Strange Sweet Song

by Rule, Adi

  The shape of a piano under a dustcover. Two chairs. No stacks of music.

  She tries the door, which surprises her by swinging open. She steps into the dimness and pushes the door closed against the gleaming snow.

  It’s a trick. President Martin lied to me. Nathan is here.

  No sound or light comes from the corner of the room where the spiral staircase descends into the lower tower. Sing pulls the dustcover off the piano. In what she feels is her memory, the image of him sitting at this piano is so clear. She sits on the bench and flips up the fallboard.

  The first and only key she depresses sends a tinny rattle into the shadows.

  This piano hasn’t been played in years.

  Sixty-five

  A VOICE OVER THE INTERCOM says, “First call,” as Sing steps inside the Woolly Lounge onto the red-and-gold carpeting. The orchestra and cast begin to file past her, back down to the stage area.

  The rest of Daysmoor’s tower was as bleak and lifeless as the topmost room, but her conviction that he existed only grew stronger with each echoing step. She needs to find someone who believes her.

  “Carrie!” She pushes her way against the tide of irritated musicians. Carrie Stewart stands by the water cooler, paper cup in hand.

  “Sing!” she says. “What’s up? Why aren’t you singing today? I have to go play, but catch me after, okay?”

  “No, wait!” Sing puts a hand on her arm, and Carrie pauses. “I have to ask you something.”

  Carrie crumples her cup. “Shoot.”

  “Do you remember Apprentice Daysmoor? Please think.” Sing bites her lip.

  “Apprentice who?”

  “Daysmoor. He lives—lived—in the tower at Archer. You and your brother thought he’d been here longer than everyone said. You said nobody ever heard him play.” She stares into Carrie’s eyes as though by sheer force of will she can make her remember.

  Carrie looks to the doorway. “Sorry, Sing. I don’t know any Apprentice Daysmoor. I wish I could help you out.” The intercom calls out final call, and Carrie smiles her good-bye—the same ambiguous smile the president wore.

  They think I’m losing it.

  A last spark of hope still prickling her chest, she hurries out of the lounge and down the stairs to backstage. The women’s dressing room is crowded since the chorus isn’t onstage now. She finds Marta at the far end of the room on a couch, reading a magazine in her Queen of the Tree Maidens costume.

  Marta looks up, branches twisting outward from her head. “Are you okay?”

  Sing sits next to her and speaks with a low voice. “You remember talking about the Felix with me, right?” Please.

  Marta puts her magazine down. “Yeah. What’s this about? Are you all right?”

  “Do you remember me showing you my necklace?” Sing holds out the teardrop pearl. “This necklace, only it didn’t have a pearl in it. It had a—a crystal. You thought it was a Felix tear.”

  “A Felix tear? Like, a wish tear?” For a moment, Marta seems like she might continue, but then she closes her mouth.

  Sing inhales. “Do you remember Apprentice Daysmoor?”

  The look on Marta’s face is all the answer she needs.

  I’m not crazy, she thinks again. She knows it’s true. But now she knows something else as well.

  Nathan is gone.

  A sadness consumes her so suddenly and so fiercely, her stomach lurches. How could she have forgotten him? She hates the Maestro, now more than ever. Not only did he take Nathan’s life, he took him from humanity’s collective memory. He took Nathan’s music from the world. He has never existed. A crow simply lived out its short life all those years ago, its heart broken because of its love of human music. No one ever knew.

  Sing’s heart has wanted to cry many times over the past two years, but her eyes and her lungs haven’t complied very often. But now she feels as though her insides are just an expanding void, a terrible, devastating nothingness trying to push its way out through her chest, her face, her throat.

  “Sing! Oh, my goodness, what’s wrong?”

  She feels Marta’s arms around her, branches and leaves scratching at her hair and face. Others are gathered, watching, mostly silent but occasionally cooing words of comfort. But she can’t stop crying. Nathan is gone.

  Yet through this violent, rocking anguish, she realizes with a strange, pricking clarity—this is what the Felix saw in Nathan’s eyes in that other, lost reality. This is utter despair.

