Page 9 of Ogres Don't Play
I licked my lips, hating that I had to say the words that would keep this possible once-in-a-lifetime experience from happening to me. Rook didn’t take custom clients very often, maybe once in a decade. It was absolutely unthinkable that I'd ever turn him down, but facts were facts. My shoulders slumped. “If you really are Rook the Luthier, I can’t pay you.”
He pursed his lips as he studied me, but there was a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “I see. I suppose we’ll have to call it part of the price for taking Lanise under your wing.”
I frowned at him because right now I didn’t even have access to the music hall where he wanted his niece to go. “Hold on there. I didn’t agree?—”
“But if I can prove that I’m Rook the Luthier, why wouldn’t you?” He raised a brow and looked so adorably quizzical when he cut me off. Adorable? An ogre? I probably had brain damage from all those falling rocks.
I tugged a strand of my too-long hair and tried to think. If he was Rook the Luthier, I’d be the world’s greatest idiot to turn down this kind of deal. I could figure out something to do with his ogre niece until the slight misunderstanding with Master Cutter was resolved. Absolutely. I could figure it out. Also, he’d mentioned something about funding.
“I find myself in a position where it is impossible to refuse you.”
He smiled. It was equally attractive and terrifying. Making a deal with an ogre? I must be mad, but if that madness had a hallucination about Rook, no musician could possibly blame me for indulging in it.
“Now,” he said soberly, coming around the partition and taking my garroting materials out of my hands. “Let’s see what you can do.”
“Do with what?”
He didn’t answer me, just went to the side of the shop behind a line of basses and cellos and pulled out a monster harp that would weigh more than me. Of course, he had no problem lifting it, but it was still an armful. He brought it over to me, the whole thing encrusted with gems in the gold dipped frame threaded with intricate lines of silver, unless it was platinum. He placed it in front of me carefully, aware of where the precise balance of the ridiculous instrument was.
I studied the gaudy thing for a long time. “It’s too beautiful to possibly have good tone.”
He laughed, and his voice was so sublime, he almost reminded me of my brother. My brother’s beautiful music hid the most destructive and vicious person in the world. That was a good reminder of exactly what I was dealing with.
“The tone won’t be the problem. It is large for you, but I need to see the full breadth of your talents if I’m going to create something that matches your skill and tastes. Please play,anything you like, but hopefully something that stretches your ability.”
Oh. That’s what we were doing. I was supposed to just sit on the monster bench and play the harp? I glanced back at the ominous piano directly behind me. “Should I sit somewhere else?”
“If he hasn’t eaten you yet, you’re probably safe.” His eyes glinted with amusement as he sank into a crouch, preparing himself to wait and watch like ogres did when they were waiting around the campfire for the stories and music to start.
“Right.” I licked my lips and touched the ridiculously large harp, the precious, proud thing. It was warm under my fingers, and a flicker of light rose to the surface of the gold. Heavenly gold. I gulped and looked past the mystic instrument to the ogre. “Did you enchant it?”
“Of course. I’m Rook the Luthier. I always enchant my instruments. Do you need something smaller?”
Good grief. This harp made the one Hope took on parades look like a cheap toy. It was made for angels. An ogre had created an angelic instrument that would be more than welcomed into the HARPs. I hadn’t played anything with angelic gold for a long time, but since the harp was my preferred instrument, and I was a master of it, I closed my eyes and prepared.
What would I play? A grand march? A heavenly dirge? No, I’d play the most complex piece I knew by an elven composer notorious for his ridiculous range and intricacy. Most harps couldn’t handle so many octaves, but this harp could take anything I gave it. Right. He needed to see what kind of musician I was, because he was going to create a custom harp just for me. Rook the Luthier?! I was going to show him absolutely everything I could do, and then some. It wasn’t about perfection, it was about range.
