Chapter Sixteen
Theo leaned back in one of the carved chairs in the Cantoris of Conservatory, feeling the tingle of his body as Maestro Nikei played his filla and used his psi to coax torn flesh and muscle to come together again. Nikei insisted on giving Theo precedence during Cantoris hours. It was not customary, but no one objected. Theo chuckled to learn that everyone at Conservatory regarded him as something of a hero, having saved Cantrix Sira from the Bariken murderers. Every day since his return, Theo had submitted to Nikei’s ministrations, then stayed to watch as the Cantor treated other, less serious ailments.
He was walking now, carefully, but without too much pain. He joined Cantor Nikei on his way out of the Cantoris. “I have a question,” he said.
Nikei nodded. “Of course, Singer.”
“Don’t you ever use the first mode for healing wounds?”
Nikei frowned a little. “I use the third, to prevent infections. Why would I use the first?”
Theo almost didn’t answer, not wanting to offend the Cantor. But he was curious. “I often use it,” he said diffidently, “to help the injured person relax. The healing seems to go faster. The fear that comes with a wound slows the mending, don’t you think?”
Nikei pulled at his lip, considering. “I did not know itinerants practiced much healing.”
Theo laughed, then pressed a hand to his still-sore belly. “We must. Or we lose too many of our customers!”
They strolled into the great room, and Maestro Nikei signaled to a waiting Housewoman for tea. “Perhaps fear is not an issue here at Conservatory,” Theo said. “But outside, I have seen travelers so frightened by being hurt that they have to be restrained from doing themselves further injury.”
“But what happens to hurt them, outside?”
Theo grinned. “Everything, Maestro Nikei! They fall off hruss, they cut themselves with their knives, they dent their heads on the branches of softwood trees, or they get blacktoe.”
“Blacktoe?” Nikei frowned again.
If this was the Maestro’s usual expression, Theo thought, it must cause some anxiety among his students. “Blacktoe,” he told the Cantor. “When the feet get too cold, the ends of the toes turn dark. They must be warmed immediately, and slowly, or the traveler can lose them. The same for fingers. Blacktoe can kill a person if it’s not caught early.”
Nikei’s frown smoothed away. “Ah, yes, I have seen this, but had not heard that name for it. I am very interested in what you say, Singer.” Their tea arrived and they sipped at it. “Healing is the most difficult part of the Gift to develop. I had assumed—” He hesitated, and it was obvious to Theo that he chose his next words with delicacy. “I had assumed that those Singers who do not become–that is, who do not come to Conservatory—”
Theo grinned. “Rather the opposite,” he said cheerfully. “Some of the best healers are itinerants. We learn it very early, out of need.”
Nikei pulled at his lip again. “The first mode. For injuries. It is a new thought.”
Theo savored a momentary sense of belonging. As he watched House members bowing deeply to Nikei, however, he was reminded of the great chasm that lay between them. At least Nikei conversed with him. He did not speak to any of the Housemen or women, only nodded acknowledgment to one or two. The Cantor was as aloof with his own House members as if the Glacier itself lay between them.
In a few more days, Theo was moving restlessly about the House and the nursery gardens. Still swathed in bandages under his tunic, he was sore, but his energy had returned in full. He needed something to do. Only after the evening meal, when he sometimes lingered with the students in the great room, telling them stories of outside, did he feel fully occupied.
Those evenings were lovely and long. Theo’s position as one of the group that had rescued Sira gave him special privileges, and the students were allowed to stay in the great room an hour past their usual time, just to hear him talk. He told them of the southern Timberlands, and the Houses on the Frozen Sea, where tiny ships like floating pukuru dared the ice-clogged waters for fish that tasted fresh as sweet snow.
Once he told them the fable of the Ship, and the little ones listened wide-eyed, not knowing what was truth and what was invention.
“The Spirit of Stars,” Theo recited, using the low tone that he knew made his youngest listeners shiver, “sent the Ship, like the greatest pukuru you can imagine, drawn by the six strongest and biggest hruss It had. Spirit knew the people would need plants and animals that did not grow on the Continent, and so the giant pukuru was packed full of fruit seeds and grain seeds and people seeds. When it landed on the Continent, it overturned, and all the seeds spilled out and began to grow. The upside-down pukuru became First House, and First Singer warmed it so the seeds could blossom and grow big and strong.”
“But, Singer,” a little boy asked, “what happened to the six big hruss?”
Theo inclined his head. “Do you know, that’s a very good question.” He pointed to the thick windows of the great room, where the darkness of the long night stretched beyond the glow of the quiru. “Have you ever seen the stars?”
