Strange Trip

Being a woman and not a First Daughter, Curnen knew nothing of the men's mysteries of her community. She did not know the words of the Silent Sons, "Silence is more musical than any song." But when Kash disappeared from her life, he who had given her songs back to her... she could think of no better way to mourn. What song was there? He had not been her love, but he had been more than her friend. And her utter fucking joy at not having to keep an eye out for Zahra, at being able to move freely in their small space again, made everything even more confusing. So when out and about, for weeks there had been no singing. No playing. No whistling, no humming, no dancing, not so much as idle tapping on a table. She did not forbid herself to speak, but it was rare, if she wasn't spoken to first.

In public at least. In the privacy of her room she threw herself into a project she had been cobbling for some months now, but this it seemed was the final push she needed to see it through. She told Coby, when she realized she really needed a man's voice for the last piece, but even he was not privy to the whole of the project.

No one would have known until the flyers went up a few days before she planned to do it. "Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation" they promised. Not quite horror stories, but a story hour for the time of year. She had never performed a whole set by herself at the inn before. Kash would have told her to be brave. If it was time. If she was ready. And now, she really thought she was.

Saturday night, Curnen put on her good dress (and still no shoes) and played for the dinner crowd. She didn't expect everyone--or even anyone--to deliberately come and stay through the whole thing. Indeed, she tried not to pay attention to that, the comings and goings of faces. She sang for the audience she had. Between songs she flirted, she charmed, she teased, and she taught, explaining what pieces were and where they had come from.

Beginning with a song that could sound perfectly innocent if not for the unease infused through the arrangement and her voice, Curnen progressed through a series of tragedies and murder ballads. At the seventh and center piece she set her guitar aside and sang unaccompanied, and this was the first admission after a kind. Though she did not think anyone in the audience had the language. She explained neither before nor after what the words meant.

The center of this labyrinth wasn't the heart, though. They proceeded there next. These four songs were chosen not just for their nature, but also because each one them touched on something of Curnen's life--her curse, her losses, her trials. For anyone who had not heard the story from her already there was nothing to make it obvious. But there was something there in the increasing wildness of her eyes, in the edge in her voice. In the way she swapped a guitar for a bodhran when she came to the heart of it.

"I know least one of y'all's impatiently wondering, 'Curnen, honey, what's the worst story you know? Just tell us that and get it over with.' All right." And she told them. And she didn't die in the telling.

The twelfth song was a break, to dispel some of that dark energy. At the thirteenth she had Coby join her on guitar while she drummed, and the two of them passed "The Ballad of Tam Lin" back and forth between them.

She could not say what compelled her toward the end, when she took up the words of the fairy queen in her mouth. By now, she had done a handful of things that no ordinary girl could or should be able to do, but no one had been able to pin down and put a word to what she was. She told them as best she could now, in the way the room went colder, in the way her eyes went black from end to end, in the way her voice crashed like bells and broken glass, in the ghost of glamour wings (for still, still her own eluded her) for just those verses to show the queen's icy rage.

Then she was herself again, and the song ended. Curnen grinned. "Happy Halloween. Tip your waitress." And it took everything in her not to stumble away from the stage. Bliss would have killed her, and Curnen was terrified and defiant all at once, but also lighter for it. She had not said the word 'fairy.' But she had shown them. Maybe they'd be fine. Maybe they'd stone her. Only way to find out was talk to anybody with a thing to say.