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“Without further ado, then, let us begin.” Aurelius dramatically turned the minute-glass, the trickle of sand counting away the seconds of her time. As he walked away he passed close enough to mutter, out of earshot of their audience, “See that you do not embarrass us all.”
She was annoyed that her performance would save him the embarrassment he so feared. He was a prime example of why she never saved a person unless the doing of it also benefited her; no matter how desperate a person was for the rescue, they were rarely ever grateful for having been saved. Her gaze went briefly to Numair. Did he hate her, just a little, for saving him?
He noticed her looking and arched his eyebrow, reminding her to focus on the task at hand. She had known which song to sing the moment their host revealed the game. Musical diversity was easy enough to come by, if one had range and a broad enough reservoir of songs to draw on. It was easier still given the instruments at her command. Clare walked alongside the fountain, trailing the tips of her fingers atop the pool of water. The small ripples in the basin caused a ripple in the sound that, up to this point, no one in the audience had noticed.
The glow of the siren rock lining the basin flickered with the change in sound, deeper blue here, lighter violet there. Clare reach into the basin’s depths and selected five stones, three large and two small. The size of the stone did not, as was a common misconception of siren stones, change the range or pitch the stone could hold. The difference in size simply made it easier for Clare to remember what each was for.
Water fell from the stones as if repelled, and as they dried, they ceased to glow, changing in color from vibrant blue-violet to dull, ordinary rock.
Into the smallest rock, Clare sang a simple fall from a high note directly down to the corresponding one an octave lower, waited five beats and sang it again. She waited ten beats this time, then sang it in reverse, low to high, repeating again after five beats. She waited twenty precious beats of time and sang a short, high note that would blend with the original one she had started the sequence with. The rock continued to look like a rock, which in turn made Clare look like a simple-minded woman singing a melody to said rock. No doubt it was part of the countess’s plan that it was nigh impossible to look anything but silly when setting up to sing using siren rock.
Which was the entire reason Clare wasted the first minute of her setup on the one rock she did not really need. Because no matter how well one sang, if the audience spent five minutes thinking one a bore and a fool, it was difficult to overcome.
Clare held the small stone up on tented fingers for the crowd, like a street magician presenting an object for consideration, then fitted it into one of the notches cut into the veins of the fountain’s spire. Water flowed down the spire’s veins, slipping over the rock and returning the stone to its brilliant blue-violet hue. As the rock glowed brighter, Clare’s voice spilled from it to fill the courtyard, the simple transitions she had sung into it playing back, the drawn-out transitions from high to low, then low to high giving the short sounds a gossamer, haunting feel. It held her twenty beats of silence, then emitted the last, short note she had sang before it started over from the beginning, repeating endlessly.
Her audience did not clap—they were the sort of audience that only applauded once, at the end of a show when it was expected of them, and certainly never with any enthusiasm—but they did sit a little taller in their seats, and the bored expressions fell away.
Clare finished with her remaining four stones, singing the longest melody into the largest stone. She sang a different melody into the second and the third, careful to keep the same tempo on each that had gone into the first. In the last she sang transitions similar to those that had gone into the stone that was currently repeating her initial notes into the courtyard.
As the last grains of sand fell into the bottom of the minute glass, Clare removed the first stone from the spire, replaced it with the largest, waited for the fourth note of the melody, and sang.
Entertaining the crowd was a more difficult challenge than mere musical diversity. But while Clare had only ever had to sing to one audience, that one had been as difficult to sing for as if he were a hundred men in one combined, and she recognized the look in this crowd from one of the myriad she had seen in the other person. The people here had no interest in wild abandon, would not have stood to dance even had decorum allowed it. They were unimpressed by anything and of a mindset to stay that way and yet, at the same time, they desperately wanted someone to prove to them that they still could be impressed.
She could sing any number of popular songs and they would clap politely at the end, unable to find any real flaw in her performance, but ultimately unmoved by what they had heard dozens of times before. She could sing any number of songs of her own creation, but none of them fit the mood of the setting she found herself in. People seated at expensive tables, wearing expensive clothes and poised to consume expensive food were not in a state of mind to receive songs born either from the depth of her misery or the height of her hopes for something different.
So she came to them in the only way that she could—with a song old enough that most would have forgotten it and yet its soul, its story, was one that all would recognize. She sang, fittingly, of the man for whom the siren rocks had been named. A man whose name had been lost to time, remembered only as the Siren, for his voice and his attitude and his body had been so beautiful that nations courted him.
