Matthias Harlow
The Silver Spoon, Craftsmen Quarter, Maribor, Temeria
1253
Piotr talked the entire way back from the smithy.
This was not unexpected, he had talked the entire way to the smithy as well, a continuous and largely unprompted commentary on the city, its residents, its history, the relative merits of various establishments in the Craftsmen Quarter, and his personal assessment of the tourney's likely participants, which was detailed enough to suggest he had been gathering this information for some time and had been waiting for someone to spew it all to.
I had listened attentively enough, something told me the boy did not have a lot of friends to talk to, and judging by the slightly surprised quality of his gratitude when I responded to things he said with attention, I was right.
By the time we reached the Silver Spoon I knew the names of four of the tourney's confirmed entrants, the location of the best and worst pie stall in the market square, the identity of the guard captain whose breastplate Tholin was currently working on, and the reason the cobbler three doors down from the inn had not spoken to the tanner next door in six years, which involved a boundary dispute, a goat, and a misunderstanding so comprehensively absurd that I was fairly certain the boy had embellished it.
"And that's why Father says always get the property line in writing," Piotr concluded, as we came through the inn's front door.
"Sound advice, I'll be sure to remember it." I said.
He disappeared toward the kitchen with a wave, which I returned as I made my way upstairs.
The sitting room door was open. Syanna was inside, seated at the small writing table by the window with a cup of something warm in her hands, looking out at the courtyard below with a considering look in her face.
She looked up when I came in.
"How did it go?" she asked.
"Well enough," I said, setting my cloak over the chair back and sitting down across from her. "The armour is salvageable. Most of it, anyway. Tholin, the dwarven smith we found seems to know what he's doing, and he's not trying to pretend the breastplate can be what it was." I paused. "There was... a complication on the cost."
"That being?" she asked.
"He wants me to enter the tourney," I said. "In the armour he forges. Perform well enough in the qualifiers to be seen, and he'll charge me only for materials."
She looked at me for a moment. "And you agreed?"
"Wouldn't make much sense for me to say no," I said. "The alternative is paying him more than we have, which limits our options considerably going forward."
She set the cup down and was quiet for a moment, and I watched her in the way I had learned to watch her, the particular processing quality of her silence, the small signals of something being weighed.
She's got something she wants to ask me.
"Speaking of options," she said. "I have also been busy this morning."
"This why you decided to sleep in after stuffing your face?" I asked.
"I was not 'stuffing my face', some of us need to eat more then once a month." she said. "What I did instead was considerably more productive."
She told me about Myrrah, the market, the Gilded Magpie, and Uldren Holt. She told me about the soiree, the 'patron of the arts', their private residence in the nobles quarter, the invitation that would be delivered this afternoon.
What she wanted from me was specific.
"He asked if I sang or danced," she said. "I told him I knew someone who could. And he informed me to bring them tonight and he would arrange the invitation." She must have seen the trepidation on my face. "You play well, Matthias, more then well and this is an opportunity for us to step into the noble circles. People with money and connections and an influence that could be useful to us going forward, if you perform well, and you will, then at minimum you leave that room known."
I looked at her, she was not wrong on any of the practical points, which was characteristically inconvenient.
"You're asking me to perform in front of a room full of strangers," I said.
"I'm asking you to do something you love in front of a room full of people who are predisposed to appreciate it," she said. "Stop trying to find a reason to say no."
"I don't particularly enjoy being looked at," I said.
"You are looked at constantly," she said flatly. "At least this time they'll be looking because of what you're doing rather than what you are."
I leaned forward slightly, elbow on the table, a fist under my cheek, turning it over.
The honest truth was that I had been thinking about it since the pass, not performing specifically, but music, the particular ache of the violin under my chin in the cold mountain air, the way the stone had given the sound back to me differently than any room ever had. I had been playing for Syanna in the evenings, quiet pieces, functional in their purpose of helping her sleep, and I had been grateful for the excuse.
But playing for one person in the dark was a different thing from playing for a room.
And yet.
I had been a musician, or had tried to be. I had spent more of my adult life in pursuit of that particular dream than anything else, had practiced until my fingers bled and my neighbours knocked on the wall and I had not cared about either. I had auditioned for conservatories and been told I was technically competent and emotionally derivative and had gone home and practiced harder because the only response I had ever known to being told I wasn't good enough was to become better.
That person had not died in a hospital room in LA.
The violin case sat against the wall beside my pack. I looked at it. "How formal is the occasion?" I said.
Something in Syanna's expression shifted, a small controlled quality of relief that she was too composed to let show fully, but my eyes picked out easily.
"Formal enough to dress for," she said. "Informal enough that a performer isn't out of place. Holt described it as artists and collectors, people who appreciate the work."
"And the host," I said. "What do you know about her?"
"Wealthy," she said. "Patron of the arts, recently arrived in Maribor, known for hosting these evenings. Holt spoke of her with considerable admiration."
"Oh? " I asked.
The corner of her mouth moved. "He was not subtle about it."
"You can't judge a man on the whimsies of his heart," I said. "What's her name?"
