“The Screaming Goat.” Raph grins. “You wanted music. There’s none better in all the fae wilds. Well, don’t just stand there. Go in.” He gives me a shove and I stumble toward the arched entry.
There’s no doors or windows in the Screaming Goat. Just columns and archways that make up the front facade, letting in the sunshine and letting out sound. There are also no chairs—only high tables that men and women stand at, stomping their feet to the music and watering the ground with frothy ale.
My eyes are drawn to the low stage opposite the entry where the band plays. Men and women twirl on a dance floor in front of it.
“Try to look less conspicuous, gosh.” Raph pulls me to an empty table by one of the archways. He scrambles up onto the half-wall, standing like he owns the place. A barmaid comes over, setting down a flagon in front of me. “Hey, where’s mine?” Raph whines.
“Maybe when you’re older.” She winks and walks away.
“Rude.” Raph rolls his eyes.
I almost miss the whole exchange, instead too focused on the music. The lively jig is played in common time. The man with the panpipes leaps across the stage, egging on the dancers with his own fancy footwork. I’ve only ever seen one performance before… My father brought a traveling band to one of his last parties for the Applegate Trading Company after I had begged and begged. The party happened to be on my birthday and he couldn’t refuse, even despite all but banning music following my mother’s death as “too painful.”
Joyce got to pick the music that night. So of course it was some dull collection of stuffy instrumentals played by men twice my father’s senior. Gods forbid we actually had genuine fun at one of those parties. If we had, this is what our manor might have looked like—might have sounded like. I try to imagine it and the thought is accompanied by a comical image of Joyce nearly losing her head from all the stomping across her ridiculously expensive rugs.
A smile cracks my lips. I’m tapping my foot along to the beat. My gaze drifts as the man with the panpipes spins. It’s then I see a whole pile of instruments off to stage right. Leaning against them is a lute. It’s not nearly as fine as my mother’s, I can tell that from here. But the strings are intact and I would bet anything it’s in tune.
“What’re all those?” I ask Raph and point to the pile of instruments.
“Instruments for performers.” He shrugs. “I see people go up and take them whenever the bar is quiet. A silent tavern is a sad tavern,” he says as though he’s repeating someone else.
Surely I’m misunderstanding. “So anyone can play those?”
“I think so.” He shrugs. I wish I knew if he was telling the actual truth, or telling the truth as best he knows it. “I’ve never seen anyone get in trouble for playing them. Oh, wait, do you want to play?”
“No, no…I’m not any good.” Yet even as I say that, I’m popping my knuckles. I’m itching for the harmonies to the panpipe’s melodies that I know are trapped in the strings of the lute.
“Eh, you’re likely right.”
“What?” I look at him, the echoes of Joyce and Helen suddenly tangling with his words.
He drops his voice. “You’re a human. There’s no way you could play well enough to keep up with fae. I’m sure you’re just blown away by the quality of our bards.”
I am. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t keep up. I think I could…
Stop that noise!
Mother, she’s doing it again. She’s playing the thing!
If you play the lute one more time I will chop off its neck or yours.
Helen’s and Joyce’s words drown out the music for a dark second. I stare at the soundless instruments from underneath the weight of all the words they filled me with. So much of Joyce and Helen pressing down on me, making me small. Never enough of me to stand against them. Never…
Laura’s temple is against my knee. She tilts her face up toward me. One more song before bed, she mouths.
“No,” I whisper.
“No, what?” Raph is confused.
Understandably so. He wasn’t there the day my hand in marriage was sold for fortune. He wasn’t there the day that I vowed to never again let them or anyone else trap me, make me feel small, turn me into a tool instead of a whole person.
“You’re wrong. I can keep up.” I glare at him. “And I’m going to show you.”
“Wha—wait!”
I’m already weaving across the dance floor. I approach the stage with enough intent that the panpipe player gives me a nod with his goat-horned head. I return the gesture and he steps away. It looks almost like permission.
The thumping of the dancers’ feet rumbles behind me. The deep resonance of the drum is within me. The music drowns out every word Joyce or Helen ever said for a brief and glorious minute while I step onto the stage and head right for the lute, slinging its strap over my shoulders.
