Tuning the Heartwood

Lior Vance tuned by habit and by ritual. His palms still smelled of linseed and resin, a warm, sticky scent that belonged to the workbench more than to him. He set the small plane beside the block of elderwood, thumbed the bridge pin with the same precise gesture he used to hold a client's wrist steady, and drew the horsehair over the string. The sound arrived as a thin paper cut — a note that irritated rather than sang — and the shop cat pricked an ear, offended in feline register.

Outside, the market voices had begun their daily quarrel: sellers arguing whether the spice-sellers' new mixture deserved the same corner, children inventing insults about the mayor's hat, a cart wheel that wobbled in time with some distant laughter. Lior could feel the city's rhythm in his bones, a network of small cadences he had learned to count over ten years of mending bridges between wood and breath. Today the rhythm felt scraped down.

Someone knocked — polite but urgent. Oren pushed open the shop door with three fingers, as he always did when he wanted to appear both casual and present. Oren wore a grin that still looked like a borrowed expression; he had the kind of face that came alive with mischief as if mischief were a second sun.

"Shop cat says you made the chair shudder with that last tuning," Oren announced, dropping a tray of brass pins onto the bench. He nudged the cat, who gave a judgmental blink and leapt to a sunny patch.

Lior adjusted the soundpost with two small taps and plucked again. The note fell flat into itself, as if discouraged from finishing. He squinted at the grain, rubbed a thumb along a seam where sapwood met aged timber. "The city feels softer today," he said without meaning to be poetic. "Voices like damp cloth."

Oren's face tightened. "You're not inventing metaphors to cover for lack of breakfast, are you? We have clefpies left from the market and—"

Lior cut him off with a half-smile. Clefpies were crescent breads stamped with musical symbols; the vendors sold them with honey and a theatrical wink. The food detail made the exchange real, ordinary; it grounded the oddness of the morning in domesticity.

A woman from the neighborhood circle came in then, wiping her hands on her apron. She was Tilda Ran, a pragmatic sort who loved neighborhoods the way other people loved family heirlooms: relentlessly and a little bossily.

"Lior," she said, breath thin like someone who had been talking at speed. "It's worse. Mrs. Halv's voice cracked in mid-sentence and she couldn't remember the rest of her joke. Children in the west lane stopped laughing. Would you— could you help? We thought perhaps a sovereign instrument."