The boy nodded. “On my way here, with my father,” he said in a sad childish tone. He and his class were not yet adjusted, and Theo saw one of the older students touch the little boy’s shoulder, and leave her hand there to support him.
“Did anyone show you the Six Stars?” Theo asked. The boy shook his head. “The Six Stars shine above the eastern horizon when you’re outside at night. Those were the hruss that drew Spirit’s big pukuru. When it overturned, to spill the seeds and to become First House, the hruss were freed. They raced up into the sky, and they still run there, across the sky each night, trying to get back to the Spirit of Stars.”
The Housewomen came to fetch the little ones then, and Theo bid them good night. The older students smiled and nodded to him, several speaking aloud to wish him a good evening. Isbel, who Theo knew was Sira’s closest friend, was the last to leave the great room, making sure he had everything he might want before she, too, retired.
The next morning, she teased him. “Tell me another story,” she said as they walked from the great room after the morning meal.
He smiled down at her. “Do you want to hear about the Singer from Trevi who had to sleep in the stables because he wouldn’t go near the ubanyor? Or the girl at Conservatory that Magister Mkel had to shut up in her room because she asked too many questions?”
Isbel giggled, and he smiled to see the dimples twinkle in her cheeks. “I do not ask too many questions! I am a serious student trying to learn more about the Continent!”
“A serious student?” Laughing, he bowed to her. “Then sing for me. Here I am at Conservatory, and all the music I’ve heard has been the quirunha.”
“I will, if you like. Tomorrow. It will cost you a story, though. And now I see Cantor Nikei watching us. He will scold me for keeping you too long.”
“Wait a moment, Isbel! I want to ask you about Cantrix Sira. Is she well?”
Isbel’s green eyes darkened, and her dimples disappeared. “I do not know, Singer. She has had a bad experience, and she will not open her mind to me.”
“She won’t?”
Isbel sighed. “She only speaks aloud. With all of us. She is far away from us, somehow, because of what happened to her in Ogre Pass.”
Theo scowled. “By the Ship, that was a bad business!”
Isbel tilted her head and regarded him. “I have never heard that expression, Singer.”
“No? They say it in the Southern Houses. What do you say when you want to swear?”
Isbel blushed, and smiled again, her mood as changeable as snow clouds over the mountains. “It is hard to swear when you do not speak aloud. But I know ‘By the Six Stars,’ and—” she lowered her voice—” and ubanyit!”
Theo grinned. “Is that your worst? It’s a good thing you don’t travel with itinerants!”
Isbel blushed again. Maestro Nikei was approaching, and she covered her mouth with her hand, but her eyes still sparkled with laughter as Nikei reached them.
They both bowed to the Cantor. Theo had to follow Nikei for his daily session in the Cantoris, and he left pretty Isbel smiling after him.
Theo met Sira again at last one morning in the nursery gardens. He was strolling among the flats of plants and seedlings that lay cosseted in yellow quiru light. He found her alone, bending over a tray of herbs to breathe in their fragrance. She turned with a flash of irritation when she heard him behind her.
She checked her reaction when she recognized him. She bowed slightly. “Hello, Singer. I am glad to see you recovering,” she said gravely.
Theo flashed his lopsided grin. “I’m fine, thanks. Enjoying my convalescence.” He was not quite as tall as she, but he thought she could not weigh half what he did. “And you, Cantrix Sira?” he asked. “Have you recovered?”
Her answer avoided his real question. “My wounds were not so serious as yours. They are almost healed.” Absently, she traced her scarred eyebrow with a long forefinger. Its darkness would be forever marked by a slash of white.
“You know, Cantrix,” Theo said in a light tone, “I’ve been an itinerant for three summers, and I’ve never had an experience like that one! Even when I accidentally came too close to the Watchers, they didn’t try to kill me.” He chuckled and shrugged. “Although they did shoot at me. But it takes time to heal . . . in many ways.”
Sira turned to him, her back straight and the angles of her face hard. “Singer,” she said harshly. “It is over. I do not think of it.”
Theo lifted his eyebrows. “Good for you,” he said mildly. He hooked a little ironwood bench forward with his foot and settled onto it, adjusting his bandages and resting his shoulders against the back. It occurred to him that perhaps he should leave her be, but an impulse, an intuition, drove him on. “So that means you’re ready to go back?”
“No!” Sira said sharply, then stopped, visibly controlling herself.
Theo watched her tense face. “Another Cantoris, then? Probably a good idea. After all, as the saying goes, the ferrel builds more than one nest.”
“My plans are not yet made, Singer.” Sira bowed again, clearly meaning to end their conversation. “I am sorry you were injured helping me, and if I may help you in turn, please ask.” She turned away with an air of finality.
