Descant! Where Vendanj had wanted her to visit. And where the man in her fevers had been from. She looked away at the wagon. Its load had been tied down with thick cords.
The Ta’Opin went on. “The instruments are old; serviceable maybe, but only to the hand that remembers how to play them. Your man around town wouldn’t have any idea how to go about it with any of these. As for the rest, moldy parchments and rotted books, little to interest a thief.”
“Still, to ride alone is risky,” Jastail commented as he settled himself comfortably with his mug.
“Right you are,” the wagoneer agreed. “But an escort would draw attention, and really it isn’t the kind of haul that needs extra riders. Besides, the legends of my people make average men wary, and dull men faint of heart.” He snickered. “And it’s my good luck that a smart man rarely takes to the road to earn his fortune.”
Wendra gave Jastail a vindicated look.
Returning her expression, Jastail spoke, his pleasant demeanor undisturbed. “To your good luck,” Jastail said, raising his cup in a toast. “Luck to have found us, and not the kinds of men you describe.” Wendra despised the way the highwayman relished the irony that the Ta’Opin couldn’t appreciate.
Jastail then proffered his cup toward both Penit and Wendra in a kind of toast. The boy smiled, and Wendra forced herself to do the same. Seanbea hummed a few happy notes as he took another drink of his tea. A comfortable silence settled over them for a few moments. Finally, Wendra had to ask.
“Tell me of Descant Cathedral.” She tried to disguise her interest, but she wanted badly to hear about this place that the white-haired man had spoken of in the cave.
Wendra immediately sensed Jastail’s anger. But right now she didn’t care.
“Ah, Descant, it’s a grand place,” Seanbea said. “There was a time when it was the pearl of Recityv, the very reason for it. The city lived for the music they wrote and performed there. It was the city’s heartbeat, the pulse of all Vohnce. Children like young Penit here are entrusted to the Maesteri, who teach prodigies the art and passion of song.”
Seanbea stood. “Its spires rise above vaulted ceilings.” He pointed into the sky as though he could see them even now. “Brass cupolas that once blazed like fire in the sun, now colored by rain, dress the cathedral like green crowns.” He stared a moment then dropped his gaze, as if looking at the street-level memory of the cathedral in his mind. “Its stone walls are dark now, and many of its colored-glass windows are boarded against vandals. It lies in the old district of Recityv, where rent is cheap and boarding houses stand next to brothels for convenience. The stench of goat pens can be smelled from its ironwood doors.”
“You’ve been there, then?” she asked.
“Been there, lady?” Seanbea said with good-natured incredulity. “I sing there.” He sat again, draining his tea in a gulp.
Penit’s face glowed. “I’ve done the skits in many cities,” the boy said. “But never in Recityv.”
The wagoneer looked across the fire at Penit. “You’re a player?”
“For a while,” Penit answered. “But only on the pageant wagons, never in the theater houses.”
“All the same,” Seanbea said, beaming. “What a chance meeting is this: a child of the stage, a brother to give me haven at his fire, and a woman—”
“Indeed,” Jastail cut in. “But we’ve traveled long today and I think—”
“We should travel together,” Wendra suggested over Jastail’s attempt to put an end to their camaraderie. “We’re faster on the horses than your wagon, so we can keep your pace, and it would be a blessing to hear you sing, Seanbea.”
“I don’t see why not,” the Ta’Opin answered.
“No.” Jastail spoke harshly. The edge in his voice silenced them all. She turned on him and found him glaring at her. The searing stare lasted a long moment. When Jastail realized he’d momentarily dropped his façade, the anger melted from his face. “My apologies,” he said. “We are going to Recityv, but we must stop at a friend’s. That will take us off the trail. I don’t suppose you can spare the time, my friend. Though I too would have liked to hear you sing.”
Seanbea held an affable expression on his face, but Wendra thought she saw concern in the set of his jaw. He took a lingering look at Penit and then at Wendra before looking back at Jastail. “I cannot, you are right.”
