Chapter Twenty Two

Toks promised herself ages ago she wouldn’t cry over Polly Paterson.

She wouldn’t do it now, except something monstrous had breached inside her. It rose up out of the ice in her blood, red like the roses in the snow, as sharp and tearing as their thorns, and it ripped through her composure. The pride that had dragged her through sixteen lonely years of ambition and achievement was riven before it. You love her, it screamed. You love her and she is leaving you.

Again.

She watched, stung to her soul and stupid with it, as Polly disappeared into the darkness of the auditorium.

It hurt like hell.

She staggered and caught herself on the piano stool. The keys blurred into grey.

“Ksenia?”

Her cousin looked shocked – like he needed her – and for one split second, an ugly, roiling, selfish fury rippled through her. Was there no one to comfort her? Did she have to do this all over again? Another lonely fucking sixteen years with her heart gouged out and no explanation, no reason or sense or fairness in the world and she would have to slog through it— Alone.

But even as her stomach hollowed itself out and twisted in agony she knew that was wrong.

A sigh as bleak and empty as the crater in her chest huffed into the silence. Nuance was supposed to be her particular brilliance. She was feted for her attention to detail and her ability to draw exquisite beauty from wood, string, metal and one hundred disparate minds. She heard everything and understood it all in unparalleled detail. She assembled the sublime out of chaos, conducted noise and commanded it to the music of heaven. She was the best – Maestro Ksenia Tokarycz, the finest conductor of her generation, the greatest musician of the age – and she was a blind fool.

She’d missed something.

Something was out of tune.

She had an awful feeling it was her.

There’d been a hundred cues – all the moments in the score she should have anticipated. She’d blithely ignored them as she’d revelled in having Polly’s attention again. She’d drunk herself silly on Polly’s devotion and let it fill her heart. And her ego. And she’d refused to see the cracks. The scars. The frayed, clinging edges of Polly’s desperate peace.

This was her curse, Toks thought. Her doom. Her destiny told in a shitty tent at a country fair half a life away on the other side of the world. How had the witch even known?

She made an appalling sucking sound, half sob, half laugh. Nikoloz looked at her. There was… knowledge… in his face.

A few things clicked, despite the turmoil in her mind.

“You knew her,” she said. “You knew she was in here. You knew to find her here.”

He nodded.

“How?”

He shrugged like it should have been obvious. It made her angry.

“And you knew him. Polly’s… friend. I saw it. The way you both looked at each other. Justin. But… He’s a nurse! From a tiny, one-horse town in Australia. How can you possibly know him?” She straightened. She almost didn’t want to know. “What is going on, Niki?”

He barked out a laugh, but his mouth twisted in a bitter grimace before he wiped it all away with the palm of his hand. There was so much contempt in his tone Toks recoiled. “How can you possibly not know, Ksenia? You’ve always been self-absorbed, so full of your own sense of importance, but this is ridiculous even for you—”

The stage door banged again.

“Alright mate, let’s keep it civil, shall we?”

The dry tone was pure Jerinja and Toks’ brain imploded. She couldn’t believe what she saw. Her eyes bugged out of her head.

Magpie Lester strode onto the stage dressed in an extremely well-tailored blazer and dress skirt. Her usually wild hair was in a stylish chignon and her make up was impeccable. The only hint this was the scruffy artist Toks had butted heads with back in Jerinja was the silk shirt beneath her jacket. It was an eye-watering lime green.

Sumi and Artis scurried after her looking harried.

“The maestro is having the second worst day of her life,” Magpie called as she stalked confidently on towering heels. “Sure, it’s a fucking picnic by comparison, but let’s cut her some slack. She really is clueless.”

“I’m sorry, Maestro. I couldn’t stop her.” Sumi came straight to Toks’ side.

At least someone cared.

“Are you alright?” Sumi whispered.

Toks grabbed her hand.

“Oh, she’ll be fine,” Magpie said. “Or she will be once we sort this shit out. Which” —she held up an almost laughably imperious finger— “we will definitely be doing. I didn’t come ten-thousand fucking miles across the planet for a chinwag.” She put her hands on her hips and tipped her chin at Artis. “You. Take your boy home and look after him. Bring him to the maestro’s place tomorrow morning. With breakfast.”

Nikoloz looked rebellious, but Artis took his hand and pulled him away.

The stage was quiet, littered with empty chairs from the orchestra. The heavy silence of the dark auditorium flowed like ice water around their ankles. This was Toks’ world, its foundation, the musical centre of everything she’d aimed for. It should have been brilliant and bright, but she no longer even cared that it wasn’t.

