‘But how could I help?’ Orial picked up her fork and toyed with the cake, pushing it around the plate. ‘I’m only in my first year of training. I haven’t learned neurology or musculature yet –

‘I’m not referring to your medical skills, carissa. I’m referring to your other gifts.’

‘I don’t have any other gifts,’ she said, confused.

‘Let me share a confidence with you,’ Cramoisy leaned closer across the tea-table. ‘Amaru Khassian did not just lose the use of his hands in the fire. He lost the culmination of his life’s work: his new opera. And now he just sits there, thinking through the lost music day and night. It haunts his dreams. At night I can hear him murmuring and weeping in his sleep. It’s destroying him, Orial.’

‘Because he can hear the music in his head but can’t write it down?’

‘To Amar music is much more than a profession. It’s his own personal language, his means of expressing himself. “Music begins where words fail…” ‘

‘But why me?’

‘Think back to a morning last week. Amaru was being treated in the Sanatorium. You were singing in the next-door cubicle as you worked. What were you singing?’

Orial frowned. That melody. That dark, haunting melody with its sinuous, twisted intervals… How did Cramoisy know she had been singing?

‘I don’t know its name. I don’t know where I heard it. I just found myself humming it.’

Cramoisy reached out across the table and took her hand in his own, squeezing it reassuringly.

‘Don’t distress yourself, child. Listen to me. You were singing a fragment of Amaru’s opera.’

‘B-but you said it was burned. How could I have –’

Cramoisy raised his hand to stroke her cheek.

‘You are your mother’s daughter. You have inherited her talents, her gifts. You will need guidance in how to use them…’

‘You mean – I heard the music in the Illustre’s mind?’ Orial could not begin to make sense of the revelation.

‘It’s a kind of musical telepathy. That’s how your mother once described it to me. You will need to develop great mental discipline if you are to use it effectively.’

‘And you want me to transcribe the Illustre’s thoughts?’

‘He needs you, Orial. You could be the one to save him from his own despair.’

‘But I’m untrained. I’ve never had a lesson in my life.’

‘Valentan and I will give you instruction in notation, theory, all you need to know.’

‘Ohhh…’ Orial let out a little sigh of excitement. It was more than she could bear. Her dearest wish come true. And then she remembered.

‘Papa –’

Cramoisy’s expression became pensive.

‘I don’t want to upset him.’

The sound of pastry forks on plates, spoons stirring tea-bowls, had suddenly become a clatter, intruding on Orial’s thoughts.