Issue #327 • Apr. 8, 2021

“Every Breath A Question, Every Heartbeat an Answer,” by Cat Rambo

“Concerto for Winds and Resistance,” by Cara Masten DiGirolamo

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

EVERY BREATH A QUESTION, EVERY HEARTBEAT AN ANSWER

by Cat Rambo

        House of Medicinal Plants, 12th Manifestation

        Feverbane, its flowers small as the narrow end of a bee’s comb and shaped roughly so. As an elder herb, it bears more meanings than most: hospitals, medicine, cleansing, removal, rebirth through pain. Also called solace-in-the-wilderness.

        She would have lain there in the hospital bed forever, feeling the ache of everything in her soul, but the birds were too irritating, their high-pitched peeps and chirrips and the flicker of them through the light coming in from the highest window. She would have gotten up and closed the shutters, but a centaur’s body presents a special problem for convalescence, and so they had her buckled into a sling that encompassed the entirety of her forelegs and chest and much of her hind legs as well.

        She would have pressed her hands over her ears to shut them out, but her head ached too dully to be touched.

        A little silver gong sat within reach on the bed table. She picked up the tiny hammer beside it and tapped the precise center. There was no sound, so she tapped again, perplexed, then several more times.

        A curtain fluttered as the nurse scurried through it. She was a little human, shaped like a dumpling, and smelled of astringent cinnamon and mint. “Once!” she snapped. “Only do that once. Multiple times means it’s an emergency. You should know better, Lady Callynahdra.”

        Callynahdra. That was hers again now, rather than “Sarge,” the only name she’d heard from anyone’s lips for years. And with the name, all the complicated weight of the Rose Kingdom’s complicated social structure. But only if she accepted it.

        “Close the shutters,” she ordered, re-summoning the imperiousness of a noble with unsettling ease. “The birds are too loud.”

        But the nurse shook her head. “Doctor says take you outside, into the sunlight,” she said, and began the long unbuckling process.

* * *

        House of Useful Plants, 7th Manifestation

        Merryngold, its colors yellow, orange, and red, sometimes variegated. Smells of spice and heat, and used to drive away vermin, which cannot tolerate its odor. Its meaning is impatient fire, particularly that of the heart.

        They offered her a choice of crutches or a wheeled cart, complicated and requiring an additional attendant. She refused the latter and hobbled out into the courtyard. A journey that would have taken her seconds once now was a handful of moments for each tiny leg of it, stopping to replenish herself between each agonizing trek. The toll of the bronze bell that marked the third turning sounded just as she set forefoot into the first patch of sunlight and felt its welcome warmth lick along her face.

        The hospital’s main courtyard was awash with pea gravel; iron cages of roses set at intervals, their planters topped with enormous hooks to allow them to be moved more easily. Most of the inhabitants ignored her slow journey as she undertook it, placing her crutch tip carefully with each labored step along the path.

        She wanted to ask the nurse at her elbow if any of the others had survived, but while she was thinking about how she might phrase it, the woman gestured to a padded wooden dais meant for centaurs and abandoned her to the sunlight. She wondered how long she would be left there.

        It was not the first time she’d wanted to ask; there had been plenty of opportunity.

        What thwarted her: what if the answer was no.

        This dais was close to the hedge maze’s entrance. A figure sat there on the long stone bench. Where the sun fell, the surface along her limbs and chest greened: a Rose Knight. This was one of the healing sanctuaries where the Rose Knights were tended as well, and she presumed the plants would be used to repair their living armor, laid along the flesh and coaxed into growing into it, with it, through magickal means. A process laborious and painful, she had been told.

        Everyone does what they can, in the service of the Empire.

        The Rose Knight’s outstretched palm held a scattering of pale flax, two tiny birds wandering along the thorny fingers to pick at the seed. In the jungle there had been tiny birds like that. Their Snake Woman had coaxed them sometimes, caught them for the stew pot. Meager mouthfuls, but by then they’d been used to surviving on scraps and shadows.

        What if the answer was no.

        Her injuries were enervation and starvation. It was not a matter of bones re-knitting but of flesh being coaxed back into a semblance of life after having conserved itself for so long on so little after having been burned so close to the edge, as well as a secondary load of parasites accumulated during weeks of travel through jungle and swamp seeking the coast, traveling by night most of the time, wary of the enemies all around them.

        Her only physical scars were leech-rounds on a foreleg and a whipvine weal on her flank.

        But it felt as though she had been emptied of herself; poured out unrelentingly without replenishment. She was almost at the dais now. She’d be able to rest there.

        She looked up and saw the Rose Knight watching her; the long legs stretched out, arms folded.

        Like others of her kind, the Knight was human, although the only flesh visible was her lean face, even that encased by the barky growth that was her living armor. Her thinning grey hair was cut short and severe, a harshness that did nothing to mitigate the leanness of her features. The resting cast of her face was a half-scowl that seemed more habit than temperament. She was older than any of the Knights that Callyn had ever seen.

        In her other hand was a ringlet of flowers, a bouquet-bracelet shaped to fit over her plated wrist made of wilting pink sapienzee. The birds hopped around the crumbs, and the Knight looked past them to nod in greeting at her.

        She took another step, then another, then stepped awry somehow. Her vision tunneled inward, and she heard the nurse hurrying back, saying something about too much effort too early. Then dark blotches ate the edges of her sight, and she was gone.

* * *

        House of Medicinal Plants, 22nd Manifestation

        Nosewrack, which does not flower but only root, has narrow leaves of grayish brown. It is used to bring dreamers and those unconscious back to their bodies. Its meaning is unwanted clarity. Sometimes called Tova’s shroud.

        Despite the faint, the nurse was willing to let her try again but only after a full day and a half had passed and she had been satisfied by watching Callynahdra use the crutches to navigate the length of a hallway and back three times.

        Most of the patients had gone back to their rooms or were in the fountain-alley, seeking its coolness. She used the crutches to move towards a shaded nook but discovered it already occupied by two nurses so intent on their whispered conversation that they did not look up.

        She kept along the path that led past them on the building’s eastern side, toward the kitchen, passing under a balcony where two patients sat on a bench smoking hamperweed. Her strength was ebbing by the time she reached the kitchen’s back entrance, which let out onto the kitchen garden, the small cemetery, and the entrance to the hedge maze, and she stopped, looking around, not sure where to rest.

        “Would you like assistance?” a voice said from behind her.

        “Yes,” she said with a wash of gratitude at the polite courtesy in the tone and turned to find the Knight.

        “I thought you might be lost,” the Knight said by way of explanation. “Come, here is a grassy spot.”

        She followed the Knight. They made their way to a corner of the garden, and she settled herself on the bench there.

        “I am Ambra,” the Knight said.

        For the first time now, she hovered between names. Sarge or Callynahdra, who was she now? In the end she drew from schoolgirl days. “My friends know me as Callyn.”

        “Callyn, well met and welcome to my little corner of the garden,” Ambra said. She did not speak further but turned her face upward to the late afternoon sunlight as though savoring it.

        Callyn leaned back, still gathering her thoughts. She had wanted air and out of the little room where so many days had been spent. A flutter of wings caught her attention. From this vantage, she finally realized why birds seemed drawn to the Rose Knight. Feeders clung to the walls of the hedge corner while others were attached to the trellis that sheltered this spot: two syrup bottles, a tray of cut-up fruit, flats of varied seed, sprays of grains tied among the leaves, and fist-sized lumps of something white scored with marks where beaks had pecked at it. The gravel underfoot was flecked with husks and spattered here and there with droppings.

        “Did you put all of these here?” she asked.

        “A patient long before me did many of them, but I have asked for others to be added since.” Ambra pursed her lips and whistled to the bird hanging upside to peck at a feeder’s side. It whirred to land in her proffered palm, picking at the little knobs and bumps in the bark of her skin.

        Callyn kept still rather than disturb the bird, but Ambra tilted her palm to let it slide back into the air, and it returned to plucking seed by seed out from between the fine wires of the feeder.

        “How long have you been here then?” she asked into the silence.

        “Fifteen years now.”

        Callyn blinked. “Fifteen?”

        Ambra laughed at her. “This is not just a hospital but a place where the elderly can linger,” she said. “I expect to die here, myself. And it is only here that I can reliably find someone who knows the ins and outs of tending to, well...” She gestured to her form. “All of this.”

        “You never leave?”

        She squinted upward. “Mmmm. They send me off every winter for a month at the hot springs, and I spend my days telling stories to the cadets there, preparing them for service to the Empire.”

        “It is a noble calling, teaching,” Callyn murmured. “Are there birds there too?”

        “Of a certainty. Some are even the same. Sparrows are sparrows everywhere. We pay attention to the showy ones...” Ambra pointed at the syrup bottles where two hummingbirds, their tails intricate whorls and curlicues, like the skeleton of a conch worn down to lacy fragility, jousted over the fullest bottle before the victor reclaimed the perch. “But there are plenty of less remarkable ones, who you can only tell apart by shape of beak or length of wing.”

        She broke off at something in Callyn’s face and laughed. “Perhaps when you reach my age, such minutiae will fascinate you as well! Or perhaps you will take up some other field, like raising thornless roses or bee-keeping.”

        It was the first time anyone had laughed around her for so long. Callyn reached for the bracelet of knotted hair that had hung on her wrist all through that march, but it had slipped off during that last, final, desperate swim, as she and the others floundered away from the shore in the hopes the promised boat would be waiting.

        Ambra was watching her in silence. A little brown bird landed on the knight’s shoulder, picking its way through the greenery there.

        Callyn’s face was wet; she wiped the moisture away and pretended it had been sweat. The knight kept her silence. Callyn said, knowing the question rude, “Do you bloom still?”

        “Ah,” the knight said. “Indeed, but it is not controlled now the way it once was. You will have seen companies of us in full blossom, scarlet and pink and the golden blossoms that mark the Emperor’s Guard?”

        Callyn nodded.

        “That is maintained in the medical gardens, where they remove fading blossoms before they can go to seed. The plant keeps blooming, hoping to propagate.”

        Callyn frowned. “Does it hurt, removing the flowers?”

        “Like snipping off a small bit of yourself.” Ambra shrugged and continued. “In the early months of the year—after the hot springs—I flower and fruit in the space of a few weeks, and then it is done.”

        She glanced up. “An attendant comes for you,” she said. She waved a hand, and the nurse, hovering a few feet away, stepped forward. Callyn wished she held such a sway over the nurses; her estimation of Ambra’s social status floated up a notch or two.

        “Lady Callynahdra, it is time for your medicinal broth,” the nurse said. She stepped forward to assist with the centaur-sized crutches.

        “Come again tomorrow, Lady, if you wish,” Ambra said. “There is little new conversation here.”

        Callyn nodded and let herself be helped away.

* * *

        House of Medicinal Plants, 14th Manifestation

        Pinchwater, its flowers blue and the size of a sparrow’s eye, its smell like moldy lemons. It is used to strengthen food, particularly soups, for the invalid and those recovering strength. Its meaning is gathering forces.

        The broth was meaty but bitter, full of oil and marrow to help build back the strength had seeped away during her trials. The flesh had melted off of all of them, even fat Jenna, till they were not quite the walking skeletons she’d seen among the refugees, so feeble they could barely move, but still as lean as one could be and still hold claim to the ability to keep moving, keep moving, as she had urged them along.

        The nurse said, “You had visitors, while you were in the garden. Shall I admit them tomorrow?”

        Was it them? Surely a delegation come to tell her the list of those who had died. What if that list held every name that had traveled with her? What would she do then?

        “No!” she snapped and flapped a hand at the nurse until she went away.

        Salt water had stung her ankles when they finally staggered onto the pebbly beach so harsh on her hoofsore feet; spotted the rendezvous frigate, two longboats already swinging down from its sides. By then it had taken sharp sensation like that to penetrate the haze of exhaustion, the bone-deep weariness.

        Who had been with her, at the end? Who had made it? She remembered figures, but they had blurred in the sunlight, staggering, falling like her to their foreknees into the water’s coolness. Was it her imagination now that some had slumped sideways as though already gone?

        She gagged on her mouthful and swallowed with difficulty. The liquid was not entirely gone, but she pushed the bowl’s white porcelain round away from her on the tray. The nurse cast a reproachful eye at the spoonfuls of dregs but refrained from comment as she took it away.

        Another nurse halted her as she was limping her way back to her room, muscles protesting at having held her frame up for so long, her stomach clenching in on itself as though rejecting the broth. The nurse who drew her aside was one that she had seen little around the hospital, one of the nurses assigned to the merchant classes and so one that did not come into the mostly unoccupied quarters reserved for the nobility, where Callyn was housed.

        She said to Callyn, “You need to be careful of the Knight.”

        “Who?” Callyn demanded, but she knew who the nurse meant. Callyn had never seen the Knight at any of the communal meals, and it occurred to her that perhaps it was true what she had always heard, that the Rose Knights lived mostly on sunlight and water, like the plants that held their forms in perpetual embrace. She wondered at the scatological details of this, with the unflinching curiosity of someone who’d been forced, more than once, to consider to logistics of where and how to dig a latrine ditch for a platoon of centaur soldiers.

        But the nurse shook her head and did not pretend that Callyn did not understand her. She said, “She’s still watched by spies from the Court. The Emperor has an assassin all set for her, it’s rumored, and is only waiting for a misstep so he can justify dispatching her.”

