Strange Sweet Song (24 page)

Sing hears Marta’s “See ya” as the door clicks shut, but Jenny doesn’t say another word.

Forty-nine

O
NSTAGE, THE BELEAGUERED CHORUS
sings the uncharacteristically sappy number that precedes Angelique’s most famous aria. The orchestra is present and in tune, but Sing can’t give them credit for anything more than that.
Just an understudy rehearsal.

Normally, she would be mortified by walking in late to a rehearsal, particularly a full run-through. But today she strides up the center aisle. She took her time getting here. Let them wait.

She sees Daysmoor turn his head as he conducts, watching her out of the corner of his eye. Will he dare admonish her publicly, knowing it will just give her an opportunity to say where she has been? What she has been doing?
Securing her role.

Or will he remain silent, aware that
the
Maestro da Navelli is here on campus? That would be just as much a victory, and everyone would notice.
I walk into rehearsal late and you have nothing to say about it.
Diva.

She sits in the front row and crosses her legs. She doesn’t have her score with her.

The number ends and the chorus members shuffle off the stage and into the house. Daysmoor turns around.

“Are you warmed up?” he croaks at her.

This? This is what he has to say? She hates his gravelly voice. “Yes,” she says, meeting his gaze with defiance. It isn’t true, exactly, but under normal circumstances of course she would have come warmed up!

“Good,” he says, turning back to the orchestra. “We started with act three. I’m sure you won’t mind beginning with ‘
Quand il se trouvera
.’ Remember your phrasing, please.”

As Sing climbs the stairs to the stage, feeling Daysmoor’s detached stare on her back, she begins to seethe. How
dare
he treat her like some novice? Sure, maybe she has gotten nervous a few times at rehearsal, which is natural, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know how to
phrase
. Anger obliterating any self-doubt, she throws her shoulders back and breathes.

The five-chord introduction swells. She watches Daysmoor conduct; his style is utilitarian, clunky, but authoritative.
It doesn’t matter what he thinks, anyway.

“Quand il se trouvera…”

The orchestra marches along, more responsive than her father’s record player, which gives her a captivating feeling of dominance. She plays with a couple of phrases, stretching or hurrying the line when the notion strikes her. Daysmoor frowns but follows. She feels the rush of power.

Again she pictures the white dress, she imagines the blond ringlets. She finds herself moving her head and arms delicately, smiling a coy little smile. She understands, now, the dangerous, intoxicating quality of a leading role. It is as though she is the worst sort of dictator—callous and terrible and omnipotent. She wears the orchestra—Daysmoor—like a silk train, delighted by how he follows her own strong steps, perfectly attached. Her voice fills the theater.

And if it weren’t for her anger, she might never have discovered this feeling!

When she has finished the aria, she looks haughtily over at Daysmoor, upright yet still managing to appear draped. His expression is inscrutable.

“Attitude isn’t everything,” he says after a moment. “In fact, it gets in the way of most things. I hope you will figure that out.” Then he adds quietly, “But why should you, when your mother never did?”

Sing can’t find words to respond. What does
he
know about her mother?

“All right,” Daysmoor says. “Do it again.” A murmur ripples through the orchestra, audible sighs from the singers in the audience.

“What?” Sing gapes at him.

The corners of his mouth are turned down slightly. “And this time, be a servant of the music, not your ego.”

Scattered muttering from the house. Sing pulls her head back in surprise. “Excuse me?”

“Apprentice,” the first chair viola says, a hand on his score, “we have a limited amount of time.”

“You heard me.” Daysmoor’s voice is quiet but commanding, and Sing knows he is speaking only to her. “Do it again.”

“This is ridiculous,” the new diva inside Sing says. “What was wrong with it?”

Apprentice Daysmoor closes his eyes. “That wasn’t singing. If I wanted people yelling at me, I’d burst unexpectedly into the girls’ locker room. That aria had no shape and no support. It was angry shouting. It was garbage.”

Sing gasps. A prickling feeling begins in her chest and spreads outward.

The first chair viola stands up. “Listen, man, don’t call her singing garbage. Can we just move on?” He turns to Sing. “That was great, Sing. Night and day from a couple weeks ago.”

