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

  The man had a point—but there were still a few things she had to get clear. “Before I agree to anything, I want to know the terms I’ll be working under here,” she told him severely.

  He nodded, his former surprise gone. “You pick the shift—except we got no openings on morning, so its afternoon, supper to midnight, or midnight to dawn. You can double-shift if you want, but we don’t really like it.”

  Thus far, sounds reasonable. “Go on,” she told him, as the sound of a hurdy-gurdy brayed out on her right.

  “Terms are pretty simple: room and board, and you pick what kitchen you want your meals out of. We don’t go writin’ up food, so if you want to stuff yourself sick, that’s your problem. You hire on as a musician, that’s what you do—no cookin’, no waitin’ tables, no bartending, no cleanup.”

  She sensed that he was about to add something else, then he took a look at her and left the words unsaid. She knew what they were, of course—that she was not to offer “extra services” to the customers.

  “We don’t argue if the customer brings a—a friend here, and wants a room to share for—oh, a couple of hours,” he said finally, “but we don’t offer him things like that here.”

  “Oh, please,” she said, exasperated. “I’ve been on the road most of my life. You don’t have whores, and you do have an arrangement with the Whores’ Guild, I take it, so you don’t allow your entertainers to freelance their sexual services?”

  He looked just as startled as he had when she had suggested that she might not want to work here, but again, he nodded.

  She suppressed a smile. Well, occasionally clothing does make the person, it appears. I dress like a Churchgoing country girl, he assumes that’s what I am! I wonder what he’ll think when he sees some of my performing clothing? Perhaps that I am some mental chameleon!

  “That will be fine with me—” she began, but he held up his hand to forestall her.

  “There’s only one more rule,” he told her. “That’s the one you might not like. No puttin’ out a hat.”

  She raised one eyebrow as high as it would go. “Just how am I supposed to make a living, may I ask?” she said, more than a bit arrogantly. “No one has ever made that part of my arrangements before.”

  He flushed and looked apologetic. “That’s the rule. There’s a charge at the door t’ get in. You get a salary, an’ it depends on how big a draw you are. Lowest is five coppers each shift, highest—well, we only had one person ever get highest, that was a half-royal.”

  A half-royal? The equivalent of five gold pieces? It was Nightingale’s turn to stare at him with mouth agape. Very few Guild Bards were ever granted that kind of money, and no Free Bard that Nightingale had ever heard of—not even Talaysen, Laurel Bard to a King, was ever paid that much!

  “So in other words, I’m on trial until you see what kind of an audience I can collect,” she said, finally, after she had gotten over her astonishment. “And I have to take your word for what I’m worth.”

  He lifted his shoulders, apologetically. “That’s the terms; that’s what the boss set,” he replied.

  She considered it for a moment, leaving her own pride out of it. This wasn’t entirely a bad thing. She could, if she decided it was worth it, exert herself only enough to pay for her army of children. She had shelter, food, and an excellent venue to hear a great deal. A place like this one would be very popular, not only with working-class folk, but with those with wealth and jaded appetites—or a taste for “uncommon” entertainment. If she had petitioned the Lady of the Night for the perfect place for her information-gathering, she could not have come up with anything better.

  Most of all, she would only have to work six hours of every day; that left her at least six to make her own investigations, provided she cared to exert herself that much. She could make herself as conspicuous, or as inconspicuous here as she wanted.

  In fact, that was not a bad idea. She could play the exotic Gypsy to the hilt here within these four walls—but her persona outside the tavern could be as plain as a little sparrow. No one would connect Nightingale with—whatever she called herself in here.

  And if she did that—well, she might not find herself in the “half-royal” category, but she was fairly certain that the five coins she would earn each shift would be silver, not copper.

  “I believe I can live with these terms,” she said, without bothering to try and strike a better bargain. Not that there would be much point to trying—the price a Deliambren set was not subject to bargaining. One accepted, or one did without.

  “Excellent!” The man positively beamed. “I saw that you had harps; we don’t have any harp players right now. I can put you up in the Oak Grove, that’s on the third floor, far enough away from the dancing that you shouldn’t have any trouble with noise. What shift?”

  “Supper to midnight,” she replied immediately, and he beamed again.

  “Perfect! Let’s go check the front desk and find out what room you’ve got—ah—” He looked a little embarrassed. “I didn’t catch your name—”

  “That’s because I didn’t give it to you,” she replied, softening the words with a faint smile, as she ran a list of possible alternative names in her mind. She would save “Nightingale” for now—just in case this Deliambren was already part of her friend’s little plot. “My name is Lyrebird.”

  He nodded with approval. “The lyre’s a harp right? Got a nice sound to it—I’m Kyran, by the way, Kyran Horat.”

  She held out her hand, and he shook it, in the way of Gypsies sealing a bargain. “Welcome to Freehold, Lyrebird,” he said heartily. “I think you’ll be happy here. You can lighten up now; the bargaining is over.”