Magpie, Sumi and Toks looked at each other. Magpie seemed to be waiting.

Toks sniffed.

“Is Polly— Is Polly okay?”

Magpie nodded with approval. “Good girl.” Her voice softened. “Yes. Yes, she is. She was reckless, but she wanted to be brave. For you.”

The woman actually held open her arms and, fuck it, but Toks had been needing a hug like that for sixteen years. She stumbled forward.

“Come on, you poor silly thing. Let’s get you home, darls, and knock some sense into you.”

It turned out when Magpie said ‘home’ she meant Jerinja, but she settled for Toks’ apartment.

Polly’s stuff was gone.

“She’s left me again,” Toks said. She was ashamed of how small her voice sounded.

“No, she hasn’t. Not really, but you’ve got me for a while instead. Sumi! Tea.” Magpie’s suitcase was standing in her hallway and she was ordering Toks’ assistant around like she owned the place. This whole thing had all been sorted out in her absence, Toks realised. She stared darkly at Sumi’s back and made a note to take it out of her later.

Magpie kicked off her shoes and scrunched her stockinged toes in Toks’ carpet. “Posh place you have. Does it fill the gaping hole in your heart?”

“Fuck you,” sneered Toks. “Where is she? Where is Polly?”

“Already on a plane—”

“Then I’m going after her.”

There was a yell from the kitchen. “You can’t, Toks! Two performances tomorrow and one on Sunday, remember? That’s nearly eight-thousand people who’ve paid to see you. You can’t just—”

“I have an associate conductor. This is what he’s for! I’m going—”

Sumi reappeared with her hands on her hips. “There probably isn’t anyone else on the planet who could conduct Ravel’s piano concerto in G from the piano, Toks. You can’t go.”

“But—”

“Sit down, big shot,” Magpie said. She’d already planted herself in Toks’ sofa and looked far too comfortable. She patted the cushions beside her. “Sit down, have a cuppa and clear your head. There’s a lot you have to hear tonight, and I’m sorry, but it’s all going to hurt.”

Toks looked from Magpie to Sumi and recognised a stubborn wall of resistance when she saw one. She perched rebelliously on the piano stool instead. Magpie rolled her eyes.

“What are you even doing here? Shouldn’t you be fingerpainting back at Jerinja?” Toks asked.

Magpie inclined her head. “Touché. The lads were here for Polly. We always knew she was going to crash, and everyone at Jerinja has been on standby all this time. Justin and Daz swooped in to rescue her just like they did before. Soldiers. Only way they know how, bless them.”

Toks just looked at her, adrift. Lost. “None of that makes any sense to me.

“What can I say, darls? I’m a romantic. The boys were here for Polly, but I’m here for you.”

“Why? I didn’t even think you liked me.”

Magpie grinned and put her feet up on the coffee table. “Well, I’d never buy you flowers, but you’re good for Polly.”

That punched her in a few ways. It would have been nice to know that the family at Jerinja had cared for her – for herself – even in a small way, but she clutched at the confirmation that she was a positive influence in Polly’s life.

“Oh,” she sighed.

Magpie chuckled. She snapped her fingers and Sumi materialised with a tray of tea and a battered manila folder under one arm. Magpie put the folder on her thighs and placed both palms on it, carefully, gently. “Oh, exactly. Now, drop the attitude, get over here, and come and learn what you should have known sixteen years ago.”

The folder was thick. Old. And it was bulging with newspaper clippings. Magpie opened it and carefully unfolded a broadsheet –The Sydney Morning Herald – yellow with age. She placed it in front of Toks.

It bore a headline from ages ago. Killed in Korovinja, it screamed, with a picture of her concert hall, bombed after the revolution. Toks pulled a face.

“What is this for?”

“Look at it.”

The picture showed a group of UN soldiers on the stage of the concert hall where Toks had just spent the evening performing. The damaged piano from the memorial in the west foyer stood amid the rubble from the dome. A row of black body bags were next to it.

Toks shrugged again. She knew this history – vaguely. Some hostage situation years ago that she hadn’t paid any attention to because she’d been busy trying to find a flat in Vienna after losing her big chance in Berlin—

She blinked.

Because she’d been heartbroken after Polly Paterson had never showed up in Berlin like she’d promised—

A truly awful possibility began to whisper at Toks’ certainty.

