Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I wake amid a delicious feeling of anticipation, as though it’s the last day of school before a long-awaited holiday – which it is, in a way. One day of school – and a music assembly day at that – one day at home, and finally Sunday in the woods with Gale.

I know I’ll be colder and wearier than I’ve ever been in my life – and probably hungrier too, before the day is done. I know Gale will waste no opportunity to mock or belittle me and will almost certainly invent additional ones, and yet I’ve never looked forward so keenly to anything in all my life.

I know he won’t hurt or compromise me in any way – if it comes down to it, he’s downright obligated to protect me – and that’s sufficient to allay any vague worries that might niggle at the back of my mind.

I roll to my back and let my mind drift lazily ahead, trying to guess what that first day in the woods will even look like. Frigid, grueling hours of learning to draw, aim, and shoot a bow, with endless trips to retrieve the promised one-and-only arrow and Gale barking criticism all the while? Peeling off rabbit skins in the vicious cold, our gloves pocketed long since, and washing the blood from our cracked fingertips in the snow? Laying deadly snares with lengths of rope and wire?

I sit up with a start, abruptly recalling something vital that I haven’t yet given thought to, nor planning.

I need clothes, and quickly: proper Seam clothes of my very own. Oh, I have clothing plain and warm enough for countless inconspicuous ventures through the woods, but I want to blend in seamlessly – pardoning the expression – in the Hob as well. Everyone in Twelve may know who I am but that doesn’t mean I should run about the Seam and the back alleys of the Merchant sector in fine, pretty clothing that positively screams mayor’s daughter, even if everyone is being startlingly nonchalant at the prospect of my presence there.

No, I need things that are cheaply made and well-worn, if for no other reason than to gobsmack Gale Hawthorne once more.

I enjoyed the sight of his gobsmacked face immensely. It would be much easier to kiss that hard, angry mouth when it’s half-open and slack with shock.

I rub the grin from my face into the downy depths of my pillow and leave the ridiculous notion of kissing him there as well.

Foolishness aside, the last thing Gale expects is for me to arrive on Sunday morning in clothing indistinguishable from his neighbors’, and while he’ll refuse to acknowledge this as any sort of wisdom or even good sense on my part, he won’t be able to conceal a grudging respect for it, and that’s the closest to love I’ll ever get from him.

Peeping out into the hallway, I spy my first proper quarry – Briony, a laundry basket in her arms – and nip out to haul her into my room.

“I need another favor,” I inform her as solemnly as I can, considering I’m atremble with eagerness. “I need clothes.”

She glances meaningfully into the basket – several of which contents are indeed mine – then back up at my face, neither insolently nor in wry jest, but it makes me giggle nonetheless. “Seam clothes,” I clarify. “Things like you lent me the other day, but for keeps.”

I fish out the pouch of pocket money from my nightstand, heavy with months of unspent coins, and tuck it inside the basket. “Can you go to the Hob and buy me shirts, trousers, a cap and coat – maybe three outfits in all?” I ask. “You can have whatever money is left over – and more besides, if that’s not enough.”

She shakes her head in reply but her expression is one of confusion, not refusal. “Miss, you could buy much finer things straight from the Mercantile,” she protests, “and they’d last you much longer besides.”

“I have far too many fine clothes already,” I remind her, “and you can have some of those if you like for payment as well. I need Seam clothes – things that wouldn’t set me apart if I was spotted on the street.”

Briony frowns. “You’d be a princess in coal dust and rags, miss,” she says, which for some reason makes me blush, much like when Jude called me the prettiest Merchant girl in Twelve, however playfully. “You’re too pale and pretty by half,” she explains. “No ragged clothes will change that.”

“You don’t need to flatter me, and I’m not trying to look like someone else,” I insist, my blush rising higher and hotter. “I just want to look less like me – less like the mayor’s daughter sneaking off to the woods.”

Her frown deepens. “Don’t see why, miss,” she replies, but carefully, as though anticipating a reprimand. “Pretty as you are, there’s no need to hide it, and everyone knows it’s you hunting with Gale now –”

“And how do you think Gale would react,” I break in sternly, “if I showed up at his door in pretty winter clothes to lay snares and skin rabbits?”

To my surprise, she grins and ducks her head like the schoolgirl she was less than a year ago. “I think he’d be that pleased, miss,” she answers. “He likes your yellow hair ever so much – ‘specially with his ribbon in it,” she adds with an impish crinkle of her eyes. “And surely you’d rather look nice for the boy you love.”

I gape at her wordlessly, wondering where her grave advisements of two days ago have gone.

“I know you said not to speak of it more, miss,” she adds in a quieter tone, setting her basket on the bed and taking my hands in hers, “and I sorely hope I haven’t caused offense. I just don’t see why you’d wish to look aught than you are, especially for the sake of a boy who –”

“A very proud boy,” I quell, before she can give me more unfounded, exquisite reasons to hope. “If I came to his house on Sunday dressed like a princess, I’d never make it to the woods.”

“And no mistake,” she affirms through an irrepressible grin. “He’d have you in his arms before the hearth in two shakes and then off to bed to warm you a sight better with his –”

“That’s enough!” I bark, snatching away my hands, and her mirth abruptly vanishes.

Briony’s been something of a paid companion as well as a maid since coming to us last summer and even more so since Katniss left, but I’m entitled to a certain amount of authority over her teasing, unlike Prim’s. I can make requests of her with relative ease, but this is the first I’ve had to chide her for what might be termed over-familiarity, and the mere prospect of it makes me feel sick.

“I’m so sorry, miss,” she whispers, scooping up the basket and burying her gaze in its depths. “I shouldn’t have spoken thus and I shan’t ever do it again. Please don’t dismiss me.”

I sigh wearily, more at myself than anything else, and set the basket back on my bed so I can take her hands once more. “You’ve done little enough wrong, Briony,” I assure her. “I’m vexed of late, by Gale Hawthorne and…by my own feelings, and I ought not take it out on you.”

“I ought not tease neither,” she replies with uncommon meekness. “Forgot my place, miss, and I shan’t again–”

“You shall,” I insist with a small smile. “Indeed, I should be disappointed if you did not. But just now, can you do as I asked and buy me Seam clothes?”

A tiny echoing smile curls her mouth. “You’ll make ever so lovely a Seam girl, miss,” she says shyly. “I reckon he’ll admire – I mean, you’ll cut as fine a figure as the handsomest Seamwife,” she amends in a rush. “But surely, couldn’t I bring you things from my family, rather than the Hob?” she offers. “Bristel’s little bigger than you” – this is not an insult, as most miners bear less meat on their bones than the average Merchant girl, and Briony’s brother is no exception – “and you can surely have as many of his clothes as you wish – and mine! – as cheap as you like.”

I answer this with a sad, albeit grateful smile. “Thank you for the offer,” I say, “but you’ll need every stitch of that clothing this winter, and more besides. Hob clothes will serve me just as well,” I insist, “and shop as cheaply as you like, so long as everything is somewhat sturdy. The rest of the money is yours to keep, and I’ll give you new thermals and some of my sweaters besides.”

Her brow furrows faintly, as though she’s debating whether or not to tell me something, but she says only, “That’s too much by half, miss. Any leftover coin will be more than payment enough. I’ll go straightaway after breakfast is cleared.”

I thank her profusely and return the laundry basket to her arms, and though everything seems quite settled, Briony still wears that strange frown as she departs. I wonder if she dislikes or dreads going to the Hob, but to my knowledge, Seamfolk of all ages move about freely there – far more freely than Merchant visitors – and patronize it as their own version of the Square, albeit a somewhat illicit one.

Emboldened by her compliments, I dress for the day in a long skirt of deep green velvet and a blouse patterned with roses that used to be my mother’s, with the downy white fur of my cuffs and collar for embellishment and further warmth, and tie back my hair at the temples with Gale’s ribbon. I look not unlike the winter witch-queen of my imagination when I’m finished and feel a little foolish for my pains, especially at the simultaneous raised eyebrows of my parents at breakfast, but I dismiss their curiosity with a reminder that it’s a music assembly day. While these have always been my very favorite days of school, for the past few years I’ve been recruited to accompany the singing, as the school no longer employs a music teacher and few if any of the rotation of faculty leading the assemblies know their way around a piano, and as an added bonus, I’m allotted a little time to play some of my repertoire for the students.

I’ve been working my way through a series of twelve pieces called The Seasons, written by a gentleman from as long ago as fairy tales with the delicious fairy-worthy name Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. My father plays some of Tchaikovsky’s festive pieces at holiday-time, from a magical winter ballet called The Nutcracker that I used to dream of as a little girl, and until quite recently I would dance around the piano to the lilting strains of the “Waltz of the Flowers” with whatever partner I could find, be he a dapper velvet cushion or a weathered old broomstick, with a princely gold ribbon tied on like a neckerchief. 

The Seasons is equally lively and romantic in turns, if not quite so festive, and like so much of our literature, musical and otherwise, it was collected and reviewed for “suitability” and ultimately approved – we suspect, due to the July piece being labeled, so very timely: “Song of the Reaper.” Especially as the book was returned with a note instructing the mayor’s daughter to learn that piece in particular and play it for the after-dinner entertainment of Justice Building officials as soon as might be managed.

It’s a work song, magpie, my father soothed me later, though we both knew the Capitol intended it to serve as a cruel reminder that their Reaping is as inevitable as the arrival of summer and that its threat is every bit as near to me as to the poorest Seam child with tesserae as numerous as the stars. I know you have never witnessed the harvest of wheat, no more than I have, but we have read of it in many books, he reminded me, and surely you can hear as much in the melody and rhythms: the steady vigor of the harvesters raising their blades and voices in chorus, rejoicing to fill the storehouses that will feed them all the winter through. This piece, and the harvest song that follows, speaks of scything grain in the field, not plucking up children and cutting them down well before their prime.

Today I mean to play – from memory, so as to further evade suspicion – the piece officially designated for September: “The Hunt.” It sounds nothing like Katniss nor Gale nor, I suspect, a day of true hunting whatsoever – rather, I’d hazard, what hunting might sound like if conducted by citizens of the Capitol: a pompous horseback parade through a landscaped wilderness, along which route, every now and again, small game is obligingly driven, to be fired upon by jeweled rifles and golden crossbows – but I think it more appropriate a selection than any other for this, the penultimate day before I step into the woods: a nascent huntress in my own right. It will serve as clever way to thumb my nose at the Capitol from the heart of the school, and its quick cheerful manner will appease anyone who might otherwise suspect a dangerous title or theme.

The January piece, “At the Fireside,” is equally appropriate to the occasion and a little warmer and mellower in nature, and I’ll conclude my set with that.

“What are you playing today?” my father asks with careful nonchalance.

“Tchaikovsky’s Seasons, September and January,” I reply, smiling with my eyes, and he returns the expression with approval.

Our everyday caution is heightened when it comes to books and music, because if a piece is ruled seditious or otherwise threatening to the present order of things it will be destroyed: officially, taken to the incinerator in the basement of the Justice Building, where their own sensitive documents are securely disposed of, but my father suspects that most if not all such seized art and literature makes its way to President Snow’s mansion instead, either for his own private enjoyment or to be reissued with strategic edits as new media for Capitol citizens.

In any case, we may well be the only people in Twelve, if not all of Panem, possessing a copy of any given story or suite, and so every volume of words or music is priceless and treated accordingly. My father’s copy of The Nutcracker, its ornate oversized pages yellowed with age and crumbling at the edges, is painstakingly, perpetually concealed behind the wainscoting in the ballroom; indeed, I’ve seen it only twice in my entire life. He’s known all the pieces by heart since he was my age and insists I learn my repertoire in the same fashion, in case the sheet music should ever be taken away.

