Songweaver's Awakening

Chapter 5 - Rajheem

Rajheem smoothed his tunic with careful hands, checking to be sure he'd fastened all the cloth-knot buttons.  It had been three months since he had come to Helen’s palace; three cycles of the moon, and he wore silk instead of faded brown.  He flexed the index finger on his left hand.  It had healed well, but it still, at times, became inconveniently stiff.

An itching sensation started at the back of his neck, and he checked to make sure the door was still shut.  The Fair Folk were everywhere inside the palace, silent and staring, though they'd not yet entered his room.  He’d tried to ask the servants about them, but whenever he mentioned the creatures, he received blank looks and sideways glances.  In his frustration, he’d even had the temerity to cry out once, to a passing servant, “There!  It’s right behind you!”  The Fair Folk had vanished in an instant.  The man had turned, looked, and looked back again at Rajheem with a mystified expression.

“He’s a minstrel,” a maidservant had said to the man.

The man had nodded, said, “Anshana have mercy on you,” and returned to his work.

Rajheem sighed, running his hands down the shirt once more, trying not to think about the masque and his role in it, and whether or not the Fair Folk would be staring at him as he sang.  With the silk tunic and pants, and embroidered slippers, he felt more like one of the jheranun than an outskirter.  What did that mean?  He was dressed like a landowner, and fed like one too.  Yet, he lived in the servants' quarters and was the son of a whore and a merchant.  Farahd had gone from outskirter to general.  Was he now going through the same sort of transformation? 

The streets still buzzed with the news that Farahd had abolished the positions of the Second and Third Seats.  No one knew exactly what it meant for Hajinn yet, but a nervous tension filled the air, whispering of coming change.  Some said the outskirters would be allowed into the inner city, others that multa would be given a way to become landowners, and others still scoffed and said things would remain as they always had.

Whatever Rajheem was now, it was not an outskirter.  He had become something different, something with no name, and that pleased him.  Humming to himself, he lifted the lute from the bed.  Unlike his old instrument, this one was highly polished to a rich, cherry sheen, inlaid around the hole with lighter wood in a floral pattern.  He tucked it under his arm and strummed an experimental chord, reveling in its full, sweet tones.

The feel of a lute beneath his hand stirred guilty memories.  Bahavis.  The thought clenched his gut.  Helen hadn’t yet let him outside the palace walls and he was afraid to press the issue.   He’d tried, a couple times, to ask one of the servants to take something to Bahavis, but they all looked at him as if he were mad.  No one wanted to venture into the outskirts alone, if at all.  He wasn’t sure how Bahavis fared, or if Varun had followed through with his threat.  Just a little longer, Rajheem thought, wait just a little longer, Bahavis, and I’ll find a way to bring help to you.

The door to his room burst open.  Lladwen stalked inside.  Rajheem nearly dropped the lute.  The man never bothered to knock, and he stepped so softly that Rajheem never knew when he was coming down the hall.

Lladwen looked Rajheem up and down.  “You’ll do.”  He was dressed in blue and silver again, the swirling embroidery spilling from his neckline down across his shirt.  He held a satin bag in one hand.  “You’re to make an entrance after one of the chants.”

Rajheem shifted from foot to foot, sweat dampening his palms.  Playing on an anonymous corner on the street was one thing; playing in front of Hajinn’s jheranun, brash as a drunken man who starts a brawl, was another thing entirely.  He would have no avenue of escape, no tricks to pull in order to get away.  “Are you sure this is what the Raja wants?  I don’t mind playing for the Raja, in private.  But the people here, they’re afraid of music.  Sometimes they listen, but sometimes it only makes them angry.”  He swallowed.  “I don’t think they’ll find me very entertaining.”