It wasn’t something I had said with any real seriousness, but there was no reason to turn down a reward when one was being offered. I looked up at him with undisguised anticipation, and Astaire thought for a moment before walking toward the piano. I watched without much thought as he sat down at the piano and lightly ran his fingers over the keys, and then it dawned on me.

“You’re going to play for me?”

I jumped up from the sofa and called out in surprise, and Astaire let out a warm laugh as he tapped the keys lightly, checking the piano’s tuning.

“Is that really so surprising?”

“You’ve never played for me before.”

“That’s precisely why it’s a reward.”

The reply was so calm it made my own surprise feel embarrassing, but a pleased smile played at the corner of Astaire’s mouth as he looked down at the keys.

Over the past month of studying together, Astaire had never once played for me. Every time I had hinted at wanting to hear him play, he would smile that infuriating smile and say I wouldn’t be hearing his playing until I broke the bad habit of relying on my ears instead of the score. So this performance was not only his way of thanking me for agreeing to his request, but a reward for a student who had followed his teaching well over the course of a month.

Having never heard him play, I had no way of knowing for myself, but people commonly described Sio and Astaire as musicians standing at opposite ends of a spectrum. Where Sio grounded his playing in classical technique and poured deep feeling into it, Astaire was said to startle people with bold, unconventional interpretations unlike anything heard before.

When I first heard that, I found it tremendously interesting. To think that his manner at the piano could be so different from his manner in everyday life. If anything, the unconventional suited the free-spirited Sio, and the classical suited the upright Astaire. Astaire playing with bold abandon. Somehow I couldn’t picture it. I approached the piano with a flutter of excitement.

“The Tempest. Have you heard of it?”

“Yes. At one of Sio’s recitals.”

Astaire asked as he set his fingers neatly over the keys. The Tempest was a piece Sio had performed at a recital a few months ago, so it wasn’t unfamiliar to me. Astaire smiled with satisfaction as I nodded readily.

“Good.”

I couldn’t tell what was good about it. Only, the smile on Astaire’s face as he said it was a pleasant one, so I assumed it couldn’t be anything bad. Regardless of my puzzlement, Astaire slowly closed his eyes. The smile that had been at the corner of his mouth was already gone.

I remembered Sio’s Tempest. A lyrical opening, and an expression that grew rougher as it went. The sound that had rung out softly, like a whisper, gradually deepened into passion. The shiver of that moment when indifference turned to passion and loneliness turned to absolute solitude. Sio’s Tempest had a clear narrative. So what would Astaire’s Tempest look like?

Astaire breathed deeply, gathering his emotions, and opened his eyes again. A seriousness I had never seen before had settled in them. So this is what Astaire looks like at the piano. The thought hadn’t finished forming before the first note rang through the air.

The chord built by both hands broke into a sprint. Faster, and faster still. It was nearly twice the speed of a standard Tempest. The velocity of it stopped the breath in my throat. Within the rushing succession of notes lived an absolute solitude, the solitude of standing alone on unfamiliar ground. Whether it was a struggle to break free from that solitude, or a surrender to dying without escape, I couldn’t tell. But it didn’t matter which. At the end of the notes sinking endlessly downward, all that remained was emptiness and desolation.

I pressed my hand over my mouth to stop myself from crying out that it was absurd.

This isn’t the Tempest. Or could I really say it wasn’t?

The melody threw my mind into disarray and my thoughts ground to a halt. It was unconventional in the most literal sense. I had never heard a performance that, with no variation in dynamics, so relentlessly pressed at the very bottom of what it meant to be human. I was certain no one in the world played the Tempest this way. So this was a first sound. A sound belonging to Astaire alone, one no one could match and no one could surpass. The hand pressed over my mouth fell limply to my side.

With a sharp, plummeting fall of notes like a scream, the hands that had been gliding over the keys went still. The music ended, and Astaire slowly rose and stood before me. A shiver ran through me at the detached gaze he turned on me.

“So that’s the sound of your Tempest.”

