Percy had never before heard such pitch-black tar in Evan's voice. It lasted only a moment. Evans placed his hands on the harpsichord and leaned over Armand.

"Stop this. Stop committing yourself to being miserable. Stop taking more prisoners to keep you company in your misery. You are worthy without your gift. You do not owe greatness to anyone. Listen to what you just played. Did you not smile just now? You did not need a muse for that."

The piece came to an end. Armand waited, his paws hovering above the keys, for the last golden baubles of his music to stop ringing in the room. As the sound faded, a heartrending shudder tore through Percy. His breath quickened, and he looked around, falling prey to a strange panic. But nothing and no one in the room had changed.

"Would you please play us a new one?" Evans asked, dipping each word in the warmth of a sincere smile. "It would bring me great joy."

Armand stared up at him. He looked lost.

"A new one – now?"

"If you feel able to? Something small and simple, of course."

Evans never pressured; he invited. Percy knew that by now. But the earlier intensity of his voice still lingered in the room, and it gave his words a white-hot edge, even as he spoke them gently as ever. Armand must have felt it sear him, too: he soon relented, turning his attention to the instrument once more.

The first notes had a choked and faltering sound to them as he struggled past his reluctance. They went to and fro with no direction, sometimes lumbering in heavy, bloated chords that reminded Percy of his recent music. Soon their weight dragged them down into a bog of cumbersome measures, and Armand hid behind a little cough, wrestling with his embarrassment as he was forced to stop and untangle the mess of notes before he could carry on. Evans watched, all of him patience. Percy envied that patience of his. He could feel himself fidgeting already, his attention ever eluding its tether. But Evans simply looked on, glad to spend his time right where he stood.

An artless harmony came to Armand. His shoulders loosened. He coaxed each note, lured them in, and waited for them to come willingly, rather than chase after them with his great big nets of chords. A melody started to unweave. Percy smiled. It was simple, and a marvel. It was the single thread that brought the unravelling of an old, dusty tapestry. And soon, Armand was grinning, too. He shaped a waltzing pattern, only to trip it up soon after; he hopped between two chords before leaping with no warning to a third; he spun each note into a delirious rhythm. It was not yet a song, but Percy could easily imagine the gloriously unrefined words that would come to it soon.

Armand rounded up every note into a frenzied crescendo, delight spinning from his fingertips. Percy recognized the familiar steps that danced their way to a cadence. Armand let out a little chuckle, which grew into wordless glee. With a final jolting chord, he shattered the music over the keyboard, leaving its shards to ring in the air.

As Armand held his paws over the silence of the keys, Percy felt it again – that strange shudder that took hold of him and tamed him. But this time, it lingered, draping an odd veil over the moment. He was somewhere between the end of music and applause, and he could feel that in-betweenness seize him and bring him to heel. He had always felt it, every time others played, or when he played himself; but he had never felt it quite like this. He found he was afraid of what might happen were that moment to linger for too long. A familiar urge came to him: to dig his nails sharply into his skin and ground himself in pain, when everything else threatened to untether him.

He looked at Evans. Evans, with his eyes closed, murmured something under his breath. Even in the fierce stillness of the room, Percy could not hear his words.

Something shifted. The air around him stretched and stretched until it was tense enough to be played like a string. Percy knew this, too, from his lessons: only a string that was taut enough could sound. The sound was not in the string: it did not live there, but merely passed through the tension visited upon it. It was the same now: it was not that moment itself, it was not that hour, nor that minute, nor that room and its gathering of chairs and mirrors. It was the sounding of that moment, as it stretched between music and applause.

A blinding light struck Percy. He was pierced by it, and he could still feel its wound, even as it waned and dissolved into shades of blue, purple and red. As his eyes struggled to recover, everything in his sight, instruments and tapestries and chairs, seemed made of molten gold. When the haze cleared, he saw, standing by the tail of the harpsichord, a striking sorceress. She was terribly handsome. She wore a dark blue robe, with two slits from which her pale thin arms sculpted out. Her chin and cheekbones, too, were nothing other than chiselled marble flesh. A sharp nose pointed from between a pair of imperious clear eyes, and her straight dark hair was cut short, just below her ears. She held herself with the poise of one who, even on the muddiest ground, would always be on a pedestal.

