank. And then the Chants and their people came north on boats and hit land on those islands. So I’m going to go there, and I’m going to stand on the ground they stood on.” He smiled again. “And if I don’t feel anything, then I’m going to stop being a Chant for good and find something else. But . . . I think I’ll feel something.” Shuggwa, he meant. I know that now. At the time I only thought him . . . puzzling, excessively mysterious, and somewhat soppy—I mean, “I’m going half the world away to look at a specific ocean because I think it will make me feel something”? What insipid tripe. But now, having read all this . . .

  He’s going looking for Shuggwa, and he’s pretty sure that he’ll find him.

  But, again, at the time, I thought only that it was silliness, much in line with his usual flavor of silliness. I gathered up everything I had learned from my teacher, all the patience that she had so vainly tried to teach me, all the grace. It was a moment for courtesy and respect. It was a moment for sincerity: “May the road be kind,” I said, echoing the words my master-Chant had given me upon our parting. “And when it is not, may you find warm shelter. And when you do not, may the rain and snow and wind harry you to wherever you are meant to go.” And I managed to be sincere when I said, “May you be worthy of drawing Shuggwa’s Eye.”

  He looked a little startled. I didn’t think at the time that he would find any value in my blessing, but since it was for me more than it was for him, it didn’t matter—except now I know otherwise. I know he heard something i
n that blessing that I couldn’t have begun to guess. I suspect it meant more to him than I ever intended: May you be worthy of drawing Shuggwa’s Eye.

  May you be worthy.

  And he said, “Thank you. Same to you.” I thought about offering to buy him a drink. I thought about asking him for one more conversation. I thought about offering to trade stories with him as we should have been doing this entire time, doubling our own knowledge by giving it away freely to each other. But I didn’t, and I don’t think he would have accepted. He looked at me, and for a moment I thought he was looking into my very soul, and he said, “You love your work, and you love your apprentices. You have a lot of discipline, and your devotion never wavers. I love you for these things.”

  And then he gave me this . . . smile. He’d smiled before, but this one was like sunshine bursting through clouds after a long winter. It blinded me—it must have blinded his lover, too, must have made him stumble a step or two.

  And then that ridiculous, beautiful creature just . . . left. He walked out of the inn with no fanfare, just as he’d walked in. He walked out of my life. And part of me wanted to call him back and do things the proper, rightful way.

  And I didn’t. So I unpacked his parcel, and I sat for a while glaring at it, and then I asked for a pen and ink, and I sat in the middle of the inn and read until dawn, scrawling all over his pages as thoughts and outrage occurred to me.

  That’s the end. I shall give this mountain of pages to Sterre de Waeyer after all, I think, and she can do with it as she will. In another few weeks, I’ll head out of this city as well, and you can be assured that I won’t be going anywhere near Xereccio or the Issili Islands for at least the next three years. Perhaps I’ll go north, up the coast to Echaree or Cormerra. I’d heard rumors of trouble in Nuryevet a couple of years ago, even before Chant-called-Ylfing owned up to it. If it has settled by now, there may be fresh stories there. Perhaps someone there remembers Ylfing and his master.