The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III Page 28

“I am going to wake him,” the physician said arrogantly.

  Oh, truly? Then he is more of a fool than I took him for! Nightingale thought in surprise. If Harperus’ trance had not been self-induced, it would have been very serious indeed. It might have been dangerous to Harperus to wake him—and it might have been impossible.

  And even though the trance was self-induced, and therefore it was unlikely the physician could break down the wall of Harperus’ will, trying to wake him could easily interfere with the self-healing process.

  “And just how much do you know about the Deliambrens?” T’fyrr all but purred, dangerously. “Have you studied Deliambren head injuries? Have you ever had a Deliambren patient before?”

  “Well, no, but—” the man stuttered, surprised into telling the truth. He had probably never had anyone challenge his expertise before.

  “Have you ever had any nonhuman as a patient?” T’fyrr persisted, his eyes narrowing, his voice dropping another half-octave so that the purr became a growl. “Have you even studied nonhuman injuries?”

  The man blanched and tried to bluff. “No, but that hardly matters whe—ouch!” T’fyrr had tightened his talons on the man’s wrist. Nightingale winced. Surely the bones were grinding together by now.

  “Why then is it so imperative that Lord Harperus be wakened?” T’fyrr asked. “When you know that you know nothing of how his body functions, and in waking him you might kill him? Is this on the orders of the King?” He pulled the man a little closer to him, effortlessly, and looked down at him with his beak no more than a few inches from the physician’s face.

  “It—no—ow!—it’s because of the escape, you fool!” The physician was dead-white now, with anger as much as with fear, although fear was swiftly gaining the upper hand.

  After all, there is a beak fully capable of biting through his spine less than a hand’s-breadth from his nose.

  T’fyrr shook the wrist he held, ever so slightly. “What escape?” he asked urgently, and Nightingale felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, both in reaction to his dangerously icy tone and in premonition. Her stomach knotted with T’fyrr’s, both of them with chills of fear running down their backs.

  “The man—the man who was caught here,” the physician stammered, unable to look away from T’fyrr’s eyes. “He escaped early this evening. We need to talk to the Envoy to discover if there was anyone he recognized among the rest of his attackers. We need to find more of the perpetrators before they have a chance to get away.”

  “What?” T’fyrr dropped the man’s wrist; the physician did not even stop to gather up his instruments. He fled the suite, leaving only T’fyrr and the guards. T’fyrr turned toward the guard nearest him, who shrugged.

  “I hadn’t heard anything, Sire,” the man said. “We’ve been here as long as you have. I can send to find out, though.”

  “Do that,” T’fyrr ordered brusquely. “If the man really did escape, there are now at least three people who need to see that Lord Harperus does not get a chance to identify them, all loose in this Palace. Now we don’t know who any of them are; they could be among the very servants sent here to serve Lord Harperus. You might consider that when you send your message.”

  The guard’s grim face grew a bit grimmer, and he himself disappeared for a moment or two, leaving his fellow twice as vigilant. When he returned, it was with his own Captain striding by his side. Nightingale recognized the Captain from the High King’s suite; he was one of the ones usually close at Theovere’s side.

  “I understand you have not heard the latest of our incidents, Sire T’fyrr,” the Captain said with careful courtesy. “I can tell it to you in brief: the Palace does not normally hold prisoners. Normally we send them elsewhere, within the city, which has better gaols than we. This time, however, it was deemed better to keep the man here, in one of the storage rooms in the cellars, with a guard on his door. Not,” he added, with a wry lift of an eyebrow, “one of us. This was merely a Palace guard, not one of the Elite.”

  T’fyrr nodded and the Captain went on. “I am told that at about dinner time, according to the guard left on duty, a woman appeared with whom several of the guards were familiar, he among them. She is ostensibly a maid here, and yet no one will admit now to having her in their service. At any rate, there was supposedly a good reason for her to be in the storage area, and when she saw the guard who knew her, she flirted with him as she has often done in the past. He allowed his caution to slip; she was only a woman after all, and alone.”

