Strange Sweet Song (6 page)

The newspaper.
“Yes, well, that was two years ago,” Sing says, remembering. The stream of reporters, the incessant flash of cameras …

Marta flushes a little. “Oh, I’m sorry, I—I—”

“Don’t worry about it.” A few students holding plates glance in their direction. Conversations ripple through the room.

“That’s cool, though, your dad being Maestro da Navelli,” Marta says. “Hey, I heard there’s a New Artist vacancy coming up at Fire Lake Opera. Wouldn’t it be incredible to get it?”

It was how Barbara da Navelli got her start. Nineteen and married to the conductor. But she was an exception.
The
exception.

Sing shrugs. “There’s no way Fire Lake would offer a New Artist spot to some teenager, even a DC student. FLAP might be competitive, but it’s basically a glorified summer camp, like Stone Hill. Fire Lake New Artists are part of the company itself, and every one has gone on to sing major roles in all the great houses of the world. Most professional singers don’t even get to audition. They have to be special.”

“It’s just a rumor,” Marta says. “But I did hear it from Lori Pinkerton.”

That name again. “Who’s Lori Pinkerton?” Sing asks.

She’s met with unbelieving stares from both Marta and Jenny. By now she’s getting used to them.

“Oh,” Marta says. “She’s a—a girl. A senior. Who goes here. I met her at FLAP.”

“Resident diva,” Jenny says.

Diva: successful, glamorous, talented. Haughty.

Ruthless.

Just like Barbara da Navelli.

“Lori’s nice.” Marta fidgets as though she’s uncomfortable gossiping.

Jenny isn’t. “She’s not even here yet. They don’t make her do placements anymore.”

Sing’s stomach prickles. The evening chill seeps through the window behind her. Her competition has a name, now.

“She’s not here because she still has a couple performances,” Marta says. “That’s why our rehearsal pianist, Ryan, was late, too. I heard them talking about it at Fire Lake.”

Ryan? At FLAP? With Lori Pinkerton?

“You don’t even know her,” Marta says to Jenny.

“My sister went here; she’s an oboe,” Jenny says. “She graduated last year—she knows Lori. The darling of the conservatory opera scene.”

“Ryan was at FLAP, too?” Sing tries to sound casual.

Jenny narrows her eyes, but Marta buys it. “Yeah. They were excited about doing the opera together.”

Jenny frowns. “Oh, jeez, Sing, don’t get all freaked out.”

Sing blinks. “I’m not freaked out.”

“It’s okay,” Marta says, misreading Sing’s paleness. “Jenny’s just being dramatic. Lori’s nice. I’m sure we’ll all get along great.”

Sing tries to believe her, but it’s hard to ignore her pleasant, open face and kind spirit. Marta wouldn’t know a resident diva if one dumped a bottle of purified water over her head.

Eleven

T
HE FELIX CLENCHED HER FRONT PAWS
, pearly claws digging into the bark of the tree limb high above the snow.

Darkness she knew. She remembered it. In the sky, the galaxy glittered, but when she chased the lights, the emptiness between them seemed endless. This never bothered her, when she was all Sky and no Cat. More room to romp and spiral and throw her own sparks into the void.

But this new darkness was different. Close. Trees and little creatures and air pressed in on her, cutting her mind off from the stars. Sometimes she didn’t remember the sky at all.

She wasn’t sure how the Cat form came into existence. Before she came to earth, there had been something catlike about her. But that vaporous felinity was different from the reality of clinging to this black branch in the freezing night.

And the reality of hunger. She might have retained more of her Sky mind if her Cat hunger hadn’t grounded her so solidly in this new, tiny world. She had understood
want,
even
need,
but it was the urgency of physical hunger that first trapped her in this Cat body.

Fortunately, her new form had known what to do. Her first kill was a tom turkey, hurrying through the woods with his family. A few loping pads, a lunge, a snap of the neck, the earthy, sweet scent of feathers, and her teeth clamped down onto satisfying warmth.

The turkey had not expected her to chase him into the air.

She had hunted many times since then. No fear, no hesitation. She had come to look forward to each kill, so tactile and messy. So different from the death of her brother. His blood had splattered the heavens with glitter; his soul had exploded. The creatures of this place died quietly and easily. Even so, the Felix could never quite kill enough of them.

Now, in her old tree, she listened to crunching snow. Her ears twitched. Over the generations, the songbirds and small creatures of this forest had learned they usually weren’t enough for her to bother with, and the larger creatures had become timid and scarce. What sort of animal would stagger around so noisily after sunset?

The Felix’s tail swished. A dark shape moved beneath her branch, making its way laboriously through the snow. The creature wasn’t looking up. She could have dropped onto its shoulders and killed it with her jaws before it knew she was there.

But she was surprised to recognize the creature as
human.
She had watched humans from the sky, she remembered.

They were sometimes … interesting. And she had known nothing but waiting and devouring for so long.

The Felix jumped from the branch and landed in front of the man, her massive body crushing the hard crust on the night snow. She watched him gasp, freeze, and turn from her before realizing running was pointless. Then he turned back.

That was slightly interesting. Most creatures ran.

“I have never seen anything like you,” the man said, shaking. The Felix took a step toward him, and he covered his face with his forearms. “You look like a cat, but you—you are not a cat.”

This was something the Felix had heard from many creatures, in their own languages. The man continued to speak. “I have come here because I am ill.” She could smell the decay on him already. “Hunters say a great, terrible beast guards this forest.” He lowered his arms. “But I have built a church. I believe we can bring goodness here. And I wanted to tell you before I die.”

The man stood, still shaking with cold or fear. The Felix took another step closer and looked into his eyes.

