The deep, resonant thrum of Brynn's fiddle wove through the fabric of Lysander's agony. It was no longer the wild cry of the street, but a low, insistent pulse, a heartbeat against the consuming roar of the fever. He lay trapped in the alley's fetid gloom, the cold mud packed on his back a grotesque parody of a healing poultice. Every breath scraped like broken glass in his chest, tugging at the brutal gut-string stitches Orlov had sewn into his flesh. The alley air, thick with decay and damp, pressed down on him, a physical weight.
The world dissolved into fractured shards of sensation and nightmare. Time lost all meaning. Moments stretched into eternities; eternities blinked past in seconds. The fever was a furnace, burning him from the inside, yet he shivered violently, his teeth chattering against the cold sweat coating his skin.
He was back in the Grand Orpheum. But the audience wasn't applauding. They were silent, their faces blurred masks of disapproval. Silas stood at the conductor's podium, not with a baton, but with the Enforcer's lash. Kael sat at the piano, his fingers moving with icy precision, playing a melody that was the exact, calculated rhythm of the flogging strokes. Crack. Crack. Crack. Each note landed on Lysander's back, tearing fresh wounds. He tried to scream, but his throat produced only the scrape of the fiddle's lowest string. Brynn was there, perched on the edge of the stage, her dark eyes watching him, unreadable, her bow drawing that same deep, mournful thrum.
The mud on his back shifted, cool and gritty. Reality bled back in, sharp and brutal. He moaned, a low, animal sound. His mouth tasted of bile and leather. The greasy strip Orlov had gagged him with was gone, but the phantom feel of it remained. He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt glued shut with grit and fever sweat.
A rough hand touched his forehead. Calloused fingers, surprisingly cool. He flinched, expecting pain.
"Still burning," a voice muttered. Brynn's voice. Close. "Drink."
Something hard and cool pressed against his lips. A chipped ceramic rim. The smell of stale water, faintly metallic. He tried to turn his head away, nausea rising.
"Drink, bird," the voice insisted, sharper now. "Or you die thirsty. Your choice."
The choice was no choice. He parted cracked lips, and a trickle of blessedly cool water flowed into his mouth. It tasted like the alley floor, but it was liquid. He swallowed, the action sending a fresh lance of pain through his ravaged back muscles. He choked, coughing, which was even worse.
"Easy," Brynn said, the word devoid of softness but perhaps holding a sliver of pragmatic caution. She lifted his head slightly, supporting his neck with a firm hand that smelled of rosin and woodsmoke. She gave him another sip, slower this time. "Small sips. Your insides are probably knotted like old rope."
He managed a few more swallows before the nausea surged again, and he pushed the cup away weakly. Brynn let his head settle back onto the compacted dirt. He forced his eyes open, blinking against the gritty blur. Dawn light, weak and gray, filtered down into the alley recess. Brynn crouched beside him, her fiddle resting across her knees. Her face, smudged with dirt and exhaustion, was turned towards the alley mouth, her profile sharp against the grimy brick. Her dark eyes scanned the shifting shadows, watchful.
"You play," he rasped, the words scraping his throat raw. It was less a statement, more a desperate grasp at the only anchor he had.
She glanced down at him, her expression unreadable. "It helps." She didn't elaborate. Helps what? Him? Her? The watching? She lifted the fiddle to her chin, not playing yet, just holding it. Her gaze returned to the alley entrance. "Orlov says sound keeps the worst scavengers away. Two-legged and four." Her voice was flat. "He also says if your eyes go white and you start raving about gilded cages, he's taking his gut string back." A pause. "With interest."
Lysander closed his eyes again. The image of Orlov reclaiming the crude stitches with his sharp knife was horrifyingly vivid. "Not raving," he managed. "Remembering."
"Save your breath," Brynn advised. "Fever talks. Truth hides." She drew the bow lightly across the strings, not a full note, just a whisper of sound, a question hanging in the damp air. "Rest. Or fight. But do it quiet."
He tried to rest. The fever had other plans. It dragged him back under, twisting memories into grotesque parodies.
He was a child, hiding behind velvet curtains in a grand, unfamiliar house. His father hammered the piano keys, sweat flying, his laughter wild and free. His mother danced, her bare feet flying over polished wood, her violin singing a melody that soared and dipped like a swallow. But the notes were wrong. Jarring. Dissonant. The audience wasn't gasping; they were laughing, pointing. Silas, younger, his face tight with fury, stepped forward. Not to stop them, but to conduct. He raised the lash. The music twisted, becoming the crack of leather on flesh. His father's laughter turned to a scream. His mother's violin shrieked. Lysander tried to run, to help, but the velvet curtains turned to thick mud, sucking at his legs, holding him fast. He looked down. He was covered in filth, lying in the alley.
