The next morning, Wenzong issued a decree through a routine morning scroll delivered to the Palace of Solitary Radiance by a low-level scribe.
Eunuch Pang read the words and trembled, “The foreign consort’s lack of unrefined composure disrupts the peace of Our inner court.
To cultivate the necessary restraint, Eunuch Pang will arrange for the Court’s Imperial Music Master, Tutor Lin, to conduct daily instruction on the zither.
Let her mind find discipline in the strings.”
To the court, it may have appeared like a harsh, mandatory rehabilitation program.
To Pang, it was a desperate race against time to get the woman to sit still so he didn’t lose his head!
When Katya awoke, instead of the usual sweeping and silence, her compound was suddenly a flurry of frantic activity.
Her young maids were scrubbing the main pavilion floor until it gleamed, and Eunuch Pang was pacing the courtyard, muttering to himself and checking the position of the sun every three minutes.
Katya was so incredibly bored from her daytime isolation that she didn’t even care that she was confused.
Her “Siberian whirlwind” energy was cooped up tight.
When she saw her maids carrying a long, heavy wooden table into her chamber, her blue eyes lit up.
Finally, something is happening.
She assumed it was a game, a new chore, or perhaps another test from the Emperor.
Because she was naturally open and starved for mental stimulation, she sat down at the table voluntarily, her back straight, a rare, excited smile broke across her unpainted face.
She was ready to learn.
She wanted to do well.
The illusion of an easy lesson shattered the moment Tutor Lin stepped through her sealed gates.
Tutor Lin was a small, elderly, hyper-traditional court scholar with a long, wispy gray beard and a absolute devotion to rigid musical perfection.
He treated the guzheng (zither) like a holy artifact.
He walked into her chamber carrying the massive instrument wrapped in heavy silk, looking at Katya as if she were a wild, untamed beast he had been tragically ordered to domesticate.
He sat the instrument on the table between them, bowed with mechanical precision, and pulled out a small box of thin, sharp tortoiseshell picks and medical silk tape.
Katya tilted her head, her smile faltering as she looked at the dozens of silk strings stretching across the wood.
She had no idea that this tiny old man was about to try and tape her fingers together to teach her how to play a song about “placid lotus blossoms”—and she had absolutely no intention of playing quietly.
Katya sat on her cushion, her eyes wide with a genuine, bright fascination as Tutor Lin carefully unrolled the silk cover from the twenty-one stringed guzheng.
To her, the instrument looked beautifully complex—like a massive, hollowed piece of timber carved straight from a sacred forest.
She held completely still as the elderly tutor leaned over the table.
She watched with intense curiosity as he used thin strips of medical silk to meticulously tape the curved tortoiseshell picks onto the pads of her fingertips.
Her fingers felt heavy, stiff, and foreign, but she didn’t pull away.
She wanted to see what this thing could do.
When Tutor Lin gently stroked a single string, releasing a clear, resonant, bell-like ring that vibrated through the entire room, Katya’s face broke into a radiant smile.
Her Siberian childhood was filled with village storytellers strumming the rustic, boxy gusli around burning hearths.
Music was a language her soul already spoke.
She looked at Tutor Lin, nodded eagerly, and mimicked his hand shape, desperate to pull a sound from the wood.
Katya expected to strike the strings, to feel the rhythm in her shoulders, and to let her voice follow the melody.
Instead, Tutor Lin demanded absolute, frozen immobility.
He tapped her wrist with a small bamboo rod whenever she moved her elbow too much.
He forced her back to remain perfectly perpendicular to the floor, her shoulders dropped, her neck stiff like a porcelain crane.
(Traditional Chinese court music relies heavily on the micro-movements of the left hand pulling and pressing the strings behind the bridges to create subtle, weeping pitch bends.
It is an art of extreme, agonizing restraint.)
For the first twenty minutes, Katya white-knuckled her way through the discipline.
She tried to count the beats.
She tried to isolate just the thumb and index finger.
But her body was a reservoir of unspent, explosive kinetic energy.
She spent her entire life carrying firewood and fighting Siberian winters; her muscles were built for impact, not microscopic plucking.
With every passing minute, the silence of the room began to feel less like a sanctuary and more like a vacuum sucking out her air.
Her wrist began to ache from the stiff, unnatural angle.
Her foot started tapping a rapid, anxious rhythm against the floor.
The strict, repetitive drone of the basic scale Tutor Lin was forcing her to practice felt like a slow drip of water onto her skull.
The breaking point arrived when Tutor Lin tried to correct her for the twentieth time.
He held up his own hand, showing her a tiny, elegant pluck that barely stirred the air, shaking his head at her heavy-handed strokes.
Katya’s patience—the very word Wenzong tried to etch into her mind the night before—completely vaporized.”I cannot breathe like this!” she snapped in furious Russian, ripping the silk tape from her fingers with her teeth.
She threw the tortoiseshell picks onto the table.
Tutor Lin gasped, stumbling backward as she stood up, upending her posture entirely.
But she didn’t kick the instrument away this time.
Instead, she leaned over the massive zither, her long blonde hair falling loose from her ear.
She gripped the wooden frame with her bare, untaped hands.If this machine wanted her to play, she was going to play her way.
She dug her bare thumbs aggressively across the strings, abandoning the polite, weeping court scales.
Instead, she struck a massive, crashing chord that made the soundboard roar.
She hit a driving, rhythmic Slavic tempo, her shoulders swaying naturally, her face flushing with sudden, euphoric release.
Tutor Lin plugged his ears, his gray beard shaking in absolute horror as the “Siberian whirlwind” transformed his sacred, meditative instrument into a thundering village war drum.
Katya throwed her head back and laughed, completely free for the first time all day, entirely unaware that her wild, echoing music was carrying right over the pavilion walls.