Side A – Yasgrid
Yasgrid hadn’t imagined Naosha to be a perfect mother, but seeing Naosha’s astonishment at the idea that she was even a good one came as a surprise.
“I’m pretty sure all mothers question that, if they’re being honest with themselves,” Kyra said. “There are very few of them who would cast themselves into a prison under the control of a mad wraith,” she nodded to Naosha, “or venture across the seas and beyond the horizon for their children though,” and added another nod towards Osdora.
“Perhaps,” Naosha said.
“You let yourself be captured?” Osdora asked.
“Not at all. It took a fair bit of work to arrange our capture, though I must give full credit to Marianne there. The girl is a good deal more clever than people seem to be aware of, and most do find her to be rather quick.”
“She certainly help me stay sane,” Kyra said.
“How so?” Gossma asked.
“I hadn’t planned on being captured. Well, not quite like I was. I spent a fair bit of time in Elshira’s clutches before my favorite cellmates arrived. I gather the usual problem with captivity is that there is nothing to do. Or that’s one of many problems with it. In my case it was just the opposite. Having no duties to execute, I did what I think any Fate Dancer would do and spent far too much time exploring the threads of fate I was bound in. I walked up and down them, and saw so many different things, and times, and people, that by the time I was no longer alone I was also no longer particularly bound to the present moment.”
“We hadn’t expected that,” Naosha said. “Part of the plan was to locate you and assess your condition. It was both better and far worse than we’d surmised it might be.”
“Better because I was physically uninjured and worse because I was so lost in the dance of fates that I wasn’t aware of your presence for three whole days?”
“Seven. Seven days,” Naosha said. “You were lost to us for a week, which didn’t disrupt our plans but did leave us rather concerned.”
“She slept for a week?” Gossma asked.
“No. She wasn’t sleeping. She simply wasn’t there. Not entirely,” Naosha said. “When Elshira cast us into Kyra’s cage, we expected to find a hurt and bedraggled Fate Dancer. What we found instead was a pale and flickering ghost.”
“I wasn’t dead,” Kyra hastened to explain. “I was in a special sort of trance which Fate Dancers normally only practice under strictly controlled conditions.”
“You were looking for how you could escape?” Osdora guessed.
“At first? I think so. Like I said, it hadn’t entirely been my idea to get captured. As I walked through all the pasts and futures I could find though I started finding things that made escape seem ill-advised.”
“Elshira would have killed you if you’d gotten away from her, wouldn’t she?” Yasgrid asked.
“A few fates ran towards that end,” Kyra said. “Those weren’t the bad ones though. The ones I saw I had to avoid were the ones were I didn’t meet you.”
Side B – Nia
The last beat faded away and Nia smelled crisp mountain air laden with the scents of cooking and working and people all around her.
She opened her eyes to find that her audience had grown a bit since the last time she’d checked. It wasn’t an enormous crowd but there were enough people watching her that self-consciousness replaced the blood in her veins for a breath or two. Margrada was smiling at her though, and that helped a lot.
It also helped that Grash and Horgi were close by, though they weren’t smiling.
“Did you hear what you needed to?” Nia asked, waiting for them to take the drum away from her. She knew better to hope they would forget and leave it with her. For one thing, even if they did, she’d still be honor bound to turn it back in, since otherwise it would be her responsibility and exposing a Shatter Drum to even the possibility of harm was a crime in the Roadies eyes.
“I thought we had, but then…,” Horgi said, shrugged, and glanced over at Grash.
“Yeah. It was simple until the end. Is that what most elves will sound like if they try to play?” Grash returned Horgi’s shrug before turning to Nia for an answer.
Margrada shook her head and answered before Nia could.
“None of that was Elven,” she said.
“But I thought I heard the forest in the last bit?” Horgi said.
“You did,” Marianne said. “I could hear it too. Margrada’s right. That’s not how an elf would have approached it at all.”
“You know, that makes sense,” Belhelen said. “It kind of had to be like that, didn’t it?”
“Had to be like what?” Grash asked.
“Nia doesn’t play like an elf,” Margrada said. “If she did, or if she played like anything other than the Stoneling, we would have heard it right away. Try to imagine if there’d been that hint of the forest at the Calling? Do you thing the gods, you know the one in the molten rock, wouldn’t have set that beat on fire in an instant?”
“Huh, yeah, I suppose that does make sense,” Horgi said.
“But how?” Grash said. “I mean, no offense, but shouldn’t you play like an elf?”
“I don’t know,” Nia said. “Yasgrid taught me how to play. Or she was the first one who taught me to play. Maybe her technique is where mine comes from. I’m borrowing her language, maybe I’m borrowing her drumming skill too?”
“Nope,” Margrada said. “Not even at the Calling. You’ve got a distinctive style of playing, but it’s yours, fully and completely. If you were borrowing Kaersbean’s you’d sound more like Osdora, like Yasgrid does.”
“Wherever you got your skill from, it sounds like it’s not the right place for us figure out what to do with the Elves who want to try playing,” Grash said.
“Let me help then,” Nia said. “Not with playing. I think I showed you everything that was just me about my playing already. Let me work with the Elves. I may not play like them, but I might hear things you wouldn’t.”
“Not to mention she can talk to the Darkwood if any of them fall into a Resonance like she just did,” Margrada said.