It took two weeks for Felix to recover. Clarissa would clear the dorm of any other men with a thunderous wrap on the door and a warning that a woman was about to enter, and for a while it was just the two of them. She would bring him meals and sing to him with her gentle, beautiful voice, and he knew this was as close to paradise as he would get in this life.
Alas, those visits only represented an hour in a day of aching and trembling in a cold sweat between trips to the dormitory’s garderobe. Clarissa insisted his physical injuries had only been a few bruised ribs, fractured bones, and some minor blood loss. The real issue was this numen-thing. When he had used the Song of Misfortune against the boar, it was like playing on a lute with brand new strings without properly tuning it. Some of his “strings” had broken, and the process of his body mending them was agonizing.
Not so for Janus. While his pain was worse the first day, even then his physical damage had been on the mend. And whatever technique he had used to fight Bruno and the boar, his “strings” were fine.
So Janus was gone within two days, off to study Greek with the librarian. Felix feigned indifference, but he missed the other boy almost immediately. Or maybe he just missed having someone near his own age to talk to. The concerns of adults were foreign to him, and he wasn't able to strike up a conversation with anyone but Chretien.
On the day after he got a clean bill of health, Felix was unpleasantly surprised to find Madina come to collect him from the dormitory. Unlike Clarissa, she didn't bother to knock let alone warn any of the men she was coming in, and those who were hanging about simply nodded respectfully instead of scurrying off when they saw her.
Madina was high on the list of people in the Song-Catchers Felix wanted to avoid for the rest of his career, and he was sure the feeling was mutual. Yet however she felt about him personally, she was now leading him to the north courtyard with her oud strapped over a plain blue dress with her uncovered hair trailing behind her. She would teach him a new song for use in his first assignmennt.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but is there anyone else who could teach me?”
“No.”
“No one else can be bothered? No one at all?”
“I’m the only one who can teach you the songs you can use.” She stopped suddenly and turned back. “Did Yew not tell you anything, or was it not worth your precious time to listen to him?”
“Hey, he barely told me anything, and I certainly tried to get it out of him. He just kept saying it ‘Wasn’t important’.”
She rolled her eyes and resumed her march-like pace. “Typical. In any case, I am the only one who can teach you, since I am the only one here in the same school as you, the Wheel of Fortune.”
“Is ‘Priestess’ another one of these schools?”
“Yes. There are 22 schools—21 really, but we say 22—each named after a theme. Bards can sing any kind of song, but only when they sing the songs of their proper school will they produce any effect.”
“How do you know I’m in the Wheel of Fortune thingy?”
“Because, however poorly, you were able to imitate my song and work its effect on Liste. If had you not been naturally inclined to Fortune, nothing would have happened, though you imitated the song perfectly—though you didn’t do that either.”
“Wait, but how did you guys know I was the right school to be able to copy your song?”
Madina shrugged. “Yew handles that, and the right people get sent to the trial. I don't know how it works and I don’t care.”
The thought of being somehow of the same nature as the surly Madina made him cringe. “You certainly don’t seem like the type to truck with something as capricious as Fortune.”
“That is one image of Fortune, but there are others. And so you know, that is the last impertinent comment I will tolerate from you today.”
"Oh, scary, scary. But didn’t Janus and I win against you and Bruno? Maybe I should be the teacher here...”
Before he could take another step, Felix found himself bent forward with Madina at his back, clutching his wrist in such a way that it screamed with a pain unlike anything he had endured in the last weeks. She was fast, so much faster than before. He had scarcely seen her duck out of sight before she had gotten behind him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! You were going easy on us, incredibly easy! I’ll shut up, I promise, just please let me go.”
She slowly released him and walked on as if nothing had happened. “If you understand, then there shouldn’t be any more problems.”
Felix leaned against the wall of the hallway to catch his breath and Madina waited for him. He could feel her smirk even with her back turned. That Dame Fortune costume must have slowed her down before.
