Chapter 5: The Snowball Court
Two days after the snow, the gardens stayed white and the fountains stayed frozen, and Quỳnh Chi woke alone in the warm dark of the King's Tower while Vladimir was already at his council.
She went barefoot to the lacquered cabinet in the corner and lifted out the case she had never once let the servants touch. Inside, wrapped in oiled silk, lay the đàn tranh, its sixteen strings glinting faintly. It had crossed the sea with her, packed between her winter cloaks, and she had carried it through two months of Northern rooms without letting anyone see it.
She set it on the stand by the window, where the light came pale and low. She tuned each string by ear, plucking softly, and outside the snow went on falling without wind.
Then she played.
The first notes were slow, each one allowed to fade before the next, like footsteps on new snow. She closed her eyes. The melody was one she had been building in her head for days, and now she finally gave it words, her voice low in her own tongue, meant for no one.
"Chầm chậm ta lắng nghe, nghe từng thanh âm tuyết rơi."
Listening slowly to the sound of falling snow.
She did not hear the door. She did not hear the boots on the floorboards, or the way they stopped. She sang the second verse with her face turned to the window, her fingers bending the strings into something that ached, and snow kept falling past the glass.
She only knew someone was there when the strings began to ring wrong, because her hands had gone still.
She turned her head, and the door was open, and Vladimir stood in it.
He had come in quietly, in his council cloak still, snow melting on his shoulders. He did not come further. He stood with one hand on the doorframe, a man of his bulk should be loud in any room, and he was not loud at all. He was watching her the way men watch a fire in a harbour.
"Forgive me," she said, rising at once, hands folding at her waist. "I did not know you were returned."
"Do not stop." His voice was rough, lower than the room. "I have heard this instrument once before. In the embassy dispatches. The envoy wrote that it sounded like rain on water." He looked at the sixteen strings, at the lacquer worn pale at the places her fingers rested. "He wrote badly. It is nothing like rain."
"You have read reports of my music?" She blinked at him.
"I read reports of everything that crosses my borders." But he said it without iron, and he still had not moved from the doorway, as if stepping inside would break something. "Two years of dispatches about this treaty. Grain quotas. Harbour rights. Not one line warned me about you."
She did not know what to answer to that, so she did what her etiquette had always taught her, and lowered her eyes. The silence stretched. The snow ticked against the glass.
"Play it again," he said. "From the beginning. I came in at the middle."
"It is not finished."
"Good. Then I will hear the whole of it when it is." He finally crossed the room, slowly, and sat down in the chair by the hearth, the big chair built for a man twice any ordinary man's size, and settled into it like a garrison settling into a long watch. "Sit. Play. I am not your king in this room for the next quarter hour. I am only a man listening."
She looked at him for a long moment, at the snow melting to dark spots on his shoulders, at the face he had turned toward the window so as not to watch her too directly. Then she sat again at the stand and drew the silk over her knees and began from the first slow note.
She sang for him this time. Not the whisper she had meant for no one, but her full voice, low and measured, the Vietnamese syllables rounding out into the cold northern room. Chầm chậm ta lắng nghe. Slowly, slowly, I listen. The melody climbed where the verse said the eyes lift to look around, and she bent the strings with her left hand, and the notes wavered like breath on cold air.
Vladimir did not understand one word of it. He understood none of it and every bit of it. He sat with his forearms on his knees and his hands loose, and he listened to a woman sing about snow in a language from the far side of the world, in a room where ten years ago he had signed death warrants by lamplight, and he thought that no chronicler would ever record this, and that this was the only hour of his reign he would remember on his deathbed.
The last verse asked its question, whether anyone would bring her the green days of spring, and she let the final string ring until it died on its own, and did not damp it. The room held the silence the courtyard had held that morning, deep and kneeling.
"That is what it says?" he asked. "The words?"
"Partly." Her fingers rested on the strings without pressing. "It says, I listen slowly to the sound of snow falling. It says, the one who cannot come to be beside me is not therefore faithless. It says, the snow falls white and unknowing outside my window." She hesitated, and he heard the hesitation. "And it asks who will bring me spring."
"You composed it here. In this room."
"Over days. While you were at council." She looked at her hands. "It is nothing. A small thing. Women of my court make such pieces the way your ladies embroider."
"It is not nothing." He stood, and the chair creaked behind him, and he crossed to the window where she sat, and stood beside the stand looking down at her. This close, the difference between them filled the whole frame, his shoulder wide as her two together, his hand beside hers on the lacquered wood like a bear's paw set down by a sparrow's foot. "You sat alone in this room every day for a fortnight and made a thing of beauty, and told no one, and called it nothing."
"It was not made to be heard by anyone."
"Then why is it true?" His voice had gone very quiet. "Every word of it. The one who cannot come and be beside you. The snow falling outside the window. The asking after spring." He looked out at the white garden. "You wrote a song about being here. About being far from home and beside a man you cannot read."
She said nothing, which was her way of agreeing, and her ears went pink, and her fingers drew back from the strings.
"I cannot answer it in your tongue," he said. "I have been having Ilya drill me at night, in your language, like a clerk. I can say perhaps forty words without slaughtering them." He looked down at her, and did not do the careful thing, and touched her jaw with the back of one scarred finger, tilting her face up. "So I will answer in mine, and you will translate it for me later if you like. I would bring you spring if I could. I cannot. I can only give you this room, and my winters, and whatever I am that your court did not warn you about. It is a poor treaty clause, but it is the one I have."
Quỳnh Chi looked up at him, snow-light on her face, and thought of the songs her tutors had taught her about northern kings, iron-hearted and cold, and how she had once believed the poems, and how the poems were written by people who had never stood in this window.
"I understood you," she said. "Without translating."
"I know. You have understood me since the courtyard." His thumb traced her cheekbone once, and came away. Then he stepped back, and was the king again in his posture if not his eyes. "Now. Play it once more from the beginning. I intend to hear this piece a hundred times before the thaw, and I will not have the first hundred be poorly remembered."
She laughed, the small startled laugh, and this time she did not cover her mouth. Then she drew the silk back over her knees, and turned to the strings, and outside the snow went on falling, slow and white and unknowing, while in the warm room a northern king sat down to listen to the sound of spring arriving by another road entirely.