Ravensblood Forest the one minute. the soldier's minute

“I feel as if I should be offended that I was not the first you sang for.”

Catching the tip of her tongue coyly between her incisors, Lotte smiled playfully up at the Ceannasach with an unrepentantly mischievous glint of moonbright eyes; “no, Turo,” she begged, her warm, rich alto coyly beseeching. Though she spoke as if in jest, the truth remained: she did not wish to spark ire within the Fearghal. The hush of his deep, accented timbre danced fingertips of delight up and down the soot-stockinged girl’s spine, and there was a note of seriousness to her following statement, impish though it was. Nightingale. “Before you, I am likely to forget the lyrics,” she said, suddenly and uncharacteristically shy. She drew breath to sing, and then — and then —

— and then she did forget them. Every line, melody and all.

Humming softly to herself under pretense of warming up her voice, Lotte grasped furiously for words and feverishly attempted to string them together in lyric form; the utter failure she experienced was new and unpleasant, though her black-masked face remained a mask of serenity. Setting aside her trepidation, she drew a deep, calming breath — and though it was not Arturo’s song as Lotte had written it, the right song found her: an Irish lullaby. She adapted the lyrics, changing the trademark “toora-loora-loora” to a fondly sung, “turo-luro-luro.”

“Over in Killarney
many years ago,
me mother sang a song to me
in tunes so sweet and low,

just a simple little ditty
in her good old Irish way
and I’d give the world if she could sing
that song to me today:

turo-luro-luro
turo-luro-lie
turo-luro-luro
hush now, don’t you cry.

turo-luro-luro
turo-luro-lie
turo-luro-luro
that’s an Irish lullaby.”

She finished the second verse and drew the song to completion, and when the last note died away she merely looked up at the Ceannasach with a curious expression, unabashedly seeking his opinion.