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But my feet are already carrying me toward a stall half-hidden between two stone buildings, shadow cutting across sunlight in one long dark slice. It doesn’t look like the other market stalls. It looks older. Quieter. Like it was there first.

It looks like a secret.

Ma follows my gaze. "Don’t wander," she says, though her attention is already elsewhere. "If you’re looking, stay where I can see you. Sola, don’t let your brother out of sight."

“Never, Ma.” Sola winks at me. “Come on.”

And I happen to love secrets.

A table waits beneath the shade, crowded with things that don’t belong together. Books with split spines. Rolled maps tied in ribbon gone dark with age. Ink boxes. Metal pieces I can’t name. Loose sheets spread over one end of the table, their corners lifting in the breeze.

Then I see the music paper, and my breath catches.

Sola spots it a second later, grinning as she nudges my arm. “Pretty cool, huh?”

Up close, I barely see anything except the music. Torn edges. Water stains. Faded ink. Hand-ruled staves. Strange little marks in the margins that don’t look like lesson notes at all, but something older.

Something that makes me reach for the page.

Then I look up, to where a woman stands behind the table, so still I don’t know how I missed her before. It’s as if she’s been there long enough for the market to move around her.

I know her.

Except I don’t. I only know the feeling that lands inside me like certainty, the same way the bell did.

She doesn’t look like anyone from Düren. Her coat is dark, fitted close through the shoulders and falling nearly to her boots. The cuffs are threaded with a pattern I don’t recognize. Her hair is pinned back, a little loose around her face. She’s already looking at me.

The bell finds me again. And suddenly, I don’t want to be here anymore. We should go. Find Ma. Find Pa. Soon, the horns might blare and then Pa will be called to the Ward, and⁠—

“Are these scores?” Sola asks beside me.

Does she not hear the bells?

The woman glances at her, then back at me. “Some of them,” she murmurs.

“It’s beautiful.” My fingers hover over the sheets, but I don’t touch. Ma says we can’t touch what isn’t ours. Ma also says we need to get inside when the bells ring. “It looks like Noctis notation.”

Sola cuts me a surprised look, but the woman keeps looking at me, as if that was the answer she was waiting for. “Does it now?”

“Master Coren showed me once,” I blurt, my fingers tightening against my own palm. “Just a little. Not a real score. But I know what it looks like. I want to play it one day. We don’t really get the real ones here. Not like the conservatories or the old houses do. Ours is…it’s not the same.”

Still, I can almost feel the weight of the bow in my hand, drawing the first note from the strings. The feeling it gives me when the sound fills my heart.

The woman’s gaze doesn’t leave mine. “But you want the same.”

“Yes,” I admit. “That’s why I practice every day. And when Master Coren lets me stay after, I practice more. One day I’m going to play a real Noctis. I’ll be the best in the entire Reach.”

Next to me, Sola rolls her eyes. “If it were up to him, he’d play all day, every day.”

The woman ignores her. She keeps looking at me for so long that I start wishing I could prove it. Then she reaches across the spread of pages and chooses one from the middle. A corner is missing. Small pencil marks run along the margin, finer than the rest of the notation. I can’t make sense of them. I only know they catch somewhere beneath my ribs.

She holds the page out to me, and I find myself staring first at the paper, then at her hand. “I don’t have any money.”

“I know.” Something shutters behind her eyes. “Dream carefully, little musician, for not every dream survives.”

I frown. “What?”

But she only waits, the page still resting between us.