They finally came to the north courtyard. It was really more of a walled pasture than a courtyard, and the dry stone walls were short enough to climb over. The grass was crossed with lines of trees and shrubs trees, many of them flowering in shades of white and pink and purple. By one of the walls, someone was tending to a vegetable garden full of cucumbers, heads of lettuce, and turnips. He saw a little pond filled with bright orange fish, beside which sat a boy around his age with short curly hair the color of tree bark. He wore a light reddish-brown tunic and stared listlessly at the water with a round, simple face.
“This is really nice,” Felix commented to no one in particular.
“I am told many people find the atmosphere conducive to composing,” Madina answered. “In any case, as long as it isn’t raining, this is as good a place as any.”
She led him toward a comfortable-looking hillock near the vegetable garden where there was a very fine-looking fountain with yet another mythological figure Felix could not recognize emptying her pitcher of water into the smooth stone basin. Unfortunately, they passed this by in favor of a secluded area with nothing but grass and rocks that was as far removed from all the pleasant scenery as one could get. Felix felt a visceral urge to complain but held it in, recalling the Lesson of the Hallway.
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Standing straight as a Roman soldier of old, Madina took the oud off her back and began adjusting the pegs. Felix considered leaning against one of the larger rocks, but when she cast him an evil look he thought better of it. There would be no time for relaxing today.
“Now, give me your lute,” she ordered.
“What? No!” Felix realized after he had said it that refusing a direct order was likely to land him back on his knees, so he was quick to add, “Even if you beat me up, I won’t let you touch my lute. My uncle gave it to me.” He decided to add a little fib since it would sound better than I just don’t want you touching it you witch. “It’s all I have to remember him by.”
“I happen to know that is a lie, but if you’re going to be this difficult, you can tune it yourself to match this.” She played a scale in a few different chords, and he was luckily able to bring it to her satisfaction. But how had she known his uncle was alive? Had he said something about it when Yew had been spying on them in the woods? He couldn’t recall.
"Good,” she said when she was satisfied their instruments matched.
“Now, I am going to demonstrate the effect of this song…on you.” Before he could process that she was essentially about to attack him, she had plucked the strings and produced a short, bouncing melody that produced a tickling sensation in his nose. Then he was sneezing over and over, each sneeze turning more painful as his eyes filled up with tears. This went on for two full minutes, getting progressively worse as bouts of coughing and choking joined the sneezing fit. Madina handed him a handkerchief that he was too moist to refuse despite his outrage, and he lost track of how long it was before his eyes were clear enough for him to glare at her.
“You,” he coughed out, “You could have at least warned me…”
“The effect will not work as well if the target knows about it. You can keep the handkerchief. Consider it my gift to commemorate the beginning of your training.”
Felix propped himself up with his lute. “Thanks for your, ugh, generosity.”
“Now, reproduce the song as well as you can. I will be your target, so you will need to envision the effect happening to me as you play. The clearer the image, the more powerful the effect will be.”
“You’re really going—” he choked out, “to let me try to do that to you?”
“I doubt you will be able to make me sneeze even once at this point, even if I don’t actively resist at all.”
Felix sniffled and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “We’ll see about that.”
She was, of course, completely right. It took him most of the morning just to be able to reproduce the melody, during which he was hit with the sneezing fit by way of demonstration well over a dozen times, and even after all that it wasn’t enough to make the effect materialize. He was sure she must be resisting, like she said, but to prove him wrong she brought over the boy from the fish pond, introducing him as Joshua, Martin the assistant librarian’s son, and had Felix use the song on him unawares. Nothing, not even a ticklish nose he said. And then, as if to rub it in, Madina told Joshua to steel himself before she targeted him with the song, and it left poor Joshua in an even worse state than Felix had been the first time. She gave him a coin for his troubles, which he took with a look of indifference and walked back to the pond.
“Just so you don’t get smug about recovering faster than Joshua, I went after him without holding anything back, because the lad has been facing songs like that since he lost his baby teeth and knows how to resist them. If I did the same to you, you’d pass out and be lucky not to end up in the infirmary again from losing half the fluid in your body.”
