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The firelight danced across the worn countertop of an inn in Imre, its swirling woodgrain patterns catching my eye as I waited for my tea to cool. It wasn’t Anker’s, where I usually played, but another place just off the main square—quieter, with fewer interruptions and less chance of running into Ambrose or his ilk.
I had come here to think, or perhaps to brood. Tuition loomed, my studies in Sympathy had stalled, and Denna’s frequent disappearances gnawed at my thoughts. Yet here I was, tracing patterns in the woodgrain like they might hold the answers to all my troubles.
I wasn’t surprised when she appeared. Denna always had a way of finding me, whether by chance or design.
She stepped through the door as if she belonged there, her twilight-colored dress catching the warm glow of the hearth. A silver pendant hung at her throat, a spiral, elegant and simple. She moved with unhurried grace, and when her eyes found mine, she smiled. It was the kind of smile that could make you forget the rest of the room existed.
“You’re brooding again,” she said, sliding onto the stool beside me. Her tone was playful, but her eyes carried that piercing quality of hers, the one that could strip a man down to his most honest self.
“Brooding? Never,” I said, feigning offense. “I’m a musician. I was merely contemplating the beauty of this fine countertop.”
She smiled, a small thing, but it felt like earning a rare coin. “Patterns,” she said, glancing at the counter. “Everywhere if you care to see them. Some natural, some man-made. All of them telling stories.”
“Patterns are overrated,” I said lightly. “They’re just order pretending to be wisdom.”
Denna leaned closer, and the faint scent of lavender reached me. “You don’t believe that,” she said softly. “You live for patterns. You see them in everything—music, magic, people.”
I shrugged, because she was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. “And you? What patterns do you see?”
Her eyes flicked to the firelight, dancing across the walls. “That’s the trick of it,” she said. “The patterns I see don’t make sense to anyone else. Maybe not even to me.”
I wanted to press her, to dig into her words the way I would unravel a melody, but I knew better. Denna was a tapestry of her own making, her threads twisted and turned in ways that defied the clumsy attempts of others to untangle them. She offered her truths sparingly, in fragments meant to confound more than reveal.
“Play me something,” she said, gesturing to my lute.
“I was just about to suggest the same,” I said, though I wasn’t. Still, I reached for my instrument and began tuning it, the familiar patterns of the strings grounding me.
“What should I play?” I asked.
“Something about patterns,” she said, her smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
I began with a simple progression, a repeating structure that spiraled outward like the swirl of her pendant. The melody grew more intricate as I played, the patterns layering on top of one another. It was a song that hadn’t existed a moment ago, but it felt as if it had always been waiting, hidden in the strings and the spaces between them.
Denna listened, her head tilted as if she could see the notes in the air. For a moment, I thought she might speak, but she didn’t. Instead, she hummed a counterpoint to my melody, her voice weaving through the music like a silver thread in dark cloth.
Her hum faded as my song came to rest, but her eyes lingered on mine. For a moment, I thought I glimpsed something hidden beneath the surface—sadness, or perhaps understanding. But it was gone too quickly to name.
“That was lovely,” she said. Her voice was soft, her eyes distant. “But do you know the problem with patterns?”
I shook my head. “You’ll tell me, I hope.”
“They make us think we understand things we don’t,” she said. “We see a spiral and think it’s infinite, but it’s just a trick of perspective. Patterns can lie.”
I wanted to argue, to say that patterns were truth, that they were the language of the world. But looking at her, I understood that she wasn’t talking about music or magic or woodgrain.
She was talking about herself.
And perhaps she was right. But even so, I couldn’t help but try to see the pattern in her, no matter how many times it eluded me.
Denna stood, her movements as fluid as a tide receding. “Thank you for the song,” she said. “You almost made me believe in patterns again.”
She left the way she always did—without warning, without a pattern. She was right, of course. Patterns could lie. But maybe that was their magic too. The way they gave us something to hold on to, even when the truth slipped through our fingers. And Denna... she was the most intricate pattern of all.