        “That seems a little lurid, and unlike him,” Callyn said. “He rarely announces assassins and their targets, for one. That would defeat the purpose of having it be an assassination. Otherwise he could just dispatch a troop and have them kill the person that way. It would be surer. Assassins spend a great deal of time creeping around and figuring out logistics.”

        The nurse’s eyes were flat as though she had expected such foolish babble from Callyn. She said, “I don’t see how you survived coming back. You must be smarter than you look, or much much luckier than you really should be.”

        Callyn opened her mouth and then closed it. Before she’d joined the Army, she had always pretended to be slower of thought than she really was. It was an act that many of the noble’s daughters affected, she knew, and more than a few of their sons, in order to disarm enemies, and it returned to her like second nature.

        She fluttered her hand at her throat. “Of course, you are here in the hospital and know more of what’s going on, including with its patients, than I do. I apologize for questioning you.”

        The nurse’s flinty eyes softened, just a trifle, then hardened again. “It’s already been noted how much time you spend with her,” she said. “If she says anything that the Emperor would want to hear, well then there’s a chance for you to redeem yourself by reporting it.”

        “Oh, how munificent,” Callyn said, and tried to keep sincerity in her tone. It must not have been as successful as she would have wished, because the nurse’s look sharpened even further.

        “I will remind you, Lady, that you are associated with a house, and therefore disgrace to you is disgrace to all of it.”

        “That is no longer true,” she protested, surprised by the threat and the matter of fact tone in which it had been delivered. “When I went into the army...”

        “And now you are in the army no longer, and not likely to be again, based on what the doctors are saying of your condition and how likely you are to recover your strength.”

        Callyn was shocked. “But there is pensioning! For soldiers that were wounded in the Emperor’s service.”

        “That is something that is at the discretion of the Emperor’s administrators,” the nurse said. “I have spent a decade dealing with them now, and I could make sure that they do not cheat you. Otherwise they have a way of diverting funds away from you and towards themselves, and calling it all administration fees, until there is nothing left but a handful of coins each month.”

        It was true that under the Emperor the already thriving bureaucracy of the Rose Kingdom had put down even deeper roots, until it had a stranglehold on all sorts of practices, but this was further than Callyn had thought it had gone.

        She said, trying to buy herself time, “What sort of things is the Emperor interested in hearing? Truly, all of her talk is harmless. Old battle stories and advice of the kind that veterans like to pass on, about warm socks and how the red moon seen over your shoulder means there will be rain by morning.”

        “You’ll know it when you hear it, I am sure,” the nurse said. “Ask for Alysshondra with one of your nurses and say that I promised to carry a message for you. They will bring me to you and you can make your report. Then I will make mine in turn to the Emperor.”

        She let go of Callyn’s arm, and Callyn watched as the small human woman clicked away down the hallway. Her heart hammered in her throat as though she had been flat-out running, in a desperate race that had demanded every bit of air.

        Chills ran their fingers over the skin of her bare arms and she rubbed at them as she went to her room.

        “Are you unwell?” her own nurse demanded, seeing her shivering. She settled a blanket around Callyn’s shoulders before she left, despite the fact that the early evening was hot and the windows unshuttered to the open air.

        Outside, birds flickered back and forth against the darkening air, then gave way to bats. A green-winged moth fluttered briefly at the glow lamp near the doorway and then was overtaken by a particularly bold bat that swooped in one window and out the other just as quickly.

        She listened, as she always did, for voices that she never heard. If they were here, if they lived, would they not be speaking, somewhere in this place? Perhaps in earshot?

        She lay awake in the darkness and waited for sounds that did not come.

* * *

        House of Useful Plants, 38th Manifestation

        Glasspetal, its flowers clear as an insect’s wings, the petals the size of a sparrow’s egg. Used in glue-making and occasionally in bone-setting. Its primary meaning is patient tenacity; it holds a secondary meaning, the good that waits.

        The next day, she found the Knight in the courtyard again, face turned contemplatively up to the sun. Two fat pink pigeons circled her boot toes today, their heads bobbing and ducking as they stepped self-importantly and cooed to each other. Something rustled in the hedge, then a jay popped out, screeched once, and flew away.

        “How was your broth?” Ambra asked. “I’ve had my share of it over the years and found the cooks here put in too many herbs. Nourishing, but nasty.”

        “That matches my experience with it so far.” Callyn settled her crutches in order to lean on them. It was easier overall to stand today, easier to hold herself upright, but she still felt scraped to the bone, as though pieces of her that should not face the air were exposed. “Though I have no other complaints of these kitchens.”

        Ambra nodded. “I do not find it a bad existence. They feed us well, and for the elderly it is not a bad thing to be close to doctors, who can help you quickly if some disaster befalls.”

        “It seems a circumscribed existence.” Callyn looked around at the high hedge wall that surrounded the courtyard, not masking the even higher stone wall beyond. The hospital lay on the outskirts of Cheon, she knew. An often-contested ancient city on the border of the Rose Kingdom, whose allegiance had shifted repeatedly over the centuries. She had never been there but imagined it as busy as any of the other large cities. Here, though, things were quiet. She could hear the chirps of the birds, the twittering of nurses, a distant clatter that might have come from the kitchen.

        Ambra’s gaze was tracking a pigeon as it flapped to its way to the cote atop the main building. “You might be surprised. The Empire fights on many borders, but many of its more important campaigners come through here, because the healers here are unparalleled. It is a teaching hospital, and so they have the best, including students who go on and teach in other places. So we have news from many fronts, including Galti, where I understand you were.”

        Callyn shook her head but could not answer. At the thought of that embattled continent, all the bile and misery and ache of that journey surged up in her, irrepressible as a spring seeking its way out from underneath a stone, rising up to fill her, drown her.

        Dark water rose in her mind, and she tried to breathe, feeling its clutch, before Ambra said, “I think I was mistaken, though, in my understanding. But surely you were trained down in Joss, where an old friend of mine is one of the drill instructors. Did you know Sharonza?”

        She seized on this lifespar with delight, pulling herself out of despair’s clutch. “I did train under her. She was merciless!”

        “She and I fought together for three years, before her knee gave out and she was forced away from active service. A sharp mind, and never asked more than she would have given herself.”

        “That is true,” Callyn admitted. “But a couple of the girls thought they were still in school and tried to play pranks on her. She put a stop to that, and quickly.”

        Those days seemed soaked in sweetness now, compared to more recent ones.

        “There are cadets coming tomorrow to be talked at, including some who trained under her as well,” Ambra said. “They are ones that I taught, back in the Academy, or who I have met and mentored over the course of the years.”

        “You are still allowed to mentor,” Callyn said curiously.

        The Knight eyed her. “You have heard something.”

        Callyn thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Nothing. I think perhaps I misunderstood.”

        All night her thoughts had circled the Knight, seizing on this new question over the ones that haunted her. Could the Emperor fear the old Knight to the point where he would contemplate killing her? Those were the sorts of things that were not done in this modern age, but at the same time, the Rose Kingdom had always clung to the past, even its barbarisms, in the name of keeping its history alive. But this Emperor had moved away from those practices, prided himself on his modernisms. On being a well-educated and forward-thinking leader.

        She shook her head again and came back to herself. Sometimes it seemed that the days were a progression of such moments, where time itself had come unmoored and she moved in a dream or memory, other times in actuality.

        It was the medicine they were giving her, she knew, because the lassitude and sense of unreality was always at its worse a half hour or so after she had drank it down, with its taste lingering in her mouth, chalky and bitter and off-putting so after it she had no appetite at all.

        The Knight said, watching her confusion, “Go and lie down, Sergeant. I fear you are relapsing.” Her eyes were worried.

* * *

        House of Tea Plants, 1st Manifestation

        House tea, which grows in reedlike stalks and bears green flowers every second year. Its children are the primary manifestations of this house. Its meaning is ubiquity.

        In the night, Callyn woke, thinking of the world she’d left behind. She had enlisted because the world of noble politics had little room for her. The army seemed to—and had—offered things beyond a world where her greatest value was her body and the heirs it could produce. All the same, politics had come to her; there was no escaping it in her world, and sometimes whispers of the Emperor’s malice, of the pettiness of his policies, of his playing of one courtier against another, reached even the soldiers.

        She had whispered her concerns to her lover once, as they lay together. She had thought to be reassured, to have her worries kissed away while teased for her fear. But rather her lover had lain quiet and contemplative in the darkness and finally said, “It is best never to speak of these things, even where no one can hear. And what can we do, as soldiers, against those on the top of the chain of command? It is not a soldier’s role to ask questions. That is something we leave to our leaders, because to question them is to hesitate, to not act when they most need us to.”

        She had not asked anything further, but she had comforted herself thinking she and her lover were very far down the chain of command, and that they would never need to worry that the Emperor’s eye would stray in their direction.

        How had the battle gone, the one that she had come back from? How thoroughly had it decimated the ranks of the Rose Kingdom? Because she knew that it had. Pushing forward as fiercely, as far and fast as they had been directed to, they’d been cut off, sliced into little groups and picked off, one by one.

        It was only luck that she and her little group had made it as far as they had, and she had lost many along the way. She thought of her captain, lying dead on the ground with an arrow through her throat. Callyn—or Sarge, rather—had hunted down that archer and trampled him to death. Then she had come back to that form lying in the dirt and nothing had changed except that her own hooves were sticky and red. She had taken the Captain’s braid and tied it into a bracelet and worn it all the way as she led her company to the coast, through swamp and jungle and skirmish after skirmish.

        All the way, she had only asked herself what the Captain would do, and moved accordingly. That had served her well. Now she wondered what her Captain would have done, here in this hospital. The Captain would have asked after her company; it would have been the first question on her lips when she awoke. Who would have thought that Callyn would be so cowardly that she could not bear to follow that path, scared like a child of the answer that might come?

        But she was. She was.

        The Rose Knight surely knew her cowardice and yet still spoke to her as though they were fellows, equal in honor. What did that mean, though, when the Knight herself was disgraced? But Callyn thought her as good a model as the Captain had ever been, as gentle and honorable, surely. The Captain had not come from the nobility but of “more peasantish stock,” she’d joked once. Her family were poor; every one of their children had gone into the army as their surest source of a career, and all of them had done well.

        For the first time, Callyn contemplated them. By now they would know of their sister’s fate. Would they come asking of her as well? Was it Callyn’s duty to go tell them of her death? The two of them had kept their love a secret, and so the siblings would have no reason to know Callyn anything more than a body that had fought under their sister’s command, as impersonal as a boot or blanket. But still, would they not want to know that her soldiers had admired her; that even the malcontents had acknowledged her a good leader and fairer than most, as Fat Jenna had said time and time again?

        Her throat ached as though she had been holding in a scream all this time, but when she opened it, the only sound she made was a long low groan of pain, and the sound seeped into the hospital walls with all the other sorrowful noises that had been made here, over the years.

        Cold wracked her. She remembered how in the jungle, the air had chilled at night, going from sweltering to bone-piercing. They had huddled for warmth where they could, and their guide, the Snake Woman, had been an adept firestarter but not always able to coax a flame after days of rain.

        Thoughts of those tiny flames danced through her head, and she realized that she was fevered.

        Now nurses stood around her bed—or were they her sister soldiers? Were they living or dead?

        She dropped into dreams of fire.

* * *

        House of Poisonous Plants, 39th manifestation

        Heartflame, its leaves as red as rusted iron, its flowers small and smelling of vinegar. Alleged to be favored of Assassin Merchants. Its meaning, you are warned or someone watches.

        Days later, she thought it had to have been, and the fever had drained away. Two pigeons roosted on her windowsill, peering in at her, and she roused enough to pour herself water from the bedside pitcher, which startled them so they flew away into the sky beyond the tall arched window.

        They brought her broth, and she drank it thinking about what would have been done with her body if she had died during the fever. She did not ask the nurse about it, although the woman patted her shoulder and announced that it had been a close call. Instead she turned her head to the other side to see the flower arrangement on the table.

        She looked at it. One of the old, formal arrangements, the blossoms arranged in careful lines, stuffed into a wireform that kept them contained, massed so they looked like a single, oddly shaped flower in the shape of the rune that denoted “Emperor’s Praise.”

        White jillyfall, pretty but lacking in perfume. Blue sorrowbell, smelling of rain and greenery, and yellow tullian and its cousin rantha, their smells mingling. A pretty thing. The nurse told her the Rose Knight had sent it. A proper gesture, from one noble soldier to another, an acknowledgement and courtesy. A gesture to initiate friendship. It must be lonely, here in this hospice. She lay there, resting, smelling the blossoms, and took the mingled perfume with her into sleep, which for once was gratefully dreamless.

* * *

        House of Useful Plants, Sixth Manifestation:

        Flax, which comes in three varieties: white, golden, and striped with red and purple. Its seeds used for meal or oil, its fibers used in making fabric. Its meaning, I speak you strong and true.

        Being in the army had given her a great distaste for something she once would have accepted unthinkingly as her due: the attentions of a body-attendant, someone who washed her hands and brushed her hair but who also tended her chamber, who tidied away towels and clothes, picked up the scattered blossoms from the bouquet. But she knew with weary distaste that she could not have managed such tasks herself now.

        She had done for herself at one point, that was something, and had done them for her Captain as well, in the spirit that such tasks should be undertaken by one who loves the one they care for, wanting to give them the best of each day, the small comforts and things that would delight them and keep them going. The captain had said, more than once, that she didn’t know where a noble girl would have picked up such skills, and Callyn had retorted more than once that she’d had them drilled into her in boot camp, where she spent endless punishment drills peeling tubers or washing linens.

