Мерседес Лэки - Passages

Late the next evening, Seladine let her play the song at half speed. She flubbed the end of the verse the first time, but got it the other two times, and made three other mistakes.

“Again.”

She played it again.

“Again.”

Three days later, when it was her turn to sit on a stool in front of the panel of instructors and play her trial, she’d played the song at full speed, with the vocals, fourteen times. The last two in a row had gone clean from beginning to end, and Bruny was nursing a tiny bubble of hope down in her gut.

She heard Seladine in her head saying, “Good, play it again,” and began.

She made it all the way through without any mistakes.

Two days later, every student in Bardic was milling about the dining hall, waiting for Bard Cambrie, who was organizing the Midyear Recitals, to come in with the playlist. Bruny knew a lot of the Trainees to recognize, a few to say hello to, but she wasn’t close with all that many.

She saw Seladine huddled with a cluster of girls her own age, chatting and laughing and casting glances over their shoulder toward the main doors every few moments. Bruny knew their names but that was all, and she didn’t feel comfortable intruding on them.

The pipe group entered in a herd, talking and shoving and poking each other. Tessy spotted Bruny across the room and waved, then beckoned. Bruny smiled and slipped through the mob to say hello.

“Bruny!” called Tessy as soon as she was within a few strides. “Any word?”

“Nay,” said Bruny. “I done be here a good quarter hour agone, and there be nothing.”

“A couple of years ago they were over an hour late with the list,” said Kindal, young man a year older than Bruny, who played the oboe. He shrugged when everyone in earshot groaned. “It’ll come when it comes.”

“Whenever it comes, we’ll make it,” said Delvan. “We did fine, and they always favor ensembles.”

“It’s no guarantee, though,” said Tessy. “They refuse groups now and again.”

“But hardly ever,” said Delvan. “A group has to make a right muck of it to get sent down.”

“Truly?” asked Bruny. “Why?”

“There are only so many spots in the program,” explained Delvan. “Soloists really have to earn their place. There’s no guarantee of a performance spot—not like the seasonal festivals, where everyone gets to perform at least once—but they do want to give as many Trainees as possible a spot. Solos are much more competitive because they’re . . . they’re taking five times as much cake, as it were. They have to deserve it.”

“Oh,” said Bruny. It made sense, of course it did. She just hadn’t thought on it that way before.

And if everyone was hoping to be a famous soloist someday, then it was practice for how competitive that would be. There were only so many great houses, after all.

“Well, ye did be that wonderful,” said Bruny. “Ye did play that fine, and the song did make me laugh! I’m sure ye will be getting a spot, nay matter.”

She got seven smiles and a babble of thanks. Tessy said, “You were very good too. You’re so much better on your harp, I could hardly believe it.”

“I done be practicing,” said Bruny. “Seladine did help me. She did make me go slow and slow and slow and slow until I did be about to scream! But it did work, and I did play the whole thing with no flubbing.”

“It was kind of her to spend time coaching when she had her own piece to work on,” said Delvin.

“Oh, yay, it did be,” said Bruny with a nod. “She be the kindest person I ever did be meeting, truly.”

Just then, Bard Cambrie came sweeping in through the doors, holding a parchment scroll. The noise fizzed up with excitement, then died down to nothing while Cambrie strode across the hall, her Bardic Scarlet cape billowing behind her. She didn’t usually wear it around the Collegium, and Bruny thought she was deliberately putting on a grand show.

Deliberate or not, it worked. She was the focus of every gaze in the room as she unrolled the scroll and held it up against the wide plank where announcements were posted. Her left hand must already have held tacks, because she unhooked a tiny hammer from her belt with the right and tapped the tacks into the corners of the scroll, tap-tap , tap-tap , tap-tap , tap-tap , then turned and gave a regal nod to the gathered students before striding off just as grandly as she’d arrived.

As soon as she was out of harm’s way, the Trainees surged in a mass toward the scroll.

It took some time before Bruny got a look. She scanned down the two columns on the playlist.

Her name wasn’t on it.

Bruny sat in a corner of the garden and watched the shadows creep across the neatly scythed lawn, one grass blade at a time.

All that work, for nothing.

She’d been fooling herself anyway, just a prideful little girl, thinking she could take a solo spot on a program after barely a year of study on one of the hardest instruments.

What had she been thinking?

All her life, back in the Tolm, she’d been the best singer in the valley. It was just so, like having gray eyes or brown hair.

But here, she wasn’t the best at music anymore. She wasn’t even the best singer. Others had finer voices, with more training. Others had the Bardic Gift. She wasn’t special, was just an ordinary girl from a valley nobody’d heard of, who thought she could be the best again if she just got the trick of it.

Even working as hard as she could wasn’t enough. She was below and behind everyone else, and however hard she ran to catch up, they were running too, and they’d always be ahead of her.

She wondered whether she should just go back home. She was nearly seventeen, old enough to marry. She knew sheep, and hard work. Surely she could find a man who’d consider her for a wife?

The sun had just vanished behind the garden wall when she heard, “There she is!” and two sets of feet crunching along the graveled path. She looked up to see Tessy and Delvan approaching.

“Ho, Bruny!” called Delvan. “You’re hard to track!”

“I do be sorry,” said Bruny. “I just did want to be quiet for a bit.”

“Yes, well.” Delvan stopped and looked at Tessy, who stepped up and sat next to Bruny on the cooling stone bench.

“We discussed it, everyone, and we all agreed. That is, if you’d like to play with us at the Recital, we’d like to have you.”

“That—? What?”

“Since you don’t have a place,” said Tessy, her voice low and earnest, “you can play with us. I know you don’t care for the pipes much, but you play them quite well in class, and you could join our group, if you wanted to.”

Bruny’s thoughts were twisting all about in her head, and she did her best to chase them down. “I’d be that grateful if—but I do care for the pipes! That is, I do think the playing of the pipes is great fun. They be just, I can’t sing while I do play them, so I do need to work on the harp. But could I be joining you? Will they be letting me? Since I did not play with you at the trial?”

“There’s more leeway with groups,” said Delvan. “We’ll have to get permission, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“That—it’d be that fine to play with you! Do be thanking all the others! I’ll be thanking them myself, when we do get together for practice!” Bruny’s head felt light and swoopy, like it was flying into the sky on feathery wings. It wasn’t a solo place, but not getting to perform in the recital at all had been that horrible, and playing with the pipe group had been that fun the year before.