Seraphina(56)

He released me abruptly and started tugging his lacy cuffs, making excuses: “I told you not to associate with him! What will it take to make you understand that he is dangerous?”

“You’re the one who’s dangerous.”

His face fell. “Music Mistress, I was just—”

“Punching my piper? Flinging me into the wall?” I shook my head. “You are off the program. Take your viola and go.”

He ran a shaking hand through his pale hair. “You can’t be serious.”

“I will fetch Lucian Kiggs if you’d prefer, and you can explain yourself to him.”

Earl Josef brushed past me, jabbing me in the stomach with his elbow and yanking the door curtain violently shut. He’d left his viola behind; I wasn’t about to call him back for it.

I turned to Lars, who was just getting to his feet. He avoided looking at me, surely as frightened as Josef that I had heard what I should not. I was ready to tell him everything when I heard Guntard in the hallway. “Mistress Seraphina! Your concert is falling apart!”

I threw back the curtain. “What?”

“Well, not yet,” said Guntard defensively, fidgeting with a button on his doublet, “but the sackbuts are almost done, there’s no one waiting to take their place, and no sign of you anywhere.”

Lars grabbed his instrument and rushed past me, up the stairs, into the wing of the stage.

Guntard was smirking. “That’s put you in a better mood, I hope!” he said, batting his eyes at me. He thought we’d been up to something back here, with the curtains drawn. Tuning each other’s lutes, as they say. Practicing our polyphony. Playing the crumhorn.

“Do you flirt with Viridius like this?” I said. “Get out of here!”


He took off down the corridor, laughing. He turned back to say one last thing, but at that very moment there was an explosion. The force of it pushed me back a step.

It was Lars. He wasn’t playing binou pipes.

For a moment I half fancied he’d somehow brought the megaharmonium with him, but in fact he was playing the Samsamese war pipes, the largest, fiercest member of the bagpipe family. Samsamese highlanders had invented the instrument as a means of threatening each other’s mountain enclaves; it made a sound like a mountain shaking its fist at those bastards across the way. The pipes were not intended for indoor use. Sound filled every cranny of the hall. I glanced up, cringing, expecting to see plaster flake off the ceiling.

It felt like someone was driving a nail into my ear.

I rushed into the wing of the stage, annoyed. Without thinking—without even closing my eyes or entering the garden—I reached inward for Loud Lad’s imaginary hand. You were to play binou pipes! This is too loud!

Lars stopped abruptly. The silence hit hard, a shock wave of relief, but he wasn’t finished playing. He had merely paused to shout: “I like it loudt!”

The brawling pipes sprang back to cacophonous life, but there was a smattering of laughter and applause, as if his statement had lent the performance some humor or at least some sense. The big fellow likes it loud, ha ha! He sure does! I couldn’t stay where I was, however, and not because the nail pierced my eardrum again. I rushed out, down the passage, and back into the dressing room whence I’d come.

Mercifully, there was no one there. I sank to the floor, my hand clapped to my mouth.

Lars had answered me. I had spoken to him just by thinking—no garden, no meditation, no avatar. Meeting my grotesques in person was spooky enough; this was something far spookier.

Or more exciting. I couldn’t work out which.

He sounded good from this distance; my appreciation increased with the square of the distance separating us—that is, in proportion to the volume decreasing. I leaned my head against the wall and listened until he’d finished, tapping my fingers along to “The Clumsy Lover” and “The Halfhearted Maidy.” The applause was muted, as if his audience was reluctant to spoil the sweet silence by clapping.

The next solo began. There were only three left before the big finale, the castle choir singing Viridius’s passionate arrangement of the Mirror Hymn. I was to conduct. I forced myself to my feet. Those ne’er-do-well choristers needed as much advance warning as I could give them. I threw aside the door curtain and ran into a solid wall.

The wall was Lars.

“It is one thing to hear music in my headt,” he said, a tremor in his voice. He stepped forward, driving me back into the little room. “But thet … thet was your voice!”

“I know,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Why does this heppen?”

His short hair stood up on his head like a boar-bristle brush; his nostrils flared. He folded his arms, as if he had no intention of moving until I had sufficiently explained myself. I said, “I have something to—to show you.” The room was not too dark, I hoped, for him to discern the gleam of my grotesquery.

I balked. Showing Dame Okra hadn’t turned out like I expected; I had no idea how Lars would react. And this room didn’t even have a proper door. Guntard might pop his head through the curtain. Anyone might.

Lars glowered defensively, as if he anticipated a scolding or a profession of love. Yes, that was it: he thought I meant to proposition him. He wore a closed expression, as if rehearsing a speech in his head, a way to let me down gently after I stripped off all my clothes. Sorry, Seraphina, I dondt like grausleiner thet can put their voices in my headt.