Author's Note: I do not usually post an author's note before the chapter, but I would highly recommend reading this one on my Patreon.
Webnovel does not allow me to include pictures or songs, and both are important to the way this chapter is meant to be experienced. I feel like you would be missing part of it by reading the text alone.
The chapter is completely free, so you do not need to pay for anything. I would appreciate it if you followed the page as a free member while you are there, and you can also check out the other stories, early ideas and smaller snippets that I do not post here, all of which are free as well.
https: // www.patreon.com /cw/ Maydae010401
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rhenawedd Lysenne
I was more embarrassed than I cared to admit.
Not because Gregoryle Tethart had insulted me, in truth his words had scarcely been worthy of the effort it would have taken to be properly wounded by them. I had said crueller things to kinder people before breakfast, and had been on the receiving end of worse from people whose opinions had actually mattered to me.
No, what stung was that they had worked.
The false title I had wrapped around myself like borrowed silk had become, in the space of thirty seconds, another reason to mock. A barony. Barely noble. Barely worth the breath required to remember it. I had come here hoping to build something, some foothold in a city where no one knew my real name or my real face, and within minutes I had found myself defending one lie with another, smaller and less convincing than the first.
Worse. I had used Matthias to do it.
I had spoken of his talent as though it were a shield I was entitled to raise. 'He is remarkable.' The words had left my mouth before I had properly examined them, and they had been true, certainly, but they had also been desperate.
I had no family name worth invoking here.
No fortune, power or influence. No connection to this city, this room or the woman whose house we were standing in, nothing that belonged to me and could be spent.
Nothing except him.
The realisation sat unpleasantly in my chest. If he proved ordinary up there. If the room received him the way it had received Edort, with the polite warmth reserved for something adequate, something pleasant enough and instantly forgotten, then I would have dragged him into my own humiliation for the price of a moment's pettiness toward a man I would never see again.
The thought left a bitter taste that the wine did not help.
Uldrin's arrival had prevented me from saying something unforgivably childish. I was grateful for that, at least.
Now I watched Matthias climb the steps to the platform with the violin beneath one arm and the bow loose in his other hand, and I hoped, with a sincerity I was unaccustomed to feeling, that I had not made an error.
The hall settled.
He stood beneath the candlelight without speaking, long enough that the room began leaning toward him without having made the decision to, there was something in how he stood that did it, in the way he looked under all that warm light that stole your attention.
Then he cleared his throat, and began to speak.
"Toussaint," he said his warm voice filling the silent hall, "is a land of many tales, most of them concern themselves with love, wine, impossible knights, and women sensible enough to ignore them."
Soft laughter moved through the room.
"But there is one tale I have always preferred." His fingers rested lightly against the neck of the violin. "A romance, though not one I imagine any of you have heard before."
The laughter faded into something more attentive. "Like all good stories," he said, "no one agrees whether it truly happened." Another ripple of amusement, quieter this time.
"They say there once lived a creature who travelled only beneath the moon." He paused. "A beast, though one with no claws or fangs worth mentioning, and no appetite for human flesh. The beast's only prey was time."
He looked out at the room, not at any one face, at all of them and none of them.
"It did not age. It could watch kingdoms rise and collapse into ruin as easily as another man watches the seasons change in his garden, it had been doing so for a very long time when one spring, on one of its many aimless journeys through the world, it came upon a village at the edge of a forest."
A few people shuffled closer unconsciously to hear him better.
"And in that village there lived a young woman." He stopped, letting the momentum build up. "She was not extraordinary by the measures that courts and histories use to determine such things, she was not beautiful in the way of portraits, not clever in the way of scholars, not remarkable in any of the ways that get a person written about afterward." His voice was even, unhurried. "But she was remarkable in one way that very few people managed to be, which is to say she was entirely and precisely herself, without apology or performance, and the creature had spent enough centuries in the world to understand how vanishingly rare that was."
The room was still.
"They spoke first at a well, she told it about the village, the season and the her fathers worries for the harvest and it told her about the road, the weather and carefully nothing about itself. They spoke for an hour and when she went inside she was smiling, and when it continued on its way it was already planning to come back."
He shifted the violin slightly against his shoulder, the motion so small it barely registered.
"It came back, and she was waiting at the well, they did not discuss this."
Another laugh from the room, warmer than the first ones, they were enjoying themselves.
"What followed," he said, "was a steady courtship, they were in the literal and unromantic sense of the word, suited. They fit together the way two things fit when neither of them has been shaped to accommodate the other but they happen to match anyway."
"She knew, eventually, what it was. It told her on a night in autumn when the question had become unavoidable, but she loved it too much to fear it and so their romance continued."
He paused again, when he resumed his voice had shifted, not dramatically, just slightly, the tone of a story moving from its middle toward the part it had been building to all along.