She snorted at that, "Whimsies of the heart?"
"I was trying to be poetic, getting into the mood for tonight, now again, who's home are we going to?"
"It honestly never came up...he kept throwing the word patron around, perhaps it has something to do with the Masquerade theme of tonight."
I hummed in thought at that. An arts patron, collecting performers and artists, hosting private evenings. It was familiar in a way that did not immediately surface anything specific, which could mean nothing or could come back to bite me in the ass.
A city the size of Maribor in this period would attract wealthy patrons from across the Continent, especially before a big event, people who came for the trade and the tourney season and stayed for the culture.
It was an opportunity Syanna was right about that, a room full of wealthy people who appreciated music was exactly the kind of room that could establish a reputation and a set of connections that paid forward.
And I had the ring, whatever the evening held socially, at least I would not be managing the hunger on top of it.
"All right," I said.
She blinked. "All right?"
"Did you expect more resistance?" I said.
"I had prepared arguments," she said, deflating a bit probably having prepared for a negotiation that had not happened.
"Save them," I said. "You may need them later on," I looked out the window for a moment, a bird I could not identify was perched on the tree outside, picking at something in the leaves, a worm it turns out as I squinted at it. "What do we need to wear for tonight, you said something about a Masquerade?"
"We need to go shopping," she said.
I looked up from where I had been staring out window. "For masks?"
"You have one set of clothes," she said. "One. The doublet you've been wearing since Dregsdon and the shirt underneath it, which I notice you are also currently wearing."
"I don't sweat," I said a bit defensively. "It stays clean."
"That is not the point," she said. "You are a knight traveling with a noblewoman, and you have the wardrobe of a man who packed in a hurry and lost most of it in a river somewhere. It is, and I mean this in the most literal sense, disgusting."
"I don't think disgusting is quite—"
"You don't eat," she said, cutting across me. "You don't sleep, you don't drink you have no inn fees because you share mine, no food costs, no ale costs, no costs of any kind beyond horse feed and the occasional smithing." She looked at me with a sarcastic look on her face. "What exactly are you being so miserly about?"
I opened my mouth and failing to come up with a good counter argument, closed it.
Something...somethings not right here. She's making too many good points.
She was, frustratingly, correct again. The purse we were carrying was not inexhaustible but it was not as strained as my habits suggested, and the habits themselves were a holdover from when I had been operating on the thinking of someone who might need to run at any moment.
"Fine," I said.
She blinked, apparently having expected more resistance. "Fine?"
"You've made another reasonable argument," I said. "I'm not going to refuse a reasonable argument." She recovered quickly. "Good, Myrrah offered to take us to a tailor she knows in the merchant district. She says he does good work and doesn't overcharge people he thinks are wealthy."
"We're not going over 600," I said.
"I'm also going to spend my own money, Matthias," she said, rolling her eyes moving toward the door. "Now come along, Myrrah is waiting for us."
Myrrah appeared in the doorway behind her, like she'd been waiting to be mentioned. Her brother, Piotr, appeared in the doorway behind her.
"Are you coming?" I asked him.
"Shopping?" he said, as though I asked to muck out a stable. He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms. "No."
"Wisely done," I said, a bit jealous and stood up and reached for my own cloak.
The tailor's shop was in the merchant district proper, a fifteen minute walk from the Silver Spoon through streets that had changed from the working noise of the Craftsmen Quarter to something more considered. The buildings here were taller, the shop fronts more deliberate about their presentation.
The shop itself was called Fenwick and Sons, which Myrrah explained meant old Fenwick and his eldest, the younger two having gone into trade rather than the needle.
The bell above the door announced us into a space that smelled of good fabric and beeswax and a faint chemical undertone of what I could only guess as dye that had been worked with recently. Bolts of cloth lined one wall from floor to ceiling, arranged by weight and colour. A long table ran down the centre of the room, and behind it, on a low platform that put him approximately at chest height to his taller customers, stood a man of perhaps sixty with a forward lean that could only come from decades of labour.
His eyes moved across the three of us, they stopped on me for slightly longer than the others before they moved on to the only one among us he recognized.
"Myrrah Kaska," he said. "Your mother's order isn't ready until Friday."
"I know, Master Fenwick," Myrrah said. "I've brought customers."
He looked at Rhenawedd, looked at me again, and descended from his platform at slow unhurried pace.
"What are you after?" he said, still looking at me in a way that started to make me a bit self-conscious honestly.
"Something for a formal evening," Rhenawedd said, taking the lead with the ease of someone who had been doing this her whole life. "Tonight, specifically, for both of us."
He finally took his eyes off of me, and looked at Rhenawedd with a pinched expression on his face. "Tonight."
"Tonight," she confirmed.
"Alterations only, then" he said. "I won't build from scratch in a day, not for anything worth wearing."
"Alterations are fine, preferred actually." she said. "Show me what you have."
What followed was one of the more unexpectedly entertaining moments I had spent since arriving on the Continent, mainly due to the strange dynamic of two women with strong opinions and a craftsman who had strong opinions of his own, all three of them engaged in a negotiation about fabric and colour and cut.
