“I get it,” Levvi says, offering me a reassuring smile. “They’re mostly too engrossed in themselves to notice us.” She lifts her fiddle, resting the base against the scoop of her neck. “Do you know ‘Ballad of the Fallen Moon’？”
All the warmth drops from my face, a strand of memory wafting through the back of my mind. Stripped of emotion. Beauty.
Pain.
The ghost of something I can scarcely grasp, its corpse anchored in my icy nether. The place inside me that’s vast like the Ergor Plains I once walked alone, blotches of somebody else’s blood frosted to the rags that clung to my skeletal body.
“Yes,” I rasp. “I know that song very well.”
Levvi drags her bow across stretched strings of Moonplume tail hair that shine in the gloom, carving out the first note—so long and deep it’s almost tangible. She plays the next few with such passion it’s like she wrote the tune herself.
Like the fable’s pretty words were tilled from the ashes of her own caged past.
I lift the amplifier to my veiled lips and draw my lungs full, shifting a little so the hidden dagger in my bodice doesn’t nudge my rib. I close my eyes and plunge into the melody in the same way I once plunged into life—but with the words I’ve since learnt how to speak. Armored by the horrors I’ve encountered since.
Flaming horrors.
Mind-mincing horrors.
The crowd dissolves into oblivion as I sing of an inky Sabersythe flying into a black velvet sky, balling up, and dying in the dark where she’ll never be seen again. Of a lustrous Moonplume that tucks beside the sooty beast, illuminating her shape.
Giving her light.
I sing of the Moonplume’s gradual dim. Of how little by little, rise by rise, her luster feeds into the Sabersythe and turns the creature’s scales white, the tune dipping into deeper, more destructive notes as I sing of the Moonplume’s slipping grip on the sky.
Of her fall.
Of the Sabersythe unfurling from her perch amongst the stars, full of gifted life and light, soaring to the world below and hunting for her friend. Of her scratching through inky shards of rock scattered across the snow, trying to piece her back together again.
Failing.
Lids fluttering open, I become vaguely aware that every pair of eyes in the room is turned to us, watching. Wide with greed or wet with emotions that slip down painted cheeks.
But it’s the cloaked male that steals my attention, the top half of his face still hidden within the shadow cast by his hood. Despite it, his stare reaches through the space and embraces me in an iron-clad grip I can’t shake.
As the words continue to pour from my lips, I become bluntly aware that there’s a danger about this male who eclipses everyone else in the room in both size and presence. Who stands with the confident ease of someone untouchable.
A sobering realization strikes like a blow to the side of my head, my gaze drifting to Tarik—perched in his booth, watching me with such condemning hunger I know I’m not leaving this place without him tailing me. The perfect outcome.
Except …
I look back to my cloaked observer, into the hooded shadows obscuring his identity.
I came here to lure one monster, and ended up snagging two.
Nothing like seven hours of straight singing without breaks to make you feel like you’ve swallowed a metal scouring brush, then hacked it straight back up again.
Tugging the chain on the privy, I clear my throat, trying to shift the strain from my vocals. I close the lavatory door behind me and move to one of the basins, lathering my hands in suds as I stare at my reflection in the mirror. Powder-blue eyes stare back at me, the bottom half of my face obscured by my thick red veil. In stark contrast to my snowy skin, it half clothes my long inky locks in a dramatic sweep.
“You sing like a Creator.”
I look at the female beside me, drying her hands while she studies her own reflection, chin high as she swings her head from side to side, inspecting her perfectly made-up face.
“Thank you.” I think.
Could be an insult. Who’s to know with these folk.
She looks at my clipped ear. “Seems wasted on a null,” she muses, like I’m not even here.
Definitely an insult.
“I’d have Ignos eating out of the palm of my hand if my voice had that kind of range.”
I bite my tongue so hard it bleeds, gaze flicking to the red bead dangling from her ear before I dip my head in servitude. “Yes. A true waste for someone the Creators did not deem worthy of their songs.”
She hums, looking at her reflection again while she fixes a tendril of hair into place, seemingly validated by my nod to her ordained superiority. The moment the door swings shut behind her, I roll my eyes, drying my hands.