Page 17 of Valdemar

Restil tapped on the doorframe, purposely out of sync with the tapping of mallet on chisel, and Marin looked up from his work. A thin but obviously strong man, his gray-brown hair hung in a tail down his back. He could have been any age from forty onward, and wore a pair of lenses in wire frames perched on his nose, a carpenter’s apron over the ubiquitous Valdemaran “working” outfit of natural linen trews and tunic, and leather wrist binders. The room smelled pleasantly of freshly cut, aged wood. “What can I do for you, young Prince?” he asked genially, causing Restil to laugh.

“For all our sakes, don’t let my father hear you call me that!” he exclaimed.

Marin raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Like it or not, will-he, nill-he, the crown is coming for Kordas Baron Valdemar since he will not pursue it himself. And that will make you a Prince. But again, what can I do for you?”

Restil explained the situation in as few words as possible, and doing his best to spare Rothas’s feelings. But Rothas’s attention had immediately been riveted by a variety of wooden musical instruments on racks on the walls: lutes, gitterns, small harps, fiddles—stringed instruments, mostly, although there were a couple of hand drums and some flutes and whistles, large and small. As if caught in (another!) spell, he drifted over to the nearest rack, looking but not touching. Respect for the beautifully crafted instruments practically oozed out of his pores. So did lust for them. He knew instinctively what they were for without even knowing the names of them.

When Restil stopped speaking, Rothas interjected a sentence of his own before Marin could reply.

“What . . . is this?” he breathed, hand hovering near a lute resting with its face against the wall, beautifully striped golden and pale gold belly shining in the light from the door.

Restil glanced at Marin, whose usually dour expression had just lit up with the biggest smile Restil had ever seen on his face. “That, my lad, is a lute. Go ahead, take her down off the wall.” He turned to Restil and made a shooing motion. “And you can leave, Prince. Either find a place to plant your behind outside if you are bound and determined to listen, or come back in a mark or two.” He rubbed his hands together. “Haven’t had a pupil with the Gifts in—well, longer than I care to say. This is a great day!”

“You mean—” said Restil, pausing with the master just outside the entry.

“Yes, yes, of course I mean I’m taking him as a student, I’m not daft or senile!” He jerked his head at Rothas, who had taken the lute down and was cradling it instinctively in the “playing” position, tentatively plucking an open string and cocking his head to hear the faint tone. “Just look at him. The lute wants to play him. They were born for each other. This is something special. A life-defining awakening is about to happen, and I’d be a fool to just let it go by. It would be—disloyal to music for me not to guide him.” Marin gazed across the room at Rothas and the lute, not even facing Restil as he spoke. “I don’t have an audience at my lessons, so go find something productive to do.”

“Yes, Master!” Restil replied hastily, and all but fled, even though he very much wanted to be there to listen in. But it had to be this way. It wasn’t because of rank. It was that Marin had apparently taken on students like this before, and had his own wise ways of handling it that required privacy for the experience to work out best. Restil surmised that just being present would undermine the moment, at a time this delicate.

Well, “finding something productive to do” was never difficult these days, so he dropped by the Old Men’s section of the wall, reported to Koto, and quickly found himself dragooned into helping set up an intricate bit of spellwork for repelling pests that would require several storage crystals. No one wanted to face another infestation of green beetles. When he pried himself away from that, he reckoned by the sun it was time to check on his charge.

He heard the faint notes of a lute as he neared the open door, and figured from the way that the notes sounded “sure” and practiced that Marin was demonstrating a tune to a pupil who had never seen a lute before. Granted, it was just a simple child’s tune, but there wasn’t any fumbling for the right notes, or hesitation. And nothing out of tune or out of place.

But to his amazement, it was not Marin who was playing. It was Rothas.

He felt his jaw sag. Rothas sat with his back to the door on a little bench, Marin sitting opposite him and smiling broadly. When Rothas finished the tune and looked up, Marin nodded.