"The years passed passed them by, seasons and harvests. The village changed around them, slowly, new faces replacing old ones, children becoming the people their parents had been."
"She changed too; her hair silvered first, then her hands became less steady, her eyes, which had always been sharp, went soft at the edges, the softness of long sight."
"The creature, as was it's nature, did not change."
"Every morning she woke beside the same face she had woken beside the first morning, unchanged, as though the years were a weather that affected everything else and left this one thing untouched. She had found the idea of this beautiful once and she found the reality of it beautiful still, though the beauty had acquired a weight it had not had before when it was an idea, it was tainted by the ache of something you know you will not be able to keep."
"She began to forget small things first, where she had left her knitting, whether she had salted the soup, the names of people she had known for decades, gone without warning."
"The creature remembered everything, that was its nature, it had always remembered everything, every conversation, every small moment, every morning and evening of every year they had had together, it began to carry them both."
"When she could not remember the name of the river they had walked beside on the day she had first said she loved it, it told her, when she could not remember the specific autumn when the harvest had failed and they had lived for three months on what the beast hunted and had been, somehow, happier than they had been in years of plenty, it told her. It became, the custodian of their history. She would ask, and it would tell her."
"Then one morning she looked at it across the breakfast table and said: I don't believe we have met."
The room was absolutely silent.
"It told her its name."
"She smiled at it, with the warmth she had always smiled, a warmth that had not changed in all the years and all the forgetting, a smile that appeared to have survived everything else. She thanked the kind stranger for visiting."
"She set a place for it at the table."
He looked down at the violin for a moment.
"The creature could have left then, some would argue it should have, that remaining was a form of selfishness, that it was keeping something for itself at her expense, that a kinder thing would have quietly disappeared and let her spend her remaining time among people she still recognized, but monsters are selfish creatures."
He looked to the hall again, his eyes finding mine.
"Self-sacrifice does not come easily to them."
"And so every evening, when the sun went down, she would find it sitting beside her, this kind stranger who visited so reliably, who always seemed to know exactly the right story to tell her. She did not know why she trusted him so completely, she simply did."
"She would reach for its hand and it would take hers and tell her the story of the night they met."
A silence settled over the room that had nothing performative in it, several people were not looking at him, managing their own expressions.
"She died on an evening, much like the one they met on," he said, very quietly. "Believing she had spent the afternoon with a kindly visitor who told very good stories."
He was quiet for a moment after that.
"The creature buried her in the garden she had kept, beside the roses she had planted the spring they met and which had grown, over the decades, into something wild and magnificent and entirely their own, and then, because it did not know what else to do with the grief it was carrying, the creature wrote a song."
He raised the bow, and without announcing that the music was beginning, he began to play
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthias Harlow
The first note hung in the air like a question nobody had thought to ask.
No applause greeted the end of my made up story, there was no murmur of polite appreciation from the assembled nobility, no rustling of silk or clinking of crystal. The hall was quiet. I could almost feel their anticipation settling over the room.
The melody I played was a bit fast paced and complex , a by product of most violin covers, but it didn't feel like the song was running away from me, as I hummed, all I felt were strings and a bow, a conversation between them that asked nothing complicated and offered nothing clever.
No cascading runs, or passages designed to make other musicians sit up straighter in their chairs, in fact anyone well versed with the inner workings of violin, might have called it repetitive, they would not have been entirely wrong. They would also have entirely missed the point.
The melody never hurried, every phrase lingered just a little longer than expected, as though reluctant to leave, each note reaching for the next before quietly surrendering to silence. It rose with fragile hope, only to fall back into quiet resignation, leaving behind an ache that the pauses carried just as well as the music itself.
The silence between notes was not empty. It was where the song truly spoke.
Some music was built for musicians, built to demonstrate what hands and years and discipline could do when pointed in the same direction.
This was not that.
This was built for the merchant with the trembling hands. For the serving girl who had forgotten why she was holding a bottle. For every person in this hall who had, at some point in their life, loved something they could not keep.
The violin did not sound like wood and horsehair anymore.
It sounded like memory.
Like reaching back for a hand that wasn't there.
Like remembering a voice with perfect clarity, only to realize you could no longer remember the face it belonged to.
I kept my eyes half-lidded, letting the hall disappear without ever losing sight of it. My bow moved with measured patience, never demanding attention, never pleading for admiration. The melody asked for only one thing.
That whoever heard it remembered someone they wished they could meet one last time.
Each note arrived and lingered a fraction past its welcome, pressing against the silence before releasing into the next.
I drew a slow breath and then I began to sing.
"I am not the only traveler"
The words left me quietly, as though they were an offering, the way you offer something to someone when you are not sure they will take it, with both hands and no demands.
