A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  Arenza held herself still and let it all wash over her like a river.

  The other apprentice, Lanh Chau, sat on the floor by Mistress Chant’s chair and provided musical accompaniment to her stories. He cradled the langeleik across his torso, his fingers tipped with pointed brass picks mounted on rings, which made his hands look clawed, yet strangely graceful. He used these to pluck the strings of the instrument, first softly like plinks of rain falling into a barrel, growing louder and more melodic as the stories mounted in intensity. At each dramatic moment, he rammed his picks across the strings with a sound like a jangling thunderclap.

  I hated it. I hated it so much.94 All of it, it’s just—showing off! The thing with the candle, and the stiff rituality of it, and the music. The music, particularly, is all wrong. It’s all wrong! This isn’t how it’s done! I’ve seen performances in playhouses, and they have musicians sometimes too—I’ve never liked it. It’s always been distracting. Artificial. Overwrought. How is someone supposed to listen to the story if someone’s blanging away at the same time like that? You can’t give your full attention to the music or to the story—it’s split in two, and neither of them deserve that.95

  And to be perfectly honest, it seems lazy.96 Music is pure emotion in a way that stories aren’t, and when you put a story to music, you’re forcing an emotion onto it. My Chant wouldn’t have liked it. The whole point of carrying stories around is that people react to them differently depending on where you go—what’s the point of that if you’re telling them how to feel with music?97 You’re just yanking them around by their feelings then. If you have something worth saying, you should be able to say it with just words. You shouldn’t need anything else, if you’re good enough.

  And yet there she was, cheating.98

  Once, my Chant and I were traveling, and we came through a village that had just been wrecked by a powerful storm. All the roofs had been torn off; many people and animals had been killed. It was terrible. And my Chant went to the middle of the village and sat on the debris-strewn steps of their ruined and rotting temple and started telling stories for the villagers. He held them in thrall.

  I don’t think Mistress Chant could have done anything like that.99

  Not without her apprentice plonking away on that damned langeleik.

  At the end, or what I supposed to be the end, she rose and bowed to the company amid quiet yet sincere applause.

  I felt tight all over. I hadn’t even been watching her for most of it; I’d been staring down at the parquet floor, keeping myself from twitching or tapping my fingers, keeping myself from reacting at all. I wanted . . . something. I don’t know how to describe it—you’d think I’d be better with words.

  When you think of wanting someone, that’s supposed to mean romance, or at least sex. This was decidedly neither of those, obviously, but it was still a kind of wanting. I yearned towards her, towards her knowledge and her assurance and her field of influence. I felt pulled towards her as all things are pulled towards the ground, as the tides are pulled towards the moons, as astronomers say the planets are pulled towards the sun.

  And yet my yearning woke a tearing anger in me, a flood of pain and grief—what was the use in yearning? What was I yearning for? That she’d take me with her? That she’d extend the wing of her protection over me as it was over her apprentices? And was that what I yearned for? To be her apprentice? To be hers?

  Too late for that. Already made my vows, already sank my homeland beneath the waves—a year and a half, it’s been. I can’t take that back, even if I want to. I can’t go home like that, can’t go back to something easier and more comfortable, where there was someone to rely on, someone to take care of me, someone to tell me anything I needed to know.

  And even if I could, she’d just cast me aside eventually too.

  I was full of grief and yearning, full of anger and resentment, and I wanted nothing more than to catch her sleeve and—and what? What then?

  I could do none of those things. The best I could manage, the only thing I could manage, was to catch her attention, to put myself before her and say Here I am.

  I wanted it, and I didn’t want it. I was dying of thirst and afraid of drowning.

  There were so many people here, so many people to whom I didn’t want to say Here I am. No choice, though. My tongue stirred before I could decide that I didn’t want to speak after all.

  “A very long time ago and half the world away,” I said, not loudly and not looking at anyone, not moving from my seat on the floor by Sterre’s knee. The applause hadn’t even quite died down yet, but I spoke, sounding calmer than I felt. “There was a”—Sterre stiffened, next to me—“a city made of bronze and glass.”