  She chuckled, then looked away from him and out over the expanse of the building and all it contained. There would be enough people here every night that she—or rather, Lyrebird—as flamboyant as that persona would be, would simply be one more flamboyant entertainer among many. She would earn enough to not only get her covert quest done, but quite possibly turn a profit. This place was built by a Deliambren, so she could probably expect some luxuries in her quarters that Kyran hadn’t even seen fit to mention—which was a far sight better than anything she’d find in an ordinary inn. All things considered, this had turned out to be luck of the sort that had eased her journey all the way here.

  “I think you’re right, Kyran,” she replied as she suppressed the shiver that thought brought her. “Shall we find out about that room?”

  Luck this good has to break sometime, she thought as she followed him. I only pray that when it does, it does not turn as bad as it has been good!

  And if this was the result of that fate, geas, or whatever else had brought her here—well, that turn of good luck to bad, very bad, was all too likely.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nightingale found nothing to complain about in the room that Kyran assigned to her, except the lack of windows—and on the whole, although it did make her feel a bit closed in, that might have been as much of a benefit as a lack. Certainly there was not going to be much of a view around here, and if the wind happened to come from the wrong direction—well, what traveled on the wind from the direction of the slaughterhouses was nothing she wanted to have to endure.

  She surveyed what was likely to be her refuge for the next several weeks, if not months, and on the whole was pleased. There was one light overhead in the main room, a second in the bathroom, both controlled by plates on the wall that one touched—her escort had shown her how to use them, and she had not revealed that she already knew what they were. This was Deliambren light, of course, not an oil lamp or candle; it replicated natural sunlight at about an hour after sunrise; warm, clear, but not too bright. The overall effect with the four walls bare of decoration was of a white box, but that was not altogether bad—Deliambren taste in artwork was not always something she admired, and only the Lady knew who or what had this room before she got it. The one thing this room did boast that was quite out of the ordi
nary was its own tiny bathroom.

  It’s out of the ordinary, unless you happen to be acquainted with Deliambrens, that is. By their standards, this is all patched together, old and rather tired, the bare minimum for civilization. She considered the closer examination she’d been able to make as she walked up the open staircases and along the balcony to her room. All visible equipment was very shopworn by Deliambren standards—their equivalent of secondhand goods. It was all too heavy and too bulky to steal, which made it safe to use here, surrounded by humans who just might try to carry it off otherwise. And those dangling wires and furlongs of conduit—those weren’t just afterthoughts, things they hadn’t quite tucked out of sight. This equipment was probably reliable, but, to Nightingale’s eyes at least, was very clearly cobbled together from several other mismatched pieces of heavy equipment, and likely there was no place else for those wires to go.

  The bathroom, stuck off one corner of the main room, was in keeping with the general feeling of “making do.” A tiny box, tiled on all surfaces with some shiny white substance that might be ceramic, it had a small sink, one of the Deliambren-designed privies, and an oblong object in one corner that she was certain must puzzle the life out of ordinary folk. She had been inside the Fortress-City any number of times; the Deliambrens used these things in places of bathtubs. At a touch, water cascaded from the nozzle in the wall, and although one could not soak in this contrivance, it was the best thing in all the world for washing hair. To her delight, her employers provided soap and towels—probably, she thought cynically, because so few of their new employees had more than a nodding acquaintance with either. That was fine with her; those were two more things she was not going to have to provide.

  It isn’t a tenth as luxurious as the baths in their guest quarters at home, though, she thought smugly. And if you look closely, those tiles show some chips and scratch marks, which means they have been reused. Probably all of the fixtures are reused. They probably believe that these rooms are as austere as a Church Cloister, and feel guilty over putting their employees through such hardship!

  A rectangular opening high on the wall with a screen over it allowed warm air—or cool, as now—to flow into the main room, while another on the opposite side removed it. There was a similar arrangement in the bathroom.

  All of the furnishings were built into the walls, meaning that they could not be moved—which was a minor annoyance. There was a wardrobe on the same wall as the bathroom, a chest which doubled as a seat, and a bed that folded up into the wall if she needed more floor space. A tiny shelf folded down, next to the bed. It was a very nice bed, though—and typically Deliambren. It bore very little resemblance to the kind of beds that she would find in other inns here. Wide enough for two, the bed was a platform that dropped down on a hinge at the head of it to within an inch or two of the floor and perched on a pair of tiny legs that popped out of the foot. The mattress was made of some soft substance she simply could not identify. The same followed for the sheets, towels and pillows. They weren’t woven; that was the only thing she could have said for certain. A single light, small but bright enough to read by, was built into the cavity at the head of the bed; it too was controlled by a palm-plate.

  Other than that, the room itself was unremarkable, and as she knew quite well, unlike the kinds of quarters that Deliambrens reserved for their guests.

  Oh, I imagine that my good host, knowing that the rooms for staff among humankind are very simple, opted for this as being “typical.” Trust a Deliambren never to ask advice on something like this!

  The fact was, by most human standards, between the heating and cooling and the bathroom, this place was palatial. Her panniers, covered with road dust and shabby with use as they were, looked as out of place here as a jackdaw’s nest in a porcelain vase. Though this “vase” had a few cracks in it, there was no doubt what it was.

