The notice went up on the public boards throughout Oakhaven on a Tuesday.

Valerius saw it on his way to the cathedral — passed a cluster of people gathered around the posting board near the Academy gates and would have continued past without stopping if he had not caught, in the edge of his peripheral vision, the gold and silver insignia of the Royal Household at the top of the sheet. He stopped. He read it.

The announcement was formal, as all Royal announcements were: dense with the specific vocabulary of official ceremony, titles compounding titles, the dry machinery of court language producing a text that required a trained eye to read quickly. He read it quickly.

The Oakhaven Royal Court, in recognition of the upcoming season of festivals, was hosting an open selection competition for the entertainment program of the Spring Solstice Celebration, the most attended event in the city calendar. Applications were invited from all registered performance artists in the city. The evaluation panel would include members of the Royal Household, the Academy directorship, and select members of the public noble class. The deadline for application was fourteen days hence.

And at the bottom of the notice, in the careful bureaucratic language of an institution that wanted to be perceived as generous: the competition welcomes collaborative applications from artists of multiple disciplines, including but not limited to music, dance, and Cadence performance. Collaborative entries will be evaluated as a unified work.

He stood at the board for a moment longer than he needed to. Then he continued to the cathedral.

She already knew.

Of course she already knew. He could tell from the way she was moving when he arrived — a different quality to her warming sequence, more directed, less contemplative. She was already thinking about the competition program, already constructing the structure of a performance in the movements of her preparation.

She glanced at him when he came in. You saw the board.

Outside the Academy.

There are twelve of them distributed around the city, she said. I checked.

He set down the violin case and looked at her. She had been in conversation with him every day for eleven days now, and he had developed a reasonable read on her baseline — the performing version and the quieter version and the places where one bled into the other. Today she was entirely the performing version, which told him she had decided something.

No, he said.

You have not heard what I am going to say.

I have heard it, he said. I heard it eleven days ago when you proposed the original arrangement, which has not materially changed. You want to enter the competition. You want me to accompany you. The competition provides a public context for you to be seen by Caelum Sterling, who will be there in some capacity given his position in the Royal Household Guard. He paused. I am not ready.

You were not ready eleven days ago and you played for an hour yesterday, she said. Readiness is not a stable state. It does not just arrive and stay.

I am not ready for this particular context. He was precise about it because he had been thinking about it on the walk over, trying to articulate what was true rather than what was convenient to say. A Royal selection competition is not a rehearsal space. It is not even a public performance in the ordinary sense. The evaluation is formal, the judges are experts, the stakes are institutional, and my current situation is known to at least three members of the Academy directorship who are likely to be on the panel. It will not be possible for me to attend without my return to performance being treated as a public event, with all the observation and commentary that implies.

He stopped. Aurelia had continued her warming sequence through the entirety of this speech, and was now standing in the near-stillness that preceded her opening phrase, looking at him with her head tilted at the angle she used when she was considering how to answer something.

You are afraid of being watched, she said.

I am describing a logistical complication.

You are afraid, she said again, not unkindly. Of playing in public after six months and having people see whether you can do it or not. Of the judges who know you and will be comparing what they see to what they remember. Of what it means if you go out there and it is not good enough. She paused. Those are all legitimate fears. They are also completely beside the point.

How are they beside the point?

Because we are not trying to win. She moved through the opening phrase of her sequence as she said it, the cherry trees responding in their usual gradual way. I have been telling you this from the beginning and you keep hearing it as false modesty. It is not false modesty. I genuinely do not need to win this competition. I need to be seen in it. There is a specific person who will be watching. He will see me, and he will see the person I am performing with, and that is the entire extent of the outcome I am invested in. The judges' opinions of our technical merit are not irrelevant, but secondary.

They are not secondary to me.

I know, she said. That is also beside the point. You do not have to care what the judges think for us to enter. You just have to show up.

He looked at her.

She was moving through the middle of her sequence now, the transitions clean and the weight distribution corrected from the first week, the heel plant problem resolved — or almost resolved; there was still a tendency on the fourth repetition to revert to the old habit under fatigue, which they had not yet fully addressed. He noted this automatically, the part of him that could not stop analyzing what he was watching filing it for later.

Why me? he asked. It was not the first time he had asked this. He asked it differently this time — not the rhetorical version, the deflection he had used at the beginning. An actual question.

She stopped.

Not at the end of a phrase, not at a natural resting point. She stopped mid-movement, which she almost never did, and looked at him directly.

Because I heard you play the Solstice Concert two years ago, she said. I was in the back of the hall with a standing ticket, I had been in Oakhaven for less than a week, and I did not know anyone and I did not know the city and I was — a brief pause, then: I was having a difficult time. And you played the second movement of the Ardenvale Concerto and I stood in the back of that hall and cried because I had not cried in months and I needed to, and your music was the thing that opened it.

