The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III Page 2

  Now Nightingale snorted. “This is hardly news; his neglect has been growing since before Lady Lark joined us. And so just what is it that I am supposed to do? March up to the High King and charge him with neglecting his duty?”

  Talaysen smiled, faintly. “Scarcely, though I suspect you could and would do just that if it suited you. No, what Rolend and I both want is the reason why Theovere has become this way. He wasn’t always like this—he was a very good ruler and kept the power neatly balanced among the Twenty Kings, the Guilds and the Church. He’s mature, but not all that old, and there has been no suggestion that he has become senile, and he hasn’t been ill—and besides, his father lived thirty years more than he has already, and he was vigorous and alert to the last.”

  She shook her head, though, rather than agreeing to take on Talaysen’s little wild-goose hunt with no more prompting than that. “I won’t promise,” she said, as the dim sense of foreboding only increased with Talaysen’s explanations. “I will think about it, but I won’t promise. All I will say is that I will take my travels in the direction of Lyonarie.” As Master Wren’s face reflected his disappointment, she hardened her heart. “I won’t promise because I have no way of knowing if I can actually reach Lyonarie,” she pointed out. “I’m afoot, remember? You and Rune came here in a fine wagon with a pair of horses to pull you and the baby—travel is harder when you walk, not ride. You ought to remember that. A hundred things could delay me, and I won’t promise what I am not sure I can deliver.”

  “But if you reach Lyonarie?” Talaysen persisted, and she wondered at his insistence. Surely he—and the King of Birnam—had more and better sources of information than one lone Gypsy!

  “If I decide to go that far and if I reach Lyonarie any time before the next Kingsford Faire, I will reconsider,” she said at last. “I will see what I can do. More, I won’t promise.”

  He wasn’t satisfied, but he accepted that, she saw it in his face.

  “You still haven’t answered the other question,” she continued, suspiciously. “Why choose me?”

  His answer was not one calculated to quell her growing unease, nor warm the prickle of chill prescience that threaded her back.

  “Much as I hate to admit this,” said Talaysen, wielder of Bardic Magics and friend to the High King of the Elves, “I was warned that this situation was more hazardous than we knew, and told to send you and only you, in a dream.”

  ###

  Three weeks from the day she had left Talaysen beside the river, Nightingale guided her little donkey in among the sheltering branches of a black pine as twilight thickened and the crickets and frogs of early evening started up their songs. Black pines were often called “shelter pines,” for their trunks were bare to a height of many feet, and their huge, heavy branches bent down to touch the ground around them like the sides of a tent. The ground beneath those branches was bare except for a thick carpet of dead needles. Nightingale held a heavy, resin-scented branch aside with one hand, while she led the donkey beneath it; her hair was wet, for she had bathed in a stream earlier that afternoon, and the still, cool darkness beneath the branches made her shiver.

  It wasn’t just the cool air or the dark that made her shiver. Not all the warm sunlight on the road nor the cheerful greetings of her fellow travelers had been able to ease the chill Talaysen’s words had placed within her heart.

  He was warned to send me to Lyonarie in a dream, she thought, for the hundredth time that day, as she unloaded her donkey and placed the panniers and wrapped bundles on the ground beside him. What kind of a dream—and who else was in it? Wren can be the most maddening person in the world when it comes to magic—he hates to use it, and he hates to rely on it, and most of all he is the last person to ever depend on a dream to set a course for him. So why does he suddenly choose to follow the dictates of a dream now?

  There had been a great deal that Talaysen had not told her, she knew that, as well as she knew the fingerings of her harp or the lies of a faithless lover, but he had simply shut his secrets inside himself when she tried to ask him more. Perhaps if she had agreed to his scheme, he might have told her—or perhaps not. Talaysen was good at keeping his own counsel.

  She went outside the barren circle of needle-strewn ground within the arms of the black pine and found a patch of long, sweet grass to pull up for the donkey. She hadn’t named him yet; Talaysen had driven all thoughts of such trivial matters out of her head.