"You have summoned me?" she addressed Evans, after surveying the others with the coldest look of disdain Percy had ever endured.

He did not need to be familiar with sorceresses to be able to read her demeanour. She was irate, and she showed it with a contemptuous silence that was all the more menacing. Screams and roars had to stop, eventually; silence could last forever.

"I have, my lady" Evans replied, bowing his head. "I wish to inform you that the curse is broken."

Percy's head snapped at once to Armand, and he let out a gasp. Behind him, he heard Delia do the same. The master of the house sat at the harpsichord still, but no longer a beast. He had blond hair that fell to his shoulders with a lustrous weight, a thin nose and a long chin. His features were pleasing, but perhaps not as far removed from ordinary as he might have wished. He stared back at everyone else, not yet recovered from the blinding appearance of the fae, and not yet caught up with his own transformation. He slowly lowered his eyes. He found hands instead of claws, but he voiced his surprise with a choked gurgle that belonged still to the habits of a beast.

The sorceress threw one of her disdainful glances at Armand, like one tosses a used kerchief to the side.

"You wish to inform me that my curse is broken?" she said with a freezing hiss.

He nodded stiffly. Percy could see a rare disquiet raking its claws over him.

"Yes. I wished you to know."

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"You wished? You tricked my curse into breaking itself, and you dare to wish?"

"Tricked the curse?" came Delia's voice, small and quiet as a speck of dust.

"I cursed this man to look like a beast and lose his talent, his one claim to glory, until he learned how to treat his muses properly, and found one willing to be his, even in his beastly shape. That is how the curse was meant to be broken. But instead, you scoffed at its very foundations. You made him willing to give up his greatness, his gift. You rid him of his need for a muse. With no need for a muse, with nothing at stake to drive the curse, there is no curse. What did you tell him? That he does not need to be brilliant? That he can simply be happy and ridiculous? You know better than anyone that there is no truth to that."

She trapped Evans in her gaze. Somehow, she seemed to be inching closer to him, even though she had not moved.

"When you sneer at the undoing of a curse, you sneer at its doing. You disrespect its casting, and its caster" she murmured. Her voice had the lethal glow of mercury. "You know that I do not tolerate any disrespect."

"Yes" he nodded. "I know."

Percy felt something cold and smooth under his palm. Without realizing it, he had edged his hand towards his blade, until it rested on its pommel. He could sense a fight twitching under the still waters of the room. As he readied himself for it, staring with dread at the enchantress, he heard Myrtle speak beside him.

"Why did you curse the servants, too?"

It was an out of tune trumpet in a silent cathedral. Percy cringed at how Myrtle's interruption ripped apart the tension that had gathered in the room, but he was thankful for it. The sorceress shifted her head just an inch; just the bare minimum to catch sight of Myrtle without polluting her vision needlessly.

"They watched on as he acted unkindly to his muses, and they did not stop him" she said. She spoke with the tone of a decree, and not of an answer. Percy doubted she ever answered to anyone at all.

"They were his paid employees. They weren't in a position to stop him or lecture him. They're not responsible for his actions."

Percy widened his eyes at Myrtle. She was shaking, her knees a little bent, as though her body strained with an invisible weight. She flinched as soon as the sorceress addressed her, but held herself there, if not steady, at least standing. The look of excruciating indifference that the sorceress distilled told Percy that the only thing keeping Myrtle unharmed was her utter insignificance.

"It does not matter. What matters is that the curse should not be broken, for he did not learn the lesson he should have."

"He may not have learned the lesson you intended, but I believe he learned a different one" Evans argued.

The sorceress sunk the claws of her stare into Evans, and held him pinned there. It was neither a long nor a short moment: it was as long a moment as she saw fit.

And, when it no longer pleased her, she raised her arms like two pale unbreaking masts in a storm of her own making. Percy flinched in a flash of panic, remembering all too vividly what had happened the last time he had faced a sorceress holding a similar gesture.

He did not even have time to despair at his own powerlessness. An impossibly loud crack pushed him back, followed by a snap that whipped the air and cut it clean. Every instrument in the room stood to attention, the harpsichord, the lute, the psaltery, the viols, their strings ripped out of them. They hovered around the sorceress, their silver gleam threading the air like cobwebs. Their glint in the candlelight warned of their sharpness.

