The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [101]
That gave her a bit of a pause. It had been rather bad, hadn’t it? The shaft had been half in her. She had seen bodies cut open before. How could it have missed all of that? She should have died, shouldn’t she?
She remembered the knight who wouldn’t die, the one Cazio had been able to stop only by hacking the body into individual pieces. She remembered the other one in the wood near Dunmrogh.
And her uncle Robert, whose blood was no longer quick but who walked and did his evil anyway.
Oh, saints, she thought. What have I become?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SINGING DEAD
LEOFF STARED at the blank parchment, terrified.
It was not the sort of thing that usually frightened him.
Since childhood he had been able to hear music in his head: not just music he had experienced but music he imagined. Not only melodies but harmony lines, counterpoint, chords. He could compose a sinfonia for fifty instruments and hear each individual voice. Writing it down was an afterthought, a convenience, a way to share his music with the less fortunate.
But now he feared the music lurking in his skull. Every time he tried to think about the forbidden modes he had rediscovered while he was Robert’s captive, he felt ill. How could he find an antidote when he couldn’t face the disease?
“I saw my mother last night,” a soft voice behind him said.
Startled, he turned to find Mery watching him from a few paces away.
“Did you?” he asked. Mery’s mother was dead, of course, but one saw the dead now and then.
“In the well,” she confirmed. “The old well in the back garden.”
“You shouldn’t be playing around there,” he said. “It’s dangerous.”
“I wasn’t playing,” the girl said softly.
Of course you weren’t, he thought sadly. You never play anymore.
Not that she ever had, much, but there once had been something of a little girl about her.
“Did your mother say anything?”
“She said she was sorry,” Mery said. “She said she’s been forgetting things.”
“She must have loved you very much to come see you,” he said.
“It’s easier for them now,” she said. “The music makes it easier.”
“The music we made together? For Prince Robert?”
She nodded. “But they’re singing it now, over there.”
“The dead?”
“They sing and sing and don’t even know they’re doing it.”
Leoff rubbed his mess of a hand against his forehead. “They’re singing it,” he muttered. “What is happening?”
“Why does it make you sad that the ghosts are singing?”
“It doesn’t,” he said gently. “Not in and of itself. But the song is bad, I think.” He held up his hands. “Do you remember when I could play hammarharp with these?”
“Yes,” she said. “The praifec had your hands broken.”
“Right,” Leoff said, shying from the memory of that pain. “And for a long time they didn’t heal, but now they have. Something in the world is broken: The thing that separates life from death. Our song made it worse, and I think their song—what you hear them singing—is keeping it worse. Preventing things from healing.”
“Your hands didn’t heal right,” she said. “You still can’t play hammarharp.”
“That’s true,” he conceded.
“What if the world heals, but not right?”
“I don’t know,” Leoff sighed.
She looked at the blank paper. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Make music that will heal things?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Will it heal me?”
“I hope so.”
She walked over and leaned against him. “I’m sad, Leoff,” she confided. “I’m always sad.”
“I know,” he replied.
“I wish I could help you, but every time I try to play something, I hurt people.”
“I know.”
“I sing for the ghosts, though, and sometimes play for them very quietly, when no one is around. Like at the well.”
“Does that make you happy?”
“No. But it makes me feel a better kind of sad.”
Rain had washed Haundwarpen that morning and left it smelling new, as if its cobbles and bricks had been laid that morning. It was a neat little town anyway, but today it almost looked like something that had been painted, so fresh were the yellow and rust trims on the houses,