Amadeus Marrow

Amadeus plays for the whole carnival at once, and every listener hears something different — the song they needed most and never asked for. The grieving hear lullabies. The guilty hear confessions set to strings. Nobody hears the same thing twice, and nobody can ever quite hum it afterward. He has never heard his own song. Every note he plays belongs to someone else's need, and the music passes through him like weather through an open window. He is the most listened-to man at Morrowglass and the loneliest. His private wound: he has spent his life playing everyone else's need and has no idea what his own music sounds like. His dangerous want: someone who listens back — who plays something for him.