Lark and Wren (44 page)

He handed their nesting cook-pot and kettle to her; she dug out the dried meat and vegetables and the canister of herb tea. It was Talaysen's turn to cook, while she spread out the sleeping rolls and went to get water.

Well, that wouldn't be hard. There was a lot of water available right now.

She stuck the kettle, then the pot, out the window, holding them under the stream of water coming off the eaves. After all the rain they'd been having, the roof was surely clean. As clean as most streams, anyway. The presence of the owl probably kept birds from perching on the roof by day, and there wasn't much else that would matter.

Already it was hard to see across the clearing. She was profoundly grateful that they'd found this bit of shelter when they had. Now they'd be able to have a hot meal, warm and dry their clothing by the fire, check their instruments, maybe even practice a little.

As if he had followed her thoughts, Talaysen looked up from his cooking. "Get my lute out, will you, Rune? I think it's warm and dry enough in here that it won't come to any harm."

She nodded, and took the instrument out of its oiled-leather case, inspecting it carefully for any signs that the rain or damp might have gotten to it. Satisfied that it was untouched, she laid it on his unrolled bedding and did the same with her fiddle.

Like any good musician, she made a detailed examination of both instruments. So detailed, in fact, that by the time she was finished, the food and tea were both ready. She dug into her own portion with a nod of thanks, a little surprised at how hungry she was. The food evaporated from her wooden bowl, and she mopped every last trace of juice up with a piece of tough traveler's bread. The bowl hardly needed to be washed after she was through, and Talaysen's was just as clean.

Once they had finished eating, Talaysen was not to give her any time to brood over the thoughts that had caused her depression today, either. Instead, he insisted that they rehearse a number of songs she was only vaguely familiar with.

Odd,
she thought, after the first few. He seemed to have chosen them all for subject-matter rather than style-every single one of them was about young women who were married off to old men and disappointed in the result. In a great many of the songs, they cuckolded their husbands with younger lovers; in the rest, they mourned their fates, shackled for life to a man whose prowess was long in the past. Sometimes the songs were comic, sometimes tragic, but in all of them the women were unhappy.

After about the fifth or sixth of these, she wondered if he was trying to tell her something. After the fifteenth, she was certain of it. And despite the message, she grew more and more cheerful with every chorus.

He
had
noticed how she'd been flinging herself at him! And this wasn't the reaction she'd been thinking he'd had to her. Was the message in these ballads that he was attracted, but thought he was too old to make her happy? It surely seemed likely.

Where did he get an idea like that? He wasn't
that
much older than she was! Girls in Westhaven got married to men his age all the time-usually after they'd worn out their first wives with work and childbearing, and were ready for a pretty young thing to warm their beds at night. Oh, at thirty-mumble, if he had been a fat merchant, or an even fatter Guild Bard, maybe she'd have been repulsed . . . but it would have been the overstuffed condition of his body that would have come between them, not his age.

At first she was too startled by what she thought he was trying to tell her to act on it-then, after a moment of reflection, she decided she'd better not do anything until she'd had a chance to plan her course of attack. She held her peace, and played the dutiful apprentice, keeping her thoughts to herself until they were both too tired to play another note. By then, the fire was burning low, and she was glad to creep into her now-warmed blankets.

But although she intended to ponder all the possible meanings of the practice session, though she did her best to hold off sleep, it overtook her anyway.

There. I think I've gotten my message across.
Talaysen put his lute back in its case with a feeling of weary, and slightly bitter, satisfaction. Hopefully now his young apprentice would think about what she was doing, and stop making calf's-eyes at him.

What he was going to do about the way he felt was another matter altogether.

Suffer, mostly. 

Eventually, though, he figured that he would be able to convince himself that their relationship of friendship was enough. After all, it was enough with all the other Free Bard women he'd known.

Maybe he could have another brief fling with Nightingale to get the thought of Rune out of his head. Nightingale had yet to find the creature that would capture
her
heart, but she enjoyed an amorous romp as well as anyone.