My father has taught me a little music theory over the years, though my brain doesn’t like transcribing sound into symbols as much as translating those symbols into tangible magic simply by striking narrow strips of wood in the right sequence, and every so often he’ll assign me to write out a piece from memory. It takes ages just to mark out the staves and while he’ll accept the melody alone, he continually presses for the harmonies, chords, countermelodies; every last detail I can wring from my brain.

Your grandmother had twice the music we do, he reminds me gently in the midst of my frustration. An entire bookshelf’s worth, floor to ceiling, and before the Dark Days, her family’s collection would fill a room. You can memorize as much as you want, but unless you pass along all the destroyed pieces you have learned in your turn, either by teaching them to someone or better still, creating a handwritten copy, when you die they may be gone forever.

I wonder if harsh, practical Gale will see any value in music – if, perhaps, that’s a dormant part of Jack Everdeen in him that I’m meant to find and stir like an ember. If he’s living off music lessons, even in part, he’ll have to concede it some value, I think wryly, whether or not he cares two pins for music in its own regard.

For the first time I wonder whether Gale has ever heard Katniss sing – perhaps in the woods, where she’s happiest. Peeta wasn’t the only one captivated by that tiny fairy child on our first day of school, nor the only one to observe the reverent silence of her songbird court, and I wonder to this day whether her father mightn’t have been the very Pied Piper of Panem, leading those lost miners through poisoned smoke and perilous darkness, far away from the living death of District Twelve, by the lamp of his silver voice.

To be sure, Katniss could lead us all into the woods like so many rats and do with us whatever she pleased, simply by raising her voice in song.

“Add the Troika,” my father suggests. “Sleighs are still on the mind at present,” and I wonder whether Katniss is visiting his thoughts as well. The breathtaking daughter of Winter himself, dressed head to foot in furs, borne across a frozen lake by tuft-footed ponies to the gentle baker’s son who won her with warm milk and fresh bread.

I wonder whether that snow maiden will melt in spring: not to death – though it may feel something like, as I know only too well – but to love and longing. Whether she might open like an iron-petaled blossom and surrender her heart to the gaze and protection of another, who loves her volumes more than she has ever loved herself – surely more than she has ever imagined any man could love a woman.

I wonder if my beloved will ever yield his heart to any maiden or if, like as not, it’s made of stone and will crack, not melt, when heated.

“You must play for your lover, petal,” my mother’s voice breaks into my mental ramblings, so softly that for a moment I’m certain I’m imagining it. “Bid him warm himself by the parlor fire and woo him with the spindrift of your fingers over the keys.”

This remark is so unexpected, not to mention absurd, that I look up with a start, afraid that my mother is inevitably, irrevocably drifting back into that haunted dream state in which she’s dwelt for so much of my life, only to find her grinning like Prim at her wickedest and my father blushing like a schoolboy caught in misbehavior. “There was very little wooing intended, Maddi,” he protests, but weakly, and she takes one of his pale, long-fingered hands in both of hers and raises it to her lips.

“A fireside chair on a winter evening and a lover at the piano is as powerful a magic as any the Everdeens ever wrought,” she counters huskily, but her eyes are merry. “And you are as deft a magician as your father, petal.”

“It would take far more than a fire in the parlor to entice Gale Hawthorne into this house, let alone to sit and listen to me play piano,” I declare dryly and get up from the table, eager to excuse myself from the tenderness kindling between them. “Do you think you can make it for the assembly?” I ask my father.

He attends them whenever possible, if for no other reason than to hear live music outside the confines of his own parlor. Before he became mayor – in his teaching days – he took more turns than most at leading the assemblies and served as accompanist when it wasn’t his turn to lead, and I know he misses it desperately.

“I’ll be there,” my mother says, to my astonishment. “It’s just before lunch, yes? I’ll stay and eat with you after.”

It’s virtually unheard-of for parents to have lunch with their children at school, but at least part of that is due to the simple fact that everyone works during the day. My father steals away to join me on my birthday when he can, even if all he can manage is a quick hug and a gaily packaged sweet before returning straightaway to work, but my mother has never been to school – let alone out and about, until recently – in midday.

My father’s entire countenance lights up at her words. “I’ll move mountains to be there,” he promises us both. “Though there’s every chance some pointless yet exceedingly important matter will be raised just as I attempt to sneak out, to firmly rout my escape.”

“That’s good enough for me,” I assure him and impulsively kiss them both before heading off to school.

I’m passing the bakery when I meet Prim on her way out, pies in pail, looking like the cat that ate the cream and the canary all in one go.

“You appear to have something to tell me,” I greet her with deliberate coolness, yesterday’s delivery of lavender lozenges rearing to the forefront of my mind.

“More than you know,” she replies with equally deliberate, if less successful, calm. “For starters: Mom really did need me for a paying customer yesterday,” she begins, “when Vick called me downstairs.”

“Will wonders never cease,” I answer dryly. “Dare I ask what, if anything, this has to do with what arrived on my doorstep not ten minutes later?”

“Nearly everything, as it happens,” she remarks, no longer troubling to hide her amusement. “You see: Gale got back early – while we were upstairs having our coffee.”

I missed seeing him by a hairsbreadth. There’s a painful lurch in my chest, as though my heart clomped sideways.

“Did you know?” I croak, intending to demand this with grace and authority and failing utterly on both counts.

“Do you really think I’d have let you go so easily?” she asks in turn. “Anyway, I knew you’d forgotten your hat the moment you ran out –”

“Or you expressly took off my hat in hopes that I’d forget it and have to come back,” I challenge.

“It was a contingency plan,” she admits without shame. “But of course, I knew you’d never willingly come back to the shop if there was a chance even one Hawthorne might still be there.

“So I went downstairs, where the kids had decided – without any help from me,” she adds, both pointedly and merrily, “that their newly arrived brother needed to buy a certain reluctant young lady a present: a peace offering, as it were,” she explains. “While they don’t know what’s happened between you two, he wouldn’t ask you about Sunday himself and you didn’t want to answer him directly, which was more than sufficient to suggest a quarrel.

“I may have mentioned that you’re fond of the lavender lozenges, that we’d just made a fresh batch, and that your mother would use them if you didn’t want them,” she goes on with all the bright-eyed innocence of a newly hatched chick. “So Gale bought you a pound of them – not the lot, mind, but a sight more than the average customer – and since we had to return your hat as quickly as possible and I was busy at the counter, there was nothing for it but to send Posy.”

“Nothing for it but to send Posy?” I rasp, my head spinning and endeavoring to refute what she’s saying all at once.

“Well, you didn’t want Vick,” she replies with a grin. “Rory was quite explicit about that, and I hastened to add that, with Vick being ever so much prettier than Gale, you were likely to fall head over heels in love if he came to your door with a bag of lavender lozenges.

“And then you –” She chokes on a bubble of laughter, as though she almost can’t believe what she’s about to say. “The boy who purportedly ‘wouldn’t buy a treat for his girl if you handed him a bag of money and marched him at gunpoint to the sweet-shop counter’ sent you a whopping pound of lavender lozenges,” she recounts with gleeful relish. “And you promptly ripped the bag apart, wrapped it around a slice of pie for Posy and sent back his message with the meagerest gesture that could be called a reply.”

It takes all the strength I possess not to bury my face in my hands and beg the snow beneath my boots to swallow me up.

If what she said is true – and impossible though it sounds, why would it not be? – Gale Hawthorne, the boy who presently won’t even speak to me, spent money on me. On a pretty, almost frivolous sort of present, whatever its meaning or motivation, and I all but threw it back at his head.

And I can’t even accuse Prim of hiding this from me because the gift was delivered by Gale’s sister and addressed in his hand. Oh, I could accuse Posy till I was blue in the face, except that I could never do any such thing, not to mention I knew she was lying immediately and still misjudged the situation. The presence of the dream-inducing lozenges certainly suggested that Prim played a role, but they could just as easily have been sent by her mother or even ordered by mine. Minus the presence of my hat, there was no clear indication that Prim was involved in any part, and yet I suspected her of masterminding the whole enterprise and acted accordingly toward an unprecedented – and surely now, never to be repeated – token from the boy I love.

“Promise me you didn’t throw them away,” she implores. “I know you must be livid but they aren’t the cheapest things to be had, and –”

“What sort of fool do you take me for?” I demand, my cheeks scalding with anger that she could think such a thing of me. “I refilled my mother’s supply and put the rest in a little jar in my nightstand, for sleepless nights.”

“I’m sorry,” she placates, holding up a hand in apology. “For what it’s worth: no one knows about your dream, or that there was anything significant about the lozenges themselves,” she adds quietly. “The kids thought they were pretty and smelled nice and liked that they might help you get a good night’s sleep. And I did ask Mom later if she’d altered the recipe to add mugwort or some other herb, but she hadn’t.”

I give a slow, frustrated sigh and stare at her for a long moment, trying to think of something – anything – to reply.

“I’m sorry for finding it so funny,” she says miserably. “I knew you’d be upset but I didn’t think it would hit you quite this hard.”

“Gale bought me a present,” I answer numbly, still struggling to accept this detail.

“Yes, he did,” she affirms, the ghost of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “A peace offering, mind you, but an unsolicited token nonetheless, and with nothing asked in return.”

Something snaps into place at these words and I glare darkly at her in realization. “But of course something was asked in return, or expected,” I counter, knowing all too well the life-and-death gravity of Seamfolk trades and transactions. “I’m supposed to be nicer to him, or more patient, never mind how he treats me!”

I whirl about and stalk off through a snowdrift – back toward my house, not the school.

“Where are you going?” Prim calls after me.

“To get the stupid lozenges and some money,” I retort without looking back. “In case he won’t take them back, he can have the equivalent in cash.”

Prim skitters around in front of me and plants her hands on my shoulders, halting my progress with her slight weight and sheer force of will. “You’re worse than Katniss!” she exclaims, exasperated. “For pity’s sake: let the man court you! You’re both free to act on your feelings and he’s already made an overture –”

“That wasn’t an overture,” I snap, pushing back against her but with frustration only, not any real physical strength. “That was a bribe, and one I’m not minded to accept.”

“Not a bribe,” she insists. “He kept saying you didn’t want anything from him, you wouldn’t accept it, it would only make you angrier still – why do you think Posy said it wasn’t from him?” she interjects on her own behalf. “But when I went to put the seal on the bag, he couldn’t stop looking at the spool of violet ribbon that we tie around gift orders, like it was taking all that he had not to ask for one on your package.”

“And you didn’t just throw one on for kicks?” I counter dryly.

“Not – my – courtship,” she reminds me, digging in her heels and giving my shoulders a mighty heave. “I didn’t want to add a sweetheart’s token where he didn’t intend one and give you the wrong idea.”

I sigh deep and crossly in resignation and let my body slack, catching Prim by the elbows so neither of us goes toppling over into the snow. “He really wanted to give me something?” I ask doubtfully.

“It didn’t start as his idea, but he took very little convincing and none of it very good,” she replies, her impishness flooding back in delighted force. “If he’d met his siblings at the mercantile you might’ve gotten something more useful out of the deal, but as it is, you and your mother get a winter’s worth of sweet dreams at Gale Hawthorne’s expense.”

“I don’t like it,” I declare.

“Yes you do, and that’s why you’re so terrifically upset,” she rejoins cheerfully. “Well, that and the fact that you misunderstood the gift and responded to it accordingly.”

“Was he very angry?” I whisper. “When Posy came back with the torn-up bag wrapped around a piece of pie – and my measly excuse for a reply?”

She grins like she holds the most delicious secret in all the world. “He raised an eyebrow at the pie,” she reveals. “Like he really wanted to be offended but might’ve almost been amused, and when he saw your note, he very carefully managed not to smile.”

