Each of us lost in our own thoughts, we walked to Danyu’s room in silence. Even the awkward quiet was not enough to disturb the separate currents of our minds. Had Danyu not been pacing anxiously in front of her door and pushed the two of us inside, that silence might have gone on forever.

“Tell me. What happened to that hand?”

The moment we stepped in, Danyu turned on Sio. Her face was flushed red with agitation, and she pulled his right hand out of his pocket, but Sio, the one it concerned most, shook her off with an easy motion and waved his hand.

“As you can see, it’s fine. Ordinary day-to-day things are no problem.”

“That means……”

“Playing the piano is another matter. They say it’s best not to push it. Otherwise the pain comes back.”

The casual way he said it made both Danyu and me go wide-eyed with shock. There was still something wrong with Sio’s hand. Even after Danyu had handed over the key she had won at the Jubilion and given him the chance. 

Whether his hand was a problem so severe that even a god could not resolve it, or whether he had simply never gone to meet the god at all, there was no way to know, but the reason was beside the point. All that mattered was the fact that he would never play the piano again.

“I gave you the key! You didn’t go to meet the god?”

“I went. Only the god was not a physician.”

“But the god knows all things, so anything you wish for……”

Danyu trailed off in a small murmur and clutched her skirt. If even going to a god had been of no use, it meant there was truly no way to heal his hand. Danyu’s face crumpled as though she were about to cry. Her eyes, fixed on nothing but Sio’s lips, looked ready to spill tears at any moment.

“I didn’t ask for my hand to be healed. Instead, I said I wanted to keep my music. That without my music I could no longer go on living. So I asked that it not be taken from me.”

Sio said it in his usual unhurried way and moved slowly toward the window. Standing there in the light, his face was terribly pale. His already thin face had grown thinner still, his jaw sharper, and the roughly unshaven stubble stood out plainly in the sunlight. And yet Sio Lieselotte was smiling, with that gaunt face.

“The god said this: that my music would never leave me, not now, not in the future. So I asked how that could be, with my hand the way it is. And the god said that the hand is only a tool, and that the essence lies elsewhere.”

“The essence.”

I repeated his words without meaning to, and Sio, who had been looking out the window, turned his gaze to me.

“That’s right. The essence. It means I had been thinking in a very foolish way. Music is not the piano. What an idiot.”

The self-deprecation was plain in the face that met mine. The smile that filled his expression was nothing other than mockery directed at himself. And yet his eyes held a certainty as he looked at me. Perhaps it meant that while regret over the past remained, he had found his footing for the future ahead.

Sio’s gaze moved past me and came to rest on Danyu. He looked at her the way he had looked at me, but for longer, and then bit down hard on his lip. A strange stirring of emotion. But it did not last.

He returned to his usual easy smile, as though nothing had happened, and moved toward the table in the center of the room. Standing before it, Sio began pulling out crumpled, carelessly folded sheets of paper from his coat pocket one by one.

The small table could not hold all the papers he produced. Several that could not find a place slipped to the floor, but Sio did not stop. Caught off guard by his sudden actions, we could only stand and watch what he was doing.

“I would like the two of you to perform these. You two are about the only people in the capital who could do them justice.”

When the papers on the floor and those on the table had grown to roughly equal numbers, Sio smiled and spoke. Before the meaning of his words had even registered, he added an explanation.

“I spent two months traveling through various parts of the kingdom and wrote some pieces. More precisely, I didn’t write them. I simply found the sounds that existed in the world and set them down on paper.”

“Some pieces? This many, in only two months.”

Danyu’s stunned voice rang in my ears. She had already slipped past me and crouched down before the table, unfolding the papers that had fallen to the floor. Every sheet she opened was filled with five clumsily drawn lines and the notes crowded across them. Danyu’s hands, which had been unfolding sheet after sheet, went still. Her face held a wonder she could not conceal.

“I can picture a coastal scene. Blazing sunlight, the sound of a ship’s horn, people full of life.”

Danyu slowly closed her eyes and began to hum the notes written on the page. Sio smiled and tapped his foot lightly in time with the melody.

“Ah. That’s the piece I wrote when I stopped at a port city in the south. I haven’t given it a title yet.”

“What about Waves?”

“Not bad.”

I walked between the two of them, absorbed in the music, and picked up one of the papers from the table. I unfolded it carefully. Like the sheets Danyu had opened, it was covered in notes. I played the music quietly in my mind. With each note that spread through me in stillness, my heart began to beat faster.

This was a form of music that had never existed before. Since Seydel Keller had established the foundations of music, every musician had written and performed within his principles. Not one person had ever stepped outside that framework. Because everyone believed it was the right way, the only way to speak in sound.

And yet this music.

“Astaire. Do you remember? Taking harmony theory together.”

Sio placed a hand on my shoulder as I stood in shock. His words brought back the memory of Sio in that harmony theory class, long ago. How could I ever forget that day? An immortal genius. Someone like you, who would not come again in a thousand years.

“Yes. It was only a single day.”

“That’s right. It was.”

I had barely managed to answer in a strained voice when a quiet laugh came from his lips. Sio dropped his gaze for a moment, as though turning that time over in his memory, and then slowly began to speak. His quiet, measured voice reached my ears with surprising clarity.

“The truth is, I often thought about The Sun you played that day. How you could move through the notes with such freedom. Whether people who grew up in a bright world could carry themselves with that kind of ease. I was too busy just keeping up with the world I had been given, and all I could do was faithfully reproduce what was on the page. I think there was a strange sort of jealousy in me from that point on. The same was true of the moment I first saw Danyu.”

I assumed he was about to boast of his own genius, but the words that came from Sio’s lips were nothing I had expected. Jealousy. Sio Lieselotte had been jealous of me? I was so stunned I could not find words, and my mouth opened and closed without sound.

“What are you talking about? What you reproduced wasn’t the score. It was the emotions of the musicians who lived in the past. I, and everyone else……”

My mind had seized up and the words would not come. He had not been a mere imitator. What he had expressed was not a score but the musicians buried by time, the sensibility of an era that had grown faint in the margins of history and been lost to us. I had been nothing more than an ordinary person who had dared to want the sound of someone like him. And yet why was he speaking of my music?

“What matters most to a person is not the past but the present, or the future. And yet until now, I had never once made music of this very moment. I had only ever chased after the past of others. I myself had been trapped within a limit. Absurdly enough, I only realized that after I gave up the piano.”

Sio gave me a quiet smile as I stood at a loss and chose to say nothing, then turned his gaze back to the window. What lay at the end of his gaze, I could not tell. Only a strange premonition resonated in my chest, that he was about to leave for somewhere very far away, somewhere now truly beyond my reach.

“From now on, I will make my own music. I will leave my language in this world, a language that will remain in history forever, and in doing so become a truly singular musician. So in a way, these pieces are my declaration of war against the two of you. Let’s see you perform them properly.”

Sio plucked the sheet music from my hand and gave it a light wave in front of me. The notes written across the page swirled into my mind in a rush.