Myrrah had, it turned out, genuine taste and the confidence to argue for it, which surprised me, given she could barely look me in the eye, though perhaps it should not have. A girl who had grown up watching every variety of traveller pass through an inn, reading their clothes and their mannersims the way her mother read a ledger, would develop her own sense of what worked and what didn't.
Rhenawedd had taste of the instinctive kind, the kind that came from having grown up around beautiful things and absorbed the principles of it without necessarily being able to articulate them. She knew immediately what she wanted and moved through the bolts of cloth Fenwick laid out with a decisiveness I had only seen shine through very few moments on our trip together.
She settled on a deep wine red gown with long sleeves and a fitted bodice, simple in its construction and expensive in its fabric, the kind of thing that worked because it did not try to do too much. The colour was close enough to her old dress that I suspected it was not an accident, though I did not say so.
"And him," she said, turning to look at me.
Fenwick turned to look at me with a similar expression, though his was more technical in character.
"Stand straight," he said.
I stood straight.
He walked around me once, presumably taking measurements by eye, which he appeared to be doing with sufficient accuracy that he only confirmed two of them with his tape.
"You're built wrong for most of what I have," he said, without apology. "The shoulders."
"I am taller than most," I said.
He ignored me. "I have a coat," he said. "Was made for a merchant who died before he collected it, Similar proportions, different colouring, but I think it could work with yours. It would need taking in at the waist and the sleeves letting out." He disappeared into the back room and returned with something draped over his arm.
Dark charcoal grey, almost black, well cut, with a simple standing collar and buttons of polished bone down the front. The fabric was a heavy wool blend that had a slight sheen to it without being ostentatious. Nothing on it that announced itself.
He held it up, for us to see, I honestly liked it, but the question was if it was appropriate for the soiree we were going to, Rhenawedd tilted her head at the sight of it. "Try it on."
I shrugged into it, and Fenwick began the process of assessing what needed doing, pins appearing from somewhere about his person and finding their places at speed that belied his experience."
"The wine and the charcoal," Myrrah said, looking between us. "They match without matching. The grey brings out the red in the gown without competing with it."
"Yes," Rhenawedd said, as though this had been the plan from the beginning, which it might have been. "Though he could do with some gloves."
"They come with the coat," Fenwick said. "Hopefully they won't be a tight fit. He'll wear a simple white shirt under. Nothing else. The coat is enough."
"You know, I am right here." I said.
He looked up at me briefly at my snide remark. "The alterations," he said. "Three hours, all in all it should be about 300 for the dress and 200 for the coat, and that's only because I want them gone, they're cluttering my shop, so don't even try and haggle."
"We'll take them, and we'll give you space to work." I said.
We spent the three hours moving through the merchant district at a pace that had nothing urgent attached to it. Luckily, Rhenawedd found a stall selling masks, simple domino style things with plain ribbons, their quality were a bit modest but they were functional. I could tell she found them beneath her standards by the slight pause before she picked them up, an evaluating look of someone accustomed to better, but pragmatism won over aesthetics and she bought the pair without comment.
We passed a cobbler's on the way back through and stopped long enough to solve the footwear problem. I chose a pair of well-polished leather riding boots, plain enough to be inconspicuous and quality enough not to embarrass the coat. Rhenawedd chose a pair of simple heels.
Myrrah led us to the bakery she had been promising since the market, tucked between a cloth merchant and a locksmith. I could not eat, but I carried the bags and watched the afternoon move through the merchant district.
When we returned, the alterations were done. Fenwick presented the coat with a look of satisfaction after I tried it on, and it being a perfect fit. He had let the sleeves out and taken the waist in and done something to the set of the shoulders that I could not explain technically but whatever he did resulted in the coat sitting correctly rather than fighting my frame beneath it.
I put the coat and the dress in their separate packages, thanked Fenwick, who accepted the thanks, and we paid and made our way back to the Silver Spoon.
By the time we arrived Piotr had taken it upon himself to arrange baths for both of us in preparation for the evening. I did not refuse. I had no particular need of it in any biological sense, I did not sweat, I did not accumulate the ordinary residue of human activity, but there was a mental relief that came from it all the same, the warm water and the clean smell of it, a small act of ordinary human maintenance that reminded me, briefly and usefully, of what I had been before all of this.
I was done in moments.
The shirt went on first, white and properly pressed, the kind of thing that felt like nothing to wear and made everything else look better for it. Then the coat, the buttons from the bottom up, the collar settling at the neck with the slight stiffness of new fabric that would ease with wear. I pulled on the gloves last, fine leather, a little tight across the knuckles as Fenwick had warned, but workable.
I checked the result in the small copper mirror.
The man looking back at me was wearing good clothes, good looking in a way I don't think I'll ever stop feeling wrong about, the more I looked the less normal my reflection seemed. The pallor and the eyes, the too-precise geometry of the face unchanged by any amount of tailoring. But slightly wrong and well-dressed was a considerably more navigable combination than slightly wrong and poorly dressed, and I am coming to realise Fenwick had understood instinctively that simplicity was the correct approach, that anything elaborate would compete with what was already there and lose.