Felix slumped against the rock, no longer caring if Madina disliked it. If his cheeks didn’t already feel like a carrion bird had been scratching at them for hours, he might have cried. What was he missing? He could envision, quite clearly, the image of the much-loathed Madina sneezing so hard it would be difficult to breathe, but it wasn’t working at all. What had been different with the boar? Was it because he was focused then on trying to keep Janus from being gored? Was it because his mind was too easily returning to an image of sunlight falling through the window of the infirmary onto Clarissa’s soft, soft hair?
“I will give you one hint. This is a song without words. Words make the message of a song clearer, but require two levels of concentration, the words and the music. That is why you are starting with a song that is just music. But even without words, you must focus on how the sound alone conveys meaning and connect that meaning to the image.”
Felix stood up. “Why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place?!” he nearly whimpered.
“I was hoping you would figure it out on your own. That is always the best way to learn anything.”
This time, Felix listened carefully to the sounds of the strings as he strummed them, exaggerating the sneeze-like crescendos and syncopation, and matching it to a somewhat less sadistic image of a sneezing Medina. After being in the courtyard all day except for meals and to use the bathroom, the sun was nearing the edge of the horizon.
“I think that’s enough for today,” Madina intoned. “We’ll start again in the morning after breakfast. I trust you’ll be able to find your way here on your own.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied with an exasperated tone that was just impertinent enough to get him a final evil eye before they parted ways for the day.
Back in the dormitory after dinner, Felix started feeling the strain of spending the day exercising his numen. It wasn't as bad as the day after the trial in the woods, but it was bad enough that he wanted to nothing more than to crawl into bed though sun was still out.
Janus, however, was in as high a spirits as ever, and continuously pelted Felix questions about the part of the Barracks he had been to throughout the meal. As a non-member, he was only allowed in a handful of places and the North Courtyard was not one of them.
“I’m glad you’re having a better time of it than I am,” said Felix, climbing into his bunk and pulling up the wool blanket “That woman has been draining my humors through my eyes and nose all day trying to teach me this damned sneezing song. But for all that I can barely make her nose ticklish, let alone make her sneeze."
“It is only your first day, my friend,” someone said nearby. “Do not be so discouraged.”
Felix sat up. “Chretien?”
“In the flesh,” he responded. Felix saw him drop a pack on the table by the bunk next to theirs and begin unfastening the straps on his tunic. “You are having trouble with your training, yes?”
Felix laid back down and fixed his eyes sulkily on the bottom of the top bunk. “Yes. I was at it for eight hours and still…nothing.”
“When my brother and I started learning our song, we were only children, much younger than even Master Janus is now. We learned from a miserable nobleman whose lover had left him. He spent the rest of his life emptying his wretchedness into that song, and then pouring it into us. It took weeks before we could move a single tear even a fraction of an inch and it was years before we could control them confidently. I know I have not, even now, mastered it. I doubt I ever will. It is so for all of us, even Madame Madina, I am sure.”
“Do you think you’ll ever write a song of your own like that?” Janus asked. “One that does some new magic… Or, I mean, Crafting."
“A work of similar inspiration, yes; but one of such abject despair, no.” By now, he was in his linens and climbing into bed. “But our work here must come first, in any case.”
“Is it really that important, finding old poems and songs?” Felix asked. “Shouldn’t we be writing the great poems of the present, instead of digging up ones from the past?”
“That is not without merit. If I had something in my heart I felt was waiting to burst out but could not because of our work, I might become a normal guild member. But there is no such impulse in me, for now. It is a matter that each of us must decide on our own, what is most valuable to us and how we wish to make use of our fleeting time. And it is fleeting.”
“Well, it’s not like I’m going to be writing any new songs, so I don't have much room to complain,” Felix said, turning on his side and shutting his eyes. “And it’s not like I can leave this place anyway. So it’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed.”