her music, she would not be passed from hand to hand but cherished by one musician and one only. And so I made the boy swear an oath to me when he bought her.’”
Braden stares at Phee. He wants to deny this, all of this. A cello cannot have a soul, and yet he has always felt that his does. He tries to shake off the mood Phee has created with questions and logic.
“Wait. You said the MacPhee luthiers have been creating these . . . contracts . . . between musicians and instruments for generations, long before the war. So this is just a bullshit story, meant to make me feel guilty.”
“I’m telling you what he told me,” she says. “Some of the MacPhee specials were built from scratch. Some were pieced together as was your cello. All of them, he said, carried a soul. Whenever he spoke of the cello, he became more . . . intense . . . than when he spoke of the others. You remember your oath?”
“I remember.”
He stands, one hand on the warm wood of the cello, feeling that she is already a part of him and he a part of her, and it is easy to lift the other hand and repeat after the strange old man, “I swear to love and cherish this cello as a part of my own soul. I swear to play her until the day of my death. If I should break my oath, the consequences be on me and my children.”
Braden, in the first heady rush of falling in love, had barely registered the solemnity of the oath. Of course he would love the cello and play her as long as they both should live.
His mother, practical and disapproving, had rolled her eyes, tolerating this foolishness as the eccentricity of a master maker, even as she must have dimly understood that she herself was under some kind of spell or she would never have consented to the shift from violin to cello in the first place.
“I know how it sounds,” Phee says. “When he first told me this tale, I asked so many questions, but he would tell me no more. He wouldn’t tell me by what craft or magic he believed he had put the cello together. He never told me what dark magic he believed he had invoked that any of the instruments should carry a soul. But he made me promise I would hold you to your oath. You, and the others on my list. So here I am, and here you are, and the only question is, What do we do now?”
“We do nothing,” Braden says. “Because there’s nothing to be done. Even if this wild fairy tale were true, which it can’t possibly be, my hands don’t work and I can’t play. Lilian and Trey are still dead. I don’t suppose the old man suggested a remedy for any of this?”
“He would say that you must play again.”
“Which I can’t.”
“Are you certain? There’s nothing that can be done?” She crosses the room, takes his right hand in both of hers.
Braden looks at her hands, strong for a woman. Calluses on the fingertips, the nails short. He can feel her touch on the back of his hand, on the part of his palm that adjoins his wrist, but on his upper palm, and where her fingers touch his, he feels only pressure.
“I went to physical therapy for a while. Then occupational therapy. I even saw a shrink. Somebody, somewhere, thought that might be helpful.”
“Was it?”
“I learned how to make my hands work for basic tasks. It didn’t bring me back my music.”
“Nerves regenerate slowly. There have been cases—”
The hope in her voice hurts more than his familiar relationship with despair. He jerks his hand away. “It’s been eleven years, it’s not coming back. And I know what you’re going to say next. I could still play. I tried that. It sounded like a five-year-old child. And that’s what really set me to drinking, if you want to know. That horrible noise, where the music used to live. I can’t—I just can’t.”
He gets to his feet. “I have to get out of here. Please move. Let me go.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“No. Please.” He needs his feet on the sidewalk with the stink and blare of the busy city around him. Anywhere away from Phee’s mesmerizing eyes and the timbre of her voice and the creepy sensation that the old luthier is looking