“A shame,” Jastail said, his control reestablished. He offered his cup to Wendra, and she fought the urge to push it back into his face.
“I’ve no stomach for it,” she said tersely.
I could snatch the boy and dash to the wagon. The Ta’Opin would defend us.
The thoughts pushed her to her feet, and she carefully eyed Penit, who watched the two men, his elbows propped on his knees and his head held in his hands. She took half a step toward the boy, but Jastail rose to his feet and cut in front of her. He took a quick seat next to Penit and wrapped an arm around him.
“We think Penit’s going to win that race,” Jastail said. He turned to the boy, his fingers riffling Penit’s hair. “Isn’t that right?”
Penit smiled, slightly embarrassed, then put his own arm around Jastail’s waist.
“He’s your boy, then?” Seanbea said, careful eyes studying them.
Wendra knew Jastail would register the curious way Seanbea eyed them as he asked. And she suddenly feared for the Ta’Opin.
“Closer than that,” Jastail added quickly. “We’re like brothers, right?”
Penit nodded with enthusiasm.
The Ta’Opin looked at Wendra. “Then you—”
“Will you sing with me?” she broke in.
Seanbea’s confusion seemed plain. He slowly shrugged his massive shoulders.
“What shall it be,” she asked.
“‘The River Runs Long’?” the Ta’Opin suggested in a distracted tone.
She could see that behind his eyes he still worked at the problem of the relationships among the three.
“I don’t know it,” Wendra said. “But sing it through once, and I’ll join you.”
Seanbea eyed her, then looked back over his wagonload once before putting his cup aside and clearing his throat. She heard a deep hum in his chest, like water on a whetstone to prepare it for use. Then suddenly, the concern that had tensed his jaw relaxed and the Ta’Opin began to sing. The melody settled low around them, as though hugging the earth and rising only as far as their ankles. It came softly, and soothed out in legato strains that flowed effortlessly from his throat. Wendra heard the refinement in his voice, the sweet richness and clear call of each phrase. He sang slowly, allowing each note a life of its own. After but a moment, Seanbea shut his eyes and followed the song where it led him.
Across the fire, Wendra glanced briefly to see Penit paying rapt attention, a smile of wonderment lifting his cheeks and arching his eyebrows. Jastail listened, too, but the deep resonance seemed to capture something different in him, leaving the highwayman to stare at things he alone seemed to see. The blank look of indifference she’d learned to hate in him hung heavy in his lids, drawing the lines at his mouth taut in an expression that bordered on sadness.
The melody slowly rose, coaxed by brighter tones from Seanbea’s voice. The tune quickened, and in her mind Wendra could see the river for which the tune was named. She could almost feel its current, visit its shores, and see the world reflected in its smooth surface. The melody didn’t inspire dance, but filled Wendra with a kind of hope. Not for herself exactly, but in general, the way spring brings hope after a cruel winter.
Seanbea moved into an elegant passage of music, calls from one voice in the song’s story, and responses from a second voice. The first rose like simple questions, a child’s questions about the river and where it led, to be answered by the second voice in a deep register, the voice of experience, of a parent, teaching the child the beauties and dangers and destination of the water’s path.
Wendra’s mind flooded with the image of a Bar�
��dyn standing over her, coaxing her unborn baby from her womb. The thick smell of copper filled her nose as she saw again the wide, unsmiling face of the Quiet standing at the foot of her birthing bed. She listened to her own unanswered cries for Tahn to come to her defense.
Seanbea’s song went on. It grew lightsome in the sharing between a parent and child of such a simple wonder as a river. But every note in the Ta’Opin’s song made Wendra’s remembrance more vivid. The beauty of the melody ached inside her, describing the child she lost to the rain and night, but proving the hope inherent in birth.
Then, without thinking, she began to sing. Seanbea’s song repeated with new questions, new answers, and deeper metaphors for the river. And Wendra wove her own harmonies of aching beauty to his lines. She sang without anticipating what she would sing next. Distantly, she was aware of Seanbea turning to look at her. But she sang past him, giving voice to the single cruelest moment of her life. Her lament rose up in a long echo like a loon’s call at dusk.
