“When you said the music was yours, then…?” She looked at him with wide, questioning eyes.
Here it was. The moment that would lead to his greatest mistake coming to light. He sighed heavily. “I composed it.”
“But I thought you were a captain.”
He laughed mirthlessly. “Like I said—it’s a little different in the human realm than it is here. Composers are not nearly as highly regarded as they are in Faerie. In fact, it’s next to impossible to make any kind of living out of being a musician. Most of us have other jobs that we do to actually make money, and music is reserved as a pastime. I became a sailor and then a captain because that’s what most of the Norditch boys grow up to do.”
She nodded slowly, as if taking her time to absorb information. “But how did your music end up in the crates?”
“Whenever Jem and the Johns and I were home between shipping runs, we would spend the evenings together playing music in the local taverns and in the town square. I would write the pieces while we were out at sea, so we usually had brand new material, which the audiences loved. One evening, I was approached by a gentleman who said he was an agent with Hollander’s Emporium. At the time, Hollander’s was a large store that carried a little bit of everything, and the man said that they were wanting to break into the music business. He said that he had heard my compositions before, and he thought that they would sell well. I was elated, of course—the idea of being able to make a living as a musician had only been an unlikely dream before that.
“However, the agent said that before they would publish me, he wanted to take a sample of my work back to his superior. Like a fool, I handed over copies of nearly everything I ever wrote. A few weeks later, he wrote back and said that Hollander’s was definitely interested in publishing my music, but that first he had an investor who wanted to hear a live performance. I convinced Jem and the rest of the crew that this was going to be our big break, and that we should cancel our shipping run in favor of meeting with this investor.”
He closed his eyes against the shame that followed. “As it turned out, that investor was here in Faerie. When we started giving a concert of our music, we realized what exactly it could do here, so I backed out of the deal. Unfortunately, Hollander’s kept all of my music, and they have been publishing and sending it through the breach for years now.”
Sienna’s eyes were thoughtful and sad as she studied him. They both had long since abandoned any pretense of completing the Midwinter decorations, and Casper’s hands sat idly twitching in his lap.
“That’s why you’ve been chasing the smugglers,” she surmised. “Because you feel responsible that it’s your music they’re bringing through. But why not go after them in your own realm?”
“Because there it would just be my word against Hollander’s. Besides, over there the music has no power—not like it does here.”
He purposefully left out the part where he and his crew had been cursed to wander the Winter seas, and the part where he was the legend known as the Flying Dutchman. She had taken all of this news shockingly well so far, but he felt certain that even her equanimity would falter at the knowledge that she was essentially betrothed to a ghost.
Jem would say he was perpetuating miscommunication.
He argued that it was just communicating subjectively.
More silence followed. Finally, Sienna shifted forward in her seat and started working on the evergreen again. “Well, for what it’s worth,” she said, looking up at him with a sweet smile, “I think it is an honor to be engaged to a composer whose work is so well-received that it has spurred illegal trade across the realms.” She thought for a moment, then added with a wink, “For a week.”
The smile had been enough to make his heart ache with longing, quite against his best intentions.
But the wink.
The wink had done him in.
“How many more of these do we have to make?” Casper shoved his needle through a cranberry, barely missing his thumb. He added two more before sliding them down the string to meet the others. Already a half dozen red garlands lay coiled at his feet. At least this was an activity that could be done in the comfort of the cushioned chairs by the fire, rather than the hard kitchen chairs at the table. His back still ached from the hours of sitting and tying that they had put in the day before, and he was fairly certain the smell of evergreen would ever be under his fingernails.
Sienna looked up from her own garland. She had tucked her legs up into her chair so that she sat cross-legged and balanced her bowl of cranberries in her lap. “Enough to make Devri happy.”
“And how many is that?”
“She didn’t say. But I gathered from the way she shoved the bag of cranberries into my hands and said, ‘Use these,’ that she wants us to use them all up.”
Casper eyed the still mostly-full bowl beside him. “I didn’t realize when I agreed to this that we would spend almost two days doing arts and crafts.”
She regarded him curiously. He was coming to both adore and hate that expression—it meant that she had grasped hold ofsomething and was coming with her innocent question and blue-eyed smiles to peel back the layers hiding him. It thrilled him that she found him interesting enough to desire to know more.
But he also knew that the more she uncovered, the sooner she would realize that he was completely undeserving of her attention and affection.
“It was my understanding that all of these decorations are human Midwinter traditions. Are these not common activities in your realm?”
“Oh, they are. I just have never been this involved in making this many of them. Not even Short John’s family had this many decorations, and they were the most excited about Midwinter of the bunch.”
Sienna chuckled. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that—what’s the story behind Short John and Longest John?”
“It’s pretty self-explanatory. Short John is the smallest one, and Longest John is the tallest.”
“But why Longest? Why not Short John and Long John? Or Tall John?”