He denied them all, wishing not to be caught up in the drama of courts, longing only for the solitude of his youth. He fled to the coastal city of his childhood, certain in the safety of the rocky crags that limned the shore, of the unforgiving cliffs by the sea that would surely be his salvation.
When the ships arrived on the coast, Clare fitted the second siren rock into the fountain’s spire, a darker, bleaker melody harmonizing with the first, and she sang of war. War over a man who looked out at gathered ships and understood that it would never stop. That he would never know freedom or peace. That blood would spill and flow until there was nothing left.
So the man known to history only as the Siren climbed to the top of the highest cliff and sang, calling ships and people to him. The ships foundered themselves on the cliffside in their eagerness, their desperation, to reach him. They flailed and sank until the next did the same, until ships piled upon ships along the shore and the desperate inside them clawed over one another, fighting each other to scale the cliff upon which the Siren sang.
When the last ship had sunk and men still scrambled up the cliff-sides, Clare removed the first melody and added the third, the two melodies now harmonizing born only of darkness and sorrow, and as the melodies twined together, the horde of scrabbling humanity reached the Siren. He sang even as, in their desperation to own him, the people tore him apart, fighting for a lock of his hair, a chunk of his flesh, a tooth ripped from his gums. And when they had torn him to pieces and set to the work of killing each other for the bits of him in each other’s possession, the rocks beneath them, so sorrowed by the Siren’s loss, absorbed his voice and continued his song, singing his eulogy until every man and woman that had come for him, had ravaged him, lay dead upon the rocks at each other’s hands.
Clare fitted the last siren rock into the spire and a high, keening note filled the courtyard and lingered, fading slowly as the melody drifted into nothingness, their rocks slid neatly from the spire by Clare’s nimble fingers. She removed the last rock before the keening note could repeat again and stood, a quiet form in the midst of the utter silence blanketing the courtyard. The audience sat as if the slightest movement would break the world, as if magic bound them in the rigidity of their forms, though Clare had used no power in the song save her own voice, her own talent.
This, the Song whispered, rumbling deep inside her. This is why I chose you.
Clare bowed, breaking the stillness, so no one would see the uncertainty the Song’s words had awakened. She had perfected the bow, a beautiful blend of a curtsy and a lord’s bow, specifically to set off her choice of outfit, the wide, flowing legs of her pants falling pleasantly around her, and she focused on the perfection of it, the smooth elegance, until the uncertainty fled her face.
Rising, her voice soft, demure, she said only, “Thank you,” and returned to her table.
As she took her seat she realized she still clutched the siren stones in her hand and she carefully, soundlessly slipped them into her pocket.
Clare almost pitied the artists who followed her. She had done them the service of showing them what the siren rocks did, and the disservice of using them so well that none could measure up against her. A few managed them well enough, though not with Clare’s complex blend of melodies and complements. The few that tried to match her intricacy were unmitigated disasters, their unfamiliarity with singing against a melody they were not actively in control of, without the little tells and intros provided by other musicians playing them, throwing them out of rhythm. Two did not use the stones at all, as if accepting the failure that would come of it, and simply sang; they did not impress, but they did not embarrass themselves either.
In the silence that followed the last performance, the brief reprieve in which the members of each table wrote their vote on the little card at their place setting and handed it off to the valets coming to collect them, the countess’s irritated gaze remained on her the whole time.
She ignored it, playing off Numair to keep the table’s attention occupied. When the time came, she accepted the winning of the contest with pretty words and pretty smiles, her face a beacon of shining appreciation for the honor bestowed upon her. She flitted from person to person in the mingling that followed, noting Chalen’s careful hand in no less than half a dozen of the garments worn.
She managed, throughout the endless talking, the trading back and forth of words that didn’t mean anything and yet could mean too much, to keep Numair with her. He might have to keep up his usual persona, but she hadn’t brought him here to throw him to the court wolves that liked to laugh at him to his face, thinking he was too dumb or drunk to notice they weren’t laughing with him.
When opportunity arose, she nodded him toward the door, but already she could see the vultures following, knew they weren’t going to reach the exit before they were accosted again.
She ducked her head closer to him and said, “Should we go out in…interesting style?”
“What exactly did you have in mind?”
