Chapter 80 - The Farm in Irttat

 

Chapter 80: The Ship of Exile 14

No. 20 Briar Street's cemetery had never enjoyed a good reputation. Even the previous tenant of the house where Lucita now lived had been frightened away by the ghost stories surrounding No. 20.

And it wasn’t just hearsay from the former occupants of No. 21 either. Several neighboring families had vaguely heard things as well, and all were a little wary of the place. 

Lucita and her friends were not troubled by such things. There was only one concern: this choice of venue might drive away the audience.

But it was an unavoidable compromise, reached after considerable deliberation.

Space in Viktori was at a premium. Large outdoor venues were scarce to begin with, and finding a spot with enough foot traffic, close to the city center, with sufficient open space, was nearly impossible.

With her status, Lucita could have arranged to use one of the city’s central squares, but that would attract far too much attention. Under the gaze of the entire capital, Linnea and her young performers might not be able to withstand that kind of pressure. 

She was still a child, after all, and her cast were all amateurs. Managing to independently rehearse and stage a production at all was already no small feat.

Beyond that, renting a garden venue wasn't out of the question either, but gardens and manor halls were places the very audience this production was meant for would never dare to enter. That was also why Lucita had not chosen the Tulip Concert Hall as the venue. 

After weighing everything, the cemetery at No. 20 Briar Street turned out to be a surprisingly fitting choice.

The cost of building the stage was not high. Lucita hadn’t demanded grandeur or perfection. She simply hired carpenters and stonemasons to erect a temporary platform on the lawn along the cemetery’s street-facing edge. 

The gravestones there were broken and toppled, long since swallowed by plants and grass. Their former occupants had been carried away by family members when the cemetery was officially abandoned. 

Without a second thought, they cut back the overgrown bushes, leveled the ground, and cleared a reasonably tidy stretch of lawn to serve as the audience area.

The stage itself required little decoration. The carpenters nailed together a large wooden board and set it at the back of the platform. One of Linnea’s friends, the young daughter of shopkeeper Charlotte, painted on it a simple watercolor night sky. 

Everything looked very humble. But soon, it became entirely different — Violet slipped out one night under cover of darkness and scattered the seeds of spring and summer flowers all around the stage.

Seeds are not precious things. A handful from the florist costs only a few copper coins. But in Violet's hands, seeds could bloom into a thousand possibilities.

Among the horse chestnuts just unfurling their first tender leaves, the westward-sliding moonlight fell upon her golden hair, while dew-wet grass brushed against her bare feet, dark with earth and moisture. 

She was the former Elven King, whose gift was dominion over life. Wherever she walked, blossoms could yield willingly to death, or spring instantly from the soil.

Whenever her skin touched the earth, it was the moment Violet felt most at peace. Peaceful enough to recall, in the deeper north, the cold and yielding feel of forest ground blanketed in snow and fallen leaves beneath her feet. 

The long-accumulated dry leaves in the cemetery rustled and stirred, slowly dissolving into the soil, becoming an endless wellspring of life that flowed into the stems and buds of new growth.

Flowers open in silence. But when countless buds open together —

A soft whisper of petals brushing against one another, like a low wind threading through.

Unlike Lucita, who could see clearly in pitch darkness with her acutely sharp vision, Violet had brought along a small lamp. 

The lantern was filled with evening primrose oil, its dim flame swaying inside the glass casing. In that soft haze, even the incessant piano practice drifting down from the house above seemed somehow eased.

Violet carried her lamp back to their garden courtyard.

She walked barefoot across the soft carpet, and at the bend of the stairs found Lucita, lit on one side by lamplight, the other half swallowed by shadow against the wall. 

Lucita was holding a small spray bottle and appeared to have been on her way downstairs, but had run right into Violet.

She caught the scent of damp grass and night dew still clinging to Violet, and the two of them exchanged a smile. Lucita said quietly: "This is going to be a perfect musical."

"You're right."

"Good night."

Lucita slipped past her, murmured good night as she stepped into her room, and continued down the stairs on her own errand. 

In her hand was a photographic emulsion she'd obtained from Lady Duren. She intended to spray it on the backdrop of the stage and see what it could do.

In any case, after that strange and unwitnessed night, when the children arrived the next day, they were stopped in their tracks by the sight of flowers everywhere. 

Some were wildflowers: pansies, geraniums, lantanas, flame-red nasturtiums, and tiny trailing lobelias. The more delicate: violets, snowflakes, and great blooming windflowers. Low-growing blue flax starred the lawn, still holding last night's dew.

Sun-lovers and shade-lovers, drought-hardy and moisture-craving, tenacious and fragile, tall and short, sparse and dense — flowers that one would never have imagined could coexist in the same patch of earth all put forth their lush and vivid faces together.

That lushness was like irresistible early-summer clouds piled high, fit to adorn a king's throne.

But now, in this untended wasteland that no one had cared for, they adorned the children's humble stage.

The temporary wooden platform with its painted backdrop, the open expanse of low-grass ground for the audience, and the rampant greenery all around, that was the entirety of the staging.

