The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I will take care of it,” Harperus promised. “Now—you go do what you can.”

  “I will—” Then her voice did break on a sob as she told him the one thing she did know. “Old Owl, wherever he is, he’s hurt. He’s hurt badly. I don’t know how badly, but all I can feel from him is pain—”

  Harperus swore in his own language, a snarl of pure rage. She had never heard him so angry in her life.

  “Go—” he urged. “This youngster and I will work together.”

  She rubbed at her burning eyes with the back of her hand, got up from her seat, pushed open the office door half-blinded with tears, and fled up the stairs to her room. She had not yet called in her promise from the Elves, and she needed to prepare the room before she could do that.

  The Elves did not care for the human cities and did not like to walk among the artificial buildings, but it seemed that for her sake, they would put their dislikes aside. She put the bed up into the wall, and pushed all the furniture out of the way. She put her harps in the bathroom. She swept every vestige of dust and dirt from the floor so that it was as white and shiny as the day the surface was laid. Only then did she lay ready the circle with a thin trickle of blue sand on the white floor, inscribing a pattern that the Elven mage she had been pledged service from would be able to use as a target.

  Then she stood outside the circle, clasped her hand around her bracelet, and let her heart cry out a wordless wail of anguish and a plea for help.

  The air in her room vibrated with a single, deep tone, like the groaning of the earth in an earthquake; the floor sang a harmonic note to the air, the walls a second, the ceiling a third, the whole room humming with a four-part chord of dreadful power.

  Then the blue sand exploded upward in a puff of displaced air.

  She did not recognize the Elven mage who stood where the circle had been, blinking slowly at her with his amber eyes slitted against the light. His hair was as amber as his eyes; his clothing of deep black silk, a simple tunic and trews without ornamentation or embroidery of any kind. By that, she knew he was more powerful than any Elven mage she had ever yet met; only a mage of great power would be confident enough to do without the trappings of power.

  “Tell me, Bird of Night,” he said as calmly as if he had not appeared out of thin air in her room, so alien to his kind; as serenely as if he had not heard the tears of her heart calling. “Tell me what you need of me.”

  She told him in the same words that she had told Tyladen and Harperus, and it did not get any easier to bear for the retelling. He nodded and waited for her to answer his second question.

  “From you, my lord, I need protection,” she said. “Protection from the spells of human mages, for myself, and for the one who once wore this—”

  She handed the Elf a feather, shed only yesterday from T’fyrr’s wing. He took it and smoothed it between his fingers.

  “A mage-musician, with wings in truth,” he said, as his eyes took on the appearance of one who is gazing into the far distance. “But he is in a place that is dark to me; I cannot find him.”

  “I can find him,” she said promptly. “But I cannot protect myself from the magics that stole him, nor can I protect him from the spells of our enemy, once I find him.”

  “I can,” the Elven mage replied, with a lifted brow. “There is no mortal born who can set a spell that can break my protections, if those protections are set with consent.”

  She nodded, understanding his meaning. With consent, the mage was not limited to his own power in setting a protection; he could draw upon the strength of the spirit of the one he protected as well.

  “You have mine,” she promised him instantly, “and you will have his, once I reach him.”

  “Then I will be away,” the mage replied, and as she widened her eyes in alarm, he smiled thinly. “Fear not, I do not desert you, nor shall I travel far, but I must go to a place more congenial to my kind. Your walls and metals interfere with my working. I have his feather, you have your Silver. That will be enough. When you need the protections, clasp your hand about the band of Silver, and call me.” He regarded her with an unwinking gaze, and then added, “I am Fioreth.”

  She bowed slightly, acknowledging the fact that he had given her part of his Name, enough to call him with. It was a tremendous act of trust on the part of an Elf. He bowed in return, then the room hummed a four-fold chord of power once more, and he was gone.

  Now there was only one thing left to do.

  Find him.

  The pain in her heart had a direction: north, and a little east. She needed to follow that—

  Someone pounded at her door, and before she could answer it, the door flew open.

  “Lady!” gasped one of the younger serving boys, panting with the effort of running up four flights of stairs. “Lady, there are guards at the door, and they want you! They say they have a warrant—”

  “What colors are they wearing?” she asked instantly.

  The boy blinked at her for a moment, obviously thinking that she was crazy. “Green and blue, but—”

  “Then they aren’t the High King’s men; they’re someone’s private guards,” she replied. “They can’t have a warrant; they probably just have a piece of paper to wave, counting on the rest of us not to know it has to be signed and sealed. Since I’m T’fyrr’s Second, they would have to have a warrant signed by Theovere directly, and he would have sent his own bodyguards. Tell Tyladen to demand the warrant and if it isn’t signed and sealed with Theovere’s seal, it isn’t valid. That should delay them. And tell him to tell Harperus!”