  Infuriating man. She hadn’t even been able to enjoy the feeling of freedom that picking and choosing her own road had given her.

  Once the donkey had been fed and hobbled, she made a sketchy camp in the gloom of dusk with the economy of someone who has performed such tasks too many times to count. She scraped dead, dry needles away from a patch of bare earth, laid a tiny fire ready to light, rigged a tripod out of green branches over it, and hung her small kettle full of the sweet water she had drawn at the last stream from the apex of the tripod. She took the tent and her bedding out of one of the panniers and dropped them both nearest to the trunk of the tree. Then she lit the fire and laid her bedding out atop the still-folded tent. Her weather-sense gave her no hint of a storm tonight, so there was no point in putting the tent up, and screen-mesh was not needed since this wasn’t the territory for bloodsuckers. She preferred to sleep out under the open sky when she could; she would sprinkle certain herbs over the smoldering remains of her fire to keep biting insects away as she slept. Sometimes the touch of the moon gave her dreams of her own, and it would be useful for one such to come to her tonight.

  The water in the kettle was soon boiling, and she poured half of it over tea leaves in her mug. She threw a handful of meal and dried berries into what remained; porridge was a perfectly good dinner, and she had feasted every night of the Faire. It would do her no harm to dine frugally tonight, and there were honeycake to break her fast on in the morning, an indulgence she had not been able to resist when she passed through the last village this afternoon.

  The moon rose, serene as always. Its silver light filtered through the branches of the tree she sheltered beneath. The donkey dozed, standing hip-shot with his head hanging, the firelight flickering over him but not waking him. Somewhere in the further distance, an owl called.

  Nightingale strained her ears for the notes of her namesake bird, but there was no sweet, sad song wafting on the warm air tonight. It was the wrong season for a nightingale to be singing, but she never drifted off to sleep without listening for one, no matter where she was or what time of year it might be. Nearby crickets sang cheerfully enough that she didn’t miss the absence of that song too much.

  Although it was very lonely out here . . .

  Abruptly, a whistle joined the cricket chorus, and Nightingale sat bolt upright on her sleeping-pad. That was no nightbird song, that was the first few bars of “Lonely Road”! There was someone out there—someone near enough to see the light of her tiny fire, even through the masking branches!

  “Might a friend come in to your fire, Bird of the Night?” asked a voice out of the darkness. It was a clear voice, a silvery tenor, a voice of a kind that a trained musician would recognize, although she did not recognize who the speaker was. It held that peculiar lack of passion that only Elves projected.

  An Elf? First Master Wren, and now one of the Elvenkin? The chill that had threaded Nightingale’s spine since her meeting with Master Wren deepened.

  Elves did not often call themselves the “friend” of a mortal, not even a Gypsy. Though Nightingale could boast of such a distinction if she cared to, she was very far from the hills and halls of those few of the Elvenkin who normally called her “friend.”

  “Any friend is welcome to share my fire,” she replied cautiously. “But an unfriend in the guise of a friend—”

  “—should be aware that the fierce Horned Owl is as much a bird of the night as the Nightingale,” the voice replied, with a hollow chuckle. “Your reputation as a hunter in the dark also precedes you.”
The branches parted, with no hand to part them, as if servants held two halves of a curtain apart, and the speaker stepped through them as into a hall of state.

  It was, quite unmistakably, one of the Elven lords, though the circlet of silver he wore betokened him a lord only, and of no higher estate than that. Amber cat-eyes regarded her with a remote amusement from beneath a pair of upswept brows; the unadorned circlet confined hair as golden as the true metal, cut to fall precisely just below his shoulders. His thin face, pale as marble, was as lovely as a statue carved of marble and quite as expressionless. Prominent cheekbones, tapering chin, and thin lips all combined to enhance the impression of “not-human.” The tips of his pointed ears, peeking through the liquid fail of his hair, only reinforced that impression.