        She let them bathe away her fever sweat and rub her down with lotion and perfume.

        “You are lucky to have lived through that,” one of the healers told her, “and all your life, I think, that fever will return when your body is under stress, so you will have to take good care of yourself.”

        “So I could not return to the army, even if I wished,” she said.

        His look was incredulous. “Have you not been listening to anything I have said? Of course not!” Evidently believing his duties discharged, he trotted away.

* * *

        House of Useful Woods, Amberwood

        Used for lances, where it is acknowledged costlier but more durable than ash or oak. Its yellow flowers are used in soporific potions. Its meaning: faith in fidelity.

        “Thank you for the flowers,” she said to the Rose Knight in the courtyard that afternoon. She did not think the bouquet was a courting gift, but she wanted to make sure.

        The sunlight sifted down over them, and Ambra tilted her face to it as she answered. “I’ve set you a puzzle to amuse yourself with, of the sort I set my students sometimes. You must keep your mind lively when convalescing. You were in the army, you know the sorts of things, the games one sets in order to while away the time at kitchen watch or labor duty, something that your mind can worry over while you are carrying out dull orders.”

        “How do you know I would has done such a thing?” Callyn said indignantly, a little offended by the Knight’s droll tone.

        “I cannot imagine that any noble took well to Army life at the beginning, no matter how determined. When you do not speak a language, you cannot know what mistakes you make in it.”

        “So what is the puzzle you have set me?”

        “It is a historical lesson.” The Knight fished in the basket beside her before holding out an ornate scroll case of the sort that would house an older, more delicate scroll. “How’s your Old Canopticon?”

        “More poor than reasonable, but I can manage.”

        “Excellent, this will fine-tune your skill with that as well. The Canoptic network used to pass messages to each other with flowers, exchanging wreaths beneath their masters’ very beaks without them understanding until it was long too late. Our own spring celebration mirrors that practice—the circlets the dancers wear are made of blossoms that signify hope and mercy.”

        She put the scroll case away in the pocket of her tunic. “I still don’t understand why you are here, rather in the court of the Emperor, advising him. The Rose Knights were what brought him to the throne.”

        “The Emperor, I say with a frankness for which some might cut my throat, is a man jealous of other’s fame,” the Knight said.

        The audacity of it took Callyn’s breath away. She did not dare answer. What if someone was listening and reported the conversation? The Emperor could be petty. Was petty. But to speak about something such as that was treason, even when not in the Empire’s heart but on the outskirts. She directed her stare at the cage of roses across from them, and the butterflies swarming the blossoms that were in the sunlight, opening. In the shadows of the foliage, tightly furled buds awaited their own turn at opening. She said, very softly, “You don’t know who you’re talking to.”

        “I know who you are. How could I not? The sergeant who led her troop from behind enemy lines after their captain fell, fought through jungle and thorn-magic, kept them alive for weeks in enemy territory.” Ambra’s eyes were kind but flinted with tenacity. “You will not acknowledge it, but it is more than physical pain that you are healing from.”

        Anger flashed through her. Who was this woman, to speak so familiarly, as though she had been there in the jungle?

        “And you?” she lashed out. “You seem hearty enough. Why are you sheltering here, hiding from the war?”

        There was a silence, in which a sparrow sang: a whee-whee-wheet that seemed all the more poignant when unaccompanied by words.

        At length Ambra said, “I tried to go back, but they told me I was broken, no longer of use. And so I stay here, and sometimes they trot me out to speak to cadets. The junior ones.”

        “You do not seem broken.”

        “I was, for a time. But I healed and found that there were those for whom the story that I was broken was more convenient, lest I return and overshadow them.”

        “You could have fought that.”

        “You are as familiar as I with the upper echelons and the power struggles there.”

        Callyn dropped her eyes to examine the wing of shadow that lay between them. “Yes, but... all you do now is feed birds. It is a waste.”

        “Birds may be more influential than you think.” Ambra’s lips twisted wryly. She pointed at a small black and white bird. “Be still a moment, and we will see if she sings for us. It is spring and so she is letting others know that she is free and seeking to make an alliance.”

        Both sat in stillness until, emboldened by their lack of motion, the bird hopped sideways and let out a soft pip-pip-pip followed by a cheery trill that seemed at odds with the song’s gentle beginning. It had a strange familiarity to it, and Callyn frowned, trying to place it.

        Ambra’s face, watching hers, caught with delight at her puzzlement. “You know it, but you do not recognize it,” she said. “Think of parades and amberwood spears in the sun.”

        Recognition flashed. “The Sisterhood of Lances!” she said, astonished. Those mercenaries had fought beside her company. But the loyalty of sell-swords was attested to in that label for them; she knew that recently they had switched sides.

        “Just so,” Ambra said. “That song is nigh three centuries old, and its composer is said to have had such a bird as a pet, that she mourned as deeply as a family member when it died. She did not write another song after that.” Her eyes met Callyn’s. “Sometimes grief can cripple, if it is strong enough, as surely as any physical blow.”

        She thought of the healer, telling her that she could never return to the army.

        She said, so softly that she was not sure Ambra could hear her, “Then what am I to do?” but in answer heard only the beating of her heart.

* * *

        House of Portentous Plants, 1st manifestation

        The puren, whose blossoms are colored according to the strongest moon. Observed for their reflection of the world and because friendships wax when their blossoms are open. Their meaning: the skies are full of omens.

        “Come in the evening after the meal,” the Knight said when Callyn was preparing to go inside to dinner. “The migration of the fellehin has started—I saw the first outliers last night, and tonight they will be in full flight.”

        “The migration?” Callyn said curiously.

        “Once a generation or so, they fly. You have never heard that?”

        “No, never.”

        “Ah well,” the Knight said. “They do not teach history the way that they used to, and for a long time the migration was viewed as a sign that a time of change had come. Indeed, it used to be a signal that the leaders would give their life to the gods and new rulers put in their place. Of course, that was centuries ago, before we had the Imperial Family to guide us.”

        Callyn asked nothing else, but back in her room she ate and then told the nurse that she would be sitting in the courtyard that evening. The nurse did not seemed particularly happy about it, but most of her unhappiness had centered on the threat to Callyn’s recovery that she felt the outing represented, and so Callyn was wrapped in multiple shawls and a horse blanket arrangement, designed to “keep the chill off.”

        When she returned to the courtyard, the waiting Knight eyed the panoply with a sardonic gleam in her eye but refrained from comment.

        In the dusk, Callyn could hear the birds in the hedges but not see them. Sleepy chirps and rufflings of wings, indignant noises every once in a while.

        Overhead the sky darkened and a few stars made their appearance, shyly refusing to emerge in direct sight but rather shimmering into existence in a spot while one was not looking at it. The faint breeze carried with it the smell of cinnamon and smoke.

        “There,” Ambra said, and pointed.

        The first streak of light, the shape of a glowing bird, moved across the sky, and then a few others chased it. It was so far up that all Callyn could see was the light, nothing of the form emitting it.

        Then more came, and more, and then it was as though as an immense glittering column moved across the sky. The beauty of it took her breath away—more creatures than she could have imagined, making up their own creature, something that moved in jolts and shudders, diving and swooping but always moving southward, ever southward.

        They moved with purpose; the sort of purpose she had once felt, now gone, like a missing limb.

        “Why do they do it?” she said. “Why cluster so?”

        “One of my teachers had a theory, long ago, that when they cluster like that it is a survival technique. Move with a pack, and perhaps another will die in your stead. Move alone and you are a target. It is a lesson for life, perhaps, but these things often translate badly when you try to think of them in human terms.”

        “No,” Callyn said, “it makes sense.” She thought of the ants she’d seen in the jungles as she and her company had fought through. You could crush them underfoot but it was to no avail; more always arose in their place. They had found you could not camp near their nests, even within circles of fire. Somehow the creatures always found a way through, and their bites left small welts at first but then greater and greater ones as the poison accumulated in the system.

        She shivered.

        “Ah,” Ambra said. “You are cold despite how they have armored you.”

        “They feel so endless in their attentions,” Callyn said.

        “Like sorrows, you mean.”

        “Yes,” Callyn whispered, half to herself.

        Ambra’s hand touched her face, the bark encasing the fingers making the touch impersonal.

        “There are fires in the sky, and the gods have created them for many reasons, and one is that you and I, here and now, can look at them and let the sight ease our hearts.” She put her hand back by her side. “I do not mean to touch you without leave, Lady. As you know, we are rendered sexless by this armor, and I would not have you misunderstand.”

        By now, Callyn had learned enough of Ambra that she could hear the world of pain held muffled beneath that matter-of-factness.

        The Knight went on. “But you have survived fire and flood, as the old song goes, and I would have you know that you are not friendless here. You are a worthy soldier. Few can claim more worthiness, in my opinion.”

        Tears burned in her eyes, made the lights overhead a single flame. She could stand there no longer, and so she said, haltingly, “I must go. The chill,” and fled more ignominiously than in any skirmish she had ever faced, false or real.

* * *

        House of Roses, First Manifestation.

        The blood-red roses that surround the Emperor’s garden, and which grow there, and only there, have a name which cannot be spoken aloud by commoners, who call them simply blood roses. Their outward meaning is loyalty; their secret meaning is servitude.

        What did it mean for her to be Ambra’s friend? The spies pretending to be nurses and attendants had made their reports by now.

        Ambra was notorious to the Emperor, which meant that for the first time his eye would fall on Callyn—at least, she thought it would be the first time, but there was no guarantee.

        What word of her would his spies make? Who at the academy would they talk to, and what would those people think when someone who would not identify themself except as a member of the secret police came and asked after her? Would they think she was a traitor? That she had come back from the war and chosen to enter the Great Game?

        She would be drawn into it, no matter what. Was it best to do so on her own terms?

        Perhaps her Captain would have considered it so, but the thought of the Captain brought a wash of sorrow and guilt and the presence on her skin of that touch.

        It was simply that she had not been touched in so long, she thought, throwing aside all thought of the massages and attentions of the nurses; simply a lack of touch, nothing more. And even if for her it was more than that, Ambra had made it clear that on her side it was nothing. “As you know, we are rendered sexless by this armor, and I would not have you misunderstand.”

        Sometimes the hospital felt as strange and difficult to fight through as the jungle had. What if the spies were assassins and came to kill her simply because she might ally herself with Ambra? That, by all accounts of the Emperor, would not be something he would rule out. Her head throbbed. She rang the gong beside the bed and ordered citron water. The nurse brought it and soaked cloths in it to drape across her neck and forehead. She tried to focus on the clean, good scent.

        She went to the window. Outside in the sky, the fellehin still blazed, still swooped across the glittering stars, brighter by far, moving southward. The Knight had said they used to be regarded as a signal of change. Was change coming? The Emperor was everywhere, and no one knew who were the members of his secret police. It was rumored he used magic to spy on people as well, even though such arts were forbidden; regarded as dishonorable.

        Perhaps he was spying on her right now. Very well, let him. She hoped it was entertaining him to watch her looking at the sky.

        What if he moved against her House? Did that matter to her? For the most part, they had renounced her when she had run away and joined the army. She ran through the lists of cousins and second cousins. There were so many of them. Surely so many that the House was too large for him to want to oppose. No, based on what she’d heard, it would be assassination of one of them—and she would be warned first in the abstract so she would not know the target, and then it would be made clear by the death. She remembered how these things worked, even if she had not been inside them so long.

        The fellehin flew southward in an unending stream. Was change inevitable?

        In the morning, the nurse said, “You have a visitor. A relative of yours.”

        “Who?” she asked curiously. This would be her House’s attempt to reclaim her. Which cousin they sent would say much about both how they regarded her and what status—or lack of it—she was being offered.

        “He said his name was Trivkin.”

        Trivkin. A cousin, of her generation, who had been relegated to minor status. A middle-of-the-road choice. Not an insult, not by any reckoning. But hardly a great compliment either.

        “Show him in,” she said. She did not bother to comb her hair or let the nurse wash her face. Let him see her as more ill than she was. The value of being underestimated was a lesson she had learned early and, since this cousin had not seen her for so long, an easy one to enact. She was in a hospital, and therefore he would view her in that context. And the truth was, she thought as a wave of lassitude rolled over her, she was ill, whether or not she liked this betrayal by her body.

        He was dressed in formal court attire. Interesting. So the House thought they would save themselves some time and effort by making the first approach and the offer all part and parcel of the initial visit. That efficiency could be argued to be a courtesy or discourtesy, depending on how you framed it, but no matter what, it said that they valued their time higher than hers, and that set her against him a little from the first moment she glimpsed the gilt tassels at his wrists and the leather band that bound his dagger into its wasp-striped sheath.

        “Callynhadra.” A few quick steps brought his bulk across the room and to the sleeping framework that held her upright. “Our family hero! They are quite proud of you for your exploits in ‘scaping the Galti.”

        “It was the efforts of my troop, and luck, as much as anything,” she said honestly.

        “Nonetheless, they say that you will be honored at court for your bravery.”

        Would it be bad to learn the fate of her comrades from him? Have him accidentally let slip exactly how many would accompany her at that honoring? She thought it would, much as that question haunted her thoughts. She allowed herself to droop. “You will excuse me, cousin,” she said, and let weariness hoarsen her tone. “I am still easily fatigued, and the excitement of seeing you has undone me. I must think on the honor you have brought me.”