  Mistress Chant’s attention snapped to me, and the noise quieted; the few conversations that had started faded away again like the falling tide. She stood there, tall and still, and listened, and I was only a few sentences in when she sat, snapping her fingers at her apprentice. He handed the langeleik over to her without a word and she laid it across her lap, using her fingernails to impassively pluck a song out along with the story, matching her pace and tone to mine, building and releasing tension. It was like . . . dancing. Like she, indulgently, was allowing me to lead.

  She kept pace so easily because she knew the story, of course. I wasn’t telling her anything new. But she seemed pleased, and she was looking at me, and . . .

  Ah. Perhaps that was why her apprentices sat stiffly and betrayed no emotion. She’d trained them to listen without taking, without grabbing it from her and stuffing it into their mouths like spoiled children in a fairy tale. She did the same now—sat quiet but for her fingers dancing across the strings of the instrument.

  I had no sooner spoken the last word of the tale100 than she set the langeleik on the floor and began: “In the ninth century since the fall of the house of Cwlladda, as it is reckoned half the world away in Fyrndarog and Calabog, there was a great plague that swept across those green, quiet lands.”101 Sterre had leaned forward, and one hand had fallen heavy on my shoulder, gripping hard, but she froze when Mistress Chant began to speak again.

  The apprentice gave me a rather pointed look and glanced at the langeleik. When I made no move to take it, he brought it onto his lap again, as a child might eagerly pull a puppy close.

  So it went. When she ended,102 Sterre started forward again and nearly spoke, but I interrupted and began anew myself: “Many years ago, there was a pirate known as Xing Fe Hua, famed around the Sea of Serpents for his adventures and exploits. He captained a ship, the silver-sailed Nightingale . . .”

  And Mistress Chant just quirked that half-smile and played the langeleik. And when I was done, she handed it to her apprentice and said, “When the world was young and the gods were first scraping the mountains up from the flat earth and laying out the rivers like ribbons across the land, there was a hero named Namhala: the same Namhala who stole fire from the underworld, the same Namhala who invented the lyre and the barbat, the same Namhala who taught the birds to sing. This is the tale of the song that broke the world.”

  And then I: “A very long time ago and half the world away, the god Uion lay with a mortal woman and begat a son, called Tyrran.” Mistress Chant rolled her eyes at this one, and I suppose I couldn’t blame her—“The Twelve Tasks of Tyrran” is rather long and bland. It’s one of those stories that all Chants should know, simply because everyone knows it. Even if they don’t know Tyrran, they know a Tyrran-like figure from their own folktales. Still, it will hold an audience reasonably well. It’s dry meat and potatoes without sauce or seasoning—it will feed your hunger, but you won’t remember that meal a week from now.103

  And then she, keeping the instrument this time, rather than handing it off to her apprentice, opened her mouth and sang “Goblin Market Whiskey” and “The Maiden’s Reply to the Goblin Merchant.”

  I don’t know why I don’t usually sing or why I haven’t bothered to learn songs like I’ve learned spoken stor
ies—I suppose it’s simply because my master didn’t either. Maybe he didn’t need them. Maybe he thought they were too easy or too . . . something. Too late to find out what he thought, anyway.

  In response, I told a story about the Umakh, the nomadic tribes of the far north. I spoke of a boy I once knew called Syrenen, who taught me to shoot a shortbow from horseback, and about his mother, the famous falconer, who could ride all the way to the horizon, one-handed, with a golden eagle strapped to her other arm and held out to the side for hours and hours without tiring.104 Mistress Chant had opinions about this, I could tell—she was disappointed that I hadn’t followed her when she’d tried to turn us towards songs,105 but she seemed to accept it. She didn’t sing again, just matched me tale for tale, playing the langeleik to accompany me except for the few stories I gave that were personal memories, mine or ones borrowed from my master, one or two that he’d borrowed from his—the unsettling wonder-tales sailors brought back from long voyages far over the ocean where there was no land in sight for days in any direction.

