Мерседес Лэки - Passages

(Then spell worked. You have Mage Sight?)

Shasta nodded, hesitantly. Not exactly. It wasn’t Mage Sight as the Mages described, it was something else. (Not Mage Sight. Mage . . . Touch?)

(Mage Touch, interesting. Something new.) Timiyon sighed and smiled. (Dmiri says we should well enough to get up and move about by tomorrow. I am looking forward to it; there is a bottle of fine wine I would be pleased to share with you. After all, it is, or it should be, customary to celebrate the completion of one’s Journeyman Trial.)

Bruny missed her fingering again, and the slow, mellow ripple of harpsong she’d been working on turned into a twanging wad of sound that jabbed her ears and made her jerk her hand away from the strings with a grimace.

She glanced across the room to where her roommate, Seladine, reclined on the bed with a book of history in her lap.

“I be that sorry,” Bruny said. She rubbed her forehead, where a headache was growing, and glared down at the harp. “This one line do be fighting me something terrible.”

Seladine gave her a rueful smile and closed her book with one finger marking her page. “You’ve been working hard,” she said. “Maybe do something else for a while, let it rest a bit, and then try again later?”

Bruny shifted on her stool and leaned back against the wall of their room. The stone was so cool it felt like leaning on a mountain—the walls of the Bardic Collegium were as thick as her arm was long, at least to the wrist, so the students didn’t drive each other to murder when they were all practicing at once. Generations of students had roughed up the walls of the dormitory rooms, chipping and carving a bit here and a bit there, to make them echo a little less.

Practice rooms were lined with tapestries to absorb sound, but sleeping rooms were bare stone boxes unless the students themselves brought in soft goods to hang. Bruny had come a little over a year ago with two changes of clothes, her toothbrush, her comb, and nothing else. Seladine’s landed family was wealthy by comparison to Bruny’s, who were sheep tenders in the Tolm Valley far to the north, but even Seladine hadn’t come to Haven with a wagonload of tapestries.

And this time of year, with auditions for the Midyear Recitals looming over all of Bardic, the practice rooms were always full.

“I do have that rhetoric piece I should be doing,” Bruny said while staring up at the much-gouged white plaster ceiling. A stack of worn, cloth-covered books teetered on the low table next to her narrow bed, the sight of them—ignored all day since classes ended—sending thorns of guilt through her. “And music theory be glaring all up at me, with Bard Breeanne may’p thinking like a nice sleep wi’book neath pillow be enough to memorize all!” She groaned and got a smirking nod in return from Seladine. “But the trials for Midyear be one week acome, and I be not ready!”

She paused, then said, “I am not ready,” with a scowl at the grammar book half-hidden under her bed. She knew she needed to learn to speak the way people in the capitol did—the way everyone else outside the Tolm Valley did, it seemed. Bards were known as great orators as well as great musicians and singers. Seladine had pointed out—gently, carefully—that by the time she graduated, Bruny needed to be able to speak like a lady, or she’d never find a place in a great house.

That did be one more thing— was one more thing—to fret on, but right then she didn’t have space in her head for those worries. Graduation for her was at least four more years away, as late as she’d started. The coming trials loomed so huge, she couldn’t see anything else beyond them.

“If you work yourself into a muddle, you’ll stumble at the trials even if you do master your piece,” Seladine pointed out. “You work so hard, and that’s wonderful—you’re determined to catch up as much as you can, and I admire that, honestly. But there are limits, and I think you’ve reached them. You can only stuff so much into your brain at once before your head explodes!”

Seladine slipped a feather into her history book and laid it on her bedside table. “Come on, it’s nearly dinner time. Let’s go see what there is to eat, and after we’ll take a turn around the garden. After you’ve had some food and fresh air, you can come back and torture your fingers some more.”

Bruny scowled, but she set her harp carefully in its case. It was borrowed from the Collegium, and she’d be that mortified to let it come to damage. Although sometimes she was sore tempted to bash it against the stone wall.

She followed Seladine out of the room and up the hallway, watching how the older girl walked and trying to copy her.

Seladine was a lady—not a titled lady, but still, her landowning family was gentry, and she’d been raised to all the ladylike manners and ways Bruny lacked. She walked smoothly and gracefully, her head high but not stiff, her shoulders straight—not slumped forward, nor pulled so far back she looked like a child trying to impress a bully. She made the rust-brown trousers and tunic all Bardic students wore look like something a lady would wear to work her embroidery and drink wine in a salon, while Bruny’s always seemed wrinkled or stiff. Her tunic was always either puffed too high over her belt or pulled down so far she looked like a corn cob ready to shuck.

Seladine had helped her so much in the last year, showing her how to braid her hair to keep it neat all day—which had felt odd at first, because in the Tolm, only men braided their hair.

She’d shown Bruny where everything was, helping her organize her studies for the classes that always seemed likely to bury her. Bruny had learned to read and figure as a child, and a bit of the history of her people, and in the Tolm that was enough. When she’d come to Haven, she’d imagined she’d learn more songs to sing and may’p learn an instrument. There was that, to be sure, but so much more—language and history and mathematics and rhetoric, religions and law and politics and mythology, composition and music theory and ensemble and music history, plus Gift training, and with so much more to come that thinking too hard about having to learn all of it gave her the cheebies.

They cut through a courtyard, a checkerboard of brown-speckled flagstones and gaps where sweet herbs grew. Two groups were taking advantage of the early evening shade to practice outside—one a trio of horns, and the other a group of seven who were playing different kinds of pipes while taking turns singing.

She knew the students in the larger group; she’d performed with them the previous year. Making music with a group was a joy she’d not had back home, and the pipers had welcomed her among them—a particularly generous act, since she’d only been playing her vertical pipes for a couple of months at the time and could barely play “Silly Sheep.”

Delvan, who played the double clarinet, had worked out a simple part for her that required only three notes and proper timekeeping. With some determined practice, she’d mastered it well enough that she could relax while she played and let her Gift float free. She’d been the only Gifted member of the group, and the others had seemed happy to have her, even with her baby-level playing.

She caught Delvan’s eye and waved as she followed Seladine across the courtyard. He raised an eyebrow at her and kept playing, but just as she stepped through the doorway back into the building, she heard the pipe music slide to a stop. Dinner called to everyone, even determined music students.

After dinner, Seladine went off with her own friends, a group of older students who were all looking forward to graduating and going out into the world. Seladine pointed a finger at Bruny and said, “Garden! At least twice round!” before vanishing into the milling after-dinner crowd.