A/N: This is a follow-up of sorts to my earlier story Scythemaker, though each can be read alone. I hadn't planned on doing a sequel, but here it is.
Waterdancer
Eighty-four steps to the moderato of Le Sacre du Printemps.
Weiss spins on the tip of her feet, one leg raised parallel to the ground in arabesque. Her rapier sweeps in front of her, its tip carving a sliver of white ice. A brisé forward, a coupé backward, a slight pressure on the trigger to change from white to blue – the ice-covered ground erupts in a shower of sapphires, and she flits on the wind, hair streaming behind her as time stops forever in that moment between rise and fall, poised at the apex like a meteor suspended in flight, and while she gracefully lands with an épaulement the same cannot be said for her opponent, lying on the studio floor with frost glinting off his armor and his limbs bound by aquamarine fractals.
"Again," says her dancing instructor.
Her next opponent is quicker, costumed not in platemail but leather armor; he is less the sharp, aggressive steps of ballet and more the fluid tempo of waltz. She bows, and he bows, barely – a ten-degree bend of the waist, all the while his eyes never leaving her face, and his is not the only eyes full of hate. They want her to fail, all the other students, not only because she is richer but also because she is more talented. But what thought spares a sculpture for its viewers? The sum of their resentful gazes hold as much fire as a matchstick held before a glacier.
She holds Myrtenaster before her, and the dance begins.
Her partner wants to lead, but he has no ear for pitch nor instinct for tempo. Weiss hears him as the sharp trill of an overexcited piccolo. A box step into a promenade and a whisk as he sails by. The next few steps are trickier; she turns a chasse into a closed impetus, and he stumbles after her, trying to match her rhythm, but moderato has turned into allegro, and she spins on the ball of her foot, transitioning yet again to a closed telemark as her free hands paints Myrtenaster in an intricate figure eight. The pattern sings, and a field of red flowers bloom in call. He screams as fire consumes him. With another wave of the baton, fire is replaced by water is replaced by steam, and when the white curtain rises Weiss extends one arm behind her and dips her knees in curtsy.
"Again."
Three opponents this time. One dances the quick step of chaconne, another the measured pace of fox-trot, the last an eclectic mix of flamenco and farandole. The music is three clashing orchestras. Weiss sticks to her own beat, shifting from waltz to rigaudon. She sees not the world so much as hears it; plans not so much her movements as feels it. Her feet dance the lively steps of pas de bourrée, darting from point to point as if she is dancing on a forest of pins. All she has to do is evade. By the eighth beat the others are tripping over their own legs. The chaconne tries to lead, but the exotic movements of farandole cannot be lead, and both clash with the swells of foxtrot meandering at its own pace. A sword slams into a shield; a bullet pierces armor; a fireball explodes against unprotected flesh. When the last steps of rigaudon die down, Weiss finds herself, without a single swish of Myrtenaster, standing among the crumpled bodies of her opponents who have fed on each other like wolves.
"Again."
The music cracks like a broken violin string. The sound crescendos as a dozen students enter the stage. Weiss's heartbeat accelerates: allegro to vivace to prestissimo, and as she faces the horde charging at her – their faces bereft of all pretense of grace, their footsteps like war drums – the only thing she sees is the simple movement one-two-three-four-one-two-three-four of the invisible baton that conducts them like puppets. Bracing the point of Myrtenaster against the floor, she skates through the chaos. A bracket turn evades the first swing of the sword. Arching her spine, she lifts one leg backwards in a Biellman spin, circling around a hail of bullets, before dipping her body so low her shoulder almost touches the ground, building up just enough momentum to skirt the edge of the chaos, gliding back and forth, back and forth, almost lazily at times, while Myrtenaster paints red-blue-green-purple-white lines along the floor. She stops. The other students, too, stop, looking at her questioningly, and the silence of the fermata is the most beautiful thing she has ever heard, each second expanding into hours, years, eons, until the melody can no longer be contained and, with a sudden exertion of thought, she drives Myrtenaster into the floor at the nucleus where all lines converge.
The overture: an inferno that explodes outward like an opened palm. A tidal wave condenses from thin air, followed by the high-pitched shriek of a hurricane. Lightning zigzags so brilliantly Weiss closes her eyes and still sees the imprint of their incandescence. The final movement: a rose of ice, its petals devouring the students in cages of white gold, a gallery of statues frozen in various stages of horror, admiration, envy, hatred, fear – and with the final settling of her baton the rose shatters, and the stage is still.