After Polly disappeared for weeks and no one knew—

Toks’ blood flowed very thick and very slow.

She peered at the picture again. That was Justin in a peacekeeper’s beret. There was Daz crouched next to him with his head in his hands.

And at the edge of the image, being attended to by a medic and wrapped in a silver shock blanket, was a young woman Toks hadn’t seen in sixteen years, but who her soul would have recognised anywhere.

Red hair. Freckles she knew like her own skin.

An appalling cut on her face. Far too much blood.

Her own Pearlie Paterson.

“What—?”

Magpie passed her another clipping.

Severin Siege’s Single Survivor. A passport photo of Polly.

“Draga collected every news item she could find,” Magpie said, softly. “These are all hers. She wanted me to give them to you. I think she always suspected you didn’t know.”

Toks snatched at the next article on the pile. More images of the devastated concert hall. Arty shots of the broken piano on the rubble-strewn stage. A candid snap of Polly from college days – Toks remembered the photo. One of both of them together taken after a performance exam, relief in both their smiling faces. They’d stuck it on the fridge in their flat in Paddington. Toks could see her own hair where the newspaper had cropped her out.

“But this makes no sense!” she cried, stupidly. “She wasn’t going to Korovinja. She was coming to Berlin. She was coming to meet me!”

“She was. She had a few days extra time, but she was always going to meet you in Berlin.”

“So why—?” The clippings were beginning to blur. “I waited for her! I searched. I called everyone! I lost—”

She lost her chance to audition for the Berlin Philharmonic. Miserable and devastated, she’d moved to Vienna. She hadn’t watched the news.

“No one knew where Polly was for the first week, darls. No one could find her. But after that, it was an international incident—”

“Incident,” Toks sniffed. Not accident. Her mother had told her from the beginning. She just hadn’t listened. “I called Mum.”

“Polly’s parents were up in Sydney being handled by diplomats who wouldn’t do anything. Draga couldn’t call them to ask. It wasn’t until the first hostage videos were released that the general public knew, and by then it was international news. The whole world was watching. I guess everyone assumed you were too.”

Toks snatched at the folder. Hostage videos? How had she missed all this? Clipping after clipping spilled over her lap. It was real. It was true. Pearlie Paterson had been taken hostage by rogue Korovinjan Securitate forces who refused to surrender at the end of the revolution. Her darling Polly, beaten and tortured by those thugs—

She knew how she’d missed this. She’d been head down in her own misery, focusing on winning a new role with the Vienna Philharmonic, throwing herself into the work like she’d always done. And trying to get by with her heart cut out.

She’d been so self-absorbed. So bitter and blind.

And she’d left Polly to suffer through the aftermath on her own.

For sixteen years.

She was monstrous.

A crippling cramp twisted her gut as something else occurred to her. She’d just dragged Polly right into the centre of all her worst memories.

“Oh god!” Toks choked out an ugly sob and realised she was crying. “I sent her photos of me strutting around like a peacock from inside the Dom Harmonja. I made her come to Korovinja! I literally tugged her into the building, and then I— I was so fucking full of myself—”

Sumi slipped into the seat next to her and put a gentle hand in the middle of her back. Toks wasn’t sure she deserved that. Sumi had always been too good to her.

“It’s okay, Maestro.”

“It’s not—” Toks cried. “I was wrong! All this time and I didn’t know. Why didn’t someone tell me?”

Magpie made a snorting noise. “How would that have gone, do you think? ‘Hey Maestro? Did you catch that one about your uncle torturing your girlfriend?’ Not really the kind of thing you bring up over coffee, is it?”

Toks stared at her. “My uncle?” She scrabbled through the papers. For a split second she thought she saw a photo of her own father. No, there! A mugshot of her uncle, General Konstantyn Tokarycz – her dad’s brother – days before his execution, naming him as the mastermind behind the hostage situation.

Oh, god. It was a mess.

Poor Polly. If only she could talk to her. Toks sobbed at the irony. Like they hadn’t had sixteen years to do exactly that. Would Polly even want to talk to her now?

“Does she still— Do you think— Will Polly still want to see me?”

“Oh darls.” Magpie put her arm over Toks’ other shoulder and pulled her in. “You might be the finest maestro in the world, you might have the most beautiful music in the heavens at your fingertips, but you’re so far behind the beat you may as well be playing a different song.” Toks stiffened and Magpie hugged her tighter. “Of course she still wants to see you. That woman has always loved you.”

Toks let relief wash over her, and finally – finally – let herself cry.