I went to the sitting room, sat down by the window with my violin case, and set it on the table in front of me, and opened it.
The invitation sat on the table beside it, it had arrived sometime when we were out, delivered, addressed to Lady Rhenawedd Lysenne and Guest, on paper that was good enough to confirm the evening was a serious affair.
I lifted the violin and drew the bow across the strings softly, checking the tuning, the familiar response of the instrument reacquainting itself with the room's warmth. The E string was fractionally flat, the A string perfect, the rest somewhere in between. I made the small adjustments by touch more than sound, the way I had always done it when my mind was elsewhere.
Which it was.
What did you play for a room full of nobles?
It was a different situation from playing for Syanna in the dark. A room full of people who collected beautiful things and had opinions about music, probably having spent the evening developing expectations required something different. Not safer, or louder, or more technically impressive, different.
The kind of piece that met people where they were and then took them somewhere they had not expected to go.
I ran the bow through the opening of something slow, feeling for it, not committing to it yet.
The door to Syanna's room opened.
I looked up.
She had done something to her hair that two lifetimes worth of experiences didn't help in identifying, but which had taken the better part of two hours to achieve and had arrived at a result that looked, as these things always did when done correctly, as though it had required no effort at all. Dark hair pinned up at the back with hairpins she had likely gotten from the market trip, a few deliberate strands loose at the temples in the way that was either artless or very precisely calculated and I genuinely could not tell which.
The dress was the light red we had chosen at Fenwick's, and it fit correctly in a way that nothing she had been wearing since Caed Dhu had, the structure of it doing what good construction did, working with rather than against the person wearing it. She had found cosmetics somewhere, subtle enough that you noticed what they did rather than their presence, a warmth to her complexion that the road and the mountain had taken and which the powder and the careful line of kohl at her eyes had returned.
She was, objectively, very pretty. The kind of pretty that had always been there underneath the dirt and the borrowed clothes and the six weeks of starvation and the permanent defensive set of her features.
Looking at as she was, an expectant yet aloof look on her face was like, I thought, looking at a younger sister who had just come downstairs in her best dress and was waiting with a mixture of hope and defiance for someone to compliment her. "And how do I look?" she asked.
I set the bow across my knee. "Like a princess," I said honestly.
Something moved across her face, brief and quickly managed, she hid away before I could read it fully.
She smoothed the front of the dress with both hands, a gesture that had nothing to do with the dress needing smoothing.
"The mask," she said, picking up the simple domino from the table and fitting it into place, the ribbon tied at the back. She turned back to face me. "Better or worse."
"Different," I said. "More anonymous."
"That's the point," she said as she looked at the violin in my hands. "Have you decided what you're playing?"
"Not yet," I said.
"You have about an hour," she said.
"No pressure then." I said, and picked the bow back up.
She sat in the chair across from me and did not say anything further, and I played quietly into the space between us while the evening darkened outside the window and the city below moved through its own unhurried preparations for the evening. Eventually Myrrah came to get us, appearing in the sitting room doorway.
"You both look wonderful," she said a bit sadly, she looked between us for a moment, taking it in. "Come on then. I'll take you to the stables."
She led us down and out through the inn's back, talking as she went, mostly about the route and the likely traffic at this hour and the fact that the lanterns had been visible from the Quarter since before sunset, which she had noticed and which had been drawing considerable comment from people on the street who did not know what occasion warranted that many lights in the noble district on a Tuesday evening.
The stables were quiet. We were taking only Épine, the etiquette of arriving at a private soiree being what it was. A lady did not ride her own horse to an event of this kind. A knight rode his and assisted his ward. The fact that we could not rent a carriage was its own small commentary on where we stood financially, but the horse was quality enough that it would not read as an insult.
Myrrah stood at the stable door while we saddled Épine, her arms folded against the evening chill, watching with sad look to her.
"I do wish I could come along," she said, which came out more petulant than she had probably intended, and which she covered by immediately adding, "Please do tell me how it goes."
"I'll tell you everything, I promise." Rhenawedd said.
We left the Silver Spoon as the sun finished dropping behind the western roofline, the Craftsmen Quarter settling into its evening register around us. The hammering from the forges had gone quiet, replaced by the lower, more conversational noise of a working street that had clocked off. Lamps were being lit in windows. The foot traffic had shifted from purposeful to social, people moving at the pace of people who were going somewhere they wanted to go rather than somewhere they needed to be.
The directions on the invitation led us out of the Quarter and into broader streets, the buildings growing taller and wider as we moved closer to the center of the city, toward the part of Maribor that existed in the shadow of the Duke's castle. The roads here were better kept, the lamp posts more frequent.
I saw the lanterns before we turned the final corner.
Even from a distance they were remarkable, strung between the townhouse's upper windows and the iron posts of the courtyard fence and the trees that lined the approach, dozens of them, perhaps more, casting a warm amber-gold light that spilled out into the street and turned the cobblestones beneath them into something that looked considerably more magical than cobblestones had any right to look.
