Arioso, looking at her, lifted his flute abruptly from his lips. “Who was that?” he asked her. “Who is that in your eyes?”
“No one,” she answered indifferently. “The librarian.”
He waited for more, hearing overtones in her voice. “You remember him, my lord,” Veris said, mistaking his silence for perplexity. “Master Caladrius. The farmer. He has been staying late to finish moving the music manuscripts.”
“Farmers don’t read music.”
“This one studied at Luly.”
“Did he.” Luna saw the basilisk’s face suddenly, beneath his smile.
“Many years ago. He remembers enough to be very helpful, though he knows nothing of history, and almost nothing of Berylon.”
“Does he play music?”
“Very little, beyond the picochet. And that, not well enough, apparently, to save his crops.”
The shadow of hollowed bone and darkness was easing behind the prince’s face. “The peasant’s instrument,” he said, enlightened. “Giulia Dulcet mentioned that she once appalled the magisters with it. He does not play it here.”
“No, my lord.” Veris hesitated. “Not yet, at least. Lady Damiet expressed an interest in it.”
“Damiet would not know a picochet from a pitchfork.”
“You should encourage her,” Luna said lightly, “if she is beginning to think.”
“Children who think are dangerous. Not that Damiet would recognize a thought if she had one. But perhaps she is not so hopelessly like her mother. If she continues to express an interest, then teach her the picochet.”
“My lord, I can’t play it myself.”
“Then have the librarian teach her.”
“My lord—”
A flurry of notes checked him. “Enough of librarians and picochets. Do you want me to finish this without you?”
Veris raised his bow; Luna found her chords. Flute, viol, and harpsichord danced in the room, uninterrupted by the librarian, who returned, that evening, only to the memory of the Basilisk’s daughter.
Seven
Caladrius stood in the gardens of Tormalyne Palace.
He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again. He wore the librarian’s black; not even the moon, drawing stars like sheep across the meadows to the west, could see him there.
On a chain around his neck, beneath his shirt, he wore the fire-bone pipe he had taken from Reve Iridia.
In the hinterlands he had dreamed the pipe; in Berylon he had found it, an answer to his need, as if a monstrous head of mist and cold had loomed out of the hinterlands to lay that carved bone under his eyes. He remembered the warning: the words of the ancient tale all students were taught that had woven themselves into his dream. Fire burned within the pipe; it would strike where he willed it. And then it would strike him, find its way into his own heart and twist him into its deadly song of fire and ice. So the tale said.
He thought: There is no other song.
But he could not risk learning the truth of the tale at the moment he played the pipe for the Basilisk. He had been taught early on Luly that each tale had its grain of truth; the pearl that formed around it was layered by time and the bright, shifting words of the teller. A shy, unusual beast might have grown monstrous over many tellings through the centuries. The power in the bone might once have been no more than an enraged bard’s wish.
Or every word might say exactly what it said, a clear and unambiguous warning to those who travelled past the boundaries of the human world to look for such a monster, such music.
The birds in the Tormalyne Gardens led him along a hidden path to the tiny barred window behind a weedy sprawl of juniper. The bars had been forced apart. He thanked the birds and, blind now, dropped down into darkness.
Stone caught him, a clumsy pile of steps that led down into a puddle. He stood a moment, felt the cool air, smelling of moss and standing water, flow into the shape of something vast and hollow around him. He moved away from the window, found a stone wall to follow with his hands, that became, within a few steps, a massive slab of wood and iron. He pulled at an iron ring; the rotting wood had begun to sag on its hinges, crumble against the stone floor. He heaved the door level, opened and shut it as gently as he could.
Dark and stone closed around him, formed a small, windowless room. Listening, he heard the sounds within the register of its silence: the forgotten screams of pain and despair that had seeped into the stones through centuries of Tormalyne history. As a child, he had never known such a place existed beneath his feet. Now, he would have assumed it, if he had thought. The fire-bone pipe, it seemed, hearing its own music, had led him unerringly there. He felt his skin constrict, his blood quicken, as if he had trapped himself there, in that place where names and past meant nothing, and time stopped.
He drew the pipe out of his shirt. It was warm, porous like bone; in the dark, its carved holes glowed. Studying it, alone with the broken ghosts that Tormalyne House had made, he heard his own heartbeat again. The truth of the tale, he sensed, was in the tale.
He raised the pipe to his lips and heard a step outside the door.
He lowered the pipe again, with infinite care, as if the sound of thread shifting against thread might travel through the stones. Then he waited, motionless, breathless. The steps passed the door. Others followed quickly, a patter of rain on the stones, many of them, trying to be quiet, all passing the door closely, as if they too followed the wall in the dark with their hands. They trespassed, he thought, breathing again, shallowly. The night watch would have brought torches; they would have found no need for silence.
He stood still for a very long time; nothing else, no voices, no other steps, broke the silence. Finally he slipped the pipe back under his shirt, and pulled the door open, one grain of wood at a time. He heard the faintest of sounds, a moth beating against glass, a distant word. He followed it.
