Lark and Wren

by Mercedes Lackey

  It was Rune's private opinion that there would be so many complaints that this particular experiment would be doomed after this year, and Talaysen agreed-but that didn't help them now.

  Talaysen had been angry at the first Faire, furious at the second, and incoherent with rage at the third. Rune had actually thought that he might brain the third gate-guard-who besides his Church-hireling uniform had worn Guild colors and had been particularly nasty-with his own two hands. But he had managed to get control of his temper, and had walked away without doing the man any damage.

  But by then, of course, their coin-reserve was seriously low, and their efforts to find an inn that did not already have a resident musician had been completely without result. So rather than risk a worse depletion of their reserves, they headed out into the countryside, where, with judicious use of fish-hook and rabbit snare, they could at least extend their supplies.

  In a few days they had gotten as far as Sire Brador Jofferey's lands. And that was where they ran into a trouble they had never anticipated.

  Sire Brador, it seemed, was involved in a border dispute with his neighbor, Sire Harlan Dettol. By the time they entered Sire Brador's lands, the dispute had devolved into warfare. Under the circumstances, strangers were automatically suspect. A company of Sire Brador's men-at-arms had surrounded them as they camped-and Rune thanked God that they had not put out any rabbit snares!-and took them prisoner with hardly more than a dozen words exchanged.

  A thin and nervous-looking man guarded them now, as they sat, wrists bound behind their backs and feet hobbled, in the shade of an enormous oak. At least they gave us that much, Rune thought wearily; they could have been left in the full sun easily enough. The Sire's men were not very happy about the way things were going; she had picked that up from listening to some of the conversations going on around them. Exchanging of insults and stealing or wrecking anything on the disputed land was one thing-but so far six men had been killed in this little enterprise, and the common soldiers were, Rune thought, justifiably upset. They had signed on with the Sire to be guards and deal with bandits-and to harass their neighboring Sire now and again. No one had told them they were going to go to war over a silly piece of land.

  Another man-at-arms approached on heavy feet, walking towards them like a clumsy young bull, and the nervous fellow perked up. Rune reckoned that their captivity was at an end-or that, at least, they were going somewhere else.

  Good. There's pebbles digging into my behind.

  "The cap'n 'll see the prisoners now," the burly fellow told their guard, who heaved a visible sigh of relief and wandered off without any warning at all. That left the burly man to stare at them doubtfully, as if he wasn't quite certain what to do with them.

  "You got t' get t'yer feet," he said, tentatively. "You got t' come with me."

  Talaysen heaved a sigh of pure exasperation. "That's going to be a bit difficult on both counts," he replied angrily. "We can't get to our feet, because you've got us tied back to back. And we can't walk because you've got us hobbled like a couple of horses. Now unless you're going to do something about that, we're going to be sitting right here until Harvest."

  The man scratched his beard and looked even more uncertain. "I don't got no authority to do nothin' about that," he said. "I just was told I gotta bring you t' the cap'n. So you gotta get t'yer feet."

  Talaysen groaned. Rune sighed. This would be funny if it weren't so stupid. And if they weren't trussed up like a couple pigs on the way to market. It might get distinctly unfunny, if their guard decided that the application of his boot to their bodies would get them standing up . . . she contemplated her knees, rather than antagonize him by staring at him.

  She looked up at the sound of footsteps approaching; yet another man-at-arms neared, this one in a tunic and breeches that were of slightly better quality and showing less wear than the other man's.

  "Never mind, Hollis," said the newcomer. "I decided to come have a look at them myself." He surveyed them with an air of vacant boredom. "Well, what do you spies have to say for yourselves?"

  "Spies?" Talaysen barked in sheer outrage. "Spies? Where in God's Sacred Name did you get that idea?"

  Rune fixed the "captain," if that was what he was, with an icy glare. "Since when do spies camp openly beside a road, and carry musical instruments?" she growled. "Dear God, the only weapons we have are a couple of dull knives! What were we supposed to do with those, dig our way into your castle? That would only take ten or twenty years, I'm sure!"

  The captain looked surprised, as if he hadn't expected either of them to talk back to him. If all he's caught so far are poor, frightened farmers, I suppose no one has.

  He blinked at them doubtfully. "Well," he said at last, "if you aren't spies, then you're conscripts." As Talaysen stared at him in complete silence, he continued, looking them over as if they were a pair of sheep. "You-with the gray hair-you're a bit long in the tooth, but the boy there-"

  "I'm not a boy," Rune replied crisply. "I'm a woman, and I'm his wife. And you can go ahead and conscript me, if you want, but having me around isn't going to make your men any easier to handle. And they're going to be even harder to handle after I castrate the first man who lays a hand on me."

  The captain blanched, but recovered. "Well, if you're in disguise as a boy, then you're obviously a spy after all-"

  "It's not a disguise," Talaysen said between clenched teeth. "It's simply easier for my wife to travel in breeches. It's not her fault you can't tell a woman in breeches from a boy. I'm sure you'll find half the women in this area working the fields in breeches. Are you going to arrest them for spying, too?" The captain bit his lip. "You must be spies," he continued stubbornly. "Otherwise why were you out there on the road? You're not peddlers, and the Faires are over. Nobody travels that road this time of year."

