‘WE’RE NEXT,’ Menico said, nervously smoothing his best satin doublet over his paunch. Devin, idly picking out his earliest cradle song on one of the spare syrenyae, smiled reassuringly up at his employer. His partner now, actually.
Devin hadn’t been an apprentice since he was seventeen. Menico, tired of refusing offers to buy the contract of his young tenor, had finally offered Devin journeyman status in the Guild and a regular salary—after first making clear how very much the young man owed him, and how loyalty was the only marginally adequate way to repay such a large debt of gratitude. Devin knew that, in fact, and he liked Menico anyway.
A year later, after another sequence of offers from rival troupe-leaders during the summer wedding season in Corte, Menico had made Devin a ten-per-cent partner in the company. After making the same speech, almost word for word, as the last time.
The honour, Devin knew, was considerable; only old Eghano who played drums and the Certandan deep strings, and who had been with Menico since the company was formed, had another partnership share. Everyone else was an apprentice or a journeyman on short-term contract. Especially now, when the aftermath of a plague spring in the south had every troupe in the Palm short of bodies and scrambling to fill with temporary musicians, dancers, or singers.
A haunting thread of sound, barely audible, plucked Devin’s attention away from his syrenya. He looked over and smiled. Alessan, one of the three new people, was lightly tracing the melody of the cradle song Devin had been playing. On the shepherd pipes of Tregea it sounded unearthly and strange.
Alessan, black-haired, though greying at the temples, winked at him over the busyness of his fingers on the pipes. They finished the piece together, pipes and syrenya, and humming tenor voice.
‘I wish I knew the words,’ Devin said regretfully as they ended. ‘My father taught me that tune as a child, but he could never remember how the words went.’
Alessan’s lean, mobile face was reflective. Devin knew little about the Tregean after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily good on the pipes and quite reliable. As Menico’s partner, that was all that should matter to him. Alessan was seldom around the inn outside of practice-time, but he was always there and punctual for the rehearsals slated.
‘I might be able to dredge them up for you if I thought about it,’ he said, pushing a hand through his hair in a characteristic gesture. ‘It’s been a long time but I knew the words once.’ He smiled.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Devin said. ‘I’ve survived this long without them. It’s just an old song, a memento of my father. If you stay with us we can make it a winter project to try to track them down.’
Menico would approve of that last bit, he knew. The troupe-leader had declared Alessan di Tregea to be a find, and cheap at the wages he’d asked.
The other man’s expressive mouth crooked sideways, a little wryly. ‘Old songs and memories of fathers are important,’ he said. ‘Is yours dead then?’
Devin made the warding sign with his hand out and two fingers curled down.
‘Not last I heard, though I’ve not seen him in almost six years. Menico spoke to him when he went through the north of Asoli last time, took him some chiaros for me. I don’t go back to the farm.’
Alessan considered that. ‘Dour Asolini stock?’ he guessed. ‘No place for a boy with ambition and a voice like yours?’ His tone was shrewd.
‘Almost exactly,’ Devin admitted ruefully. ‘Though I wouldn’t have called myself ambitious. Restless, more. And we weren’t originally from Asoli in fact. Came there from Lower Corte when I was a small child.’
Alessan nodded. ‘Even so,’ he said.
The man had a bit of a know-it-all manner, Devin decided, but he could play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even have sounded on Adaon’s own mountain in the south.
In any case, they had no time to pursue the matter.
‘We’re on!’ Menico said, hastily re-entering the room where they were waiting amid the dust and covered furniture of the long-unused Sandreni Palace.
‘We do the “Lament for Adaon” first,’ he announced, telling them something they’d all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the sides of his doublet. ‘Devin, that one’s yours—make me proud, lad.’ His standard exhortation. ‘Then all of us are together on the “Circling of Years”. Catriana my love, you are sure you can go high enough, or should we pitch down?’
‘I’ll go high enough,’ Catriana replied tersely.
Devin thought her tone spoke to simple nervousness, but when her gaze met his for a second he recognized that earlier look again: the one that reached somewhere beyond desire towards a shore he didn’t know.
‘I’d very much like to get this contract,’ Alessan di Tregea said just then, mildly enough.
‘How extremely surprising!’ Devin snapped, discovering as he spoke that he too was nervous after all. Alessan laughed though, and so did old Eghano walking through the door with them: Eghano who had seen far too much in too many years of touring to ever be made edgy by a mere audition. Without saying a word, he had, as he always had, an immediately calming effect on Devin.
‘I’ll do the best I can,’ Devin said after a moment and for the second time that afternoon, not really certain to whom he was saying it, or why.
IN THE END, whether because of the Triad or in spite of them—as his father used to say—his best was enough.
The principal auditor was a delicately scented,
