“His voice is changing. Come, Yanus, it’ll have to be Menolly.”

Yanus grumbled bitterly against the inevitable as he climbed into the sleeping furs.

“That’s what everyone else has told you, haven’t they? So why make so much of a necessity?”

Yanus settled himself, resigned.

“The fishing will be good tomorrow,” his wife said, yawning. She preferred him fishing to stomping around the Hold, sullen and critical with enforced inactivity. She knew he was the finest Sea Holder Half-Circle had ever had: the Hold was prospering, with plenty for bartering set by in the storage caves; they hadn’t lost a ship or a man in several Turns either, which said much for his weather-wisdom. But Yanus, at home on a heaving deck in foul weather, was very much adrift when taxed with the unexpected on land.

Mavi was keenly aware that Yanus was displeased with his youngest child. Mavi found the girl exasperating, too. Menolly worked hard and was very clever with her fingers: too clever by half when it came to playing any instrument in the Harper Craft Perhaps, Mavi thought, she had not been wise to permit the girl to linger in the old Harper’s constant company once she had learned all the proper Teaching Songs. But it had been one less worry to let Menolly nurse the old

Harper, and Petiron had wished it. No one begrudged a Harper’s requests. Ah weH, thought Mavi, dismissing the past, there’d be a new Harper soon, and Menolly could be put to tasks proper to a young girl

The next morning, the storm had cleared off: the skies were cloudless, the sea, calm. The burial barge had been outfitted in the Dock Cavern, Petiron’s body wrapped in harper-blue on the tilter board. The entire Fleet and most of the Seahold followed in the wake of the oar-driven barge, out into the faster moving current above Nerat Deep.

Menolly, on the barge prow, sang the elegy: her clear strong voice carrying back to the Half-Circle Fleet; the men chanting the descant as they rowed the barge.

On the final chord, Petiron went to his rest. Menolly bowed her head, and let drum and stick slide from her ringers into the sea. How could she ever use them again when they had beaten Petiron’s last song? She’d held back her tears since the Harper had died because she knew she had to be able to sing his elegy and you couldn’t sing with a throat closed from crying. Now the tears ran down her cheeks, mingled with sea spray: her sobs punctuated by the soft chant of the steersman, setting about

Petiron had been her friend, her ally and mentor. She had sung from the heart as he’d taught her: from the heart and the gut Had he heard her song where he had gone?