So that’s why I did it: I looked at Orfeo, and I whispered my secret: “My name’s Ylfing.”213
My voice was steady.
His smile widened. “Ylfing,” he said—my name. My name. My name, passing another person’s lips for the first time in nearly two years.
The world came alive.
“Some people call me something else,” I said. I felt wild. Adrift.
“Mmm,” he said, his voice almost a purr. “I like your name, if you do.”
“I do.” My grip had tightened on the glass, and I felt like something was about to fall on me. My breath was short in my chest, and I longed for nothing more than for him to say my name again. Again and again and again. “I said I was having trouble with names lately,” I whispered.
“And it’s complicated,” he said.
“Very.” I drained the rest of my wine. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Yes, certainly,” he said immediately. “So . . . what do you do?”
A bubble of harsh laughter burst out of me before I could swallow it. “Sorry. Sorry, I wasn’t—it wasn’t you, it was—oh, shipwreck,” I said, and refilled my glass, drained it again. “Orfeo,” I said.
“Ylfing,” he said, and my heart thumped once, hard, in my chest.
“Is it all right if we—stop?” I set my glass down heavily. “Stop pretending, I mean. I’m not okay, and you don’t seem to be very okay either.”
“Me? I’m fine,” he said quickly.
I looked straight at him. “You’re not,” I said. The wine was . . . oddly, it was making everything clear, clearer than I’d managed in years. I felt more Chantly in that moment than I ever had, and my eyes felt sharp—I looked Orfeo over, just as I’d been trained. I looked at him and saw him. I’d already pinned him as a flirt, but now I studied him, looked right into his soul, picking out things about him and piecing together specifics that had trickled out throughout the conversation: the way he was more comfortable buying the wine than having the wine bought for him; how he knew for a fact he’d make a subtle pass at someone three times but forthrightly only once; how he wasn’t accustomed to being flustered; his merchant family that took him on travels far from home and how he might not be in one place for longer than a couple months at a time . . . Flirt, I concluded, might have been too mild of a word.
“Orfeo Acampora,” I said, “you’re a bit of a rake, aren’t you?”214 And then, as he was opening his mouth with a desperate look on his face, I held up one finger. He said nothing. “No, that’s not quite right. You’ve been a rake until recently. And, like you said, you’re trying to be a better person now.”
“Have you been talking to my family?” he demanded.
“No. Tell me the long, complicated story.”
He laughed shakily. “You mean you can’t read that out of my eyes too?”
“I can’t read anything out of your eyes,” I said, which I suppose wasn’t quite true. He has very expressive eyes. “I like stories. Tell me.”
Orfeo caught the aleman’s eye and gestured for another bottle of wine. “Can we walk? Would you mind? I need some fresh air.”
“Sure, if you like.”
He let out his breath all in a rush and laughed again, steadier now, and shook his head. “I really am trying not to be like that anymore. I didn’t know it was so obvious.”
I shrugged. “I have training. I’m good at reading people.”
“Terrifyingly, amazingly so, apparently.” We collected the bottles of wine and went out from the warmth into the cool night air, and he put his arm around my waist as we walked down to the canal. We found a seat on some stone steps leading down to the water in the shadow of a bridge and huddled together in the dark. It’s midsummer, but the wind off the sea keeps the city cool, and in the night it’s just chilly enough for lovers.
“So what happened?”
“The long version?” he asked. His voice was . . . different, here in the dark. Raw, more vulnerable.
“Do you have anywhere else to be?” We’d left the glasses inside, so we were drinking straight from the bottles, passing them back and forth. “I don’t.”
He let out a long breath. “I’ll give you the medium version. What it comes down to is that I thought as long as I was honest about what I wanted, I wasn’t going to hurt anyone. Except, as it turns out, it’s not that . . . tidy.”
“Feelings,” I said.
“Feelings,” he agreed. “Dammit, I don’t want to regale you with all the selfish little things I did to people; I didn’t want a conversation with you to be like this.” I drank, and listened. We couldn’t even see each other, cast in darkness like we were here. “I . . . was making a habit of being honest about what I wanted while intentionally ignoring the idea that maybe other people’s wants might change or grow. And my family . . . noticed. They’d been noticing for a long time, but they always joked about it: Oh, Orfeo, should we even ask the innkeeper for a room for you, or are you going to find a bed yourself tonight? That kind of thing.” Then, suddenly, “Do you have siblings?”
“No,” I whispered. “I have no family anymore.”
“That thing you did in the bar, where you looked at me and saw right through me. Siblings can do that, and cousins if you’re close to them. They see everything about you, all unadorned. A few months back, we were on a voyage. Everyone was bored. We were just bickering among ourselves, keeping ourselves entertained, and my sister Giada looked over at me and said, Ah, but Orfeo doesn’t care about anyone but himself. He’d flee for the door if his bedmate invited him to stay for breakfast in the morning, and he wouldn’t even wait long enough to put on his drawers. He’s cold like that.” I handed him the bottle of wine, and he paused to drink. “That shook me up. I don’t think I’m cold. But I’d never seen myself that clearly before, until I was forced to.”
