She had moved farther onto the bed, in part because Mania had made room. Tiene’s dark eyes were wide like a fawn’s; her robe had fallen open, and Kevin could see the start of her breast’s deep curve. Then he felt the light stirring of Mania’s hand along his thigh under the sheet. There was suddenly a pulsing in his head. He drew a deep breath.
And swung quickly out of bed. Cursing a hard-on, he kicked into his breeches and slipped on the loose-sleeved doublet Diarmuid had given him. Without bothering to button it, he left the room.
It was dark on the landing. Moving to the railing, he looked down on the ruin of the ground level of the Black Boar. The guttering torches cast flickering shadows over bodies sprawled in sleep on overturned tables and benches, or against the walls. A few men were talking in muted tones in one corner, and he heard a woman giggle suddenly from the near wall and then subside.
Then he heard something else. The plucked strings of a guitar.
His guitar.
Following the sound, he turned his head to see Diarmuid, with Coll and Carde, sitting by the window, the Prince cradling the guitar in the window seat, the others on the floor.
As he walked downstairs to join them, his eyes adjusted to the shadows, and he saw other members of the band sprawled nearby with some of the women beside them.
“Hello, friend Kevin,” Diarmuid said softly, his eyes bright like an animal’s in the dark. “Will you show me how you play this: I sent Coll to bring it. I trust you don’t mind.” His voice was lazy with late-night indolence. Behind him, Kevin could see a sprinkling of stars.
“Aye, lad,” a bulky shadow rumbled. “Do a song for us.” He’d taken Tegid for a broken table.
Without speaking, Kevin picked his way forward over the bodies on the floor. He took the guitar from Diarmuid, who slipped down from the window seat, leaving it for him. The window had been thrown open; he felt a light breeze stir the hairs at the back of his neck, as he tuned the guitar.
It was late, and dark, and quiet. He was a long way from home, and tired, and hurting in a difficult way. Paul had gone; even tonight, he had taken no joy, had turned from tears again. Even tonight, even here. So many reasons he could give. And so:
“This is called ‘Rachel’s Song,’ ” he said, fighting a thickness in his throat, and began to play. It was a music no one there could know, but the pull of grief was immediate. Then after a long time he lifted his voice, deep when he sang, in words he’d decided long ago should never be sung:
Love, do you remember
My name ? I was lost
In summer turned winter
Made bitter by frost.
And when June comes December
The heart pays the cost.
The breaking of waves on a long shore,
In the grey morning the slow fall of rain,
And stone lies over.
You’ll bury your sorrow
Deep in the sea,
But sea tides aren’t tamed
That easily—
There will come a tomorrow
When you weep for me.
The breaking of waves on a long shore,
In the grey morning the slow fall of rain,
Oh love remember, remember me.
Then the music came alone again, transposed, worked on harder than anything he’d written in his life, especially what was coming now, with his own stupid tears. The part where the melody hurt, it was so beautiful, so laden with memory: the adapted second movement of the Brahms F Major Cello Sonata.
The notes were clean, unblurred, though the candles were blurred in his sight, as Kevin played Rachel Kincaid’s graduation piece and gave sound to the sorrow that was his and not his.
Into the shadowed room it went, Rachel’s song; over the sleeping bodies that stirred as sadness touched their dreams; among the ones who did not sleep and who felt the pull as they listened, remembering losses of their own; up the stairway it went to where two women stood at the railing, both crying now; faintly it reached the bedrooms, where bodies lay tangled in the shapes of love; and out the open window it went as well, into the late night street and the wide dark between the stars.