When Elphie gets home that evening, her father and Nanny are waiting for her. Nanny looks wary. Frex seems a little predatory, or hungry.
“Not enough that you’re green as a spring cucumber,” says her father, “but now you’re tricking yourself out in song? I hoped your mother wouldn’t bequeath her exhibitionist tendencies to any of you. Oh, Elphie, the gossip.”
She pretends she doesn’t know what he means, but of course she does, she does. “It wasn’t song,” she protests. “I had a tickle in my throat. I was just opening my lungs.”
“Oh, little Fae-Fae can sing, for sure,” says Nanny, using the name that Nessa invented for Elphie, back when Nessa was hardly verbal. “Hasn’t she been singing lullabies and night songs for her sister and brother for years now. Too deep in your books to notice, Brother Frexispar?” Her use of his more formal name is cutting, somehow. A father ought to know such a thing about his oldest child. He flinches.
“Lei was all but ambushed by nosy parkers on her way back from market,” he says to his daughter. “Elphie! Calling attention to yourself. Just when we’re trying to settle down here and fit in among these Quadlings.”
“No hope of our passing unnoticed.” She all but sizzles at her father. “You a hulking Munchkinlander man with a beard, and the rest of us bizarre in one way or the other. Anyway, I thought you were trying to attract attention. For a congregation?” This is an unstable argument but she’s in defensive mode.
He won’t strike her, he would never do that. But his voice is both flat and strategic. “Well, you want to be a trumpet, give us what you got.”
She hates him. What does he want from her? How miserable a parent can be, so full of shift.
“Go on, favor him with that singy-thingy you do for your brother, love-him-to-death,” says Nanny, in a voice that means, Oh, get it over with and let us move on.
Mostly in order to protect the Ski’ioti—to distract her grown-ups from asking why she’s been ululating across the rooftops at top volume—Elphie takes her cue from Nanny and stumbles into a common nursery ditty.
Little lamb, little lamb,
Wanted for the evening meal,
We never wonder how you feel,
We only think of how you veal.
Her father stares at her. “It’s an old song, I didn’t make it up, it’s the first thing I could think up,” she declares.
“Do you remember the anthem to the Unnamed God that we sang back in Quoyre?”
She says no, but when he begins, she’s able to join in a little. At least he isn’t yelling at her anymore.
Beloved and beshadowed
You give us sweet permission.
To heed your call and do our all
To spend our lives in mission—
(Something something, she forgets the last line.)
It doesn’t matter that she can’t remember the tiresome words. Her father is looking at her as if she’s scored it to the very syllable.
Lei is peering in through the open doorway. “Who knew the little asparagus had a voice like a soprano toucan.” The landlady’s hypocrisy is curdling, as the news about Elphie’s performance has arrived here through Lei’s own gossip. Still, the landlady’s regard is genuine, at least.
“Don’t, just don’t,” says Nanny, turning to Frex, “after all this time,” and she wags her finger at him, which could get her sacked, and how will she ever find her own way back to civilization, but she can’t stop herself, “don’t tell me you never noticed that your oldest child can actually carry a tune?”
“She sang in Qhoyre, I remember that,” protests Frex, a bit feebly. “It just wasn’t very good singing. More of a curiosity, since few people in Qhoyre sing at spiritual rallies. And not for the public.” Her father regards her with apprehension, summing something up behind his holy eyes.