Page 12 of A Fractured Song

“She stopped the fire with her voice,” Mr Mosley continued. “Changed the wind, made it rain…things I’d never believe if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes. All by herself!”

“Goodness.” Instructor Oriana spoke mildly. “That’s advanced songcraft for a solitary singer just out of the academy.”

“I was careful,” Marieke said quickly. “I did no more than was necessary to put out the fire. And I’ve stayed in the area since, monitoring the elements. I don’t think my intervention had any unintended impact on the weather or environment.”

The instructor’s smile was indulgent. “I wasn’t criticizing you, Marieke. I’m impressed—I’d forgotten that agricultural song was one of your key areas of study. And frankly, I’m relieved. We left the capital in a hurry when we received the report of another huge wildfire. We didn’tknow what we’d find, and I admit I was expecting things to be in a much worse state when we arrived.”

“What do you meananotherhuge wildfire?” Marieke asked with a frown.

“This is the third one in the last fortnight,” Solomon said gravely.

“I haven’t heard anything about that!” And Marieke had thought she’d been keeping her ear to the ground for any major reports from the capital.

“The others were in different parts of the country,” Solomon said. “It takes time for news to travel.”

“Were the others caused by magic?” she asked quickly.

Instructor Oriana gave her a sharp look—it sat strangely on her round, friendly face. “We’ll just get settled in, Marieke, and speak with the town elders. Then we can discuss these matters more fully somewhere comfortable.”

Marieke accepted this dismissal with a nod, not averse to having the extra time to gather her thoughts. She hung back as the other singers followed Mr Mosley into the town hall that sat just off the central square. She’d prefer to tell her version of events in private anyway, rather than in the company of the local witnesses.

When the group from the capital emerged, Marieke was waiting. She fell in with the small crowd trailing along behind as the newcomers were guided toward the site of the fire.

“I don’t suppose you can repair any of the damage?” Mr Mosley asked hopefully, as they all came to a stop near the blackened field.

“I’m afraid not,” Instructor Oriana said, sympathy in her voice. “I’m no expert in agricultural song, but I don’t believe there are any songs that can revive plants this badly destroyed.”

“No, the crop is gone, I’m afraid,” Marieke chimed in.

Instructor Oriana nodded sadly. “What I do have experiencewith is storytelling song, however. I can’t fix the damage, but I can assess it. And maybe get a picture of what happened.” She turned toward the destroyed crops, a look of calculation on her face.

“How can storytelling assess damage?” The whisper came from a local man standing just beside Marieke.

“Storytelling is a broad term,” Marieke told him, her own voice quiet as well so as not to disrupt Instructor Oriana’s process. “And a misleading one, because it makes the area of study sound insubstantial or primarily for entertainment. It’s actually one of the hardest and most powerful types of songcraft. There are very few fully qualified storytellers, and Instructor Oriana is one of them.”

“But what do they do?” the man asked. “Tell stories?”

Marieke shook her head. “The discipline of storytelling songcraft isn’t about singers telling stories to other people. It’s about magic telling stories to the singers. A singer qualified in storytelling can get the magic to tell them the story of what’s in front of them—or in mundane terms, to provide an assessment of what they can see. For example, they could walk into a room and use a song to discover what and who might be in the room, without needing to see it with their eyes. That’s how she’ll assess the damage—she can sing a song that will read the state of the field and report it back to her.”

The man nodded, looking impressed, but Marieke wasn’t done. That cursory explanation gave Instructor Oriana far too little credit for the true scope of her capability.

“That’s the basic level of skill,” Marieke went on. “A really experienced storyteller can manipulate the magic such that it will tell them not just the story of the current situation, but the story that led to it. A powerful storytelling song will recreate the events that led to what’s currently visible.”

“They can see the past?” the man demanded.

“Not literally, but sort of,” Marieke said. “They can get enough information about the past to make informed speculations about what occurred to bring us from that past to this present.”

She could see she’d lost her listener with her increasingly convoluted explanation, so she didn’t add her final point. After all, there was no need to go into the most impressive form of storytelling song, given that as far as she knew, Instructor Oriana couldn’t harness it. Marieke didn’t think anyone alive could do so. The ability to coax magic into telling the story of what was yet to come was so impossibly difficult to attain that not all experts on singing lore agreed that it was even possible. There were tales of it happening in the past, but Marieke’s fellow students had believed them or not as they saw fit.

She smiled as she thought about the first time she’d heard of storytelling song, in a class led by Instructor Oriana, incidentally. Dazzled by the prospect, many students had signed up for the three-week introductory course, which was designed to test aptitude. Almost none had gone on to actually study it, after discovering how very difficult the skill was and how slowly they were progressing in spite of their hard work. For her part, Marieke had enjoyed the course immensely. She would have been glad to continue to do a full semester, if not more. But given most students didn’t pursue it, the academy had allocated a small capacity for the class. It had been full both times she’d tried to apply for further study in the area. So she’d focused her energies on agricultural song instead.

Her reminiscing was cut off as Instructor Oriana began her assessing song. Thanks to all the practice she’d had during the instructor’s classes, Marieke managed to keep her reaction internal. The good folk of Bull Creek didn’t have equal success. She saw winces on all sides, and a few people actually covered their ears with their hands. Others just stared open-mouthed atthe venerable instructor, who was standing with eyes closed and arms upraised as she released a song that sounded closer to a bat’s screech than a bird’s melodious chirp.

Off-key, Marieke’s choral instructor would call it. It was a concept very difficult to explain to the majority of the population who were born without the capacity to sing and could simply never learn to make their voices do that. Difficult to explain to some singers, too, she thought, one eye twitching as Instructor Oriana’s song changed, swelling from a simple assessment to some more specific task Marieke didn’t recognize.

Needless to say, Instructor Oriana wasn’t the one who taught choral class. In fact, rumor had it that the class had been introduced because of the storytelling instructor’s inability to carry a tune. She was the cheeriest of academy members, liked by everyone. But there was simply no getting around the fact that her singing voice sounded like a cat being forced into a bathtub.

At least it didn’t affect her strength, magically speaking. In terms of her grasp of magical theory and her ability to manipulate the magic of the land, she was among the best in the country. The academy required students to study pitch and rhythm and such concepts in choral class as a matter of presentation and professionalism in their craft. It had nothing to do with the effectiveness of their magic. Marieke had learned on her visit to Aeltas that the southern country didn’t even have such a class.

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