CHAPTER 8: THE SONG THAT PLAYS ITSELF

  The very next day, by late afternoon, the entrance hall at the base of the stairway no longer looked so sorely empty. Instead, there was evidence of a pitched battle. The Princess Irena Vaudrin had fought valiantly against a book, and it had gone very poorly…

  For the book.

  Sheets of paper lay in a wide ring across the floor, each one bearing a carefully inked sigil copied from that old wizard’s scroll. Irena had arranged them according to the logic she had reconstructed: larger sigils at the cardinal points, smaller ones outlining perimeter, and the most ornate set where she believed the ritual’s “front” ought to be.

  The floor refused to cooperate. The stones were sloped and cracked, and the papers refused to lie flat. Every draft sliding down the stairwell made them lift and curl. After the third time she had sprinted after a drifting sigil to stop it escaping, Irena had abandoned dignity and raided every shelf and box within reach.

  Now the papers were pinned with whatever she’d found to hand: stones from floor, an old iron candlestick, a dented pewter plate, a boot with its sole half-hanging off, even the lidded pot they usually prepared peas in. The ring of sigils looked less like something inscribed by a legendary archmage and more like the work of a particularly determined lunatic with access to a midden heap.

  Which, in a strictly technical sense, it was.

  “Are you sure it’s meant to look like… that?” Lira asked from the doorway.

  “I am fairly sure it is meant to be carved into the floor,” Irena said, straightening up from where she’d just nudged a page back into alignment with the toe of her boot. “I possess neither a floor I am willing to destroy, a chisel, nor the luxury of time. So this is what we have.”

  Lira hugged the bucket tighter.

  “And the… papers don’t have to be perfect?” she asked. “Because the one under the shoe has a… little… smudge…”

  Irena pressed her palm briefly to her brow.

  “They must be close enough,” she said. “I copied them as precisely as I could from the scroll. The symbols are correct. The order is correct. The circle is complete. That is what matters… Probably.”

  Irena paused, then asked, “And the bucket?” whilst eying it.

  “Sand,” Lira said at once. “For putting things out. If they catch fire.”

  “I am not setting the tower on fire.”

  “I know,” Lira said. “But if we’re wrong, I’d like for us to be wrong with a bucket of sand at the ready, if you don’t mind, Your Highness.”

  That, Irena supposed, was difficult to argue with.

  She took a breath and stepped carefully over the edge of the makeshift circle, into its centre.

  The entrance hall was the largest unbroken space in the tower: its high walls ribbed with old beams, cut by only two arrow slits, and the doors to the working quarters and the outside world. The stairway curled upward on one side. On the other, old hooks on the wall spoke of the cloaks and weapons that had once hung there, in a time when people had come and gone from this place as a matter of routine.

  Now there were only the two of them here. The circle. The thin light creeping in across the floor, the moon as a witness. Torchlight guttering against the lunar illumination.

  And the words in her head, ready to be spoken.

  “Right,” Irena murmured. “Here we go.”

  She shut her eyes for a moment and ran through the three components she’d pieced together from the scroll’s translated instructions.

  The words first.

  She shaped them silently with her mouth, tongue pressing to the backs of her teeth, lips rounding, flattening. The old script had older vowels that pulled longer and heavier than modern speech allowed. Her own language, but twisted through a lens: words drawn out in ways no one had spoken at court for centuries.

  Then the gestures.

  She raised her hands and recalled the movements she had sketched upstairs. The ritual required rhythm. The scroll had insisted on that point. Music lay at its heart. So she had borrowed from the only formal rhythm she knew that made sense in this context: the measured authority of a conductor of an orchestra. The idea had come to her from studying this very ritual. Her fingers traced invisible lines. A broad sweep to call. A lift to raise. Sharp flicks at the wrist for glimmer. A turning of the palms to animate, to direct, to bind the whole.

  Lastly, the spell focus.

  She opened her eyes and looked down at the circle. The sigils lay in ink, not stone. Paper, not carving. But the pattern held. The intent held. The wizard’s notes allowed for that much flexibility… Probably.

  She swallowed.

  “Lira,” she said, not taking her eyes off the circle. “If I tell you to run, you will do so immediately.”