  He was ill-dressed for walking through a forest in the dead of night, though that never seemed to bother the Elvenkin much. He wore black, from his collar to the tips of his soft leather boots, black velvet with a pattern of silver spider webs, velvet as soft as a caress and fragile as the wings of a moth. Nightingale had worn cloth like that herself, when she spent time beneath the Hills.

  “Call me a friend of a friend, Bird of the Night,” the Elven lord continued, as the branches closed behind him without even snagging so much as a sleeve. Nightingale sighed; the Elves always made such a performance out of the simplest of things—but that was their nature. “And in token of this, I have been asked to gift you with another such as the gift you already bear, the maker of which sends his greetings—”

  He held out his hand, and in it was a bracelet, a slender ring of silver hardly thicker than a thread. It had a liquid sheen that no other such metal had—it was the true Elven-forged silver, silver that no mortal could duplicate, more valuable than gold.

  She opened herself cautiously, and “touched” it with a purely mental hand. She did know that bracelet; she wore its twin on her right wrist. The maker could be trusted, insofar as any Elf could be trusted. She relaxed, just a trifle.

  “In the name of friendship, then, I accept the gift and welcome the bearer,” she replied, holding out her hand. The Elf dropped the silver bracelet into her open palm without a word; the bracelet writhed in a strange, half-alive fashion and slipped across her palm and ringed itself onto her hand, then moved over her hand and onto her wrist, joining to the one already there. As it did so, she heard a strange, wild melody—but only in her mind. This was the music of Magic, true Magic, the magic that the Gypsies, the Elves, and some few—very few—of the Free Bards shared.

  If she had not already had this experience with the quasi-life of Elven silver more than once, she would probably have been petrified with fear—but that first bracelet had been set on her wrist when she was scarcely more than a child, and too inexperienced to be frightened. She had not known then that Elves could be as cruel as they were beautiful and that very few of them were worthy of trust by human standards.

  For a moment, a fleeting moment, she felt very tired, very much alone, and a little frightened.

  When she pulled her hand back to examine her wrist, she could not tell where the first bracelet began and the second ended—only that the circle of silver on her wrist was now twice as wide as it had been. She did not try to remove it; she knew from past experience that it would not come off unless she sang it off.

  The Elven lord dropped bonelessly and gracefully down on the other side of her fire, and caught her eyes in his amber gaze. “I come with a message, as well as a gift,” he said abruptly, with that lack of inflection that gave her no clue to his intentions. “The message is this: The High King of the mortals serves his people ill. The High King of those who dwell beneath the Hills would know the reason why, for when mortals are restless, the Hill-folk often suffer. If Nightingale can sing and learn, her friends would be grateful.”

  The chill spread to Nightingale’s heart, and she shivered involuntarily at this echo of Master Wren’s words.

  First Talaysen speaking for one king, now an Elven messenger speaking for another. This was so unreal that if someone had written it as a story-song she would have laughed at it as being too ridiculous to be believed. Why is this happening to me?

  “Is there no further word from my friend?” she asked, hoping for some kind of explanation.

  But the Elf shook his head, his hair rippling with the movement. “No further word, only the message. Have you an answer?”

  It wasn’t a wise thing to anger the Elves; while their magic was strongest in their Hills, they could still reach out of their strongholds from time to time with powerful effect. Songs had been made about those times, and few of them had happy endings.

  “I—I don’t know,” she said, finally, as silence grew between them, punctuated by the chirps of crickets. Firelight flickered on his face to be caught and held in those eyes. “I am not certain I can send him an answer. I am only one poor, limited mortal—”

  But the Elven lord smiled thinly. “You are more than you think, mortal. You have the gift of making friends in strange places. This is why the High King asks this question of you, why the runestones spelled out your name when he asked them why the mortals grew more troublesome with every passing month, and who could remedy the wrongness.”

