real magic could be found, in the way he worked a song through changes in modulation, pauses, slides up and down the scale, emphasis added and withdrawn. With his voice, he could make them believe. No one was immune. Wherever he went, whomever he played for, they were his for as long as he sang.
The problem was that it didn’t end there and the result wasn’t always pleasant. His voice could provide a healing balm, but it could be a weapon, too. And in the heat of a moment’s careless lapse or an ill-considered emotional surge, it could shift from the former to the latter.
And even that wasn’t the worst of it. What it did to him was even more terrifying. When he used the magic in the wrong way, in an ill-advised response to anger or fear, it whisked him away and dropped him into a deep, dark nothingness, into a place where everything disappeared and time stopped. It happened all at once and without warning. It was as if he had been yanked outside himself. This has happened only a scattering of times—but they were times that were among the blackest of his life. To lose all sense of what was happening, to be stripped of control and become a helpless prisoner in a timeless nothingness was something he could barely stand to think about.
He did not want it to happen to him ever again. He would do anything to prevent it.
He sang his last song for the hour and stood up to receive the resultant applause before departing the tiny stage and moving back behind the bar to gain some space. Calls for drinks for the player, the singer, the music man rang through the great room, but he declined them all. Drink fogged his mind, and a fogged mind was dangerous for someone with his condition. As marvelous as his gift could be, it could also be unpredictable. No matter the urges he felt, he couldn’t let his guard down. With a moment’s carelessness, the darker emotions could take control and his singing could turn lethal.
It had happened only that handful of times, but he remembered the consequences of each one vividly. He didn’t want any more memories to add to that bin.
He stood behind the bar and drank from a glass of water, smiling and waving at his listeners. Off to one side, the Fortren brothers stood talking, heads bent close. Scheming, he corrected himself, not talking. Like weasels. The music never seemed to affect them in the way it affected others. They weren’t immune to the magic; they couldn’t be. They seemed mostly enraged by it, as if it awakened something in them that they would have preferred to leave sleeping. They had threatened him on more than one occasion because of it, never saying exactly why they were so troubled.
At the back of the room, the stranger in the black cloak was staring at him, his narrow features revealed, bladed and flat. His eyes glittered, but there was no malice or ill intent reflected.
Odd, Reyn thought. Then the head lowered, and the face disappeared back into shadow.
The boy studied him a moment longer, then he turned and went back into the kitchen for something more to eat. The singing, the turning of his audience from doubters into believers, the giving what they didn’t even know they wanted—it was all hard work and it made him hungry. Standing at the griddle, he made himself another sandwich, casting occasional glances at the old grease-dog as he cooked food, prepared plates, and called off the orders to Sorsi and Phenel, the two serving girls.
His gaze shifted to a tiny window and the darkness outside. He wished he knew more about the source of his power. He didn’t question that it was a form of magic; he had accepted that a long time back. If you could use your voice to do the things that he had done—good and bad—you commanded magic. But where had it come from? Why did he have it? His parents hadn’t told him, assuming they had even known. They were dead before he was even old enough to ask the questions that plagued him now. He could still see them in his mind, dragged from their home by the townspeople to be stoned until they were dead.
Because of him. Because of his voice. Because of what he was suspected of being by frightened, superstitious fools.
He shut his eyes against the thoughts and