A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  Three hundred, four hundred—it seemed like they cared more about the price than they did about the amount of bulbs in the lot. They were quite happy to purchase a single bulb for eight hundred guilders when fourteen hundred for five had been too expensive.

  The tempest whirled around me, the noise battered into me like a gale, but I sold the futures contracts and, at last, fell back. There was no applause now—the people weren’t even paying attention to me by the end. I could see little knots of people fighting and bickering around those who had bought the contracts, begging for the winners to sell to them. It seemed some people were already regretting not buying the bulbs cheap when they could.

  I’ve done the math, and one guilder buys around a tenth of a pound of tea in Heyrland, or two chickens, or fifteen pounds of bread, or roughly seven and a half pounds of good cheese (depending on the variety). And some of them had bought one bulb—one single bulb—for eight hundred guilders. Eighty pounds of tea; sixteen hundred chickens; twelve thousand pounds of bread; more than five and a half thousand pounds of cheese. You could feed an army. Supposing two pounds of bread, a pound of meat, and eight ounces of inexpensive cheese per person per day (and taking into account the negotiations with merchants for discounts on such large orders), you could feed a hundred and fifty soldiers for a month for the price of what one star-in-the-marsh bulb sold for today.281

  I turned back to Sterre, breathless and exhausted and exhilarated, my skin still crawling, though not unpleasantly, with the ebbing tide of all that attention.282 She and her porters and assistants were surrounded by sheaves of paper in a drift on the floor. I walked across them, looking down. They were marked with scrawled numbers written large—the noise had been at times so loud and overpowering that they’d had to hold up the amounts to communicate across the hall how high the bidding had risen.

  Sterre had tears of joy in her eyes, and she caught my face in her hands and kissed my forehead soundly. “Gods bless you, heerchen. I knew you could do it. I knew you could.”

  Someone pressed a cup of lukewarm tea on me, and I drank it in a daze. It was thick with honey and the wholly unsurprising tang of lemon. “Are we done?” I rasped.

  “We’re done,” she said. She was beaming at me like I was her own child. “You can have the rest of the day off. And here—go buy yourself something nice.” She pressed a small purse of coins into my hand. “There will be more where that came from, heerchen, I promise you. Tomorrow’s payday, and you will certainly have a beautiful reward—a bonus.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and dropped heavily down the steps, brushing past the line of gawking merchants who watched me pass. I fought my way through the crowd outside and collapsed on one of the little oases of greenery that dotted the huge cobblestone courtyard at the back of Stroekshall, a little miniature park. This one had a slender tree and a generous swath of grass.

  It was not like anything I’ve ever done before, and I wanted to sit alone with it for a minute and think about it. Was it a Chant thing to do? Was it an Ylfing thing to do? Was it something in-between?

  I’ve been thinking about it all day and I still don’t know. It was like . . . nothing I’ve ever done before, like nothing my master-Chant told me he’d ever done. He’d spoken before audiences of hundreds, I know—at the very least, there was that time he was on trial for witchcraft. He was always so practical and prosaic and worldly. Even if he had spoken before thousands, I don’t think it would have struck him this way.

  This . . . this was transcendent. I’ve been trying to think of something to compare it to. It was nearly a religious experience, or at least what I’ve always imagined one would feel like. It felt like the whole world had turned to watch me, like the gods themselves had paused to glance over. It was terrifying. It was thrilling. It was more than I could possibly hold within myself, my lungs and stomach and heart and throat all brimming over at once.

  My master would have scoffed at me. He would have snorted and dismissed it, flicking his hand in the way that he did when something failed to engage him. He would have said I was building it up all on my own, that it was all in my head. He would have explained it away, made it mundane and unlovely, sucked all the goodness out of it until it was as leathery and desiccated as dried meat. He would have told me why I shouldn’t have bothered to feel anything.

  And maybe that’s all true. But, putting all that aside, what it comes down to is that doing things his way hasn’t been working for me. Trying to be him hasn’t been working.