  She put the bed back up into the wall in order to have more room to work, then set about unpacking her things and putting them away. The harps she left in their cases for the moment, but set beside the cushioned chest-seat. Her costumes were next, and she quietly blessed her instincts as she unpacked them, one by one, and shook them out thoroughly before putting them away in the wardrobe. She had been tempted to get rid of the more flamboyant of them, relics of her first days on the road and ill-suited to her current life. There were three of them, all made of ribbons and scarves sewn into skirts; seamed together from the waistband to the knee, then left to flutter in streamers from the knee to the ground. With them went patchwork bodices made to match the skirts, and shirts with a May-dance worth of rainbow-ribbons fluttering from each sleeve. One was made up in shades of green (from forest-green to the pale of new leaves), one in shades of red (a scarlet that was nearly black to a deep rose), and one in shades of blue (from the sky at midnight to the sty at noon).

  I was so proud of being a free Bard, then, that I thought every bit of clothing I owned should shout to the world what I was. They were my flags of defiance, I suppose, and fortunately, at the time, no one who might have taken exception actually recognized them for what they were! Now I hardly ever wear them except at Kingsford Faire.

  She hung those at the front of the wardrobe; they would do very nicely for Lyrebird in a casual mood. The majority of her clothing, sensible enough skirts—three of them, of linen and wool—bodices to match of linen, leather and more wool, and six good shirts with only a modest knot of ribbon on each sleeve, she hung in the rear. They were clearly worn and had seen much travel, the wool skirt and bodice were carefully mended, and three of the shirts plainly showed their origin as secondhand clothing to the experienced eye. Those she would use on the street; she could even add a patch or two for effect. She had done so before.

  Then came underthings and a nightshift, stockings and a pair of sandals, her winter cloak and a pair of shawls for weather too cold for shirtsleeves but not chill enough for the heavy cloak.

  Then, at the bottom of the pannier, the other clothing that would—oh, most definitely!—be suited to the exotic Lyrebird. These costumes would virtually guarantee that she was seen and remembered.

  The packet she removed from the bottom of the pannier was hardly larger than one of her sensible skirts folded into a square. She had never worn these garments in human company before—not that anyone had ever forbidden her to, but she had never felt safe in doing so. Some would have considered them to be a screaming invitation to the kind of activity the proprietor of the Muleteer assumed she would be open to. Others would have considered their mere possession to qualify her for burning at the stake.

  She unfolded the outer covering of black, a square of that same, soft black velvet that the Elven messenger had worn, and shook out the garments, one by one.

  And as always, she sighed; what woman born could refrain from a sigh, presented with these dresses? They were Elven-make, of course, and not even the Deliambrens could replicate them. Elven silk. Incredible stuff. Now there is magic! The sleeves, the skirts, floated in the air like wisps of mist; they gave the impression that they were as transparent as a bit of cloud, and yet when she wore them, there was not a Cloistered Sister in the Twenty Kingdoms who was as modestly clad as she. There was so much fabric in them that if one took a dress apart and laid the pieces out, they would fully cover every inch of space on the dance floor below, yet each dress packed down into the size of her hand and emerged again unwrinkled, uncrumpled.

  One dress was black, with a silver belt, otherwise unadorned, but with its multiple layers of sleeve and skirt cut and layered to resemble a birds feathers. One was a true emerald-green, embroidered around the neckline, sleeves, and hem with a trailing vine in a deeper green; it had a belt of silk embroidered with the same motif. The third was the russet of a vixen’s coat, and the sleeves and hem were dagged and decorated with cutwork embroidery as delicate as lace; the belt that went with this was of gold-embroidered leather.

  They would suite Lyrebird very well—and because no one sav
e the Elves had ever seen Nightingale in this finery, there was very little chance that anyone would recognize her from a description. She would certainly stand out—but no one would know her.

  Nor would anyone recognize, in the plain, shabby little mouse who would go out into the streets, the flamboyant harpist of Freehold in her Elven silks.

  And since most of my customers and the members of my audience are going to be nonhuman, Lyrebird is going to be perfectly safe from any untoward conduct, even in her Elven silks. Very few nonhumans were going to find her attractive or desirable, which was just fine so far as she was concerned.

  She selected the russet for her first performance—what better place for a russet vixen than an Oak Grove?—and gratefully stripped out of her sweat-soaked clothing and headed for the bathroom.

  The water-cascade worked just like the one she remembered, and to her great pleasure the soap was delicately scented with jessamine and left a fresh perfume in her hair. She luxuriated in the hot water pouring over her body, washing every last trace of the long journey away. This would be wonderful for easing the aches and strains of long playing, caused by sitting in one position for hours at a time.

  She dried and styled her long, waist-length black hair in an arrangement very unlike Nightingale’s simple braid; this was an elaborate coil and twist along the back of her head, with the remainder of her hair emerging as a tail from the center of the knot, or allowed to trail as a few delicate tendrils on either side of her face. She slipped the silken dress on over her clean body—it would have been a desecration and a sin to have put it on without a full bath—reveling in the sensuous feel of the silk caressing her hips and legs, slipping sleekly over her arms.