Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

  “Seventeen.” That was her uncle. “I think. The edge of seventeen, anyway.”

  “Not the sharp edge,” grumbled the woman. Rose. It had to be.

  Tam blinked, got an eyeful of glaring torchlight, and decided to lie still a moment longer.

  “And how old were you when you picked up a sword?” asked Freecloud. She could hear the wryness in the druin’s smile. “Or when you killed that cyclops?”

  A sigh. “Well, what about this?” Armour clinking. “She fainted at the sight of me. What will she do when blood gets spilled?”

  “She’ll be fine,” said her uncle. “She’s Tuck and Lily’s girl, remember.”

  “Tuck Hashford?” Brune sounded impressed. “They say he was fearless. And we’ve all got a bit of our fathers in us. The gods know I do.”

  “Our mothers, too,” said a woman Tam didn’t recognize. “Does she even want to go? Have you asked her?”

  You do, said a voice in Tam’s head.

  “I do,” she croaked. She sat up, instantly regretting it. The noise of the Cornerstone commons screeched in her skull like a boat full of cats. The four members of Fable stood around her. Bran was kneeling by her side. “I want to go,” she insisted. “Where … uh … are we going?”

  “Someplace cold,” said the woman who wasn’t Rose. It was the Inkwitch, Cura, who regarded Tam as if she’d found the girl squished on the bottom of her boot.

  Where Rose was sturdy with lean muscle, Cura was waif-thin and wiry. She wore a long, low-slung tunic cut high on the hip, and black leather boots boasting more straps than a madman’s jacket. Her fine black hair was long enough to tie back, but shaved to stubble on either side. There were bone rings in her ears, another through her left eyebrow, and a stud in her nose. Her skin was porcelain pale and crowded with tattoos. Tam’s eye was drawn to a sea creature inked on Cura’s thigh, its serpentine tentacles curling out from beneath the hem of her tunic.

  The Inkwitch caught her staring and gave the cloth an inviting tug. “You ever see one up close?” Her impish tone implied that she wasn’t referring to the creature tattooed on her leg.

  Tam looked away, hoping her sudden flush was attributed to her fall. “You’re going to fight the Brumal Horde?” she asked.

  “We’re not,” said Rose. “We’re finishing our tour first, and after that we have a contract in Diremarch.”

  “Our final contract,” said Freecloud. He shared a meaningful look with his bandmates. “One last gig before we call it quits.”

  Branigan perked up at that, but before either he or Tam could ask anything further, Rose cut in. “I should warn you,” she said. “What we’re going up against could be just as dangerous as the Horde. Worse, even.”

  To Tam, there was nothing worse than the prospect of never leaving home, of being cooped up in Ardburg until her dreams froze and her Wyld Heart withered in its cage. She glanced at her uncle, who gave her a reassuring nod, and was about to tell Freecloud that it didn’t matter if they were facing the Horde, or something worse than the Horde, or if they were bound for the Frost Mother’s hell itself. She would follow.

  “One song,” said Rose.

  Branigan looked up. “Say what?”

  “Take the stage.” Rose set a halfpipe between her lips and rooted beneath her armour for something to light it with. Eventually she gave up, and settled for a candle off the table beside her. “Pick a song and play it. Convince me you’re the right girl for the job. If I like what I hear, then congratulations: You’re Fable’s new bard. If I don’t …” She exhaled slowly. “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Tam.”

  “Well, in that case, it’s been nice knowing you, Tam.”

  Chapter Three

  One Song

  Around midnight a train of linked carriages hauled by sturdy Kaskar ponies clattered across Ardburg. It was free to ride, and spared drunks and those abroad late a long walk through often inclement weather. Tam flagged it out front of the Cornerstone and chose a carriage she thought was empty. It wasn’t. There was a city watchman passed out on the opposite bench. His helmet was overturned in his lap, and from the reek Tam guessed it was filled with vomit. She pushed open the screens despite the cold, and once they were moving it didn’t smell so bad.

  The city was usually asleep this time of night, but since the fights were the next day, the streets were lively still. Light and noise spilled out of every inn, music from every tavern. The brothels, especially, were busier than usual, and from behind their drawn curtains Tam heard yelps of pleasure and pain, often mingling.

