The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III Read online

  Nightingale was still ambivalent about joining one of those expeditions; she could add a good margin of safety for the group if she used Bardic magic to make gang members utterly forget who their attackers had been. But if she was caught doing something like that, and fell into the hands of the Church—

  Flame is not my best color, she thought, trying to drive away fear with flippancy.

  She reached the roof door to the staircase going down, and turned to take one last look up at the stars. And she thought, oddly enough, of T’fyrr.

  I am glad he is safe, with Old Owl, the Deliambren, she thought soberly. If any of the rumors are true, he would he in grave danger. At least, with Harperus, he has protection and a quick way out of any danger that should come.

  So at least one person she cared for was safe. And with that thought to comfort her, she took the stairs down to the staff quarters, and to her empty bed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nightingale slipped out into the early morning mist by way of a back staircase. She had learned about it from one of the waiters, the second day of her arrival at Freehold. It was mostly in use by night, rather than by day; it locked behind you as you went out, but Nightingale had learned from that waiter that she already had a key. Every staff member had a ring of keys they got when they settled in; Nightingale didn’t know even yet what half of them went to, but one of them locked the door to her room, and one unlocked this back staircase door.

  She had visited the used-clothing market soon after setting up her network of children, and had acquired a wardrobe there that she really didn’t want too many people in Freehold to know about. It was not in keeping with Lyrebird, or with the sober and dignified woman she had portrayed herself as when she arrived.

  In fact, she rather doubted that she would have had a hearing if she’d shown up at the door in these patched and worn clothes. They were clean, scrupulously clean, but they did not betoken any great degree of prosperity. That was fine; she wasn’t trying to look prosperous, she was trying to look like the kind of musician who would be happy to sing in the corner of a kitchen in exchange for a basket of leftovers.

  She made one concession to city life that she hoped no one would notice, for it was quite out of keeping with her costume. She wore shoes. She had no stockings, and the shoes were as patched as her skirts, but she did have them, and no one as poor as she was supposed to be would own such a thing.

  But I’m not going out into a mucky street or traipse around on cobblestones all day without something to protect my feet, she thought stubbornly, as she crossed the street headed east, skipped over a puddle and skirted the edge of a heap of something best left unidentified. There was just so much she would do to protect her persona, and there was such a thing as carrying authenticity too far.

  She did not carry a harp at all, only a pair of bones and a small hand-drum, the only things a musician as poor as she would be able to afford.

  The mist here beneath the overhanging upper stories of the buildings chilled the skin and left clothing damp and clammy, but in an hour or so it would be horribly hot, and the one advantage this costume had was that it was the coolest clothing she had to wear, other than the Elven silks. That was mostly because the fabric was so threadbare as to be transparent in places. It was all of a light beige, impossible to tell what the original color had been now. The skirt had probably once been a sturdy hempen canvas, but now was so worn and limp that it hung in soft folds like cheesecloth, and was as cool to wear as the most finely woven linen. She didn’t have a bodice; no woman this poor would own one. Nor did she have a shirt. Only a shift, which if she really was this impoverished, would serve as shirt, petticoat, and nightclothes, all one. It was sleeveless, darned in so many places she wondered if any of the original fabric was left, and had at one time been gathered at the neck with a ribbon. Now it was gathered at the neck with a colorless string, tied in a limp little bow.

  She hurried along the streets, sometimes following in the wake of one of the water carts that was meant to clean the streets of debris and wash it all into the gutters. In the better parts of town, that was probably what it did do—but the street cleaners were paid by the number of streets they covered, and every time they had to go back to the river filling-station to get more water, they lost time. So in this neighborhood, the water sprinkling the street was the barest trickle, scarcely enough to dampen the cobbles, and certainly not enough to wash anything into the gutters. Those few businesses who cared about appearances, like Freehold, sent their own people out to wash the street in front of the building. And there were those who lived here who didn’t particularly care for having garbage festering at the front door, who did the same. But mostly she had to pick her way carefully along the paths worn clean by carts and rag-pickers.

