Strange Sweet Song (19 page)

“Why? Is that what
you
would ask for?”

He is silent for so long, she feels she must have overstepped her boundaries. But eventually, he inhales broadly and says in a light tone, “What makes you think the Felix would even grant me a wish? She must find utter despair in your eyes before she’ll do it, or she’ll just eat you. Do I really seem that miserable?”

Yes,
she thinks. But, studying his face, she realizes it isn’t true. He doesn’t look hopeless or despairing—a little sad, yes. Tired, yes, and too guarded for someone so young. “Not right now,” she says. He catches her eye, and for just a moment she thinks his face lightens; his features come together somehow, the straight nose, the smooth jaw, and those tired, sad eyes, almost lovely in the gray light.

Sing’s head throbs and she blinks.
What is the matter with me?
“Anyway,” she says, “it’s despair greater than hers she has to find. I wonder what she’s so sad about? You know, I’ve listened to
Angelique
hundreds of times, and I’ve never wondered that before.”

Daysmoor smirks. “That’s step one to becoming a diva I can tolerate.”

Sing draws herself up. “Oh, thanks.”

He puts up his hands, mockingly protective. “Sorry, sorry. Well, Miss da Navelli, what would
you
wish for? Fame and glory?”

She doesn’t know right away why the remark wounds her. Then it strikes her—that’s the goal, isn’t it, the legacy of the da Navellis?
Fame and glory.
“No,” she says, running her hand along the curve of the stone bench. She sees him turn to look at her out of the corner of her eye. “I mean, fame and glory would be … would be…”
Nice?
As nice as they were for her mother, dead at thirty-eight from heart failure due to some outrageous combination of drugs and stress? As nice as they are for her father, gray-haired, never home, hounded by the press? “It would be nice to get to sing the roles I want, yes. But I’d rather get there on my own.”

“I wonder if you mean that,” he says, his raspy voice crackling like the dry brush around them.

“I don’t know what I’d wish for,” she says, truly imagining for the first time the weight of such a choice. “I suppose if the Felix ever caught me, and saw despair enough to want to grant me a wish, I’d already have something to wish for then.”

He is studying her. “Yes, I suppose you would,” he says quietly. “But what would the Felix want with you? Why would she seek you out, if not to grant you a wish?”

She watches his fingers, which are remarkably long and somehow entrancing. All of a sudden, he reaches for her crystal pendant. “What is this?” His eyes are fixated, his voice sharper.

She pulls it away, wrapping her fingers around it. “It’s my necklace.”

“Where did you get it? What is it?”

His tone disturbs her, and his sudden intensity. “I found it,” she says. “I found the stone. On campus, in the grass.” Then, without knowing why, she asks, “Is it yours?”

He frowns and takes a step back. “No. I … don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. I just—I probably just noticed it because it sparkled. I—like shiny things. But it …
feels
like it’s mine.”

“Oh.” The glassy object is cold in her hand. It glimmers unnaturally in the gray light, as though it is lit from within. “Here, then,” she says, unclasping the necklace. “You can have it.”

Daysmoor looks at her for a long moment as crows caw in the distance. Then he reaches out, but doesn’t take the necklace; he curls his fingers around hers and gently closes them over the stone. “No,” he says. “I think you should keep it. And keep it hidden.”

Forty-one

S
ING CLASPS AND UNCLASPS
her
Angelique
score as she walks across the dewy grass, the cold morning sun making her squint. Marta plods beside her, smelling of cinnamon. Her curly hair bobs in the restless air.

In truth, Sing hoped to get Marta alone this morning, but now that they have these few minutes crossing the quad, she’s not sure exactly what she wants to ask or how to begin.
I found this perpetually cold crystal on the lawn, and I’ve been singing to this wild orange cat, and then Daysmoor said all this weird stuff, and now I think the Felix might be real.
No. Definitely not.

“Les oiseaux chantent dans mes bras…,”
Marta sings lightly as they walk, the harmonics of her voice almost completely dissipated by the outdoors.

“You’ve got to connect
les
and
oiseaux,
” Sing says automatically. “
Lay-zwa-zoh,
not
lay-wah-zoh.
”

“Oh, I knew that!” Marta wrings her hands. “I have so much trouble remembering when they connect and when they don’t.”