Other guests were converging on the gate from several directions, arriving by carriage mostly, a few on horseback, all of them dressed in their best.
The residence itself was three stories of good stone, well proportioned, with light coming from every window in a way that suggested every room was in use. From inside came the hum of a gathering that had been underway for some time.
We rode up and I dismounted, handed the reins to the young man who appeared at the courtyard entrance, and reached up to help Rhenawedd down with the formal care that the occasion required.
She took my hand and descended with the ease of someone who had done this a thousand times.
A servant at the gate took the invitation, examined it briefly, and nodded us through with a warm word of welcome. The courtyard opened before us and I stopped moving for a moment, taking it in.
It was not merely lit. It had been transformed. The lanterns overhead turned the courtyard air amber and warm, the light catching on the polished buttons of other guests' coats and the jewelry at women's throats and the condensation rising from glasses of wine carried through the cool evening air. Along the courtyard's edges, the entertainment had already begun. A pair of acrobats worked in the space near the fountain, their movements precise and unhurried, the kind of performance that rewarded attention without demanding it.
Beside them, a fire-breather was completing a long arcing exhale that turned the air above his head briefly and brilliantly orange, drawing a sound of appreciation from the nearest cluster of guests. Minstrels circulated through the crowd, their music light and social, designed to fill the air without occupying it.
People laughed. Glasses clinked. The smell of good food drifted from somewhere deeper in the courtyard.
I adjusted the violin case in my right hand, offered Rhenawedd the hook of my left arm, and led her toward the main doors.
The wave of quiet moved ahead of us like a wave.
It was subtle at first, the nearest guests registering our approach and pausing in the way that people paused when something caught their eye, the brief stall of a conversation mid-sentence, the glass that stopped halfway to a mouth. Then it spread, the way these things spread in crowds, one person's attention signaling to the people beside them that something worth looking at had arrived, and those people signaling to the ones beside them, and so on outward until a significant portion of the courtyard had found a reason to glance in our direction.
Not just at me, I noticed. At her too.
At us.
"Oh my," said a woman somewhere to the left.
"Who is that?" someone else murmured.
Rhenawedd's arm tightened fractionally on mine, stepping back into a posture and a composure she had grown up with and spent the last several months not needing. I felt it happen and said nothing.
The door attendant pulled the main doors open as we reached them, a small practiced bow, a murmured welcome, and then the interior was before us.
High ceilings, the kind that made sound behave differently. Good furniture arranged for conversation rather than display, the pieces chosen by someone who knew the difference between decorating a room and furnishing one. Art on every wall that could hold a frame, landscapes and portraits and two pieces near the far wall that looked older than the building containing them. The floors were warm wood, the kind that had been there long enough to have developed a colour of their own, and the rugs on them were the deep saturated reds and golds of things that had come from somewhere east of the Continent.
The room smelled of beeswax candles and wine and something floral I could not immediately place, a specific bloom I had no name for, sweet without being cloying, present without announcing itself. And beneath all of it the complicated warm layering of human presence, the composite scent of a crowd gathered in an enclosed space, which the ring managed down to a dull background hum rather than the urgent demand it would otherwise have been.
There was something else in it. A singular note underneath everything, alien and strangely familiar at once, like a word in a language you had studied but never spoken. I could not place it for the life of me.
Inside, the guests were arranged in loose constellations of people who had been here long enough to find their orbits, clusters of conversation around points of shared interest, a few individuals moving between them, making use of their gifts of social navigation. The lutenist I had heard from the courtyard was visible in the far corner, his music filtering through from outside.
The wave of attention followed us through the door.
Here it was less subtle. In an enclosed space with better light, there was nowhere for the stares to go except where they went, which was directly at us, and the guests were making only the barest concession to good manners in their attempts to be circumspect about it.
Conversations did not stop but they slowed, the thread of them losing some of their tension as the speakers' attention was divided between what they were saying and the couple who had just walked in.
Whispers carried in a room with good acoustics.
"The eyes—"
"—never seen anything like—"
"—who is she, do you think—"
"—Not from the city, by the look of the—"
"—extraordinary, both of them—"
Rhenawedd's posture did not change. Her chin did not lift in any dramatic way. She simply walked as though this were entirely expected, which I guess it had been, for most of her life, and which she had stepped back into with the ease of someone finding a garment they had thought was lost and discovering it still fit.
I kept my pace easy and my face neutral and let the room do what rooms did. We made our way deeper into the room, the conversations around us picking back up with the gradual naturalness of people who had decided to pretend they had not been staring and were now committed to the performance. A servant offered wine. Syanna took a glass with the ease of someone for whom this was simply what one did at these occasions.
I declined with a small gesture and ignored the part of me that said she was too young to be accepting wine at a private soiree as though it were water.
I looked around the room properly, taking it all in.
It was not what I had been expecting, these people were considerably more liberal than what came to mind when the word noble came to mind, which I was choosing to attribute to the atmosphere of the soiree rather than any conclusions about Temerian aristocracy. The sounds drifting from the other rooms were illuminating in a way I had not anticipated.