“I’ve seen this once before, when I had a student with the Bardic Gifts,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Understanding music means understanding systems. There are combinations of finger, string, pressure, and timing to call out each note, and by using the combinations inside a vast musical pool you can play and create songs. One of the misunderstood secrets of the Bardic Gift is that it thrives on perception of systems and details. You, young Rothas, you’ll be able to pick up just about any instrument, see it demonstrated, and play a simple tune immediately, because you will intuit its system. Mastery will take about a year, which is a fraction of the time it would take an ordinary musician like me.”

Every line of Rothas’s back proclaimed that, for the moment at least, he had forgotten his lifebond, and more importantly, his depression. “How many instruments can I learn?” he asked, breathlessly.

“As many as you want.” Marin shrugged. “Practically speaking, though, you’re going to be limited to the ones I know how to make, because I am the only luthier we have. Which means if you are pining to master the shawm or the rebec, you are out of luck. I mostly make string instruments. Which I suppose is just as well, because you’ll want instruments you can use to accompany your singing, and that means stringed instruments for the most part. We’ll start with the lute, and that one is now yours.”

Rothas gasped. “Really?”

Marin smiled broadly. “She’s made from the heartwood of one of those giant Hawkbrother trees. An experiment really, but one that turned out unexpectedly well. The tone isn’t like we are used to; it’s brighter and louder, more overtones than undertones, like the child of a standard lute and a gittern. But I think it will grow on people. You’ll be worthy of her fairly quickly, and meanwhile, even a flubbed note sounds well on her.” Now he looked up at Restil. “Shoo,” he said sternly. “We’ll be busy until suppertime. You can come for him then.”

Restil gave the master luthier a silent salute, and took himself back off to the mages. There was still work to be done on that anti-pest spell-web, but he already felt joy and a little bit of wonderment.

• • •

The change in Rothas was remarkable. When Restil came to fetch him to supper, he was just lacing his new lute into a leather carrying case after carefully detuning her strings. He stood straighter, and although there was still a kind of hum of sadness to him that penetrated even through Koto’s shield, he was no longer crushed beneath the weight of it.

He was so full of what he had learned that it bubbled out of him, and as they made their way across the vegetable gardens to the manor, Restil just let him gush. This was probably the best the young man had felt since the unknown magician cursed him, and he was a better companion for it.

He stood taller, too, as if some of the weight of his situation had fallen from his shoulders, and his expression was alive in a way it had not been until now. And he certainly attracted attention the moment he set foot in the Great Hall; all eyes turned toward him, and Restil could almost hear hearts breaking all around him. Hopefully who he is and the fact that he’s lifebonded has spread at the speed of gossip, and everyone knows.

His father looked up to see what the cause of the sudden silence was, and beckoned them over. Nothing loath, Restil led his still-babbling charge toward the head table.

Once Rothas realized where they were heading, he shut up abruptly, and followed Restil’s lead. Since the seating in the Great Hall was all shared benches rather than individual seats or stools, they took places roughly across from the Baron and everyone on that bench scooted over a little.

As it happened, they sat right next to Koto, who scooped up a bit of spiced bean paste with a bit of flatbread, popped it in his mouth, and swallowed before speaking. “Good. I don’t like to talk about people behind their backs. Kordas, I can work with this boy. I have my own personal shield on him now, which should keep him from affecting anyone else except the girl. There, I don’t know. Lifebonds have a way of tying people together in ways that shields can do nothing about.”

Kordas nodded, but still looked concerned. “I do have a question about this, since all I know are shields for magic. Do emotions merely hit the shield and dissipate? Or do they bounce around in there, like a mirror-magic shield does? The latter would not be good.”

Koto snorted. “I know my business, Kordas Valdemar. Dissipate, of course. Otherwise he’d already be a stewed little pot of misery, weeping his eyes out right now, and getting worse by the moment.”

The effects of his first, and by all measures, highly successful, music lesson had begun to wear off on the walk to the manor, and now some of that profound misery was creeping back into his expression, though Restil couldn’t feel it . . . thank the gods.