Apprentice Daysmoor looks at Sing. “She knows I’m right.”

Sing’s face is hot.
Garbage.

The ripple of murmuring throughout the theater has become a wave of nervous titters and expressions of shock. “That’s cold,” someone in the wind section says.

Apprentice Daysmoor straightens up, and Sing notices for the first time how tall he is. “I’m her coach,” he says to the first chair viola. “It’s my job to get the best performance possible out of her, not coddle her and tell her she’s wonderful. Do you disagree?”

The viola sits down and flips the pages of his score. “Not at all, Apprentice Plays—ah, Daysmoor.” He smirks. A few orchestra members laugh outright.

Daysmoor’s face offers no hints about whatever emotion might be happening inside. He simply raises his baton, still as stone until the orchestra is focused, then gives the downbeat for the introduction to Angelique’s aria.

Her face burning, Sing begins again. She will not be taken down. She will not be held back by an arrogant apprentice or ripped apart by the whispers of a jealous house. It is her role now. The aria is louder now, vainer, more energetic. She sings to the balcony. She sings like her mother.

Halfway through, Daysmoor cuts the orchestra off. “Miss da Navelli,” he says, “if you’re not going to take this seriously, then get out.”

Fifty

B
ARBARA DA NAVELLI HAS TAKEN
to visiting Sing during the night.

Sometimes the dream is a memory—the front door whooshing shut, the thuds of baggage hitting the hardwood floor, a loud coo, a present being thrust into Sing’s small hands, the click of expensive shoes carrying her mother away again to recharge in some hidden place.

Sometimes the dream is Dunhammond, with Lori and Ryan and Apprentice Daysmoor and the Maestro scorched by Barbara da Navelli’s radiance. In these dreams, Sing stands at her mother’s side on the Woolly stage, afraid to move her feet lest she crack the shiny floor. “If you play a thing, you make it true,” Barbara da Navelli says. She is dressed as Angelique, holding a magnificent golden crook.

“I’m only the understudy,” Sing says, squinting at Lori’s smug face in the shadows. Or is it Zhin’s?

Her mother turns to her. Her eyes are catlike, her teeth elongated. Sing wonders if her mother can see the despair in her eyes, if she will shed a tear and grant her one wish. But her mother only says, “Impossible. You are a da Navelli. Take what is yours.” She swings her crook, which crackles and hums so loudly, Sing covers her ears. The stage explodes with electricity. Zhin and Ryan clasp each other and shrink back into the darkness; the Maestro clutches his heart and turns his eyes skyward. Only Apprentice Daysmoor remains impassive, his black eyes fixed on Sing as though he is sitting in judgment of her.

This night, Sing wakes with a smoldering determination, her mother’s words as fresh in her ears as if she had only just spoken them.
Take what is yours.
But in the dimness, Sing finds herself clutching not an electric, golden crook, but a soft, worn lamb with button eyes.

As her senses continue to awaken, she frowns. Something is glowing. A chill courses through her body, not from the air, but from what feels like an icicle driven into her chest.

The crystal.

She unclasps the necklace and holds the pendant away from her body, squinting at it in the dull gleam it is creating. She remembers the ashy smell of snow, trees as glossy as tar, and the gentle rustling of leaves.

Fifty-one

“
I
DIDN’T KNOW
he was your boyfriend. You never told me.”

Crossing the icy quad, Sing blinks away the memory.

“You’ve got to know about him, Sing. How could you not know?”

She doesn’t want to hear it. Blink.

“I thought we’d laugh about it. He’s screwing around with that Pinkerton girl as well. I thought we’d make fun of her.”

She kicks a chunk of snow out of the path. At least it is morning, and Zhin is gone. They are both gone. She doesn’t need Zhin or her father anymore. She doesn’t need Jenny and Marta. The clockwork has been set in motion. Once Harland Griss hears her at the Autumn Festival, once she has gotten the New Artist position, then … then …

She doesn’t finish the thought. She doesn’t know how.

Blink.

She should have done laundry last night, especially since Zhin took a pair of regulation kneesocks with her. She didn’t even offer to give them back. Now Sing is on her last pair and she’ll have to do laundry tonight, during the school week, when she should be doing homework. And she should really take a shower, as evidenced by her hair, shoved up into a messy ponytail. And the
crows.
She has to start thinking about her stupid report on the stupid
crows.