  Before the boy’s scandalized eyes, she stripped off her skirts. “Give me your breeches!” she ordered.

  “What?” he gasped.

  “Your breeches! I can’t climb in skirts! Now!” She put enough of the power in her order that he obeyed her, blushing to the roots of his hair, and she pulled his breeches on, leaving him to look frantically for something to cover himself with.

  Which is ridiculous; he’s wearing more now than some of the male dancers wear on stage.

  “Go!” she snapped at him, running for the stairs to the roof. “Tell Tyladen what I just told you!”

  She didn’t wait to see how he solved his embarrassing quandary; time was not on her side.

  The King can’t know about this; that means that this arrest is on a trumped-up charge at worst. That means I won’t have to dodge every guard in the city, only the ones in blue-and-green livery.

  They would probably bully their way inside, and might even get as far as her room before Tyladen called in enough help to throw them out again.

  And I left my harps!

  But T’fyrr was worth all the harps in the world. The Elves could make her a new pair of harps; all the universe could not make her a new T’fyrr.

  She scampered across the roof in a bent-over crouch, in case someone was watching from one of the other rooftops. When she got to the edge, she scanned the area for a lookout.

  There was one, but he wasn’t very good; she spotted him before he saw her, and commotion down on the street caught his attention long enough for her to get over the side away from him and down onto one of the walkways. She paused just long enough to coil up her hair and knot it on top of her head—then, from a distance, she was just a gangly boy, not a woman at all.

  She stood up and shoved her hands in her pockets, and strolled in a leisurely manner along the walkway until she got to the building across the street. No shouts followed her, and she did not sense any eyes on her for more than a disinterested few heartbeats.

  She took care not to seem to be in any hurry; she even stopped once to look down with interest at the milling knot of guards at the side door of Freehold. One or two of them looked up, then ignored her.

  Then she reached the haven of the next building and threw her leg over the side of the roof there, climbing up onto it, rather than going down to street level. Just as if she had been sent on an errand over to Freehold and was retu
rning.

  When she was reasonably certain that no one was watching her, she sprinted across to the other side of the roof. There was another walkway down the side of the building there, and this one went all the way to the ground if you knew how to release the catch on the last staircase.

  All Freeholders, of course, did.

  She careened down the metal staircase, knocking painfully into the handrails and slipping on the steps in her hurry. She tumbled down to the drop-steps, hit the catch, and let her weight take the steps down into the noisome alley below.

  Then, at last, she was in the street, and it would take a better tracker than a noble’s guard to find her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I had not known it was possible to hurt so much. T’fyrr had always thought that when you were injured, you lost track of the lesser pains in the face of the greater. Evidently, I was mistaken, he thought, far back in the fog of pain and background fear. Odd how it was possible to think rationally in the midst of the most irrational circumstances. Probably that ironic little mental voice would go right on commenting up until the moment he died, since it seemed more likely that he would die of his many wounds rather than maddening hunger.

  So T’fyrr cataloged every pain, every injury, working inch by inch over his abused flesh in his mind. He had to; it was the only way he could keep himself sane. As long as he had something to concentrate on in the face of darkness, fear and the absolute certainty that not only did he not know where he was, no one else did either, he could stay marginally sane.

  Whoever had plucked him out of the sky at the height of his climb had known exactly what they were doing. They were ready for him the moment he tumbled, sick and disoriented, onto the floor of the room they had brought him to. He had not been able to raise so much as a single talon in his own defense.

  Magic. They caught me in a magic net and dragged me down to their hiding place. And to think I was laughing in my heart at Nightingale’s “irrational” fear. Magic could do nothing to me, of course. It has no power over the physical world. I wonder if I will get a chance to apologize to her?

  Before he could move, four burly men had swarmed over him, trussing him up like a dinner fowl. But they had more surprises in store for him.

  They hooded me. They hooded me like an unruly falcon! The hood had to have been made to order, as well; there were no hunting birds out there with heads as large as T’fyrr’s. Maybe they were willing to kidnap him by magic, but they weren’t counting on magic to keep him docile.

  And someone, somewhere, made them a hood to fit a Haspur. Not them, I think. They do not strike me as the sort to be falconers, or they would know that hooding a raptor does not make him deaf or unconscious. So someone, somewhere, probably in this city, made them a hood. That someone will know who they are. If I can get free. If I can pursue justice against them . . .

  Then to add insult to injury, they had put some sort of contraption over his beak that kept him from opening or closing it completely. A bit, he thought, combined with a muzzle. It was somewhat difficult to be sure, since they had put it on him after they hooded him.

  Padrik’s people only starved and beat me. At least they didn’t torture me like this . . .