"Again."
The dance instructor rises. To Weiss, it is as surprising as seeing an audience member climb on stage. The instructor has a swan's grace and a swan's high-peaked brow and a swan's white head of hair, and two decades ago, perhaps three, she had a swan's beauty. The instructor's weapon is also a rapier, silk-thin and white as alabaster. More of an artist's sculpture than a weapon. She extends it in salute. En garde. After a moment of hesitation, Weiss does the same.
The music starts.
Their swords begin the opening steps. Myrtenaster flashes forward and out, testing the waters like a new couple in a ballroom. The footwork of fencing is as complex as that of any dance. Weiss shifts her weight from foot to foot, increasing distance, decreasing distance, changing directions, like tracing the lines of a puzzle-knot, and the air becomes a web of silver, too fast for the eye to follow, metal striking metal with the melodic tings of chimes. The scale ascends higher and higher as their weapons fly faster and faster, two octaves, three, four, until the pitch veers towards the edge of hearing and Weiss is unsure if she is wielding Myrtenaster or restraining it, the blade dancing with a life of its own.
The first misstep jars like a gunshot in a sonata. Weiss jumps back. Her hand gingerly touches the cut on her arm.
"Again."
Weiss closes her eyes and remembers grey.
The grey of her father's hair, the grey of her sister's cloak. A sword at her back to drive her forward; a sword before her for her to follow. Which is which, she is unsure. She remembers a life of grey, spent among tutors and lessons and books, wondering, always wondering, whether there is more to the world, and finding it: She remembers the song. The first song, the first dance. Where she hears it she does not remember. What it sounds like she does not remember (and to this day she searches the world for the tune). Like a splash of color on a black-and-white photo. She remembers her first teetering attempts to mimic that beauty, like learning to walk all over again, and her first triumphs, so full of pride, and if she lives ten thousand years she will forever remember that dividing point like a chasm splitting two halves of the world: a world of grey – and afterwards.
Myrtenaster blooms to color in her hand. Weiss lunges forward with a red-hot blade, the air around it shimmering with heat. Her dancing instructor does not even attempt to parry but dodges, countering with a riposte that Weiss hears as a low cello cord. She evades with a cambré, body arched backwards so her opponent's rapier passes over her, and, placing both hands on the floor, she uprights herself with a somersault as the tip of her foot sweeps back in a quarter-circle. Myrtenaster glows green. The sound of violins pulse in her ears, a thousand arpeggios in accelerando as the world slows down to match her tempo. Myrtenaster darts forward as sinuously as a gymnast's ribbon, and though her instructor keeps with the beat as surely as if she has a metronome ticking in her heart, Myrtenaster strikes point twice, three times, cutting loose strands of hair, bone-white, that appear still in the air.
The retardando is immediate. Like being ripped out of time, as the last of the green Dust is spent like wheat under a mill. Weiss jumps back once again, cycling through Myrtenaster's chambers. Red-blue-purple are gone. There is only one last bit of white left. She has used up most of the Dust in the earlier bouts, but endurance, too, is one facet of performance. Her instructor seems to sense her weakness. She advances without pause, stringing moulinet into septime into froissement, and it is all Weiss can do to follow. But cruelly, cruelly. Performance is not sport but art, and, above all else, perfection is not an end but a journey. A dozen pinprick cuts dye Weiss's skin, each a narrow avoidance of greater injury, and she bears it with the patience of a coryphée awaiting her entry call. The virtuoso knows that improvisation cannot be rushed. If it comes, it comes like lightning on a clear day.
Her instructor's tour de force reaches its last act.
The orchestra fades a niente.
The curtains begin to fall.
And through the dimness of pain Weiss sees the first flicker of her own spotlight. She lowers her sword, and becomes still, and bares her heart to the world. Her instructor's response is immediate. The rapier changes direction in midair, and Weiss feels the first hint of metal piercing her skin with the lassitude of a sarabande, a blossoming warmth and wetness. She spinsto the right. The rapier carves a red ribbon from shoulder to shoulder, but Weiss ignores it, bringing up Myrtenaster to meet her instructor's sword with a sound like a million bells harmonized into a single, pure tone. Myrtenaster glows white; the other rapier, too, glows white – and shatters. Before the thousand ice crystals settle on the floor, in the perfect E-sharp of that shattering sustained in the air, Weiss extends Myrtenaster's tip to touch her instructor's throat.
In the silence that follows, Weiss hears thundering applause.