It was a completely different sound from Sio’s. In truth, not only Sio but no one in the world could produce a sound like Astaire’s just now. To think the same piece could be played so differently. If Astaire hadn’t said he was playing the Tempest, I would have been certain I was hearing a different piece entirely.

“Is that all? Didn’t you think about how you would play it, what sound you would draw out? You didn’t have any thoughts like that?”

Astaire’s voice came out sharper than usual at my dazed murmur.

“I told you. To win, you’ll have to surpass me, not Sio Lieselotte. I’ll be playing this piece at the Jubilion. You need to play that piece with your own touch. Without that, you’ll never beat me.”

I lost my words at the firm declaration and blinked. A sound that belonged to Danyu Astrid alone. Did I even have something like that? I tried to think, but I couldn’t imagine it. My sound had always been directed toward Sio. In truth, it wasn’t only my sound. My every ideal had always been Sio Lieselotte. If only I could become like Sio, and through that draw closer to him, I had wanted nothing more than that.

I quietly lowered my head and looked at my trembling hands. White hands that still bore the marks of hard practice. What on earth had I been working these hands so hard for. If it had been only to catch up to Sio, these hands would not feel this unfamiliar to me now.

Yes. What I wanted right now was not to catch up to Sio. The realization struck like lightning, and I lifted my head to find Astaire still watching me with that detached expression. I reached out desperately and grabbed hold of his sleeve.

“I want to find it. My sound. Like you, like Sio. I want to find my own sound too. Where is it?”

At the words that finally came out as they truly were, a smile bloomed at last on Astaire’s face.

“It’s already inside you, Miss Danyu. Everyone is born with their own music.”

My own sound was inside me. It was an extraordinarily abstract thing to say. I raised my hand and clutched at my chest, reaching for a sound I couldn’t see, but nothing came into my grasp. Empty air drifted through my hand in place of a sound. Astaire looked at that empty hand and lowered his eyes. Something distant and long past settled in his gaze.

“The first time I played the Tempest was after meeting Sio at university. As I mentioned, I had been thinking of quitting piano at the time.”

Astaire had heard Sio’s music, felt the limits of his own ability, and tried to leave the piano behind. When I first heard that story, I had assumed the limits he felt were about talent, but the limits the nineteen-year-old Astaire had faced were something more fundamental. Something that could be called, in a word, what we name a sound or a tone.

“Whether it was despair or envy, I still don’t know. I simply surrendered to the churning emotions and struck the keys. That was when I found my sound for the first time.”

“So emotion is sound?”

“It goes deeper than that. You have to look closely at the emotion. Where does this emotion that rules me come from, and how far can it carry me.”

Astaire said this with a bitter smile.

“Making music takes more courage than people expect. You can’t find your own sound without looking at the very bottom of yourself. So only those who truly want it can find their sound. The fact that Miss Danyu doesn’t know her own sound means, in the end, that she has never once looked inside herself. I was the same until I was nineteen. That’s why seeing Miss Danyu reminds me of myself back then. I had defined the sound I possessed as the limit of what I could do, and never thought to go further.”

The Astaire the Tempest revealed was an unfinished thing sinking into desolation. I found myself wondering what had truly been at the bottom Astaire said he had seen. And what lay at the depths of my own self, stirring quietly beneath the surface. At the very floor of the deep, what would show its face there, an angel or a demon. A fine trembling moved through me.

“People see a musician’s emotions through music, and beyond that, their life. What is Miss Danyu’s music? Do you have the courage to show yourself to people, wholly and without reserve?”

Astaire told me that to find my sound, I had to open a door. That door was an enormous, heavy iron door. Some people’s doors had no lock, but some had dozens of locks hanging from them.

When I drew close and looked at my own door, it held more locks than I could count. The keys were the life I had lived, and no one but me could know where my keys were. What kind of person was I, truly. That fundamental question circled through my mind.

I sat down at the piano and pressed the keys without direction. Seydel’s eighth sonata. But what reached my ears was not my own sound. Only the sound of Sio the first time I heard him, only the startling sound of Astaire, rang out through the whole world.