At least he'd given Rune something to think about. And the next time they met up with one of the gypsy caravans or another gathering of Free Bards, she'd start looking around her for someone her age. That should solve the problem entirely. Once he saw her playing the young fool with all the other young fools, his heart would stop aching for her.

He looked down at her sleeping face for a moment, all soft shadows and fire-kissed angles. Maybe I shouldn't have been so hard on Raven, he thought, dispiritedly. Maybe I should have encouraged him. He was one of her teachers before; he knows her better than I do. They might get on very well together. . . . 

But though the idea of Rune with another was all right in the abstract, once he gave the idea a face, it wrenched his heart so painfully that his breath caught.

Dear God, I am a fool. 

He slipped inside his own bedroll, certain that he was going to toss and turn for the rest of the night-

Only to fall asleep so quickly he might have been taken with a spell of slumber.

It was the sound of a harp being played that woke him; he found himself, not lying in his bedroll in the tiny, earthen-floored cottage, but standing on his feet in the middle of a luxuriously green field. Overhead was not a sky filled with rain clouds-not even a sky at all-but a rocky vault studded with tiny, unwinking lights and a great silver globe that shone softly down on the gathering around him.

Before him, not a dozen yards away, was a gathering of bright-clad folk about a silver throne. After a moment of breathlessness and confusion, he concluded that the throne was
solid
silver; for the being that sat upon it was certainly not human. Nor were those gathered about him.

Eyes as amber as a cat's stared at him unblinking from under a pair of upswept brows. Hair the black of a raven's wing was confined about the wide, smooth, marble-pale brow by a band of the same silver as the throne. The band was centered by an emerald the size of Talaysen's thumb. The face was thin, with high, prominent cheekbones and a sensuous mouth, but it was as still and expressionless as a statue. Peeking through the long, straight hair were the pointed ears that told Talaysen his "host" could only be one of the elven races.

There were elvenkin who were friends and allies to humans. There were more who were not. At the moment, he had no idea which these were, though the odds on their being the latter got better with every passing moment.

The man was clothed in a tunic of emerald-green silk, with huge, flowing sleeves, confined about the waist with a wide silver belt and decorated with silver embroidery. His legs were encased in green trews of the same silk, and his feet in soft, green leather boots. His hands, resting quietly on the arms of his throne, were decorated with massive silver rings, wrought in the forms of beasts and birds.

A young man sat at his feet, clad identically, but without the coronet, and playing softly on a harp. Those about the throne were likewise garbed in silks, of fanciful cut and jewel-bright colors. Some wore so little as to be the next thing to naked; others were garbed in robes with such long trains and flowing sleeves that he wondered how they walked without tripping themselves. Their hairstyles differed as widely as their dress, from a short cap like a second skin of brilliant auburn, to tresses that flowed down the back in an elaborate arrangement of braids and tied locks, to puddle on the floor at the owner's feet, in a liquid fall of silver-white. All of them bore the elven-king's pointed ears and strange eyes, his pale flesh and upswept brows. Some of them were also decorated with tiny quasi-living creations of magic; dragon-belts that moved with the wearer, faerie-lights entwined in the hair.

Talaysen was no fool, and he knew very well that the elves' reputation for being touchy creatures was well-founded. And if these considered themselves to be the enemies of men, they would be all the touchier. Still-they hadn't killed him out of hand. They might want something from him. He went to one knee immediately, bowing his head. As he did so, he saw that his lute was lying on the turf beside him, still in its case.

"You ventured into our holding, mortal," said a clear, dispassionate tenor. He did not have to look up to know that it was the leader who addressed him. "King" was probably the best title to default to; most lords of elvenkin styled themselves "kings."

"Your pardon, Sire," he replied, just as dispassionately. "I pray you will forgive us."

When he said nothing else, the elven-king laughed. "What? No pleas for mercy, no assertions that you didn't
know
?"

