He should have seen it before. He shouldn’t have been so absorbed in his music that he failed to see or help. He began to hate himself for blathering on about his lessons while she waited on the prospect of a few plugs in exchange for being beaten while giving up her maiden box.
His music had gotten in the way. And yet even now he used it to find refuge from a pine overcoat and the anguish of people he loved but had rarely seen in four years. Refuge from his own shame.
Sometime during the chorus of his song, his grip loosened. His bow and viola slipped from his hands and fell, crashing against the wood scuttle.
Divad’s hands became still. His left forefinger had come to the end of the original scar. His right hand remained poised with the taper punch near the surface of the new soundboard. The mark was complete; as nearly identical as he could make it. The one gouge in the antique instrument that utterly belonged to him.
His leaving for Descant to study music had meant one less wage earner to support the family. He couldn’t have known the produce trade would wane, any more than he could have imagined his sister would take to the mattress to help earn coin. Jemma had never said a word. Not to him, and not to his parents. Her modest contribution had helped them continue to survive.
“If only I had been there,” he muttered to himself, “instead of here.”
Music, even the learning of music, had begun to mean something different after that. He no longer took it for granted. And he did his damnedest to put it after his family in his list of priorities. That had meant late-hour repair for fiddle players and the like, who were willing to pay a Maesteri to fix up their decrepit instruments. He’d started to become accustomed to the wee hours sitting in this very shop. And every plug or jot he earned made its way to his father, no matter how healthy the cart-trade was at the time.
As the rain continued to whisper beyond the window, he nodded to himself. The soundboard was done. But he didn’t, just yet, stand to leave. Instead, he remained in the company of wood smells and old spruce, thinking about smokiness.
SIX
THE SELLARI PRISONER sat bound to the trunk of a tall poplar tree. I’d asked Baylet for a deaf one, like our Shoarden men. He’d assured me this one could not hear. The man appeared to have been severely beaten—for information, I assumed. The blood on his face had dried in the cold night air, and his chin hung slack so that his sleeping breath gave out slow tendrils of steam in the moonlight.
I stood a ways off, considering what I must do.
The lesson in the score given me by Divad had become clear. Scordatura was a kind of music notation used for altered tunings, as the viola d’amore usually had. That particular instrument was rarely tuned in fifths. In fact, it might employ twenty or more different tunings, each one to suit the individual piece. The various tunings made it possible to play chords and individual notes that weren’t playable using conventional tuning.
Scordatura told the musician how to tune his instrument and where to put his fingers. But not what note to expect.
Some called it finger notation. On the page, the music appeared to be dissonant, filled with minor seconds. But because the strings were tuned differently, scordatura notation merely indicated finger position, the possible note combinations were unique.
That night I realized what scordatura could teach me about absolute sound, song with absolute value. That’s why Divad had given me this piece of music in the Chamber of Absolutes. Trying to make sense of the notes proved frustrating, until I let myself simply consider where my fingers would rest on the strings, not knowing which note would sound, but trusting that the right one would.
Like scordatura tuning, singing a note with absolute value meant finding the right place inside a thing to resonate with, regardless of the note. If I meant to produce music that could stop Shoarden men, it would have to be of the absolute kind. I needed to figure out how to resonate with some part of them even when they could not hear me. I needed to go beyond my training, and figure out where to play these Sellari, the song of them.
In a real way, I’d be playing them like a scordatura-tuned viola d’amore. And the song that came out of me would resonate inside them as though they were aliquot strings.
I gave a weak but grateful smile, thinking of Maesteri Divad. He’d been trying to help me, even as he’d tried to convince me to stay. Perhaps he’d known I would come here to fight, regardless. But I still had to find that Sellari string to play. And looking back at the captive, I decided how I would do it.
As I approached him, the frozen ground crunched beneath my feet, the sound of it loud in the night. The Sellari couldn’t hear me, so I tossed a small stone at his chest. His slack mouth slowly closed, and his eyes opened. He looked up at me, seeming to gauge whether or not he’d be beaten again. After a moment of silent regard, I allowed myself to become attuned to the figure sitting before me. To hear the
