Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
As soon as my foot touched the stage, the room hushed to a murmur. At the same time my nervousness left me, burned away by the attention of the crowd. It has always been that way with me offstage. I worry and sweat on stage. I am calm as a windless winter night stan she invade everyone. Consider me as a candidate for my talent. His words had a soothing ritual feel when he gestured to me. There was no familiar applause. Only an expectant silence. In a flash. I saw myself as the audience must see me, not finally dressed as the others had been. In fact, only one step from being ragged young, almost a child. I could feel their curiosity drawing them closer to me. I let it build. Taking my time as I unclassified my battered secondhand loot case and removed my battered secondhand loot. I felt their attention sharpened at the homely side of it. I struck a few quiet chords than touched the pegs, tuning it ever so slightly I fingered a few more light cords, testing listened, and nodded to myself. The lights shining onto the stage made the rest of the room dim. From where I sat Looking out I saw what seemed to be 1000 eyes. Simon and Willem Stanton by the bar day! It by the door I felt a vague flutter in my stomach as I saw ambrose watching me with all the menace of a smoldering coal. I looked away from him to see a bearded man in red Count! Through an old couple holding hands. A lovely, dark eyed girl. My audience, I smiled at them. The smile drew them closer still and I sang. Still sit for though you listen long long would you wait without the hope of song so sweet as this as illion himself set down an age ago masterwork of a master's life of savvy in and allow in the woman he would take to wife. I let the wave of whisper pass through the crowd. Those who knew the song made soft exclamation to themselves, while those who didn't asked their neighbors what the stir was about. I raised my hands to the strings and drew their attention back to me. The room stilled and I began to play. The music came easily out of me. My loot like a second voice. I flicked my fingers and the loot made a third voice as well. I sang in the proud, powerful tones of savvy in trail yard, greatest of the amir. The audience moved under the music like grass against the wind. I sang as sir Save Ian and I felt the audience begin to love and fear me. I was so used to practicing the song alone that I almost forgot to double the third refrain. But I remembered at the last moment in a flash of cold sweat This time as I sang it, I looked out into the audience, hoping at the end I would hear a voice answering my own. I reached the end of the refrain before Alan's first stanza. I struck the first chord hard and waited as the sound of it began to fade without drawing a voice from the audience. I looked calmly out at them, waiting every second a greater relief vied with a greater disappointment inside me. Then a voice drifted onto stage, gentle as a brushing feather, singing savvy in. How could you know, it was the time for you to come to me Save Ian! Do you remember the days we squandered pleasantly? How well then have you carried? What have carried in my heart and memory? She's saying as a win! I is savvy in on the refrains. Her voice spun twinning and mixing with my own part of me, wanted to search the audience for her to find the face of the woman I was singing with. I tried once, but my fingers faltered as I searched for the face that could fit with the cool moonlight voice that answered mine distracted. I touched a wrong note, and there was a burr in the music. A small mistake! I set my teeth and concentrated on my playing. I pushed my curiosity aside and bowed my head to watch my fingers careful to keep them from slipping on the strings. And we sang her voice like burning silver. My voice and echoing answer. Savvy in sang solid, powerful lines like branches of a rock old oak. All the while. A win was like a nightingale moving in darting circles around the proud limbs of it. I was only dimly aware of the audience. Now dimly aware of the sweat on my body. I was so deeply in the music that I couldn't have told you where it stopped and my blood began, but it did stop. Two verses from the end of the song. The end came, I struck the beginning chord of civilians verse, and I heard a piercing sound that pulled me out of the music like a fish dragged from deep water. A string broke high on the neck of the loot. It snapped, and the tension lashed it across the back of my hand, drawing a thin, bright line of blood. I stared at it numb, li it should not have broken. None of my strings were worn badly enough to break, but it had, and as the last notes of the music faded into silence I felt the audience began to stir. They began to rouse themselves from the waking dream that I had woven for them out of strands of song. In the silence I felt it all unraveling the audience waking with the dream unfinished. All of my work ruined, wasted, and all the while burning inside me was the song that the song, the song, without knowing what I did. I set my fingers back to the strings and fell deep into myself into years before, when my hands had calluses like stones and my music had come as easy as breathing back to the time I had played to make the sound of wind turning a leaf on a lute with six strings, and I began to play slowly than with greater speed as my hands remembered. I gathered the fraying strands of song and wove them carefully back to what they had been a moment earlier. It was not perfect. No song as complex as sir, save Ian can be played perfectly on six strings instead of seven, but it was whole. And as I played, the audience side stirred and slowly fell back under the spell that I had made for them. I hardly knew they were there, and after a minute I forgot them entirely. My hands danced. They ran, then blurred across the strings as I fought to keep the lutes, two voices singing with my own. Then, even as I watched them, I forgot them. I forgot everything. Except finishing the song. The refrain came and alone. Sang again to me. She was not a person or even a voice. She was just a part of the song that was burning out of me. And then it was done. Raising my head to look at the room was like breaking the surface of the water for air. I came back into myself, found my hand bleeding in my body covered in sweat. Then the ending of the song struck me like a fist in my chest, as it always does, no matter where or when I listen to it, I buried my face in my hands and wept not for a broken lute string and the chance of failure, not for bloodshed and a wounded hand. I did not even cry for the boy who had learned to play a lute with six strings in the forest years ago I cried for sir, save Ian and alone, for love, lost and found and lost again at cruel fate and man's folly. And so for a while I was lost in grief and knew nothing. Chapter 55, Flame and Thunder. I held all of my morning for savvy in and allow in to a few moments knowing I was still on display, I gathered myself and straightened in my chair to look out at the audience. My silent audience. Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musicians curse. Even as I sat. The ending I had improvised was fading from my memory. Then came doubt. What if it hadn't been as whole as it had seemed? What if my ending hadn't carried the terrible tragedy of the song to anyone but myself? What if my tears seemed to be nothing more than a child's embarrassing reaction to his own failure. Then waiting, I heard the silence pouring from them. The audience held themselves quiet, tense and tight, as if the song had burned them worse than a flame. Each person held their wounded selves closely, clutching their pain as if it were a precious thing. Then there was a murmur of sobs released and sobs escaping, a sigh of tears, a whisper of bodies slowly becoming no longer still. Then the applause a roar like leaping flame, like thunder after lightning.