The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [11]
A thaurnharp began sounding a delicate melody that blended with the birdsong and bee buzzes of the afternoon.
“What tune is that?” a familiar voice softly asked, startling him.
“She’s improvising,” he murmured.
“It sounds a little sad.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Everything she plays these days is sad.”
Warm, supple fingers wrapped around his own stiff and ruined digits. He opened his eyes and turned his head so that he could see Areana’s red-gold hair and dark-jeweled orbits.
“I didn’t hear you come up,” he told her.
“Bare feet don’t make much sound on clover, do they?”
“Especially feet as dainty as yours,” he replied.
“Oh, hush. You don’t have to win me anymore.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “I’d like to win you again every day.”
“Well, that’s nice,” she said. “Good husband talk. We’ll see if you feel that way in ten years as opposed to ten days.”
“It’s my fondest wish to find out. And again in twenty, thirty—”
She cupped her hand over his mouth. “Hush, I said.”
She looked around the glade. “I’m going to start calling this your solar. You always want to be in the sunlight these days.”
Don’t you? he wanted to ask. She had spent months in the dungeons, just as he had. And just as he had, she had heard—
No. He didn’t want to remember.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to remind you. I just—I wonder what you will do when winter comes.”
He shrugged. “It’s not here yet, and I can’t stop it coming. We’ll see.”
She smiled, but he felt it turn in him.
“Maybe I can write a bright music.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve ruined your nap.”
You have, he thought, his bitterness growing. And why carp about winter?
“Still,” she went on, her tone changing, “all you do is nap, it seems.”
He sat up, feeling his breath begin to fire. “How do you—”
And then a bee stung him. The pain was very simple, very direct, and he found himself on his feet howling, swatting at the air, which was alive with the swarming insects.
He understood now. The pain of the sting had wakened his sense.
“Mery,” he shouted, striding toward the girl where she sat with her little thaurnharp.
“Mery, quit that.”
But she kept playing until Leoff reached down and stopped her hands. They felt cold.
“Mery, it’s hurting us.”
She didn’t look up at first but continued to study the keyboard.
“It doesn’t hurt me,” she said.
“I know,” he said softly.
She looked up then, and his chest tightened.
Mery was a slight girl; she looked younger than her eight winters. From a distance she might be five or six.
But she wasn’t at a distance now. Her eyes had been azure when they had met. They were still blue, but they seemed filmed over somehow, sometimes vacant, sometimes sharp with subtle pain a child her age should not know. Up close, Mery might be a hundred.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What were you trying to do there?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He knelt and stroked her hair.
“Robert won’t find us again.”
“He took it with him,” Mery said, her voice just audible. “He tricked you into writing it, and he took it with him.”
“It’s all right,” Leoff said.
“It’s not,” Mery replied. “It’s not. When he plays it, I can hear it.”
The hairs went up on Leoff’s neck. “What?”
“He doesn’t play it well,” she whispered. “But now he has someone else to do it. I can hear it.”
Leoff glanced over at Areana. She hadn’t said anything, but tears were running quietly down her face.
“I thought you would fix it,” Mery said. “Now I see you can’t.”
“Mery…”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I understand.”
She lifted the thaurnharp off her lap, took it by its carry strap, and stood up.
“I’ll play someplace else,” she said.
“Mery, please don’t go,” Areana said.
But the girl already was trudging off.
Leoff watched her leave and sighed. “She expects me to do something,” he said.
“She expects too much,” she said.
He shook his head. “We were there, but she played it. I used her—”
“To save our lives,” his wife gently reminded him.
“I’m not sure I saved hers,” he said. “I thought she would get better, but she’s slipping away, Rey. It’s worse every day.”
She nodded. “Yah.