  And lying there in the grass in velvet and silk and gold braid, with all the wealthiest people in Heyrland drifting past in little groups and talking quietly to each other while regular waves of half-muffled noise surged out of Stroekshall, I looked up at the sky and thought, with some relief and an equal measure of terror, Maybe I can still do this after all. Maybe it won’t be unbearable forever.

  And then Mistress Chant came up out of nowhere and said, “Now you’ve done it.” 283

  “Sorry,” I said automatically. “What is it that I’ve done now?”

  “That show inside. Those clothes. How dare you?”284

  “You were in there?”

  “I was.”

  I shook my head. I still felt foggy and vague—she would have had to pay money to get inside, unless she had a patron of some kind to pay for her, and considering how strongly she objected to my doing that . . .285 “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You’re not a Chant.”

  I sat up, leaned back against the trunk of the tree, and let my hands fall loose on the grass to either side of me. “Should I tell you my name, then?”

  Her face turned bright red with fury. “You don’t understand. You’re not taking this seriously—you’re not even taking yourself seriously. Don’t you have any shame? Don’t you have any knowledge of the power a Chant can have? No,” she answered. “You don’t. Because you’ve felt so sorry for yourself for so long that you don’t notice what you’ve learned how to do.”

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  “What were you trying to do in there? What were you playing at? The way you batted your eyes at the crowd and cocked your hip. You sold those flowers like you were selling yourself, just like you’ve been selling yourself for months now.”

  “I do what’s asked of me,” I said. “Sterre didn’t have anyone else who could have done it. I was good at it, wasn’t I?”

  “You don’t feel any remorse? You sold them trash and dressed it up as something valuable.”

  I felt something twang inside me, and I folded my arms at her. “I didn’t tell them to bid that high. If they think it’s worth that much money, who am I to tell them otherwise?”

  She spat at my feet. “You’re responsible. You knew what you were doing. You knew that a story makes a thing more valuable than it would be by itself. You gave those flowers a story, and you let it spread like a plague through the city. You did that. You just let two dozen people—”

  “They’re not mine. I don’t control them. I told them information, and it’s up to them what to do with it. It doesn’t have anything to do with me,” I snapped, and then I felt a cold twist in my stomach. I sounded like my master-Chant. I heard it in my voice and cringed from it. “I didn’t force anyone to do anything.”

  “Did you see what else happened?” she said in a low voice. “After people bought your thrice-damned flowers?”

  “I was busy,” I said. “What are you referring to specifically?”

  She knelt on the ground near me, leaning close—looming, more like. “You weren’t the only one selling futures contracts in the aftermath.”

  I sat up. “What? Who else?”

  “Those six people you sold the bulbs to—they’re already selling offshoots before their bulbs are even in the ground. And no one who bought a contract from your hand walked out of Stroekshall with it—they’d sold them along by the time they reached the doors. People were already second-guessing themselves for not paying more.
You made them that desperate.”

  “But they made money. None of my concern.”

  “People in there held a contract for less than three minutes, and then they got their money back and walked away with a fortune—twenty, thirty, fifty guilders more.”

  “Well, good for them. So it’s not a problem—it’s even less to do with me. Go yell at someone else.”286 I got to my feet and dusted off my clothing.

  “It’s gambling,” she said. She hadn’t moved. “You’re beguiling people into gambling their lives, their livelihoods, on these flowers. How can you do that in good conscience?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not for me to worry about. They can make their own choices.”

  And then I left her, and went home to the inn, and found that Orfeo had left a message for me with the innkeeper—he was out with his family at the Stroekshall auctions, and he hoped to see me for dinner later in the evening.

  He’d been there! I hadn’t seen him. He’d be able to tell me whether I’d done something bad—Mistress Chant has such a way of chewing on the back of my brain for hours and hours after every time she comes around to harangue me.287

  I was angry for the rest of the day, a grudging resentment against Mistress Chant and all her stupid opinions, and that she’d come up and spoil the afterglow just when I was starting to get a handle on it. My mood only slackened when I set eyes on Orfeo, right around dinnertime. He spotted me sitting in my usual place in the second-story gallery of the inn and came up the steps, catching me with one hand on my jaw and one in my hair, kissing me soundly before either of us said even a word.