He surfaced gasping, the phantom screams echoing in his ears. Brynn was playing again, softly, persistently. That same low thrum, a grounding wire against the electrical storm in his brain. The mud on his back felt warmer now, uncomfortably so. Orlov's voice echoed in his memory: "If the fever breaks before dawn..." Was dawn close? The light seemed no stronger.
Time crawled. He drifted in the liminal space between waking torment and fevered nightmares. Brynn's presence was a constant, a silent sentinel. She would check his forehead with those cool, calloused fingers. Force sips of the metallic water between his lips. Scan the alley with hunter's eyes. And always, the fiddle. Sometimes just a single sustained note, vibrating in his bones. Sometimes a fragment of melody, harsh and unresolved, mirroring the chaos outside or the chaos within him.
Once, during a lull in the fever's worst grip, he found the strength to speak. "Why?"
Brynn paused, the bow hovering over the strings. She didn't look at him. "Why what?"
"Why… help?" The effort cost him. He coughed, the spasm tearing at his back.
She was silent for a long moment, her gaze fixed on the chipped varnish of her fiddle. "Orlov owed me," she said finally, her voice low. "For… something. This squared it." She shrugged, a sharp, economical movement. "And dead nobles stink worse than week-old fish. Attract flies. Bad for business." She drew the bow, a short, sharp scrape. "Don't flatter yourself, bird. It wasn't charity."
Lysander believed her. Charity had no place here. This was transaction. Survival. The brutal arithmetic of the Crescent. He was Orlov's debt payment. He was Brynn's effort to avoid a stinking corpse near her… territory? He didn't know where she lived, only that she guarded this patch of alley with fierce vigilance and the voice of her fiddle.
The fever raged anew, fiercer this time. The world dissolved into abstract patterns of heat and sound. The mud on his back felt like molten lead. He thought he heard Silas's voice, cold and precise, dissecting his failure. Kael's voice, whispering warnings that sounded like threats. The scrape of the fiddle became the rasp of the lash, the whistle of the bow through air the whistle of the Enforcer's truncheon descending.
He thrashed weakly, a moan escaping him. Strong hands gripped his shoulders, pinning him down. Not Enforcers. Smaller, fiercer. Brynn.
"Stop," her voice cut through the haze, sharp as her knife. "Fight it inside. Not out here. You tear those stitches, you bleed out. Then Orlov takes his payment from me." The threat was clear, pragmatic. Survival demanded stillness, even in torment.
He forced himself to go limp, panting, sweat pouring down his face, mingling with the alley filth. He focused on the pressure of her hands, the only solid thing in the dissolving world. He focused on the deep, resonant note she began to play again, steady and unwavering. It wasn't comfort. It was a command. Endure.
He endured. Breath by ragged breath. Second by agonizing second. The fever burned. The mud cooked. The stitches pulled. Brynn's fiddle played on, a defiant heartbeat in the gut of Veridia's wound.
Then, as the gray light filtering into the alley began to take on the faintest, palest hint of gold at its edges, a shift. A single, violent shiver wracked him, different from the others. Deeper. More profound. It felt like something inside him cracked.
He gasped, a great, shuddering inhalation. And then the sweat came. Not the clammy, fevered sweat, but a sudden, drenching flood. It poured from his skin, soaking the filthy nightshirt, washing rivulets through the grime on his face. The unbearable, furnace-like heat that had consumed him for hours began to recede, like a tide pulling back from a scorched shore. It left behind an icy, bone-deep exhaustion, but the oppressive, sickening pressure in his head lessened. The world swam back into focus, sharper, clearer, though no less grim.
He blinked, his eyes crusted but open. He saw the crumbling brick walls, the damp straw, the leaning stack of worm-eaten timber. He saw Brynn, crouched beside him, her fiddle resting on her knees, her bow held loosely. She was watching him, her dark eyes sharp, assessing. Her face was etched with fatigue, but her gaze was alert.
The deep thrum of the fiddle had stopped. The alley was quiet, save for the distant, waking clamor of the Crescent street and the frantic pounding of his own heart, slowing now to a heavy, exhausted thud.
Brynn leaned forward slightly, her eyes searching his. She didn't touch his forehead this time. She just looked. Then, a flicker in her expression. Not relief. Not satisfaction. Acknowledgement.
"Fever broke," she stated, her voice rough with disuse but clear in the dawn air. She looked towards the alley entrance, where the pale gold light was strengthening. "Dawn." She turned her gaze back to him, her eyes holding his, weary but unwavering. "Welcome to the Dump, bird. Now the real work starts." She didn't smile. She lifted the fiddle back to her chin. The bow touched the strings, not with the deep thrum of the vigil, but with a single, clear, high note that hung in the air, sharp and challenging as the first light of day piercing the alley's gloom. The sound of survival, harsh and unadorned. The sound of the morning after.