The bow answered, it always answered.
"Who has not repaid his debt."
I had never believed the violin should accompany the voice, the relationship was the other way around, the violin said what it needed to say first, and the voice arrived afterward to translate, imperfectly, for those who needed language to understand what the strings already knew.
Two people ,one story neither of them telling it in the same order.
The story carried the melody, the melody carried the room.
"I've been searching for a trail to follow again"
When I looked up again nobody was eating.
"Take me back to the night we met"
The servants had stopped walking, a woman near the back had her hand pressed flat against her sternum without seeming to know she had raised it.
Even Tethart, whose smile had been a fixed feature of his face since I climbed the stage, had let it slip somewhere in the last few moments and not yet noticed it was gone.
I had performed for crowds before. University halls, street corners, restaurants, competitions, concert halls, the full catalogue of places where music goes to be assessed.
I had played for critics who knew everything about music and felt nothing from it, and for drunkards who felt everything and knew nothing, and both had applauded.
"I had all and then most of you."
Nobody had ever cried.
"Some and now none of you."
Not because of anything I had done.
The elderly merchant near the front removed his spectacles. His lenses were clean. He polished them anyway, slowly, and subtly tried to wipe at his eyes with his sleeve.
"Take me back to the night we met."
Across the table his companion reached for his hand without looking, and the merchant took it without looking back, and neither of them said anything.
A serving girl had forgotten to serve those around her, a bottle held firmly in her and the entirely of her focus on me, the wine a forgotten accessory, she stood with it loose in her fingers and tears on her face.
Holt had stopped performing interest, what remained on his face was something older and quieter than interest, something that looked, in the candlelight, remarkably like regret.
And Rhenawedd...I found her for only a moment among the faces.
I had catalogued her expressions over weeks of careful observation. Pride, which she wore like armour. Amusement, which she wielded like a blade. Calculation, which was simply the resting state of a mind that had never once been careless.
I had seen her contemptuous and curious and carefully neutral and occasionally, briefly, something approaching warmth, though she would have disputed the word.
I had not seen this, she looked the song had sent her a million miles away.
Something twisted in my chest, something that had no business twisting.
This was not mine.
None of it was mine, not the melody or the words, not the grief threaded through every phrase like silver through dark cloth. They belonged to another world, another artist, another life that had been lived and ended.
I had stolen it, carried it across the boundary between one reality and another, and performed it for people who would never know its origin.
The applause that would come, the praise and respect that would follow wouldn't be for me.
It would belong, in some portion that I could not measure and could not ignore, to a man who would never know this room existed.
Like accepting gratitude while wearing someone else's face.
The bow never faltered, the music did not wait for me to resolve the discomfort. Music rarely does.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you."
The great doors opened somewhere in the second refrain, the sound was nearly nothing, a soft percussion against the larger sound of the hall, the brief intrusion of cool evening air, the darkness from outside pressing briefly against the warmth within, several heads turned on instinct.
Then the crowd began to part the way water moves around a stone, the way a school of fish darted around a shark. People stepped aside without knowing why they were stepping aside. the quiet hall filled with gasps at her passing, the music no longer the only thing people were focused on.
For one quick moment something in me surged upward with a force that had nothing to do with reason and everything to do with my biology, a feeling of warning I had only ever felt once.
A deep sense, an instinctive awareness of meeting something dangerous.
The sight of her was its own kind of distraction, she moved through the parting crowd like a wind through a field of reeds, her gown was a crimson so deep it darkened to black in the folds and shadows.
Blood red hair caught the candlelight the way a ruby caught the last light of an afternoon, warm, briefly luminous and already suggesting the dark that came after it. A masquerade mask, intricate and eye catching, dark lacework over pale skin, framing eyes that were doing the same thing my eyes were doing, which was looking at the only other thing in the room that mattered.
She walked straight toward the platform.
Straight toward me.
The melody continued beneath my fingers and from my voice as though nothing had changed, but my eyes stayed on hers. I was in the final verse and the final verse needed me to be in it.
Then she stopped a few paces from the platform and the scent of her reached me.
She smelled of stolen life, not blood, blood was too simple a word for what arrived.
It came like a tide rolling through the hall, slipping beneath perfume and beeswax candles, beneath polished oak and roasted venison, beneath wine and lavender oil and every other scent the room had spent the evening constructing around itself.
It erased them.
Iron first, fresh and bright then warmth followed by a sweetness that was neither floral, nor artificial, it was a living sweetness I had only ever identified as coming from fresh blood, from blood still carrying the memory of the hearts that had driven it.
No two alike.
One rich like expensive fruit wine. Another sharp like spirits. One carried the faint bitterness of medicinal herbs. All clean and carrying the uncomplicated vitality of youth. Dozens of them, layered one atop another until they became something almost orchestral, each impossible to separate completely and yet distinct enough that if I surrendered to instinct I could have followed every note back to its source.