  She saw a pair of black-robed priests cupping their hands to catch the falling snow. “The Winter Queen is coming!” cried one, a woman with her scalp shaved bare. This wasn’t really news to anyone. According to her disciples, the Winter Queen (and the Eternal Winter said to accompany her return) was always coming. Tam figured those priests would be as surprised as everyone else if she actually decided to show up one day.

  At last they left the chaos behind. Tam sat alone with her thoughts, and with the snoring soldier, of whom she asked the question that had been on her mind since leaving the Cornerstone earlier that evening.

  “What the hell just happened?”

  Tam approached the stage. She didn’t even have an instrument. What sort of bard didn’t own an instrument?

  You’re not a bard, she reminded herself. You’re a girl who’s about to embarrass herself in front of two hundred people, including Bloody Rose herself.

  A glance toward the balcony told her Rose was watching, still dragging on the halfpipe she’d lit earlier. Freecloud was beside her, Brune and Cura farther along the rail. Word that Fable was auditioning a new bard had swept the room like a brushfire. Now that the racket was starting to dwindle, Tam would be expected to take the stage and sing a song that might or might not change the course of her life forever after.

  Tera and Tiamax were watching from behind the bar. The arachnian offered her a three-handed wave and shouted, “You’ve got this!” over the din.

  Bran was shooing patrons from the table closest to the stage, while Edwick—

  “Here.” The old bard thrust his lute into her hands. “This is yours now.”

  “No, I can’t,” she protested. The lute, which the bard reffered to as Red Thirteen, was the instrument on which Tam had learned to play. It was Ed’s pride and joy. He’d had it for as long as Tam could remember, and had never played another instrument that she knew of.

  “Take her,” he insisted. “Trust her. Do you know what song you’ll play?”

  Tam knew a hundred songs, but just now she couldn’t recall even one of them. She shook her head.

  “Well, good luck.” Edwick retreated to a seat beside Bran, and the entire tavern suddenly hushed all at once.

  Cradling her borrowed lute, Tam stepped onto the stage and crossed to the vacant stool. The boards squealed beneath her feet, impossibly loud. Her mind was racing, trying desperately to think of a song—any song—let alone one that would impress Rose.

  And then she had it: Castia. It was rowdy and rousing, guaranteed to get the crowd on her side. It condensed the Battle of Castia, during which Grandual’s mercenaries had overcome the Duke of Endland and his Heartwyld Horde, into seven verses and an instrumental solo Tam hoped to hell she was capable of pulling off.

  Better still, it painted Rose’s father, Golden Gabe, as the greatest hero in the five courts, without even mentioning that he’d crossed the entire breadth of the Heartwyld to rescue his daughter from almost certain death, or that Gabe and his bandmates, in the process of getting there, had cured the rot, killed a dragon, and destroyed half of Fivecourt. The last verse was dedicated to Rose herself, who’d led those besieged inside the city to victory at last.

  Castia was perfect.

  She took a breath. Waited for the silence to deepen, the way Edwick had taught her to, and then—

  “Pfffft! The fuck is this!?” Branigan was standing, having sipped his whis
key before spewing it onto his lap. “What in the cold heart of hell did you put in here, Max? Lamp oil? Piss? Gods, is this hatcher piss?” He sniffed it, and went so far as to taste it again. “It’s bloody awful!” Edwick dragged him down into his seat and hissed at him to shut up. “Sorry,” he told the room. “Sorry, Tam. Go on, love.”

  Tam took another breath. Waited, again, for that utter silence to descend, and then plucked the opening chords of Castia.

  A roar of approval went up from the commons. A great big smile broke across Branigan’s face, and Edwick nodded approvingly. When Tam looked to the balcony, though, Rose seemed uninterested. She stamped her halfpipe out on the rail and said something under her breath to Freecloud. The shaman, Brune, pulled his long hair aside. He locked eyes with Tam and shook his head so slightly it was almost, almost, imperceptible.

  She stopped. The song’s opening notes were left shivering in the air. A confused murmur arose and left behind a bewildered hush.

