Page 5

That is when I hear it. Or fail to hear it.

Someone behind me says, “You have been listening to the room since you came in.”

The voice does not carry. In a hall that throws every sound up into the rafters, his arrives flat and close and stays where it is put, and the back of my neck goes warm from the hairline down.

I turn round.

He is tall, his hair is dark, and his coat is black with gold worked at the collar and the cuffs, and his mask is gold too, fine as lace, older than anything else in the room. His mouth below it is not doing anything. Every other person in this hall is holding a cup. His hands are empty.

Heat gathers low in my belly at the size of him, and at that mouth, and I am annoyed to notice it.

“Everyone’s listening to the room,” I say. “It’s very loud.”

“They are enduring it. You are working.”

Nobody has ever said that to me, not even Corentin, who taught me to do it.

“It’s a trade,” I say. “Fifteen years of a man shouting at me across a foundry until I could hear which way a room leans. Anyone with two ears and no choice could learn it. And it’s a bad room.”

“Bad how?”

Wine, a stranger, and my one subject. Of course I talk.

“All roof, no belly.” I rap the wall with a knuckle, which accomplishes nothing, and I do it anyway. “The sound goes up, it dies up there, and what comes back is the ghost of it. That’s why everyone is shouting. They can’t hear themselves, so they push, and then the next table pushes, and by midnight this place will be a brawl and nobody in it will know why they’re angry.”

“How would you fix it?”

“Cloth. Half the hall of it, hung all down that side. Sailcloth, tapestry, anything soft.” I point with my cup. “You can’t fix the stone, you can only give it something to eat. Soft things eat sound.” I hear myself and take a drink. “You’ve gone quiet. Is that the mask, or are you always like this?”

“You would hang cloth in a hall you are not enjoying.”

“I’d do it in a hall I hated.” The stone hums under my knuckles.

A beak mask is coming down the wall doing inspections. He reaches the girl, and her chin is up, and he takes her face in two fingers to turn her head, and I am moving before I have decided anything.

The man in the gold mask gets there first.

He does not touch the buyer. He does not say a word that I hear. He stops beside him and stands, and the buyer’s hand comes off the girl’s face at once, and he goes off down the hall fast, leaving his drink on the ledge.

I watched him do it, and watching him do it made me want him, and I know what that says about me.

“How did you do that?” I say.

“People are careful around me.”

“Why?”

“They cannot say why. They stand a little further off than they meant to.” He is watching the buyer’s back, and everything about him has gone still, and up close it lifts the hair on my arms. The girl is breathing in little sips. I put my cup into her hand and she drinks half of it without noticing.

“Go and stand with the other girls by the pillar,” I tell her. “They don’t bother a group.”

The girl hands me back the cup.

“What do I call you?” she asks.

“Enora. Now go.”

She goes. The man in the gold mask stays beside me.