My lips sprawl into a foolish smile of their own accord, hastily rubbed away, but not before Prim can witness it. “Don’t get too excited,” she warns, but merrily. “When Posy relayed that you'd be coming over for Sunday breakfast, he scowled to high heaven and told them they’d be scouring every inch of the house – and taking baths besides – before you’d set one lily-white foot inside.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” I sputter through an encroaching blush. “They’re not going to boil gallons of water on my account–!”

I break off as Prim erupts into laughter. “You have no idea how badly I want to be there on Sunday morning, for so many reasons,” she says. “Maybe I can invite myself to stay over Saturday night –”

“Lest you forget, two of the Hawthornes are eligible prospects for a girl your age,” I remind her, “and I don’t think your sweetheart would be altogether pleased for you to sleep over in a household with two such prospects about.”

“He wouldn’t at that,” she concedes thoughtfully. “He said he wished I could find a sweetheart my own age, or closer to, but it made him downright sick to say the words, and Mellarks never rest easy when there’s a Hawthorne about, never mind how disinterested the respective Everdeen.”

I grin, take her arm, and steer us around in the direction of the school. “But you like having a contingency plan,” I needle playfully, with a poke at her ribs. “And Rory admires you ever so much –”

“Truce!” she begs, shifting her lunch pail onto her forearm to offer me that hand to shake. “I’ll stop teasing you about Vick if you stop teasing me about Rory.”

“I shall certainly consider it,” I concede, clasping her mittened hand firmly. “But as I know you’ll never relinquish Gale as teasing fodder, I reserve the right to torment you all I like about your hulking yellow-haired sweetheart.”

“I would expect no less,” she replies, her eyes twinkling like lamplight on snow, and together we make our merry way to school.

Music assembly takes the place of third period, giving every student a little holiday, but I get to miss half of second period as well to coordinate with the assembly leader – today, Miss Farlow, whose mathematical brain gives her a unique appreciation for music, if not an aptitude for producing it herself. Like the rest of the faculty she’s Merchant-born without a business of her own, though her strong head for figures would have made her a coveted accountant in wealthier times, and I’m a bit surprised no Merchant bachelor has snatched her up to manage the books for his family’s business. While not especially striking in appearance, she has a pleasant sort of prettiness and an even-tempered manner that would be welcome at one’s fireside of an evening.

“We’ll start with the anthem, of course,” she tells me with a surreptitious poke of the tip of her tongue out one corner of her mouth.

“Panem forever,” I concur gravely with a subtle eye-roll of my own as I duly lay out the unnecessary sheet music.

Outside the context of the Reaping, the Hunger Games themselves, and the Victory Tour, the Capitol’s stately anthem feels as out of place in the backwoods mining village that is District Twelve as the biannual appearances of Effie Trinket. It’s the most ridiculous sort of – anachronism, I think the word is – and ironic to boot, considering the tune they chose, but we’re only called upon to sing it at special school functions, such as music assembly days, and, depending on who’s in town for Saturday dinners, I may be instructed to play it for our guests after the meal.  My father passed along his faint recollection of the original lyrics, which are far better suited to charismatic revolutionaries like Jack Everdeen and Peeta Mellark than bloated Capitol politicians, and I let these occupy my mind as my fingers grandly recite the tune.

See, the conqu'ring hero comes!
Sound the trumpets! Beat the drums!
Sports prepare! The laurel bring!
Songs of triumph to him sing! 

Laurel again, I muse with mild curiosity, and wonder why Ashpet Everdeen would have given her fading newborn daughter a name almost synonymous with victory. To be fair, “Laurel” is as steeped in our Appalachian origins as “Ashpet” and in far more common circulation, and a swiftly snuffed life in Twelve could be construed as a bitter sort of triumph, but Ashpet was made of fiercer stuff than that, even after the loss of her husband and baby girl, and shrewd as a vixen to boot. 

She sang songs that reduced my own grandmother to tears, not merely at the beauty of her voice – which was accounted as legendary as that of her face – but because those melodies had never before been heard in these parts, nor since, unless Jack managed to pick them up in his turn, or Katniss in hers. Grandma Annalise was the first to suspect where the Greenbriers’ fey foundling had truly come from, and those songs provided the best clue of all.

Haydn, Gran told me once in a reverent whisper, a few months before she died, as she stroked the loveliest melody from the piano that I had ever heard, at once grand as a parade and gentle as the rocking of a cradle. How could that wild wood-sprite know Haydn – the very tune these wretches should have chosen for their anthem, had they any cleverness at all?

It sounds more like a lullaby, I remarked from my place beside her on the bench, and she looked up from the keyboard with that canny speaking expression that those of us who brush against dangerous information on a daily basis swiftly learn to master and exchange.

And so it was, for her, she replied in a hush, her fingers continuing by rote to provide a melodic cover for our dialogue. So she told me, when I asked. Who would rock their child to the Deutschlandlied?

My father was mayor then and my mother bedridden by her headaches, and in my slow lonely laps from one end of the Justice Building to the other, I had noticed something intriguing that I returned to as often as I dared: a photograph better fit for a storybook, and the subject’s name every bit as magical as Tchaikovsky’s.

I leaned so close my lips brushed Gran’s ear and whispered, A German prince, perhaps?

Her fingers faltered on the keys, striking a dissonant chord. It may well mean nothing for us, and do still less, she murmured, gliding seamlessly back into the song as though no mistake had been made. But it doesn’t fit in this world they’ve built up around us, and that makes it very curious indeed. Hopeful, even, one might say.

That was all we spoke of it, then or after, and once Gran had played her way through five variations of Ashpet Everdeen’s mysterious lullaby, we adjourned to the sunroom for lemonade and shortbread and eager tidbits of benign town gossip, as though it was no different from any other afternoon on any other day. I have yet to voice my suspicions about Ashpet’s antecedent to either of my parents, though my father knows full well which corridor I like to haunt on those days when I have cause to meet him at work and which portrait I raise a hand in front of, obscuring everything below the eyes. He’s a perceptive and highly intelligent man, despite his unprepossessing appearance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he already knows, and has for a good long while.

“What about requests?” I ask Miss Farlow, nudging my mind back to the present.

“Well, it is less than a week since New Year’s,” she reminds me with a crooked smile.

“How many people are singing ‘Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair’?” I groan, and she laughs.

“We should have twenty-three if they all come up for it,” she answers cheerfully.

Most students don’t give a moment’s thought to performing in the assemblies, save for the big formal one at the end of June, before the eighteen-year-olds head off to their final Reaping, but of course, this one fell unusually close to New Year’s. Everyone’s still soaring – or smarting – from their ribbon exchanges and thus all the love songs, requited and otherwise, get trotted out for a recitation. They can pick any song they like from our primer and I’m expected to accompany them on demand unless they supply their own accompaniment – highly unlikely, as few of Twelve’s residents can read music and fewer still have access to instruments – and while I’m competent at sight-reading, I play through the primer at least every couple of months, cover to cover, so as not to be caught off-guard.

Depending on the number of requests submitted to the assembly leader in the weeks preceding, there may also be group singing – which, depending on said leader, could include anything from favorite folk songs to old nationalistic tunes clunkily reworded in praise of Panem – or the leader may take the opportunity to teach a less familiar song, sometimes enlisting one or more students to perform it for their classmates before everyone attempts it en masse.

On occasion, the teacher leading the assembly might be secretly, passionately musical and will perform several pieces themselves, with my accompaniment – and a good bit of rehearsing ahead of time – if needed, while others don’t care two pins about music or the assemblies themselves and will vaguely wave the students through the singing of the anthem before handing the whole thing over to Madge Undersee for an impromptu piano concert. Having played for audiences including President Snow, Head Peacekeeper Cray, and Gamemakers visiting incognito, I’m reasonably comfortable with a large group of indifferent listeners, especially when they’re more interested in talking amongst themselves than seeking out mistakes in – or even paying attention to – my performance, but after fifteen or twenty such minutes the whispers and snickers start to get to me, even though I know it can’t all be related to me or my playing.

If Katniss hadn’t left with Peeta in November, I would have begged her to perform a set with me from my father’s ancient, priceless copy of The Oxford Book of Carols.

Not the nativity ones, of course – “The Praise of Christmas” neatly evades any such reference and would be exceptionally lovely with her fluid range and shimmering timbre – though I can’t help wondering what exactly Jack Everdeen passed down to his daughters through that immeasurable oral repertoire.

“It should be a nice mix,” Miss Farlow says. “Aside from the lovesick ‘Black is the Color’ mob, we have a group of twelve-year-old girls singing ‘Jingle Bells’ –”

“Well, sleighs are on the mind at present,” I remark with a smile, marking the song in my copy of the primer.

“Then we have the Donner Trio singing ‘A Marshmallow World,’” she goes on. “It’s not in the primer but–”

“I know it by heart,” I assure her.

It’s a favorite “party piece” of my mother’s family, as traditional at our winter gatherings as folk songs are to the rest of Twelve, and so catchy and innocuous that I’ve heard Justice Building officials whistling it on their way home from the festive evening we host for them on the last Saturday before New Year’s.

When your livelihood and heritage lie in a luxury trade, as candymaking must inevitably appear to our poor little district, you can either carry it like a loathsome and shameful burden hanging around your neck, making self-deprecating comments in front of anyone who might resent you for the source of your family’s income, or you can cheerfully embrace it as a part of your identity. My cousins have opted for the latter, performing sunny songs about sweets – or at least, full of the language thereof – in their tuneful trio of voices at assemblies throughout the year and even donning little confectionery accents for the occasion.

I anticipate red and white ribbons in their hair today, twined in peppermint-stick fashion, or perhaps multicolored ribbons curled and shaped to simulate glossy ribbon candy.

“…and Jude Tolliver and Luka Mellark are singing ‘I Gave My Love a Cherry’ –” Miss Farlow goes on, jarring me back to the matter at hand.

“Does Luka know he's signed up for that?” I wonder, and she returns my grin.

“One hopes,” she says merrily. “That one’s on you, if you’re willing?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I declare.

“And finally, Columbine and Bracken Wilhearn are singing a duet to round things out,” she concludes, glancing back at her handwritten list and thus missing my wince. “‘Roving on a Winter’s Night,’ which I don’t think I’ve heard since we lost Jack Everdeen. They’ll accompany themselves on mandolin and dulcimer, so you get a little break there, and then we’ll close with your piano solos. How does that sound?”

I scowl faintly in lieu of a reply, irritated that Columbine has found a way to infringe upon this happiest of mornings, and with a beautiful song to boot. The Wilhearns are wealthy enough to own instruments and allot their children ample free time to practice them, so Columbine and her siblings frequently volunteer to perform, both in the school assemblies and at community events like the Harvest Festival. Bracken, younger by two years, is a quiet amiable boy and a duet will divide the attention Columbine would otherwise soak up in total, and I should be delighted not to have to accompany her on a solo as I have on three previous occasions, but today it almost feels like a dig. Like I’m beneath them somehow, or Columbine wants to make a point of not needing me, never mind they’d have signed up for the duet several weeks ago.

Her voice will never rival Katniss’s but it’s lovely enough to render her a very pleasing package indeed, especially in Katniss’s absence.

I find myself suddenly, fiercely glad that Gale is no longer in school with us, even if that means he won’t hear me play the hunting song. After all, he’d only make fun of it – or of me, like as not, for being an idle rich girl with time lying so heavily on my hands that I turn them to memorizing silly pieces.

“I said: is everything all right?” Miss Farlow asks softly, and clearly for the second time, making me look up with a start. “You’ve never been tardy before Tuesday and I didn’t record it then, thinking perhaps you’d had some delay at home, but yesterday you ran out of class looking nauseous and…”

She trails off, biting her lips together, and drops her voice still more. “Madge, I feel terrible asking this,” she says, “but could you be pregnant?”