  “Can I start over?” she called up to Rose.

  The mercenary’s eyes narrowed. “If you’d like.”

  Tam closed her eyes, aware that her hands were trembling, that her foot was tapping nervously at the boards beneath her. She could hear her heart pounding, feel her blood rushing, see her dream of leaving Ardburg in Fable’s company lingering by the door, already clenching its cloak against the cold outside.

  Tam thought of her father, of how furious he’d be if he could see her now.

  She thought of her mother, of how proud she’d be if she could see her now.

  Before she knew it her fingers had picked out a melody, slow and soft and sad.

  It was one of her mother’s songs. Tam’s favourite. Her father’s, too, once upon a time. She was forbidden to play it, of course. She’d tried singing it to herself once, shortly after her mother’s death, but grief had overwhelmed her, stifling her voice with sobs.

  Now it spilled out of her. The lute sang beneath her fingertips and her words sailed toward the rafters like floating lanterns set loose on a summer night.

  The song was called Together. It wasn’t rowdy, or rousing. It didn’t garner a cheer as she played it, and her uncle’s expression (Edwick’s, too) was mournful. As the song went on, though, the ghost of a smile haunted his lips. Together wasn’t about a battle. There were no monsters in it. No one was slain and nothing at all was vanquished.

  It was, instead, a love letter from a bard to her band. It was about the little moments, the quiet words, the unspoken bond shared by men and women who eat and sleep and fight alongside one another, day after day. It was about a bandmate’s laughter, a bunkmate’s snoring. Lily Hashford had dedicated a whole verse to describing her husband’s sidelong smile, and another decrying the smell of Bran’s socks when he pulled his boots off.

  “They’re my lucky socks,” she heard her uncle confess to the old bard beside him. “I’m still wearin’ ’em!”

  Another unique aspect of Together was that the music ended before the words, so that Tam sang the last refrain with her lute in her lap. Her hands were motionless, her foot was still. Her aching heart beat a slow and steady cadence inside her.

  The song ended, and you could hear the candles flicker in the silence that followed.

  As one, two hundred heads turned to the balcony above. Brune and Cura were watching Rose. Freecloud was looking down at Tam. He was grinning, Tam saw, because he already knew.

  “Welcome to Fable,” said Rose.

  And the crowd went wild.

  Tam tugged the bell cord. When the carriage came to a stop she hopped out and called her thanks to the driver. Home was a short walk away, but she took her time. She bowed her head against the blowing snow and stepped carefully over cobbles slick with ice. Edwick’s Red Thirteen was cradled in her arms like a suckling babe. The Cornerstone’s bard had insisted she keep it, and when Tam refused—because she couldn’t deprive him of his most cherished possession—he scurried into the back and returned with a near-identical instrument he dubbed Red Fourteen. So that was that.

  Tam had never owned an instrument of her own before. As a girl, she’d assumed she would one day inherit her mother’s lute, Hiraeth. But when her mother died, Hiraeth had disappeared as well. Likely, her father had destroyed it, or else sold it off so the sight of it wouldn’t haunt him.

  Uncle Bran had warned her against going home at all.

  “Stay here tonight,” he begged. “Or sleep in the argosy. I’ll go by your place in the morning and sort things out with Tuck. I’ll say it was me who asked Fable to take you on.”

  “It was you.”

  The old rogue considered that a moment. “Gods of Grandual, your old man’s gonna kill me. My point is: If there’s hell to pay, let me pay it.”

  There would be hell to pay—Tam was sure of it—but no matter how estranged she and Tuck had become these last few years, she couldn’t leave without saying good-bye.

  Bran regarded her sadly. “You’ve got a fire in you, Tam. I can see it in your eyes. I can feel it rollin’ off you, hot as a hearth. I know Tuck, and if you take that fire home, he’ll smother it. He’ll snuff it out and stamp it to ash.” When Tam only shrugged her uncle shook his head. “I’ll drink to your valour, then,” he said, and quaffed what remained of the horrid Turnstone whiskey. “You know, this stuff ain’t so bad once you’re used it.”