  I was tiring a little, and increasingly annoyed at the presence of the audience, who would insist on clapping after every story and calling for another, as if they had any part in the conversation that we were having. They were quieter for her stories than they were for mine, and they’d liked the songs—a few times, someone quietly suggested that another song would be nice, but Mistress Chant and I politely ignored them and kept circling each other in words and tales.

  Here I am, I said to her again and again. See, this is what I’m capable of. See me!

  I suppose her demeanor of impassivity overlaid with faint amusement was what drove me to the next one. “I’m Chant,” I said, addressing the audience for the first time with a quick glance from the corner of my eye. “And she’s Chant. Perhaps you are wondering what a Chant is and does.” Her expression flickered, and I charged along. “A very long time ago and half the world away, there was a vast land in the southern reaches of the Unending Ocean, and it was called Arthwend.”106

  Mistress Chant stood up abruptly, smoothing the skirts of her long waistcoat and folding her hands before her. “I yield,” she said smoothly. “We have monopolized the attention of the room far too long, don’t you think?”

  The tale crumbled to ashes on my lips. Sterre surged forward again, seizing my shoulder. “Heer van Vlymen certainly has other entertainments planned, I’m sure,” she said, her voice a little too loud, a little too harsh. “But I find myself wanting to stretch my legs.”

  “Oh, a few!” van Vlymen replied cheerfully. “But a turn about the garden sounds just the thing to clear the palate—shall we all go out for some fresh air?”

  Sterre rose to her feet, pulling me up with her by my arm. “Just the thing indeed! Chant, accompany me, won’t you?”

  I followed her out of the parlor through the ornate Vintish doors to the wide paved patio that overlooked the garden. She turned back to me, but several others had indeed followed us out as well—she pulled me farther along, down the small flight of steps on the side to one of several cozy nooks tucked within the ornamental trees and bushes. “What was that about?” she hissed. “Where were those manners you supposedly had?”

  I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. She wouldn’t have believed me—she knows I’m not stupid. It had been a little rude, what I’d done: Our host had provided us with a light entertainment, and . . . well, Mistress Chant was quite right in that last comment that she’d made. We had monopolized the attention of the room. It was different for her, of course—she had been invited. Hired. I was just a guest, and not even that. A guest of a guest.

  I dropped my eyes. “I’ll apologize to Heer van Vlymen,” I said. “I got carried away.”

  “Carried away?” she demanded. “You embarrassed me in front of my friends and two dozen potential new customers.107 What must they think of me?” She pressed her fingertips to the center of her forehead. Her skin had grown florid with anger.

  “No one seemed to mind,” I said.108 “It’s not a disaster. I would have stopped if anyone was bored.” But they hadn’t been bored. I would have been able to tell. I would have felt the weight of their attention drop off my shoulders.

  “You will apologize.”

  “Yes, I said that I would.”

  “And you won’t pull a stunt like that again.” She dropped her hand and met my eyes. “Do you understand? Besides the social faux pas, you mustn’t ever let them know that you’re angry like that. It embarrasses us, makes us look weak. Reckless. Careless. Do you think people will trust me with their money if they think I’m that kind of person, or that my employees are that sort? I don’t mean to scold you like you’re a child, but you must follow my lead more carefully in the future—can you imagine how this would have gone if the party had been hosted by anyone besides such a close friend of mine? An outburst like that could have shipwrecked us.”109

  I closed my eyes. I could have been angry. Perhaps I should have been angry. Perhaps I should have argued with her about the sort of expertise a Chant possesses, the kind of insight I could offer her.110

  Relief isn’t quite the right way to describe what I felt in the wake of her words. I was too tired and heart-sore for that. It was more of an aching regret that I’d had to endure at all, for so long and all alone—and now here was Sterre rebuking me for doing something wrong, and instead of angering me, that made it all right. She was so controlled, so careful not to actually shout at me, but I could see she was angry, which meant she was frightened. Frightened, because she’d been counting on me to help her, and I’d stumbled. It mattered to her that I do it properly. It mattered.