  And she knows she must find the Felix.

  Sixty-six

  THE FOREST HAS LOST THE OTHERWORLDLY glitter of first snow and has settled into a dark, freezing grayness. Sing trudges up the mountain, acutely aware of the muted rustles and cries around her. She doesn’t know where the Felix lives, and part of her mind still insists that none of what she thinks she remembers was ever real. But the deepest part of her heart insists otherwise.

  Nathan. She clutches his memory.

  Maestro Keppler will never get the better of her again. He is dead.

  The snow becomes deeper and more biting as she ascends. The Felix will be near the summit. Durand told her so in Angelique—La bête se cache en haut. The beast hides itself above.

  The mountain isn’t enormous, but it is steep. She pulls herself up tumbles of snowy rock and pushes stiff branches out of her face. There is no path here—there are no paths anywhere in this forest—but she just keeps going up.

  Eventually, the trees thin and finally disappear. She can see the conservatory below, closer than she imagined. Dunhammond is already close to the clouds. It didn’t take much to reach the tree line.

  The low sun gives the mountain a golden haze but is not yet setting the snow on fire. The Felix probably lives not on the open summit, but in a sheltered place nearby. Sing peers around her. For the first time, she has doubt. Although the summit is smaller than she expected, there are many places for a cat to hide—even a big cat. She heads toward some small ledges. Their embrace would leave a cat safe from the elements, and the view from their shoulders is spectacular.

  It is the perfect place for the big cat to live. She should expect—or at least be prepared—to see it.

  But when she clambers down into the shelter of a small overhang, she gasps at the sight of the massive, otherworldly creature sleeping there.

  The Felix is bigger than she remembers, though in truth she remembers very little about the night she was attacked. The great cat’s fur is brilliant reds and violets, with tiny dots of white scattered throughout like stars.

  For the first time, Sing considers the fact that if the Felix chooses not to grant her wish, she will instead tear out her throat.

  The cat raises her head. She wasn’t sleeping after all.

  There is no point to running away, so Sing takes a step closer.

  The Felix rises, evening sun rippling her fur like water. Her head is level with Sing’s own. Then a low noise begins in the cat’s throat and pushes itself out past her yellow teeth. Sing can smell decay and bad meat.

  This was not a good idea.

  The low noise becomes a growl, and Sing tries to edge away. The Felix presses closer, however, not with feline slink but with menacing purpose, tail swishing. Sing feels her back scrape against the ledge and hardy bushes behind her. One strike from a heavy paw, one tear of her jugular, and everything will be over.

  The Felix cocks her ears and catches Sing in an unwavering gaze. Sing could not move now even if there was a chance she could escape this creature. Her hands shake. She remembers the black-violet eyes that now hold her, but the eyes in her memory are different somehow—colder, fiercer. These eyes, the shimmering nebulae surrounded by coarse, fiery fur, stare listlessly into Sing’s own eyes without judgment or wrath. Sing’s breath freezes in her lungs. Please, she thinks. Please help me. Please bring Nathan back. You must see my pain.

  The nebulae lock on to her gaze, burning her mind.

  And then, without ceremony or fireworks, a single tear
escapes the massive cat’s eye, slides over the red fur, and falls with a small warmth into Sing’s hand. She looks down, transfixed. The tear sits in her palm, shivering and glowing.

  A wish.

  Nathan once asked her what she would wish for, given the chance. She had to think about it then. But the wish in her hand isn’t filled with beautiful possibilities. It is a solitary lifeline to the thing she wants more than anything in the world. That is what a wish really is, she realizes.

  Then, to her amazement, a second tear falls into her hand.

  She stares at it, shining and pulsating next to the first.

  Two wishes? Why has she been granted two wishes? Is this Fire Lake after all, then? Can she have Nathan and her career?

  When the third tear falls, she finally looks up. The Felix is staring, eyes filling again, until a fourth and fifth tear fall into Sing’s outstretched hands. Then a sixth. A seventh. Sing watches her palms fill with glittering diamonds, twenty, thirty, a hundred, until the tears start overflowing onto the frozen ground in little glowing heaps. Enough wishes to grant Sing everything she could ever desire for the rest of her life.