  “So you were at the auctions?” I said breathlessly when he let me go.

  “Forget about me, you were at the auctions!” he said, all delight. He pulled up a chair to my table. “Why didn’t you say anything? I had no idea!”

  “Neither did I until this morning,” I said. “So I couldn’t have said anything until I was at the doorstep of Stroekshall.”

  “I knew you did translation work for de Waeyer, but . . . Wow. Ylfing. That was really spectacular.” He was looking at me differently, like a man who has discovered an unexpected treasure.

  “Was it? Someone was very rude to me afterwards.” 288

  “What! What for? What did they say?”

  “Ugly things. They—she. She’s a colleague of mine, sort of. Another Chant.” I chewed my lip. “I don’t know what to make of her. She was angry at me for taking that job, I suppose, and she thinks I’m a heretic and a blasphemer. She thinks I’m doing harm.”

  Orfeo looked rather taken aback and gave me an extraordinarily puzzled look. “Harm? How?”

  “She thinks the flowers are useless—which they are—and that I’m tricking people into wasting their money. She accused me of selling the flowers like I’m selling my body.”

  Orfeo went very still. “Sorry, who is this person? A colleague? How long have you known her?”

  “A couple weeks, at most. We’ve hardly ever talked.”

  “So she’s all but a complete stranger. And she thinks she can just walk up to you and insult you like that?”

  His outrage on my behalf was both gratifying and endearing. I reached out and ran my fingertips over his knuckles. “I guess so. I’ve been sulking about it all day.”

  He took my hand in both of his. “Put her out of your mind this instant. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You were splendid. Magnificent. I’ve never seen anything like that. You were practically glowing. And those clothes, those colors! Nobody could have taken their eyes off you. At least, I certainly couldn’t. I’ve . . . never seen anything like that. Are you sure you don’t have the Pezian gift?”289 And he let the golden light flicker over his hands as if in invitation.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “You were splendid,” he said again. “Calm and assured and . . . and brilliant. How many languages were you speaking? I thought I counted five, but—well, I don’t know how you managed to hear the bids in that din.”

  “Where were you standing?”

  “Second-floor balcony, on the same side of the building as the stage was but a ways down towards the end. We hadn’t even been looking at the bidding—we were only there to watch the trends. But then I heard your voice, and I was surprised, to say the least. I leaned out over the railing to watch you. I made my family watch too. We were all impressed; everyone was. We talked about you afterwards, and I bragged that I’d taken you out dancing last night.” He grinned. “And then they were impressed with that too. First time they’ve been impressed with me in . . . well, probably ever. Uncle Simoneto told me I could take you to dinner and call it a business expense, if I wanted.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “I swear I’m not!” Orfeo put one hand over his heart. “Here, I’ll prove it.” He leaned over the railing and shouted below: “Uncle! Uncle, come here!” He’d been sitting at the bar, flirting with Mevrouw Basisi, I think. When Orfeo called, he looked up, and Orfeo waved him over. “Come up here; you’ll want to meet my friend.” I’d seen Orfeo’s uncle the last few days, but Orfeo hadn’t introduced me, and I hadn’t felt the need to introduce myself.

  Orfeo’s uncle squinted up at us. “I’ve left my spectacles in my room, boy. Who is it?”

  “Come up.”

  He shook his head and made for the stairs; he didn’t recognize me until he was about ten feet away. “Good gods, Orfeo, you’d better warn a man. I didn’t know him without that splendid costume.” He came forward the rest of the way with his hand outstretched, and I got to my feet to shake it. He looks just the same as Orfeo, but eighty pounds heavier and thirty or forty years older. They have the same eyes, the same curls, the same cheekbones. The same tendency toward a sunshiny outlook on life. “Simoneto Acampora,” he said. “It’s a true pleasure to meet you.”

