The Song of Andiene - By Elisa Blaisdell Page 0,101

voice.”

The songs continued, of kings and commoners, and the crowd was more at ease, though Andiene, Kallan, and Syresh still stood alone. Then Ilbran bent low, and spoke to Lenane. She nodded, and plucked the first notes of a prelude that was sad and proud, fit to mourn a king’s passing.

“How did he learn it?” Syresh murmured. “When did she teach it to him?” And then Lenane played and Ilbran sang, the Song of Andiene, of how she went from the city a hunted child, of how she would return in pride and power.

The torches burned lower, smoking in their holders. The crowd was hushed. The children slept, Kare among them. Lenane and Ilbran spun out the story of tragedy, magic, and glorious prophecy.

Chapter 21

In the weeks to come, there was no more singing, nor any dancing, nor any wearing of fine robes. The days were spent in half-darkness in the caves beneath the palace, each person lying on a separate patch of earth, sprawled like a cross so that skin would not touch skin, taking shallow breaths of the heavy dead air.

No one could sleep, not truly sleep. The earth that they lay on became heated, so that they turned restlessly and constantly, trying to find a place to lie that was still cool from the night.

Andiene and her people huddled in a corridor apart from the rest of the palace dwellers. The others, king, nobles, and commoners alike were quiet, suspicious, afraid to give offense.

“Look at them glance at us out of the corner of their eyes!” said Lenane. “Just as you said, we are summering in a palace—but I see no difference.” She fanned herself. It was night time; the air had grown damper. Her clothes clung to her and dripped salty-wet with sweat.

Kallan marked another day on his wall-tally. “No history is made in summertime.”

Ilbran counted the tally-marks. How many more days? This was grim shelter, heavy with the never-ending memories of pain and death. “Nahil’s dungeons were not empty like this,” he said.

“They were as bare as this by summertime,” Kallan said. “Emptied of prisoners as fast as the executioners could work. Taules Reji is the same as any other lord.”

They are all the same. That thought filled Ilbran’s mind as they left their dark shelter and climbed up the shallow worn steps to go out into the night. The wind does not blow in midsummer, for that is when the sea hawks build their nests on the stilled waves. But now the air moved slightly, enough to cool them, and tell them that they had passed the crest of the summer.

Throughout the city, people were coming to the surface of the earth like earthworms tunneling upwards in a drowning rain.

The stars were scattered and broken, but gave a little light. Though the people were half-dazed with lack of rest, they found work enough to pass the time. But when they saw Andiene and her companions in the inner courtyard, they took their work elsewhere.

Ilbran called his daughter to him, and tried to pick the tangles from her long hair. But she fussed and fretted, impatient at his clumsiness, and at last pulled away from him, to go to where Andiene sat and knotted lanara thread into lace, working slowly, but her hands so skilled she scarcely needed to look at what she did.

He recognized her work. She had shown lace such as that to his mother long ago. Now she taught the art to his child, who learned it eagerly, a new game.

Lenane had found work of her own that would occupy her for ten summers, or twenty. She did not waste her lute-work on melodies. Instead, she drove their nerves near to snapping with repetitions of one note, over and over, softer to near silence, then shading louder. She played endless patterns, running up and down the ladder of notes. At last, she would look at her companions, judge that they could bear no more, and break into some dance-song that made their hearts laugh to hear it.

“One part melody to ten parts lute-rack,” Kallan said once.

Syresh sprang to her defense. “The same as sword-fighting, as you teach us. Power and control and endless practice. How else could she make a plucked string sing with a human voice?”

Kallan looked at him and laughed. Ilbran rose wearily and returned to the endless sword-drill.

Kallan tutored them both. Through the long summer he had taught them, as patient and merciless toward them as Lenane was toward