  “I am already planning to run,” Lira said quietly. “I will simply do so faster if you shout.”

  “Comforting,” Irena muttered. “Very well.”

  She drew in a breath, set her shoulders, and began.

  The first attempt didn’t go to plan.

  She spoke the invocation carefully, each word placed like a heavy stone set down to build a wall. The hall caught her voice and returned it altered, deeper, weighted.

  The air itself answered her.

  She felt the response before she saw anything: pressure against her chest, a tightening low in her gut. The hair along her arms rose. Her hands moved as rehearsed. The call. The raise. The fingertips for glimmer. The sharp tie-off to secure the animation.

  Lira stood frozen by the doorway, bucket held at the ready, eyes enormous.

  The final word left Irena’s mouth.

  Nothing happened.

  Then the dust lifted from the floor.

  Only an inch. A thin, wavering veil. For a moment, the flagstones lay clean beneath that flat grey layer; then the dust fell again in a soft hiss, settling back exactly where it had been.

  Silence.

  Irena cleared her throat. Grit coated her tongue.

  “Did it…” Lira began uncertainly. “Was that…?”

  “Yes,” Irena said, sharper than intended. She forced her shoulders to loosen, pressing her lips together. “Something certainly happened. Clearly not the magic we intended, however.”

  She glanced down. One sigil had blackened at the edge. Smoke curled faintly upward.

  “Sand,” she reminded Lira.

  Lira yelped and threw the bucket’s contents in a panicked arc, burying the page completely.

  “Sorry,” Lira said, cheeks pink. “I panicked.”

  “It’s… fine,” Irena replied.

  She stepped out of the circle and crouched, brushing sand aside. The parchment had crisped, but the sigil remained legible.

  “They were never meant to be used like this,” she muttered. “There is enough power to burn the paper. It wants something more resilient. Something that it can sink more force into.”

  “Like stone,” Lira said, still clutching the bucket.

  “Mm.” Irena pursed her lips. “Well, we work with what we have. Hand me the ink.”

  By the second attempt, her fingers bore dark stains to the first knuckle.

  They replaced the most damaged sigils and rotated the rest so the scorched edges faced away from the heart of the circle. Smoke lingered in the air.

  “Second attempt,” Irena said, stepping back into position.“If anything screams, including me, apply sand liberally.”

  Lira didn’t laugh at that. She just tightened her grip on the refilled bucket and nodded.

  Irena centred herself.

  This time, the words flowed more easily. Her mouth remembered them. Her arms moved with confidence rather than imitation. The pressure returned, stronger.

  This time, the dust did not move.

  Light appeared.

  A shard winked into existence before her, three feet from her chest. It hovered, sharp-edged and wrong, catching colours that did not belong to the hall. Violet. Blue. A flash of green that made her eyes ache.

  Irena forgot what she’d been saying. The shard rotated once, then vanished with a sharp snap.

  The pressure in the air drained away.

  For a long second, neither of them said anything. They simply stared at where that aberration had floated, suspended in the air.

  “Did you see that?” Lira squeaked.

  Irena’s hands were trembling. She hadn’t registered it until she tried to lower them and found her fingers buzzing with pins-and-needles.

  “Yes,” she said, when she finally found her voice. “I did.”

  “What was it?” Lira edged a fraction closer to the circle, peering at the now-empty space. “It looked like… like someone broke a window and left it floating there!”

  “A fragment of the glimmer,” Irena said, mind racing. “The light portion of the spell is working. It responded to the ritual.” She exhaled, almost giddy. “This works… This actually works.”

  Another page smoked at the edge of her vision. Lira yelped again, tossed more sand, and once again hit her mark. Irena huffed out a short, breathless laugh that was half nerves, half exhilaration.

  “Again,” Irena said.

  “Your Highness—”

  “Again,” she repeated. “We are close. I can feel it.”

  Lira hesitated, then squared her shoulders and nodded. “I’ll fetch more paper.”

  By the third attempt, the circle looked more like a patchwork than the original diagram.

  Irena stood at its centre, fatigue aching in her body. Something about this ritual was exhausting her far more quickly than the otherwise mundane actions warranted. She ignored it. She had seen two parts of the spell work now. She knew where she had made a mistake.

