; “Now girl, see to the glows before the fleet gets v back/*
4 TTiat job took Menolly inexorably to the Harper’s 1? room: swept clean of everything that had been per-^ sonal to Petiron. She was also reminded of the sealed ,. message on the Record room mantel. What if the Masterharper were expecting a message from Petiron about
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the songmaker? MenoUy was so very sure that part of that unopened message was about her. Not that thinking about it did Menolly any good. Even knowing it for a fact would be no help, Menolly decided gloomily. But that didn’t stop her from going past Yanus’s Record room and peering in at the tempting package on the mantel
She sighed, turning from the room. By now the Masterharper would have heard of Petiron’s death and be sending a new Harper. Maybe the new man would be able to open the message, and maybe, if it was about her, maybe if it said that the songs she’d sent were good ones, Yanus and her mother wouldn’t put such restrictions on her about tuning and whistling and everything.
As the winter spun itself out, Menolly found that her sense of loss when she thought of Petiron deepened. He had been the only person in the Sea Hold who had ever encouraged her in anything: and most especially hi that one thing that she was now forbidden to do. Melodies don’t stop growing in the mind, tapping at fingers, just because the/re forbidden. And Menolly didn’t stop composing themwhich, she felt, was not precisely disobeying.
What seemed to worry Yanus and Mavi most, Menolly reasoned to herself, was the fact that the children, whom she was supposed to teach only the proper Ballads and Sagas, might think Menoll/s tunes were Harpercrafted. (If her tunes were that good in her parents’ ears, what was the harm of them?) Basically they didn’t want her to play her songs aloud where they would be heard and perhaps repeated at awkward times.
Menolly could, therefore, see no harm in writing down new tunes. She played them softly in the empty Little Hall when the children had left, before she began her afternoon chores, carefully hiding her notations among the Harper records in the rack of the HaU. Safe enough, for no one but herself, til the new Harper came, would discover them there.
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This mild deviation from the absolute obedience to her father’s restriction about tuning did much to ease Menoll/s growing frustration and loneliness. What Menolly didn’t realize was that her mother had been watching her closely, having recognized the signs of rebellion in her. Mavi didn’t want the Hold to be disgraced in any way, and she feared that Menolly, her head turned by Petiron’s marked favor, was not mature enough to discipline herself. Sella had warned her mother that Menolly was getting out of hand. Mavi put some of that tale down to sisterly envy. But, when Sella had told Mavi that Menolly had actually started to teach another how to play an instrument, Mavi had been obliged to intervene. Let Yanus get one whisper of Menoll/s disobedience and there’d be real trouble in the Hold for the girl.
Spring was coming and with spring, the quieter seas. Perhaps the new Harper would arrive soon.
And then spring did come, a first glorious day. The sweet scents of seabeachplum and marshberry filled the seaward breezes and came in through the opened shutters of the Little HaU. The children were singing loudly, as if shouting got them through the learning faster. True, they were singing one of the longer Sagas, word perfect, but with far more exuberance than was strictly needed. Perhaps it was that exuberance that infected Menolly and reminded her of a tune she’d tried to set down the day before.
She did not consciously disobey. She certainly was unaware that the fleet had returned from an early catch. She was equally unaware that the chords she was strumming were notofficiallyof the Harper’s craft And it was doubly unfortunate that this lapse occurred just as the Sea Holder passed the open windows of the HalL
: He was in the Little Hall almost at once, summarily