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Zeven sings.
There are many other things he does. He sleeps, almost every day. He climbs the drainpipe by old Tatar's pawn-shop all the way up to the roof; sometimes he roof-hops all the way to the alehouse, the only two-story building around, so that he can see all the way to the other side of the river, if the weather's fair. He daydreams about the cows in the distance—at least he assumes they're cows, never having seen one up close—and about living in a farm. The songs always talk about how nice farms are. Peaceful. He doesn't like peace that much, he thinks, never stays still long enough for it, but sometimes he'd like to be able to have any of it. He runs, real far, far from Berte and old Tatar, past the fishmonger's stall all the way to somewhere he can see the richer people from a distance and wish.
(Berte is not his mother. He knows as much. She's too old, and too mean, and besides she told him so. There's rumours that she sold all of her kids to buy dreamerie or something, but she can't sell him because he's not hers. She still took care of him, for some reason, and he feels a little bit like he owes her so. Their life isn't good, exactly, but he knows it would be worse if he didn't have her, if he was just a weird foreign-looking ten(?)-year-old who could only sing good. He thinks maybe he's pretty, under all the dirt and soot, from what some of the stranger strangers said, sometimes, when they sort of sideways said they wanted to buy him off her, too. He had heard what happened to pretty kids who got bought like that, though, so he just stared at them with Glare #4 until they got nervous and left. It always worked.)
He talks to the poor people, instead, and the few rich who sometimes come by here, for whatever reason. He turns the charm on and seduces them into taking pity on the poor half-Haighlei boy and giving him a few coppers.
(He only recently found out that the thing he is is "half-Haighlei", from some merchant that was passing by who had never been here before. He doesn't know what a full-Haighlei is, and all Berte told him was that he's "some foreigner's spawn what won't ever be nothin'". Zeven very strongly disagrees, he will definitely be somethin' someday, but that day is not today.)
He eats, sometimes, when there's enough food.
But today there's not enough food, so what he does instead is sing, because singing makes people give him coppers, and coppers can be used to buy stale bread and mouldy cheese and wormy apples and if the food doesn't really taste good, well, nothing else in his life tastes good, and it's still better than not being alive.
(Zeven's seen dead people, of course. The old frail ones who lived nowhere and couldn't sing so they just begged for their coppers and sometimes people pitied them, or the young ones who tried to steal the coppers without being caught and then got caught. They looked like they were asleep, most of the time, sometimes with wounds but even the living have wounds. Sleeping isn't so bad, and sometimes Zeven has dreams that are better than when he's awake, but Berte told him when you're dead you don't ever wake up again, and you don't dream either, so it's worse.)
Today there's not enough food and it's mostly Berte's fault. They could have enough food if she didn't spend so much of their coppers on her dreamerie. There was a while there when she didn't use it, at all, and then they had warm food and warm blankets and even a new tunic that almost fit him, although nothing really fits him, he's small and scrawny and poor and no one cares about small, scrawny, poor kids, so no one makes clothes for them. Anyway, there was a while there when she didn't use it, then she started using it again, stealing the coppers he got her (they are his, a part of him keeps saying, he is the one singing for them and smiling for them and lying for them, but she takes them anyway) to buy the strange plant (he's been told it was a plant, by Tatar who sold it, but if it's just a plant why does he hide it? and besides it doesn't look like a plant) that made blue smoke and made Berte's eyes look somewhere that didn't exist. Dreams, she says, and that's why it's called dreamerie, but he's pretty sure you shouldn't be dreaming while you're awake.
He gets angry with her about that, sometimes, but never in a way that shows. He knows that if he didn't have her it would be worse, not even Glare #4 is enough to scare away the stranger strange strangers without Berte there to also glare. The strangers don't mess with kids who'll be missed, so he makes sure Berte will miss him. He sings for her, sings and pushes the images in his head into the song, pushes the feelings at her so that she'll feel nicer for a bit, nicer than when she's on dreamerie, even, and sometimes if he pushes too much and too hard his head hurts, but it's worth it because Berte will miss him and so no one will come to steal him.
When he was much younger, like two years ago, he used to hope that if he sang enough, beautifully enough and for long enough, she'd forget about the dreamerie and they could use the money she stole from him to buy actual food instead. But he got over that.
So Zeven is on a street corner and he sings, and he pushes the images and the feelings into the song (though not as much as he does for Berte; he doesn't want people to steal him if they like it too much), and people stop to listen.
He knows their names, he knows all their names, at least of the regulars, the people who are always there. When Berte sends him out to buy food he talks to them, he listens to them talk about their lives. Anno's little boy was born a month ago and he's small and sickly but he got past the worst of it and he and his wife are now thinking of giving him a name; Lysel likes her name a lot, because her mum had read it from a book about princesses and it was a princess's name, and she doesn't really pretend she's a princess but sometimes she likes to imagine it, and she tries to make her clothes look and feel nicer so that she can think it more, and she hopes someday some prince will come for her but everyone else says the years are getting heavy on her and if she doesn't find a husband soon she never will even though Zeven thinks she doesn't look heavy at all; Dennel is almost old enough to join the guard and he really wants to, he's listened to Zeven's songs about fights and wars and daring rescues and dashing warriors and he wants to do that.
Zeven knows their names and their stories, and he puts them in the music. Sometimes in the words, into some half-remembered melody he heard somewhere else or something he made up himself, but most of the time just in the music itself. That makes people stop more, he noticed, and when he sees someone coming round the corner he puts them in the song, he doesn't look directly at them because he is nice and nonthreatening but he can see them, he can feel them when they detour a little bit so they can get closer and listen more, and drop some coppers into Berte's hat or tear off a piece of the loaf they're taking home for their dinner.
Today he's singing a song for Dennel, some song about a war and a place called Sun's Hill. He only remembers little bits of it, and he knows some bits of it aren't the same as what Dennel thinks so he changed it to match. It's a song for Dennel, who's coming just round the corner and who likes to be sung about even if he never realises it's him Zeven's singing about when he sings about Sun's Hill.
Dennel drops one copper into Berte's hat, and Zeven flashes his Smile #7 at him and then goes to see if Berte has anything left in her waterskin to wet his dry throat.