My jaw drops wide as a fish’s and my cheeks burn with mortification, not shame. “Could I?” I challenge in a hiss, aghast that anyone – let alone my math teacher – could have put the pieces together in such a pattern. “I’ve never even kissed a boy!”

She raises a hand to placate and apologize at once. “I suspected as much,” she admits, which somehow only embarrasses me more, “and I hope you’ll forgive the question. I just – I know that your father is much occupied with the running of the district and your mother is ill, and your best friend has gone away besides,” she explains gently. “And now to hear of some – dubious, shall we say – plans with an older boy –”

“Was it dubious when Katniss went to the woods with him?” I interject in a fierce whisper and she smiles.

“It should have been,” she concedes, “but you know better than anyone how she looked – or rather, didn’t look – at boys, and she was half-wild herself. You’re a full-blooded Merchant girl,” she reminds me. “The mayor’s only child, and – Gale Hawthorne has a bit of a reputation.”

“Not for getting girls pregnant,” I counter coldly and hope to my bones that I’m right.

“Not for getting girls pregnant,” she agrees without hesitation, to my immense relief. “But he is a passionate young man and – he might try to seduce you for any number of reasons.”

If the notion of Gale luring me into his bed – in a cramped sooty Seam house with his laundress mother and three little siblings underfoot – wasn’t so ridiculous, I’d say she wasn’t far wrong. Gale resents Merchants almost as much as he hates the Capitol and my family sits a painful notch nearer that pedestal, at least in his eyes. Enticing me into a degrading marriage or even taking his fill of me physically, whether or not I wound up pregnant, would make a fine act of defiance against the despised mayor’s family, and if he got me for a wife, there would be money and other small comforts thrown into the deal, to say nothing of a girl beneath the coverlets to slake his lust and, every now and again, produce another one of those children he supposedly wants.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Gale must have been inwardly delighted – nay, gleeful – when I demanded to be his hunting partner, and that’s why he agreed so readily – and why he’s kept confirming that I haven’t changed my mind after his false step with the kiss. A little white rabbit hopped right into a snare he didn’t even have to set and he couldn’t resist toying with her, and now he’s desperate not to let her get away.

I should hate him more than ever, except I love him to distraction and something in me doesn’t quite believe that Miss Farlow has the right of it. I know Gale doesn’t love me – nor for that matter, ever will – but if it’s all just a cruel game of seduction and humiliation, why would he involve his siblings? And while his mother can’t be overly fond of the Merchant folk whose clothing she launders, I suspect she’d box Gale’s ears, and then some, if she discovered he was up to something so reprehensible.

More to the point: it’s not like any Merchant bride, even the mayor’s only daughter, comes with a handsome dowry. Yes, I’d bring a certain measure of money and comfort to the union – linens, dishes, small furnishings and the like – but without a trade of my own I would ultimately be little more than one more mouth to feed. With Gale’s new job, the Hawthornes are much better off than the typical Seam family, and it would be stupid in the extreme for him to marry a girl he didn’t love and take on her care and feeding for the rest of her life, just so he could debase her and wound her family by extension.

Which means, concludes Prim’s merry voice in my head, that Gale Hawthorne is completely, utterly, head over heels in love with you.

Or, I counter wryly, he plans to save a lot of money and headaches and just get under my skirts at the slag heap.

But if Columbine is to be believed and Gale’s never bedded any of his conquests to date, why would he attempt it with the one girl in Twelve who could easily see him punished for it? While it’s not a crime to engage in premarital – or for that matter, extramarital – sex in Twelve, where copious offspring are as valued a commodity as a rich lode of coal, there are a handful of strictures that give it consequences. In particular: if an unmarried boy and girl in Twelve become lovers but he leaves her to marry someone else, he can be heavily fined for “breach of promise,” especially if his original girl is pregnant. A similar penalty falls on a married man who impregnates a widow.

It sounds uncharacteristically sentimental on the part of district lawmakers till you remember that production of new workers and tributes is our true industry, and an unwed mother is likelier to suffer malnutrition during her pregnancy, resulting in a weaker child or even the loss of it. As it is, the fines – steep by Merchant standards and astronomical by Seam – are intended for the Capitol’s coffers, not the abandoned mother and child nor even the running of the district, and I believe there’s only been cause to enforce them three times since my father took office.

The case would be a little more tenuous without a pregnancy, but if the mayor’s daughter was deflowered by a Seam man who promptly swanned off to marry his own true love, he would end up selling everything he had in a feeble attempt to pay the fine before dying of hunger or cold in the street, and his family wouldn’t be far behind.

But all of that aside: if Gale truly wants to be a father like his siblings claim, would he really bed a girl he cares nothing for and take the chance that she might conceive his child?

“No,” I tell Miss Farlow firmly. “He may not like me very much, but he’d have no reason to seduce me.”

She smiles faintly. “To woo you, then,” she allows. “If you’re not concerned for your reputation, at least have a care for your heart.”

“My heart is in absolutely no danger of being stolen by Gale Hawthorne,” I dismiss, because it’s been in his possession for the past three days already, and probably longer still. “Now, what did you have in mind for group songs?”

Miss Farlow’s structured approach makes her an easy leader to work with, and we map out the program in a few minutes with nary another mention of Gale Hawthorne, then I have just enough time to run through each of the requested pieces quickly before students begin trailing into the hall. I typically play some of my rehearsal repertoire for background music as they arrive, but owing to the festive air of today’s event, I opt for lively seasonal tunes instead. For good or for ill, I don’t tend to look out at the audience during the assembly, but copious New Year’s ribbons, both red and white, reappeared in braids and around arms this morning, and I anticipate a more colorful crowd than usual today.

Once all the students have arrived and settled into their seats, Miss Farlow joins me on the stage and we dutifully open with the anthem, then segue brightly into our seasonal fare as she calls up the group of twelve-year-old Merchant girls for their rendering of “Jingle Bells,” white ribbons in their identical blonde pigtails and strings of tiny bells in hand for percussion. The effect is utterly endearing but I can’t help shaking my head at how childish – and appropriately so – they seem compared to their classmate, the apothecary apprentice with the strapping twenty-one-year-old heir to Twelve’s bakery in keeping.

My cousins make an equally charming picture with their festive red-and-white frocks and New Year’s ribbons curled into peppermint ribbon candy – making me right on both counts – and I can’t resist quietly singing along with the Donners’ infectious winter theme:

Those are marshmallow clouds being friendly
In the arms of the evergreen trees
And the sun is red like a pumpkin head
It's shining so your nose won't freeze. 

Now more than ever, I’m profoundly grateful that Gale is no longer in school with us and therefore through with attending these assemblies. While he’s heard this song before and inevitably noticed me singing along as I accompany my cousins, if he was here today I know I’d never hear the end of it, and our trip to the woods – indeed, our hunting partnership – would be cut tragically short when, after countless insults, I ran him through with a peppermint stick.

Being descended from candymakers may seem like a ridiculous heritage to an angry Seam boy, but I refuse to be ashamed of it. While most residents of this district are lucky to afford one visit to Donners’ per year, it’s always an occasion of pure joy, even if they walk out with one tiny piece of peppermint to split five ways – and looks and smells have always been free. For over half of the children attending this assembly, New Year’s means pressing your frostbitten face against the window of the sweet-shop and drinking in the clouds of chocolate, peppermint, and caramelized sugar that waft out each time a paying customer departs, and for such children, a bustling sweet-shop in the heart of their derelict little district can turn the cruelest season of the year into a marshmallow world, at least for the weeks surrounding New Year’s.

The program starts out much like any other, save for a hilarious awkward moment when the twenty-three students who requested to sing “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” are summoned en masse for a group performance. I didn’t see a list of names and Miss Farlow doesn’t read them out, but only fourteen kids go up, and conspicuously, none of them are Merchants. I wonder how many lost their nerve and how many simply didn’t want to take the stage alongside their sweetheart’s siblings or romantic rivals.

After centuries of being trotted out for recitations in these parts, the song’s become a monotonous old chestnut that I could plod through blindfolded in my sleep while standing on my head, but this time around snatches of the lyrics catch at my brain like exquisite barbs:

If he on earth no more I see,
My life will quickly leave me…

I'll write him a note in a few little lines,
I’ll suffer death ten thousand times… 

I scowl fiercely and pound out the chords for the fourth verse running, reminding myself that this song may once have meant – may still mean – a great deal to circumstance-bound sweethearts like Peeta Mellark and I should really be more considerate of their plight, no matter how I feel about the black-haired young man in my sphere. Just the same, my gratitude at Gale’s absence redoubles, and I note with interest that Columbine isn’t a part of the lovesick group – like as not, because she has her own showpiece coming up, but I can’t help wondering if she’d requested this song as well but then refused to go up and make her declaration alongside a dozen of her classmates.

When Miss Farlow summons Jude and Luka for their duet, I dare a glance into the audience to see if I can catch Luka’s reaction, but by the time I spot him he’s on his way up behind his cousin, primer in hand and wearing a scowl to rival Gale at his finest. The Mellarks have pleasant enough voices – the baker’s, my father mentioned once, is surprisingly beautiful – but music is not considered their strong suit, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen one of them take the stage at an assembly.

It’s customary to dress up for an assembly performance, if not a requirement – even non-performing students often don their best for the occasion – and Luka’s ignorance is as obvious in that respect as in his frantic paging through the primer. While his dark sweater and corduroys are as neat as ever, he looks a sad shadow beside his cousin’s red-and-white gingham shirt and red neckerchief – even Jude’s socks, peeping out from beneath the cuff of his trousers, are red as sweetheart ribbons.

“It’ll be good for you,” Jude murmurs to his poor cousin, throwing me a wink, and I wonder just how much he knows about Luka’s impossible love. Luka’s sweetheart is most definitely not present at this assembly and I can’t imagine her being won by this of all songs.

Despite his antics, Jude has a bone-melting tenor voice – another area where his Seam heritage shines through – and he sings the first verse of the beloved riddle song with nary a hint of humor or self-deprecation:

I gave my love a cherry that has no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that has no bone;
I gave my love a ring that has no end,
I gave my love a baby that’s no cryin’.  

I wonder why he chose this particular song, if it’s directed toward Columbine, and if she has the slightest idea that he loves her. I wonder if it would even affect her to know. 

The cousins exchange a look before the second verse – traditionally sung by a child – which, of course, is Luka’s labor. I’ve never heard him sing on his own, and while he begins the verse with clear hesitation, his voice is warm and resonant; lovelier than I suspect any of us were prepared to believe, and a fine counterpart to Jude’s:

How can there be a cherry that has no stone?
How can there be a chicken that has no bone?
How can there be a ring that has no end?
How can there be a baby with no cryin’?

I silently applaud Jude for drawing attention to his cousin’s voice, though I can’t help worrying that Luka’s crowd of admirers will only grow – exponentially – after this demonstration, and he’ll wind up hiding in his bedroom for the rest of his days, staring at the ceiling and pining for his impossible love. 

Though now I think of it, there’s a poignant song in one of my father’s books about yearning after a girl with the same name – and one suspects, in a comparable situation – as Luka’s sweetheart, and I resolve to dig it out when I get home. I doubt he’d let me teach it to him, of course, but I could at least write out the lyrics for him, so he’d have something to mull over while he stares and pines.

The cousins sing the third verse together, with Luka supplying commendable harmonies:

A cherry when it's blooming, it has no stone,
A chicken when it’s pippin’, it has no bone;
A ring when it’s rolling, it has no end,
A baby when it's sleeping, it's no cryin’.
A baby when it's sleeping, it's no cryin’.

I expect the students to erupt at the end – after all, Luka and Jude are both lively, popular young men and singing such a tender duet is a bold, out-of-character display that they pulled off magnificently – but the response is surprisingly subdued. No whoops or cheers, only wordless, emphatic applause that goes on much longer than usual, and I wonder if the audience genuinely admires the cousins for their presentation or if their respective unrequited loves are better known than they think, and their classmates are commending their bravery in this declaration of sorts. 

