anith sat in the darkness high above the stage, legs dangling from the rigging while the men sang far below her. She had never been a big opera fan. Her parents were, though, and she distinctly remembered sitting by the fire while her father played his favourite pieces on the phonograph. But that was so long ago now. That was back when some records were still cylinders, before the gramophones came along to dominate. For her, the gramophone signalled the beginning of change. Every time her brother returned home, he’d bring one of those new flat records for her collection. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong... He’d tell her stories about seeing these people play and even meeting some of them afterwards. She asked again and again to be allowed to accompany him on his journeys, but he always told her no. When she was older, they said. When she’d finished her schooling.

But those years in between were bereft of music. There had been no melodies down there in the dark, and the only rhythm was her own heartbeat, tip-tapping against her chest. Music no longer mattered.

She emerged different. She was older, of course. Bigger. Taller. Stronger. Her parents had left her there as a child, and when she had emerged blinking into the warm sunlight, she was nineteen years old. A woman. There was another World War going on and she barely knew who the sides were. She returned home and she sat with her parents by the fire while Dvorˇák played. On the gramophone, she noted. Conversation was stilted. They didn’t know her any more and she didn’t know them. It would be years before she realised that she’d need to forgive them for abandoning her, and it was only then that she could let herself love them again.

They had to leave the house soon after her return because of the air raids. Her parents travelled to Scotland. Tanith’s new duties as a hidden blade took her on a different path. And she started paying attention to music again. But try as she might, she couldn’t find that sense of delight she used to feel. And then the fifties came, and brought with them Nina Simone and Elvis and Chuck Berry. She did her best to ignore Pat Boone and found a spark of that old delight that only burned brighter with the advent of the sixties and the Beatles and the Stones and long-haired hippies and free love, and she was right in the middle of it all, forty years old and looking half that age. Magical and powerful and beautiful and trained to kill.