  But she returns her focus again to the Felix’s eyes. And something happens that has never happened in the history of the world, though the Felix has stared into the souls of countless creatures.

  Sing stares back.

  She looks beyond the sheen of sadness, beyond the black-violet nebulae, into the broken heart of the great cat.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I … I didn’t even think about the fact that you lost Tamino.”

  The Felix’s gaze becomes more present now, and she seems to study Sing’s face. Sing lets her hands fall to her sides, tears scattering over the ground. She feels the last of them drip off the ends of her fingers and knows they are all gone, drops of water seeping into the mountain.

  “I can’t grant your wish,” she says. “I can’t do magic.”

  The Felix looks at her a moment longer, then slowly turns her head away and retreats into the shadow of the rocky overhang.

  Sing looks out across the snowy landscape. The sun is approaching the horizon, spreading a fiery veil over the quiet spaces of the forest.

  I can’t do magic.

  Only … only maybe that isn’t true.

  Didn’t she cast a spell that drew Tamino from the forest? There were no crystalline wishes or ethereal bargains that night. There was only a song. Maybe, now, a song will be enough.

  She starts to sing.

  She sings the first song that drew Tamino to her, Angelique’s most difficult aria. Her voice cannot cut through the vastness of the mountain sky, but it spreads and carries, drifting among needles and seeping under rocks. She feels the Felix watching her.

  The words haven’t changed, but she hears new meaning in them now. When he finds himself in the dark forest, he will know what it is to be alone. She always thought Angelique was imagining Elbert’s fear, but now the song feels like a warning. Prince Elbert had power and wealth, but no one to go with him into the dark forest.

  When the last note has died, everything around her is still for just a moment before the rustles and crunches of lives being lived return. She stares into the woods. So does the Felix. A small breeze ruffles Sing’s hair, icy but not unkind.

  Then, deep among the trees below them, a light appears. A little spark, golden and steady, which seems to wind its way in their direction. A jolt of electricity shoots outward from Sing’s heart. Could it be a piece of Tamino, coaxed out from the ether by the music he loves? The Felix emerges from the shadows, eyes fixed on the spark.

  But just when the spark reaches the tree line, it seems to drift away, as though it has lost its focus. Sing senses the Felix glance at her.

  He can’t find us unless I sing, she thinks, and starts again.

  This time, she sings the farfallina song. Before long, the spark finds its way to them and remains, hovering, near the shadowy overhang. The Felix watches it intently.

  “Ecco, ecco, a trovata. Bianca e rosa, colorata…”

  Other sparks find their way to the overhang and cluster there. She sings as many verses as she can remember, as more and more sparks arrive from every direction. They seem to bring warmth with them, and her voice grows.

  “Gira qua, gira là, fin che posa su papà.” As Sing finishes the last verse, she realizes she hasn’t thought of that final line in years—the moment when the little butterfly at last comes to rest on its papà. Her father used to hold her hands as he sang, making them flit here and there and finally come to rest on his heart.

  The sparks have gathered into a single bright shape that illuminates the ledges and the dusky forest around them. Sing and the Felix watch as the light gradually dims, settling into a solid form. Orange fur. Bright eyes.

  Sing exhales, letting her body fall back against the brackeny ledge. She is exhilarated. It was magic.

  The Felix rubs her head against the orange fur and licks the fuzzy ears. Tamino says, “Chrrrrp!” Sing catches his eyes, and he closes them. She feels thank you.

  Twilight settles over the mountaintop, but the two cats do not retreat to the shelter of the rocky overhang. Sing watches them turn and start to make their way up the ledge toward the summit, their dusky forms glittering rust and deep lavender. She knows she will never see them again. It is like the end of an opera, whole but bittersweet.

  But just before they disappear completely, Tamino looks back and closes his eyes in a last cat-smile. Then, the golden light still clinging to his fur expands, washing over the landscape like a great exhalation, causing the trees to bend and the snow to drift. Sing feels it pass through her with a warmth. She feels something change.