Jude gives me a gratified, bittersweet smile over his shoulder as they return to their seats, and I return it with a little nod – in part for what he’s done but also because I know what’s coming. The last piece of the assembly before my pointless piano set.

I move to a chair at the side of the stage and Miss Farlow calls up Columbine and her brother for their duet. Bracken has donned jaunty red suspenders and a matching neckerchief for the occasion, plus the inevitable red ribbon around his left arm, but Columbine is heart-stopping. Her dress – a warm wintry plaid of red and evergreen, clearly tailored by their mother’s deft needle – fits her like the proverbial glove, and her hair is half swept up into a crown of red ribbons and half lying in curls against her creamy neck. She holds both instruments while Bracken brings the piano stool front and center for her to sit on, a dull stab of a reminder that I have been made obsolete by their performance.

They know the mandolin and dulcimer equally well and play them interchangeably, but I ungraciously surmise that Columbine chose the dulcimer for today’s performance because of the becoming picture she makes with the long slender instrument lying across her lap. It’s traditional to play it in this fashion, but Bracken will sometimes attach a strap allowing him to wear the dulcimer around his neck and play standing up – like Jack Everdeen did, now and again. It makes the performance a little more portable but unless you’re versatile enough to play underhand, you’re constantly tipping your face down, which compromises projection in singing.

I wonder what ultimately happened to Jack’s dulcimer. He sold it some twenty years ago to buy Alyssum’s wedding ring, or so the story goes, but whenever a performance was called for, someone always rustled up a stringed instrument to put into his hands, be it a dulcimer, mandolin, or even a banjo. Simon and Swannee Wilhearn were particular fans and will have lent him both of the instruments their children are currently holding, which I find deliciously ironic, but it suddenly, keenly bothers me that he gave up his beloved dulcimer for his bride and neither of his daughters ever got to learn – or even see – it. They’d been too busy surviving after his death to even think about music, but Katniss is safe and healthy and well taken care of now, with time – indeed, a very room – for hobbies, but no instruments to speak of.

Whoever ended up with Jack’s dulcimer would clearly recognize it as a treasure, and therefore it’s still intact and in existence somewhere in Twelve. I resolve here and now to find it and buy it back for Katniss, so she can have that priceless piece of her father and, if she wishes, learn to play it herself.

And then the Wilhearns begin their song and my heart hurts too much to let me think about anything else.

Columbine will never be as beautiful as Katniss, nor is her voice a true rival, but Katniss has never made an exhibition of her looks or her talents, and at this moment, the stunning Seam girl seated at center stage and singing to her dulcimer is a living fairy tale that no man or boy in Twelve can possibly resist. Her voice and Bracken’s weave together in a hushed harmony that makes you lean forward in your seat, as though they’re singing only for each other, their deft hands plucking and strumming without almost thoughtless ease:

A-rovin' on a winter's night
And drinkin' good old wine,
And thinkin' about my own true love,
He holds this heart of mine.

My love is like a budded rose,
That blooms in the month of June.
He’s like some music instrument,
That's just been lately tuned.

They insert an instrumental interlude at this point and I tear my gaze free, looking out into the audience for respite, but there’s only an endless sea of rapt faces, both olive-skinned and fair, gazing up at the siblings. I’m about to turn my attention to my hands in my lap for the remainder of the song when I spot an unlikely pair in the very back row of the hall and give a muffled squeak.

It’s Jack and Alys Everdeen – or rather, so like them as to momentarily stop my heart. At the end of the row sits a Merchant woman in a high-collared violet dress, her pale hair braided round her head, leaning over to say something to the Seam man, tall even in a folding chair, seated beside her. It’s impossible to make out either’s features clearly at this distance but his straight dark hair brushes his jaw when he turns toward her to reply and the lower half of his face is shadowed by a budding growth of whiskers, broken momentarily by a flash of teeth as he smiles.

The back row of the hall is kept empty during assemblies for any Justice Building staff who’d like to sit in, the rare Capitol visitor, and the almost rarer parents who are able to leave their work mid-morning to watch the performances. My eyes move eagerly past the strange pair, hoping to spot my father further down the line, when my heart gives a cold, excruciating lurch of realization and drags my gaze back to them.

Even at this distance, the pretty Merchant woman is unmistakably my mother, never mind I can’t remember the last time, excepting this week, that I saw her in public. And unlikely – no, impossible – as it is, there’s only one Seam man who’s even remotely connected to the mayor’s wife, and I haven’t seen him out of a cap since October – or seen him, period, in enough days for him to have made a start on a beard.

The singing resumes with a solo verse from Bracken, addressing his sister in a gentle, merry voice:

Who's gonna shoe your pretty little foot?
And who's gonna glove your hand?
And who will kiss your ruby lips,
And who will be your man?

Columbine responds huskily, her eyes never leaving the audience:

Papa will shoe my little foot,
And Mama will glove my hand
And you will kiss my ruby lips,
And you will be my man.

And I realize: Gale is here because she invited him. Columbine has surely taken pains to ensure he’ll show up anywhere she’s due to perform, but this is still New Year’s week and he’s supposed to go to the woods with me in two days – and she knew she’d be singing this particular piece. What better way to ensure she has his attention than to banish the mayor’s colorless daughter from the stage, literally take over my seat, and woo him with a Seam-cherished love song?

Bracken joins her on the next verse in his soft subtle harmonies but I barely hear the words – or rather, I can barely pick out the Wilhearns’ voices over the clamor of my breaking heart, sobbing the next verse from memory: 

I’ll love you till the sea runs dry,
And rocks melt with the sun.
And I will love you till the day I die…
My only one.

It appears that Miss Farlow was right and my heart was in danger after all.

For pity’s sake, my head admonishes, none of this is a surprise, and it doesn’t change anything. Gale needs a hunting partner and for whatever reason he agrees that should be you. You don’t want him for a sweetheart anyway, so where’s the harm? If he has Columbine’s arms and lips to come home to he’s less likely to flirt with you, so this can only make things better.

This, of course, is all quite true, but it does nothing to allay the heartache, and I stare down at my hands in my lap for the remainder of the song, trying to think of a better way to end the program than the piano pieces I’ve prepared. There are over ten minutes remaining in which I can effectively play whatever I like, but Gale will find The Seasons as foolish and worthless as my sweet-shop heritage. I could make up some variations on the festive songs performed earlier, turning them into something like a piano solo, or I could lean over and ask Miss Farlow if we can end with more group singing instead, but my mother is here too – the first time she’s ever come to an assembly in my life – and that calls for much more than accompaniment or a few feeble variations on previous tunes.

The Wilhearns end their song to thunderous applause and Columbine rises gracefully to bow with her brother, then Bracken replaces the stool with a quick apologetic glance in my direction – he understands, at least in part – and there’s nothing for it but to resume my seat at the piano.

I didn’t bring my music for The Seasons, knowing today’s selections by heart, so when I take my seat the primer is still open to the last song I played from it: “I Gave My Love a Cherry.” Except it’s not the only song to use that melody, and there’s a terrible, irresistible urge coming over me.

After all, no one listens to my solo set anyway – I can already hear the anticipant silence crumbling away into dozens of whispered conversations – and the only person here who might care two pins both knows and loves the alternate lyrics.

I don’t have a Katniss voice, or a Columbine voice, or even an Alyssum and Prim voice; I’ve never sung on my own outside of family parties and I’m not entirely certain what my voice will sound like when it comes out. But my range is respectable, my pitch is excellent, and most importantly at the moment: I keep a library of songs in my head.

I devise an introduction with cold but steady fingers and clear my throat before stepping off the precipice: 

You ask how much I need you, must I explain?
I need you, oh my darling, like roses need rain.
You ask how long I'll love you; I'll tell you true:
Until the twelfth of never, I'll still be loving you.  

My voice is limber from the group singing, making the higher intervals easier to land, but it’s far too strong, too bright; my diction too clear. There’s no chance the back row of the hall hasn’t heard every last syllable. 

I remind myself that I’m singing for my mother, not the angry young man who surely left the moment Columbine’s song was finished, never mind I’m thinking of nothing but him as each tender word leaves my lips:

I'll love you till the bluebells forget to bloom;
I'll love you till the clover has lost its perfume.
I'll love you till the poets run out of rhyme,
Until the twelfth of never and that's a long, long time.
Until the twelfth of never and that's a long, long time.

The last notes fade away to a breathless sort of silence, as though the students aren’t sure whether to applaud or not, and then a pair of hands near the front – Jude or maybe Prim, I daren’t turn to look – eagerly leads the charge in emphatic clapping and the rest follow suit, like a downpour on the thinnest of tin roofs, here and there punctuated by whistles and inarticulate exclamations.

They clap for my piano pieces, of course, but it always feels like a passive response; by rote, almost, not the way they applaud their classmates, no matter how terribly they perform. But this is altogether different. This applause is enthusiastic, eager; excited, even – and it’s taking a long time to die down. It’s as though something new and truly unexpected happened in this place for the first time in living memory and the secondary student body – the twelve- to eighteen-year-olds of District Twelve, with only poverty, hunger, and an imminent Quarter Quell lying ahead of them – are clinging to that progress, or hope thereof, with both hands

“Sing another!” cries a young man over the din – this time it’s unmistakably Jude – and I turn very slightly to face the audience, keeping my gaze high and unfocused, and declare loudly through my blush: “And now we conclude this assembly with three piano solos representing the seasons of autumn and winter.”

A small sad sound sweeps the room – a disappointed sigh? – and we return to our expected roles: the students to somewhat attentive silence and I to my solo Tchaikovsky set. Each piece wins a respectable measure of applause but nothing like that for the piece I sang, and I put it down to an acknowledgement of raw nerve. Not only did the quiet mayor’s daughter sing in public before the entire secondary school, but she did so right after Columbine Wilhearn’s magnificent showpiece.

It’s a pity I sent Briony to the Hob on my behalf, I think madly, halfway through “The Hunt.” I should have gone myself – after this, I know I could have – and taken my pick of the clothing there.

My set concluded, Miss Farlow thanks us all for participating – “and Madge Undersee most particularly,” she adds with a sweeping gesture at the piano and a genuine smile – then she dismisses the students for lunch. I busy myself needlessly at the piano till the hall is nearly empty then, reluctant as though I’m pulling off a bandage, I let my gaze drift to the back row. My mother is waiting for me there and waves when she catches my eye, but the seat beside her is empty.

Well, I expected no less.

I hurry back to meet her, because her presence here is far more remarkable than Gale Hawthorne’s, and gasp to find her teary-eyed and wearing an expression that reads at once sorrowful and proud. “What’s happened?” I exclaim, taking her hands as much for my own reassurance as hers. “Is it Dad?”

Did I manage to anger them? I add silently, swallowing back my fear. Will we all suffer because I wanted to offer up a love song too?

She shakes her head and draws me into her arms, and she’s so warm and lovely and smells so wonderfully of lavender soap and lilac water that I melt against her like a weary child. “Oh petal, there’s nothing wrong in all the world,” she whispers against my hair, stroking my back with one delicate hand. “I’m so sorry for my maudlin appearance,” she soothes. “It was just – you reminded me so much of Maysi up there.”

I open my mouth to apologize but the words die in my throat, because neither Aunt Maysilee nor my mother was ever especially skilled at music, nor interested in creating it. “But…Maysi didn’t play, Mom,” I puzzle gently. “She…she quit piano because the lessons bored her–”

“Maysi played as well at sixteen as your father does now,” she murmurs, drawing back a little to cradle my face in her hands. “She was bored because she was advancing quicker than your gran could teach her, and she knew I was in love with Myron. So she stepped back.”