“It’s okay,” Sing says. They are already halfway across the quad. “I make those mistakes all the time. Just listen to a recording.”

Marta adjusts her books. “I know. I just don’t like listening to recordings. I want to sing my own way.” She laughs. “I guess that’s not such a good idea if I get the words wrong.”

“I know what you mean about singing your own way,” Sing says. “But sometimes listening to a great singer will help you figure out the song a little better. The parts she chooses to make important, you know?”

“Yeah. You’re right,” Marta says. “You know a lot about singing, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.” Sing feels the heat creeping up her face and curses her mother’s fair skin.

“And you speak all these languages. I’d
love
to speak another language.”

Sing focuses on the grass in front of her. “I only speak English and Italian, and that’s just because of my parents. I can just pronounce the others. I couldn’t make sentences by myself or anything.”

“Still.”

Sing finds an inroad. “But
you
know all this stuff about … about magical creatures and stuff, right?”

“Yeah, that’s so useful, isn’t it?” Marta laughs. “I’d rather be able to speak Italian.”

“But, like, you know all about the Felix, right?”

Marta’s pace slows just a bit. “Did you want to ask me something?”

“Well … I don’t know.” Sing takes a deep breath. “Do you really think it’s real?”

Marta surprises Sing by coming to a full stop. “… I do. I think I do. I
want
to.” She looks into Sing’s eyes. “Sometimes I worry that belief and hope are the same thing, and that truth is something else entirely.”

“I understand,” Sing says, trying to. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course you can.”

Sing tries to get her mind around a single question. She decides to start with, “How many Felixes are there?”

They start walking again. “Just the one, as far as I know,” Marta says. “Why? Have you been seeing them?” She laughs.

Sing forces a laugh. “Oh,
Angelique
’s got me thinking, I guess. And being here, you know? Where Durand was.”

“Oh, I know,” Marta says, a new excitement in her voice. “It’s this exact forest that inspired him. I mean, the librettist
wrote
it, and added the villagers and the royalty and blah blah blah, but Durand was
mesmerized
by this forest. It’s where he—it’s where they say he actually met the Felix. It’s why this place is so—magical.”

“So if the Felix gives you a wish,” Sing says, trying to steer the conversation back on course, “what happens? Do you get a—a magic stone or something?” She has an image forming in her mind, amorphous and dim right now but amassing itself around a few scattered seeds.

“A magic stone?” Marta looks at her sideways. “I’ve never heard that. It just grants your wish and goes away. That’s it. Well, actually, it cries you a tear—the tear is the wish. That’s kind of like a magic stone, I guess, now that you mention it. Except I don’t think the Felix grants many wishes. Mostly it eats you.”

The tear is the wish.
Could this strange, cold crystal be a tear? Sing looks down, afraid Marta will see her thoughts.

Marta stops and turns to her, eyes serious. “Sing, what are you getting at?”

Taking a deep breath, Sing pulls the gold chain from inside her shirt. “Well, what do
you
think it is?” She holds the crystal up. Marta takes it between her thumb and forefinger, peering.

On first glance, it is just pretty. Sparkly. Sing knows this. But she lets Marta study it, and after a moment, Marta’s eyes start to take on their own otherworldly shimmer. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it on the quad, near the woods. Is it … do you think it’s…?” Sing can’t say
magical.
What does that word mean, anyway?

“It feels cold,” Marta says. “And—sad, somehow.”

“I know.”

Marta folds her fingers around the crystal and closes her eyes. Then she opens them again and opens her hand, letting the chain fall back into place around Sing’s neck. “This little thing … it’s shaped like a tear, right?”

“Right,” Sing says.

“And it clearly has some kind of power. You can feel it, can’t you?”

Sing feels her body cringing at this line of inquiry, but she thinks of Tamino, of the glowing shape she followed into the woods. She looks at the crystal. And she knows what it is.

“I think,” Marta says, “I think it must be a Felix tear. Someone’s wish, Sing. Is it yours?”

Sing stares at the tiny, shimmering shape. “No,” she says. “It’s not mine.”

“Hey!” an unmistakable voice calls across the campus. Sing tucks the crystal back into her shirt.

Jenny is half walking, half jogging across the grass. “Dirt!” she yells.

