Between dances, Sean kept her mug full and piloted her about the hall as he met and exchanged some of his cryptic remarks to men and women.
"Who are these folks?" she asked in his ear as he maneuvered her to yet another couple.
"The parents of the Bremport victims," he said.
"What the frag! That's unfair, Sean." She tried to pull free, but his grip was implacable.
"Why? They know you're going to sing. They've wanted to meet you. They have. You're their last link with their dead."
"Oh, frag it! That's not fair. To me, Sean."
"Yes, it is, because now you'll know which faces to look for when you're singing."
"Is that why you're attached to me like a limpet?" she asked bitterly. "So I can't escape this ordeal?"
"It won't be an ordeal for you, Yanaba, but a release," he said softly and with such great tenderness that she felt weak-kneed. Damn Clodagh. She was blurring.
About then, she noticed that Bunny and Diego had not once parted company.
"Yes, Diego'll sing, too. You aren't the only one," Scan said, observing the direction of her interest. Then he chuckled. "Will the miserable like some company?" He began to propel her in their direction.
Some quality of the look with which Bunny was favoring Diego made Yana dig her heels in. "No, Scan, we won't interrupt them."
"No." Scan looked at the young pair, his mobile face thoughtful. "No, I don't think we will. Bunny's handling him like a trooper."
"Handling him?" Yana bristled.
Scan shrugged, his expression bland. "Keeping him company, if you like. You know more people here than he does."
Just then Sinead and Aisling danced up to them, Sinead leading, as always. Both wore superb leather shirts, Aisling white, Sinead buff, with elaborate decorations which were so tasteful that jewels could not have been better displayed.
"Enjoying yourselves?" Sinead asked, her expression bland, but the slightly arch tone of her voice seemed to convey some hidden message evidently intended for Sean.
"Now that you mention it, I am," Sean said, equally archly, locking gazes with Sinead. "How about you, Yana?"
"Oh, I am, indeed I am," she replied. Sinead nodded and kept walking.
"What's up with your sister?" Yana asked Scan, as he whirled her in a pirouette to the other side of the room.
"Don't let her worry you for a single minute," he said.
She caught an odd twitch to his mouth, a twitch of minor irritation, she thought. Well, sisters had been irritants to brothers since the worlds began.
About the time she was beginning to wonder if the music makers had been trading off with others who looked identical to keep up such an amazing barrage of dance tunes and tempos, the current ones put down their instruments and left the little stage.
Somehow Scan had timed it so that he and Yana were at the seemingly bottomless punch bowl as the last note died away. He pressed yet another cup into her hand.
"I'll be too blurred to sing," she said, trying to put it down.
"Drink it. You're on."
With what seemed to her like unceremonious haste, he then guided her across the floor to the platform.
"No, no, Sean," she protested, noticing herself to be the center of attention. In the sudden way these people had, everyone was settling into a quiet mode all around the room as Sean led her inexorably to the stage. Even the children were quiet, the babies remarkably all asleep.
"Yes, yes, Yana."
"Why me?" she protested, but her feet seemed willing to follow Sean.
"You're the hero."
She tried to wrench her arm free of his grasp, but his fingers merely tightened, and then she was stumbling onto the box that was the step up to the platform. She stood there, miserably aware of being the focus of so many eyes, so much unwarranted attention, of her coming ordeal. How could anything she said, or sang, help ease their losses?
Scan held up both arms and what little noise there was died completely.
"This is Major Yanaba Maddock," he announced, turning slowly to take in everyone patiently waiting. "You all know her. She will sing." Then, with an oddly formal bow, he gestured for Yana to sit on the single chair that was now centered on the stage.
She sank limply to the chair, feeling the hard seat grind into her tailbone. Sing? She was supposed to sing now?
A soft beat registered, and she saw Scan, the bodhran in one hand, gently fingering sound from the skin. She blinked and suddenly began the chant that had come to her. She hadn't rehearsed it since that day, weeks before, when Scan had coaxed the words from her. But they were there, on her tongue, and in the proper order, in the precise rhythm of the drumbeat, and her voice was saying them. She was unaware of anything else because her mind was back there, in Bremport for those few surrealistically macabre and devastatingly helpless and horrible minutes, and she wondered that she could enunciate any words for the pain in her chest, the constriction in her throat, and the unwept tears that pressed against her eyelids. She wished she were even more blurred than she knew she had to be, to let go like this. To perform, as if by rote, any duties that had not been drill-inspired over centuries of practice.
She heard, from a distance, her own voice, and she had never realized she could sound like that: a husky rich contralto that dipped and rose. She wasn't really aware of what she was singing until she got to the final lines.
"I was sent here to die, too, here where the snows live The waters live, the animals and the trees live, And you."
As the last of that vowel drifted into nothingness, she bowed her head, tears streaming down her cheeks and falling into her hands. She couldn't move and didn't know what she was supposed to do next. Maybe Scan would liberate her.
Then a pair of work-roughened hands slid across hers, pressed gently, and withdrew only to be replaced by another set of hands. By the third pair she looked up, for their touch was like a benison, healing her grief, staunching her tears. She could even smile as yet another set of parents laid hands on hers to mutely offer their appreciation. Seeing the tears in their eyes-tears of an odd sort of sublimated sorrowing-hers began to ease, along with the constriction in her chest, the tight bands about her heart.
The little ceremony completed, Scan collected her and brought her wordlessly to Clodagh's bowl, where the woman herself ladled a cup for her and solemnly inclined her head in a regal bow of approval as the cup was handed from Clodagh to Sean and then to Yana.
Then Sean put his arm about her shoulders and drew her to sit in a space that magically appeared on a bench against the wall. His shoulder touched hers, his hip and thigh brushed hers. She felt drained but exultant, no longer sad but infinitely relieved. She sipped the punch, keeping her head down, unwilling to make eye contact with anyone as she savored what was, as Sean had said, a healing.
The little susurrus of soft voices, expectant, made her look up to see Bunny leading Diego to the stage.
"This is Diego Metaxos," Bunny said, arms above her head and turning around slowly to the audience just as Sean had done. "He must sing."
Yana hoped that she had shown as much composure as Diego did. He sat down with more grace than she had, his hands splay-fingered on his knees.
"I am new come, in storm, here., A storm of heart and mind and soul. I sought and found storm with Lavelle She saved me when the sled crashed down. With the heat of her body she saved me. With the wit of her mind she saved my father, too. Saved me to see the cavern that all say I didn't see."
His tone was rich in irony and his tenor young and surprisingly vibrant though Yana suspected he had never sung before audience either.
"But I saw the caverns and the water and the carving of wind and water.
I saw the gleaming snow, like jeweled cloth.