By Kyle Alderdice

You may remember when I spoke of the traveling band that was stranded with us for a brief time during the war; it was spring, and it rained for weeks, and we forgot all about the fighting.

No one noticed them for hours until one of our men went to check the rain barrels near the collapsed front of the old church, and there they were, half under the eaves, protecting their instruments more than they were keeping themselves dry. The skinny men were a bundle of reeds, a hollow wooden lute, and a bunch of wet clothes that were probably court-fancy once but now looked no different than our damp, worn-through uniforms leftover from a war nobody remembered. “Extra firewood,” one of our men said, but of course it wasn’t as cold as it could have been that spring, just terribly wet. No one said a thing about burning the instruments for warmth or the cooking fire once we saw what they could do.

Most of the soldiers had never heard more than one instrument played at a time—if any at all. Some men only knew music through song, and for them that wasn’t even music, just an extension of their breath, their feelings—and now they had five together, whistling and strumming and clicking like some inventor’s machine. It was eerie and warm, the way they played during mealtimes while they shared our food and listened to our tired theories about who was in conflict with whom, though the audience gave our stories new thrum. While we had wandered the same church ruins for months waiting for something to happen, their music seemed to carry the moving sounds of the road with them, a rambling, content-if-not-happy journey with an arrow but no destination. We had all kinds of questions for the quintet, but we were nervous to ask any of them, for fear the music would stop and we would be left to our usual stone silence, the idea now unbearable, when before it was all we knew.

Their favorite—or was it ours, that song we begged them to play again and again?—was a hymn a few of us already knew. They wouldn’t sing it because they said it was traditionally sung by a boy, and the young lad who traveled around with them got caught stealing pelts from a farm and was surely stuck in a different castle or church just like this one, chained somewhere, maybe without hands or a tongue. When they spoke of him, the group, for all their joyful playing, betrayed the sadness that weighed on them. Even though they were musicians and we were soldiers, they likely had seen more of life and the world than we had.

Someone said that we should learn it, that one of us could sing it in the boy’s absence—it would be nice if we found a fitting voice for the tune, and the hymn could be done properly every night at mealtime. Now this idea gave us direction, and we all took it upon ourselves to remember the words and master our voices over the hills and valleys of the melody. One day, while we all took turns up on the roof doing the watch, the rest of us sang for each other. Some men were nervous, but did it because it seemed like the right thing to do, maybe for the boy, maybe it being the only thing keeping them going besides counting days of rain. Others had an air about them so free, like the hush of water all around the countryside, that made them feel private and unself-conscious. We all nodded along with each other, helping fill in the words if someone stumbled over them.

Hearing the poetry again and again, accompanied by our new friends, we were reminded that it was an Advent hymn, with all the familiar imagery of the poor virgin mother, the holy child, and the animals. Stuck in those ruins, it could have been any time of year, but early in life, I remember being told that the Christ child may have actually been born in spring, and we changed it to appeal to the heretics, or to bring light to a dark season. It made sense—the song wasn’t one of snow and thin tents and thick rotting layers of clothes you don’t take off for days, it was a song of rain and the sunlight breaking through it and all God’s creatures coming out of winter’s rest to share the dreams they had while sleeping underground.

When it came time to decide which man would be the boy, we didn’t know how to go about it. We asked the musicians to choose, but they seemed to sense that this ritual was more important to us than it was to them. We didn’t know what made someone good at the song besides really knowing the words. We didn’t have a David as we kept pointing out, laughing to fill space, looking at each other, so it seemed kindest to pick the youngest. A young man named Cecil, who we were all in awe of already, because he somehow stayed cleaner than all of us, and had an air of nobility about him, though if he really was an aristocrat, it wouldn’t have mattered in this age, and he never brought it up.

So Cecil sang our song at night under the hiss of rain on stone outside, though really we all sang along anyway, quietly under our breath. We imagined what redemption was like, chanting for an unseen Savior, and maybe this was it—a roving band alongside you for the darkest of springs. Everyone was grateful when the war ended, of course, and we got to go back to our families, but for me, maybe for all the men in that ruined church, final freedom was a bit emptier than that redemption we found in the middle of it all, hidden underwater, no way out but within.

Kyle Alderdice is a fiction writer, poet, and French translator from New York. He is the winner of the 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Prize, chosen by Tony Tulathimutte, and his work appears in Pinch, Swing, Carve (Editor’s Choice 2023 Raymond Carver Contest), the Broadkill Review, and Strange Hymnal, among others. He has received funding from the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, which he attended in 2024 and 2025. He studied French and Political Science at Duke University, and he holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.