“It seems to me, now that I think of it,” Theo went on comfortably, as if she had not tried to dismiss him, “that I heard a rumor you refused another Cantoris.”
Sira thumped her fist on a nearby table, making the seed flats jump. “I swear, a Singer cannot take a breath but what the whole Continent knows it!” Her flash of anger made the air around her glitter.
“Oh, I think your term is too general,” Theo said. “It’s just Cantors and Cantrixes whose every breath is of interest to Nevya.”
Sira looked at him over her shoulder. “I do not understand.”
Theo shook his head. “Sorry, Cantrix. Forget that.”
Sira stood still for a moment, gazing out into the humid air of the nursery gardens. Then, as if she had forgotten all about Theo, she strode away, leaving him alone.
Sira was healing, although not in the way Mkel hoped she would. She had spent many hours in the nursery gardens, breathing in the damp earthy air and thinking, while the gardeners watched from a distance. She tried not to notice, but she was aware her story had spread throughout Conservatory. Everywhere she went the House members looked at her with sympathy. She doubted they would be sympathetic if they knew the whole story, the truth.
Stabbing Wil had been bad enough. But in her dreams she felt that flash of psi, over and over, that had destroyed Trude’s mind. Often she woke, shaking in the dark, to wish hopelessly that Maestra Lu were there. Sira pondered all that had happened, and her resolve hardened like a pond at the end of summer as it gradually freezes from the top down.
Isbel came to her room one afternoon. Sira. We should talk.
Sira shook her head. “There is nothing to talk about.”
Open to me, my friend.
“I cannot,” Sira said. “I am no longer the person I was when I lived here.”
“You are to me,” Isbel said stoutly. “I want to help you find yourself again.”
“That person is gone,” Sira said. “We can never walk back in the same footsteps.”
“That sounds like something the Singer Theo would say.”
“Theo? Have you been talking to him?” Sira leaned wearily against a wall. “I think I have never met anyone with so much conversation.”
“Yes. He is so funny. And he has such blue eyes, like a summer sky. We all like him.”
Sira hardly heard her. “Isbel,” she asked abruptly, “can you come and bathe?”
“Yes, of course. We can—”
“And do you have a sharp knife in your room?”
Isbel frowned. “I have the knife I use for cutting filhata strings. It was sharpened last week in the abattoir. But why?”
“Bring it, please,” Sira said.
Isbel obediently went away to her room to fetch the knife, carrying it back carefully wrapped in a bit of leather. She followed Sira to the ubanyix. They walked together much as they had when they were students, the pretty plump girl and her tall, solemn friend.
In the ubanyix, the girls shed their tunics and trousers and immersed themselves in the warm water. Sira unbound her hair and ducked her head below the surface for a moment. When the thick mass of her hair was soaked, she knelt on the bottom of the tub with her back to Isbel. “Please cut it for me.”
Isbel gave a gasp of dismay. “But Sira, why? Why cut your beautiful hair?” She held the knife awkwardly in her hand, as if she wished she had not brought it.
“Where I am going I do not want it,” Sira said. She leaned back slightly, so that her hair hung directly in front of Isbel.
“But, Sira . . . Cantrix . . . where are you going?”
“Away. And I am not a Cantrix anymore, Isbel. I am just a Singer.”
The odd tableau held for a long moment before Isbel, helpless before the force of Sira’s determination, took the heavy wet hair in her hand. She began to cut, tentatively at first, and then, when Sira remonstrated, more strongly. Sira reached over her shoulder to catch the long strands as they fell. When it was finished, Sira put her hand to her head, marveling at the lightness of it. Her fingers slipped easily through her cropped locks, and she felt free.
Theo was almost sorry one morning to realize that there was no longer any pain or stiffness in his wound. He stretched his shoulders and arms, feeling soft and lazy from weeks of easy living. He had enjoyed every day of his recuperation, hearing the quirunha daily in the best Cantoris on the Continent, watching the single-minded discipline of the students. The students had come to treat him as one of their own, and he thought he would always look back on this time as one of the best of his life, a shining interval of community with these chosen ones.
He had not seen Sira at the quirunha, nor at any other House functions. He assumed she must be having her meals in her room. Since their encounter in the nursery gardens, he had heard nothing of her, so he was startled to find her at his door one morning.
He bowed courteously, trying to hide his surprise at her cropped hair.
“May I speak with you, Singer?” she asked.
“At any time, Cantrix. Could you call me Theo, do you think?”
“Will you call me Sira, then?”
He grinned at her. “Probably not. You’re a Cantrix, after all.”
“Perhaps I shall go on calling you Singer,” Sira said, with a flash from her dark eyes. She stepped past him into his room.
