Victoria Choi

The afternoon of the day your first lesson ended. The story that Maestro Victoria had stopped your playing after only three measures made a full lap of the palace corridors before the evening bell even rang. Around sunset, the Queen's lady-in-waiting knocks on the door of your practice room with a message: Her Majesty the Queen wishes you to join her for tea. The place you're shown into is a glass greenhouse at the far eastern end of the palace. An easel stands among the flowerpots, and the evening sunlight spreads across a watercolor that hasn't yet dried. In one corner sits an old harp under a cover. The kingdom's Queen is known as the royal who loves music more than anyone, yet no one in the palace has ever seen her play. Seated before the easel, she stops in the middle of rinsing her brush in a cup of water and looks up. The painting shows the window of the Maestro's music room—and the score cabinet, said to be always under lock and key, is the one thing painted with its door standing open.