He was very still.

I came to you specifically, she said, because of that. Not because of your name, not because of your reputation. Because I know what your playing does to people when you mean it, and I know what I am asking you to come back to, and I thought — if I can be the reason you mean it again, even once, then that is worth something.

She turned back to her sequence without waiting for his response, which was correct — she had said the true thing and she was leaving him room to do with it whatever he needed to do.

Valerius stood for a moment in the quiet of the cathedral.

He thought about two years ago. He had played the Ardenvale Concerto's second movement with a specific intention in it — he had lost a classmate that year, one of the Academy's brightest junior students, to a sudden illness, and he had played the second movement the way his mother had told him never to play: with everything visible, nothing held back, all the grief and its companion, the gratitude for having known the person at all, present in every phrase. He had not known, standing at the front of the concert hall with Aetheris at his chin, that there was a girl standing in the back with a standing ticket who was having a difficult time.

He thought about what she had said: I needed to, and your music was the thing that opened it.

This was, he realized, the most honest thing she had ever said to him. And it had landed differently than the earlier honesty — you looked like you needed company even if you do not want it, you need a reason and I am a reason — which had been honest in the way of someone who was honest as a strategy. This was honest the way accidents are honest: because she had not been able to help it.

He went to the violin case. Opened it. Picked up Aetheris and the bow and rosined the hair with the care of someone who is giving himself a moment to make a decision.

Two weeks, he said, is not enough time.

She was still moving, facing away from him. For what?

To prepare a performance that meets the standard the Academy judges will apply. My Resonance sensitivity is still diminished. The arrangement we have been working with has three sections that I am not satisfied with. Your footwork on the fourth repetition of the middle phrase reverts under fatigue and we have not resolved it.

A pause in her movement. Not a stop — a slight change of quality, as if she were listening more carefully.

Those are true things, she said.

They are also the requirements for entering, he said, if we are going to enter. We would need to run full-length rehearsals every day. I would need the arrangement complete within four days. The footwork correction needs to be drilled until it holds under fatigue, which means you will need to practice it separately in the mornings before our sessions.

Another pause.

Those are conditions, she said, not quite a question.

Those are the conditions, he confirmed. The application also needs to be filed within three days or the best time slots go to early registrants. Collaborative applications need the full names of all performers and a brief description of the proposed work.

She had stopped moving entirely now. She turned to face him, and he could see her reading him — the careful, total-attention reading she applied to things she considered important — and then something shifted in her face. Not the big smile. Something smaller and more genuine than that, surprised out of her, and she looked briefly like the girl who had been in the back of the concert hall two years ago with a standing ticket, before she put the performance back in place.

I will practice the footwork every morning, she said. Six o'clock. The cathedral will be empty.

Good.

You will have the revised arrangement to me in four days?

Three, he said. Four is too close to the margin.

She crossed the nave toward the wall where she kept her things — a worn bag, a water flask, a small notebook she had never shown him the contents of — and found what she was looking for: a folded registration form, the official Royal one with the gold seal at the top. She had, he noted, already obtained it.

She came back with it unfolded and held it out to him along with a pen. The form had her information already filled in: Aurelia Thorne, Weave-Dancer, independent, Oakhaven residency three months. His section was blank.

He looked at the blank section for a moment.

He thought about the back of the concert hall. He thought about eight bars, and ten bars, and the three cherry trees responding together, and the warmth in Aetheris's strings that was growing daily. He thought about his mother's voice: not felt. He thought about what it would mean to mean it again.

Sign here, Maestro, she said, and there was something in her voice — the formal title deployed with a precision that made it mean several things at once, none of them quite ironic.

He took the pen. He wrote his name in the blank section with the habitual clarity of someone whose mother had insisted that a signature was itself a performance and therefore required to be legible, and he handed the form back.

She looked at his signature for a moment. Then she folded the form and put it in her bag.

From the beginning, she said, and this time do not stop at bar twelve.

I stopped at bar twelve once, he said.

From the beginning, she said again, and turned to her opening position, and waited.

He raised Aetheris to his chin.

The strings were warm. The cherry trees were already beginning their slow responsive pulse, reading the intention in his raised bow before he had played a note. The cathedral was cold and broken and ancient and full of accumulated Resonance and the smell of flowers that bloomed in winter, and outside its walls the city of Oakhaven was going about its ordinary business, and there was a registration form in Aurelia Thorne's bag with both their names on it.

He played from the beginning.

He did not stop at bar twelve.

He did not stop for a long time after that.