Gregory Keyes - The Blood Knight

The book was an older one, printed in antique Almannish characters. It was entitled Luthes sa Felthan ya sa Birmen —“Songs of Field and Birm”—and those were the only intelligible words in the book. The rest of it was inked in characters Leoff had never seen before. They resembled the alphabet he knew in some regards, but he couldn’t be certain of any single letter.

There were some pages with odd poetic-looking configurations that also seemed somewhat familiar, but all in all it appeared that the book’s cover and its contents did not go together. Even the paper inside didn’t seem to match; it looked much older than the binding.

He’d found an intriguing page of diagrams that didn’t make any more sense than the text, when he heard someone rattling at the door again. He sighed, steeling himself for yet another round with the prince or his doctor.

But it was neither, and Leoff felt a rush of pure joy as a young girl walked in through the portal, which promptly slammed and locked behind her.

“Mery!” he cried.

She hesitated a moment, then rushed into his arms. He lifted her, his ridiculous hands crossing behind her back.

“ Urf !” Mery grunted as he squeezed.

“It’s so good to see you,” he said as he set her down.

“Mother said you were probably awfully dead,” Mery said, looking terribly serious. “I so hoped she was wrong.”

He reached to tousle her hair, but her eyes grew wide at the sight of his claws.

“Ah,” he said, clapping them together. “This is nothing. Something to make my hands feel better. How is your mother, then, the lady Gramme?” he asked.

“I don’t know, really,” Mery replied. “I haven’t seen her for days.”

He knelt, feeling things pop and pull in his legs.

“Where are they keeping you , Mery?”

She shrugged, staring at his hands but never directly into his face. “They put a blindfold on me.” She brightened a bit. “But it’s seventy-eight steps. My steps, anyway.”

He smiled at her cleverness. “I hope your room is nicer than this.”

She looked around. “It is. I have a window, at least.”

A window . Were they no longer in the dungeons?

“Did you go up or down stairs to get here?” he asked.

“Yes, down, twenty.” She had never stopped staring at his hands. “What happened to them?” she asked, pointing.

“I hurt them,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry,” Mery said. “I wish I could make them better.” Her frown deepened. “You can’t play the hammarharp like that, can you?”

He felt a sudden clotting in his throat. “No,” he said, “I can’t. But you can play for me. Would you mind doing that?”

“No,” she said. “Though you know I’m not very good.”

He peered into her eyes and placed his hands gently on her shoulders. “I never told you this before,” he said, “not in so many words. But you have it in you to be a great musician. Perhaps the best.”

Mery blinked. “Me?”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“My head is too large for my shoulders, anyhow, Mother says.” She frowned. “Do you suppose I could ever compose, as you do? That would be the very best thing.”

Leoff rose, blinking a bit in surprise. “A female composer? I’ve never heard of that. But I see no reason…” He trailed off.

How would such a creature be treated, a woman composer? Would she reap commissions? Would it bring gold to her pocket?

Probably not. Nor would it increase her chances of a good marriage; in fact, it probably would decrease them.

“Well, let’s talk about that when the time comes, eh? For now, why don’t you play me something—anything you want, something for fun—and then we’ll have a lesson, yes?”

She nodded happily and took her seat at the instrument, placing her tiny fingers on the yellow-and-red keys. She hit one experimentally and held it down, giving it a delicate tremble with her finger. The note sang so sweetly in the stone room that Leoff thought his heart would flow like warm wax.

Mery gave a little cough and began to play.

She began plainly enough with what he recognized as a Lierish nursery tune, a simple melody played quite naturally in etrama, the mode known also as the Lamp of Night, lilting, plaintive, soothing. Mery fingered the melody with the right hand, and with the left she added a very simple accompaniment of sustained triads. It was altogether charming, and his astonishment grew as he realized that he hadn’t taught her this—it had to be her own arrangement. He waited to see how it would continue.

As he suspected, the last chord hung unsustained, drawing him into the next phrase, and now the humming chords became a moving set of counterpoints. The harmonies were flawless, sentimental but not overly so. It was a mother, holding her infant close, singing a song she’d sung a hundred times before. Leoff could almost feel the blanket against his skin, the hand stroking his head, the slight breeze blowing into the nursery from the night meadow beyond.

The final chord was again unsustained, and very odd. The harmonies suddenly loosened, opened up, as if the melody had flown out the window, leaving infant and mother behind. Leoff realized that the mode had changed from the gentle second mode to the haunting seventh, sefta, but even for that mode the accompaniment was strange. And it got stranger, as Leoff realized that Mery had moved from lullaby to dream and now—quite quickly—to nightmare.

The base line was a Black Mary crawling under his bed, the tune had shifted to some nearly forgotten middle line, and the high notes were all spiders and the scent of burning hair. Mery’s face was perfectly blank with concentration, white and smooth as only a child’s could be, unmarred by the march of years, the stamp of terror and worry, disappointment and hatred. But it wasn’t her face he was hearing now but rather something that had come out of her soul and that clearly was not unmarred.

Before he knew it, the melody had suddenly broken: fragmented, searching to put itself back together but unable to, as if it had forgotten itself. The hush-a-bye had become a whervel in three-time, calling up images of a mad masked ball in which the faces beneath were more terrible than the masks—monsters disguised as people disguised as monsters.

Then, slowly, beneath the madness, the melody came back together and strengthened, but now it was in the low end of the scale, played with the left hand. It gathered the rest of the notes to itself and calmed them down until the counterpoint was nearly hymnlike, then simple triads again. Mery had brought them back to the nursery, back to where it was safe, but the voice had changed. It was no longer a mother singing but a father, and this time, at last, the final chord resolved.

Leoff found himself blinking tears when it was over. Technically, it would be surprising from a student of many years, but Mery had studied with him only for a couple of months. Yet the sheer intuitive power of it—the soul it hinted at—was nothing short of astonishing.

“The saints are working here,” he murmured.

During his torture, he’d almost stopped believing in the saints, or at least stopped believing that they cared about him at all. With a few strokes of her hands, Mery had changed all that.

“You didn’t like it?” she asked timidly.

“I loved it, Mery,” he breathed. He fought to keep his voice from trembling. “It’s—can you play it like that again? Just like that?”

She frowned. “I think so. That’s the first time I’ve played it. But it’s in my head.”

“Yes,” Leoff said. “I know what you mean. That’s how it is with me. But I’ve never met—Can you start again, Mery?”