  Nightingale grew colder still. The Elves lived outside time as humans knew it, and as a consequence had a greater insight into past and future than humans did. Elven runestones were the medium through which they sought answers, and if the runestones really had named her—

  But I have only his word for that, and the word of the one who sent him. Elves lie as readily as they speak the truth; it is in their nature.

  “I will do what I can,” she said finally, giving him a little more of a promise than she had given Talaysen. “I cannot pledge what is not in my power to give. The seat of the High King of the mortals is far from here, and I am alone and afoot.”

  She waited for his response, acutely aware of every breath of breeze, every rustling leaf, every cricket chirp. He could choose to take offense; that Elves were unpredictable was a truism.

  The Elven messenger regarded her with one wing-like eyebrow raised for a moment, then grudgingly acknowledged that she had a point. She breathed a little easier.

  “I will take him your answer,” he said as he nodded, and rose fluidly to his feet. Before she had blinked twice, the branches of the tree she sheltered beneath had parted once again, and he was gone.

  There was nothing else to do then but finish her porridge, strip off her leather bodice and skirt, and lie down in her bedding. But although she was weary, she stared up into the interlacing branches overhead, listening to the crickets and the breeze in the boughs, tense as an ill-strung harp. This was two: Wren and the Elves. Gypsy lore held that when something came in a repetition of three, it was magical, a geas, meant to bind a person to an unanticipated fate.

  Whether or not that person wanted it.

  It was a long time before she was able to sleep.

  ###

  She made better time than she had thought she would; she had assumed she would be walking at the same pace unburdened as carrying her own packs, but she found that she could make a mile or two more every day than she had anticipated, with no difficulty whatsoever. She reached the crossroads and the small town of Highlevee three days sooner than she had expected to—

  Which only increased the tension she felt. If she went south or north, she would be traveling out of the Kingdom of Rayden and away from the road that would take her to Lyonarie. If, however, she traveled eastward, she would soon strike the King’s Highway, which led to Lyonarie, and there would be no turning back. She’d hoped to have more time to think the problem through.

  Though the height of summer was past, the heat had not abated in the least. The sun burned down on her with a power she felt even through her wide-brimmed, pale straw hat; dust hung in the air as a haze, undisturbed by even a hint of breeze. The grasses of the verge were burned brown and lifeless, and would remain that way until the ra
ins of autumn. She had kilted up her skirts to her knees and pushed her sleeves up over her elbows for coolness, but she still felt the heat as heavy as a pack of weights on her back.

  Summer would linger in Lyonarie, long past the time when it would be gone here—or so she had heard. At the moment, that did not seem particularly pleasant.

  As she led the donkey down the dusty main street of Highlevee, a little after noon, she found herself dragging her feet in the dust, as if by walking slower she could put off her decision longer.

  It was with a decidedly sinking feeling that she spotted someone she knew sitting at a table outside the Royal Oak Tavern, just inside the bounds of the town. It wasn’t just any acquaintance, either.

  Omens come in threes. So do portents. And so do the bindings of a geas set by Fate and the Lady. If ever there was an omen, this must surely be it—for there was no reason, no reason at all, for this man to be here at this time.

  Unless, rather than a geas, this is a conspiracy set up among my dear friends . . .

  For sitting at his ease, quite as if he belonged there, was a man called “Leverance” by those who knew him well. The trouble was, most of those who knew him well lived within the walls of the fabulous Fortress-City that the Deliambrens called home.

  He should not have been here. He should, by all rights, have been back there, amid the wonders of Deliambren “technology,” as they called it. Few of the odd half-human folk ever left those comforts—why should they? There they had lighting that did not depend on candles, as bright as the brightest sunlight on a dark winter night. They had heat in the winter and cool in the summer, and a thousand other comforts even the wealthiest human could only dream of. He should not have been sitting calmly at a wooden table, with a wooden mug in one hand, nibbling at a meat pasty and watching the road, his strange features shadowed by a wide hat of something that was not straw.