        That social code moved them back to the traditional approach. She had acknowledged that he would be presenting her an offer but had clearly maneuvered so he could not make it yet. She could not say why it satisfied her to make him do this dance in turn, but it did.

        It would not anger the House. They were used to negotiation. If anything, it would heighten their respect for her. Raise her value.

        How easy it was to slip back into their way of thinking. How seductively easy. She let her eyelids drift close, half in pretense, half in actual weariness.

        He stood looking at her rather than moving away. Considering.

        “You learned a great deal in the Army.” His voice was dry, not a tinge of emotion in it. “Grew up some. Acquired poise, as they called it in the finishing school you would have gone to if you hadn’t run away. There were some of us who assumed that meant you hadn’t learned anything, but I wasn’t one of them. People can learn a great deal in the real world. I insist my own children go out into it for a season, make their own way, did you know that?

        “Your children weren’t of age when I went away,” she said. “I haven’t been tracking the family and its doings, any more than you have been tracking mine.”

        He smiled. “At first not at all, and no one would speak your name without a choke of anger. But in time we learned that you were doing well, had even made it to sergeant. That surprised some people, that you could gain position without it being bought for you. As I indicated, opinions were mixed.”

        “And you were my champion,” she said without opening her eyes.

        “I would not go that far,” he said, “but at least I was not among your detractors.”

        He did not say anything more but left the room. Tradition demanded he return in two days’ time with the actual offer, although it would be couched in odd and vague terms that only someone who could read between the lines could decipher. She knew how to do that though. Could have done it in her sleep.

* * *

        House of Roses, Second Manifestation.

        The white roses that line the roadside everywhere, and which grow of their own accord, and sicken only when they are tended, are called wayrose. Their outward meaning is peace; their secret meaning is unity.

        “I hear you had a visitor,” Ambra said.

        “Gods, this place is a hotbed of gossip,” Callyn said.

        It was true. The nurses seethed with each other’s doings, and there was a layer of patients and their mischief on top of that, not to mention the layers of outsiders who came and went: consultants, gardeners, handiworkers, drayage, and other specialists. She tilted her face up to the sun; its thin warmth was unexpected but welcome.

        “My family wants to reclaim me,” she said.

        “Do you want to be reclaimed?”

        (”It would give me an existence,” she said. “I don’t know how many roles there are for old soldiers.”

        Ambra snorted. “Please. Armloads of them. Teaching noble and merchant brats, for one. The schools always need teachers.”

        “I don’t have the patience for that.”

        “If you dealt with green soldiers, then you can definitely deal with them a few years earlier.”

        “Can, yes. But do I want to? I always found novices maddening.”

        “And yet you managed to work with them.”

        “It’s different for you. I can tell that you like them.” Callyn rolled a shoulder in the sunlight’s gentle warmth.

        “I do like them. I like shaping their minds and teaching them how to puzzle out things. How to see the world from more than one side. Sometimes they come back, years later, and say things about how I changed their outlook on life.” Ambra waved a hand in a careless gesture. “If I were a vain woman, my ego would swell.”

        “It is very good then that you are not vain,” Callyn said.

        Ambra unfolded her arms and leaned forward to peer at her. “Did you just make a joke at my expense? You must be feeling better.” She bared her teeth in a grin before settling back. The hedge was full of the tiniest of gray brown birds; they clung to the suet feeder so thickly you could barely see it, some hanging sideways, others entirely upside down. The noise they made was a soft and constant querulous piping, so quiet that Callyn could barely hear them.

        It occurred to her that the birds would startle if someone else were there, trying to listen.

        She said, suddenly, “Is this all you will do with the rest of your life? Sitting in a hospital, teaching birds to come eat from your hand?”

        “It seems a pleasant enough existence,” Ambra drawled. “Why? Do you have some plan that you think would better suit me?”

        “It seems a waste when you could be working for the Empire, doing more than inspiring cadets to keep their hooves shining.”

        “The Empire does not want me doing anything but that, and I am content enough to serve it in such a fashion.”

        Callyn looked at her hard, and Ambra met her gaze without flinching. She tried to decipher the expression. The Knight had been human once, after all—some would still think her one, but Callyn saw her as closer to the category she herself occupied—that of Beast, beloved servant of Humans but never, ever their equal.

        She had assumed Ambra felt the same, but in truth there was no admission of lack in that clearwater gaze, limpid and placid as a forest pool. But underneath that surface lurked some spring that fed its waters. Callyn was the first to drop her eyes.

        “Do you have some other career in mind for me?” Ambra asked. “Or is this because you are not sure what you yourself want to do, how you want to live your life once you are free from this place?”

        That hit home, and she shuddered for a second at the depth of the wound it made. But that was life, a series of such wounds, and you had no voice in whether or not they occurred to you. She said, “No, but it is a waste.”

        “You have said those words once, and now twice. Repeat them a third time and they will not change in any way, and become truer or falser,” Ambra said. Her voice was tired, the first time Callyn had heard any trace of such a thing in it. It felt like seeing a parent weep when you had seen them always strong; that same bone-wrenching sense of wrongness.

        Everything felt wrong nowadays. Everything was destroyed, without her captain and her command. Without them she was something floating and unmoored, something undefined. Was that why she would not let herself ask who was left alive yet, because to know the tally was to know that she had become something other than what she had been?

        Or was it simply that dread of hearing all of them, all of them are gone? She didn’t know, and trying to pick an answer only made her head balloon with pain, as though it were too small, too obdurate, to contain all her thoughts.

        “Listen to me,” Ambra said, and caught at her hand. “Listen to me. You do not have to decide anything. You have been hurt deeply, child. You have been hurt and are allowed time to heal. The war is not calling you back. You are exempt from it now; you know as well as I that you will never be a strong arm again. But you have been maimed deep in your soul as well. No one undergoes a journey of the kind you survived and comes away unscathed. Give yourself time to heal. Be kind to yourself, because the world seldom is, yet you can demand this from it now.”

        “They wanted me to decide today,” she said. “My House. They sent a minor cousin.” She let her hand continue to rest where it was. The barky skin was rough, but Ambra was careful to keep their touch light.

        “A predictable move, that shows they underestimate you. They thought you fled a marriage, I warrant, and did not realize that you simply were not of the right nature for their world. You are not a pliable spirit.”

        “I was a good soldier,” she said. “Even in training, I worked hard, to prove myself.”

        “I meant that you are stubborn in your pursuit of what you think is right. That is an admirable quality.”

        “But how do I determine what is right?” she said. “I used to trust my captain for that.”

        “Ah, the harshness of life,” Ambra said in a tone as dry as withered leaves. “Forced to decide for yourself. How did you think she did it? Did you think she had some inner compass that guided her?”

        “I did.”

        “Perhaps she did, and you can have it too. Perhaps she too had someone who decided, and when that someone was gone, she used them still, asking herself, ‘What would they do, in such-and-such-a-place and time and quandary?’ Because you can still ask her, and guide yourself with the answer you supply.”

        Like a touch under her elbow, holding her upright. Something she could lean on in a world that had been far too scarce of such things. It was silly, a word trick, but it was true—it was something she could rely on. Could it work? She felt as though she had awakened from a long nap, refreshed, as though heavy blankets had been removed. She met the Knight’s eyes full on and said, “Thank you.”

        Ambra released her hand, leaned back in her bench. Overhead, birds chittered, clinging to one of the shelves of seed, picking through the grains and throwing the chaff down to litter the gravel.

        “They are messy things,” Ambra said. “I pay one of the kitchen girls to come and clean this all away in the evening, but even so, she must come again in the morning and pick away the weed sprouts that have sprung up overnight from the seeds.”

        They sat in silence. The birds moved back and forth, some in the hedges, some on the ground, picking at the gravel and turning it over.

        “Have you read that scroll I gave you yet?” Ambra said somewhat diffidently.

        “I have not. I have been too swamped by my own thoughts.”

        “It is good to have diversions,” Ambra said. “To avoid overtaxing one’s mind. You will need to contemplate such targets in order to survive.”

        Birds chittered in the bush, and something sang out wheet-wheet-wheet. Bird or insect, she couldn’t tell which.

* * *

        House of Medicinal Plants, 89th Manifestation

        The little gray plant that grows at the foot of dungheaps, and puts out small white flowers in clusters of three, and leaves in clusters of two, is called coaxweed. It restores the spirit, when taken in combination with slumber and sufficient food. Its meaning is endure.

        She didn’t take the scroll out till that evening, after she’d drunk her broth and eaten the grainy mash that accompanied it. She settled into the sleep cradle. It was the sort of thing a granny might have slept in, rather than sleeping standing up like an adult, but she had to admit, she had grown to like its comforting give underneath her ribs, the blanket like an embrace over her back’s knobbed spine, the flesh eroded by the weeks of starvation.

        She was still so tired, all the time. Was this now her permanent condition, so worn aware by what had happened to her that she would never be anything but a shadow of her former self? Her head throbbed at the thought.

        She called to the nurse, who brought her cool water and fluffed her pillow, before she unrolled the parchment on the little reading table and began to puzzle through it. She had not been good at Canopticon when she was in school, and accordingly she had not liked it because she had not found it easy, but she went at cracking it the same way she had approached the task in school, with a grim determination that carried her through the unpleasantness. She found, to her surprise, that it seemed easier now.

        The scroll had been written by an ambassador, jotting notes down of the flower language as she understood it. This ambassador was a sly and funny writer, interjecting sardonic commentary on the natures of the people receiving the observed bouquets, poking fun of foibles, like the vain noble who named all her roses in some fashion after herself.

        Callyn jotted notes to herself on another bit of paper she’d asked the nurse for.

        A ringlet around Ambra’s wrist, that first day. Just for practice, and good thing for her. Pink sapienzee. Its meaning: subversion, working against the status quo. Treason.

        Then the bouquet sitting beside the bed:

        White jillyfall, pretty but lacking in perfume. Something is not as it seems.

        Blue sorrowbell. I am your steadfast friend.

        Yellow tullian. Follow me.

        Yellow rantha. Join me.

* * *

        House of Useful Plants, 1st Manifestation

        Grass grows everywhere. It is fodder and bedding and roofing. It bends but does not break underfoot. It fixes loose soil in place and knits the world together. Its meaning is you can trust.

        They sat without speaking, and the little birds came and went, perched on the edges of twigs and exchanged bits of song and liquid chirps, flapped and fluttered through the sunlit air. Bold and brassy, chivvying each other whenever one paused.

        The sunshine seeped onto Callyn’s face; sifted warmth from the blue sky overhead, softer than the jungle’s more intense though rarely glimpsed blue. She flinched away from a cheep and a rustle so close she felt a feather flick her earlobe.

        “They act as though there will be nothing left, although they know it is always here,” Ambra said. “Human nature or animal?”

        “What?”

        “They argue such things across the sea. About whether you or I are creatures of magic rather than naturalborn.”

        “I am naturalborn, whatever illusions someone across the sea has.” She quirked at the thought of her mother. What would her mother have said of who her daughter had become?

        “It is our nature to be drawn into politics?”

        “One is always drawn into the game, whether you will or not. There’s a wary look you come to know, a tacit ‘is it safe to speak of this’ that means they are more than halfway to thinking that the answer to that is yes.” Her voice was light as sunlight. Atop the rooftop cote, the pigeons cooed.

        “I loved my captain,” she said.

        Ambra’s head tilted. “To love one’s leader...”

        “No, I loved her. I would have wedded her when all of this was over. We had agreed to wait. Not that it didn’t take us years to acknowledge it. But we had confronted it and decided to do the ethical thing. Marriages complicate military life, which is why they are discouraged.”

        “And then she died,” Ambra said.

        She managed to speak the bitter words without them choking her. “And then she died. I wore her plait as bracelet. It fell away during the journey.”

        “The journey,” Ambra echoed.

        “All throughout, I simply asked myself, What would she do, and it led me onward.”

        “And now?”

        “And now? All I want is to stay alive,” she said. “Sometimes in the night I feel my heart beating so hard I think it will kill me.” She shifted uneasily. “Tell me again why a man prone to jealousy might be jealous of you.”

        “There are people who do things because they must be done in order for the world to keep on working, and there are people who do things because they want to be remembered or loved or to heap up riches. The second group will always hate the first and yet not understand what it is that they hate so fiercely—a mirror held up to show them how good they could be, if only they tried.”

        “You make it sound noble.”

        “I would rather think it noble than meddlesome. The truth is probably a question of perspective.” A flock of the little tits, their bodies no bigger than a knuckle, their features colorless of fog, clung to the branches for moments and then, emboldened, more and more others came while Callyn and Ambra held still, barely breathing. Then some idle noise—who knew what—frightened the birds, and they were gone.

        “The birds must come from all over,” Callyn said.

        “They do.”

        “It’s a big continent. That’s a lot of birds.”

        “Ever more so when you reckon in some of the islands.” Ambra’s grin was wolfish.

        “I might be willing to go here and there, and look... look for more birds for you. In time,” she said.

        “When you are healed enough, perhaps we will talk of it,” Ambra agreed.

        “You know what’s happened to them, don’t you?” The words were finally there, and she wanted to take them back as soon as they appeared.

        The bark of Ambra’s brow creased in thought. “Them?”

        How could a moment be so momentous to her, feel like stepping from a boat onto dry land finally, and yet confuse Ambra? “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll ask one of the nurses.”

