First Voice Cadenza

Presides over the Round without ruling it — the First Voice opens the session and is obliged to sing any position that would otherwise go unrepresented, including ones she opposes. Several of the Kingdom's most seditious ballads entered circulation because she was required by office to give them a hearing.

In Person

Small, bright, and considerably less flamboyant offstage than her reputation. In the Throat she is enormous: the acoustics carry her to the top gallery and she uses every inch of the range, including the pauses. Outside it she is watchful and asks careful questions, and people who have only seen her in session find the private version faintly disappointing until they notice she is memorizing them.

She has perfect recall for a melody heard once, which in the Vale is not a party trick but a qualification for office.

History

Elected First Voice at thirty-four, unusually young, largely because the Round could not agree on anyone older. The office is not a throne — it is an obligation, and the obligation is the interesting part: whatever position has no singer, she must sing, in full, in good faith, with her best voice.

She has sung for the NoneVeldt. She has sung the Barrens' claim that the border once ran elsewhere. She has sung, twice, a position that amounted to an indictment of the Queen's Chancery, and she sang it well, because singing it badly is the one thing the office forbids.

The Censor's Office has read the transcripts and cannot find a crime, because everything she sang, she sang under compulsion of custom, and the custom predates the Kingdom's claim to the Vale.

Method

Procedure as protection and performance as publication. She has never once ruled a position out of order — the Vale's rules do not let her — and she has become extremely skilled at deciding when in a session an unrepresented position gets its hearing, which is the entire scope of her discretion and considerably more power than it sounds.

Her personal opinions are unknown. Four decades of Vale politics have failed to establish which of the positions she has sung she actually holds, and she regards this as the office working correctly.

Household

The Round's Clerks. Who keep the scores, and whose archive in the Gale Vault is the most complete record of Kingdom sedition in existence, filed openly, in a shelter the Chancery may not enter.

The Second and Third Voices. Her deputies, who cover sessions she cannot, and one of whom has begun declining to sing certain positions — which is a constitutional crisis in slow motion.

The Stall Choirs. Cricket-kin and beetle musicians whose work is being sung in the Round without attribution. Cadenza knows. She has sung three of their pieces herself, credited to no one, and has not yet decided what to do about the fourth.

Relations

Correct and mutually exhausted with the Censor's Office, whose senior clerk she has known for twenty years and with whom she exchanges notes on wording. Cool with the Consonance, who hold that her office is being used as a smuggling route for politics — a charge she has never denied, because denying it would require her to have an opinion.

The ballad trade carries her sessions to nine provinces within a season. She has never sent a song anywhere and every song is hers by proxy.

Reputation

In the Vale: the office, doing its job. In the capital: a suspicious figure with a technically unimpeachable record and a very great deal of explaining that nobody has yet been able to require of her.

Among the Kingdom's radicals: something close to a patron saint, which would horrify her, because the day she is seen to take a side the office stops working.

Hooks

"She sang the case against the Chancery for an hour and a half, beautifully, and then she opened the floor to the reply, and the reply was worse."