  “She then incapacitated the guard and let the prisoner escape,” T’fyrr concluded, seeing the obvious direction the tale was heading.

  “She didn’t bloody incapacitate him; she knocked him cold with a single punch!” the Captain corrected bitterly. “A single woman, no taller than his chin! It’s unnatural! I’ve never seen nor heard of the like, for a woman half a man’s size to take him down with one blow, even if he didn’t expect it!”

  Nightingale had, of course, but she kept her peace. There was no point in getting suspicion pointed in her own direction. The regular guards by now were smarting with the disgrace; they would be looking for an easy suspect, and she was in no mood to provide them with one. It would be all too easy for someone to claim that she had somehow slipped down to the cellar, perhaps during one of the brief times she had gone to fetch something for T’fyrr from his suite.

  Especially since she had been seen in the Lower Kitchen and could have been mistaken for a maid, with a long stretch of the imagination. There were cooks and the like who would be perfectly able to identify her as “Tanager,” and for a noble, there wasn’t a great deal of difference between a “maid” and a “street-musician.”

  “So the man is gone, and we have no suspects whatsoever.” T’fyrr clacked his beak with anger. “This is not cheerful news, Captain.”

  “Do tell,” the man retorted heatedly. “At the moment our best hope is that Lord Harperus regains consciousness and can tell us what he saw. That is probably why the physician was sent—I expect it was by the Captain of the Watch.” The Captain’s tone turned condescending. “I’m afraid that he hasn’t had much experience with injuries. I am certain he thought a head injury was no more serious than a drunken stupor and could be dealt with in much the same way.”

  His tone implied that the Watch Captain had no combat experience, which was probably true—and the scars on his own face and hands spoke volumes for his expertise.

  “So your best hope is to keep him safe,” T’fyrr turned the full force of his gaze on the Captain. “I am the nearest you have to an expert on Deliambren medicine—although, if you want a real expert, there is a Deliambren running a tavern in the city, a place called Freehold. His name is Tyladen. He probably has a great deal more knowledge than I.”

  “I know the place,” the Captain replied. “Many of my men have been there, now and again, and they speak highly of the place. I’ve been there myself.”

  For entertainment? Not primarily, I warrant. Probably to see if it was a hotbed of Fuzzy subversion. But it wasn’t, and so he permits his men to visit it recreationally.

  “Tyladen of Freehold might be persuaded to come attend to his fellow countryman’s needs,” T’fyrr said, and Nightingale sensed his fragment of ironic pleasure at the notion that Tyladen just might be forced to do something besides sit in his office like a spider in a web, collecting information at no cost or danger to himself. She was beginning to have a very poor opinion of Tyladen’s courage, and she knew T’fyrr shared it. “Other than Tyladen, I am your nearest source, and I assure you, it would be much better to wait until Lord Harperus wakes of his own accord. It could be dangerous to try to bring him to consciousness at this point.”

  The Captain acknowledged T’fyrr’s expertise with an unwilling nod. “I’ll have that noted, Sire T’fyrr,” he added politely. “Now, by your leave, I’ll take mine.”

  T’fyrr bowed slightly, and the Captain walked out, at a slightly faster pace than he’d arrive
d. T’fyrr had impressed him with a level head and good sense, at any rate.

  They both returned to their seats beside Harperus’ bed. Nob had long since closed the curtains against the night and lit a lamp or two, turning them low. Most of the room was in shadow; the rest in half-light. Curtains pulled halfway around the bed to keep the light from disturbing the occupant left the bed itself in deep shadows, in which Harperus’ white hair gleamed softly against the pillow.

  The Haspur turned to Nightingale and touched her hand, as lightly as a puff of down, with the talon that had just come close to crushing the wrist of the interfering physician. She smiled tremulously at him.

  “When do you think he’ll wake?” he asked her in a tense whisper.

  She closed her eyes and again dropped briefly into the healing-spell with three key notes of the chant. The song Harperus wove about himself was coming to a close, winding in and around itself the way that all Deliambren music ended, in a reprise of the beginning, a serpent swallowing its own tail. “Soon, very soon,” she said, opening her eyes again. “Within an hour or two at the very most, I suspect.”