  As the light strengthened and the mist thinned, she got into some better neighborhoods, and now she took advantage of the directions her children had given her, slipping along alleyways and between buildings, following the paths that only the children knew completely. Even the finest of estates had these little back ways, the means to get into the best homes, so long as you came by the servants’ entrance where no one who mattered would see you.

  Even the Palace. They can put gates across the roads and guard the streets all they like, but even the Palace has to have an alley. Even the Palace has to have a way for people to come and go—people that the lords and ladies don’t want to know exist.

  Rat catchers. Peddlers. Rag-and-bone men. Dung collectors. Pot scrubbers and floor scrubbers and the laundry women who did the lower servants’ clothing. Garbage collectors. There was a small army of people coming and going through that back entrance every day, people who didn’t live at the Palace, despite the huge servants’ quarters, but who lived off the Palace. Even the garbage from the Palace was valuable, and there was an entire system of bribes and kickbacks that determined who got to carry away what. The Church actually got the best pickings of the edible stuff, and sent the lowest of the novices to come fetch it every day. They carried away baskets of leftovers from the royal kitchens that fed the lords and ladies and the King himself. Allegedly those went to feed the poor; Nightingale hadn’t seen any evidence for or against that.

  None of these people were “good enough” to warrant the expense of clothing them in uniforms and housing them in the Palace; they got their tiny wages and whatever they could purloin, and came and went every day at dawn and dusk. They never saw a lord or a lady—the most exalted person they would ever see would be a page in royal livery.

  But, oh, they knew what was going on in that great hive, and better than the lords and ladies who lived there! Each of them had a friend or a relative who did rate quarters above, and each of them was a veritable wellspring of information about just what was going on. Gossip was almost their only form of entertainment, so gossip they did, till the kitchens and lower halls buzzed like beehives with the sounds of chattering.

  Very few of them ever got to hear even a street singer; no one was out in the morning when they would scamper in to work, and by the time they went home in the evening, it was generally in a fog of exhaustion. Sevenday was the day for Church services, and if one picked the right Chapel and began at Morningsong and stayed piously on through Vespers, the Priest would see that piety was rewarded with three stout meals. No street singer could compete with all the bean-bread, onions, and bacon grease to spread on the bread that one could eat, and a cup of real ale to wash it down. Sometimes on Holy Days, there were even treats of a bit of cheese, cooked whole turnips, cabbage soup, or a sweetcake . . . all the more reason to come early and stay late. And if one happened to doze off during the sermon, well, Sevenday was a day of rest, wasn’t it?

  So when a poor musician like Tanager showed up, looking for a corner to sit in, asking nothing more than the leftovers that the kitchen staff shared, she was generally welcomed. As long as she didn’t get in the way and didn’t eat too much, her singing would help pass the time and make the work s
eem lighter, and one just might be able to learn a song or two to sing the little ones to sleep with.

  So in the corner Tanager sat, drumming and singing, and between songs listening to the gossip that automatically started up the moment that silence began.

  Now the alley was hemmed on both sides by high walls, walls with tantalizing hints of trees and other greenery on the other side. Nightingale—or “Tanager”—joined the thin stream of other threadbare, tired-looking people all making their way up this long, dark alley, some of them rubbing their reddened eyes and yawning, all of them heading for their jobs at the Palace.

  There was nothing at the end of this corridor of brickwork, open to the sky, but a gate that led to the Palace grounds.

  By now, she was elbow-to-elbow with the Palace servants, none of whom were distinguished by anything like a livery. No one ever saw these people but other servants, after all. She slipped inside the back gate with the others, completely ignored by the fat, bored guard there, whose only real job was to keep things from leaving the Palace, not from entering it.

  Now she saw the first real sunlight she’d seen this morning; the cobblestoned courtyard and kitchen garden were open to the sky. Here, the sun had already burned away the mist, and she squinted against its glare as she stared across the courtyard to the great stone bulk of the Palace, dark against the blue sky, with the sun peeking over it.