  She would not make it a third time.

  Some pages were fresh and crisp, others speckled with stray sand, a few with one edge browned but still legible. The weights holding them in place had multiplied: now an extra spoon, a cracked bowl, and a stone Lira swore was shaped like a rabbit when she showed it to Irena had joined the previous oddments. Irena did her best to pretend she didn’t find the maid adorable for it.

  Irena stood once more in the centre, heart beating quickly in her chest. She rolled her neck, shook out her hands, and glanced over at Lira.

  The halfling’s face was pale, but her stance had settled into something more rooted. The bucket of sand rested at her feet now, one hand still on the handle. The other she pressed against the doorframe, grounding herself.

  “One more,” Irena said.

  Lira nodded. “One more,” she agreed. “We can do one more.”

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  “Bossy for a maid,” Irena muttered, and earned the shadow of a smile in return.

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and released it, carrying the last of her apprehension with it. Then she began. The words flowed like a learned song. Her hands moved with certainty, conducting the unseen: calling, lifting, lighting, setting it all into motion.

  She said the words…

  “Per chordam ascendens et vocem stellarum,

  By the rising chord and the voice of the stars,

  “organa voco; surgant chorda et tympanum,

  I call the instruments; let string and drum arise,

  “lumen glimmeret, motus animetur:

  Let light glimmer, let movement be given life:

  “sit hoc canticum quod se ipsum canit.”

  Let this be the song that plays itself.

  The ring of inked sigils thrummed at her feet. She felt it low. A hum in the soles of her feet, in the bones of her forearms, in the hollow of her chest where rage and grief usually lived. The air pressure increased, the room dimming slightly at the edges as if all its attention had turned towards the circle.

  Something shifted behind her eyes. The pattern she was shaping outside herself with her hands and her voice turned inwards instead. Lines made up of the words, the gestures, and the shape of the focus at her feet lifted, immaterial and intangible, folded tight behind her eyes, condensing into a single, impossible shape pressed against her mind from the inside.

  It wasn’t some imagined sensation. It felt physical, loaded, as if she could hold it there, walk away with it, and loose it later with a single breath. Yet she couldn’t hold it. It wanted to be free, and she wasn’t nearly ready to catch it.

  The strange shape tore free from her mind, rushing down her nerves and out through her voice and fingertips; the space it had occupied in her head snapped empty, leaving a faint, ringing absence.

  The world held its breath.

  And then The Song That Plays Itself began.

  The instruments did not appear all at once.

  First came the sense of presence: not something arriving, but something withdrawing, as if the air remembered a shape it had once held and made room for it again. Then the empty space above the circle began to resolve into form.

  A lute coalesced first, its strings glimmering like spider-silk in moonlight. A small harp followed, its frame carved from a wood that didn’t quite look like any wood Irena knew, edges outlined in soft radiance. A pair of narrow pipes slid into being end to end, then separated and drifted apart to hover at different heights.

  Below them, a drum swelled into existence, its skin taut and faintly luminous. Two more lutes. A lyre. Something that resembled a violin, and a cousin of the cittern she had once seen at a court performance. More and more, until perhaps a dozen shapes hung in the air, each arriving with a subtle shift, as if the spell assembled them from intention rather than matter.

  They held translucence at the edges, as though the tower stones might show through if one stared hard enough. But the light outlining them remained unmistakably real: gentle and steady, like starlight caught and coaxed into different forms.

  They hovered at varying heights, some at waist level, some high in the towershaft, arranged in a loose spiral that suggested motion even before anything moved.

  Lira’s bucket hit the floor with a solid thump.

  “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh.”

  No hands reached for strings. No musician lifted a pipe. The instruments began to play anyway.

  Irena did not recognise the song. It held none of the sharp insistence of marching tunes, nor the ornate, practised complexity of royal chamber concerts. It moved lighter than both, layered rather than regimented, each instrument drifting in at its own pace before winding into the others as if the music had decided to become whole by degrees.

  Strings thrummed a soft, repeating progression. Pipes lilted above, notes climbing and retreating back on themselves. The drum found a heartbeat pulse so low that Irena felt it under her ribs more than she heard it.

  As the music rose, the light answered.