The intro was light, delicate strokes in the upper octaves, and then the melody began, and I sang. It was technically a duet, but that was fine because I’d just add the male singer’s voice to the accompaniment. The first part, the solo, where I sang the Elven song on the heavenly instrument, I was filled with the power of the thing, the strength, solidity that it gave me as it supported me and gave me the ability to accomplish every impossible trill. It was tuning in to my angelic blood. No question about it. This harp had been made for an angel.
How in the world had an ogre managed to create something like that? I opened my eyes and saw his glowing gold gaze through the strings, making my heart beat a little faster. Patterns of gold also spread over his cheeks, intricate chases of light that showed his magic even if I had no idea what he was doing. I should have thrown the harp down and jumped out the nearest window because he was an ogre, but then the part where the second voice was supposed to join came and he opened his mouth and sang.
He knew this song? One of the most obscure Elven numbers that was rarely played because it was so difficult, long, and obscure? He was a musician even if he wasn’t Rook the Luthier, and the last thing I’d ever do was run from a musician. Unless it was my brother.
I closed my eyes and focused on the instrument, forcing my voice to capture all the nuances in tone and emotion the song required while my fingers danced. His voice wasn’t anything close to angelic, which was fine because it was an elven piece, but I was half angelic, and so when he sang, he contrasted so completely that it set off my own sweet tones as if the Elven song was always intended to be played by an ogre and an angel. It gave the song purpose, conflict, emotion that built within the piece that was supposed to be nothing more than an exercise. The words started to mean something, the aching for beauty,and his voice clarifying the obscure words, providing context out of his own raw musicality. It was the bone-gnawing craving for another heart that would bring light to his darkness, but the fear that his darkness would crush his precious love’s delicate light.
Yes, I knew the words, and they’d always struck me as silly, because every soldier in the Hosts knew that light was the strongest, least delicate thing in existence. Hearing him sing it, I felt the weight of mountains of darkness burying the light in his soul. I felt his yearning for something light and good in his life. I felt his soul, trapped in the dark nature of his being but longing for a different existence.
I sang, offering him my light, my heart, and then almost flinched because what was I thinking, doing a love song duet with an ogre, but I didn’t, because the strings under my fingers had to be held perfectly during those long scales and trills, so flinching was absolutely out. I wasn’t going to mess up the beauty and emotion for the sake of my skittishness. Also, if he stopped singing and ruined the song, I’d kill him.
The piece was long, and parts were pure instrumentation, which I did with the focus I reserved for music, and yes, I did use my toes, and hair, and will, to get some notes to fall into line, adding in everything necessary to make this piece what it had to be now that an ogre and an angel were trying to conquer it. The harp came alive, gold glowing, jewels burning, feeding me their strength while the sound pealed and responded to my will with the delicacy of a much smaller, less elaborate harp. Playing it was pure pleasure, so I extended the interlude, adding things that no sane instrument would be able to do, because the music swallowed me up, consuming me in its absolute perfection.
He came in without me, because he was supposed to, and apparently he knew what he was supposed to do. And then his words blended with the harp’s notes, and everything was raw power and dangerous desire that no respectable elf would everfeel, but the harp leapt to meet that dark tone, building in tempo and volume until I came in, fighting my way through those chords of power and beating hunger to find his heart, the place in the darkness that could be tamed, drawing it towards the light, but the struggle of darkness…
I became lost in emotions as the music conquered me and I became its slave. It was the sweetest, most intense, agonizing pleasure I’d ever experienced, and I’d played among the ranks of the angels.
The song built higher and higher while I soared on emotions that became absolute reality until the rush of the finale, where pleasure and aching and hope were drawn out to the utmost, and then it peaked, slammed down, and ended in a growl of lowest tones, his voice, my harp’s lowest strings, and then silence.
The silence was a blunt shock that hit me like a wall of stone. I sat there blinking at the ogre standing across from me, his eyes on me, the hunger he’d sung clear in his glowing eyes. Would he eat me? Ogres shouldn’t eat angels, because our blood was poisonous. He’d have to drain me very well first. Maybe he’d use my blood in his luthier process. That would be such a worthy cause that I wouldn’t raise a hand to stop it. Irrationality, thy name is Mirabel.