““Welkley came with four fiddles after dinner, two hanging from the fingers of each hand. Astonishing fiddles, nothing modest about them, smelling wonderfully of wood and varnish and gleaming brown, orange, vermilion. They were the best he’d been able to find in such a short time, Welkley explained. She was to choose one of the four, as a gift from the royal family. Fire thought she could guess which member of the royal family had spared a minute amidst his preoccupations to order a roundup of the city’s finest fiddles, and again she found herself uncomfortably close to tears. She took the instruments from the steward one by one, each more beautiful than the last. Welkley waited patiently while she played them, testing their feeling against her neck, the sharpness of the strings on her fingertips, the depth of their sound. There was one she kept reaching for, with a copper-red varnish, and a clarity like the point of a star, precise and lonesome, reminding her, somehow, of home. This one, she thought to herself. This is the one. Its only flaw, she told Welkley, was that it was too good for her skill.””