Laughter, certainly. Music, yes. And underneath both of those, the unmistakable sounds of people who had found something more interesting to do than listen to a lutenist.
I chose to ignore the grunts and moans I could hear, even with the ring on, and turned my attention to finding an alcove near the far wall where we could settle without being the most immediately visible thing in the room.
The lutenist was performing near the alcove I had picked out, his voice carrying well, a confident baritone working through something unfamiliar. His eyes traveled the room, reading his audience, landed on Rhenawedd, and stayed there with an interest that had nothing professional about it.
I stepped slightly in front of her and looked at him.
He looked back at me for approximately two seconds before finding something extremely interesting to study in the middle distance directly away from us.
We found the alcove and settled into it. The music continued. The room moved around us.
"Does it remind you of home at all?" I asked, the question had been sitting in the back of my mind since we walked in.
She snorted. "Not at all," she said. "The balls in Toussaint make this look like a village fete." She glanced around the room. "The music is adequate, the art on the walls is better than adequate, actually, the people seem..." She paused, searching for the diplomatic phrasing. "Enthusiastic."
"That's one word for it," I said.
"The balls at Beauclair were royal affairs," she continued, settling into the memory. "Three hundred guests at minimum, the great hall lit with thousands of candles, their light bouncing of the crystal chandeliers, my father's personal orchestra in the gallery, it was the kind of event where you rehearsed your entrance for a week and still managed to trip on something due to your excitement." She looked at the room around us with something that was almost fond. "This is more intimate though, I'll give it that, more honest, in its way."
"The sounds from the other rooms are certainly honest..." I muttered.
She let out a soft chuckle at that.
Before she could respond, a figure detached itself from a nearby cluster of guests and made its way toward us.
He was perhaps forty, dressed in an expensive fussiness that showed he was a man who had opinions about his own appearance and the budget to indulge them. His coat was embroidered along every available edge, his cravat tied in a style that had required either great effort or a very patient valet.
He arrived before us and performed a bow that was perhaps ten percent deeper than the occasion strictly required.
"I do beg your pardon," he said, with the tone of someone who did not particularly beg anyone's pardon for anything and was using the phrase as punctuation rather than apology. "I am aware the whole point of a masquerade is the anonymity of it all." He smiled. "But I simply could not help myself. You are, both of you, quite the most striking people in the room this evening and I find I am constitutionally incapable of allowing remarkable things to pass unremarked." His eyes moved between us. "And the accents. Toussaintois, if I am not mistaken? One does not often encounter Toussaintois in Maribor."
"One does not often have cause to visit," I said pleasantly.
He laughed, a short sharp thing. "Gregoryle Tethart," he said, pressing a hand to his embroidered chest. "Of the Koviri Tetharts, though we have estates near Vizima these days. And you are?"
"Sir Matthias Harlow," I said. "This is my ward, Lady Rhenawedd Lysenne."
Something shifted in his expression at the title, quick and almost hidden. His eyes went to Rhenawedd. "Lysenne," he repeated. "I am not familiar with the name."
"I would be impressed if you could identify every barony in Toussaint," Rhenawedd said.
"Baron?" Something shifted in his expression, a small smirk disguised as politeness. "Well. I suppose that would explain my unfamiliarity with the name." His eyes traveled her dress again, briefly, his shoulders straightened and his tone shifted to a more casual tone. "And the quality of the attire," he muttered, almost to himself.
From somewhere just behind his left shoulder, not quite quiet enough, came the murmur of the people who had been listening.
"A barony," someone said, in the tone of someone sharing a private joke. "Barely distinguishable from the peasantry, some of them."
"Toussaint baronies especially," another agreed. "Half of them granted for saving someone's horse from something or other."
Neither of them bothered to lower their voices by any meaningful degree.
I did not look at Rhenawedd, I did not need to. I could feel her go still beside me. Tethart's eyes returned to the violin case, to my coat and my face, where they lingered for a moment, a flash of something ugly beneath them.
"I confess," he said, recovering his momentum, "that when I first noticed you I rather assumed you were part of the entertainment." A small pause, constructed with some care. "The violin, you understand. And the attire is very fine, naturally, but it has a certain—" he searched for the word with a sadistic pleasure, "—practicality to it. The cut of a man who travels rather than a man who stays."
"We do travel," I said.
"Indeed," he said. "And those eyes." He leaned forward slightly, the wine giving him the courage for a closer inspection that sobriety might have discouraged. "Extraordinary colour. I have seen a great many eyes in my time but I do not believe I have encountered that particular shade." He tilted his head with the scholarly interest of a man who collected unusual things. "Forgive me if this is indelicate, but one hears stories about witchers, the mutations they undergo, and the resulting—"
"I am a Knight of the realm, not a Witcher." I said my voice going hard for the first time since he had gone on this crusade to embarrass me, just because the women he was flirting with had been making eyes at me.