  T’fyrr sighed with relief. “It cannot be too soon for me.”

  “Nor for me,” she replied. “I still need to invoke healing on you again—”

  “And I on you,” he interrupted, and a gentle warmth washed over her as he touched the back of her hand again. “But we may be sitting here guarding Harperus until—”

  “Until what?” came a weak voice from the shadows. “Until the moon turns blue? Until the Second Cataclysm?”

  “Until you wake, old fool!” T’fyrr said, turning quickly toward the head of the bed. “By the winds, you had us worried!”

  “Not half so much as I worried myself,” Harperus replied with a groan and a sigh as he tried to sit up. “I’m too old to be practicing self-healing. It is a bad habit to get into, relying on self-healing too much.”

  “It is a worse habit to put yourself in situations where you need to practice it,” Nightingale scolded. By now the guards just outside the bedchamber had heard the third voice, and one had come to investigate. He had come in at least twice so far today, fooled by T’fyrr’s mimicking ability while they were practicing their music.

  “Lord Harperus is awake and ready to speak,” T’fyrr told him, as the man opened his mouth to ask what was going on. “While you are notifying those in authority, you ought to send a servant to bring some food for Lord Harperus—”

  “Light food,” Nightingale interrupted. “Suitable for an invalid. And make sure it is tested before you serve it to him. Remember, we do not know who attacked him, or what positions his attackers hold. They could work in the kitchen.”

  “Oh, not tea and toast!” Harperus complained, but subsided at her glare, sinking into the shadows of the bed. “Well, all right. I suppose you know best, Nightingale, you are healer-trained. What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you wouldn’t promise to come here!”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said, tartly, in the Gypsy tongue. “And this is the reason why! I’ve been here all along; I’m T’fyrr’s accompanist. I just didn’t want you delightful people to endanger my safety by telling everyone on the planet that I was your agent. None of you Deliambrens has an ounce of sense among you when it comes to keeping secrets.”

  The Deliambren sighed and lifted a hand to rub his head. He replied to her in the same language. “For once, I have to agree that you were probably right. But in our own defense, Nightingale, we never thought that anyone would resort to a direct attack.”

  “A direct attack?” T’fyrr said sharply. “There have been three thus far, old friend, one on me alone and one on Nightingale yesterday that I became involved in! That is why we were not here last night!”

  “What? What?” Harperus sat up abruptly—too abruptly, for he sank back down again, holding his hand to his head. “Does Tyladen—”

  “Tyladen knows all about it, since we confronted him about it this morning,” Nightingale replied, glad that they had all switched to the Gypsy language, though she had not been aware that T’fyrr knew it. Then again, with all the Gypsy songs he learned and has been learning, I suppose he would have had to. And I know Harperus has some sort of machine that puts languages into one’s head. “And since I spent the better part of an hour reciting what happened to you at those listening devices in T’fyrr’s room, he knows about what happened to you, too.”

  “Whether or not he can be persuaded to come out of the safety of Freehold to do anything to help you is another question altogether,” T’fyrr added, and clacked his beak. “And this open chattering is another reason why Nightingale and I have been reluctant to work with you—you may hope that there is no listening post in the walls, and that no one else here knows this language, but I would not hope for it very hard! This is the Palace after all, and I would wager that the King’s Spymaster has a man in every room, and an expert in every tongue on Alanda!”

  Oh, well said, my love! she applauded mentally. It isn’t likely that anyone within listening distance actually does know the Gypsy tongue, but they could very easily find someone to listen, now that they know we’re likely to use it among ourselves. Since I am a Gypsy, it is logical to assume that we are using that language.

  Harperus shrank down into his pillows. “I am rebuked,” he said in a small voice. “Justly rebuked. And I apologize for all that has happened so far.”

  “Cease apologizing and start thinking how you can protect us,” Nightingale replied, switching back to the common tongue. “That will be apology enough.”

