The next day, Swann woke to the low brass movements of Korsakov’s Scheherezade. The tuba’s thick undulations rolled through her bed and pulled her from the dream she was in. With a sigh, Swann swung her legs over the side of the bed and stretched. The window shades that ringed the top of her room opened slightly with the motion and her room gleamed in the early morning sunlight. Swann straightened her pajamas and stood, the shades opening fully as she rolled her shoulders back and put her arms above her head to remove the creaks that came from sleep.
The music got louder as Swann moved down the corridor, her feet nearly silent against the wood floors in the hall. The song had progressed to the slow part with the woodwinds and Swann followed their trilling around the corner to stand in the open door to one of the practice rooms. Inside, Orpheus moved slowly, his hands down at his sides as he traced the floor with feet that kicked up swirls of bright orange and the explosive sound of a bassoon. Swann leaned against the door jamb and watched as her brother’s movements quickened with the beat of the music and the piece built to a crescendo.
As Orpheus began to do straight-legged fouttes, orange kicking up around him in violent waves as he turned, Swann heard a thump from the room across the hall. This was followed by a second thump, a muffled groan, and a series of curses uttered in a tone so calm it was almost possible to ignore the vitriol and inventiveness in them. Orpheus’ dancing crescendoed again and across the hall, Swann could hear Agon being dragged across the floor.
“See how she likes it,” Orpheus hissed between his teeth, turning in place and then executing a precise grande jete that, from the sound of it, tied Agon into her sheets and dropped her on the floor again.
“That’s not very nice, Orpheus,” Swann said, trying not to smile.
“It’s not…very nice…when she dances that…ridiculous Chopin…at 6 in the morning,” Orpheus panted. He was answering Swann as he did barrel turns around the room. Across the way, Agon yelled something not fit for human ears and apparently managed a counter-gesture. The thumping had stopped, if nothing else. Orpheus stopped with a slow turn and let the true color of the room seep in slowly as he put his hands on his knees and tried to calm his breathing.
Agon came through the door a few seconds later, her hair disheveled and her eyes overflowing with fury. Swann took a step backwards as Agon’s dainty footfalls sent streams of bright blue streaming up the walls to crackle against the ceiling. Agon’s hair was lifted in the wake of her magic. As she moved through the door, the blue arced out from her in lightning bolts and raced across the edges of the room, flying towards the ceiling, covering the windows and plunging the practice room into an obscurity filtered through the blue now straining to get through the windows. Swann blanched and danced a quick containment. Streams of her magic tried to twine themselves around the edges of the room, but it was early and Agon was furious and Swann wasn’t sure her quick measures had really done anything.
Downstairs, the big chandelier that hung in the foyer was swinging, Swann could hear it clinging against itself. One of the maids yelped and the butler yelled for her father but all of that was muffled outside the electric force of Agon’s fury and Swann’s meager containment field. Swann pressed herself against the wall of the practice room and watched as Agon swept toward her brother, her feet barely touching the ground, her hands limed in blue lightning. Orpheus, to his credit, did not step back, he merely stood to his full height and looked down at his sister.
“Is this really necessary?” He said his voice quiet and barely audible.
“I don’t know,” Agon said through clenched teeth, “you tell me.” Agon’s smile was feral as she settled into a deep plié and looked up at her brother. “Do try to keep up.”
With an explosion of trumpets, Agon leapt to her feet and into a sissonne buoyed by magic to carry her twice as high as she could normally go. With the movement of her feet, Orpheus was flung across the wall and pinned there. The low brass section that followed had Agon executing furiously perfect chaines across the room which slid Orpheus along the back wall, bumping his head against each light fixture as he went.
Agon had conjured Stravinski’s Firebird Suite and jumped straight to the hunt. The magic rippling across the edges of the room echoed her anger, leaping up in flames of a sickly green that left the wall scorched behind them. Swann moved as quickly as she dared out of the way of her sister’s wrath and did a quick combination to pull Orpheus from the wall. Orpheus slid from Agon’s grip and hit the ground harder than he had probably expected, wincing as he got to his feet. Across the room, Agon was dancing the flames higher. She prepared and was off, a sweeping glissade that had her halfway across the room then in the air in a heartbreakingly precise switch-leap, arms and legs extended, trailing fire. Orpheus danced out of the way and watched as the music simmered down around her, the flames around the room subsiding as she pas-deburreed backwards, her arms waving like wings in front of her. As Agon’s feet traced patterns of fire across the floor, Swann saw that she was barefoot, her magic wild and uncontrolled without the channels of pointe shoes to guide it. She held her breath.
The hunt portion of Stravinski’s suite was mercifully short and Agon danced through it quickly, collapsing in a graceful split as around her the flutes died down. Slowly, real sunlight filtered in through the windows again. The room was silent but for the siblings’ harsh breathing. Orpheus moved toward his sister and extended his hand. Swann watched from the corner as Agon lifted her head and frowned.
“You’re not gonna do the best part?” Orpheus asked with a faint smile. A thin trickle of blood had slid down the side of his face from where he had slammed into one of the lamps and Swann, coming up behind him, quickly snapped her hands and brought them together, closing the small wound. At his feet, Agon smiled and let Orpheus pull her to her feet.
“Well we might as well, I suppose.” Agon stretched her hand out and connected the three of them with crossed arms. “Squab?” Agon said, her voice softer as she used her sister’s nickname. Swann smiled and began the combination, the growing grandeur of the music following the growing length of their steps.
It was harder to dance when they were all connected, but ultimately more satisfying when they got it right, their jumps and echappes in perfect time. Agon managed to make being linked to two other people look as graceful as dancing alone and Swann envied her for it. Around them, the room filled with the gold of a spell danced correctly and the swells at the end of the Firebird suite had them moving faster and faster, their feet flying. As the music broke, Agon and Swann took turns leaping into Orpheus’ arms and using the weight of the gold to slow their descents to the ground, taking the extra time to do slow, mid-air pirouettes.
The final tinkling of the music signaled the end of the piece and the three siblings collapsed to the floor as the room lost its golden river. Swann stretched her arms and legs out and flexed, feeling the satisfying pop as her meager containment field came off the sides of the room and dissolved. With the dissolution of the containment, such as it was, the three could finally hear what had probably been there for a while: the slow, unimpressed applause of their parents crowded in the door of the practice room.
“Well,” their mother said, her face creased with a frown, “I trust that little exercise will serve as its own deterrent in future…” She cocked one eyebrow and then threaded her arm through their father’s and moved to go down the stairs.
“You’ll all three be repairing the cracks to the walls later,” he said over his shoulder, his normally sunny expression eclipsed with anger. “No magic.” He pulled their mother across to his other side, shifting her around him with two touches to her waist that made the hall completely silent behind them.
Orpheus waited until he thought they were downstairs before he began laughing uncontrollably.
No comments:
Post a Comment