"No, Sire," he replied carefully, choosing his words as he would choose weapons, for they were all the weapon that he had. "I admit that I saw the signs, and I admit that I was too careless to think about what they signified." And he had seen the signs; the vegetation that tried to prevent them from entering the clearing until Rune drew her Iron knife; the Fairie Ring of mushrooms encircling the house. The ash tree growing right through the middle, and the condition of the house itself. . . .

"The mortal who built his house at our very door was a fool, and an arrogant one," the elven-king replied to his thought, his words heavy with lazy menace. "He thought that his God and his Church would defend him against us; that his Iron weapons were all that he needed besides his faith. He knew this was our land, that he built his home against one of our doors. He thought to keep us penned that way. We destroyed him." A faint sigh of silk told him that the king had shifted his position slightly. He still did not look up. "But you were weary, and careless with cold and troubles," the king said. His tone changed, silken and sweet. "You had no real intention to trespass."

Now he looked up; the elf lounged in his throne in a pose of complete relaxation that did not fool Talaysen a bit. All the Bard need do would be to make a single move towards a weapon of any kind at all, and he would be dead before the motion had been completed. If the king didn't strike him down with magic, the courtiers would, with the weapons they doubtless had hidden on their persons. The softest and most languid of them were likely the warriors.

"No, Sire," he replied. "We had no intention of trespass, though we
were
careless. It was an honest mistake."

"Still-" The elf regarded him with half-closed eyes that did not hide a cold glitter. "Letting you go would set a bad example."

He felt his hands moving towards his instrument; he tried to stop them, but his body was no longer his to control. He picked up his lute, and stripped the case from it, then tuned it.

"I think we shall resolve your problems and ours with a single stroke," the elf said, sitting up on the throne and steepling his hands in front of his chin. "I think we shall keep you here, as our servant, to pay for your carelessness. We have minstrels, but we have no Bards. You will do nicely." He waved his hand languidly. "You may play for us now."

Rune awoke to a thrill of alarm, a feeling that there was something wrong. She sat straight up in her bed-and a faint scrape of movement made her look, not towards the door, but to the back of the cottage, where it was built into the hillside.

She was just in time to see the glitter of an amber eye, the flash of a pointed ear, and the soles of Talaysen's boots vanishing into the hillside as he stumbled through a crack in the rock wall at the rear of the cottage. Then the "door" in the hill snapped shut.

Leaving her alone, staring at the perfectly blank rock wall.

That broke her paralysis. She sprang to her feet and rushed the wall, screaming at the top of her lungs, kicking it, pounding it with hands and feet until she was exhausted and dropped to the ground, panting.

Elves.
That was what she'd seen. Elves. And they had taken Talaysen. She had seen the signs and she hadn't paid any attention. She should have known-

The mushrooms, the ash-tree-the bushes that tried to keep us out- 

They were all there; the Fairie-circle, the guardian ash, the tree-warriors-all of them in the songs she'd learned, all of them plain for any fool to see, if the fool happened to be thinking.

Too late to weep and wail about it now. There must be something she could do-

There had to be a way to open that door from this side. She felt all over the wall, pressing and turning every rocky projection in hopes of finding a catch to release it, or a trigger to make it open.

Nothing.

It must be a magic door.

She pulled out her knife, knowing the elves' legendary aversion to iron and steel, and picked at anything she found, hoping to force the door open the way she had forced the trees to let them by. But the magic in the stone was sterner stuff than the magic in the trees, and although the wall trembled once or twice beneath her hand, it still refused to yield.

Thinking that the ash tree might be something more than just a tree, she first threatened it with her dagger, then stabbed it. But the tree was just a tree, and nothing happened at all, other than a shower of droplets that rained down on her through the hole in the roof as the branches shook.

Elves . . . elves . . . what do I know about elves? God, there has to be a way to get at them, to get Talaysen out! What do I have to use against them?