My mouth filled.
The song nearly died in my throat.
Hunger was not the right word. Hunger was what a man felt after missing supper. This was older than hunger. This was the thing that hunger was a pale and insufficient translation of, the original from which that word had been borrowed and inadequately adapted.
Every heartbeat in the hall announced itself to me simultaneously. Every pulse. Every warm throat. Every fragile artery beneath lace and silk and the thin armour of good manners.
The violin nearly slipped.
No human smells like this.
This was not the scent of someone who had hunted. It was the scent of someone who had dined. Recently. Frequently. Voraciously. The blood was not on her. It had become part of her, absorbed and incorporated and carried the way a fine cellar carried the memory of every vintage stored within its walls across decades.
She stopped directly before the platform.
She was beautiful in the way that things were beautiful when they had been perfecting themselves for a very long time.
People had stepped aside for her without knowing why.
Prey often did.
She looked up at me.
Her eyes drilled into mine, and for one suspended heartbeats length of time, the beast inside me understood before the man did.
This was a predator.
Something that had been at the top of whatever hierarchy governed these things for so long that the hierarchy had stopped mattering and only the patience remained.
Every instinct I possessed, the ones I had spent weeks learning to keep in their proper place beneath the borrowed civility of the ring and the careful management of distance and diet, lifted their heads simultaneously.
The hunger I had been holding at arm's length pressed forward with such a force it was almost a physical sensation.
I pressed it down, the ring made the impossible just something hard to do, and forced the bow across the strings with a conscious effort all while I kept my breathing in the rhythm the music required..
Still through out all of this she looked up at me.
Her expression contained nothing I could identify. She did not blink a detail that stood out, because I did not blink either, not unless I remembered to, not unless the performance of being approximately human made it necessary.
She only watched.
I sang the final verse to her.
Not because I had decided to, or as a hidden message, but because she was standing there and her eyes were on mine and the verse was already leaving my mouth.
The silence that followed was heavy, it was almost enough for me to tear my eyes away from her but her emerald eyes sucked me in.
Even the applause was not enough to make me look up, and it was not the polite ripple of an audience performing appreciation, it was immediate and louder than the occasion seemed to require, people responding before they had decided to respond, voices calling out above it, 'Another song! More!'
I stood on the platform with the bow loose in my fingers and did not move.
Underneath the applause, the candles and the warm complicated press of thirty people enjoying themselves in a beautiful room, my only focus was her.
Sweet and warm and terrible.
Her expression had not changed. It still contained nothing but there was something in the absolute unblinking steadiness of it, the composure of a creature that had been watching things for longer than most things had existed, that told me everything the expression was choosing not to say.
She knows.
She could almost certainly smell the blood of slaughtered animals that clung to me beneath the coat and the ring's suppression. She knew I was not human.
Then as I looked closer at her face, and her features beneath it became more familiar; understanding struck, with the embarrassing force of something obvious arriving several minutes too late.
Toussaint, the orphanage her ethereal presence, the impossible grace and the fondness for children that had seemed, in the context of a game played in another world, merely altruistic until it wasn't.
The pieces assembled themselves, she had said, in that other world, that she had acquired the Heart of Toussaint from a young woman.
My eyes moved, involuntarily, to where Rhenawedd stood in the alcove across the room. Still and composed now watching the platform with a questioning look on her face.
That was why she had been so determined to come here.
I had thought she was just homesick, that this was an attempt to remember the good parts of home, added on was the opportunity for connections to be made.
The pendant.
She had come here to sell the Heart of Toussaint, and she had not told me, and the reason she had not told me was that she had known I would say no.
I was going to have words about that later.
I moved my eyes back to our hostess.
She was still looking at me, with the patient unreadable expression and the genteel smile of a woman who had been waiting for this particular moment in this particular evening and had found it entirely satisfactory.
"That," she said, her voice carrying easily through the settling applause, warm and gentle but carrying a weight to it, "was a lovely song." The smile did not waver. "I have never heard its like."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Authors Note: That's it for chapter 24! Hope you enjoyed the song, I almost went with a LOTR ballad, but I felt that this song would be a better fit.
As for Orianna...be honest with me how many of you thought that this was Triss? I know it seems like a bit of a stretch for her to be here, but it seemed like a reasonable explanation as to how she acquired the Heart of Toussaint, and a party seemed to fit her m.o.
Orianna is Matthias first true encounter with a vampire, and although it isn't the worst case scenario, this has the potential to be very, very bad for him.
Please tell me how this chapter read, I'm trying to cut out the repetitive and overtly descriptive language I use, while still keeping my chapters a good length.