  They had already pulled all of his primaries; the feather sockets ached any time he moved his wings. They were working on the secondaries. They’d clipped his talons until blood flowed in order to collect that as well. This in addition to bruises and aching bones.

  Correction. They weren’t exactly torturing him, technically, since that wasn’t their intention.

  Whoever they are.

  In fact, he wasn’t supposed to be alive at all. The mages hired to steal him from the sky had been ordered to kill him on the spot. They’d had a little argument about it while he lay there bound and hooded and helpless. One of them had been in favor of carrying out their orders as stated, but the rest had overruled him.

  Thank the winds for temptation, and those unable to resist it.

  He had heard them talking, every word; they might have been under the impression that he couldn’t understand them, rather than thinking that he was like a falcon and would “go to sleep” when deprived of light. It seemed he was very useful to these mages, and a source of much profit. My blood and feathers—and the talon bits too, I suppose—are valuable, but only when taken from a living creature; and therefore, I am more valuable alive than dead. I doubt their employer knows of this little trade on the side.

  Why bits of him should be useful to a mage, he had no notion—but then again, this situation was frighteningly similar to a rumor circulating about human mages who were capturing nonhumans and “sacrificing” them. What if there were human mages who were capturing nonhumans, but using bits of them for magic? The idea would have made him sick, if he’d had the leisure to be sick.

  Do they do this to their own kind, I wonder? Or is this reserved for “lower creatures”? They were so indifferent to the amount of pain and damage they inflicted as they collected their trophies that he could well imagine they were not above kidnapping fellow humans and treating them the same way.

  Which might account for the rumors of nonhumans who captured humans and sacrificed them . . . and would certainly account for the expertise with which he’d been trussed up.

  Why was it that humans were inclined to spawn both the best “saints” and the worst “villains” among their numbers? Was it just that humans were inclined to the extremes?

  His mind was wandering, ignoring his urgent need to find a way out of his bindings and escape, and meandering down philosophical paths that had nothing to do with what he wanted it to think about.

  How long have I been here? He wasn’t certain. They never took off the hood, and although they hadn’t been feeding him, he had “heard” the music of Magic near him several times, as if they were nourishing him that way instead of by conventional means. He wasn’t thirsty or hungry, at any rate, which was different from his captivity at the hands of Padrik’s men.

  But closed inside the hood, his body racked with pain, there was no way of telling how much time had passed. It could have been hours . . . or days.

  There was an escape open to him; a realm of illusion and hallucination that would at least take him out of his pain and current fear. All he had to do would be to give in to the beckoning, grinning specter of madness, as he had when the Church had held him, and—

  I will not go mad. I will not lose heart.

  Nightingale was out there, somewhere; he sensed her, a tugging in his soul that actually had a physical direction. She was as racked with grief for his loss as he was with pain, but she had not given up to despair. Yet. He could not tell what she was doing, but he knew that much at least

  She is trying to find me, trying to find a way to free me. I must believe that. She has those damned Deliambrens to help her, and maybe more help than that. She must come; she will come. But it was hard to hold on to hope when his strength drained away steadily.

  I have made some difference in the world, he told himself defiantly. I have redeemed myself—and I have had love. Even if I die—

  No, that was the way of despair! He shied away from the thought with violence. I will not die! he shouted against the darkness. I will not! I will fight every step of the way, with everything at my command!

  Which at the moment was not a great deal . . .

  Voices, muffled by a wall, grew nearer. They were coming again. He waited, wild with rage at his own helplessness, as a door opened and two men entered, still talking.

  “—probably another week or so,” one was saying. “I don’t know how these creatures replace blood loss, but we’re draining him fairly quickly.”

  He felt hands fumbling at his restraints. This time they didn’t seem to have brought any of their bravos with them. Could he—?

  He tried to lash out at them as they freed his arms, tried to leap to his feet. If I can injure one, the other will run and I can hold the injured one and make him take off the
hood—

  Visions of escape flashed across his mind.

  He flung out his taloned hands with a strength only slightly less than that of an unfledged eyas; he got as far as his knees before he threw himself off balance and tumbled in an ungainly sprawl across some hard surface.

  The men both laughed, as he sought for a reservoir of strength and found it empty. “I see what you mean,” said the other. “Still—we can’t keep him around for too long, or our client is going to hear about the new artifacts in the market and is going to wonder where all those vials of blood and feathers are coming from.”

  “He gave us permission to take what we wanted—” the first man argued.

  “But you don’t get fresh blood from a week-old corpse,” the other reminded him.

  Artifacts, T’fyrr thought miserably, as the two men threw him on his stomach, pinned his wing and arms effortlessly, and plucked another handful of secondary feathers. I am nothing to them but an object, to be used at their pleasure. They harvest me as if I were a berry patch.