  At that moment, both Harperus’ food and the Captain of the Elite Bodyguards arrived, and Nightingale and T’fyrr got out of the way.

  “Do you think we need to spend the night here?” she asked him in an undertone.

  He shook his head. “There is no point in trying to silence him now,” the Haspur replied. “What would be the point? If he saw anyone he knows, he’ll tell the Captain. I think we can return to the suite and get some rest of our own.”

  She licked her lips nervously. “I wonder,” she said, tentatively, “if we might leave Nob here to take care of him? They’ve replaced all his servants, and I’d like someone here tonight we can trust.”

  He blinked at her, and she sensed his speculation and growing excitement as he realized that they would be alone in the suite if they left Nob here. He was probably wondering if she meant what he thought she did.

  Well, I’m wondering if I really mean what I think I do . . .

  “I believe that would be a good idea,” he replied. He beckoned to Nob, who was sitting in a chair in the corner, pretending to read.

  “I’d like you to stay here with Lord Harperus tonight until we can bring him a body-servant that we know can be trusted tomorrow,” T’fyrr told the boy soberly.

  Nob glowed with pleasure at the implied trust. “Yes, Sire!” he said eagerly. “I’d be happy to, Sire!”

  “We’re relying on you, Nob,” T’fyrr added. “There isn’t anyone else in the Palace I trust as much as you. We’re leaving his safety in your hands. I must count on you to be clever and cautious. Test his food before he eats it—watch anyone who comes in that is not one of the Royal Elite Bodyguards. And if anything seems amiss, do not confront the person yourself, go get the Bodyguards.”

  The boy sobered, but continued to glow. “You can count on me, Sire T’fyrr,” he replied fervently. “I won’t fail your trust.”

  T’fyrr parted his beak in a smile. “Thank you, Nob.” He waited until the Captain had finished questioning the Deliambren, then brought the boy over to Harperus’ bedside.

  “Well, that was a bit of bad news and good,” Harperus said as the Captain left. The bed-curtains had been drawn back, and the bruise on Harperus’ forehead stood out in vivid ugliness. “The bad news being that my prisoner escaped, the good that I knew one of the others by name—he was a common guard I’d had to complain about to his superior. He’s likely still on duty, or at least in th
e Palace garrison; probably doesn’t know I have a damned good memory for names and faces. They’ll have him in a real gaol within the hour.”

  “We’re leaving Nob with you for the night,” T’fyrr told him, resting one hand on the boy’s shoulder as Nob stood straight and tried desperately to look older than his years. “He’s the only one we trust to see to you until we can get Tyladen to send someone from Freehold that we can rely on.”

  “Whatever you need, my lord, I’ll take care of,” the boy replied earnestly. “Just ask! I can do whatever you need to have done.”

  Harperus looked sharply from T’fyrr to Nightingale and back again, but said nothing except, “That will be welcome indeed; I know what a good body-servant Nob is. I have seen his work in your suite, T’fyrr. I appreciate it very much, both that you, T’fyrr, are willing to do without his service for one night, and that you, Nob, are willing to put in the extra hours and the effort to help me.”

  Now the boy blushed and dropped his gaze, nearly bursting with pride.

  “We’ll leave you for now,” T’fyrr said gravely, his voice giving no hint of anything but weariness and concern for Harperus. “Don’t overwork Nob, Old Owl.”

  Harperus smiled, winked, and waved them both off, then turned to Nob with instructions for drawing him a bath. T’fyrr took Nightingale’s hand in his own, and the two of them left the suite together.

  He didn’t seem inclined to drop her hand when they entered the hall, and she didn’t withdraw hers. In spite of worry, the reminders of yesterday’s attack in the form of distant aches, and the deeply lurking fear the attack on Harperus had left with her, she was happier than she had been since she was a child.

  In fact, the only other time she recalled being this happy was when she had first learned to invoke the Bardic Magic. That was—oh, too many weary years ago, when the world was all new and shining, all music was a delight, and every day brought only new adventures. The world is new again, all music is pleasure, and there are more possibilities in each new day than I can count . . .