With the help of a servant who had been waiting for her, she returned home and spent the next three days bedridden, unable to move her arms for five days after that. It took another two weeks before she could sit at the piano and play again. After a few days of rest her hands moved without trouble, but her mother came running in a panic every time she sat down at the piano, and so she was unable to play for quite some time because of that.

For that reason, she had to spend two rather tedious weeks without the piano. That the loss of piano from her daily life alone could make each day feel this empty was, the more she thought about it, genuinely surprising. There had been a time when she had been jealous of the piano that occupied most of Sio’s mind. Perhaps even more so than the lovers who had stood beside him.

Her mother, seeing her at a loss from the boredom, held out a very thick book. She took it and skimmed through it briefly. It was a book about the life of Seydel, the composer of the eighth sonata.

“Astaire left this for you to have.”

“Mr. Astaire came by? He just dropped off the book and left?”

She asked in surprise, and her mother looked at her with an unreadable expression and let out a small laugh.

“He came while you were ill. I forgot all about it in the chaos and only just remembered to give it to you now. Are you that disappointed you didn’t get to see him?”

“That’s not it. I just thought it was strange that he came all this way and didn’t give it to me himself.”

She mumbled a reply and slipped away from her mother’s teasing words. Her mother’s laughter followed her from behind, but she did her best to ignore it. She walked quickly to her room, threw herself onto the bed, and let out a faint sigh. The weight of the book in her hand felt oddly burdensome.

After leaving Sio’s house that way, Astaire had vanished without a trace. She could understand him not coming to the house when her condition made lessons impossible, but she couldn’t make sense of him not even replying to her letters. She had thought that in their short time together they had shared many conversations and gone through many things side by side, but perhaps none of that time had meant anything to Astaire. She shook her head trying to shake off the inexplicable sadness that crept in, but her mind remained tangled.

She rolled around on the bed groaning with frustration, and her gaze eventually landed on the book. Her head was too cluttered for the words to sink in, but it was something Astaire had left for her, so she figured she would at least try to read it.

On the very first page of the book was a portrait of Seydel. Unlike the portraits of most musicians, which depicted them in old age, the Seydel in the painting was a young man. Only then did she recall that Seydel had died at a very young age and was known as a tragic genius.

Seydel Keller. He was the history of the kingdom itself, the very origin of music. Some revered him as a god, while others pointed fingers and said he had sold his soul to the devil. A sound that bewitched people. Seydel had the ability to create such a sound. Whether he was god or devil remained unknown, but in any case, he was the person among all those who walked the earth who stood closest to the heavens.

By contrast, Seydel’s origins were entirely ordinary. As was common for people born in the age when gods still walked the land, his father was a farmer. As a child, Seydel spent his days helping his father work the fields. He tilled the soil, sowed seeds, and pulled weeds. The land was not particularly large, but Seydel’s fields always yielded a rich harvest. Even in years when floods or droughts drove the whole village to suffer poor harvests, Seydel’s land alone escaped the blight.

Why is it that only Seydel’s family has such a good harvest? The villagers began to wonder. Perhaps the Seydel family used some special fertilizer, or perhaps there was a secret in the seeds they sowed, or no, maybe the land they held was simply unusually fertile. People put forward several theories, but none of them were true.

One year, after several consecutive years of poor harvests, the villagers’ patience reached its limit. They gathered up all manner of tools and descended on Seydel’s still-abundant fields. Standing before Seydel’s bewildered father, they demanded:

Why is it that your land alone yields such a harvest? What trick have you been using?

Seydel’s father scratched his head in considerable distress. In truth, there was nothing special about his household at all. He tilled the soil, sowed seeds, and pulled weeds, just like everyone else. The only difference, if there was one, was his son Seydel’s strange habit. Once a day, his son would wander through the fields murmuring words that he himself could make no sense of whatsoever. Whenever his son completed one such circuit of the fields, the crops seemed somehow to come alive with vigor.

The villagers gathered in small groups and decided to watch what Seydel did. Seydel wandered through the fields at an unhurried pace, his lips moving naturally. What flowed from his lips at that moment was music. His words carried rhythm and melody, and it was none other than the language used exclusively by the gods.

The people stood transfixed by the sound flowing from Seydel’s lips and clutched their chests. Each time sound poured from his mouth, their hearts lurched and then raced in rapid succession. Then one among those who stood there in a daze, drunk on the sound, cried out:

This is the voice of the gods!

Only then did the people realize that Seydel had spoken the language of the gods. From that point on, young Seydel became the center of the village. Every place his music reached brought a bountiful harvest, and people who heard the rumors gathered around him in growing numbers. 

The village became a castle, and the castle became a kingdom. The gods, seeing that someone had appeared to tend the earth in their place, departed serenely into the heavens, but at some point Seydel lost the ability to sing. His throat had been overworked to the point where he could no longer produce the precise notes he once had.

When Seydel could no longer sing, people created instruments. The piano, the violin, the cello, and others. Among all those instruments, Seydel loved the piano most for its ability to produce a wide range of sounds. It was why the majority of the music he left behind was written for piano.

Most of the pieces he left were about confusion and loneliness. It struck her as deeply ironic that Seydel, always surrounded by people, had poured such feelings into his music, but because no one truly understood his music, he was genuinely alone.

Failing to understand something ultimately breeds fear. People held Seydel in awe, yet feared him at the same time. They were always on guard, wondering what language might be hidden within his music, music they could not comprehend. Every time Seydel saw their wary eyes, he shuddered with a loneliness that cut him to the bone.

As time passed, Seydel lost his mind to his own sound and to the eyes of the people around him. The fact that he stood utterly alone in the world drove him to madness. Why could people not understand the screams buried within his music? He was crying out like this. Suffering this much.

Unable to bear it any longer, Seydel chose to bring a blade down on his own right hand and make himself crippled. He believed that if he severed music from himself, he would no longer have to be alone. But people still sought music from him. Even though they did not know what he was trying to say.

Seydel had a handful of students. They awakened to sound, but in the end they never understood Seydel’s language. Unable to find understanding even from the students he had taught himself, Seydel ultimately could not endure the loneliness and took his own life by hanging himself at the piano. He was only twenty-nine years old. The end of the man who had possessed the sound closest to the gods was profoundly wretched.

The closer she drew to the end of his life, the slower her hand moved turning the pages. Something hovered just out of reach, and the feeling sat heavy in her chest. She pushed past the tightness and barely reached the final page when a small slip of paper fell out. Neat handwriting. It was Astaire’s hand. She startled and picked up the paper that had fallen onto the bed.

Miss Danyu. I have lost our bet. The prize is already in your hands.

She furrowed her brow at the words she couldn’t make sense of. Winning the Jubilion. That had been the condition for victory. There was still some time before the Jubilion, and the bet had not even properly begun. So why had Astaire left a note like this? And what did he mean that the prize was already in her hands? She read the note over and over in confusion, but found no answer.

She sent a letter to Astaire right away, but no reply came even after a long while. She eventually went to his house out of sheer frustration, only to hear from a neighbor that no one had been there for quite some time. She trudged home with nothing to show for it, and there, waiting for her, was a piece of surprising news.

“What is this?”