Page 48 of A Tale of Ice and Ash
Cole made a noncommittal gesture, swaying in time to his own music. “I don’t think she often goes into that corridor.”
“Do you?”
Cole bit his lip, still smiling. She tried not to pay too much attention to the pull of his lips, refocusing her gaze on the keys of the piano, but that was almost worse. There was something in the way that Cole’s deft hands moved that held her gaze, something attractive about his careful, tapered fingers.
“Do you still sing?” he asked.
“Whenever I can,” she said, thinking more of the dwarven ditties she’d half-hum as she hung the laundry out to dry, mucked out the stables, washed the dishes. She had sung nothing refined and courtly in a long time. She wondered if she even remembered any.
Cole switched keys. She knew this tune, the words falling out of her before she found the strength to resist. Cole glanced at her for a second, and then closed his eyes, holding on to every note she uttered. The air crackled with fine, sharp music, bursting with a song of lonely winters and lost loves.
“Perfection,” said Cole, as the song drew to a close. “Another?”
“We cannot stay here for an entire hour, surely? What would we talk about?”
“You have almost five years of adventures to fill me in on. Why not start there?”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What have you been doing in five years?”
“Growing ever more handsome and steadily more skilled on the piano,” he said, tapping out another tune, “can’t you tell?”
“You’re different.”
“Different how?”
“Well, you’re still just as annoying, but… I don’t know.”
Another grin, a sliver of mischief. “Do you like me more, now?”
“Well, it would have been hard to like you less.”
Cole choked on his laughter, breaking his tune.
Eirwen slid in beside him and tapped out a few notes. The keys felt alien beneath her fingertips, it had been so long. She could barely remember how to play at all, and was conscious of how Cole’s skill far outstripped her own.
“Something wrong?”
“I’m worried you’ll tease me.”
“Would you like a lesson?”
Eirwen scowled, and slammed down her fingers, banging out a short sequence before her nerves could seize her. It was clunky, but not awful. She slowed down, taking her time, trying to remember an old song from childhood.
It did not come. Instead, she improvised, adapting a simple dwarven tune and singing over the parts she couldn’t quite manage.
“Pretty,” said Cole, his dark eyes fixed on her.
“It needs practise.”
“So does everything in this world.” He opened the book of sheet music and thumbed through the pages. “Remember this one?”
“I do.”
“I’ll be primo, you be secondo.”