“But…why on earth would you lie about something like that?” I sputter, as stunned as if my mother had punched me in the gut. All my life I’ve envisioned Aunt Maysilee as a sullen music student, scowling through her lessons and kicking the piano with her high-buckled shoes till her parents finally let her quit or Grandma Annalise sent her off, not a prodigy to rival a boy who was veritably raised at the piano.

“You know why,” she reminds me softly, tracing my cheek with one finger, and no more needs to be said. “And it wasn’t wholly a lie; she really was bored with her lessons, just…not with music.”

“And with Dad?” I press delicately, fairly certain I know the answer, and she laughs.

“Maysi was a blazing streak of life,” she recalls fondly, “and your father liked piano technique exercises and diagramming sentences.”

“But he was still handsomer than Dewey Cartwright,” I counter, daring to be impish.

“Dewey put up with Maysi,” she replies, her eyes dancing. “And he was sweet as spun sugar; all the Cartwrights are, if a little doughy in the middle. But give her another summer and I wouldn’t have been surprised if –”

She breaks off sharply and something closes behind her eyes, like a door slamming shut, and I know it’s because we were treading too close to the pain – closer than we’ve ever come before. “Seam boy,” she says after a moment, faintly. “Maysi would have loved a Seam sweetheart. She knew Jack liked Alys before I did and could never understand why she didn’t reciprocate, and if she – under different circumstances,” she amends with visible control, “I think she’d have gone off to the Hob and carried home a miner, like Rooba.”

I wonder for the first time how much I truly know about Aunt Maysilee’s Games. The subject is utterly forbidden at home, both officially and unofficially, but I’ve seen a few pictures from the Tribute Parade as well as the interviews, and Haymitch Abernathy was a devastatingly attractive young man. Almost as good-looking as Gale with twice the snark and arrogance, and all at once it occurs to me that I may not have been the first Donner girl to fall unwittingly for a sharp-edged, angry Seam boy.

My mother brought a picnic hamper for our lunch, and I carry it for her as we make our way down to the lunchroom. “So: no Dad?” I guess.

“I stopped there on my way over, but he was stuck fast in committee,” she answers ruefully. “I was hoping he could at least catch the end. He’ll be heartbroken to have missed your debut.”

“It wasn’t a debut,” I insist, never mind my cheeks are burning. “The singing was…just some kind of fluke. And you still managed to find someone to sit with,” I remind her pointedly.

“Oho!” she chuckles with unmistakable relish. “I was beginning to think you hadn’t noticed.”

“Well?” I press when, after several moments, no further explanation is forthcoming, but she shakes her head.

“Let’s wait to get settled,” she says. “It’s little enough of a story but it’ll be best savored over coffee and sandwiches.”

I’m surprised but grateful at the lack of interruptions as we wind our way to my usual table. Classmates typically exchange quick compliments in passing after the assembly but no one even approaches me today, most likely due to the presence of my mother, who most of them won’t even recognize. Not to mention, rare as it is to see a parent at the school, they may assume she’s a new teacher or even, elegantly as she’s dressed, a Capitol representative of some kind.

She unpacks the hamper, gracefully spreading a square of festive calico for a tablecloth and arranging a plate of cold roast beef sandwiches, a bowl of tossed salad greens, and three miniature goat cheese and apple tarts into a pretty tableau, but I recognize stalling when I see it, even if it’s uncharacteristic behavior from my mother.

“You’re not fooling anyone,” I warn, but playfully, and her eyes glint up at me as she patiently pours us each a steaming cup of coffee from a tall flask and adds precise, generous measures of cream and honey to both.

“There’s not so very much to tell,” she begins, nonchalant as you please, as she takes a seat opposite me. “I came for the program, like I said I would, and he was there when I arrived.”

“You got there early?” I confirm, struggling to temper the voracity in my voice.

“Of course,” she replies, then pauses for a lingering sip of coffee, grinning with her eyes over the cup.

“How early?” I croak, abruptly recalling my conversation with Miss Farlow before the students arrived. I can’t decide whether Gale or my mother would have been the worse audience for that exchange, but either way it can mean no good for me.

“Just before the kids started coming in,” she says. “You were running through the songs on your own.”

Which means if anyone overheard us, it was Gale. As awful as our words of pregnancy and seduction must have sounded, most damning of all was my final remark: My heart is in absolutely no danger of being stolen by Gale Hawthorne.

I close my eyes at the recollection and an echoing pain beneath my ribs. A public love song, however indirectly presented, is meaningless when they’ve heard what you say about them in private.

“He was sitting in the back row already,” she adds, frowning slightly at my expression, and reaches through our picnic to lay a hand on mine. “It looked like he’d been there for a bit.”

I shake off the misery of being overheard – and, inevitably, misheard – by the boy I love to respond to something far more startling. “And you sat by him?” I exclaim, aghast.

“Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve stood three inches away from an attractive young man?” she rejoins wryly. “It was as much a matter of my knees giving out than any active decision on my part.”

A perverse giggle bubbles up in my throat. In all likelihood, my mother hasn’t been within an arm's length of any  young man – not counting the annual Victor’s dinner, at which her attendance is compulsory and far too painful for her to appreciate anything but the quiet darkness of her bedroom afterward – since Aunt Maysilee died, and Gale is a virile specimen. I wonder whether it was the sight or scent of him that affected her more strongly.

“I didn’t think he knew who I was at first,” she goes on. “I asked if I could sit by him and he sort of shrugged indifference. He was watching you rather intently,” she adds in a leading tone, “and I don’t think he cared to be interrupted.”

He was waiting for Columbine and watching for insult fodder in the meantime, I translate silently, but aloud I say only, “I don’t expect he ever cares to be interrupted, or have an unexpected person in his proximity.”

“About halfway through the program he murmured, ‘Does she know she’s that good?’” she reveals with a smile. “I assumed he was talking to himself, but then I felt him looking at me and realized he must have recognized me as your mother. So I answered that you truly don’t have a clue, and never have,” she says with tender frankness. “That you see your playing as ‘solid’ or ‘proficient,’ not ‘impressive’ or ‘beautiful.’”

“Gale Hawthorne doesn’t know two pins about music and he cares even less,” I retort through a rising blush. It’s unsettling how well my mother knows me for having dwelt all these years on the outermost fringe of my life and galling that Gale could have guessed such a personal thing from our fleeting interactions. “Anyway, I know he only came to see Columbine,” I tell her, “so you can dispense with trying to make something out of nothing. Maybe you misheard and what he actually said was, ‘Does she really think she’s that good?’” I suggest dryly.

“Wrong on all counts,” she replies, her eyes mirthful. “But since you clearly put no stock in my perceptions, I’ll give you the bare facts. His face was none too pleased when you left center stage to the Wilhearns, and for the majority of their duet he was watching you. That was the first you even looked in our direction,” she admonishes, but gently, “and I was certain the pair of you would finally make eye contact. You looked startled and happy for a half second when you saw us, then you looked away and…I thought you were about to cry,” she murmurs, squeezing my hand. “Did it upset you so much, to see him there?”

“You said something to him,” I evade firmly. “You said something during Columbine’s song and he answered you and smiled. I would’ve thought a smile would crack that face,” I remark.

“Oh, petal,” she sighs, but it sounds dangerously close to a chuckle. “I said that Columbine made a pretty picture up there – which we all know she did – and he replied that Seam folk have no need for ornaments, unless they’re the sort that prove useful now and again.”

I eye her merry countenance with a mixture of disbelief and horror. “You baited him?” I hiss. “Were you fishing for a compliment on my behalf?”

“The compliment was inherent,” she replies. “After that he didn’t stop looking at you till the program was over and done with, and even then he lingered at the back of the hall, as though he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave.”

“And you didn’t invite him to stay for lunch?” I mock.

“The thought crossed my mind,” she admits, unoffended, “but the first time the pair of you sit down together, I want it to be in the parlor with a roaring fire in the grate, a simmer-pot of hot chocolate to hand, and you at the piano, playing nocturnes in a dark velvet gown.”

“Mom!” I groan, never mind that the scene she’s just painted will probably revisit me in the twilight hours very soon, and in decadent sensuous detail, courtesy of Alyssum Everdeen’s lavender lozenges.

“Anyway, don’t you want to know what he thought of your beautiful singing?” she presses, stealing my hand for a quick impish kiss to the knuckles.

“I didn’t realize you were privy to Gale Hawthorne’s innermost thoughts,” I answer with feigned disinterest, never mind I’m trembling to my very bones.

“He settled back in his chair, expecting a solo piano set like always,” she says, “and then you sang two notes and his entire body jolted as though he’d been shocked. He sat forward, eyes narrowed as though he couldn’t believe what they were telling him, and his jaw slacked a little as he just stared and stared at you. He was enraptured, petal,” she whispers.

“He was gobsmacked,” I correct her, and wish the admission didn’t hurt so much or that I could even pretend to be sorry I’d missed the expression this time. “Dumbfounded that I have any kind of singing voice, or maybe that I was nervy enough to make a show of it for the first time after Columbine’s spectacular performance.”

“Dumbfounded, yes,” she concedes quietly. “And as much by your lovely voice as by the lovely song you chose to sing.”

“I can’t tell him,” I choke out, the words leaving me like a small cry of pain. “I can’t ever, ever tell him, Mom, and there she was, like some fairytale princess on her throne, beckoning him to sweep her up and…and the song just fell out of me,” I insist, hoping to convince myself as much as her. “The music was still out on the piano when I got back – you know that – and I remembered the other lyrics and…it just happened.

“Did he guess?” I whisper, considering this for the first time, and she shakes her head.

“Like everyone else in that hall, he knew immediately that your song choice was intentional and directed at some boy,” she murmurs sadly, stroking the back of my hand with her thumb. “But like someone else I know, it never once occurred to him that he might be the one.”

“My lady Madeline – and…my lady Madeline!” Jude declares, sweeping up on my side of the table with an expression stuck halfway between delight and utter shock at the presence of my mother. “Please forgive the informality, Madam Undersee,” he begs with a modest bow in her direction. “I merely wished to inform your lovely daughter that I have never in all my days been so pleased to be upstaged.”

“There was nothing inferior about your performance, Mr. Tolliver,” she replies, stealing away her hand to shake his. “Nor with your cousin’s,” she adds in a carrying voice, peering around him. “Wherever he might be hiding.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” mutters Luka as he jogs up beside Jude. “I was blindsided at the assembly, Mrs. Undersee, and ask you not to judge my performance too unkindly. Had I known your daughter meant to honor us with a rendering of the same tune, I would have stayed in my seat,” he adds in an unexpectedly tender voice, smiling down at me.

“Come by tomorrow, if you can,” I tell him. “There’s something I want to give you.”

“And everyone’s concerned about my behavior?” Jude wonders, his shock at last giving way to mischief. “Watch yourself, cousin,” he cautions. “Her sweetheart is a jealous man, and surely more so after today.

“Tell the truth, I didn’t think he’d show,” he remarks. “I promised it would be worth his while, but I had no idea what marvels truly lay in store.”

Before I can process, let alone respond to this piece of news, Jude takes my face in his hands and bends to press a sound kiss between my brows. “Magnificent, Madeline,” he murmurs. “More than you can possibly imagine.”

“Any more of that and my husband will come ‘round to ask about your intentions,” my mother warns from across the table, but her lips are twitching at the corners with the smile that’s already reached her eyes. “We’ll see you tomorrow,” she tells Luka, “and your cousin is welcome to accompany you if he wishes, so long as he leaves his kisses in the foyer.”

She gives Jude a playful wink and I consider that allowing her into the heart of a school chock-full of young men might in fact have been a very bad idea.

The cousins depart with gracious farewells and my mother turns to me with a grin that could rival Prim’s. “Well, what do you think of that?” she asks.