Chuckling, Theo pulled forward the single chair for her to sit on, and seated himself on his cot. He waited for her to speak.
“I have questions for you,” she said. Her young face was intent. The short hair, brushed away from her cheekbones, relieved the sharp angles of her face. Theo liked the way it looked.
“I prefer that no one know I have asked these questions,” Sira went on.
“Go ahead,” Theo answered cheerfully. “I’m as quiet as a caeru in a snowstorm.”
Unsmiling, Sira said, “I want to know everything about being an itinerant Singer.”
Theo found himself without words for once. He searched her face for her meaning, and she looked away, down at her linked hands. “Singer. Theo. You are the only one I can ask.”
Theo sighed. “Cantrix Sira. The life of an itinerant is not easy. Constant exposure, loneliness, hard work. I don’t want to brag—” he grinned, “—but we’re a tough bunch.”
“I will not be a Cantrix anymore. I want to choose my own way.”
Theo said, “There is nothing I would like better than to give you whatever you need, Cantrix—I mean to say, Sira,” he amended. “But I know this business. It would waste your Gift.
“You have something others would give a great deal to have, your Conservatory education. You have a place where you belong, people who care about everything you do.”
“People who wish to control everything I do,” Sira said bitterly.
“Believe me. You must not throw away these advantages. It would be wrong for me to teach you the itinerant’s trade. And if I did, it would require practical lessons, not just talk.”
“Take me with you, then, when you leave. I will be your apprentice.”
“Sira. You belong here, not out there in the mountains and forests. I can’t be the means of taking you away from those who need you. I can’t bear that responsibility.”
Sira sat still for a moment before she nodded acquiescence. She avoided his eyes as she said, “Thank you just the same.” She stood and bowed. “I will consider further. And I appreciate your keeping our discussion private.”
Theo stood, too, and moved to the door to open it. “Let me help you in some other way.”
She shook her head. “I do not know what that would be, Singer.” He held up an admonishing finger, and the ghost of a smile turned up her lips. “Theo.”
He bowed. “Sira . . . give yourself time.”
She did not answer, but walked away in silence. He watched her narrow back moving down the corridor. Such intensity, he thought. Perhaps that is what my Gift lacks.
*
Sira soon learned it was not easy to prepare all by herself. She had no metal, as Cantors and Cantrixes never had need of it, but she needed to obtain provisions and equipment, which were as essential as information. She had never cooked for herself. She had never saddled hruss. But, determined on her course, she visited the kitchens and the stables and the storehouse, begging supplies.
The Housemen and women knew her, of course, and the dramatic tale of her survival in Ogre Pass had spread throughout Conservatory. The people in charge of the things she wanted were inclined to be indulgent with her. They looked curiously at her short hair, but she was a full Cantrix, and they asked no questions. Slowly her small room began to fill with the things she needed–a knife, a cooking pot, a bowl and cup, some grain and dried meat, a small cache of softwood. She started to worry that everything would not fit into a saddlepack.
The problems of hruss and saddle plagued her the most. As inexperienced as she was in matters of trade, she knew these were valuable, and that such metal as there was often was spent on them. All she had of great value was her filhata, given to her by Conservatory before her first quirunha. It had been sent back to her from Bariken, and now she offered it to the man in charge of Conservatory’s stables.
Erc was a paternal man. “Cantrix Sira, you don’t need to part with your filhata. Magister Mkel would be glad to give you hruss and tack if you need to ride somewhere.”
“No. I cannot ask him. And I do not wish you to ask him, please, Erc. I am not going on Conservatory business.”
“What other business does a Cantrix have?”
“I do not think I need to explain,” Sira said as sternly as she knew how.
Erc was abashed, and Sira regretted the necessity of being brusque. He said, “Of course, Cantrix. But we can lend you the hruss and saddle, and you will return it when you can.”
“Thank you, Erc, but no. I much prefer to pay for it.”
Erc’s genial face creased with worry, but he pressed her no further. Awkwardly, he accepted her filhata, encased in its fine wrapping, and after showing her a saddle and saddlepack, took her to the stalls to choose a hruss. Sira did her best to look knowledgeable, but the hruss all looked the same to her. She accepted the first one Erc recommended, a comparatively small animal with shaggy chin and fetlocks.
“When will you want it ready, Cantrix?” he asked.
When she opened her mouth to answer, Sira realized that this was an important moment, the final step of her going. Her voice trembled ever so slightly. “Tomorrow morning, please.”
Erc bowed deeply in acknowledgment. “It will be saddled and fed.”
Sira bowed in return and set off for her room, empty saddlepack thrown over her shoulder. I will be ready, too, she told herself. Ready to live my own life.