  Small motes winked into being near the instruments and drifted on invisible currents, like fireflies made of snowfall. They swirled through the hall, caught in Irena’s hair, settled on Lira’s shoulders, and dotted the walls with slow-moving stars.

  Irena stood at the centre of the circle and felt her shoulders loosen without her permission. A laugh climbed out of her chest, caught halfway, and tangled with something dangerously close to relief. Her eyes stung. She could not tell whether the light did it or the sudden, impossible certainty that she had done the impossible.

  “I did it,” she said, voice barely above a whisper.

  Lira pressed a hand to her mouth and took one hesitant step forward, then another, crossing the circle’s threshold without seeming to notice that she had done so.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. The reverence in her voice rounded it, softening it into something almost childlike with wonder.

  She turned in place, staring up as a cluster of glimmer motes drifted past her face. One landed on the tip of her nose and dissolved, leaving a faint tingle and the thinnest outline of light that faded a heartbeat later.

  The stark, wary lines that weeks had carved into Lira’s face smoothed away under wonder. Her eyes shone. Her mouth, usually so careful, broke into a grin so wide it scrunched up her nose.

  Irena’s breath caught.

  Lira giggle-snorted.

  The sound burst out of her unbidden, awkward and half-squeaked, laughter catching at the back of the throat. She clapped a hand over her mouth too late, eyes widening a fraction as if embarrassed to have done that with a princess present.

  The ridiculousness of it, framed by floating instruments and drifting stars, tipped Irena over the edge. She laughed too. Not the tight, bitter sound she had used to deride the people who had done her harm. Not the careful, measured chuckle expected at court. This laugh rose from somewhere deeper, and it left her genuinely happy. It felt… good. Wrong, somehow, against the backdrop of everything that had been done to her, but good all the same.

  Lira looked at Irena as if she’d seen her for the very first time, then started laughing too, this time without trying to hide it.

  “You did it,” Lira said. “You really did it. You made a—... a wizard’s party!”

  “Thalen made it,” Irena said, though her pride refused to relinquish all the credit. “I merely learned how to use it too.”

  “That still counts,” Lira said stoutly.

  A nearby lute drifted lower, its strings still shining. It circled them like a curious animal testing the air. The song carried a pulse beneath the melody, a quiet, insistent beat that tugged at the body and asked for movement. Irena felt it in her feet. In her hips. In the way her shoulders wanted to sway.

  On impulse, she reached out and caught Lira’s hand.

  “Come on,” she said over the music. “You said it yourself. It is a party. We cannot stand here like statues.”

  Lira’s eyes went round. “Your Highness, I don’t know court dances,” she protested, half-horrified, half-delighted. “I’m all left feet, and I’ll step on your toes, and—”

  “I am wearing boots,” Irena said. “And if we collide with anything, the fault will be mine. I made them after all.”

  She tugged gently, and Lira yielded. They moved together.

  Calling it dancing was generous at first. Irena had learned stately, formal steps: posture, precision, the correct fall of sleeves, the correct distance between bodies. None of it fitted this music. And Lira seemed entirely oblivious to what was proper as she bounced close and reached for Irena’s arms.

  The spell did not care about courtly decorum. It wanted them to turn in circles. It wanted spins. It wanted them to forget who they were for but a moment and to enjoy themselves.

  Irena did not forget herself. Years of drilled steps clung to her like cobwebs. But she loosened enough to sway, to turn, to let the beat carry her half a step forward and then back. Lira, shorter and quicker, bobbed and shuffled in her own common fashion, trying not to tread on Irena’s big feet and failing just enough to make them both giggle.

  A floating drum dipped too low. Irena yanked Lira out of its path even though it was probably harmless, her hand sliding to the small of Lira’s back. For one breath, they pressed close: Lira’s head nearly against Irena’s shoulder, the difference in their heights suddenly stark.

  Heat flared in Irena’s cheeks. She let go at once, stepped back, and nearly tripped over her own feet in her haste.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” Lira replied at the same time.

  They looked at each other.

  An instrument somewhere between a harp and something stranger trilled a high, cheerful arpeggio, bright as laughter and pointed as a tease.

  Lira smiled again, helplessly.