* * *

        House of Roses, Third Manifestation

        The rose that is used to construct the armor of Rose Knights was created from a rose that grew in stone when a god called it forth. Its color varies, but the heart is always scarlet. It is called war rose. Its outward meaning is strength at arms. Its secret meaning is I have confronted the truth.

        Still it was hours later before she did it, and even then indirectly, edging up on it. She said to the nurse, “Are there visitors?”

        The nurse was sullen. She said, “Last time I asked, you rebuffed them...”

        Callyn said, humbly, “It’s hard when you are ill.”

        The nurse relented but still did not answer. “They’ve been waiting,” she said. “I’ll go fetch them.”

        As she vanished through the doorway, Callyn wanted to call her back, wanted to change her mind. Surely it wasn’t too late. But she let the sound of the nurse’s footfalls die away, going down the hallway, and did not call out.

        Moments later, she heard them coming.

        She could not count how many. Who had survived? Not the Snake Woman, not the new recruit. Perhaps Jolanda, Alyssum, Karas, Penny. Surely it couldn’t be all four. She strained her ears to hear the hoof-falls on the tiles. How many? At least one or two, that was something to cling to.

        Something to cling to for now. And later, in the game, there would be other things, other hands.

        Other questions, other answers, including the ones that had hovered between her and Ambra, fluttering like birds. Every breath a question. Every heartbeat an answer.

Copyright © 2021 Cat Rambo

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Nebula Award-winning writer/editor Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches in a haunted gully in West Seattle. Their over two-hundred-fifty fiction publications have appeared in such places as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Asimov’s. This is their fifth story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The third Tabat novel, Exiles of Tabat, will appear in May from Wordfire Press while space opera You Sexy Thing will be published in September by Tor Macmillan. Find out more about Cat’s writing and teaching at catrambo.com.

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CONCERTO FOR WINDS AND RESISTANCE

by Cara Masten DiGirolamo

        On the dusty stage above a desert of empty seats, the first clarinet played the tuning note. The warm, reedy tones of the other clarinets joined her, then the cloudy air-throats of flutes, the determined drone of a bassoon, then horns, trumpets, trombones, and the burbling boom of the tuba. The instruments’ voices merged, then broke, and merged again. It was how every rehearsal began. But today the conductor’s stand stayed empty.

        The first clarinet paused for breath and frowned. Something sounded off. Was it her? Hers was supposed to be the keynote, but maybe she’d jarred her instrument out of tune without noticing. She didn’t have perfect pitch—she’d gotten this position through time and toil—and glanced toward the first trumpet, who did. But he sat drooped in his chair, lanky form in a posture of exhaustion, his instrument between his knees. What had he been doing last night? He was from the mountains, she remembered. He’d probably been up all night, waiting for news after the earthquake.

        Beside her, the second clarinet shifted in his seat and grumbled, “I thought there was going to be a new conductor. What’s the point of holding rehearsal without a conductor?”

        The complaint lit the first clarinet’s seething anger. He should shut his mouth and tune his clarinet. Yes, the new conductor was late, but the ensemble had all gathered, when, for too long, they hadn’t known if they would ever gather again. Two weeks at home, with nothing but shrieking children and her mother and sister-in-laws’ chorus of laments—oh our menfolk, oh the senate, oh the drought—was enough. She needed this. Didn’t they all, right now? They would have an ordinary rehearsal if she had to drag each one through it by their nose.

        She played her note to the empty conductor’s stand as if it could batter the ghost of the man upon it. The fool, the pompous, brazen fool.

        The first clarinet had worked closely with their old conductor—organizing concert advertising, copying parts, keeping rehearsal notes. It was extra money—always welcome—and she’d liked the old conductor, for all that he’d grumbled and acted put-upon. They both believed in efficiency; no patience for time-wasters, artistes, and layabouts. He’d had no patience for politics either.

        He should have had a little more patience.

        Conductors never listened to advice. They stood at the podium, controlling three-score people with the flick of their fingers, and thought they’d become gods. But when a young senator had just named himself Dictator, it wasn’t a good time to be a god.

        All the conductor had done was complain about the drought, about how he thought the Dictator was wasting resources with the siege against Labadi. But that had been enough.

        Who in the ensemble had reported him? Someone quiet—the nebbish second oboe, perhaps? Someone guilty—was that what weighed on the trumpet’s shoulders? Someone loyal? The tall young woman who played the tuba—arms ripcord-strong from carrying it—wore the same dim and unfurtive look as the Greyshirts’ farmboy recruits.

        It could have been anyone.

        Her clarinet squeaked as she over-tensed her mouth.

        How could they be an ensemble if they couldn’t trust the musician at their side?

* * *

        The timpanist lightly tapped the drum that matched the tuning note with his new mallets. He’d made them himself and was very pleased by them. Buying good wood and rawhide, soaking the rawhide in a basin, shaping it around the heads—he’d never worked a craft before. He’d been a laborer, laying tile in the hot sun, picking grapes, digging graves. He wanted to show his mallets off, but he wasn’t sure if he should. What if all timpanists made their own mallets? Would he get a look like he’d said he was proud of having lost all his milk teeth? He couldn’t risk people wondering if he really belonged here.

        He tapped the drum again, then winced. Not quite right. Placing the key, he adjusted the tension, tap tap, turn, tap tap. There. The next drum was in fourths with this one. He tapped both, puzzled over the interval, then adjusted the higher drum just a touch.

        He’d been told he’d be joining a percussion section. So he’d given himself a quick lesson in musical notation for drums and shown up, expecting to be handed a triangle or put on the bass drum. But it turned out the ensemble had lost their timpani player.

        He’d lied through a fixed grin, pretended the pitched drums were old friends. Halfway through rehearsal, just as the conductor turned to a timpani-heavy section, he’d faked a loud, nauseated groan, clutched his stomach, and run to the toilets. Then he’d come in early every day to learn as much as he could. How to tune the finicky drums. How to play a simple roll.

        He’d been there early, tuning his drums, listening for the intervals with his eyes shut, when the first clarinet—the ensemble’s taskmistress—caught him. He’d noticed her before, liking the look of her: military bearing, short skirts, great legs. But he hadn’t wanted her to look back.

        Here she was, studying him. His mallet bounced to stillness on the drum.

        “You’re not using the bones?” She tipped her head toward the xylophone.

        “Ah—no.” He had at first, to find the pitches for tuning, but now he could hear the intervals. He hit all four drums in succession.

        She cocked her head, then nodded. “Good. Good ear.”

        An unusual feeling washed through him—a bit like pride, a bit like luck. The timpanist had never shown talent at something before. He liked it.

        But now that the conductor had been detained, the timpanist was careful not to catch the first clarinet’s eye.

* * *

        The tuba player spotted the new conductor’s arrival first, which was a surprise, as the large instrument in her lap often blocked her view of important things—such as the conductor’s baton. A woman had entered the auditorium through the side door, moving with a spring-heeled gait, carrying an overflowing folder of papers and a tiny leather case. A baton case—the new conductor. She was slender in a boyish way, as if she were a baton herself, in a brown suede jacket and tailored grey trousers. There was a vibrancy, an energy to her that made the tuba player smile, then catch herself. She needed to stay wary.

        This is what the tuba knew about the new conductor:

        One, she was not from Biga, like they were. She was from Masl, a graduate of their Academie. She’d taken a hood in conducting but also in composition history, losing herself in the dusty archives of the music library to write a dissertation on three obscure Bigan composers. They’d been popular two centuries ago, when Labadi was the dominant city in the area and Biga just a farm town with pretensions. She was known to have had two boyfriends and three girlfriends in her time at the Academie, some concurrently. She was part of one of the secret dueling societies at the school and had a scar across the back of her hand from it. She dabbled in acting. And when she left Masl, the oboist from her wind quartet clung to her leg and sobbed to try to keep her from going.

        The tuba was excellent at gossip.

        No surprise the new conductor was a foreigner—a safe choice. Why would someone from Masl care about Bigan politics? People from Masl weren’t horrified when one leader of the Bigan senate replaced another in a literal backstabbing. They just called it ‘operatic.’

        Wind ensembles derived from military bands, horn and fife and drum. They played the sort of music that leaders who had proven themselves on the battlefield—or pretended they had—liked the most. The Dictator needed the music that could make a usurper into a military victor. He needed them. That was why their whole group hadn’t been detained—so far.

        The tuba knew it wasn’t safe to be here, hiding in plain sight under the Dictator’s eye. But so far she’d been overlooked. The new conductor made her want to stay longer. She wanted to stay as long as there were good things in Biga.

        She still believed in good things.

        “Greetings.” The new conductor sprang up the steps that led onto the stage by threes and was on the dais in an instant. She rested her elbows lightly on the podium and surveyed the ensemble. “I am your new conductor. I am most glad to meet all of you.” Her gaze crossed the group from right to left, landing last upon the first clarinet.

        “Rehearsal starts on the hour, you know,” the first clarinet said. “We cannot start without you.”

        The conductor tipped her head to the side; her lips quirked. “Yes, yes,” she said, then continued as if the clarinet hadn’t spoken. The tuba player hid a laugh behind her hand. “I am most excited because conducting a wind band gives me the opportunity to direct a work by my most favorite composer.” She openly smiled her pleasure, then bent forward, intent. “It is not a simple work, and we must give it utmost effort, but I hope we may present it in two weeks at your festival for the Cleansing of the City. It was written for such an occasion, and is most suitable.”

        She tapped her folio on the podium to tidy the papers inside, then started handing out parts. The first clarinet sprang up, as that had always been her job under the old conductor, but the new conductor ignored her and paced the narrow aisles between music stands and chairs herself.

        When the tuba’s part came, it was unusual. The notation was not the modern standard but the precursor to it, with odd marginalia written using a chisel-edged pen in a language she didn’t know. Other musicians were also murmuring at their parts.

        “We can’t play this,” the first clarinet protested. The tuba wished she’d shut up. Even if they couldn’t, she wanted to try.

        “Is it too hard?” The conductor looked concerned.

        “No,” the first clarinet said. “It’s non-standard. The clefs are fine, but the annotations—What language is that?”

        “Labadin.”

        The tuba looked up. The very word sounded like sedition. Labadi had been under siege for weeks, after declaring their independence from Bigan rule. Last night, an earthquake centered in Labadi had shaken the Bigan Cathedral enough so that the head of the statue of Yitmar, the goddess of green growing things, fell and smashed on the stones. The Dictator was sending no aid to Labadi, and people had been arrested for sharing rumors of the devastation.

        But there was nothing but innocent bemusement in the conductor’s tone. “I assumed Labadin would not give Bigans trouble, as it is a closely related language. But it does not matter. You have me. For interpretation.”

        The first clarinet’s face flushed dark.

        “Now we tune,” said the conductor.

        “We’ve already tuned,” said the first clarinet.

        “Oh no,” the conductor said. “We tune at the beginning of rehearsal, and as you said, the rehearsal cannot begin until I am here. We tune.”

        Stiffly, the first clarinet stood and played her tuning note.

        “No.”

        Startled, the first clarinet cut off.

        “You are flat.”

        “I am not.”

        “You are. What did you do? Tune to the piano in the foyer? It is not bad, but it is not quite right. And as I can hear the difference between right and not quite right and it gives me a migraine, please tighten your instrument.”

        The first clarinet did so with a jerk.

        “Again.”

        It took two more tries before the clarinet was in tune.

        The tuba thought she might stay in Biga a little longer now. She was enjoying this too much. Sometimes, after everything that had happened, she felt guilty about being happy. But other times she was only grateful for the opportunity.

        “Now,” the new conductor said once they were tuned, offering a smile that promised infinite secrets. “We begin.”

* * *

        The auditorium was dark, save for one gas-burning lamp that illuminated the trumpet’s music stand. He had stayed late to practice his solo—and to avoid the friends he no longer felt friendly toward.

        The night before, he’d met them in the taverna, eating tiny fried river fish and pickled burdock root and drinking givo, grape-seed liquor—for once not more expensive than wine, as even drought-shriveled fruits could be distilled. His friends had been artists once, Hurio a playwright and Martio an actor and operatic tenor. But they’d gotten in political trouble and could no longer find jobs. Because of that, the trumpet picked up the bill for most of the liquor, and still they kept trying to convince him to become a rebel like them.

        Last night, Martio had also come with a story.

        “Alicio, Alicio, let me tell you what I heard,” he said. He had the actor’s art of capturing attention. “I heard—from a reputable source, mind you—that just before the earthquake, a young man came down from Labadi to the army encampment. They say he was carrying a lyuta, and he offered to play it in exchange for food. Of course the soldiers laughed at him. They searched him, stripped him, humiliated him. But then, they said, yes, play your lyuta. Sieges are boring, and armies need entertainment.

        “They say he played so beautifully and sang so sadly that everyone in the encampment gathered to listen. The privates, the sergeants, the captains, the generals. And as he sang, the earth began to shake. When the song crescendoed to a climax, the earth cracked and opened up. And he continued to sing as the earth rent itself apart and swallowed the whole battalion.”

        The trumpet had heard stories like that before. Incenti, songs that could, in a perfect performance, create physical effects upon the world, had been a common theme in his grandmother’s hearthside tales. No doubt the idea had its origins in the mountains, when a song with the right frequencies had disturbed a carefully balanced rockpile and resulted in an avalanche. But if incenti had once been other than myth, in today’s corrupt era no performances ever did more than shake a few bats from the rafters.

        Finishing the tale, Martio turned to the trumpet, his tongue grown silken with eloquence. “Now that is resistance, Alicio. That is the strength of your people.”