  Tam paused outside the door to her home, steeling herself for the ordeal ahead. She heard a meow from inside; Threnody, heralding her arrival. When she finally worked up the courage to enter, the cat threw herself against Tam’s boot and purred contentedly.

  Her father was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of what she hoped was just beer. He was staring at nothing and toying absently with a strip of yellow ribbon.

  “What did I tell you about putting bows on the cat?” he asked.

  Tam shook off her cloak and hung it by the door, then knelt to scratch Threnody behind the ears. She was rewarded with another throaty purr. Thren was a long-haired Palapti, white as fresh snowfall. Tam’s mother had brought her home from a tour down south. “But she looks so cute with it on there.”

  “She looks ridiculous. Don’t—” He trailed off as she stood, his glare fastened to the instrument in Tam’s arms.

  “What’s that for?” he asked.

  “Playing music,” Tam answered. Great start, she berated herself. Way to butter him up.

  “Why do you have it?” he clarified.

  “Ed gave it to me.”

  Tuck’s perpetual frown deepened. “Well, you’ve no need of it. You’ll return it tomorrow.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will—”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t?” Her father looked suspicious. “Why can’t?”

  Outside, the wind picked up. It pummelled the walls and clawed at the windows with ice-cold fingers. Threnody finished circling Tam’s foot and trotted over to her water bowl, oblivious to the tension in the room. Or maybe she just didn’t care. Cats could be assholes sometimes, and Thren was no exception.

  “Fable’s in town,” she said. “They were at the Cornerstone tonight. Uncle Bran—” She saw her father’s knuckles go white, no doubt wishing the mug in his hands was Branigan’s throat. “They mentioned they were looking for a bard, and Bran told them I could play …”

  “Can you, now?” Her father’s tone was breezy, conversational. That’s when she knew he was really angry. “Self-taught, are you? A born natural? You haven’t picked up a lute since … well, since you were little.”

  “Ed’s been teaching me after work,” she admitted. Boy, she was throwing everyone under the argosy’s wheels tonight, wasn’t she? She’d might as well confess that Tera had been giving her archery lessons twice a week, or that Tiamax poured her a beer at the end of every shift—that way her father could plot the murder of everyone in the Cornerstone.

  “Is that so?” Tuck downed what remained in his mug and stood. “Then when you return his lut
e tomorrow you can let Ed know you’re quitting. They need extra hands at the mill. You can start next week.”

  “I already quit,” she told him, irritated by the dismissiveness in his tone. “I’m Fable’s bard now.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “Tam.” His voice grew stern.

  “Dad—”

  His mug exploded against the far wall. Threnody bolted from the room as shards rained to the floor.

  She said nothing, only waited for his rage to subside. He slumped back into his chair. “I’m sorry, Tam. I can’t let you go. I can’t risk losing you, too.”

  “So, what?” she asked. “I’m supposed to stay in Ardburg my whole life? Work at the mill for a few lousy courtmarks a week? Find some nice, boring girl to settle down with?”

  “There’s nothing—wait, girl?”

  “Maiden’s Mercy, Dad, are we really doing this now?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Tuck said. “Listen, this is our fault. I know that. Your mother and I told you too many stories. We made being a merc sound more glamorous than it is. It’s a hard life, you know. Long roads, lonely nights. You’re wet half the time, cold all the time, and then you fight some horrible thing in some awful place, and you’re scared shitless it’ll kill you before you kill it. It’s not like in the songs, Tam. Mercenaries aren’t heroes. They’re killers.”

  Tam moved to join him at the table. She set the lute down and took her seat. The chair between them—her mother’s chair—remained empty as a chasm.

  “Things are different now,” she said, laying her hand over his. “We’ll be touring arenas, mostly. I’ll probably never see the inside of a monster’s lair or set foot in the Heartwyld.”

  Her father shook his head, unconvinced. “There’s a Horde north of Cragmoor, the remnants of those who survived Castia. Rose’ll want her crack at it, sure as hell is cold. Ain’t nobody loves glory like that girl. Except maybe her father. Gods, that guy was a piece of work.”

  “Rose wants nothing to do with it.”