Level
3
Experience
1,400 XP
The fiddle was part of that education. Fey things care about music the way they care about names and debts, and Auntie expected it kept the way she expected the shelves kept. Corinthia was corrected when she played badly, exactly and once, the same as for anything else. She was never praised for playing well. She simply stopped being corrected, and that was how she learned she had it.
The magic came somewhere in the middle of those years. It was not given to her so much as it settled, the way damp settles in a cellar. She was already living in the dark by then. It simply began living back.
What Auntie was raising her for, nobody has ever said. Corinthia does not seem to have asked.
The Return
Eighteen years after the trade, Corinthia's mother died. Not of the ailment she had been cured of. Something else, unrelated, quick.
The following morning there was a girl on the front steps of the Rookshadow house in Springreach, grown, unhurried, dressed in nothing anyone recognized. She carried a fiddle case and nothing else. She waited to be invited in, and she was very patient about it.
She said she was coming back from Auntie's house.
Nobody has been able to establish why. Auntie made no demand, sent no message, and asked for nothing. The contract, as far as anyone can reconstruct it, was fulfilled on both sides and ended when the woman it was written around stopped breathing. Corinthia offers no explanation and does not appear to find the question interesting.
The boon held to the last day. The family is still wealthy. Every ship and every warehouse and every good year sits on top of a five-year-old girl, and now the girl is in the house, saying good morning at breakfast.
Her Father
He wanted a son. He has never said so where he could be quoted and has never once managed to hide it.
He does not think of himself as a man who sold his child. He thinks of himself as a man who saved his wife, which is true, and the two facts have coexisted in him for eighteen years without ever being made to look at each other. Corinthia's return introduced them.
He is frightened of her. He is also, underneath that, resentful in a way he could not defend out loud, because she came back and his wife did not, and the exchange has come out backwards.
He has not been cruel. He has been worse than cruel, which is practical. He put her in good clothes, gave her money, and suggested she take walks in the city to reorient herself. He suggested it often. He suggested longer walks. He mentioned that the guild takes on people of unusual ability, and that the work is steady, and that it often keeps them away for weeks.
Corinthia understood exactly what she was being told. She thanked him for the clothes, which she found strange and did not say so, and went out into Springreach on foot.
She reads his discarding of her as reasonable. She was purchased for a purpose, the purpose has concluded, and a man is entitled to dispose of a thing he no longer has use for. She holds nothing against him. She has said, without any edge in it at all, that she likes how honest he is about not wanting her.
Springreach
She found the Adventurers Guild by walking until the walking arrived somewhere. Nobody sent her. Nobody vouched for her. She waited on the step until she was asked in, and then remembered that she had been.
The city is loud and appallingly bright and full of people who say things they do not mean, and she is fascinated by all of it in the manner of a traveler in a foreign port. She is not trying to fit in. She is observing local custom with genuine and unhurried interest, and complying where compliance seems polite.
She is not, whatever the drawing room concluded, without manners. She has excellent manners. They belong to somewhere else.
She is careful with names, gives her own slowly, and spends other people's like coin. She keeps precise count of favors and says the count out loud. She does not thank people casually, because thanks is a species of debt and debts should be settled properly or not incurred. She waits on thresholds. She keeps her word with a rigidity that has already caused trouble.
She has no sense at all of volume, of staring, of how long a silence is allowed to run, or of which subjects are unsuitable for dinner.
And she fixes rooms. A room that is too bright is a room that has been left broken, and she will correct it where she stands, without asking, regardless of who is in it and what they were doing. If they wanted it bright they are welcome to say so. She will be genuinely puzzled, and she will put it back.
Playing
The family gave her clothes and money. They did not give her the fiddle. She came back with it.
It is not a fine instrument and she does not treat it as a precious one. She plays in corners and in poor light and late, and she does not stop when people come in, and she does not perform. Asked to play, she will, immediately and without fuss, and then she will count it as a favor given and say the count out loud.
Nothing she plays is recognized. No Springreach airs, no ballads, no drinking songs. Long modal things without obvious endings, in tunings that make other musicians frown and then stop frowning. Asked what a piece is called she gives a name in a language nobody speaks and does not offer a translation.
Her fingers move a half beat ahead of the sound. She sometimes sings under her breath while she plays, and it is not quite in the same key as the fiddle.
It is the first thing Springreach has wanted from her. A room gone quiet for a tune is the nearest she has come to being welcome, and she does not understand what has happened when it does.
Bearing
She has the family face. Anyone who knew her mother sees it at once, and that is the hard part of looking at her. The fey work did not replace the Rookshadow in her, it refined it, the way a reflection in dark water resembles the thing above it.
Symmetry a fraction too exact. Cheekbones a shade too high, eyes set a touch too wide. Ears tapered, subtly, noticeable at conversational distance and not across a room. Dark hair with colors in it that no lamp should find. Skin even and unfreckled and untouched by eighteen years of sun. Hands longer than her sleeves were cut for, and no self-consciousness about them whatsoever.
At her throat, a dark mark, geometric and deliberate. It is the only unlovely thing on her. It did not grow there. It was applied.
She is still. Not composed, not poised. Still. She holds a position past the point where a body wants to move, and when she moves it happens all at once with no windup, and people flinch and then feel foolish.
Light near her runs a half beat late. Her shadow occasionally settles at an angle the room does not account for. She has never noticed. Nobody has told her.
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