"No, no, of course, I only meant—"
"I was born with a condition," I said, keeping my voice even and my expression coldly neutral, making clear that the line of questioning had reached its natural end. "It leeches colour from the body. The eyes, the skin, the hair. It is called albinism. Anyone well versed with the afflictions of birth would tell you the same." I paused. "The closest I have come to the Witcher profession is a contract or two on the road, as any capable knight might when the situation presents itself and a village requires assistance."
From somewhere nearby, the background conversation had caught up.
"Albinism," a woman's voice said thoughtfully. "Is that not what Princess Adda has? I heard she is as white as new snow."
"No no, she was cursed," her companion said. " Entirely different."
"Are they?" the first voice mused. "I always assumed—"
"It's not well known," a third voice cut in, quieter, more considered. "Children born with it are often thought cursed by their parents. Abandoned for it, most of them. You wouldn't see many who lived to adulthood outside of certain special circumstances."
A small silence followed that observation, Tethart took this opportunity to continue on in his attempt to one up us.
"And the violin," he said, recovering his footing showing he was accustomed to social reversal. "You are the entertainment after all, then."
"Ser Harlow is performing this evening as a guest," Rhenawedd said, stepping in with a bright and entirely genuine-sounding warmth that almost made me do a double take. "A personal favour to me. I thought it would be a shame to keep his gifts for the arts secondary to his martial ones." She smiled at Tethart a smile that courtiers' daughters learned before they learned to walk, the one that was all surface and no depth. "He is, as I am sure you will soon find out, rather remarkable. Though I confess I am biased, having had the pleasure of his performances on many occasions."
Tethart opened his mouth.
"Lady Lysenne!" The voice came from somewhere to our left, warm and and a little bit hurried, I turned towards it and saw whom I assumed was Holt. He was perhaps fifty, compact and sharp-featured, even with the mask, he was dressed well and sensibly. His eyes found Rhenawedd first.
"I almost did not recognise you," he said, arriving before us slightly breathless, "if not for your voice I would have been searching all evening." He turned to Tethart and bowed. "Pardon me, my lord. I need to steal these two away, I'm afraid, we are nearly at the interval and Edort...while entertaining, is no Jaskier, he cannot hold a crowd past the second song and our hostess is beginning to notice, we need a Bard to pick things up." He turned back to me, and his eyes went immediately to the violin case with the focused interest of a man who had been waiting for it. "Which I am assuming is you. A violinist? Or a fiddler?" He looked me up and down. "Well, judging by the look of you the answer is fairly obvious, "Uldrin Holt, collector and connoisseur of the arts."."
Then he turned to Rhenawedd and a smile filled his face.
"You," he said, "did not mention you were a Sylph." He pressed a hand to his chest theatrically. "I have half a mind to throw silver at you to check, half the people in this room have barely spoken to the partners who brought them since you arrived."
"Thank you again, for the invite." Syanna said warmly.
"Of course, " Holt said, with the ease of a man comfortable with his own reputation. He turned to me. "Now. What are you going to play? I need to know what I am introducing you as and I would rather not improvise."
I opened my mouth.
"Something we have not heard before, I hope." Tethart's voice, coming from somewhere just behind Holt's left shoulder, had recovered its confidence. He stepped forward back into the circle we had cut him from. "Given the way Lady Lysenne speaks of your playing I trust you will not disappoint us with something pedestrian. It would be unfortunate to have raised expectations so thoroughly and then failed to meet them."
He said it pleasantly, that was the craft of it, the smile never wavered and the tone stayed conversational and the words were structured so that any response could be reframed as defensiveness.
I looked at him for a moment before turning to Holt.
"Something they have not heard before..." I said. "That I can promise."
Holt's eyes brightened at that, I decided then that I liked the man.
Tethart's smile held, but something behind it had gone slightly flat. "Wonderful," he said.
Edort, the lutenist, finished on a flourish that drew precisely the response it deserved.
Polite applause rippled through the hall, a few appreciative nods and several murmurs of approval. The sort of reception granted to a skilled professional who had delivered exactly what had been expected of him.
Edort bowed with a practiced grace and stepped down from the platform the conversations resumed almost immediately. Uldrin appeared beside me before the applause had entirely died away.
"Well," he said, rubbing his hands together. "I believe that makes the stage yours." His eyes flicked toward the violin case. "What are you playing?"
I closed the latches. "A song."
His expression suggested he had hoped for more than that. "What song?"
"You are introducing me, Uldrin, get them excited," I stood. "I shall introduce the song."
He stared at me for a moment, then a slow grin spread across his face.
"You know," he said, "I think I might like you, Ser, please do not make a fool out of us both."
"I will keep that in mind." I said as he broke away from us.
Uldrin straightened his coat and made his way toward the platform.
The conversations gradually softened as people noticed his approach. He did not hold any formal authority over the room, but it seemed that Uldrin possessed a rare gift: the ability to convince people that whatever he was about to say was worth hearing.
He stepped onto the small raised platform and waited, not long after the room settled. "My friends," he announced, his voice carried easily through the hall. "I must once again beg your indulgence."