Lucita had assumed there wouldn't be many audience members. Most people, she thought, would dismiss it as children's mischief — and so when she saw people gathering in crowds before the stage, even beginning to block the road, she realized that in this city, this kind of performance was deeply out of the ordinary.

Open-air. Accessible to all. Free. The humble staging and modest space, none of it bore any resemblance to what passed for refined musical theater.

But this kind of free entertainment was precisely enough to draw people who had just finished a long week of labor and found themselves with a little spare time.

Whether it was the out-of-season lushness of the flowers, or the ages of the young performers, or the surprisingly respectable costumes, for whatever reason, many who had come for the novelty stayed.

And so, before the performance began, they had more than enough audience.

The curtain rose on summer's first musical.

To Lucita's surprise, the piano Linnea had brought to the stage was not for herself.

The one playing it was the skinny girl Lucita had seen that day on the piano bench, her face taut, whether from nerves or concentration it was hard to say.

And Linnea stood calmly at the front of the stage. Within the now-flowing piano accompaniment, her voice entered gradually, like water gathering into a current, then surging into the sea.

She began to sing the first verse of Starfire.

Of course — Lucita had nearly forgotten. Even though countless instruments had come into existence over the ages, and even though merfolk played harps and flutes, their most precious gift in the realm of music had always been their voices.

That voice alone was enough. Even without any deliberate use of their spiritual allure, it could drive ancient humans to throw themselves into the sea in helpless fascination, leaving behind countless strange and haunting legends. 

The song drew the crowd into a dusk on the edge of night. The air grew thick and heavy, low thunder rolling now and then, clouds hanging at all four corners of the sky, ready to collapse. 

That thunder pressed against the chest like the burden of a thousand years upon the shoulders.

For Linnea, it was the invisible, crushing curse that had broken her family. The shadow that hung over her childhood memories, never to be dispelled. 

Endless deaths and corruption. The dim scales of those who had sunk to the bottom of the sea. The foam floating on the surface, lives dissolved into nothing. 

For the people in the crowd, it was the sacks hauled on the docks, the rusted iron handles of rickshaws, ten years of identical factory smoke and dust that left one’s footsteps—and one’s life—stranded in the northern wind. 

Shrunken bellies in years of good harvest. The hunger for knowledge swallowed generation after generation, and eyes that remained dim. And those who died and were born in bewilderment, without even a gravestone to mark them.

The performers were children the neighbors knew from daily life: the youngest twelve or thirteen, the oldest sixteen or seventeen. They wore performance costumes made at the tailor’s, nothing elaborate, yet they expressed a richness of emotion Lucita had never seen before. 

Children carry an untamed boldness. The wounds of the age have not yet been scoured into scars by wind and frost. They have not yet lost their capacity to feel pain and injustice. 

They are new. Tender. Their wounds can still bleed. Their mouths can still make sound. Their hearts still beat. They can cry with genuine feeling, and laugh without restraint.

So in a moment like this, dressed in their costumes, they were no longer the reliable tailor's daughter, or the mischievous florist's little sister, or the shy child of the paper-box factory worker.

Parched spirits seized hold of the indignant notes and plunged into the world of the drama.

Lucita leaned against the wall in a corner, looking up at Linnea's silhouette, and felt a wave of vertigo within the song.

Something powerful was spreading —

She straightened, turned, and vanished into the air beside the wall.

No one noticed.

She passed through the world layer of sound.

In this layer, the singing had become tangible, like molten rock grinding away at every murmur and whisper in every corner. 

Like a crashing waterfall. Like a steam boiler exploding. The waves of sound were overwhelming.

Even the distant bell tolling from a high tower, arriving here, could only crumble into ruin.

But no. Not here. 

Lucita moved through the sound-waves, thick as solid matter, and stepped into the scent layer. 

The flowers had fragrance. The flowers filled the abandoned garden, and their mixed, heavy scents surrounded everything.

But beyond that, there were other smells.

Leaves have a scent. Branches have a scent. New-grown plants, full of the moisture life requires, carried a damp fragrance that could quiet even an anxious heart. 

And there were sharp human smells: sweat and skin. The coarse, wheaty scent of hard bread from someone’s pocket. And on the stage, the salt of tears falling from the young performers’ faces. 

All of these surged from every direction, proclaiming the raw vitality of countless living beings. 

But still not. Not here.

She parted the scents and entered the spirit layer.

In an instant, countless waves of surging suffering rippled through the world, and in one moment they resonated with her own heartbeat.

Lucita clutched her chest and stumbled.

Here. This is it — the human spirit!

The spirit layer was boiling, intense enough that even through the surface world she could feel it. 

She turned back in alarm to look —

In that single moment, countless consciousnesses had merged into one great torrent, as though capable of breaching every dam in the world.

All fell silent.

She wheeled around and stepped urgently back into the human world.

At that moment, Linnea was repeating the climax of the third verse.

"We want abundance, we want to be free. 

Break apart the lies nurtured in comfortable beds, in this hour that threatens to destroy us. 

Forward! Forward! See how the sun is about to rise, in the hour after dawn…"

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