The image changed then, and in the Ta’Opin’s song-fashioned world the skies emptied rain into the river, somehow further darkening Wendra’s countermelody. She lifted her song higher, but softer, a delicate huskiness edging the timbre of her voice. She’d never sung like this before, but it seemed right.
The Ta’Opin’s melody sank to a whisper, falling to his deepest register, holding long notes with open lips to keep the river running while Wendra wove her dark tale above it. The rush and rasp in her throat sputtered and dipped like an injured bird, falling toward the river mud of Seanbea’s vision.
And when she thought her song was ended, when the pain of the voice given to the wound of losing her child might close her throat, a crescendo of song filled her chest, and reached a height of pitch she’d never imagined.
The bottom of pain.
Seanbea followed, in perfect time. Wendra’s chest vibrated with the powerful basso of his voice. But she ascended higher, a piercing note rising and turning in melodic groups until the moment of her loss became as real as this moment by the fire.
She sustained the note, the sound of it pounding in her head, making her aware of every beat of her heart, while she felt the explosive power of Seanbea’s pulsing rhythm beneath. Then she stopped. Seanbea did the same, anticipating the moment as though they’d rehearsed the duet. The brutal memory departed. And she sat next to the Ta’Opin, listening to the echo of their final notes into the alder and out upon the hard roads that had brought them both here.
When the sound was gone, and all that could be heard was the fire, she looked at Seanbea and saw anguish in his face like that of a father agonizing over a lost son. Had he seen what she saw?
She glanced quickly at Penit, relieved that the awe in his face remained. But she didn’t meet Jastail’s gaze. Quietly, on weak legs, she left the fire.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Hidden Jewels
Thousands apply every year to Descant. A handful are accepted. Of those, maybe one in a hundred has Leiholan gifts. And very few of those ever learn Suffering.
—Lettered response to the Randeur of the Sheason on the topic of Leiholan
Helaina slid through the shadows of Recityv’s worst slum. Fires burned openly in the alleys, where animals lapped at muddy puddles and nosed through refuse on the ground. The alleys reeked of human waste, besides. She held her shawl up over her face, but mostly to guard against being recognized. She’d risked her visit to Descant Cathedral to visit an old friend and ask a favor.
The Cathedral had once rivaled Solath Mahnus as the jewel of Recityv. Its marble gables and towering vaults had risen at the same time as the palace and courts. Now, it lay surrounded by a rough working class that scarcely noticed its remaining splendor. And the coarser among them tended to vandalize or deface the cathedral. Heavy boards had been secured against the lower windows, and its base showed the stain of men who stood against it to urinate.
She smiled sadly. All this came in an age when the League proclaimed that civility had rescued them from the superstition and myths of the past. Free of such burdens, apparently men’s civility amounted to pissing wherever they pleased.
Even on the symbols of things they once held dear.
She ascended the Descant steps and quietly knocked. A moment later, the door cracked open wide enough for a pair of eyes to see out, and surprise lit the doorman’s eyes when Helaina lowered her shawl to reveal her face. He immediately stood back and motioned her inside.
The door shut smartly behind her. “I wish to see Belamae.”
Helaina’s use of the Maesteri’s first name—Belamae Sento in full—startled the doorman. He would not have heard it often used.
“Of course, my lady.” The man bustled ahead, retreating into the dim halls of the cathedral and motioning her along.
Only a few steps inside, the distant sound of song rose as a hum emanating from the marble pillars themselves. Among the things she must discuss with Belamae, this song was the most important.
The doorman led her beneath great vaulted ceilings, until they came to an unremarkable door. The man knocked and bowed as he stepped back. Shortly the door opened, and her old friend with his snowy white hair offered his wide smile in greeting before wrapping Helaina in a firm embrace.
“You don’t come to see me often enough,” Belamae said.
“Nor you me,” Helaina countered. “But mine is the greater sin. Your cathedral is a more pleasant place to spend an afternoon.”