“I think it was a mistake to let you out of the house,” I answer dryly, refusing to rise to the bait. “Dad isn’t the handsomest man anymore, and proximity to all these teenage boys is turning you into an addlepated flirt.”

“I mean about Gale and you know it,” she says. “It changes everything if he came at Jude’s behest.”

“Yes,” I agree. “It means he came to see a fool made of Luka Mellark, and Columbine’s serenade was just a lovely bonus.”

“Jude clearly adores you,” she counters, “which merits an entire conversation in itself, and yet, as you say, he seems singularly invested in the prospect of you and Gale. Therefore, if he encouraged Gale to attend this assembly – and make no mistake: your lover sacrificed half a day’s work to be here – t’was for your sake, and yours alone,” she concludes triumphantly.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I reply, even as warm blood seeps up into my cheeks. “Gale would never sacrifice half a day’s earnings in the dead of winter just to sit and listen to me accompany a music assembly.”

“Where else could he see you prettily attired and playing piano?” she insists, her conviction as unwavering as her smile. “I loved a musician myself at your age, you may recall, and one devises all manner of schemes in the hope of catching one’s beloved at the piano.”

“If he appears in the parlor tomorrow night, I’m moving in with Prim,” I tell her smartly.

“If he appears at Saturday night dinner, you’ll have bigger problems than that,” she answers, but her perpetual dread of that weekly Capitol invasion is nowhere to be found in her merry eyes or impish manner. “That said, once you’re courting properly, he may well be required to attend,” she realizes. “In which case it may be wise to ease him in as soon as can be managed.”

“And do you really think,” I hiss under my breath, “that Gale Hawthorne will sit placidly at a table alongside Cray and Dad’s Capitol cohorts, passing the butter and salt as nice as you please?”

She smiles, a hard, canny, daring sort of expression, the likes of which I’ve never seen on her face before. “On the contrary,” she murmurs. “I think he’ll do anything but.”

I drop my gaze and shake my head, perplexed and more than a little frightened by her words. My mother has never challenged the regime that effectively slaughtered her twin sister, but I suspect she’d throw herself body and soul into any rebellion with half a shot at success, and I don’t have to be Gale’s confidante to know that he’s boiling for a chance – any chance – to strike back at the Capitol.

Her sitting beside Gale at the assembly suddenly feels calculated, dangerous, even seditious. “Mom, don’t,” I whisper, looking up at her with the imploring eyes of a frightened child. “I couldn’t bear it if…either one of you,” I finish in a small voice, and she takes my hand in both of hers.

“Never fear, petal,” she soothes, “nothing’s going to happen,” but the way she says nothing sounds like it’s something very important indeed.

I assess our perimeter with a swift subtle glance and ask, softer still: “Mom…who’s Laurel Everdeen?”

She raises her brows at the question but her expression holds curiosity only, not surprise. “Jack’s little sister,” she says, as though this is mere point of fact and not secret in the slightest. “Katniss’s aunt, as would have been. His mother went into labor early, at the shock of his father dropping dead in the mines, and lost both husband and baby in one day.”

“Then why is her name familiar to me?” I press, keeping my voice low just the same.

My mother shrugs. “She’s a ghost,” she replies. “All the Everdeens are, really – drifting in and out of people’s dreams and memories, long gone though they are. It’s almost like none of them really died.”

This is so near yesterday’s wild hare of a notion that I start in my seat, eyeing her sharply, but there’s no conspiracy or suggestion in her expression, just a sad sort of wistfulness for the loss of the fairytale presence that was the Everdeens in Twelve. The gentle toymaker and his cougar-eyed huntress, their fairy-singer son and his mysterious little sister, snuffed before her life had scarce begun, who might’ve been all of that and more besides.

Even Katniss is effectively lost to us, I think. Not to death, of course, and certainly not forever, but she too was swept up and borne beyond our reach, as though meant for some better life than Twelve could offer.

I wonder for the first time if I could reach Peeta’s house on foot – break from Gale in the woods early some Sunday to cross the frozen lake in the tracks of pony and sleigh – and what I might find when I get there.

“Well, green eyes are rather memorable in a place like this,” I venture, light as one fingertip, and her canny smile returns, albeit softer than before, as in an unspoken shared secret.

“One can’t help but wonder where you’ve seen them before,” she remarks, and holds my gaze for an extra half-second before releasing my hand and turning her attention to our meal.

I doubt my mother has lingered in any part of the Justice Building since the last moments she spent with her sister after the Quarter Quell Reaping, but she clearly remembers Ashpet Everdeen, and the answer to that particular riddle lies in plain sight for anyone with eyes to see. It’s downright obvious once you think of it, and yet somehow I doubt Katniss has ever known.

“I don’t suppose you know what happened to Jack Everdeen’s dulcimer?” I cast out casually, determined to glean every last nugget of knowledge from this lucid and forthcoming version of my mother before she inevitably retreats to the silent darkness of her rooms, and she raises her eyes over a forkful of salad greens.

“He sold it to buy Alys’s wedding ring,” she confirms, “but even she never knew where it ended up, or she’d have found a way to buy it back for him. Instruments – especially fine ones – are scarce in these parts and Jack was admired for his music, so I surmise it does not currently belong to a musician, or they’d have acknowledged it as Jack’s long since, if only as a point of pride.”

I frown in defeat. “Which means it might well have been destroyed for kindling –”

“Or ended up in the hands of someone who admires Jack but doesn’t play themselves,” she posits with a wink. “Rooba was mad about him, you know, and she could well afford such a keepsake. Do you plan to learn it,” she wonders playfully, “so you can further show up Columbine at the next assembly?”

I smile dryly but at my own conclusion, which is half a degree off from hers but could not have been reached without her insights. “I want it for Katniss,” I clarify. “She should have her father’s dulcimer and learn to play it if she wants.”

“Best start pooling your pocket money, then,” she teases. “And hunting for deer. That might be the toughest trade you’ll ever make.”

“Of that I have no doubt,” I answer gravely, and wonder how on earth I’ll even broach the subject, let alone propose a trade.

Because if, as I suspect, Raisa Mellark is the present owner of Jack Everdeen’s dulcimer, there’s surely nothing on this earth that can entice it from her hands.

Our meal progresses without further discussion or interruption until two bites into the cheese and apple tarts, when my father rushes up to the table to present a tiny bakery box. “I’ve just got time to leave cake and kisses,” he laments, bending to hug me about the shoulders and kiss my cheek. “But I insist you recount every detail over cordials in the parlor tonight – and that means you, Maddi,” he clarifies, turning to plant a kiss in my mother’s elegant coiffure. “I don’t trust the magpie at present.”

“The magpie might surprise you,” my mother murmurs, catching his hand at her shoulder. “They’re not generally accounted sweet singers, but this one sang the loveliest tune I’ve heard in time out of mind.”

The mayor of Twelve straightens with a jolt, his eyes wide in disbelief and something that might be rapture. “Madge sang?” he breathes.

“A love song,” my mother confirms, and he clasps a hand to his heart in what doesn’t quite look like mock-theatrics.

“There’s more,” she entices with a wicked smile in her eyes, “much more,” but he shakes his head in near-desperate refusal.

“No more,” he begs. “I’ve hours of committee to weather with a mindful of my beautiful wife by daylight, and if you tell me another word about Madge’s performance I’ll surely be done for. Who knows what I’ll unwittingly sign off on?”

“Gale Hawthorne’s housing, one hopes,” my mother remarks lightly, and he grins like a fool.

“That’s all squared away,” he replies, making something jolt hard in my chest. “It’ll take an excessive number of days to draw up the papers and issue notice, of course, but Hawthorne should be under his new roof before the end of the month.”

“And which new roof might that be?” I interject and don’t bother to hide the tremor – half panic, half foolish, dizzying elation – in my voice. “Dad, you’ve never put him over the barber shop?” I don’t even want to imagine how Gale will react to being assigned a Merchant residence, especially if he thinks I had anything to do with it, but at the same time I’m almost overcome by the prospect of such proximity.

My father meets my desperate gaze with a grave frown, though his eyes are alight with mischief. “That is a matter between the Justice Building and an unmarried District citizen, Miss Undersee,” he admonishes with downright gleeful mock-severity. “Should you choose to marry this man, you would then become privy to such information, but until such time, the matter remains confidential.”

“Shall I walk you back to work?” my mother asks him, half-rising from her seat. “After all, I’m married to the mayor of District Twelve, and as such am privy to certain information that does not concern unattached female citizens.”

My father glances between us, his merriment faltering slightly as he considers whether to walk back to his office in the company of his beautiful, so long sequestered wife, exchanging news about the man with whom their only daughter fell, both unwillingly and unwittingly, in love, or to keep his mind on district matters for the remainder of the afternoon and leave my mother in my company for the last few minutes of this admittedly precious mealtime.

“Dad needs lunch too,” I answer for them both and stand to tuck the remains of our meal back into the hamper. “You can discuss my trousseau on the way if you like,” I add wryly, wrapping the last sandwich in a napkin and pressing it into my father’s hands.

“You sang, magpie,” he murmurs. “Sang to an assembly-roomful of people whose good opinion you don’t care two pins for. Why?”

“Because I love him,” I answer, feeling weary and old as dust. “Because I love him to the marrow of my bones, just like every other girl except for the Everdeen ones, and I couldn’t say it with Tchaikovsky.”

“I’ll teach you new Tchaikovsky tonight,” he promises, pressing a kiss to my cheek. “You might be surprised.”

My mother kisses me as well, with an apologetic smile, but I don’t begrudge her departure, nor am I especially bothered that they intend to gossip like teenagers about me and Gale for the remainder of Dad’s tiny stolen lunch break. They surely haven’t had opportunity – or cause – to talk like this since before I was born, if not longer still, and I sit down alone with my tiny cake: a dense square rich with apple and pumpkin, with a buttery ginger icing and sprinkles of caramelized sugar.

A few students pass by with brief compliments on my performance – “Nicely done, Madge,” and the like – nothing beyond what I typically hear after accompanying an assembly, until Bracken Wilhearn stops beside my chair.

“You have a beautiful voice, Miss Undersee,” he says in his own husky tenor, ducking his head in an oddly bashful gesture. “If you wanted, perhaps we – we could do a duet sometime.”

He colors violently at these words and my brows fly up in surprise. I’d assumed Columbine sent him over to be snarky but this confident, consummate young musician is suddenly, and very believably, acting like an enamored swain. “I’m not sure your current partner would care for that,” I point out kindly, and he drops his gaze to his shoes.

“She’s my sister, not my sweetheart,” he replies – downright mumbles – to the floor. “And you’re – forgive the presumption – powerful pretty, Miss Undersee. I-I know you fancy someone else, but…we don’t have to be in love to sing together,” he concludes in a soft, hopeful voice, raising his eyes to the tabletop.

Bracken may be a year younger than me and the brother of my unintended rival, but I’ve never wished so badly that I could just tell my heart who to love. I take one of his slender hands in both of mine and plant a kiss on the knuckles, making him start and meet my gaze with his own, wide-eyed.

Swannee Wilhearn’s son might be even prettier than her daughter, with those long-lashed Seam eyes and his mother’s sweet, sensitive mouth.

“I’ve never been more flattered,” I tell him sincerely, astonished not to be blushing and stammering myself. “And I won’t definitively say no to anything you’re offering. You’re right, I do…like someone,” I admit, a little lamely, “but I’m not crazy enough to assume that’s going to end with a midsummer Toasting, and there are precious few musicians in Twelve as it is. It’s best if we all get along, and well. We could do something for the formal assembly in June, if you want,” I suggest, and he smiles gratefully.

“I’d like that, Miss – Madge,” he answers shyly. “Thank you.”

“Thank you for asking,” I tell him. “I’ve never sung a duet with a boy before.”