“Dirt?” Marta says.

“Plays-poor!” Jenny is rummaging in her backpack as she reaches them. “Purely by accident, I might add,” she says, “since I’m not in the business of drama for drama’s sake.”

“What does
that
mean?” Sing crosses her arms. “I have a legitimate—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jenny’s face is flushed with exertion. “I’m doing an article on the Gloria Stewart competition. It’s kind of a huge deal that it’s here this year for the first time. ‘Thank you’ to your dad, by the way. Mr. Hey-Howzabout-A-Brand-Spanky-New-Theater.”

Sing isn’t sure how to respond. “Yeah, I’ll—tell him.”

“Your dad must be really nice,” Marta says.

Jenny pulls out a piece of paper. “So I went through the
Trumpeter
database for the heck of it, and our favorite apprentice comes up in this article about a different Gloria Stewart competition, at Carnegie Hall.” She hands the paper to Sing. “Kinda horrifying.”

DC PRODIGY DISAPPOINTS IN NYC

Nathan Daysmoor, a favorite to win this year’s inaugural Gloria Stewart International Piano Competition, failed even to complete his performance last night at Carnegie Hall. Despite the hype leading up to the competition, Daysmoor, a protégé of DC’s illustrious Maestro George Keppler, had never given a public performance. It is easy to see why. He fumbled his way through thirty seconds of barely recognizable Rachmaninov before being booed off the stage by an unappreciative crowd. Perhaps next year, DC will send a competitor based on talent rather than looks and charisma.

“Yes, folks, you heard it here,” Jenny says. “‘Looks and charisma.’”

Sing’s mouth hangs open. “When did this happen?”

“That I don’t know.” Jenny folds the paper again. “The database is so incomplete and screwed up.”

“Nineteen sixty-seven,” Marta says. The other two look at her. She shrugs. “It says ‘inaugural.’ That means the first one. Which was in 1967.”

Jenny puts her hands on her hips. “Marta Kost, I love you dearly, but which do you think is more likely? That Daysmoor is some kind of immortal, talentless Phantom of the Opera with a slightly better complexion, or that some first-year
Trumpeter
journalist didn’t know what ‘inaugural’ meant?”

“I know what’s more likely,” Marta says. “I just don’t know what’s true.”

Forty-two

M
AESTRO KEPPLER GAZES OUT
at the dark, empty theater. It’s a strange vantage point. He is used to focusing on the orchestra, not the audience. Sitting alone here, center stage, feels alien. Or is it the absence of the crystal?

How could he have been so careless as to let it slip from his pocket? How could he have done that?

His only consolation is that Nathan doesn’t know it exists.

But thanks to that idiot da Navelli trying to buy his daughter’s career with this new theater, the damn
Gloria Stewart competition
is coming up! Here! With Nathan getting it into his head to enter!

Luckily, George is confident he has killed that idea, for now. Nathan has been so much more reasonable these last ten years or so, since George learned how to use the crystal. He just has to hope Nathan doesn’t decide to test the limits again.

He has to find the crystal, before it’s too late.

Forty-three

T
HE RAIN CAME DOWN
in buckets all night. The gray sky and chilly, damp grass are keeping Mrs. Bigelow’s other students off the lawn this morning, which suits Sing fine. Let them do their research in the library. It will be easier to listen to the crows out here.

She has set up under the large maple tree behind Hud, near the barbarian fence, and sits cross-legged on an old blanket, notebook in hand.

“Caaaaw,”
the crows say.

Maybe Mrs. Bigelow was right. Crows are certainly not songbirds. In fact, the only song Sing has written out in the notebook over the past month of observation is, “
Caw
(crackly).”

Yet she feels she is getting to know them just a bit. Unlike their more musical neighbors, the crows radiate an intelligence that Sing finds fascinating. They have strong opinions about people—not people in general, but individual people. From her first day studying the crows, Sing has taken pride in the fact that they don’t fly off when she approaches their big tree. Lately, they’ve even stopped making an irritated fuss when she arrives, ruffling their shiny feathers and shifting their weights from one clawed foot to the other and back again. Being accepted by the crows—even grudgingly so—has to count for something, she thinks. There must be something fundamental about her that is good, or pleasant, or kind. Something utterly un-diva.