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Duet (Concerto Re Maggiore)

Pairing: Ilyacha (Julian/Alexander)

Word count: 2.1k

Summary: Alexander by his own admission is more magician than musician, but a chance meeting with a handsome vielle-wielding sailor in Venterre leads to quite a special performance indeed.

—

Over the hubbub of a crowded marketplace floated the glassy, sweet timbre of harp strings, glittering and filtering through the noise like the sunbeams that streamed through the trellises and awnings of the surrounding shops. Alexander was decidedly a bit out of practice when it came to playing in public, musical showmanship was not something that had ever come particularly easily to him, but he was stuck in this city (Sableblanc-sur-Mer, he reminded himself, a port on the eastern coast of Venterre) overnight while waiting for the next ship across the Golden Gulf and back to Zadith. Stuck here, with only a satchel full of books and his old knee harp. The books had long since been read, and reread, cover to cover, and so he had turned instead to the instrument.

He had found himself a shaded little alcove a ways off from a cluster of cafés and wine shops, propping himself against the wall with the harp a surprisingly comforting weight across his lap. Slowly, methodically, he picked at the strings. His fingers were stilted, the rhythm of scales and arpeggios retained through muscle memory disjointed and staccato from lack of attention. His brows knit at a wrong note here, his lower lip set at a pout at a clumsy run there. Halfway through a passage he noticed a few people watching, he completely slipped his fingering and an accidental sounded with a calamitous twang.

Glowering, he quickly stoppered the strings before the duff note could travel too far, and refrained from doing anything until the onlookers had lost interest and melted back into the masses.

How annoying it was, knowing that he could only get better through practice and any natural talent within him had run its course. Practice would make perfect, he knew that much from years of perfecting magic work, experiments, but it was this practice that he never really found time for, admittedly.

Not that that had stopped him ever enjoying the actual act of music making, it was something different from spellwork and science and swordplay, something to get lost in. He flexed his hands, righted his position, and strummed a few glissandi from the thicker, rumbling lower strings to the thin twinkling high register. He tried an arpeggio, a run of a short melody from a half remembered song.

Neglect of practice aside, a decade and some of musicianship had set a certain dexterity in him, in his hands, that bit by bit began to flow with each pluck of string. It was not wholly unlike the weaving of a spell, learned precision slowly becoming familiar til in a breath it is second nature.

Alexander wove this spell, became blissfully lost at last, and played.

The notes dropped through the air like beads of crystalline water into a pond. He still hit a few wrong notes, forgot to change a lever, misplaced his fingering, but it didn’t matter. He found he could ignore the crowded square, ignore any eyes and ears that had turned his way. He went on whatever whim swayed him, flitting from the Nalban and Cumbran folksongs he’d grown up with, to new Vesuvian concerti, to snatches of street songs he’d heard over in Zadith and here in Venterre, and all the way back round again.

Halfway through the energetic last movement of a concerto, his reverie was broken.

“Is that Albiviozza’s violin concerto?”

Alexander jumped, his hands twitched and fumbled, and clumsily tangled in the strings with a discordant clatter.

Gods strike it all.

“It was,” he muttered indignantly, his frown cutting a deep, displeased line into his forehead.

He looked up to where the accosting voice had come from. There was a man standing there, a little older perhaps than Alexander himself, clad in well worn travelling garb that Alexander could just about place as being mostly from the salt flats near the southern sea, but with an eclectic mix of other clothes and accessories from around the world piled on top of the patterned cloth, all coated with a layer dust and sea-fresh salt. His curly auburn hair flowed loose and long, perhaps a touch longer than Alexander’s own unruly mane scraped into a ponytail, and across his broad shoulders was slung a slightly battered-looking case of some sort.

“So sorry, my good fellow,” the man continued brightly, “didn’t mean to disturb you,”

“I’m sure.”

“But it’s a magnificent concerto, and it’s good to hear it played with such gusto.”

Alexander glanced him up and down quizzically; he seemed to be genuine. There was something just so about the man’s easy smile, the twinkle in his grey eyes, the warm joviality in his tone that made Alexander’s ire, and the cleft between his brows, dissipate.

“Thank you,” he said, “it’s a favourite of mine, especially that last movement, with the call and response passage towards the end. I can’t quite do it justice on my own, I’ll admit, I’m not a proper musician and it’s not meant to be for harp at all, let alone a little knee harp like this-” he cut himself off before his tongue could run away with him into a tirade of nervous babble, “uh. Um. Anyway, yes. Thank you. Again.”

The man tilted his head,

“You know, I know the movement well too. Back of my hand, from memory. I wonder,” he shrugged the case off his back, “may I play with you?”

Alexander eyed the case, eyed the man, eyed his own fidgeting fingers that were itching to play more. The stranger’s enthusiasm was infectious,

“Alright then.”

His grin was radiant as the midday sun.

He made quick work of setting the case down and flipping the latches open. Inside was a large, old-looking, yet clearly lovingly well maintained string instrument. There was a pattern in the wood, carved delicately into the body and the five pegs that adorned the headscroll. It was a vielle. With a flourish, the man lifted the instrument under his chin and produced a sleek, arcing bow from the case. Alexander watched as, with practised ease, he briskly tuned each string. Even with those simple open strings, Alexander couldn’t help but marvel at the rich sound. It suited the man, he thought, it matched the vibrancy and timbre of his voice. The deep russet wood complemented his hair, too, as did the bold curves of the body of the instrument to the wide set of the man’s shoulders, the strong, flowing lines of his arms and Alexander was suddenly, painfully aware that he was staring, so dropped his eyes quickly back to his own strings to reset the levers.

