Page 34 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Georgiana and I were breakfasting in the grand music room, a glorious space with a towering wall of windows. Georgiana, a famed pianoforte performer, was an equally brilliant technician, so manufacturers sent their new models for evaluation. She tore apart each hapless arrival, marveling at innovations to the escapement or frowning at skimpy dampers, then reassembled it to play.
A year ago this room had eight instruments, but the war had shrunk the collection to four. Two were new models loaned from the Erard London factory. The other two were permanent acquisitions and Georgiana’s favorites, eight-foot grands built to order by Nannette Streicher, a great Viennese builder. Their sweeping curves nestled back-to-back in the center of the room.
Georgiana stopped her practicing—some blistering finger exercise she invented—and came over for a bite of toast. She did not allow food or drink within ten feet of a keyboard, so our table was tucked in the corner.
I placed the melody I had transcribed by her plate.
Her attention shifted from toast to paper. “Not your usual style.” Her lashes lifted, and our gazes met. “This is like my songs. Music of power. And it is familiar, but I do not know why.”
“We heard it in Fènnù’s memory. The three great wyves attempting to heal the song.”
“Oh… you remember it fromthat?” She nodded with professional approval. “You are remarkable. I was overwhelmed.”
“They are connected. The relics, the great song. I think it is a clue.”
“Have you played it?”
“I sang it. Nothing happened. But I do not have… oomph.”
She had picked up her toast; playing made her hungry. The crust stopped an inch from her lips. “Oomph?”
“You are the great wyfe of song.Youhave oomph.”
She set down the toast. “My songs are not written. I do not write them down, I mean. I just sing what comes to me.”
“You can sight-sing anything. Will you try this one?”
I waited for her to refuse. Georgiana was cautious about singing. Cautious of the power it invoked.
She lifted the score, scanning through the lines. “I do not know if I should sing another wyfe’s music. Not with…oomph.” Thoughtfully, she handed the score to me. “This may be like my songs, but it is not mine. You understand it better than I. We should perform it together. You play. I sing.”
I had not expected that. My own breakfast twitched in my belly. But I sang it once already. I had barely even hesitated. Had I been so confident I would fail alone?
“Will something happen?” I asked.
Her lips curved. “You are the one who remembered it. What doyouthink?”
I had no answer, so I swallowed my hesitation, wiped my fingers, and walked to the second Streicher. We sometimes played duos on the twin instruments—for pleasure, not performance, as I could not match Georgiana’s keyboard skill. The instruments had an exquisite, singing tone from high-tension strings in iron-reinforced frames, an invention of the last few years.
I opened the lid to the short stick and positioned the music, then experimented with chords. It would sound absurd to plink out a unison melody while she sang, but more importantly, the great wyves’ song was complex and layered. Even if I could not reconstruct all three voices, I could test the harmonies that lingered in my mind.
Georgiana listened dreamily, standing beside the instrument so we faced each other. She did not need to see the score; her second reading had been to memorize it. Already she was lost in the music, imagining how the melody would fit with my harmonies.
I nodded to her and played an opening chord. She sang the first note, lingering and high. I had written no words for the vocalist. Georgiana chose simple syllables, sounds without meaning that fit the flow of the melody.
Music, whether heard or played, had always formed structures in my thoughts, abstractions that nested and resolved, intricate as filigree or roiling like thunderheads. Social nuances might puzzle me, but music embodied Plato’s pure forms of emotion: ecstasy, longing, grief, and fury all distilled to their essence and stripped of artifice, innuendo, and imprecision.
But nothing prepared me for this. As Georgiana’s voice soared among theharmonies I played, fabulous arches threw themselves into my mind, scaffolding that supported another layer and yet another, each of Georgiana’s notes fixing a taller peak, a shimmering sun, hot or magnetic, that coaxed the phototropic, crystalline edifice higher. It was a structure of flawless feeling, and my inviolate love for her infused every truss and beam.
Then the abstract became visible—the music room’s towering glass windows blinked out of existence, and I saw the form of music itself, a fairy fortress spun of countless interwoven triumphs and trials. But incomplete. The summit soared, but the foundation gaped where two other musical voices should stand. The fairytale pillars teetered like brittle spun sugar.
From far away, a tremendous presence, feminine and inhuman, launched towards us as fast as thought. Her shadow blackened the castle’s trusses, then spread to cover the horizons. Her mind, disfigured and diseased, swallowed us.
Fènnù.
Her voice roared like a mad goddess:Raise nothing between me and my wyfe of war!
Like an iron sky falling, her dark weight slammed down. The castle’s incomplete foundation shattered, and it crashed in catastrophic ruin. An arctic blast froze my skin to crackling ice, but then the real world—glass windows, polished keyboard, and a single sheet of music—snapped back into view.
