“Let me have it,” I said warily.

“You’re hearing the song inverted. Perfectly inverted. Every bloody layer of it. Unreal. And you aren’t even intelligent enough to understand how fantastically improbable that is. Do you have Asperger’s?” he demanded. “What other unusual things does your brain do?” He narrowed his eyes, peering at me as if I was a fascinating specimen he’d like to slap on a slide and push beneath a microscope.

“Inverted. Explain.”

“I knew as soon as you began humming that it was essentially the same thing. But not. Inversion is the rearrangement of the top-to-bottom elements in an interval, chord, or melody. In simpler terms, you’re hearing the music the box plays with every last bit of it flipped.” He made a rotating gesture with his hands. “Perfectly flipped, and that’s impossible. People don’t hear music perfectly inverted.”

“Play it the way I hear it on the keyboard.”

“Give me a sec.” He went back to work on his computer, inverting what he’d converted to numbers earlier. When he was done, he opened a program, exported the data, punched a few more buttons, and music began to play through the computer speakers.

I was instantly transported to a state of bliss.

This time, I was happy to note, I wasn’t the only one.

It ended much too soon and left the three of us shaking our heads and looking slightly lost.

“That,” Dancer said in a low, stunned voice, “was the most extraordinary arrangement of frequencies I’ve ever heard.”

Alina agreed, looking slightly dazed.

I demanded, “Is it the song?”

Dancer snorted. “You’re asking me that? How would I know? You’re the bloody queen who’s supposed to do something with it. Is it?”

“I think it has to be. But that doesn’t make any sense. The king was never able to complete it. We know that for a fact. Or he would have turned the concubine Fae and he didn’t. And he gave the music box to the concubine long before she supposedly killed herself.”

“Then it can’t be the song,” Alina said.

“Maybe it’s part of the song and he was never able to figure out the rest,” I proposed.

Dancer raked both his hands through his hair, looking as if he was on the verge of tearing it out. “Bloody hell, you’d better hope not. Do you know how impossible it is to finish someone else’s symphony? Completely. Look at all the brilliant minds that worked on Mahler’s Tenth. None of the versions ever sounded right to me. I got so frustrated listening to them that I actually took a few stabs at it myself. I did no better. Impossible to precisely duplicate another’s creative vision.”

“But if this particular song is made of frequency that affects matter—which I’m sure you can devise some way to test—wouldn’t even part of the song give you insight into what frequencies can affect the matter of the black holes? And you could extrapolate from there?”

“Sure,” Dancer said exasperatedly. “If I had a few centuries to work on it and countless, perfectly contained black holes to test my theories on.”

I sighed, pressing my fingers to my temples, thinking hard. “I know there’s something to it. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. Just convert it all and invert it and let’s try playing it to one of the smaller black holes, okay?”

He shrugged. “It’s worth a try. It’s not like we have much else to go on.” He spun back around in his chair and began typing. After about three seconds he tossed over his shoulder, “Leave. You’re disturbing my brain space.”

With a snort of laughter, I held out my hand to Alina and took my first stab at sifting tandem.

MAC

I banged into the bookstore a short time later with Alina on my heels, both of us holding our faces and muttering beneath our breath.

My first tandem sift had not gone well.

The Compact negotiating crew had arrived and was waiting for us. My dad was on the Chesterfield, on the middle cushion, his arms spread along the back. Barrons and Ryodan were in their usual corners, while Cruce leaned lightly against the mantel of the fireplace.

Barrons surged to his feet in a ripple of muscle and aggression the moment he saw me. “Who the bloody hell gave you a black eye?” he growled.

“That would be you,” I said with mock sweetness, pressing a hand to my bruised cheekbone. “And your bloody wards. It felt like slamming into a brick wall.” Fortunately, I healed quickly. Unfortunately, my sister didn’t.

The corners of his mouth twitched then he gave up the ghost and just flashed me one of those rare, full-on smiles that always made me catch my breath and stare. He’s so damn beautiful and his smiles are sunshine in a black velvet sky, improbable and stunning.

“You sifted. You figured out how to use it,” he murmured. “Without Cruce.”

“And rebuilt the abbey,” I told him proudly. “It’s never looked better.”

“You will sign the Compact and restore my wings,” Cruce growled.

“I intend to.” I wasn’t signing it merely to figure out how to use the True Magic. I wanted full, unstinting access to Cruce’s wealth of information and knowledge. I wanted to know if he’d ever caught even the remotest whisper that the king might have come close to re-creating the song. I wanted to play the music box for him. Pick his brain for days.

I stood motionless, feeling the lovely, wounded earth beneath me, and invited it to restore his torn wings.