“Re maggiore, yes?” the man asked. Alexander nodded.

A moment of eye contact, an unspoken connection. A shared breath in, a preparation. Fingers poised over strings, twitching around the heel of a bow. Exhale.

Then, in perfect tandem, the downbeat.

The last movement of Leonato Albiviozza’s Concerto in Re Maggiore per Violino e Orchestra was vivace, lively. It pulsed with energy from the first quaver, a furious yet triumphant arpeggiated run with an energetic basso continuo line that drove the action forward. The true, full orchestration here would have featured a cembalo and theorbo filling out the depths of that bass, and the rest of the string family assembled to provide strength and texture with a solo violin soaring over the top. Alexander had heard it performed once in some concert hall in Vesuvia, it had been thrilling.

Notably, there was no provision for a Cumbran knee harp and a vielle, and yet the arrangement of this impromptu performance worked. The glistening thrum of harpstring and the rich voice of the vielle blended seamlessly as Alexander took on the continuo and accompaniment while the stranger flew through the solo line.

Alexander had not played in ensemble for a good long while, let alone experienced the trust and nigh intimacy needed for a duet, but he didn’t feel any apprehension, any hesitation. He’d never met this man before, he didn’t even know his name, yet they had found an instant synergy through this music. It was as though there was a thread formed of silvergold starlight and heartstring linking them from hearts and lungs and minds, like it was their souls in wordless conversation alongside their instruments. When one of them coloured a phrase, the other was able to pick up on it in an instant, their articulation was synchronised, reciprocal push-pull, give and take. Each little cue, each little detail.

It was truly playing together, rather than merely two people playing the same piece at the same time. With a deal of hindsight Alexander might have chastised himself as being too fanciful, overly invested in random streetside busking with a complete stranger. But in the moment he gave little regard to the logic of that reasoning, there was no room for it amidst the music.

The man’s thick brows were arched in concentration, similarly to how Alexander’s own must be, yet his face was the picture of determination and of the joy of sheer relishing the sound, the connection, the all-encompassing feeling of shared musicality. Wordlessly, Alexander shared in that joy too, the ostinato of his pounding heartbeat a further addition to Albiviozzi’s score, one that could only be felt rather than heard; he didn’t know it but the stranger’s racing pulse was a perfect match, feeling each striking drumbeat reverberate through his own veins.

They had attracted a small audience of passersby and cafe patrons, intrigued by the sound. Street performers were commonplace in big port cities like this, there was usually a handful littered around a street corner, but the gusto with which the two ad hoc buskers were playing and the sparkling, wordless rapport that was flying between them seemed to reel people in. As loath as Alexander usually was to have an audience, he found he rather didn’t mind this time, any doubt or self-consciousness had long been eclipsed by concentration on the music. The music, and the man he was playing it with.

They had by now reached the section that Alexander had mentioned previously, where the soloist and accompanist played antiphonally. But here, with two people, it had become less of a ‘call and response’ and more a conversation. A declaration. Two voices speaking to each other through melody. It wasn’t especially technically tricky, but what got lost when trying to play solo was the intent, the colour, the nuance. The stranger played the call phrase, a vigorous major ascending scale that sprung into an arpeggio,

We’re nearly at the end now, what a triumph,

And Alexander the response, an answering run of arpeggios tumbling down his strings and back up again,

We play well together,

Then the two phrases joined together in polyphony, circling each other like partners on a dancefloor, whirling joyously until they hit the final phrase. Alexander felt his actual partner’s rallentando like it were his own breath, his own thought, and in deliberate tandem, they hit the final, perfect cadence.

A flicker of silence. A pause, a spell.

Then, a burst of applause. Alexander breathed out a heavy, satisfied sigh. He caught the man’s eye and smiled. The man’s face had gone a touch red from exertion, but he returned Alexander’s grin roguishly, before throwing his head back and laughing,

“Now, it’s not every day you get to do that.”

“Definitely not.”

The crowd began to disperse, a handful congratulated them on a job well done for which Alexander, now once again very self aware, sheepishly thanked them. His partner basked in the praise,

“And would you believe it, I’ve known this fellow all of twenty minutes!”

Alexander’s cheeks flushed hot, and he dipped his head to try and hide it. Then, they were left alone, cloaked by the hustle and bustle of the city around them.

“Well then,” the man said exuberantly, stretching his shoulders out, “I have to say, my friend, we make quite the team.”

Alexander quirked his lips,

“I’d have to agree. And… well, thank you for asking me to play.”

“Thank you for obliging. Though I did think at first, from the look on your face, you were going to tell me to piss off.”

“Well… I did consider it. But when else will a stranger be so brazen as to ask me to play a violin concerto in broad daylight with a fiddle and a harp?”

“When indeed,” he said, cocking an eyebrow and holding out his hand, “Julian.”

Alexander shook it, warm and calloused and still brimming with energy,

“Alexander. You know… in all seriousness, I haven’t played like that in a while. It was good. We play well together.”

The man smiled again, different now, taking in the details of Alexander’s face and lingering on his eyes, his mouth,

“We do.”

A few people had flipped some gold pieces into the open vielle case; Julian eyed them, then flicked his gaze back up to Alexander’s, eyes lidded and shapely lips teased upward into a knowing smile,

“Perhaps, Alexander, I might buy you a drink with our spoils?”

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