The Name of the Wind

My audience. I smiled at them. The smile drew them closer still, and I sang.

“Still! Sit! For though you listen long
Long would you wait without the hope of song
So sweet as this. As Illien himself set down
An age ago. Master work of a master’s life
Of Savien, and Aloine the woman he would take to wife.”

I let the wave of whisper pass through the crowd. Those who knew the song made soft exclamation to themselves, while those who didn’t asked their neighbors what the stir was about.

I raised my hands to the strings and drew their attention back to me. The room stilled, and I began to play.

The music came easily out of me, my lute like a second voice. I flicked my fingers and the lute made a third voice as well. I sang in the proud powerful tones of Savien Traliard, greatest of the Amyr. The audience moved under the music like grass against the wind. I sang as Sir Savien, and I felt the audience begin to love and fear me.

I was so used to practicing the song alone that I almost forgot to double the third refrain. But I remembered at the last moment in a flash of cold sweat. This time as I sang it I looked out into the audience, hoping at the end I would hear a voice answering my own.

I reached the end of the refrain before Aloine’s first stanza. I struck the first chord hard and waited as the sound of it began to fade without drawing a voice from the audience. I looked calmly out to them, waiting. Every second a greater relief vied with a greater disappointment inside me.

Then a voice drifted onto stage, gentle as a brushing feather, singing....

“Savien, how could you know
It was the time for you to come to me?
Savien, do you remember
The days we squandered pleasantly?
How well then have you carried what
Have tarried in my heart and memory?”

She sang as Aloine, I as Savien. On the refrains her voice spun, twinning and mixing with my own. Part of me wanted to search the audience for her, to find the face of the woman I was singing with. I tried, once, but my fingers faltered as I searched for the face that could fit with the cool moonlight voice that answered mine. Distracted, I touched a wrong note and there was a burr in the music.

A small mistake. I set my teeth and concentrated on my playing. I pushed my curiosity aside and bowed my head to watch my fingers, careful to keep them from slipping on the strings.

And we sang! Her voice like burning silver, my voice an echoing answer. Savien sang solid, powerful lines, like branches of a rock-old oak, all the while Aloine was like a nightingale, moving in darting circles around the proud limbs of it.

I was only dimly aware of the audience now, dimly aware of the sweat on my body I was so deeply in the music that I couldn’t have told you where it stopped and my blood began.

But it did stop. Two verses from the end of the song, the end came. I struck the beginning chord of Savien’s verse and I heard a piercing sound that pulled me out of the music like a fish dragged from deep water.

A string broke. High on the neck of the lute it snapped and the tension lashed it across the back of my hand, drawing a thin, bright line of blood.

I stared at it numbly. It should not have broken. None of my strings were worn badly enough to break. But it had, and as the last notes of the music faded into silence I felt the audience begin to stir. They began to rouse themselves from the waking dream that I had woven for them out of strands of song.

In the silence I felt it all unraveling, the audience waking with the dream unfinished, all my work ruined, wasted. And all the while burning inside me was the song, the song. The song!

Without knowing what I did, I set my fingers back to the strings and fell deep into myself. Into years before, when my hands had calluses like stones and my music had come as easy as breathing. Back to the time I had played to make the sound of Wind Turning a Leaf on a lute with six strings.

And I began to play Slowly, then with greater speed as my hands remembered. I gathered the fraying strands of song and wove them carefully back to what they had been a moment earlier.

It was not perfect. No song as complex as “Sir Savien” can be played perfectly on six strings instead of seven. But it was whole, and as I played the audience sighed, stirred, and slowly fell back under the spell that I had made for them.