As if to rub it in, they caw horribly as she reaches Archer. Part of her can’t believe she is actually going to her coaching session after getting kicked out of rehearsal yesterday. But it doesn’t seem to matter much, now. Not after everything has settled, flurries of emotion slowing and drifting into stillness. Not after—

Blink.

She pushes open the door to the little practice room.

Apprentice Daysmoor sits in the corner, head tipped back, eyes closed, mouth turned down in the smallest of scowls. His arms are folded and his legs crossed at the ankles, but his gray robes cover these bony angles in gentle folds.

She yanks up one of the rusty music stands to the proper height and tosses her
Angelique
score onto it. Then she sits down heavily at the piano and starts playing her warm-ups.

“Where’s the little master?” Daysmoor murmurs after a moment, as though he isn’t really interested. Sing doesn’t turn her head, but she can see him out of the corner of her eye.

“Ahhhh-ehhhh-eeeee-ohhhh-oooo.”
That “ee” was flat. She stretches her neck, one side and the other.

The apprentice draws his arms out from his robes and crosses them behind his head. “Still abed? You want me to go fetch him?”

“I told him I’d eviscerate him if he showed his face.
Ahhhh-ehhhh-eeeee-ohhhh-ooooo.”
A little better. She moves on to arpeggios.
“La-la-la-laaaaa-la-la-la.”

Daysmoor doesn’t say anything else, and he doesn’t stir. It is nearly twenty past nine when Sing finishes warming up. She sits for a moment, looking at the reflection of her tired eyes in the piano’s shiny music rack.

“I hear congratulations are in order,” Daysmoor says. “For some unfathomable reason, Maestro Keppler has decided that you should sing Angelique at the Autumn Festival instead of Lori Pinkerton.”

Sing’s heart jumps. It has happened, then. She knew it would. Even before her father’s conversation with the Maestro yesterday, something in her knew it would happen; she’s been groomed for two years to replace her mother. Yet it is still somehow unbelievable.

Unbelievable, and more real than she could possibly have imagined it to feel.

“So we have work to do,” Daysmoor says. “And no sign of Mr. Larkin. Am I supposed to play accompanist as well as coach today? You tell me, since you’re the one who decided to tell him not to come.”

Before she can stop herself, she says, “Just give me another write-up, then.” A mumble, barely audible. Why is she angry?
Now,
when she should be ecstatic. When the plan has worked.

It’s his smirk, sitting under those cold, dispassionate eyes.
He probably won’t say anything about my comment. He’ll probably just shut his eyes and lean back in his chair, pretend he didn’t hear—

“
You
left rehearsal. Not me. And you did it again yesterday. I
should
give you another write-up.”

“I only left yesterday because you were being a jerk,” she says vehemently, yet bracing herself for the backlash. “And it didn’t even matter that I left the other night! Nobody noticed!”

“I noticed,” he says.

They are silent for a few moments. Sing slowly plays a scale with one hand.

“Would you rather have a different coach?” Daysmoor says.

Sing looks up. “What?”

The smirk is gone, but his voice isn’t harsh. “You’re obviously not my biggest fan. Would you rather have someone else?”

What kind of a question is that?

He sits up. “Well?”

Anger tightens her chest. “Well what? You don’t even coach me.” She didn’t mean to say it aloud, but now that it is out there, she lets her hesitation drop away from her like a heavy old coat. “You don’t give me any advice. Any
real
advice. Nobody does!”

“Would you listen if I did?” His voice hardens. “How could I possibly have anything useful to say to
Miss da Navelli
? How could anyone?”

“You don’t know me,” she hisses, rising.

He stands as well, a head taller than her, slouched, ungainly. “You don’t know
me
.”

She will not be intimidated. “I know you well enough. You gloom around this place like a dusty spirit. You actually
haunt
. You act like you’re better than the rest of us. But you know what? You’re a total hack and you know it. You’re a hack amateur. You can’t even play. That’s why you’re so critical and horrible and lazy. That’s why you’re not entering the Gloria Stewart competition.”