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.”

  She let her breath out slowly. “I don’t know where else you’ve been before this, Chant, but there’s certain ways of doing things in polite society.”

  “Yes,” I said, nearly giddy. “I shouldn’t have let her get to me.”

  “Is that what happened? She got to you?”

  “I got to her too. We were trying to outdo each other. Sort of. It was an argument.”

  Sterre subsided then. “And you won. You won, because she yielded.”111

  The trickling thread of euphoria vanished. “No. Not . . . not really. She just wanted to stop me and that was the easy way to do it.” I glanced over my shoulder, through the branches of the bushes and trees. I could just see a corner of the railing around the patio, and the shadows of people milling about. I could barely hear soft conversation, and I wondered suddenly if Mistress Chant was going to try to talk to me—she’d objected to the Arthwend story, enough to interrupt me in the middle of it. She’d probably want to scold me too, but the thought of that soured my stomach.

  Sterre treated all her employees like family. She looked after them, kept them close. I was one of hers. Mistress Chant, on the other hand, had no claim on me at all, and so she hadn’t any right to scold, not like Sterre did. Sterre rapping my knuckles like this meant she was pulling me closer into the family; Mistress Chant’s would mean she was shoving me away, denying me my place.

  “To anyone else in the room, it looked like you won,” Sterre insisted. “Right?”

  “You’d know better than I,” I replied absently, still looking off towards the patio. “But the others weren’t angry or bored or insulted. They were curious. They wanted to listen to us.” I shrugged. “If it looked like I won, then that’s extra prestige for you, isn’t it?”

  “Even so, I won’t have you speaking out of turn like that again,” she said. “If you can’t be fit to be seen in public, then you won’t be. No more parties, unless I have your word that this won’t happen again.”

  “I’ll be good,” I said mildly, turning back to her. I found I wanted to please her. Didn’t care about the parties in the slightest, but I cared about that.

  Sterre gave me a sharp look—she clearly didn’t entirely believe me. “See that you are,” sh
e said. “There are no third chances.”

  She swept away. I stood in the cool dark shade for a time, surrounded by the greenery, until I heard voices approaching—party guests, strangers. People I didn’t want to see or speak to. People who would definitely want to speak to me, if they saw me. I ducked through the bushes and emerged on the other side of the artificial thicket, farther away from the house.

  I found myself among a stand of chest-high shrubs with a shallow pond on the other side, surrounded by the graceful curve of a cobblestone walkway like a moat around an island. I crouched beside and behind the shrubs, sitting on the stones that bordered the water, and settled in to enjoy the solitude while I had it.

  I was ready for it; I was willing. I reached out to gather a moment of peace and sweet stillness close to me, and . . . felt my heart grasping at nothing, like fingers catching uselessly at a wisp of smoke.

  This happens from time to time. There are days when I feel more awake and present in the world than I’ve been for years, days when maybe it doesn’t matter so much that an audience wants to eat me alive. There are days where I find enough within me to try, at least. I thought this was going to be one of those days—I’d shrugged off the presence of the audience in the parlor, I’d even been a little eager for Mistress Chant to listen to me.

  But it was that moment of giddiness, the ghost of euphoria I’d felt in the conversation with Sterre—it had faded away and left me plummeting, harder and faster and further than I’d expected.

  I dropped my head into my hands and let emotion wash over me, let it swamp me. No euphoria now. All I could think of was Sterre, and belonging, and . . . him. My old master. I hurt. Gods, gods, how I hurt. I hurt now, thinking of it.

  Grief. I was grieving. That’s what that was. I couldn’t put a name on it until just now as I was writing it down. It’s been grief this whole time. Three years of it. And now, only now, the dawning realization: My master didn’t make me a Chant because I was ready. He did it because he was sick of me. He did it because he wanted to be rid of me. I would have no place here if Sterre hadn’t decided that I did.