  "We're musicians," Rune said, as if she was speaking to a very simple child. "We are carrying musical instruments. We play and sing. We were going to Kardown Faire and your road was the only way to get there-"

  "How do I know you're really musicians?" he said, suspiciously. "Spies could be carrying musical instruments, too." He smiled at his own cleverness.

  Talaysen cursed under his breath; Rune caught several references to the fact that brothers and sisters should not marry, and more to the inadvisability of intercourse with sheep, for this man was surely the lamentable offspring of such an encounter.

  "Why don't you untie us and give us our instruments, and we'll prove we're musicians?" she said. "Spies wouldn't know how to play, now, would they?"

  "I-suppose not," the captain replied, obviously groping after an objection to her logic, and unable to find one. "But I don't know-"

  Obviously, she thought; but she smiled charmingly. "Just think, you'll get a free show, as well. We're really quite good. We've played before Dukes and Barons. If you don't trust both of us, just cut me loose and let me play."

  Not quite a lie. I'm sure there were plenty of Dukes and Barons who were passing by at Kingsford when we were playing.

  "What are you up to?" Talaysen hissed, as she continued to keep her mouth stretched in that ingenuous smile.

  "I have an idea," she muttered back out of the corner of her mouth. And as the captain continued to ponder, she laughed. "Oh come now, you aren't afraid of one little woman, are you?"

  That did it. He drew his dagger and cut first the hobbles at her ankles, then the bonds at her wrists. She got up slowly, her backside aching, her shoulders screaming, her hands tingling with unpleasant pins-and-needles sensations.

  She did have an idea. If she could work some of the same magic on this stupid lout that she'd worked on the elves, she might be able to get him to turn them loose. She'd noticed lately that when they really needed money, she'd been able to coax it from normally unresponsive crowds-as long as she followed that strange little inner melody she'd heard when she had played for the elven-king. It was always a variation on whatever she happened to be playing; one just
a little different from the original. The moment she matched with it, whatever she needed to have happen would occur. She was slowly evolving a theory about it; how it wasn't so much that the melody itself was important, it was that the melody was how she "heard" and controlled magic. Somehow she was tapping magic through music.

  But she couldn't explain that to Talaysen. Or rather, she couldn't explain it right now. Later, maybe. If this really worked.

  The captain poked their packs with his toe as she stood there rubbing her wrists. "Which one is yours?" he asked, without any real interest.

  "That one, there," she told him. "Why don't you hand me that fiddle-that's right, that one. A spy would never be able to learn to play this, it takes years-"

  "A spy could learn to play a couple of tunes on it," the captain said, in a sudden burst of completely unexpected thought. "That's all a spy would need."

  He looked at her triumphantly. She sighed, took the instrument from him before he dropped it, and took it out of its case to tune it. "A spy could learn a couple of tunes," she agreed. "But a spy wouldn't know them all. Pick one. Pick anything. I couldn't possibly know what you were going to pick to learn to play it in advance, so if I know it, then I'm not a spy. All right?"

  She saw Talaysen wince out of the corner of her eye, and she didn't blame him. No fiddler could know every tune; she was taking a terrible risk with this-

  But it was a calculated risk, taken out of experience. If he'd been a bright man, she wouldn't have tried this; he might purposefully pick something really obscure, hoping to baffle her.

  But he wasn't bright; he was, in fact, the very opposite. So he did what any stupid man would do; he blurted the first thing that came into his mind. Which was, as she had gambled, "Shepherd's Hey"; one of the half-dozen fiddle-tunes every fiddler wishes he would never have to play again, and which someone in every audience asks for.

  She played it, thinking very hard about getting him to release them, and listening with that inner ear for the first notes of the magic. . . .

  He started tapping his toe halfway through the first repetition; a good sign, but not quite what she was looking for. But his eyes unfocused a bit, which meant she might be getting through to him-

  Or that he was so dense he could be entranced, like a sheep, by perfectly ordinary music.

  Three times through. Three times was what had worked with the elves; three times had coaxed pennies from otherwise tight fists.

  Two repetitions-into the third-and-

  There. Just an echo, a faint sigh of melody, but it was there. She was afraid to play the tune again, though; repeating it a fourth time might break the magic.

  "Pick something else," she called out to him, breaking into his reverie.

  He stared at her with his mouth hanging open for a moment, then stammered, " 'Foxhunter.' "

  Another one of the tunes she had learned to hate while she was still at the Hungry Bear. She sighed; if her feelings got in the way of the music, this might turn out to be a bad idea instead of a good one. But the magic was still with her, and stronger as she brought the "Hey" around into the first notes of "Foxhunter." His eyes glazed over again, and she began to get the sense of the inner melody, stronger, and just a little off the variant she played. She strove to bring them closer, but hadn't quite-not before she'd played "Foxhunter" three times as well.