  They kept dancing. They grew bolder. They ducked beneath glowing lutes and spun past drifting pipes. Lira’s wonderment came in bursts now, little gasps and giggles, especially when a mote of light landed in Irena’s hair, and she had to shake her head like a dog drying itself.

  Time blurred. The song cycled through phrases, returned, elaborated, braided itself into something richer and then lightened again. At some point Irena realised her throat hurt, her chest ached pleasantly, and she could not remember the last time she had felt anything like this: pleasantly exhausted, and happy.

  Eventually, the spell began to release its hold on them.

  The instruments’ light softened, then dimmed. The music unwound, layer by layer, until only a single thin thread of melody remained. That too faded into nothing. The motes disappeared like dew under sunrise.

  For a long moment, the hall held onto the echo of the sound, as if reluctant to admit it was gone. Lira’s hand still rested in hers. Irena noticed it at the same instant Lira did. They both let go a fraction too quickly.

  “Well,” Lira said, slightly breathless. “If that’s wizard-madness, it’s… not so bad.”

  “It is not madness,” Irena said, though her correction carried no bite. “It is a craft.”

  “You’re very good at it,” Lira replied. Then, quieter: “I’m glad you are.”

  Irena didn’t have an answer for that that didn’t do something embarrassing to her throat, so she just nodded, still smiling a little, and told herself the tight feeling in her chest came from exertion alone.

  The tower at night never truly fell silent.

  Neither stone nor timber slept. It shifted and cooled and complained beneath its own weight. Wind sometimes sang through the arrow slits, a thin, wordless keening that set the quiet listener on edge. Far off, on nights rare enough to forget until they returned with a jolt, the dragon turned in its sleep with a grinding rumble like distant thunder.

  But that night, the quiet felt easier to Irena.

  She lay in her narrow bed and stared up at the rafters, replaying flashes from earlier: the way light had haloed Lira’s hair; the look on her face when the first instrument formed; the peculiar jolt she had felt when Lira’s body had pressed to hers for that single startled heartbeat.

  Warmth crept into her cheeks in the dark.

  Idiot, she told herself. There are more important things to dwell on than the way your maid laughed.

  She forced her mind back to the spell: the way it had felt to invoke it, the sequence she had used, the way the sigils had responded. She could refine it. She could separate the levitation component, perhaps, without summoning an entire orchestra…

  A sound cut the thread of her thoughts.

  Soft. Muffled by distance and stonework. A tiny, broken sound, too sharp to be the tower’s settling and too human to ignore.

  Irena clenched the blanket between her fingers.

  She had heard it before, on other nights, drifting up through the floor: strangled noises as Lira sobbed in the night. Irena had stared at the ceiling and told herself it was not her place. Servants coped in their own ways. Lira would be mortified if she intruded.

  Another whimper followed. Irena’s jaw tightened.

  She threw the blanket back.

  The floor stones chilled her bare feet. The stairwell air bit colder. She did not take a lamp; she knew the path now, and faint light from lower arrow slits caught the edges of steps and rail well enough.

  Lira’s door waited one level down.

  Irena paused outside it, her hand hovering over the rough wood. Pride and dignity warred in her chest: rank, distance, the unspoken rule that a princess did not creep into her maid’s chamber in the middle of the night.

  From the other side came Lira’s voice, small and distressed and lost in sleep. Then another stifled sob.

  Irena pushed the door open.

  Lira’s room was barely a room at all, more a rectangular nook carved out of the tower’s wall. A closet or guard post repurposed, with a door put over it. Pallet bed. Small chest. Stool. The air held the faint scent of soap and herbs, the ones Lira favoured when she could get them.

  Lira lay curled tight on the pallet, blanket twisted around her legs. She faced the wall. Her eyes stayed shut. Her jaw clenched so hard a muscle jumped in her cheek. Her hands knotted in the pillow fabric and trembled.

  Words spilt from her in dream-fragments. Irena caught only pieces: “Da,” and “please,” and “I’ll come back,” and, over and over, “don’t leave me here.”

  Irena’s heart broke to hear it. She stepped inside and pulled the door nearly closed behind her. A floorboard by the bed creaked under her weight. Lira flinched and half-woke, breath coming in sharp gasps.