        His people, his home, Labadi, in the mountains, with purple gorse on the hillsides and vivid red and yellow flowers on sticky vines, with pestilent monkeys picking through trash, and music, always music, on every streetcorner and under the long tented awnings of the markets. It had suffered enough, besieged by the Bigan dictator who would not allow them to rule themselves. Aided by the drought and last year’s poor harvest, he planned to starve Labadi’s resistance out.

        And then, two nights ago, the earthquake, centered near Labadi. The Dictator offered no aid. Masl had a relief boat ready, but the rivers were too dry to carry it and the mountain passes too treacherous to go by land. Labadi was cut off. And yet people, like Martio, were casting this disaster as an act of defiance.

        His family.

        If his mother did not send word soon...

        This story was the worst Martio could have chosen. If any were so foolish as to believe it, if the rumor reached the Dictator’s ear, he would have cause to wipe the Labadin out. They would take the musicians first.

        “Don’t—” The trumpet grasped vainly for words. “Don’t tell that story again. Don’t be a fool, Martio.”

        But Martio had laughed and turned away.

        Now alone in the dark auditorium, the trumpet played his solo once more, hearing in his mind the swell of the other instruments around him: the thready underpinnings of the clarinets, the rich whine of the oboes, the rumble of the timpani. As he finished, the brazen echo took its time dying. For a moment he smelled something fresh, like spring rain on the wind. But he was indoors, and the drought was here to stay.

        He put away his instrument and went back to the sweltering garret apartment that he would never call home.

* * *

        The run-down jewelry shop in the money-lenders’ district was doing good business during the drought. Locals pawned their heirlooms for a few coins to buy the now-expensive food. When the drought ended, perhaps they would have the funds to buy them back. Or perhaps not. This jewelry shop would survive even if no one bought anything at all. When the last patron slipped out the door, the timpanist emerged from between two shelves and approached the counter.

        “How is the new conductor?” asked the man sitting there. He wore a jeweler’s lens and eyed the open back of a pocketwatch.

        The timpanist, distracted by trying to separate his reports from his sheet music, responded before he’d thought about it. “Terrifying,” he said.

        The jeweler sat up on his stool and stared at him.

        The timpanist forced a smile and handed the reports over, letting the worn pages of his drum part slip back into the bag. “I mean—she’s a character. She—she brought in this composition. It’s old as balls and the notation is weird, and she’s got a plan for how we’re rehearsing it, but no one has any idea what that plan is, except whenever we really get going and are getting it, she stops us.”

        The jeweler eyed him over the open pocketwatch. Was this useful information? The timpanist didn’t know. His mouth was spilling improvisation. But something about the piece was different from the ones they’d played with the old conductor. It had moments of military flair, but it wasn’t a march or an overture to an extended fanfare. It had a sparseness to it, with single lines passing from instrument to instrument, a clarinet echoing a melody from an oboe, a trombone line picked up by a horn or a muted trumpet. Playing it felt different.

        “There was this one part—it was all brass, nearly. The trombones were doing an up-down bomm-bomm-bomm-bomm thing, and the horns were daa-da-ta-da-ta-daaa, building and building and then the trumpets cried out, a piercing fanfare above the rest, and then... me.

        “I’d been counting my ass off. I knew my part was coming, but I had no idea what it was supposed to sound like. There were at least two-hundred measures of rests before it, so I was tapping out the rhythm on my legs, trying to hear how my part might fit with what everyone else was playing. And then we were almost there, one more measure of rest, and I took a breath and—”

        The timpanist felt it again, that surging wave of adrenaline, and raised his hands up, then let his body go, miming the way he had pounded on the drums as if he was playing the jeweler’s countertop itself.

        The jeweler recoiled. The timpanist froze.

        This was definitely not useful information. He should have stopped talking three minutes ago. The jeweler’s mouth had drawn down at the corners in a cold line.

        The timpanist tucked his hands in close to his sides, to restrain any further urge to drum.

        “I just— It just— It sounded wild. Absolutely wild. Like, I don’t know. It sounded like that feeling you get when you’re hiking in the hills and you look up, and there’s a cougar looking down at you.”

        The rhythm had been so frantic, syncopated and unexpected, that everyone stopped playing and turned to look at the timpanist. Sweat had run down his forehead; he’d felt panicked and wild and embarrassed. Everyone had stopped. Everyone was looking at him.

        “That was right? Wasn’t it?” he’d asked the conductor. “It was a lot of counting, but I thought—”

        The conductor had grinned her foreign grin. “That was right. To be fair, I did not expect any percussion to actually come in on the right beat on our first time through. Thank you for paying such close attention.”

        The timpanist had wanted to melt away into the floor and at the same time puff his chest out with pride. As the conductor gave a few comments to other instruments, he stood there, still shaking with adrenaline, the pounding of the flurried tattoo in his ears.

        It had been... glorious.   

        “I got it right,” he said, and the jeweler’s shop reformed around him.

        The jeweler had an expression on his face that the timpanist could not read at all, but he was certain it was not a good one. “I wasn’t asking—” he said, slowly and carefully as if he suspected the timpanist might not know the language. “—about your musical impressions.”

        The timpanist flushed. “Of course,” he said, scrambling to put some other impressions together. “I mean, I don’t really have any. She didn’t even comment on why the job came open, so either she’s very discreet, or she just doesn’t care about our politics. She is a foreigner.”

        “Mmh.” The jeweler shuffled the pages of the report.

        The timpanist’s mouth filled with more words and explanations, but he’d already said too much. He bit his tongue.

        “Keep an eye on things,” the jeweler said finally. “And try not to get carried away.”

        The timpanist stuffed his sheet music as deep into his satchel as it would go and slunk out into the relentless Bigan sun.

* * *

        In the middle of rehearsal the following week, the doors in the rear of the auditorium opened, and the tuba, focused on offbeat oomp-pahs in time with the timpani behind her, found herself performing an impromptu solo for an extra two bars before she realized that the rest of the ensemble had stopped playing.

        They’d stopped because the Dictator had come for a visit. The tuba nearly fell off her chair in the lurch caused by her impulse to escape.

        “Hey, are you all right?” the timpanist whispered.

        “Fine,” the tuba hissed, straightening up and trying to breathe more slowly.

        The Dictator shook hands with the new conductor. “So glad to have you!” The tuba did not have to look at him to know his face, his shape. He was not particularly tall nor short. He was fresh-faced and young, with a godlike body, ginger in his Bigan-dark hair, and a boyishly sly smile.

        The tuba couldn’t breathe when she looked at him. She couldn’t breathe, just like her father couldn’t breathe—sucking futile gasps as he tried to pull air into punctured lungs; like her little brother, shot in the back as he tried to run out of the door to the kitchens; like her mother, knocked aside, head impacting the edge of that little tiled table she loved so much.

        “...play a snatch of what you’re working on?”

        The conductor, unusually subdued, called out a measure, and the ensemble began a careful recitation of one of the more ornate sections of the piece. The tuba couldn’t get enough breath to blow a note, but it was a part where she didn’t come in, so she clung to the valve casings and pressed her mouth to the mouthpiece, hiding as much of her face as she could.

        He used to come over to their house, a white villa on the hill. He’d said her mother’s alvino was the best he’d ever had. He’d played quoits with her brother. He’d flirted with her, casually, as a young man did with a girl just on the border of being of age, and then seriously, when—she now knew—his alliance with her father had grown shaky and he was seeking new ways to shore it up. If she hadn’t been so set on becoming a musician, her father might have encouraged her to marry him. Instead she’d fled from his men into the dark streets as he made his move to take the city.

        The section ended. Finally, finally he left the auditorium. The tuba held her instrument and quietly cried.

        When rehearsal finished, the timpanist nervously hovered by her chair. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

        “Are you?” the first trumpet had come up too, his instrument already packed away. “I saw—” He made an aborted gesture towards his face. He’d seen her tears.

        She wished she could be grateful for their concern instead of only afraid. She shook her head. “I didn’t expect to react like that, I’m sorry. It’s just different, with the old conductor gone.”

        She’d practiced the line in her head for the whole last hour of rehearsal, and it came out smooth and assured. The trumpet nodded. The timpanist drew back and wrapped his arms around himself.

        “I didn’t know him as well as you all did,” he said.

        The tuba laughed abruptly. “Oh, he was awful. I much prefer the new one. And yet—”

        The trumpet’s face was shadowed. “And yet,” he muttered.

        The timpanist looked between them. “A drink, for us all? I’ll buy.”

        The tuba took a breath and calmed herself. These boys—the trumpet with his reluctant speech and hunched shoulders, the timpanist with his stubborn chin and ill-fitting clothes—they were just boys, musicians, like her. She didn’t need to fear them. And by the gods she did not want to be alone tonight.

* * *

        At the beginning of the second week of rehearsal, the first clarinet stood for her solo. She wished she’d had more time to practice it at home, because the two times she’d played it before, the new conductor had made a tight sort of face, and the first clarinet didn’t know what she was doing wrong. She hated that; how they never practiced the sections in order, never finished a whole movement, how the conductor never explained exactly what she was looking for. But home was not conducive to practice.

        The first clarinet was not naturally talented, but she was persistent. She had chosen music, and she had committed to that choice, just like her foolish father and brothers had committed to their senator. Now the senator was dead and they were rotting in a prison camp, while their wives and children had all moved into her mother’s house, where the first clarinet, unmarried, still lived—five women and twelve children in one narrow townhouse, and the only paycheck was hers.

        The long rehearsals were a respite. At least in the concert hall, she could hear herself think.

        She began to play. Standing gave her the flexibility in her diaphragm to get the depth of sound she needed. The piece was growing on her. At first it had seemed unnecessarily complex, but when they got it right, it was beautiful; all those passing notes became melodic lines, the rhythms unexpected and exhilarating.

        Halfway through, the conductor cut her off.

        Then she pointed at the second clarinet—an older man who had been a condescending section leader until the first clarinet had challenged him for his seat and taken it. “I want you to try the solo.”

        “What?” The word shot out of the first clarinet’s mouth before she could think. “It’s my part. I’ve earned it.” Her eyes stung and she hated herself. Her father would be ashamed of her insubordination, for being so upset about losing a solo.

        “Have you?” the conductor asked. “But it sounds not right. You have earned a position of leadership, so for you, the most important thing should be the whole. The piece must be right. Would you complain if I said, oh, the score had a mistake, the part is for a trombone?”

        The first clarinet clenched a fist at her side. “I can do better.”

        The conductor looked at her for a long time. Then she quirked that mysterious smile. “I will give you a chance. We will have... my favorite thing. A challenge!” She nodded to the second clarinet. “Would you like to fight?”

        “Yes please,” he said with a cockiness that made the first clarinet furious. He would not have been so confident if the conductor hadn’t just undermined her.

        “Then, at the end of the week. Now let us turn to the Adagio.”

        The first clarinet sat down in her seat, shaking with anger. But she had a chance. A challenge meant she had one more chance.

* * *

        In the taverna nearest the concert hall, the trumpet leaned against the table, fingers curled around the base of his glass of givo. He’d grown comfortable with the tuba player and the timpanist—funny, as he’d been with the ensemble for years and hadn’t made friends. But he’d had his other friends then. Now, new ones were a better choice.

        The tuba, her pretty braids falling down across her face, matched him drink for drink. The timpanist was flushed and bolt-upright across from them. He seemed to grow younger when he drank, and he held his liquor much worse.

        The trumpet had still heard nothing from his family. All he knew was that the relief boat from Masl had not been able to sail. He was so tired.

        “Do you feel like there’s something different about this piece we’re playing?” the tuba asked, musing over her third glass of givo.

        “What do you mean?” the timpanist asked, with the quick curiosity that took him after a few drinks. His accent would come out too—but it was a city accent, and the trumpet was not from this city and couldn’t place the neighborhood.

        “It’s like—” the tuba searched for words. “It’s... exactly what it was meant to be. And because of that it becomes more than what it is.” She frowned. Then shook her head. “I’m drunk.”

        “You’ve had nothing!” the timpanist protested. “You should have another.”

        The piece was by a composer from Labadi: Miel Bicello. The trumpet had gone to the library on a morning off to find out more about him, but all the books on Labadi were gone. That, on top of the lack of news, calcified into a rock in his stomach. The Dictator wanted the trumpet’s home to not exist, to not ever have existed. But it did exist. Every day that they played this piece, he clung to its existence.

        “It’s true though,” he said. “It feels true. I can hear it, sometimes, how it should sound, and we are getting so close. I think the conductor can hear it too.”

        Every rehearsal made the ache inside him hurt worse—the Labadin words in the margins, the little changes the conductor would make. She would bring in new pages, switching a part from one instrument to another, each time making it sound more like home. She even brought in a ring of bells—Labadin bells, the ones meant to be worn around the ankle while you danced. She gave them to the timpanist, saying he looked like someone who could dance.

        She was right. He’d jigged like a sailor the other night when they were out. The trumpet wanted to tell him that they were Labadin bells, that he used to wear them while dancing with his brothers and sisters in the children’s parade. But the books were gone, and when he tried to speak the name of his hometown it burned his lips.

        The timpanist looked between him and the tuba, worry on his face. “I heard her saying that she studied this composer at school,” he offered. “She wrote a thesis on him.”

        The tuba laughed. “That’s why I’m surprised she conducts him so well. My father had many academic friends; they always joked that the point wasn’t to understand their subject but to argue about it.”

        “Was your father an academic?” the timpanist asked.