A few chuckles answered him. "We have spent the evening enjoying the considerable talents of merchants, musicians, diplomats, scholars, and at least three men who have assured me they could have become poets had they not possessed the good fortune to inherit land."
That earned a louder laugh. Uldrin smiled. "However." He gestured toward me. "There remains one guest whose abilities have been discussed far more than they have been demonstrated."
The attention of the room shifted. "I was informed, repeatedly and with increasing levels of enthusiasm, that Sir Matthias Harlow of Toussaint possesses a talent for music."
His gaze drifted briefly toward Rhenawedd. "Certain individuals may have oversold the matter." He was good at this, I couldn't help but note. "Fortunately for all of us, we are about to discover the truth."
More laughter at which Uldrin spread his hands.
"Whether this ends in admiration or embarrassment, I trust you will all agree it is worth witnessing." He stepped aside with a flourish. "My friends." The grin widened. "Sir Matthias."
The applause began politely, then grew as people joined in. I picked up the violin properly and walked toward the platform.
The walk was perhaps fifteen feet.
It was long enough for a memory to claw it's way to the surface of my conscience, which it did without my permission, I had been twenty two.
A recital, technically, the end of year performance for the advanced students at the music school I had been attending on my parent's life insurance payout.
It was not a large venue some forty seats, maybe fifty, filled mostly with the families of the other performers and a handful of faculty who were there. I had stood in the wings for eleven minutes before my name was called.
I remembered those eleven minutes as if they were a recent occurrence. The feeling of the curtain I had been holding, the smell of the stage, dust and old wood; the sound of the performer before me finishing to a modest applause.
And then my name, and the curtain, and the light.
I had been so frightened that my bow arm shook for the first eight bars. It wasn't a huge mistake, I did not think, or at least no one had mentioned it afterward, but I had felt it, the tremor in the wrist that came from the heart beating too fast and the body translating the adrenaline into the only motion available to it.
I had been terrified, but as I stepped onto the platform now and looked out at the assembled guests of Maribors aristocracy, thirty odd people in their best clothes with their wine and their expectations, I waited for that same fear to arrive.
It did not.
I stood in the light of the candles and looked at the room and felt, with some surprise, essentially nothing. I wasn't even calm, or projecting the performed composure of someone suppressing something. Simply the absence of the thing I had been bracing for. The heart that did not beat could not race. The stomach that processed nothing could not drop. The biological machinery of stage fright had been removed along with everything else, and what remained was something closer to clarity than composure.
Which was, I thought, both a gift and a small loss.
Fear had always been useful. The eleven minutes in the wings, awful as they had been, had also been the last time before a performance that I was entirely certain the music mattered to me. Fear was proof of investment. Standing here without it felt like performing in a room with no walls, technically easier and somehow emptier for it.
I stood for a moment without raising the bow, and thought about what I was going to play.
The plan had been simple enough when I had formed it in the alcove. A technically demanding piece, something that demonstrated precision and control, the kind of playing that earned respect from people who understood music and impressed people who did not. Clean, effective, sufficient. The musical equivalent of answering a question accurately.
Then Tethart had opened his mouth.
Something we have not heard before. The way Lady Lysenne speaks of your playing.
I looked at Rhenawedd's face across the room. She had said remarkably little since Uldrin had introduced me, which from her was its own form of pressure. She had put her credibility behind this. She had told a room full of strangers that I was worth their time, and she had done it without asking me first, which was either tremendous confidence or tremendous presumption and I had not yet decided which.
Either way, technically proficient was not going to be what would bring the house down.
I thought about what Uldrin had said about Edort. 'He is no Jaskier, he cannot hold a crowd.' And I thought about what made Dandelion, Dandelion. The man was accomplished but he was not extraordinary by the standards of trained musicians.
What he was, was a storyteller. Every song he wrote had a shape to it, a beginning and a middle and a place it was going, and you followed it the way you followed a person through an unfamiliar city, because the guide seemed to know where they were headed and you wanted to find out.
A good song was a story.
Less musician. More bard.
I looked at the crowd, properly, for the first time since stepping onto the platform. The woman near the front who had been talking to her companion and had stopped mid-sentence when the applause died. The older man to the right who was looking at me as though he was waiting on me to embarrass myself. Tethart, glass in hand, waiting. Uldrin at the back, arms folded again, having transferred his earlier confidence back to uncertainty.
I thought about what story I wanted to tell.
It couldn't be a story from this world. Something they would recognise, that they would have already filed under a category before the first phrase was finished.
I lifted the violin to my chin, faced the crowd, and told a story.
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Authors Note: That's it for chapter 23, I wanted to introduce the patron, but that will have to be next chapter, but I'd be surprised if you haven't already guessed who it is, this chapter was getting a little too long, and I think I got carried away with the images, but in my defense I like how the scenes played out in my head so much I had to.
I think a problem I have is that I go too crazy with the details, but I like bringing these places to life way too much, also I recently finished a glossary for Syanna, if you're interested in that feel free to check it out on the same Dramatis Personae thread as Matts.
As always, please leave a like and a review if you enjoyed this, and feel free me to tell me what you did not like, and what I could have done better.