“Would you run away without your drawers if someone invited you to stay for breakfast?” I asked mildly.
He took a breath. “Yes. Because I’ve done almost exactly that. And I didn’t even think about it until Giada said that, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About how cold it really is to do that. About how many little hurts I’ve probably caused, you know? A thousand times I probably made someone feel just a little bit bad, or made their day a little worse, or spoiled the afterglow with a clumsy comment. And the whole time I was priding myself on my gentlemanly comportment as a lover. So now I’m . . . trying to be better.”
“How?”
Another pause while we both drank. When he spoke again, I could almost hear him mentally tearing at himself. “Well, sometimes now I ask people if they want to talk about things that are bothering them. And then I try not to fidget and squirm when they’re naturally and understandably emotional about things that are going on in a part of their life that doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’m trying not to panic when people want a little bit of extra care from me. I’m trying to be less afraid of giving a shit about them. That sort of thing.” There was a long silence between us. “What about you? You said you were trying to be a person again.”
“Yeah,” I said. We’d had enough wine by that point that it had dulled the ache.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he said, so deliberately again that I couldn’t help but laugh, and that set him off too.215
“What, are you hoping I’ll help you practice?” I said, bumping his elbow with mine.216
“Even rakes know it’s uncouth to only talk about yourself,” he said loftily, and I laughed again. “Go on, though. I told you all about my thing. It’s only fair. I shouldn’t be the only one admitting my flaws to a stranger.”
So I told him. I told him about Chants; I told him about growing up in Hrefnesholt, and meeting my master. I told him about leaving, barely more than a child myself, to follow my master-Chant across the world on my apprenticeship. I told him about what happened, the real story, because I didn’t have time to come up with a different one. I told him about the year and a ha
lf of walking next to Chant with the knowledge that I didn’t know him at all and that he would hurt me if it furthered his interests, and then about leaving Chant at last to be a Chant myself, and about another year and a half of wandering alone, lost in a swamp, even when I was here in the middle of a city.217
And the whole time, he sat quietly, and nodded, and listened. He even laughed at the funny parts, because there were funny parts.218 But he listened. And he didn’t expect anything. He just . . . listened.
And I realized that I was telling a story. I was telling him a story, and it didn’t hurt at all. It was just . . . me, prying my heart open with a crowbar and opening it to him, handing him my treasures, my memories, my self and saying Is this enough? Is this someone I could be again?
[[p195]]And when I finished, he said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you. It sounds like you’ve been hurting for a long time.”219 I nodded, drained. But not empty. Not raw, like I’d been before. I felt . . . clean. Like just saying all of it aloud had made a difference, had let me purge something that was making me sick. Like it had brought the summer’s king-tide rushing across the stinking swamp, and then it had pumped it all back out again. “You’ve been through hell, haven’t you? It sounds lonely.”
“It was,” I said.
He shifted a little, scooting closer, so that we were touching from shoulder to knee. “I’m glad I could come sit with you.” He handed me the bottle. “Sounds like you need another drink.”
I knew what I wanted, but I had to pull together my courage to ask for it. “Actually, I—if you don’t mind, what I really need right now is a hug.”220 His arm came around my shoulders and pulled me over, close to his warmth, and I let my head drop onto his shoulder. “Are you going to run away without your drawers if I start crying?” I mumbled.
He snorted. “Not right now. I’m pretty drunk. It’d be hard to scare me off right now.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and buried my face in his neck. He smelled of sea salt and black tea and, faintly, of roses, like he’d dabbed a little perfume on his neck that morning and it had all but worn away. He gathered me in close and rested his cheek on my hair and held me tight.
I don’t have the words. People aren’t meant to live as I’ve been living, all alone and untouched and adrift—even Chants shouldn’t live like that. I felt like I was crumbling to pieces and being rebuilt all at once.
It was . . . warm. Just warm.
I did end up crying after all, and he noticed before I did. He held me tighter, kissed my hair, said, “You’re all right now, Ylfing. It’s okay.”221
And when I pulled away eventually, he let me go, and stroked my cheek, my shoulder, down my arm, and took my hand. “A little better?” He tucked something into my other hand—a bit of cloth, a handkerchief. My fingertips caught on the rough lines of embroidery on one corner of it, and I dried my eyes.
“A little,” I said. “You’re not as bad at that as you think you are, you know.”
“Drunk,” he said cheerfully. “Nothing frightens me when I’m drunk.”
“You don’t need to be frightened when you’re sober, either,” I said. “I’m a Chant. Running off in the dead of night is part of the job description. I’m not going to have any expectations of you.” Never mind that I’m already half in love with him—that’s not really any of his concern unless he wants it to be. I took another drink, finishing off one of the bottles of wine. After a moment, I threw it as hard as I could into the canal. It splashed with a hollow sound, and we watched the ripples, just visible in starlight and distant lamplight, until they died out. “I don’t know what I want anymore, or where I want to go, or what I want to be. It feels like everything was taken from me. I barely know who I am now. Ylfing isn’t even my name anymore, not really. I was supposed to give it up. I’m only supposed to be Chant now.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because,” I said, struggling to come up with an answer. “Because that’s the way it is, that’s the way it has to be. That’s the sacrifice I made.”