She bristled in surprise.
There
was the brilliant galaxy she had missed for so long. In this man’s eyes, she saw the boundless, swirling reaches of his soul. She saw his pain and disease, his hope, his uncertainty. A sleeping part of her mind stirred from where it lay curled around her memories of home. For a moment, she was mesmerized.

Then it passed.

She tore out his throat.

Twelve

B
Y THE LIGHT OF HER TIFFANY LAMP
with the dragonfly motif, Sing reads a sappy novel about orphans. The orphans wear raggy clothes and have open sores and eat rats and never, ever have to go to the opera with their fathers.

When she has inadvertently read the same paragraph three times (the orphans tell one another everything will be okay), she puts the book down and turns over. In the safety of the warm room, she thinks about the audition. She sang the vocalise adequately. She shaped the lines and formed the vowels as best she could. Her father told her that, no matter what, she would be one of the top sopranos at the conservatory, even as a first-year.

She just has to hope that’s true. She
did
get accepted after only one audition, quickly—the letter came within three weeks. And she made a splash at her old public school, winning the talent show and the Arts Advancement Scholarship. And hadn’t her father been telling her she would be great like her mother? That he could tell? If only she would
learn
?

You hear the breath continue after the vowel, Sing? She does that well.

You see how she moves her hands?

You see the spine there? Even when she is reclining?

You hear the sparkles on that B flat? How it spins?

Yes, she heard. Yes, she saw. And yes, she can do all of it. Why, then, is something always missing?

She buries her face in her pillow, remembering the eyes in the president’s office. Daysmoor’s unsettling gaze. The Maestro’s barely concealed dislike. More than dislike.

Why does he hate her? Sometimes it seems as if the more people loved her mother, the more they hate Sing. They will especially hate it if Sing performs
Angelique.

But she starts to read over the libretto again, and the familiar, safe feeling returns. The voices and costumes are as clear in her mind as they were when she was five, sitting in that theater yet existing elsewhere. She is alive and protected.

Sing closes her eyes and hums the first aria, starting low and choppy, suddenly soaring up into a heartbreakingly beautiful phrase about how the stars watch over the fields. She shivers as she remembers hearing it for the first time.

Will she ever get to sing it? Will she be cast as Angelique? At Stone Hill, after
Osiris and Seth,
Maestra Collins told her—and her father—she thought Sing could handle a bigger role. Is that true? She knows she has come further in two years than most people do in ten. But does anyone ever go from First Priestess to Angelique in three months?

She pictures herself, as she has done a thousand times, in that white, ruffly dress. Only now, the stage she imagines is a real one—the warm, paint-scented stage in the Woolly Theater, hung with velvet curtains so rich and heavy, they would crush a person if they fell. She imagines staring out, nothing visible except the shimmering spikes of bright light reaching down into the black void of the auditorium. And behind her, the world of
Angelique
. A world of love and honor and courage, held together by beautiful music. She tosses her blond ringlets and smiles, and the music comes, clear and strong and fierce.

Angelique
is her secret. It is the hope that has kept her struggling for the last two years, through lessons and repertoire and soirees that were all just a little too difficult for her to do well. The hope that someday, she would sing this role; that she would
be
Angelique. Queen of that perfect world.

If her father knew the conservatory had chosen to stage it this semester, she wouldn’t be here. He would have pulled her out of high school next semester instead. But through some whim of fate, she is here.

Voices float in from outside her yellow pine door. Students are heading to the lobby to wait for the lists to be posted by the midnight deadline. Sing closes the score. Maybe she should wait downstairs with the others. Maybe Jenny and Marta will be there.

“Back later, Woolly,” she says to the battered gray lamb whose button eyes stare at her from the bed. She puts on her slippers, ties her red silk bathrobe, and tucks the score under one arm.

Downstairs, the moon-faced lobby clock says nine thirty and already the ugly maroon couch and most of the chairs are occupied.

Three girls Sing saw at the Welcome Gathering stop talking as she enters, then begin whispering after she has passed them. She hears, “Sing!” and then stifled giggles. She turns, but as she expected, none of the girls are looking at her. They appear deeply entrenched in their own conversation. “I like to
sing,
” one of them says. The other two laugh and snort.

I shouldn’t have turned around. They wanted to see if I’d react to the word.

She finds one of the last available stuffed chairs and tries to read. But she hears her name over and over, murmured, whispered, thought. Does everyone here know who she is? Are they all talking about her? That could have been a furtive glance from the stocky boy in the corner, huddled with his friend. That could have been her name coming from a group of heavily made-up girls over by a potted plant. Or it could have been her imagination.

Every few minutes, she looks for a figure crossing the quad from Hector Hall. But all is dark except for light pooling in front of windows.

In front of her, the windows look out onto the moonlit lawn behind the dormitory. She gazes past the silhouette of an impressive maple tree and into the forest, separated from the conservatory by a tall wooden fence.
When he finds himself in the dark forest …
Sing wants to throw open the window, dive through, rush headlong into the cold arms of those shivering black trees.

What about this forest unnerves her father? And what, inexplicably, draws her to it? The spiky pines and jutting cliffs that drift away up the mountainside divulge nothing. But perhaps, she thinks, the woods and mountains north of Dunhammond don’t need to flaunt their secrets. Perhaps they—and the conservatory—are so steeped in wild magic that trying to see it out a window is like using a dowsing rod at the bottom of a lake.

Thirteen

Angelique

An Opera in Three Acts

Libretto by Jean-Paul Quinault

Music by François Durand

CHARACTERS

Villagers, Huntsmen, Tree Maidens

Overture.

ACT I.

A village.

No. 1, Chorus.

The quaint inhabitants of a quaint village describe how much they love farming.