By midday the wind carried salt into Elowen's workshop, veining the varnish on spruce like frost. She wiped her hands on a rag and pressed her ear to the curve of a newly voiced viola, as if it might whisper its first secret to her. The town clung to the cliff outside. Ropes creaked, gulls dipped and scolded, and the tide kept its blunt rhythm against the caves below.
Her father’s hammer beat out a steady pulse in the cooperage next door. Every few strikes he paused to listen, as if his barrels might disagree with him, then resumed. Elowen smiled. In this place everything had a tone, even wood under a blade. She held the neck of the instrument against her jaw. The spruce smelled faintly of resin and citrus oil; her fingertips were blackened by iron filings from the pegs. She set a bow across the strings and drew out a thin, testing stroke. The note rose honey-smooth and then roughened, as if it had scraped a stone.
'Again,' she murmured, and adjusted the bridge by a hair. The sound warmed. It was close now, almost breathing.
Ivo appeared in the doorway, all elbows and grin, hair a mess from the cliff-wind. He cradled a crust of bread and a jar of pickled capers like contraband. 'Master Havel says your instruments steal singers from the tavern,' he announced, leaning against the doorframe.
'They borrow them,' Elowen said. 'They give them back.'
Ivo popped a caper and made a face at the brine, then ate another. 'Gossips in the market were telling it again. About the hush in the caves. They say it takes voices.' He tried to drop his tone low, theatrical. 'Do not sing after dusk, or the cliff will drink you dry.'
She set the viola down. The warning was old as the town. Children grew up with it, and still it crawled under the skin. 'You haven’t been shouting to the breakers again, have you?'
'What? No.' He laughed, then sobered under her gaze. 'No. I haven’t.'
Her father came in wiping sweat from his neck. He smelled of wet wood and smoke. The lines at his eyes deepened when he saw Ivo. 'Go make yourself useful. Add sand to the rasp bucket.'
Ivo groaned but took the pail. Elowen watched him go. He had a way of humming when he worked, a tune he never knew he carried until someone pointed it out. She caught herself humming it now, a crooked little thing with too much sea in it.
Along the street a fishmonger called out prices. Someone argued over a spade. A bell from the beacon tower rang a dull warning for coming fog. Elowen wrapped the viola in soft cloth and tied it with twine. The knot cinched tight, sure under her stained fingers, and still a prickle ran along her forearms.
There were stories like gulls in this town: they nested where you left scraps. She kept her shop door open anyway, loved the way the world barged in with salt and gull-cry, with risk and rumor. It kept her honest. It made her instruments sing.