He found them all finally, in a huge chamber with groined arches of wood and stone, dimly lit by a couple of oil lamps. He recognized racks for bottles and kegs, though they were empty. Pellior House must have appropriated the wine cellar along with the music. They sat among spider webs on kegs and barrels, fifty of them maybe, all of them young, many of them younger than Hollis. He recognized the cob-haired piper from the tavern, who was arguing with a lean, red-haired young man with a thin, inflexible mouth.
Arms, they were discussing. The inept trapper who had spilled them all over the Tormalyne Bridge. Whom to trust. Whether to trust.
“We must wait, Nicol,” Justin insisted. However passionate, they kept their voices low, barely above a whisper. “He must be watching for us now.”
“He’ll be watching the Tormalyne Bridge. The Pellior Bridge is always crowded with people and wagons crossing to and from the countryside.”
“He’ll be watching all the bridges.”
“Then what possessed the trapper,” someone wondered, “to cross the Tormalyne Bridge when he would have been safer crossing farther down river?”
“It’s natural for someone coming in with a wagon load of furs from the forest.”
“How much did it cost us,” someone else asked dourly, “to be betrayed to the Basilisk?”
“He didn’t betray us. He didn’t have time,” Nicol said. “Why would the prince suspect Tormalyne House? He destroyed it. He left some life in Iridia House. He wouldn’t trust Marcasia House just because it allied itself with Pellior House during the war. Either of those Houses could be suspect. His own heir could be.”
There was a small silence. A young woman said somberly, “What about Luly? Griffin Libra called himself Griffin Tormalyne and went up there, as far as you can get fr
om the Basilisk without vanishing into the hinterlands. And he is dead. From fire on a rock in the middle of the sea. Justin is right. He suspects Tormalyne House.”
“The House no longer exists,” Nicol said stubbornly. “A few poor scattered scions. No one bearing the name was left alive. Why should he suspect us?”
“Because he is who he is,” Justin said. “That’s why Griffin went to Luly. Because he had some vague idea that Arioso Pellior has secret powers. I think he was right. And I think that it was no accident that Griffin Tormalyne was killed again by fire. Arioso Pellior has a long memory and he sees with killing eyes.”
“But with all that power,” a young man in the shadow of empty ale kegs asked perplexedly, “why would he fear a House he destroyed? Why make such a gesture across such a distance? What did he think Griffin Libra could do to him? Or even Griffin Tormalyne?”
“What would a basilisk fear?” Justin asked, and answered himself, “His own eyes.”
Nicol sighed. “Metaphysics aside, we can’t afford to wait, if we want to strike during the autumn festival. That’s the time he’ll be off-guard. If he ever is. We should bring arms across the Pellior Bridge. And we need to find the witness who ran before the Basilisk does. If he knows anything at all—if he speaks—”
“We’re searching, Nicol.”
“Well, search discreetly. We can’t let the prince know that anyone else has any interest in him at all.”
“It’s hard to look and not look—”
“Don’t speak. Just listen. And trust no one. No one.”
Caladrius eased back into the darkness. They would have set a watch somewhere: just outside the window, most likely, since no one had stopped him inside. He must wait until they left before he could. He found another open doorway, another room, that held moonlit windows and no secrets. There he slid to the stone floor and stared into the night, contemplating the unsettling image of the heirs of the ruined House raising what arms they could manage to get across a bridge against the Basilisk’s guard. They would be slaughtered. He quelled a sudden, futile urge to appear among them, name himself. He would not dissuade them; he would only give them something more to fight for: an illusion of the future. He turned the pipe in his fingers absently, feeling the subtle intensity of heat above its finger holes. A live thing waited within it to be set free, to sing. He thought of Justin’s question: What would a basilisk fear?
Its own eyes. Its own power. So a claw of fire had ripped across Luly, where the great bards were taught to find their own power within the hinterlands. The young man calling himself Griffin Tormalyne had come to Luly in a search for such power. Caladrius had considered him misguided then; now, holding such a song in his hands, he realized it was he himself who had been misguided. The Basilisk saw far more clearly the dangers in the hinterlands, and what he feared was the meeting of his enemy and all the ancient powers of the north.
We have met, Caladrius thought. Still now, he watched the silver rim around the window slowly darken as the moon set. They had gathered so carelessly under a full moon. At least they would not disperse under it. He would wait, he decided, and fight with them, when they fought the Prince of Berylon. He would play a song for every basilisk he saw.
They left finally, with as little noise as they had made entering. He watched for the darkest hour. Then he followed shadows through side streets and alleys. He sensed no turmoil in the streets: the children of the House had scattered like the stars before the dawn.
At his window above the tavern, he watched the music school until its doors were opened to morning by a yawning magister. He crossed the street, walked between the griffins into the halls. Even that early, someone played a harpsichord. He remembered the smells of flowers, resin, lamp oil. He lingered there in the hall, trying to put names to the various white-eyed heads who studied him, until someone living, dressed in black, came along.