“What did you get in return?”
My heart stumbled in its beating. “What?”
“When you sacrifice something, you’re giving something up in order to get something else. What did you get?”
I was . . . speechless. I opened and closed my mouth. “I’m a Chant now,” I said. I could hear how weak I sounded.
“Why did you have to give up your name for that?”
I rallied at last, at last. “Because Chants have to. My job is to go from place to place, and learn all I can, and listen to people’s stories and tell them to others so that the really important things in the world get remembered. That way they never die—people aren’t ever really dead as long as their stories are told.”222
“And what’s that have to do with your name?”
“Because I can’t be a person when I’m doing my duties. I don’t get to have an identity, because I might get in the way of the stories, or muddle them up.”
Orfeo squeezed my hand. “Why’s that bad?”223
“Because they’re important. They should stay untainted, the way I found them. My master used to rebuke me—I’d make up new stories about gods or heroes that I learned about, and he taught me that that wasn’t right of me. So I stopped.”224
“Ylfing,” he said, very gently. “That’s bullshit.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s not; it’s the way it is.”
“Yes, it is. You say you can’t be a person because the stories shouldn’t be influenced by your personness. Except they’re made by people. A story doesn’t happen without people’s influence.”225 He looked at me for a long time, as if he was waiting for me to respond. I had nothing to say. “What if you’ve got it all backwards? What if you can’t understand the stories as they deserve unless you are a person, unless you’re personing as hard as you can?”226
A shudder went over me. The tugging in my chest.
I closed my eyes. “I’m glad you came out here with me,” I said.
“So am I,” he said, without a hint of polite deception. I could hear his smile in his voice.
I’d told him my name, and the world hadn’t ended. It felt good. Orfeo had spoken my name, and I already felt closer to him than anyone else for the last three years. “When I was younger, I definitely would have noticed you trying to buy me drinks,” I said.
“Oh yes?” He was pleased, and he wasn’t trying to hide it.
“Yeah. I would have tripped over myself. I would have talked to you for hours and then gushed to everyone I knew about all your virtues and accomplishments.”
He squeezed my hand, rubbed my knuckles gently with his thumb. “I wouldn’t dream of stopping you, if flirting was something you felt like doing,” he said innocently, and I couldn’t stifle the bubble of laughter that rose in my throat.227
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I know how anymore. I forgot that too.” Regretfully, I made to draw my hand out of his, but he caught my fingers again at the last moment.
“Would it help if I started?”228
I swallowed. My mouth was dry. “Maybe . . . ? I suppose it depends on if you’re any good at it. Are you?”
“I’ve been told I can be terribly enticing when I set my mind to it,” he said.229
“I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your efforts to improve yourself.”
As if in answer, he slowly raised my hand to his lips, giving me more than enough time to pull away if I wanted, and when I did not, he kissed the backs of my fingers. He was looking at me—I could feel the weight of his eyes, even though it was too dark to see his face.230 My heart stuttered in my chest. “How did you like your flirting, before? Jokes and teasing? Poetry? Somewhere in the middle?”231
“Mostly I just threw myself at boys that I thought might catch me. And I told them a lot of things about themselves that I thought were wonderful.”
“I think you’re wonderful,” he said without missing a beat.232 Young Ylfing would have swoo
ned right off the steps and into the canal. I made some small noise, and he grinned against my fingers and kissed them again.
“You think so?”
“I do,” he said. “I think you’re brave for traveling all on your own. I can’t imagine that. I’ve been beset by relations my entire life, and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if anything happened to them. I think you must be very strong, and very determined, and very disciplined.233 And honest.”
“You’re guessing,” I whispered.234
“I’m drawing logical conclusions,” he said, turning my hand over and kissing my palm. “Just like you did when you looked straight through me and asked if I was a rake. Are you not honest?”
“My master always told me I was bad at lying. I guess that means I must be honest, then, yes.” I looked out over the water. “I don’t feel like I’m those other things though. I don’t feel strong or brave. I just feel tired. And I feel tired of being tired.”
“Tired of what, specifically?”
“Giving bits of myself away without getting anything back.”
“Oh. That does sound hard. Like trying to get water by scraping mud out of the bottom of a well.”
“Yes,” I said, turning back to him.
“Mmm. But it seemed easy for you to tell me everything about yourself. Unless I’m wrong and I missed something. You didn’t have to do that. I don’t want you to do anything you hate.”
“It was easier than the alternative.”
“What would the alternative have been?”
“I would have said, Call me Chant.” He hummed and took a sip of wine from the other bottle and offered it to me. I took it and sipped too, wishing in a silly romantic part of me that was stirring to wakefulness that we were sharing a glass instead, so that I could drink from the opposite rim. That’s a romantic superstition in Araşt; they call it “a kiss over a river,” a charm to reunite lovers separated by circumstance or bad fortune.
A Choir of Lies Page 18