        The tuba went abruptly still. “No,” she said.

        The trumpet stared deep into his givo. He wanted to be home. He so deeply wanted to be home.

        The timpanist tried again. “I think I understand what you mean,” he said. “Yesterday, with the clarinet solo—the way the first clarinet played it, it sounded like a very nice clarinet solo. But when you played your solo today—” he gestured to the trumpet “—it sounded like something real, not an instrument but a song woven from the cries of the mountain eagles.”

        The words caught the trumpet’s ear, and he lifted his head. The compliment was nice, the metaphor lovely. The timpanist, embarrassed, ducked down, his long eyelashes brushing his cheeks. The trumpet pushed the bowl of spices and puffed rice towards the pretty boy. “The composer was from my hometown,” he said. “Perhaps that’s why I can hear the mountains in the piece.”

        “Where are you from?” the tuba asked.

        The trumpet made to say it, to say the name: Labadi. But he couldn’t. “Just a small mountain town.”

        “They say incenti came from the mountains,” the tuba said, leaning forward on her elbows.

        “Incen-what?” the timpanist asked.

        “Music magic,” the tuba explained. “Some pieces, it’s said, if played perfectly, can change the world.”

        The timpanist looked back and forth between them, a furrow on his brow and a pout on his mouth like he was worried he was being made fun of. “Is that a real thing?”

        “Of course not,” the trumpet said. “It’s a country folktale.”

        “I don’t know,” the tuba said. “Sometimes when we’re playing this piece, I imagine it could be one.”

        All three fell silent, the trumpet with an anxious sickness in his gut.

        “If any piece could,” the timpanist said slowly, “I think it would be this one.”

        The trumpet agreed, but he would never say so.

        As he went up to get another round of drinks, someone grabbed his sleeve. Martio.

        “Alicio. Where have you been?”

        “I have rehearsal,” he said.

        “Drinking with these collaborators.” Martio sneered.

        “My fellow performers,” the trumpet hissed. “My friends.” He shook Martio’s grip from his sleeve. He tried to walk on, but Martio followed him into the crush by the bar.

        “We have a plan, Ali. We need you.”

        “Oh, a plan? What is it, a bombing? A riot? How will it help the Labadin? How will it help my family?”

        “It will bring attention to their plight! The Dictator will know we are serious.”

        The trumpet snorted. It would not help the Labadin, no matter what Martio claimed, not even if their bombs shouted ‘Free Labadi!’ instead of booming their explosions. “I have to work. I have work, unlike you.”

        “You are just frightened. You’re a timid mouse, with no convictions. I spit on you.” And Martio did spit. The trumpet reeled back, his fists balling. Martio stood there, chin out, ready to be hit.

        The trumpet lowered his fists and turned away. When he returned to the table the timpanist’s eyes lingered on him. Like an apology, the timpanist pushed the basket of puffed rice back.

* * *

        The tuba player lived above a grocer. Before the drought, the grocer had been very kind when the tuba had yet to sort out where her money was coming from and had none left for food after paying the rent. But now the grocer’s crates and baskets grew empty, with only shriveled onions and wrinkled, leggy caisci remaining. Still, she would not mark up her prices so only the rich could eat. That was another small good thing. The tuba player valued it and made sure to always pay her rent on time.

        She didn’t have a tuba at home, just a small euphonium. She was known as the girl with ‘that brass instrument.’ It was better than lugging the tuba through the city every day. If she needed to run, she could run.

        “Sweet-thing!” the grocer called out, as she returned from rehearsal. “I was just talking to someone about you. Always admirers for such a pretty girl. The spitting image of poor Lady Crio—may the gods keep her soul—though I didn’t say that. Not these days. But I did mention you had a concert coming up. He seemed so interested to hear about it—”

        “Thank you,” the tuba said, the sweetness in her voice all artificial. She’d gone as still as a windless lake at the mention of her mother’s name. “Did he leave?”

        “Yes, I’m afraid. You missed him by an hour or so.”

        The tuba nodded. She walked up the stairs. There was only one entrance to the apartment. It would be hard to get in without anyone noticing. And yet the panic in her chest made it seem all too likely. If he was in there, waiting for her... She could just go, turn around, not even try her own door. But there was a chance—

        If she died, she died. She’d accepted that a long time ago. She opened the door. Was there a sound? No. She grabbed the bag she’d left hanging from the coat rack and her euphonium tucked behind it, stepped back, and shut the door.

        She didn’t lock it. Thieves could take what they wanted. She wouldn’t be coming back.

* * *

        “Have you heard of incenti?” the timpanist asked the jeweler. He’d put off including it in his reports for a week now, going out with the trumpet and the tuba every night after rehearsal, hoping for a little more information first. But the subject never came up again.

        “What?” the jeweler replied, sounding irritated, not looking up from the timpanist’s reports.

        “I don’t know. No one told me stories when I was a boy. The other musicians were talking about it. When I asked around, all I could find were a few rumors about avalanches, and old tales about singers kept aboard ships to call winds and storms. Lots of old songs are said to be incenti—magic—but they don’t do anything. I guess it’s just folklore—”

        The jeweler was glaring at him out from under his bushy eyebrows.

        “Just nonsense,” the timpanist said hurriedly.

        “Right. Except that the conversation was obviously seditious.”

        “What? We were just talking about music. There was no implication—”

        “Why are you defensive, Savant?”

        “I’m not!” Now that was defensive. The timpanist grit his teeth at his own childishness. “I would tell you if I saw signs of sedition. Yes, Ali has friends who are suspect, but he has been out with me every night. He hasn’t met them once.” Except that one time—but he’d refused them.

        “What about the girl?”

        “Marin?” In his reports, the timpanist had only said he’d been going out with a few other musicians; he hadn’t mentioned a specific girl. “She—she plays the tuba.”

        The jeweler glowered. “I don’t care what she plays. Who is she? Her family, her contacts. I sent someone around. She’s a lodger. Fake name.”

        “She’s—” The timpanist remembered her shock, her sweat, her tears, in the presence of the Dictator. “She’s been with the ensemble for a while. From what she’s said, I think she’s an orphan. I can ask about her teachers, her previous musical groups—”

        The jeweler sat back slowly, crossing his arms. “You haven’t even fucked them.”

        The timpanist went still.

        “You three looked pretty cozy in that bar. Back in my old job I could have gotten an adultery case on less. But each night you all went your separate ways. If you’d gone home with either one, or both, I’d understand it.” The jeweler shook his head.

        No. The timpanist hadn’t slept with them. But he felt as sated as if he had. They went out every night to tavernas that had music. They laughed together, sometimes danced. He knew them well now. Alicio, the trumpeter, his family were goat farmers. He’d gotten his town’s only scholarship to the conservatory. Marin, the tuba player, she held her drink better than either of them, and told filthier jokes too. She was good-natured and cheerful even in the face of terrible things. It was not that he liked them and so he did not believe they were traitors, but they were not traitors and so he liked them.

        They treated him as a fellow musician. He liked that too. He liked it better than being spied on by the people he was working for.

        The timpanist unclenched his fists, stretching out his hands, then closed them again, but only as tight as he would hold his mallets. “Have you ever played music, sir?”

        The jeweler scoffed. “Can’t say it’s a good idea on stakeout. Learned to knit, though. Blessing on long cold nights.”

        “Well, I like it. The music. That’s all. I like the music.”

        “I’d guessed that,” the jeweler said. But there was the hint of a smile in the corners of his lips.

        The timpanist left, oddly relieved by the conversation. The jeweler in the end hadn’t been all that interested in his report. He wouldn’t send people to break up the ensemble because of an innocent chat about folktales. The music could not become a weapon.

        There was no such thing as incenti.

* * *

        At the knock, the trumpet opened the door to his garret apartment. “Marin?”

        “I was going to leave the city, but I just—” The tuba player stood at the top of the rickety stair, clutching her euphonium case to her chest. “—I walked and I walked. I went to every gate, but I could not bear to cross.”

        The trumpet took a breath. Dangerous, this was dangerous. He knew who she was, of course he did. Everyone knew that Senator Crio’s eldest daughter was a musician. She hadn’t wanted to get a chair through her father’s name, so she’d always used a different one. And she hadn’t been killed in the purge. The Greyshirts had orders to hunt her. He could not let her stay.

        But without their tuba, the ensemble would fall apart. No grounding bass to guide them.

        He nodded.

        That night she cleaned and oiled her euphonium, but she did not play a note.

        They slept in his narrow tick bed, back to back.

* * *

        As the ensemble hurried to rehearsal and home again, they saw the streets sprouting garlands of laurel and bunting in anticipation of the Cleansing of the City festival. The concert on the first night would take place outdoors, from atop the old, broad city walls, so the ring of the trumpets, trombones, and horns would echo over tiled rooftops and domed spires. Workers were finishing construction on a grandstand and an acoustic backdrop to carry the sound of the entire ensemble, brass and woodwinds and percussion, to the crowds gathered in the plaza below. The following morning, at dawn, the children of the city, dressed in white, would race a circuit of the streets, tossing cloth bombs of chalk scented with desert myrtle at doors and arches and bridges to drive foul spirits away. Then the priests and priestesses would walk the streets, the novices with brooms made of sacred leaves or grasses, sweeping the cobbles and bricks.

        Usually, the final part of the ceremony was to open the sluicegates of the hilltop cisterns and send water rushing down the streets into the river. All those who wished to rinse off their burdens of guilt and pain and sorrow bathed themselves in the running water to start their lives afresh. But as everyone in the ensemble knew, the spring rains had not come, and there was not enough water to cleanse the city of blood and shame.

* * *

        “Are you ready?” The conductor leaned on her podium and smiled down at the clarinet section with the quirk of secret knowledge to her lips that the first clarinet truly wanted to despise.

        Today was the day of the challenge, and the first clarinet felt nothing but a simmering intensity in every sinew. She hadn’t had much sleep, but she had practiced.

        Trying to find time and space at home, as children screamed and her sisters-in-law called her selfish for ignoring their troubles, had seemed futile. But she’d sat in a corner, stuffed her ears with wax, and played against the chaos. As she did, her eldest brother’s daughter stopped to listen. Then she corralled the other children old enough to be out of cribs and made them sit as a small audience and be silent. The first clarinet uncorked her ears and played to them. In their faces, she could see when the solo was coming right, when it worked.

        She’d given the girl her old recorder. The girl’s mother hadn’t thanked her—”the noise! The noise!” she’d said. But the first clarinet didn’t care. Her mother had always said the same about her playing too.

        The conductor nodded to the second clarinet. He stood. She gave the ensemble a measure and counted them off. Over the ensemble, the second clarinet began to play.

        The first clarinet stayed quiet, listening. No, not like that. Oh, that line was beautiful. Mmh, not quite in time with the flutes. The shape of the solo, set in the landscape of the piece, was clearer to her now than it had been. She watched the conductor’s face. The conductor usually conducted with her whole body, relaxed shoulders, swiveling at the hips, leaning back as an arpeggio bellied out, sighing at its end, tossing her head to the energetic martiality. But for this she stayed composed, the end of her baton lightly twitching.

        “Thank you,” the conductor said with a slight nod. Then her eyes turned to the first clarinet. There was a challenge in them.

        The first clarinet rose. She was no longer angry, or irritated, or anxious. She understood. It had to be right.

        So she would play it right.

* * *

        The tuba player had no part in this section, so she sat back and listened. The second clarinet had been good. He sounded assured, with a resonant depth of tone. But the first clarinet...

        There was a new shape to her part, an intensity and eagerness. She didn’t follow the conductor but pushed. Eighteen measures in, the conductor was no longer looking at her. She had her eyes shut; she was directing the whole ensemble, breathing with the first clarinet. The tuba shut her eyes too. This was why she hadn’t left. This was why she would risk it. Because if she left—if she left she would not have this, could not have this. She needed this.

        The highpoint, now, the peak; muted trumpets joining, the raindrop rhythm of the trombones. A flourish, a long, endless fermata, and then a rumble, organic, thunderous—the bass drum?

        The tuba opened her eyes. She hadn’t remembered the bass drum having a part there. But the drum’s skins were flat; still. The rumble had come from all around. A vibration shivered through the pages on her music stand, and a spark of static electricity cracked from her fingers to the valves of the tuba.

        She looked behind her, caught the timpanist’s wide eyes, looked to the trumpet who’d just put down his instrument. A moment hung between them.

        “Enough.” The conductor cut off the first clarinet, her voice sharp and rough as if she was just remembering how to speak. Startled, the first clarinet lowered her instrument, her lips unusually red, her cheeks flushed. Shame shuttered her face. Failure.

        “You keep it,” the conductor said. “Thank you. Now, to the Allegretto.”

        The second clarinet grumbled and turned his part over.

        The first clarinet looked staggered, then slowly sat, putting a hand on her chest as if her lungs were strained.

        Incenti. The tuba breathed slowly over her mouthpiece. For a moment, she thought the air was touched with the scent of spring rain.

* * *

        The timpanist paced back and forth in his apartment. He knew what he should do. He knew it. The conductor—oh she had plans. It seemed like most of the ensemble hadn’t noticed—too busy playing or counting or being bored, or they didn’t know enough of incenti to recognize what had happened. But he’d felt it. And that feeling—he’d entered with the trombones, an arpeggioed tattoo, and it had felt—He’d been buoyed by it. He had never experienced anything like that before—being part of something, part of creating something greater than the sum of its parts, part of an act of beauty that could change the world.

