The instrument was old-fashioned in design and modern in manufacture, a compact keyed string instrument occupying the space between desk and piano, its mechanisms exposed beneath one raised panel because Yira had apparently been adjusting something herself.
Yira leaned over a sheet of manuscript paper.
Her fur was deep russet, somewhat darker than Kimia’s. Her hair had been tied back badly and was coming loose. One ear remained flattened in concentration.
She wrote three marks, then played the phrase.
Stopped. Crossed one out, then played again.
The room looked as though music had exploded in it.
Dirty dishes occupied the window ledge. A fork rested atop a stack of notation paper. Three cups, one containing something dried at the bottom. Bundles of manuscript paper lay everywhere. Some tied with string. Others rolled. Several had been crushed into balls and thrown unsuccessfully toward a wastebasket already overflowing.
A small string instrument Kimia did not recognize leaned against the wall. A reed instrument lay disassembled across a chair. Books. Magnetic cores. Pencils. An ashtray containing no ash but several broken nibs. A computer terminal in the corner of the room with an microphone and other devices connected to it, the microphone surrounded by an improvised recording environment made with blankets and pieces of furniture.
Yira herself wore loose house clothes and no shoes.
She looked recently awake.
Kimia remained outside.
She had raised Yira as she had raised all of them, as well as she knew how.
Etiquette. History. Numbers. Languages. Court. The obligations of House Chityala.
Some of her children had wanted those things.
Titles. Administrative positions. Military commands. Marriage arrangements entered willingly enough because they strengthened families already connected by interest.
Yira had wanted none of it.
She wrote music.
For theaters. Televox productions. Private patrons. Films.
She advertised when the money was good enough.
Occasionally, she did orchestral commissions for numerous clients that were respectable enough. Newspapers mentioned her lineage, which annoyed her.
She lived unmarried.
Not lonely, as far as Kimia could determine.
A bachelorette's life, something that centuries ago would have been made exceedingly difficult by numbers alone.
The old yinglet sex ratio had not survived modernity intact.
Medicine had helped. Intentional demographic policies and genetic initiatives had helped more. Slow manipulation across generations had taken the old imbalance and reduced it until being born female no longer meant having an entire social order waiting to arrange itself around one’s fertility.
The instincts remained. They always did.
Male yinglets still possessed that old pull toward matriarchal protection.
Watch. Guard. Stay close.
The impulse had become quieter beneath education, law, and eight centuries of people teaching themselves not to confuse instinct with obligation, but it never vanished.
Kimia had seen it in her sons or specific members of her personal guard.
Little reflexes. Positions taken in rooms. Attention shifting when her voice changed. Old biology wearing modern clothes.
Yira had escaped a different thing.
Expectation.
She did not need to be anyone’s matriarch. She did not need to inherit. She did not need to rule.
She could spend an evening furious because four notes would not behave.
Kimia envied her.
The feeling arrived without bitterness.
That made it worse.
Yira played the phrase again.
This time it worked.
She froze, then immediately scribbled it down before it could escape.
Kimia smiled.
She did not enter.
She could have.
Yira would have welcomed her.
Probably.
But Kimia did not want the room to become a room containing a duchess.
It belonged to a composer who had forgotten dinner plates existed.
She continued down the corridor.
The music followed for several seconds, then stopped and started again.
Somewhere around the next corner came the quiet mechanical click of the indrel’s mask.
Kimia turned.
The bodyguard approached.
Alone now.
Vehm had presumably reached bed alive.
Kimia waited.
“Delivered?”
The indrel stopped. Its head moved once.
“Yes,” Kimia interpreted.
Click.
“Good.”
It resumed its place behind her. One of her shadows restored.
Kimia considered her chamber.
No.
Not yet.
There was too much night left. Too much bed. Too much vice.
She needed something that could occupy the mind without demanding anything important from it.
The televox archive.
That would do.
The palace maintained several archives, most of them created because House Chityala possessed an institutional quirk of forgetting anything it had paid to record.