no longer smothered her under the patent falsehood of unworthiness. The blemish on her self-image, which had strangled the fearless intimacy of her innate joy, was cleansed.
She pronounced at due length, ‘If this man’s talent is considered black sorcery, then the temple and the Light’s priesthood are wrong to forbid us the benefits of such practice.’
‘He might heal Efflin’s ailment the same way, you think,’ Tarens ventured, afraid to hope.
As fresh tears brimmed her luminous eyes, Kerelie nodded with encouragement. ‘Let him try. I can assure the attempt is unlikely to cause any harm.’
The vagabond accepted her tone as consent and resumed his disputed place at the invalid’s bedside. Efflin’s eyes remained stubbornly shut. Inert to the life in his presence, he languished amid the unwrinkled sheets, motionless but for his slowed breaths. He seemed a being sucked empty: except that the dark-haired healer surveyed his slack frame with undaunted focus. As though attentive to registers too refined to be heard, he studied Efflin’s unresponsive condition.
No word did he speak. No demonstrable feeling moved his expression. Yet after a searing, stopped interval, the vagabond reached out and claimed the wood flute.
The oiled surface had been polished by love. Beyond that, the toy instrument was unremarkably plain: a fancy fashioned by country-bred hands for a child, whose sprightly laugh and innocent pleasures had perished of sickness untimely. The drilled stops were spaced for a little boy’s hands. But the stranger’s slight fingers danced over them, silent, as if the wood sang, quite alive to the sensitivity of his inner mind. As Kerelie and Tarens watched, their strange visitor did the unthinkable: he raised the heirloom flute to his lips and sounded the lowest pitch.
The bass note that emerged should have been nothing special. Yet his extraordinary, expressive breath shaped a tempered statement that raised the small hairs at the nape. The vagabond’s regard stayed riveted upon Efflin’s form, dull and abandoned to listlessness under the blankets. The ferocious attentiveness brought to bear bespoke nothing else but an awareness of the uncanny.
The flute’s voice dwindled like a cry into nothing. In fixed focus entrained upon Efflin’s blank face, the dark-haired fellow paused once again, then uncovered the next hole and ran up the scale. The highest tone faded. This time the silence hung like blown glass. Head tilted, he engaged the small instrument, and by tentative phrases, began to unreel an evocative melody.
Ragged nails and rough callus had hidden the fact that those fingers belonged to a talent: his touch on the flute spoke, exquisitely sure, and laced calm through the stuffy room. The outlay of music refigured the senses, until familiar perceptions acquired a chisel-punched clarity. The neat, coloured petals in Kerelie’s embroidery glowed, alive in the handcrafted counterpane. Fire-light shimmered like a warm caress over the quaint patterns carved into the pine bedstead. Moonlight glittered the frosted window-panes to opalescence, and buffed a sheen on the grain of worn floor-boards. Vitality became magnified, until the clean sigh of the onlookers’ breaths flowed like spun silk, entwined and then braided by the intimate love expressed between them as a family.
The vagabond took charge of his composition and wove in the flicker of a sprightly lilt. All the while his gaze stayed locked upon Efflin’s features. Change had crept in, almost unseen: the invalid’s brow was no longer smooth, or the lips, slack with bitter indifference.
Soon the furrowed frown deepened. As if the happy lift in the tune somehow chafed, Efflin gritted his teeth with annoyance.
Like the hook of a burr, the musician seized his bold theme and expanded its rankling influence. His melody soared into foot-tapping joy, then took flight with grace notes that skittered with laughter. Caught up, then wound in and gripped by his spell, the listeners smiled as the tonal harmonics seized their hearts and flung open the gates of remembrance.
Swept away, they relived the forgotten cadences of better times, when an older brother’s mature strength had worked the croft side by side with their uncle. The lost days of their childhoods re-emerged, before the high temple’s decree had seized their father as a troop conscript. The ribald jokes, the wry pranks, and the long, summer days spent lazily fishing, while Aunt Saff smoked the beehives to harvest the honey, and the sun-drenched barley fields ripened to yellow. The crushed scent of greenery, and boiling jam, and the spike to Fiath’s jack whiskey brewed in the cold snap of autumn – the ease of those gilded years flooded back on a poignant wave of nostalgia.
Efflin’s eyes were closed still. But his wracked fight to stay separate now became a pitched battle that rammed his frame rigid.
The musician played on. Tempo quickened as he sliced golden showers of sound out of silence. His merry measures described Efflin’s grace, until none watching could deny the sorrowful ache of a lifetime laid down by abandonment. The brother who wasted in bedridden inertia became an agony to behold. Kerelie fought the fierce need to shake him, and Tarens shuddered with clenched fists, raked by the urge to pick a rife fight.
But the voice of the flute raised a wall in restraint, fashioned to smother harsh action. Bright as the struck peal of bronze chimes, the notes quickened with shimmering urgency. To Efflin’s being, as once he had been, the musician added a descant theme teased in counterpoint through the base melody.
Kerelie whitened, first to identify the uncanny source of the tune’s inspiration. ‘He’s playing the boys! Paolin and Chan, do you hear? Light above,’ she gasped, aching, ‘Make him stop! I can’t bear it.’
Her appalled shock only spurred the musician to seize on the fuel of her distress. He reached into that molten core of sheer agony and played love, his tender measures swelled to a shout that scalded with more brilliance yet. Two deceased children were respun from the grave. Vibrant, as though living – almost! – the eye saw them in etheric vision beside Efflin’s bed. Their young spirits would have showed laughter and verve, unmarked by the loss of their mother. With all of life’s wonder undimmed, their memory beseeched the grown man to open his jaded eyes and acknowledge them.
The insistent demand: to be what they were, must crack, through a fiercely kept isolation and loose the agonized grief kept imprisoned by steel reservation. The music commanded, until stone itself could have wept in unbridled sympathy.
The musician dared further. Theme and playful embellishment flowed into refrain, and resounded, more haunting yet. The pervasive gloom of the sick-room air parted before the sweet scent of Aunt’s cherished roses.
Which lyrical impact raised Kerelie’s tears and winded Tarens like a punch in the chest. But Efflin’s response outstripped them both: quaking as though seared inside by hot iron, he bit his lip to the verge of drawn blood.
This time, Tarens unriddled the astonishment. ‘Light’s own grace,’ he whispered, appalled. ‘Efflin! Aunt Saff! For mercy, how deeply he must have loved her!’
As if his cry unleashed comprehension, the innocent melody that bespoke the two boys reached consummate pitch. All three of the musician’s laid lines became welded into a harmonic nexus. Imperative artistry cascaded, peaked, and stripped bare an indelible truth: that Efflin’s theme was the backbone that cradled the effervescence of both little boys.
‘The children were Efflin’s!’ gasped Kerelie, rocked by the bolt-strike of epiphany. ‘Paolin and Chan! Bone and breath, they were Efflin’s!’
Facts fit.
With a sting like the snap of a brittle stick, the flute’s call destroyed all reserve. On the bed, Efflin turned his head into the pillow and buried his ravaged face. He groaned, stricken through by