“I’ll come up with something really good,” he says eagerly. “Unless – well, you’ve a much better selection of music to hand –”

“Come up with whatever you like,” I urge him. “I’ll ask my father for suggestions too and we’ll get together soon and pool our ideas.”

“I’d like that,” he says again, his dimples deepening. “Thanks ever so much, Miss…Madge.”

He departs with one last bashful backward glance and Jude practically slides into my lap in his haste to sit beside me. “The only way that’s happening,” he informs me sternly, “is if all four of us go out for phosphates and you and the boy mysteriously disappear off to your conservatory.”

“For pity’s sake, we’re not courting,” I grumble playfully.

“He’s a firm step up from a Hawthorne,” he points out. “Not to mention, you’d get a wedding gown to make Capitolites swoon.”

“He’s everything Gale isn’t,” I point out in reply, allowing myself to consider it properly for the first time. “Bracken’s a little young just now, but I suspect he’ll make a magnificent husband and father.”

“If you’re marrying any half-Seam lad, it’s going to be me,” Jude quells, so matter-of-factly that I almost giggle. “I have a very fine bed where I’ll keep you like a queen and feed you fresh bacon buns and hot Scotch eggs all the day long.”

“Are you that sore that I kissed his hand?” I venture impishly, and he scowls – genuinely this time, I think. “Whatever for?”

“Bracken’s a good lad,” he admits. “Among the best, really, but if you don’t marry Gale you should marry me.”

This remark is so patently uncontrived and so painfully sincere that my mouth drops open. “What about Columbine?” I wonder.

“You saw her today,” he says, his voice catching slightly. “She’s too grand for the likes of me, with her sights set on someone else entirely. I love her to bits and pieces and I’m not – neither of us, you nor me, is – giving up, but… how about it, Madge?” he asks softly, raising his eyes to mine. “If Gale and Columbine marry other people –”

I shake my head fiercely, bile rising in my throat at the very thought, and Jude lays a hand over mine. “I know,” he soothes, “so much better than you think I do, and I don’t want to think about it either. I’m not asking you to agree to marry me right now or anything like that –”

“You’re just hedging your bet,” I interject in a feeble attempt to tease, but the words come out raspy and thin.

“No,” he says firmly, squeezing my hand. “I’m only asking: if Gale and Columbine both wind up with people other than you and me and we haven’t found anyone else to marry in the meantime, can I court you, Madge?”

I try to smile but something hot and sharp is pricking at the corners of my eyes. “I’m the same invisible girl I was three hours ago, you know,” I tell him in a small voice. “Singing a love song in public doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes everything,” he insists, “you were never invisible, and I wanted you then too.”

With a shiver at the tenderness of this declaration, I take a moment to envision what he’s offering. Jude is as promising a prospect as Bracken, perhaps even more so, and he comes with all the comforts of a butcher’s household. He’s gentle, merry, and easy on the eye and ear. There’s little doubt in my mind that his honeymoon will consist of tucking up his bride in a deep featherbed and feasting her upon the most decadent foods, in and amongst languid rounds of lovemaking.

After all, if the stories are to be believed, Rooba swept his father straight from their first meeting in the Hob to the depths of her bed, where she nourished the weak young widower on whole roast chickens and her own amorous vigor till he was sufficiently fortified to stand beside her at the Justice Building – and then, likely as not, fed him an entire loaf of bread, toasted bit by bit over their hearth, and a potful of honey besides, before carting him back up to bed.

I don’t want a Brognar but Judah Tolliver is the sweetest of the bunch, and there’s something irresistible about the combination of rich food and a warm bed and an ardent, soft-spoken lover who wants to fill you with sustenance and passion in equal measure.

I would be heartily surprised if Katniss hasn’t succumbed already.

“Okay,” I croak. “If we… if the people we want marry other people, you can court me – but I’m not promising more than that.”

Jude’s smile is like a sunrise, broad and blinding. “I’d be worried for both our sakes if you were,” he assures me. “But would you consider throwing in a clause about not marrying a Wilhearn in the meantime?”

“But Jeremy’s so much prettier than you,” I banter back, but delicately, because Jude’s middle brother – the undeniable offspring of Rooba’s second husband, Jerry Wilhearn – is widely considered the best-looking of the lot, closely resembling his handsome Mellark cousins but with the striking strawberry-blond hair shared by his aunt and sister.

“Jeremy’s making eyes at Greta Brenneman these days,” he dismisses, “hoping he’ll have more luck there than Marko. You could do better.”

I ask my heart why it had to run after an angry young hunter who despises me with every fiber of his being when there’s a butcher-boy holding my hand and declaring that even his handsomest brother is beneath me.

“I don’t expect I will,” I tell him sadly. “But thanks just the same.”

“Oh Madeline,” he sighs. “If that fool breaks your heart I’ll pummel him myself.”

The remainder of the day passes in blessed haste and thankfully, Prim is so caught up by the fact that I sang in the assembly that there’s neither time nor reason to mention the conversations with Bracken and Jude – nor, for that matter, the mortifying exchange with Miss Farlow. Better still, it escaped her notice that Gale attended the assembly, so I can attribute my spontaneous decision to sing to my mother’s unexpected presence and Columbine’s show-stopping performance.

“And a love song!” she squeals, her arm hugging mine as we make our way toward the Square. “You realize, everyone will be dying to guess what mysterious sweetheart made the mayor’s daughter find her voice. You’re like the prince in the cinder-lass tale,” she sighs, “only you know the boy who captured your heart and everyone else is leaving the ball looking for him.”

“Good grief,” I groan, but it’s as endearing as it is surprising to hear Prim gushing about romance and fairy tales like the child she still is in truth. “I guarantee no one cares who I love, Prim, or why I decided to sing a piece today.”

“On the contrary,” she counters. “The school was buzzing like a beehive and no less than three girls asked me directly who your sweetheart is.”

“And what did you tell them?” I ask, halting our steps and squaring to face her in my best attempt at an imposing older sibling.

“That you had yet to freely mention him by name,” she replies with a grin, “but that I have every expectation that you’ll be engaged by your birthday and married by midsummer.”

“Prim!” I hiss, mortified.

“It’s not a lie,” she asserts, her eyes wide and innocent as a doe’s. “You’re as close-lipped about him as can be, and I truly have every expectation of a hasty courtship and a rapid marriage.”

“I liked you better when you were acting your age,” I grouse and set us back on our way.

We part at the bakery, despite impressive and resilient efforts on Prim’s part to bring me home with her in anticipation of Gale’s arrival, and recalling Briony’s errand, I make my way home with an eager step and a light heart. Assemblies, love songs, and unexpected suitors are school-day matters, but it’s the week-end now, and in just over twenty-four hours I will be trekking out to the Seam then onward into the woods, to learn the forbidden trades of hunting and foraging.

I’m so giddy to see what Briony’s brought home, to start piecing together my huntress wardrobe, that I trip up the stairs in stocking-feet and burst into my bedroom, expecting to find a parcel or even a laundry basket of Seam clothes waiting for me, but instead Briony herself is sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a bundle far smaller than I’d anticipated and looking utterly distraught.

“Miss Madeline, I’m that sorry –” she begins mournfully.

“Are you all right?” I interrupt and sit beside her, fearful all at once that she might have been harassed or bullied – or worse – in the Hob. Violence is far less common in Twelve these days but I know Briony treads a tricky line, living among the poorest of the Seam while spending the bulk of her time in the mayor’s mansion as a housemaid and veritable paid companion to the mayor’s daughter. A wisp of black hair has escaped her braid and I tuck it behind her ear with a gentle hand, but her resulting wince doesn’t seem to be one of pain.

“I tried, miss,” she attempts again. “I went just as you said, but Caitrin Maybold wouldn’t sell me a scrap. She said if you wanted anything from her stall – forgive me, Miss Madeline,” she interjects, cringing. “She said, 'If the mayor’s girl wants aught from this establishment, she can march down here and buy it herself.' ”

My brows arch at these tidings. Seam folk are fiercely proud and stubborn, as I know only too well, and this can flare up into near-defiance on the most peculiar occasions, but I’ve never heard of one turning down good money for an honest transaction. Not to mention, our Seam staff makes nearly all of the household purchases on our behalf, so there would be nothing out of the ordinary in Briony shopping for me, even in the Hob. “Who’s Caitrin Maybold to me?” I wonder, as the mention of her name feels significant, and Briony blushes miserably.

“Hazelle Hawthorne’s sister, miss,” she admits. “Your lover’s auntie, as would be.”

“Of course she is,” I deadpan, surprised only by the fact that I hadn’t anticipated this. Indeed, in light of my response to Rory seeking an answer on Gale’s behalf, I should have expected nothing less. “But surely there are other clothing stalls?” I venture, and Briony shrugs thinly.

“Half a dozen on any given day, but she’s your best bet,” she says. “Hazelle does mending along with her laundry and brings Merchant cast-offs to sell at her sister’s stall. Not fancy things,” she qualifies quickly. “Sturdy, everyday things that can be patched up or trimmed down or made over. The only other stall with the quality you need for…what you need,” she explains, “would be Swannee Wilhearn’s, and I didn’t reckon that was an option.”

“You reckoned rightly,” I agree and tug lightly at her bundle. “So where did you get these?”

“From home,” she confesses, sheepishly studying her skirts as she surrenders the bundle to my hands. “It’s some things of Bristel’s and mine. I couldn’t come back empty-handed, miss –”

“Nor will you,” I promise, then realize abruptly: “You knew, didn’t you? About the stalls you’d have to visit in order to buy what I wanted. You anticipated this might happen; that’s why you tried to convince me to accept things from your family.”

She shrugs once more. “It’s not my place to contradict your orders, miss, especially if there’s nothing harmful in them,” she remarks. “It was worth a try. New stalls crop up now and again that are worth a look, or sometimes Hazelle covers the stall herself. Believe it or not, she’s less particular about her trades, provided they’re honestly done and no one ends up the worse for it.”

I consider how Gale’s mother has kept four children alive – was Posy even born when her father died? – by hand-washing the underwear of Merchants and their wives, day in and day out. I’m don’t doubt she’d have found an opportunity to poke fun at me had I come shopping at her stall, but she’d never have refused my coins.

Well, hadn’t I been wishing just a few hours ago that I’d gone to purchase the hunting clothes myself?

“Keep the money,” I tell Briony, “all of it, and the clothes.”

“I can’t, miss!” she gasps. “I’ll keep the clothes and thank you for it, and a coin or two for my time if you insist, but it’s little enough trouble walking to the Hob and back, and your folks pay me plenty. I can’t take extra pay for not doing what you asked.”

“On the contrary, you did exactly as I asked, even though you had misgivings,” I remind her. “And it wasn’t your fault in any way that this Caitrin Maybold…” I sigh in a little huff and admit, “Gale tried to be indirect with me and I wouldn’t have it, so it’s no surprise that his kin chose to return the favor when I wanted something. Now, I believe I owe you a new pair of thermals,” I recall, “and some sweaters besides.”

Briony stalwartly refuses to accept anything more than one tiny handful of coins, but I march her to the kitchen and fill her pockets with an orange and a small bundle of peppermint sticks parceled up in paper. I still have every intention of presenting her with a new set of thermals from the mercantile, of course, but that will have to wait till tomorrow – after I get back from the Hob.

I return to my room and open my wardrobe, considering. The last time I went among Seam folk, I tried to blend in as best I could, stuffing my fair hair inside a stocking cap and donning a borrowed old overcoat over my very plainest clothes – everything I could think of to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.

If the mayor’s girl wants aught from this establishment, she can march down here and buy it herself.

“Gauntlet accepted, Mistress Maybold,” I murmur, taking the kitten-soft wool of my finest skirt between two fingers. “I’m not hiding anymore.”