“Yet you’ve come after dark hour.” He nodded satisfaction to the doorman and sent the man away.
Together, Helaina and Belamae went into his brightly lit office and took chairs beside each other before a cold hearth. She relaxed back into the leather, made for comfort and not ceremony—a fine treat. And for a brief moment, she closed her eyes, concentrating on the distant hum, before coming to her purpose.
Before she spoke, Belamae said, “You’ve come about the Song of Suffering.”
The regent sighed, then nodded. “There are rumors, Belamae. And if they’re true, there’s likely only one cause. I know you won’t lie to me, and I need the truth.”
The Maesteri patted her knee, then stood and went to his music stand. There he fingered several sheets of parchment. He gathered them into a pile and sat once more. “I read it every day.” He handed the sheets to Helaina.
She took them in hand. “What is it?”
“The music that accompanies the Tract of Desolation.” He sat back into his chair. “The Song of Suffering. This is what the Leiholan sing in the Chamber of Anthems.”
“Your translation of the Tract is safe?” she asked.
“I would have come to you if it were not,” Belamae said.
Helaina grew thoughtful. “How long have you been its steward, my friend? Since long before I became regent, I think.”
Belamae laughed warmly. “I hadn’t even had my own Change. And I sang the Song for twenty years before I began to teach.”
“Responsibilities fall too much to the young these days.” The regent looked into the flameless hearth.
“If I recall, you were rather young when you were called to be regent,” Belamae said. When she looked up again at him, he was smiling. “Daughter of the wealthiest merchant family in Recityv. A year, maybe two, beyond your own Change, when the commerce guilds asked you to represent them on the High Council. What was it, a year later, when you took the regent’s seat? We were both young once,” the Maesteri said, wistfully, “both making far-reaching decisions at a tender age.”
Helaina nodded, thinking that she was here now, at not-so-tender an age, with more far-reaching decisions to share. “I’ve called for a running of the Lesher Roon.”
“That’s what I hear,” Belamae replied. “You’re filling your table in preparation for the Convocation. Wise of you. And you’d like me to sit again on your council, I’m guessing.”
“That’s only part of it, but yes.”
“The others don’t care much for
the opinions of the Maesteri, but I’ll return to my seat there if you wish it.” He patted her knee again.
“Belamae…” She hated having to say it. “I want you back on the Council not just because of Convocation.” She paused. “Roth is going to formally call for an end of the Song of Suffering. He’s gathering Council votes.”
The Maesteri returned a serious look that slowly warmed to a smile. Then a warm laugh. “Oh my,” he said. “What a fool. He and his League have been talking about that for some time now. Well, I’ll come be a vote, then. But rest easy, Helaina. We musicians aren’t a soft bunch. And if Roth really wants to square himself against Leiholan, well … let’s just hope he’s not that much of a fool.”
Helaina smiled back. Her old friend was unshakable.
“So now I must tell you the truth about these rumors,” he went on. “There’s word of Quiet in the land again. That’s at the heart of it, yes?”
“They’re not rumors. Not to my mind.”
Belamae uttered a weary sigh, and scrubbed his wooly brows. “The Song of Suffering is meant to keep the Veil strong. But the Leiholan who sing it are tired. And there are few of them left, Helaina. The gift to create with song doesn’t come as often to men and women as it once did.”
“But you’ve so many students here,” she said with fresh concern.
“And not all those who possess the ability are able to learn Suffering,” he explained. “And of those who can, only a few are able to endure the horrors it describes. The act of singing it takes a heavy toll. It’s a portion of the Tract of Desolation, for gods’ sake. And the song is long. Sung without pause, it takes seven hours. One Leiholan rests a full day after performing it.”
“Belamae.” She stared him straight, coming to the question that had gotten her arthritic bones moving late this night. “Do the Leiholan falter?”
Her old friend looked back. “Some days … yes.”
Empathy swelled in her for the keeper of the Tract, even as dread gripped her. “Then the Veil weakens, and the Quiet slip through.”
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