They recognized one another; she smiled, surprised.
“Master Caladrius.”
“Magister Dulcet,” he said, relieved at the sight of her calm face after a damp night underground. “I have come to borrow books.”
“Veris Legere must have books on everything you need.”
“For the history of Pellior House,” he explained. “Not Tormalyne House. Where the music came from.”
“Of course,” she breathed. “I wasn’t thinking. Come in here. Take whatever you need.” She opened a door. Within the room, a young man kneeling to see a book on a shelf, flashed a look at him and rose abruptly. They stared at one another, while Giulia introduced them.
“We have never seen a bard this far south before,” she added, as if the bard were a migrating bird. “He is visiting for a while. The students are fascinated. Master Caladrius has come to borrow books on the history of Tormalyne House, to help him catalogue a collection of music.”
The bard murmured politely, got out of their way. Giulia moved along the shelves, choosing appropriate tomes and manuscripts, while Caladrius, blinking, gripped the edge of a table to keep himself from following his son out the door.
Eight
“Which is interesting as far as it goes,” Hexel said, “but I can’t get it farther than that. She is in love. He is in love. Lovers are only interesting to one another. He sings of love. She sings of love. What else is there to sing about?”
“Clothes.”
“Giulia, are you paying attention?”
Giulia stopped roaming Hexel’s cluttered study. She stooped to pick up a stray sheet of music on the floor. “Now I am,” she said firmly, trying to convince herself. She had not seen Justin for days, except very briefly, for moments snatched away from her duties. He did not complain; he, too, seemed preoccupied, but by what she could not guess. Another woman seemed most probable. But, she thought, I would guess that.
“What are you thinking about?” Hexel demanded. “You are not listening to me.”
“I was thinking of Damiet,” Giulia answered, which was another perplexing worry: Hexel knew her only by Giulia’s tales; he had not yet heard her. He grimaced.
“Bad enough she must sing my music, must she also occupy my study?”
“She wants me to find her a picochet, so that the librarian can teach her to play it.”
“Is she still in love with him?” Hexel asked promptly, on the scent of a plot.
“She watches him come and go while she sings. She sulks when she doesn’t see him. She asks his advice about her singing, as if I am only there to turn pages. She dresses for him, and is offended when he doesn’t notice.”
“And he?”
“He doesn’t notice.” She frowned, gazing absently at the manuscript sheet, which had a dusty footprint across it, and a message, not written in Hexel’s hand, in the margin. “He is polite.”
“He loves someone else.”
“I don’t think love is on his mind at all. He seems oblivious of Damiet’s state. He should be careful. Damiet Pellior rejected by the music librarian could be dangerous.”
“Her father will put an end to it soon enough.”
“Her father hardly seems to notice her state, either. He told Veris to have Master Caladrius give her lessons.”
Hexel, seated at his desk with a scribble of notes in front of him, rapped his pen impatiently on the paper. “What kind of a plot is this? It is completely useless. A love unrequited, a beloved who pays no attention, a father who does not care—Give me something to sing about.”
Giulia was silent, trying to think. The message on the music sheet resolved itself under her gaze: Magister Barr, I no longer find it possible to hide my feelings for you. My heart is in tumult. Only you can give me peace. Meet me… “Hexel—”
“I’ve finished a duet about their perilous and passionate love. They meet at night, in secret. They sing, they part. Now what?”
“Someone sees them.”
“His family or hers?”
“How much singing to you want Damiet to do? Hexel, did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Meet Cressida under the orange tree at midnight?”
“What Cressida? What orange tree? Giulia, try to keep your mind on my work. The families are feuding, the lovers must hide their love—How can it end happily?”
“Someone must help them,” Giulia suggested. “Him. Damiet does not need to sing much, but she must have scenes to wear her dresses in. They part after their duet, he climbs her wall and falls into the path of—No. Better yet, someone discovers them in her father’s garden. That way he can sing, and Damiet can be seen.”
“Who discovers them?”
“Her sister, who, being in love herself, takes pity on them.”
“Do we have someone who can sing the part?”
Giulia sighed. “Yes. But she’ll make Damiet sound like a goose with its tail feathers caught in a door. They can’t be in the same scene together. Perhaps a brother would be better. Or some wise servant.”
“What’s the point of their families being bitter enemies if all they do is skulk around in the dark? Where is the dramatic tension in a wise old servant? Giulia, you’re trying to keep this too safe.”
“I’m not—”
“The father sees them.”
“He’d toss her lover in the dungeon. How are we supposed to get him out? This has to have a happy ending.”
“You’ll think of something,” Hexel said briskly. “And I can write a sad, bitter, despairing aria for him to sing about love, life, loss and death, just before he is set free.”
“How?” Giulia demanded. “How will he be freed?”
“I don’t know—the families reconcile or something. That way we could have everyone sing at once, and drown Damiet.”
“But, Hexel, it would be easier if he is never in the dungeons in the first place.”
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