  She had no real idea just how big the Palace was; huge, that was all she knew for certain—at least the size of several Freeholds. From all she had been able to gather, this was only one building of several, all joined by glazed galleries, and all as big as this one was. It made her head swim just to think about it.

  She paused just a moment to take in a breath of fresh air before she headed for the back door to the servants’ kitchen.

  The servants, of course, were never fed out of the same kitchen that conjured up the meals for the lords and ladies. In fact, there were two kitchens that fed the servants: Upper and Lower. Upper Kitchen was the one that fed the pages, the personal maids and valets, the Court Musicians, nannies and nursemaids, tutors and governesses, all those who were not quite “real” servants, but who were not gentry, either. Lower was for the real servants: anyone who cleaned, cooked, sewed, polished, served food and drink, washed, mended, or tended to animals or plants. Tanager would never have dared intrude on the Upper Servants’ Kitchen; Lower was where she fit in, and Lower was where she went.

  She needed that breath of fresh air when she got there; as usual, it was as hot as a Priests Personal Hell in there, with all the ovens going, baking bread for afternoon and evening meals before it got too warm to keep the ovens stoked. Breakfast bread had been baking all night, of course, and Tanager’s arrival was greeted right at the door by one of the undercooks, with enthusiasm and a warm roll that had a scraping of salted lard melting inside it. Tanager got out of the doorway and ate the roll quickly, as would anyone for whom this would be a real breakfast. Then she hurried across the slate floor and took her seat out of the way, off in a corner of the kitchen that seemed to be an architectural accident; a bit of brickwork that might have served as a closet if it had been bigger, and might have served as a cupboard, if it had been smaller, and really wasn’t right for either. Before she had come to sing, there had been a small table there. You could put a stack of towels there, or a few of the huge pans needed to cook the enormous meals they prepared here—or Tanager. There were other places for the towels and pans; now the wedge-shaped corner held a stool for her to sit on.

  The kitchen was a huge, brick-walled room, lit by open windows and the fires of three enormous fireplaces, where soup and stew cooked in kettles as big around as a beer barrel. There were five big tables, and counters beneath the windows, where the cooks and their helpers worked. No fancy pastry cooks here; the fare dished out to the lower servants was the same, day in, day out: soup and stew made with meat left from yesterday, sent from the Upper Servants’ Kitchen, bread, pease-porridge and oat-porridge. On special occasions, leftover sweets came over from the Upper Servants’ Kitchen, as well—breakfast sweets came over at noon, lunch sweets at dinner, and dinner sweets appeared when all the cleaning up had been accomplished, by way of a treat and a reward for the extra hours. So far, Tanager hadn’t seen any of those.

  Tanager thought long and hard as she settled herself on her stool. This was the first time she had needed to hear about something specific. Something as odd as the “Law of Degree” was not going to come up in normal conversation.

  And I’m not going to ask about it myself. That leaves only one option; I’ll have to use Bardic Magic to coax it out of them.

  Tanager was a simple girl; Nightingale was anything but. Easy in her power and comfortable with it, she had been using Bardic Magic for as long as she had been on her own, on the road. Often she had no choice. The use of Bardic Magic to influence the minds of those around her had sometimes been the only way she had gotten out of potentially dangerous situations. Living with the Elves had refined her techniques, since Bardic Magic was similar to one of their own magics. Now she scarcely had to think about tapping into the power; she simply stretched out her mind, and there it was.

  I need a song as a vehicle; something that includes nonhumans. But nothing too jarring to start with; something they would enjoy listening to under ordinary circumstances. And it will have to be something with a strong beat as well, since I only have the drum to accompany me. Ah, I know; that song Raven wrote: “Good Duke Arden.” It has several verses about Arden taking care of nonhumans in his train.

