baby dervla learns to sing

Dervla's mother gestures with a hand -- one hand, always, because she used to travel, and she insisted on learning the truncated form which might be used while holding a rapier or a gun.

'You need to practice,' her mother says, and the way her fingers linger by her throat indicate the topic of her sentence even though she doesn't say it outright. 'Your tutor will notice if you do not.'

The words are blunt, artless. Dervla knows they weren't always this way; she's read her mother's poetry. When there were no wrinkles on her face at all - humans grow and die so fast - she spoke with wit and fire and her mother's partner assures her that her voice was sweet as a bird.

But all that art is Dervla's, now, art squandered as she frowns and tucks her hands into her elbows. "He doesn't think I'm good enough."

'It does not matter,' her human mother says, and Dervla fills in the grammar to spoken Common as she watches her hands move. 'You will tell stories, and you are good at it. He will teach you.'

Unspoken, the fact that her mother can't teach her personally.

It's a remarkably mystic way of arguing, for a human -- which makes sense, the way she'd followed her mystic partner into a realm of flowers and fae customs. Dervla is still too young to know how to argue in the language of laws, and so she bows her head. "I will."

-

Her mother's partner, Olwen, hears the sadness in her notes, and she comes to sit next to her and listen. She is cryptid, with big dog-brown eyes and no eyebrows and black thin lips; she is not her mother, though she's helped to raise Dervla too. (She asked, once, why Olwen did not help, and learned that she feared passing on her canine spirit.) She looks at Dervla, her ears wilting low, and her light fur and light hair just make her expression all the more doleful.

Dervla dislikes it, because Olwen has captured the essence of the dog within herself, and weaponises it with age and grace that Dervla cannot possibly yet have.

"You're sad," her mother's partner says, reaches out to take her hand. "Why are you sad?"

"Because it doesn't matter how beautiful my voice is," Dervla says, puts barbs in it because she knows it will hurt and she's at the age when she wants to hurt others just because she's hurting. "I'll never be anything worth singing about."

Olwen's hand tightens around hers, but she does not return the barbs. She is older, and wiser.

"It doesn't have to be you," she says. "It doesn't have to be your story. There are so many other stories out there, after all, so many people eager to tell them. There's people who shine so bright, the light gets into what they say and what they do and how they dress and how they act. We've all seen them, full to bursting."

Dervla frowns as she thinks. Yes - yes, she's seen it. Lively people, exciting people. Other people.

"Don't you think," Olwen says, her tail thump-thump-thumping against the arm of their fancy pale couch, "you could sing about them?"

"I guess I could," Dervla says, slipping her hand out of her mother's partner's paw. "I'll have to think about it."

"So you will," says Olwen, and she leaves, and she doesn't disturb Dervla again, because her notes aren't quite so sad any more. And her tutor visits again, and appreciates the change, and the child learns to sing.