Free Songmaster by Orson Scott Card Page B

Ansset said.
    “Is the ban lifted?”
    Ansset again looked at them in silence.
    “Oh,” said Rruk. “I’m sorry.” Her voice told how sorry.
    It was then that Ller noticed that Ansset’s blankets were rolled together.
    “Are you leaving?” Ller asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Where?” Ller insisted.
    Ansset went to the blanket, picked it up, and came back to the door. “The High Room,” he said. Then he walked by them and headed down the corridor.
    “To live there?” Ller asked.
    Ansset did not answer.

 

15

     
    “This was not a job for a seeker,” the seeker said. “I know,” Esste answered, and she sang him an apology that pleaded the necessity of the work.
    Mollified, the seeker made his report. “I spent the income from a decade of singers getting into the secret files of the child market. Doblay-Me is a simple place to do business. If you have enough money and know whom to give it to, you can accomplish anything.”
    “You found?”
    “Ansset was kidnapped. His parents are very much alive, would pay almost anything to get him back. And when he was taken, he was old enough to know his parents. To know they didn’t want him to go. Stolen from them at a theatre. The kidnapper I talked to is now a petty government official. Taxes or something. I had to hire some known killers in order to scare him into talking to me. Very unpleasant business. I haven’t been able to sing in weeks.”
    “His parents?”
    “Very rich. The mother a very loving woman. The father—his songs are more ambiguous. I’m not a great judge of adults, you know that. I haven’t needed to be. But I had the feeling there were guilts in him that he was afraid of. Perhaps he could have done more to get Ansset back. Or perhaps the guilts are for other things entirely. Completely unrelated. According to the law, now that you and I know this, it’s a capital offense not to give the boy back.”
    Esste looked at him, sang a few notes, and both of them laughed. “I know,” the seeker said. “Once in the Songhouse, you have no parents, you have no family.”
    “The parents don’t suspect?”
    “To them their little boy is Byrwyn. I told them that the psychotic child in our hospital on Murrain had the wrong blood type to be their son.”
    A knock on the door.
    “Who?”
    “Ansset,” came the answer.
    “May I see him?” the seeker said.
    “You may see him. But don’t speak to him. And when you leave, bar the door from the other side. Tell the Blind that I’ll be taking my meals through the machines. No one is to come up. Messages through the computer.”
    The seeker was puzzled. “Why the isolation?”
    “I am preparing Mikal’s Songbird,” Esste said.
    Then she arose and went to the door and opened it. Ansset came in, holding his blanket roll unconcernedly. He looked at the seeker without curiosity. The seeker looked at him, too, but not so unemotionally. Two years of tracing Ansset’s past had given the boy unusual importance in the seeker’s eyes. But as the seeker watched, and saw the emptiness of Ansset’s face, he let himself show grief, and he sang his mourning to Esste, briefly. She had told him not to speak. But some things could not. Should not go unsaid.
    The seeker left. The bar dropped into place on the other side of the door. Ansset and Esste were alone.
    Ansset stood before Esste for a long time, waiting. But this time Esste had nothing to say. She simply looked at him, her face as blank as his, though because of age some expression was permanently inscribed there and she could not look as empty of personality as he. The wait seemed interminable to Esste. The boy’s patience was greater than most adults’. But it broke, eventually. Still silent, Ansset went to the stone bench beside one of the locked shutters and sat down.
    First victory.
    Esste was able, now, to go to the table and work. Papers came from the computer, she wrote by hand notes to herself; wrote by keys messages into the computer. As she