  So she began with that, then moved on to other melodies, songs that dealt with nonhumans in a favorable light. And all the while she sang, she concentrated on one thing. Talk about the nonhumans, what the lords and ladies are saying about them.

  She sat and sang and drummed until her wrist and voice tired; one of the pot scrubbers, with an empty dishpan and nothing better to do at the moment, brought her a cup of flat ale. Tanager pretended to drink it, but it really went down a crack at her feet. And while she drank, she listened.

  There was nothing at all in the gossip about the “Law of Degree,” but there was something that made her sit up straight in startlement.

  “La, Delia, did ye see th’ lad wi’ all the snow-white hair, him an’ his coach with no horses come in yestere’en?” asked one of the undercooks. “Faith, ’tis all m’sister, her as is Chambermaid t’ Lord Pelham’s nannies, can talk about!”

  Lad with all the hair? Coach with no horses? Dear Lady, that can’t be—oh surely not—

  “Coo, ye should’a seen what came w’ him!” said another, one of the chief cooks. “ ’Tis a great bird man, ’twas, w’ wings an’ all, an’ a great evil beak like a hawk i’ the middle’v his face! An’ claws! I wouldn’ want t’ get on the wrong side uv him!”

  Tanager sat frozen, her hands wrapped around her empty cup. It was! It was Harperus—and with him, T’fyrr! It must be! But why here, and why now?

  “Ah, but ye haven’t heard the best of it,” said a third girl knowingly. “My second cousin is best friend t’ Lord Atrovel’s secretary’s valet, an’ this birdy-man like to set the whole Court on its ear!”

  As Tanager sat in stunned silence, the girl gleefully told the entire story, while the rest of the kitchen worked and put in a word or two of commentary. According to the girl, a nonhuman who had to be a Deliambren from the description, and another who was either T’fyrr or another of his race, had come in yesterday afternoon to Court. They had been announced as some kind of envoy, and at that point, for a reason that the girl either didn’t know or couldn’t explain, the bird-man broke into song. From there, her version differed slightly from the ones offered by a few others. The others claimed that the bird-man had challenged the King’s Musicians to a contest and had won it; the girl maintained that he had simply begun singing, as a sample of what he could do.

  At any rate, when it was all over, the King had appointed the bird-man to be his Chief
Musician (the others claimed Laurel Bard), the rest of the Court Musicians were furious (no one differed on that), and most of the King’s Advisors were beside themselves over the fact that the King had overruled them.

  Ah, but if the first girl was to be believed, the King had not only appointed the Haspur—for it must be a Haspur, even if it wasn’t T’fyrr—as his Chief Musician, he had appointed him directly to the Royal Household, made a sire out of him, and installed him in a suite in the royal wing of the Palace!

  I only hoped to hear something about the Law of Degree, Tanager thought dazedly, not this—

  Could it be T’fyrr and Old Owl? She didn’t know of any other Haspur and Deliambrens traveling together. But why would they come here?

  Why am I here? Whoever these strangers are, it is for the same reason, surely.

  Now she was very, grateful that she had been so careful to keep her real identity and purpose here a secret. With two sets of agents blundering about, it would have been appallingly easy for them to trip each other up.

  Now I need only watch for them, and avoid getting entangled in whatever scheme they have going. Oh, yes, need only. If it is Harperus, that will be like trying to avoid the garbage in the streets! He’s more clever than twenty Gypsies in his own way, and encompasses everyone he meets in his grand plots in some way or another. Ah, well, at least he doesn’t know I’m here; I just hope he doesn’t get T’fyrr in trouble . . .

  Somehow she managed to pull herself together and continue singing and playing for the rest of the morning. That was all the time she ever spent here—and that was reasonable, for Tanager. Mornings were fairly useless for a street-musician; the afternoon meant better pickings, and Tanager would now, presumably, go on to whatever street corner she had staked out as her own. There she could expect to earn “hard currency” for her work; pins, mostly, with a sprinkling of copper coins, and some food.