Page 14

I reach for her hands. She flinches, and I stop. Then she reconsiders and lets me touch her. I turn her wrists toward the firelight and look more closely.

“What happened?” I ask.

I hear my own voice and I remember. She’s staring at my mask.

I let go of her and cross to the table where the paper is. I write and bring it back to her.

What happened? Who hurt you?

She looks down.

“It was Callum, when he put me in the cage,” she says. “He took hold of me, and I didn’t go easily. It isn’t anything. It doesn’t even hurt.”

I write under the first line.

I can heal you. Will you let me?

She reads it twice. She looks up at me, and there’s doubt in her face. I’d rather see that than anything else. She nods.

I point to the second chair by the hearth, and she sits down in it and folds her hands in her lap. I put a log on the fire. I stand where I can see her face and start singing.

I keep it low and inside the mask, as much as I can. The grille keeps my jaw closed, and the sound comes through it weaker. Which is what I want. A healing song for a few bruises needs very little, after all. I feel her body through the connection the song creates between my power and her as my patient. I find the bruises first, the blood pooled under the skin of her delicate wrists. I move it back where it belongs and mend what was torn. There are scrapes on her hands and knees from the cage, and I close them easily. There’s stiffness in her back and neck from a night spent on a strange mattress, wrapped in a lace dress, and exhaustion that one night’s bad sleep didn’t cause. I ease those too. I watch the strain go out of her neck. Her hands loosen in her lap.

I feel the rest of her through the song. There are burns under her dress, on her shoulder, right arm, ribs, and her thigh. There are also the scars on her face and neck, which I saw last night and didn’t linger on. And inside her head, on both sides, there’s the damage that took her hearing. I can feel exactly where it is and I know exactly what it would take to fix it.

I stop singing as soon as her wrists are smooth again.

She lifts her hands and turns them over. The skin is pale and unmarked all the way around.

“I don’t believe it,” she says. “I don’t believe you did that.” She looks up at me. “You can heal people. Do you know what that is? That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

She’s looking at me, and for the first time, she isn’t looking at a monster.

It hurts, because I’ve just made a choice she knows nothing about. I could give her back her perfect, unmarred skin. I could give her back her hearing. I’d only have to keep singing a little longer, a little more, and she’d stand up from the chair whole.

I’m choosing not to, and I tell myself it’s because the scars take nothing from her. That much is true, because I thought she was beautiful last night, and I think so now. However, it isn’t the only reason. If I give her back everything she lost, she’ll have no reason at all to stay, not even for the day or two I’ve allowed in my head.

The last reason is the worst. If she can hear, she can hear me. She’d hear my voice, and she might become what everyone becomes around me and my songs. I want Aveline to stay exactly who she is. I want her to be herself, I want her here, and I know what both of those wants make me.

“How did you do it?” she asks. “You didn’t even touch me.”

I take the paper and write. It takes longer this time.

With my song. I am a Cantor. That is the name of my species. When a Cantor sings, things happen. It depends on the song. I sang a healing song for you.

She reads it slowly, and she touches her own throat while she does it.

“I’m sad I can’t hear it,” she says.

It’s better that you can’t. Trust me.

She looks from the note to my mask and back.

“I used to sing, too,” she says.

I sit down in my chair so that she doesn’t have to look up at me. Taking my gesture as an invitation, she goes on. Her voice is low, warm, and a little rough. She doesn’t know that, but I do. I could listen to it for as long as she’d let me.

“I’m from Rosemere,” she says. “I sang at the Lyric House there. I was the youngest prima donna they’d ever had. People came to listen to me. They loved my voice, and I loved singing for them. That was my life, and I thought it would be like that forever.”