A smile lit Dax’s face, and he raised his eyes to Perri’s window. His smile broadened.
It was silent in the concert hall. No announcement. No speeches. Dax didn’t say a word. The audience was as quiet as a held breath.
Marin was glad they came. Grateful. No, that didn’t even go far enough. Whatever Dax decided after the concert, she was certain that coming to see him was the right decision. He wanted them here. If they hadn’t come…We might have broken his heart.
She’d tried not to think how close she’d come to doing exactly that.
He sat in a crystal chair in the center of a ring of grass, and he fixed his eyes on Marin’s. She wondered what he was feeling and thinking at this moment,hismoment. All these eyes on him. All the expectations. Did he want to be here? Was he afraid? Was he ready?
And then he began to play.
His fingers danced over the strings, lightly at first. Even from the front row, she had to strain to hear. It was like hearing a bit of a dream, lingering right after you wake up.
Ree let out a tiny gasp.
Marin realized she knew the melody: it was a variation on one of the silly songs that Ree liked to sing.
“Sing, my friend,” Dax said to Ree.
In his sweet voice, Ree sang:
“The sea, the beautiful sea,
So bluuue, so truuue,
You think you stole my heart, but I gave it to thee!”
“Again,” Dax said, still playing. And as Ree sang the lyrics again, a chorus of singers stepped out of the shadows. They added harmony to his sweet melody. “Perri?” Dax requested.
From the window, Perri added his own trumpeting music, layered over the voices, and Dax lowered the guitar and lifted a flute to his lips. The sea serpent and the flute danced notes high above the singers as they wove an increasingly complex collection of notes. It was both like and unlike what Dax had played on the sailboat—the chorus of singers adding a depth to it that made Marin’s eyes fill. She’d never heard anything so beautiful.
When the singers ended on a chord, Ree fell quiet as well.
Then it was just Perri and the flute, filling the concert hall. As they reached the final note of the melody, Dax lowered the flute and began to sing himself. It was a new song, achingly beautiful—a story song about a musician and a dragon and the sun over the sea.
Drums began, as soft as rain at first, then growing.
Horns joined in.
Dax lifted his flute again, and in the music, Marin heard their entire journey: fleeing the city, swimming with the turtles, dancing beneath winged cats, nearly dying in a magic storm, sleeping on amarmoose… She didn’t know if anyone else could hear the story, but she was certain they couldfeelit.
Wrapped in the music, she lost all sense of time. It sailed around her, and she sailed with it… until at last, it was only Dax’s voice and his guitar again… then silence as the moon above drifted apart into stars and faded into blackness.
There was an entire breath of silence.
And then the concert hall erupted into thunderous applause.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
As the applause faded, Dax was swept away by the other grandmasters out of the concert hall, and Marin and Ree picked their way through the crowd toward the exit. It took a while to cross the concert hall—it felt as if everyone wanted to talk to Ree, the shrub who’d participated in what was roundly considered the finest grandmaster opus heard in years, and to her, peppering her with questions about Perri and how she knew Daxicend and did she know he’d transformed music with his skillful blend of folk and academic styles… But at last, they were able to slip out the door and escape down to the canal.
Dax had beaten them there.
Seated on the bow, he grinned at them as they clambered onto the boat. Perri was half-submerged beside the dock, munching on a squid that Dax had clearly given him.
“You were wonderful!” Ree crowed.
“How are you here?” Marin asked at the same time. “The crowd was intense, and the grandmasters—”