  “Lira,” Irena said softly.

  Brown eyes blinked open, unfocused, then sharpened. Lira saw her and tried to push herself up on one elbow, scrubbing at her face with a free hand.

  “Your Highness,” she whispered, mortified. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to— I’ll be quiet, I—”

  “You do not need to apologise for a dream,” Irena said. The words tumbled out faster than she intended. She hesitated, then sat on the edge of the pallet. The smallfolk bed sat far too low for her. The thin mattress dipped and, by gravity, drew Lira a little closer.

  Lira stared at her, sleep-tousled and damp-cheeked, caught between the instinct to sit up straight and the lingering fog of her nightmare.

  “You’re a princess,” she said after a moment, bewildered more than protesting. “You shouldn’t be… in my little hole of a room.”

  “I should not be in this tower at all,” Irena replied. “My pride has survived that indignity remarkably well. It can endure one more little thing.”

  For a heartbeat, she perched there, every lesson of her upbringing screaming at her to rise, to restore distance, to put the walls of stone and rank back between them: the necessary barriers that had kept her respected and dignified at court.

  Alone, but for Elene…

  Lira shivered. The tremor ran through her shoulders, and Irena’s attention snapped fully back to her.

  “I keep waking up,” she murmured, staring at the crumpled blanket between them. “I think I’m back home and then I remember… and there’s no one here, and I sound like I’m barmy and—”

  The rest broke into a sharp breath.

  Irena closed her eyes briefly. Then she moved.

  Slowly, giving herself every chance to abort this ridiculous, reckless idea, giving Lira every chance to stop this, she swung her legs up onto the pallet and lay down on her side, facing Lira. The bed was narrow; there was no way to do it without closing the distance between them.

  She left a hand’s breadth between their bodies.

  “May I stay?” she asked quietly. “Just for tonight.”

  Lira’s gaze turned to hers, startled. Whatever arguments she had died on her tongue. There was a moment of silence between them. Irena wondered if she had overstepped.

  Then Lira gave the tiniest nod.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Please.”

  Something eased in Irena’s chest.

  She slid an arm beneath Lira and drew her in, closing the last sliver of space between them. Lira went tense for a moment at the unfamiliar contact, then loosened almost at once, as though some rope inside her finally cut loose. Irena’s other hand hovered, awkward, then came to rest between Lira’s shoulder blades, her palm spanning most of Lira’s upper back.

  Lira’s breath hitched. “This feels very… improper,” she said, but her mouth twitched toward a smile, and Irena could hear it in her voice. “But nice… And I’m too tired to mind.”

  “That makes two of us,” Irena said. “Let it be our scandal alone.”

  She lifted her free hand and, after the briefest hesitation, smoothed it through Lira’s hair in slow strokes from crown to nape. The hair felt softer than Irena expected, curls thick under her fingers.

  “You are safe,” Irena said, quiet but steady. “You are not alone. Not while I am here. Do you understand?”

  Lira made a small, wordless sound that travelled straight through Irena’s ribs. Her fingers, which had bunched in her own nightshirt, released and slid instead to Irena’s side, curling into the cloth there like an anchor.

  Tension seeped out of Lira in slow surrender. Her body, rigid at first, gradually softened and settled into Irena’s. She tucked her forehead beneath Irena’s chin, breath warm against her throat.

  “Thank you,” Lira murmured, already drifting off to sleep. “Please don’t… go.”

  “I won’t,” Irena whispered back, and held her close.

  The promise bordered on ridiculous. Irena thought of the King, the baron, the dragon, the ward-stones, the entire stacked apparatus of the world that had conspired to lock them here. She thought of magic she had only just begun to bend to her whims. She thought of failure and its consequences, being trapped here forever. She thought of success and of leaving this place forever.

  And, she thought, despite it all, in this little nook, two bodies lay tangled on a narrow pallet: a princess who had invoked magic against all odds, and a maid who had helped her hold the pieces of a ruined life together.

  Irena listened as Lira’s breathing deepened into the steadier rhythm of real sleep. Her own eyes drifted shut, the echoes of the song that played itself still humming quietly in some stubborn corner of her mind.

  “I’ll be right here,” she said, and felt Lira sigh as the last of her tension left her body.