That job took Menolly inexorably to the Harper’s room: swept clean of everything that had been personal 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 the songmaker? Menolly 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 them—which, 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 Menolly’s tunes were Harper-crafted. (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 Hall. Safe enough, for no one but herself, til the new Harper came, would discover them there.