        He clutched his mallets in his hands. His home-made mallets, that hit with just the right resound.

        He knew what he should do. This was foolish, selfish. But...

        He wanted to play.

* * *

        The early morning street was crowded with the line for the water pump. Greyshirts watched it, making sure no one took too much, but still it always ran out before midday.

        Martio was there. The trumpet did not meet his eyes, trying to walk past.

        “Ali. I had a letter. From Labadi.”

        “What?” The trumpet froze. They stood shoulder to shoulder beside the line for the pump, facing in opposite directions, neither turning their heads nor making any sign that they conversed. “How can you, if I have not?”

        There were no letters getting through. So long as the trumpet had no news, he had to tell himself that. He spent his days vacillating between unfounded hope and unconfirmed despair.

        “I’m sorry, Alicio.” Paper slipped into the trumpet’s hand. “I guess it was just an earthquake.”

        Martio walked on quickly. The trumpet clutched the letter in both hands. He could not bring himself to open it.

        “Hey, you!” Down the street a Greyshirt took a stride toward Martio. “Show your identification.”

        Martio glanced about, searching for an excuse, an escape. There was none. A shadow in an alley formed into the shape of another Greyshirt, moving toward him. An apparent farmer drew a pistol and turned the flap of his jacket over to reveal the Dictator’s warrant.

        The trumpet stumbled backwards. He needed to look away, he needed to distance himself, pretend to be unaffected, uninvolved. But he could not. He’d looked away from Labadi. Everyone had looked away from Labadi. He could not look away from Martio. But he could not move to act either.

        “I live nearby,” Martio said, his words rapid and rattling against each other. “I didn’t bring my papers, but I—”

        “Are you Martio Balani?” “Get on your knees!” “Hold out your hands.”

        Martio showed his empty hands, holding them open before his face. He tried to kneel while keeping his hands up and fell in the gutter. One Greyshirt grasped his thick hair, pulled his head back. The warranted farmer pressed his pistol to the bulge of Martio’s throat. The other Greyshirt opened Martio’s jacket, pawing through the inside pockets. He tore a packet of identification papers out with a rip of silk.

        “It is you!” He shook the papers in Martio’s face.

        “Of what crime am I accused? I’m just an actor!” Martio protested, but his voice cracked.

        “Disloyalty and sedition.”

        “I am loyal to Biga!”

        “Oh good.” One of the Greyshirts laughed. “Then tell us you love the Dictator. Swear it.”

        The trumpet couldn’t breathe. There was a place for defiance and a place for capitulation. He had heard what the Greyshirts had done in other parts of the city. In his heart, he couldn’t believe it: this was Biga, wellspring of senatorial rule, of justice and free debate, not some lawless place. But though his heart didn’t believe, his mind knew enough to be afraid. Do it, he silently begged. There would be other days for defiance.

        But Martio did not say the words. “Let me go,” he said instead.

        “Say it.”

        “No.”

        “Say it.”

        “No! Free Labadi!”

        The shout of the forbidden name roused birds from the rooftops, soaring black specks against the bright cloudless sky. Then the nose of the farmer’s pistol slid down to the center of Martio’s chest. Two shots. The scent of burned cloth, gunpowder, and blood.

        They dropped him, a heap of flesh on the paving-stones, baking in the hot sun. Blood began to flow down the long-dry gutters.

        “Not such a good actor,” the warranted farmer said. “Couldn’t even say his lines.”

        The passers-by looked away. The trumpet’s fingers clawed at his palms; his throat was bulging and raw with leashed screams.

        “Who has this man been with? Who has he been speaking to?” the Greyshirt demanded.

        A woman in the water line turned toward the trumpet and pointed. “Him. He spoke to him.”

        The trumpet ran.

* * *

        Under the steeply slanted ceiling of the trumpet’s garret apartment, the tuba sat on the bed and oiled her euphonium’s valves. The tick mattress already stank of valve oil, so she didn’t feel bad about dripping on it. She looked up when she heard the thunder of feet on the stairs.

        The trumpet burst into the garret, shaken and sweaty. “I have to leave,” he gasped out. “I’ll go to Masl, to—somewhere. You must leave too. It isn’t safe here.”

        “What happened?”

        “My friend—” He crumpled an unopened letter in his hand. “My family.”

        His urgency struck her. She’d always known she would have to leave at no notice, to abandon everything. But his pain and panic broke against her and fell away. Her own feelings were all muted as if by heavy felt.

        “We can’t go,” she said. “The festival begins tomorrow night. They can’t play without us.”

        The trumpet gaped. “You’d stay here because of the performance? You’d stay to die? They killed your family, and mine—I should have gone to Labadi immediately, even if there was nothing I could do, even if they would have killed me for trying to get in. Now it’s too late.”

        The tuba shook her head. “You felt it too. We need to play this piece.”

        “Incenti isn’t real!” He screamed it.

        The tuba sat silent. She knew he believed that, in spite of what they’d heard. He needed to believe it. If he thought, even for a moment, that incenti might be real, he would have hope again, and with hope came pain, and they had all suffered so much already.

        “Once,” he said, “yes, once I thought it was, that it could be.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “When I was a child I thought that if I played, just right, I could change the shape of things—transform a caterpillar into a butterfly, shift the course of running water, draw clouds into the sky. But those were a child’s beliefs. I am grown now, grown so old that I have friends bleeding out in the gutter. Incenti isn’t real. And even if it were, how could it fix things? There is no reason to stay.”

        “Maybe not,” the tuba said. “But does it matter? If there was something to do, fine. If there was a way to end the drought, or bring relief to Labadi, or give amnesty to my father’s friends, we should do that. But just running away? I would rather play that piece and die than run and live like a rat.”

        “You would?”

        The tuba nodded, short and abrupt. Maybe she’d only said it because he needed to hear it. Maybe she’d bullied herself into it, when on her own, her fear would make her run. But it had been said. She would stand by it.

        “What do we do?” he said.

        “We go now. We spend the night in the practice rooms. If they come here and find it empty, they’ll think we’ve run. They’ll be watching the borders. They won’t check the concert hall.”

        The trumpet blinked at her, befuddled and exhausted by the emotion that had coursed through him. But the practical suggestion was enough to cling to. “Right,” he said. “Right.” He packed a bag and gathered up his trumpet case.

        They hurried together into the baking night.

* * *

        The conductor was perched crosslegged on her podium when the first clarinet arrived, gazing out over the grandstand, past the city to the dry dirt fields and the hills lined with vines and olives beyond.

        The first clarinet slowed to a stop. She had not expected the conductor to be there—and yet, wasn’t that why she’d come early? To spend more time with her? “How long have you been here?” she asked. “I’m stupidly early.”

        “Mm?” As if waking from a deep sleep, the conductor lifted her head.

        The first clarinet found herself unable to look away. She’d fought against this feeling but lost the battle. It was what troubled her most about the new conductor: the way she made no sense yet perfect sense, the way she was purely frustrating yet mesmerizing, the way she knew everything and explained nothing.

        “Why are you doing this?” the first clarinet asked. “I felt it the other day. I think I know what it is. I just don’t know why.”

        The conductor watched her for a moment, eyes shadowed and unreadable. Under that gaze, the first clarinet felt transparent, exposed. Once more, she waited to discover if she would be deemed worthy. Then came the slightest of nods; the conductor’s gaze drifted past her, toward the mountains.

        “My family came from Labadi,” she said. “My great-grandparents. They left after the last failed push for independence. I grew up with stories about this. About incenti.”

        “Oh.” The shape of the conductor’s face, her bearing, they had always been familiar even as her accent made her strange.

        “They say the music needs to be played with perfection, but I have a theory this is not so. If ‘perfection’ is needed, such pieces would never work, for nothing in this world is perfect. Instead, I think they must be played with need, with full commitment.” She reached out and caught the first clarinet’s hand. “When I first saw this score in the archive, I could hear it. I knew how to make it right. But hearing you play it, with life—that was not an experience I had imagined, and I am honored by it.”

        The first clarinet struggled to not seem as flustered as she was. Having her hand taken was overwhelming; the compliment made it worse.

        “But—what does it do?”

        “I don’t know.” The conductor smiled, still holding her hand.

        The first clarinet was tired of asking the practical stupid questions. But someone had to be stupidly practical. Someone had to count chairs and get the ensemble members on stage and make sure that the gods-bedamned Greyshirts wouldn’t be waiting at the bottom of the steps after the performance to arrest the lot of them.

        “What’s the point if you don’t know?” She pulled her hand away. Too many of them had felt the building shake, had smelled the change in the air, and one of them was an informer. They knew one of them was an informer. This performance would never happen.

        She had come regardless. If she missed her chance to play that solo, she would regret it for the rest of her life.

        “To find out?” the conductor asked, teasing. Silently laughing, she shook her head. “It’s music.” There was no smile this time, just assuredness. “Music is meant to be heard. And this piece was written for the Cleansing of the City. I don’t know what that means, except that it means it is the right piece for today. If everyone comes, if we play with our full intention, we will find out what it does. And if it does nothing? It is still Labadin music, being given the honor it deserves.”

        “We will all be thrown in jail.”

        “It’s a possibility.”

        The conductor moved to the side and patted the space beside her. Surprised, the first clarinet hesitated, then sat down.

        They sat together quietly as stupidly early turned into reasonably early, and then to on-time, and one-by-one the other musicians began to arrive.

* * *

        As the sun lowered toward the western horizon, the conductor rose and mounted her platform. She peered at the searingly blue sky. Was that grey haze on the horizon distant clouds? She paged absently through her score. She had held the ensemble back from performing the whole concerto as one until now, because she did not know what would happen. If it were to collapse the roof, she’d prefer they were outside.

        The performers continued to file onto the stage and take their seats: her darling first clarinet, always ready; the tuba player and the first trumpet, both a little more rumpled than expected, tired and shaken but moving with a certain step that gave her confidence. The flutes were all there, the rest of the clarinets, the trombones, the horns, the percussionists. Paper whispered and stands creaked as the ensemble arranged their music. Those who sat sat perched on the edges of their chairs, their bodies tilted forward like young shoots toward the sun. Those who stood held themselves in readiness, each muscle a pressed spring.

        Only the timpanist was missing. They could play without him, but his part was a key one. Would the magic happen without him, or would they simply cry out a fruitless lament into the air?

        She knew he was the informer. She’d noted his vigilant eyes, the care in his casual jibes to the other percussionists. His application forms had been impeccable—most unusual for a musician—and the conductors referenced on them did not remember his name. But she’d also seen the craving in him—for connection, for purpose. She had tried to fill him up with music. Had it been enough? Would he come with his mallets, or leading a gang of Greyshirts bearing chains?

        Behind her, she heard the disquieted murmur as the Dictator and his fellow senators took their boxes in the stands. Crowds were streaming into the plaza below the wall to see such pomp and circumstance, to hear the wind ensemble, to listen and perhaps be changed by music alone.

        The first clarinet sounded the tuning note, one lone perfect voice against the rustles of the settling audience. Then others joined, and for a moment all was cacophony—then harmony—then silence.

        A thump of footsteps, there. The timpanist hurtled up the stairs to the stage, his mallets in hand. His hair was disordered; his white dress shirt flapped untucked. He took his position behind his drums. With his eyes closed, his ear cocked, he beat a light tap on each to check the tuning. A nod. He settled himself. Feet planted, shoulders back, his mallets poised over the broad head of the largest drum, readied for the opening flourish.

        She raised her baton.

        The world around them hushed. The grandstand fell silent. The crowd in the plaza below the walls held its breath.

        For her whole life, the conductor had wanted to direct a piece that she knew, in her soul, was incenti. Deep in the dusty forgotten archives reading this score, she had foreseen this moment: the pale stem of her baton against the violet evening, the breathless baked-over air, the soundless crowd, and her players, ready to come together and cast true music into the skies.

        This ensemble, she had faith in them. They had risen to the challenge of this piece; shown themselves sensitive and eager to learn. In spite of the loss, the risk, the inescapable suffering of the world they inhabited, they had devoted themselves to the music. Together they would turn this dusty manuscript into beautiful, irrefutable sound. Together, they would cleanse the city.

        The conductor scanned her gathered players, noted her principals: her spiky first clarinet; her first trumpet, his chin up, his bell flaring above his stand; her tuba, cradling the glorious brazen mass of her instrument. Behind the tuba, her timpanist’s fierce gaze; she inclined her head just a touch, saw his slight delighted smile.

        A twitch in the air—

        Her baton plunged.

Copyright © 2021 Cara Masten DiGirolamo

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Cara Masten DiGirolamo is a former trumpet player and current MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. She is a queer writer and artist, an amateur bookbinder, and an instructor in the secret art of Turkish paper marbling. With a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University, she is renowned in some circles for DiGirolamo 2012, an article on the phonology of fandom pairing names, and not at all renowned for her expertise on Middle Welsh pronouns. Her short fiction appears in venues such as Daily Science Fiction, Cast of Wonders, and Newmyths.com, and is forthcoming at Fantasy Magazine.

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COVER ART

“Arathi Temple Complex,” by Leon Tukker

Leon Tukker is a student based in the Netherlands, self-taught in 3D software and digital painting. After graduating a game design course, he plans to start freelancing or join a company. He has always been a big fan of fantasy and science fiction, and most of his paintings are about those subjects. He has a fascination for all natural things on earth that have an alien feel about them. See more of his artwork in his gallery on ArtStation.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2021 Firkin Press

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