A breath of a second later, the sorceress crashed her arms down. The strings shot forth with a hiss, each firing in different directions.

For all the shortcomings that not even an expensive education could fix, Percy was at least blessed with agile reflexes. He ducked out of the way of the string that came for him, and heard its frustration hissing a hair away from his cheek.

He shot a harried glance around him. First he caught sight of Armand, strapped tight to the harpsichord with a look of desperate confusion. Then he saw Delia, with a string wrapped around her torso, and Valeria, who had reacted quickly enough to draw her blade, but not so quickly that she had been able to wield it: a string now bound her sword-arm to her chest. Her face blistered with rage. To her right, Myrtle had tried to duck behind a chair, but all it had earned her was a string tying her wrist to ornate varnished wood.

In front of him stood Evans, his knees buckling slightly under the weight of his punishment. A string curled viciously around his throat. With life-gracing instinct, he had lifted one hand in time, and it was now trapped there, binding his wrist tightly to the side of his neck. Two strings had reached for him: the other tied his arm to his side.

The sorceress turned her stare to him. She held the string tied to his neck, and pulled on it with an almost delicate tenderness. Evans winced as he tripped forward.

Percy reacted even before he realized he was the only one free to move. He rushed to Evans, blade in hand, fear scorching his grip. He did not dare to look at the sorceress; he knew that if he did, he would stop. In two steps, he reached Evans and raised his sword with both hands, ready to cut the string held by the sorceress.

With barely a sound or a disturbance in the air, she suddenly stood before him, filling his vision and his world. Her eyes engulfed his. They had the threatening coolness of deep waters that none drank from, and none crossed – waters made for drowning.

"You. You look like you have some potential for greatness, unlike these sad ends to stories."

She cast a glance around the room as she spoke. A thick confusion clouded over Percy. Even as he stared up at her, he felt he was merely looking past her. He could not tell whether she was speaking to him, or whether he was hearing her unspoken voice in his mind.

"Tell me. Are you made for bowing?" her words had the weaving of a rope. "You will always have to bow to someone. But if you're an artist bowing to an audience, you are merely bowing to your own greatness. You owe them nothing."

He still held his sword lifted high. His arms did not tire, as though that was their natural state, frozen in their intent by the sorceress. Behind him, a thousand miles behind him, he could hear the frustrated groans of Valeria as she struggled against her bonds. By his side, Evans had fallen very still and quiet.

"I took away Armand's gift" she went on. "I can give it to another who is more deserving of it. You look like you're afraid of ridicule – that's a good start. Deal with them for me" she said, cutting a stare at the others, "and the gift is yours."

Percy slowly lowered his sword. It was because his arms were tiring at last, he told himself. But they did not ache in the least. He felt a different ache, elsewhere. A path was greeting him, him, who was so used to well-marked roads, and who had been fighting brambles and briar ever since he had left his home. The enchantress was right. Armand had struck him as being undeserving of his gift from their very first encounter. Wasting such a gift would serve no end. Wasting the roses, the glory and the purpose it would bring. And he had always been fond of music. He could make something of it.

How inconvenient it was, to feel repulsed. To feel dread forming in cracks that had so far been left unfilled by his indifference. He could not open his hands to accept the sorceress' gift: they held something already, though he did not know what.

His arms ached, now. He waited a little longer, just long enough for her words, spoken or unspoken, to smoke away. He lifted his arms to their full height again and brought them down, slicing the string.

A crushing blast of sound broke him where he stood. There was nothing to compare it to: there was no thinking through it or past it. The pain of it was abominable. It was just sound, and it just carved his mind and shattered his bones. He fell to his knees, his mouth torn, his scream lost in the world-eating roar that buried him.

It faded in monstrous ripples. The pain made scraps of him. Shaking and whimpering, his chest buckled forward as he knelt under the agony. He felt his forehead touch the floor. He had never imagined sound could be so cruel – had never feared. And there was the worst cruelty of all: yet something else to fear, joining the terrors that already crowded his mind.

His surroundings had vanished with the crashing sound, but little by little, wary and trembling, they returned to him now. He realized Evans had spoken, but his voice was too far away for any understanding to reach Percy. But the sorceress' words – those he heard as soon as she bore them down upon him.

"Yet another sad end."