  She watches their vague forms disappearing up into the darkness. And she can’t be sure, but it seems as though once they reach the summit, they just keep going.

  Sixty-seven

  MARTA AND JENNY ARE SITTING on Sing’s bed. Marta holds Woolly, which, unexpectedly, doesn’t bother Sing at all.

  “Where have you been?” Jenny crosses her arms and scowls like someone’s tiny mother. “Do you know what time it is?”

  Sing would laugh if it weren’t for the genuine concern in Jenny’s face. “Eight thirty?” she hazards.

  Jenny glances at her watch. “Well, yes. It’s about eight thirty. Which isn’t so late. But still. Where have you been?”

  “Are you okay?” Marta asks.

  Sing throws her coat over her desk chair. She pulls the chain on her Tiffany lamp and switches off the garish ceiling light. “I’m okay,” she says. “Sorry to scare you guys.”

  “Marta told me you lost it earlier,” Jenny says.

  Marta inhales, eyes wide. “I didn’t use those words!”

  “It’s okay,” Sing says. “I had a hard day. Angelique and Fire Lake and the Maestro and … and everything. I’m sorry for freaking out.”

  Jenny plays with a bit of thread on the quilt on Sing’s bed. “Well, as long as you’re having a bad day, we might as well tell you—”

  “No!” Marta says. “I mean, at least wait!”

  Sing takes her boots off and throws them in the corner. “Tell me what?”

  Marta taps Jenny’s knee forcefully, tap tap tap. “Jenny—”

  “Ryan’s back with Lori,” Jenny says. “She sang well today, you know. At the performance. That guy from Fire Lake was talking to her.” They both look at Sing.

  Now Sing does laugh, despite her friends’ serious faces. It’s an unconscious reaction, her body jolting with sudden emotion that could easily have been a sob. Ryan. How ridiculous it seems now that she ever worried about what Ryan thought.

  “Don’t lose your marbles, Sing,” Jenny says.

  “Are you okay?” Marta asks.

  “I’m fine. Stop asking if I’m okay.” Sing finds her sneakers, one under her chair, one under the desk. Jenny and Marta are still looking at her. She tries not to think of Nathan, whom she alone in all the world still keeps. She think
s instead of Tamino, and the last cat-smile he gave her. “I’m fine. I mean … I’m going to be.”

  * * *

  Sing, Jenny, and Marta cross the quad toward the Woolly, feet crunching the snow in and out of the circles of lamplight. Although Sing’s body would rather sleep, her mind wants stimulation. Or distraction. They are too late to hear the finals of the Gloria Stewart competition, but the after-party promises to be good.

  Sing is secretly glad she won’t have to listen to Ryan play, though she can tell the others would have liked to go. Marta rattles off the names of the finalists in each category. Sing barely listens, her nostrils tingling with the cold, her woolen hat itchy against her forehead.

  “Wait,” she says, and Marta pauses. “Who was that last one? Keppler?”

  “Yeah,” Jenny says, a little out of breath from keeping up with them. “Amateurs Over Sixteen. Gave Ryan a run for his money, I’ll tell you that. My money’s on him to take it all.”

  “He was amazing,” Marta says.

  “Not—” Sing isn’t sure how to phrase it. “Not Maestro Keppler?”

  “Um, no.” Jenny’s voice is flat. “Maestro Keppler, besides not being an amateur, is dead. As of yesterday. You do remember that, right?”

  Sing remembers. But just for a moment, she wondered. She has been thinking about that last golden wave of light that Tamino sent out from himself. It felt as though the world changed with it, but she doesn’t know how. “Yes,” she says. “Sorry.”

  “Sing means Apprentice Keppler,” Marta says. “Yeah, it was him.”

  “Apprentice Keppler?”

  Jenny sighs. “Um, yeah. Your voice coach? Maestro Keppler’s nephew, or grandnephew, or whatever? You really have had a bad day, haven’t you?” They reach the broad steps of the Woolly. The light from the theater’s large windows deepens the darkness outside. Jenny pauses at the door. “Are you sure you’re up for this party? Did you hit your head?”