  But this was a subtle, slippery magic that she was trying to work. She had to get inside him somehow, and control the way he thought about them; this called for something quieter. Maybe that was why she hadn't quite managed to touch the magic-tune yet. . . .

  This time she didn't ask him to pick something. She slowed the final bars of "Foxhunter," dragged them out and sent the tune into a minor key, and turned the lively jig into something else entirely different; a mournful rendition of "Captive Heart."

  That did it! The hidden melody strengthened suddenly; grew so clear, in fact, that she glanced at Talaysen and was unsurprised to see a look of concentration on his face, as if he could hear it too.

  Once, twice-and on the third repetition, something dropped into place, and her tune and the magic one united, just as the sun touched the horizon.

  She played it to the end, then took her bow from the strings and waited to see what, if anything, the result of her playing was going to be.

  The captain shook himself, as if he was waking from a long sleep. "I must-how-I think-" He shook himself again, then drew his knife and cut Talaysen's bonds, offering him a hand to pull the Master to his feet. "I don't know what I was thinking of," the captain said, vaguely. "Thinking two minstrels like you were spies. Stupid, of course. These past couple of weeks, they've been hard on us. We're looking for spies behind every bush, it seems."

  "No harm done, captain," Talaysen said heartily, as Rune put up her fiddle as quickly as she could, and slung her pack on her back. She dragged his over to his feet, and he followed her example, still talking. "No harm done at all. Good thinking, really, after all, how could you know? I'm sure your Sire is very pleased to have a captain like you."

  When Talaysen stopped for a moment to get his pack in place, Rune took over, pulling on his elbow to get him moving towards the edge of camp and the road. "Of course, how could you know? But we obviously are musicians and you don't need to detain us, now, do you? Of course not. We'll just be on our way. Thank you. No, you needn't send anyone after us, we'll be fine-we know exactly where we need to go, we'll be off your Sire's land before you know it-"

  She got Talaysen moving and waved good-bye; Talaysen let her take the lead and wisely kept quiet. The other men-at-arms, seeing that their captain was letting the former captives go, were content to leave things the way they were. One or two of them even waved back as Rune and Talaysen made all the speed they could without (hopefully) seeming to do so.

  It wasn't until they were on the open road again that Rune heaved a sigh of relief, and slowed her pace.

  "All right, confess," Talaysen said, moving up beside her and speaking quietly out of the corner of his mouth. "I saw what happened, and I thought I heard something-"

  "How much do you know about magic?" Rune asked, interrupting him, and gazing anxiously at the darkening sky.

  "Not much, only the little Ardis tells me, and what's in songs, of course." He hitched his pack a little higher on his shoulders. "You're telling me that you're a mage?"

  She shook her head slightly, then realized he might not be able to see the gesture in the gathering gloom. "I'm not-I mean, I don't know if I am or not. I know what happened with the elves, but I thought that was just because the elves were easier to affect with music than humans. Now-I don't know. I hear something when I'm doing-whatever it is. And this time I think you heard it too."

  "Ardis told me every mage has his own way of sensing magic," Talaysen said thoughtfully. "Some see it as a web of light, some as color-patterns, some feel it, some taste or smell it. Maybe a mage who was also a musician would hear it as music-"

  He faltered, and she added what she thought he was going to say. "But you heard it too. Didn't you? You heard what I was trying to follow."

  "I heard something," he replied, carefully. "Whether it was the same thing you heard or not, I don't know."

  "Well, whatever is going on-when I really need something to happen, I think about it, hard, and listen inside for a melody at the same time. When I find it, I try to match it, but since it's a variation on what I've playing, it takes a little bit of time to do that, to figure out what the pattern is going to be. And it seems like I have to play things in repeats of three to get it to work. It's the moment that I match with that variation that I seem to be able to influence people."

  "But what about with the elves?" he asked. "You weren't doing any variations then-"

  "I don't know, I'm only guessing," she replied, looking to the west through the trees, and wondering how long they had before the sun set. "But what I was playing was all Gypsy music or music already associated with the elves, like the 'F
aerie Reel.' Maybe they're more susceptible to music, or maybe the music itself was already the right tune to be magic. Next Midsummer Faire we are going to have to talk to your cousin about all this-I don't like doing things and not knowing how or why they work. Or what they might do if they don't work the way I think they will."

  She was looking at him now, peering through the blue twilight, and not at the road, so she missed spotting the trouble ahead. Her first inkling of a problem was when Talaysen's head snapped up, and he cursed under his breath.

  "We'll do that. If we're not languishing in a dungeon," Talaysen groaned. "If this isn't the worst run of luck I've ever had-if I hadn't already been expecting the worst-"

  She turned her head-and echoed his groan of disgust. Just ahead of them was a roadblock. Manned by armed soldiers with a banner flapping above them in Sire Harlan's black-and-white stripes.

  "Well, there's no point in trying to avoid them; they'll only chase us," Talaysen sighed, as the soldiers stirred, proving that they'd been sighted too. "God help us. Here we go again."