  “See?” Orfeo said brightly. “I told you I knew him.” I sat back down, and Orfeo leaned close. “I can introduce you as Ylfing, can’t I?” he whispered.

  My stomach lurched unpleasantly, a moment of vertigo. “I—uh—no. Chant.” I’d spoken before I’d really thought about it—I’d mentally reached for something solid to steady myself, and my hands had landed on that boulder I’d been carrying around. Too late to change my mind. I couldn’t unsay it. I made myself smile at Uncle Simoneto. “I’m Chant,” I said, and hated every letter of it.

  “Yes, I know!” he said. “Did my blockhead nephew really take you dancing last night?”

  “Yes, of course.” I looked curiously between the two of them. “Do you often tell tales about taking people dancing, Orfeo?”

  “Never in my life. My uncle is teasing me,” he sniffed. Simoneto laughed—big men like him often boom with laughter, but he was nearly silent, cackling softly into his beard like a man half again his age. “Uncle, tell Chant how good he was at the auction today.” It felt deeply wrong to hear that not-name from Orfeo’s lips instead of “Ylfing.”  “I said everyone was impressed, and he doesn’t believe me.”

  “Oh, yes,” Simoneto said immediately. “Very good. Strong work, I have to say—you must have the ears of a bat and the eyes of an eagle. Not to mention a silver tongue.”290

  “Quicksilver, surely,” Orfeo said, beaming at me.291

  “And a tailor of legend,” Simoneto added.

  “The clothes were just what my employer asked me to wear,” I said quickly. “I had no part in all that. And the rest, I was faking most of it,” I said. “I’d never done that before; I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do—as long as people were still bidding, it didn’t matter what I said, so I just said whatever sounded likely. Right?”

  Simoneto blinked, then nodded thoughtfully, a grin beginning around the corners of his mouth. “You’re a smart one, then, quick on your feet.” Orfeo looked back and forth between us. I could see some beautiful thought dawn on him, something that made him look joyful and, a moment later, hungry. And then, whatever it was, he went very still indeed, staring at noth
ing. Then suddenly he looked over again, his eyes flickering across me and then away, intense and thoughtful.292

  “I try. I’m trained to be adaptable.”

  Simoneto and I spoke for a time, and when the Acamporas began settling down for dinner, he insisted that I join them at their tables below on the main floor. Orfeo spoke up for the first time in several minutes to agree strongly, seizing me by the arm and looking at me imploringly so that I couldn’t help but accept the invitation. They introduced me to the rest of the family (including one young man I think I recognize—the one who was at Master van Vlymen’s salon, the one who embarrassed himself). They introduced me, of course, as Chant.

  The Acamporas are a gregarious bunch. They all wanted to speak to me, or tease Orfeo in front of me, which he took with an extremely funny air of dignity, but which must have bothered him more than he wanted to admit in front of me—I spotted him dragging a few of the perpetrators off to the side of the room to speak fiercely to them, gesticulating and shoving their shoulders when they laughed at him. If they tried to walk away, he caught them by their sleeves and dragged them back, or stood before them and blocked their paths until they rolled their eyes and agreed to whatever it was he was saying.

  They all called me Chant, and . . . and Orfeo did too.

  I found myself getting tired and upset more quickly than I had expected—maybe it was just the aftermath of the auction. I excused myself from dinner and came up to my room to write. They’re still down there now. It’s so early in the evening—I’ll probably nap and then go see if Orfeo wants company.

  All right, I suppose I won’t nap. Ugh! Every time I start drifting off, I sink right into that dream again. I can’t go five minutes without choking for breath and feeling like I’m covered in beetles or tangled in the roots of the flowers.

  I don’t understand why it’s pressing on me so, today of all days—the auction went well! I felt good! I felt like I’d done something right! So why is my mind throwing this at me so strongly? Why plague me with the flowers and the water, and the thick mud sucking me down, and something (a bird?) pecking and tugging at my clothes in the brief moments I can pull myself above the surface? Is that what it’s going to be now? More torments?