by DAVID B. COE
“I won’t.” When the gleaner continued to stare at him, he smiled, adding, “You have my word.”
Tavis followed Grinsa into the tavern, the warm air and aromas of cooking meats and stews wrapping themselves around him like a blanket. There were a few more people here than there had been at the Iron wood, but still the inn was nearly empty. All the faces he saw were pale, all the eyes yellow. Who could have imagined that he would ever spend so much time with sorcerers? Looking around the tavern, however, another thought came to him.
“You know,” he said softly, “if Corbin was hired by a Qirsi, he might have come here. And he would have stood out like a Revel tumbler in a cloister.”
Grinsa gave him that look, the one that always came to his face when Tavis surprised him with an insight. It almost seemed to say, See what you can do when you think?
“Choose us a table,” the gleaner said. “I’ll buy two ales and speak with the barman.”
Tavis nodded and walked to the back of the tavern. He sensed the inn’s patrons watching him, but he tried to ignore their stares. A few moments later, Grinsa joined him.
“He’s going to bring our ales and sit with us for a time. Remember-”
“I know,” Tavis said. “Say nothing.”
“It may be even more important here, Tavis. These people may trust me because I’m Qirsi, but they’ll be wary of questions, particularly if they think we’re enemies of the movement. For all we know, this is the man who paid for Chago’s blood.”
Before Tavis could respond, the Qirsi bar man emerged from behind the bar, carrying two tankards. He smiled at them, but Tavis could see the man staring at the scars on his face. Talk about standing out, he thought, wishing he could hide under the table.
“Looks like you’ve had a rough time of it, my young friend,” the man said, setting the tankards on the table and sitting beside Tavis.
At least he was honest enough to talk about the scars. Better that than the silent, sidelong glances Tavis had endured for the past several turns.
“He met up with some thieves a while back,” Grinsa said. “We were in Caerisse at the time, the Paalniri Wild. He doesn’t really like to speak of it.”
“I should think not.” The man leaned closer to examine the wounds. “Looks like he’s healed well,” he said, glancing at Grinsa. “Your work?”
“I’m not a healer. I found someone in Enharfe to help him.”
The bar man nodded. “I see.” He gazed at the scars a moment longer, then faced the gleaner. “You said you had questions for me.”
“We do. We’re wondering if you’ve seen an Eandi man in the last turn or so. A singer.” Grinsa described the assassin briefly.
“Yes. I’ve seen him.”
Grinsa blinked. “What?”
“I’ve seen him,” the barman said again.
The gleaner just stared at him, as if unable to believe what he was hearing. “You’ve seen him recently?”
“Yes. He came in for an ale one night during the last waning.”
Tavis and Grinsa shared a look. That was just around the time the duke of Bistari was killed.
“Did he speak with anyone?” Grinsa asked, leaning forward.
“As I remember it, he did.”
“Who?”
The man faltered. “What is it you want with the singer?” he asked. He eyed Tavis briefly. “Is he the one who did this to the boy?”
The gleaner shook his head. “No. I assure you he’s not.”
“Then why are you so eager to find him?”
“Let’s just say that he owes us something. We need to find him so that we can collect on an old debt.”
The barman seemed to consider this.
“Now please, who was it he talked to?”
“I misspoke before,” the man said, his eyes flicking about the tavern uneasily. “I remember now. He didn’t speak with anyone.”
He was lying. Tavis didn’t need to be a gleaner to see that. He almost challenged the man, but Grinsa beat him to it.
“But a moment ago you said-”
“I was wrong. He sat alone the whole time he was here. I’m sure of it.” His face had turned ashen and his brow was suddenly damp. It almost seemed that he felt a dagger at his back.
“So you’re telling me that an Eandi singer came into your tavern, drank an ale, and then left without speaking to anyone.”
“That’s right.”
Grinsa shook his head. “I don’t believe you. Most Eandi would rather take off an arm than sit among white-hairs.”
“Believe what you will. Your friend here seems happy enough to drink my ale. Why would the singer be any different? He was with the Festival-maybe he was used to our kind.” He pushed back from the table and stood. “If there’s nothing else, I’ve a tavern to run.”
Grinsa looked up at him, his yellow eyes holding the man’s gaze. “We’ve no other questions, if that’s what you mean,” he finally said. “But we’ll need a room for tonight. Two beds.”
The barman didn’t look at all pleased with the notion that they’d be staying the night, but he nodded before walking off.
“That’s it?” Tavis asked. “You just let him go?”
“There’s nothing to be gained by asking him more questions,” Grinsa said calmly.
“But he was lying.”
“Yes, he was. And he was going to keep on lying no matter what we asked him.”
Tavis looked away, pressing his lips in a thin line, much as his father often did. Grinsa was right. Again.
“We learned all we needed to,” the gleaner told him, his voice dropping nearly to a whisper. “Corbin was here when Chago died, and because our friend at the bar is such a poor liar, we know as well that he spoke with someone. Given how he reacted to our questions, I think we can assume it was someone this man fears.”
“Maybe,” Tavis said. “Or maybe he fears us.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said before that for all we knew the barman was with the conspiracy. What if he’s not, but he thinks we are? We’re looking for an assassin, because, in your words, ‘he owes us something.’ With all that’s happened in the Forelands in the past few turns, and with all the talk of Qirsi plotting against the courts, that would be enough to scare me.”
Grinsa’s white eyebrows went up. “A fair point. If you’re right, I certainly don’t think we should do anything to disabuse him of the idea. Having him afraid of us could be helpful.”
Tavis glanced around the large room. “Should we talk to anyone else? It may be that others noticed the singer as well. A patron may be more willing to talk to us than the barman.”
“I’d rather not let it be known too widely that we’re looking for him. He may still be nearby; we shouldn’t do anything to scare him off.”
The boy smiled. “It seems we won’t be going north to find Shurik after all.”
Grinsa gave a reluctant nod. “Not yet, at least.”
After finishing their ales, Grinsa paid the barman for a room and he and Tavis ascended a creaking wooden stairway to the tavern’s upper floor. Their room was the first one on the hallway. In most ways it was no different from every other room in which they had stayed since leaving Eibithar: small, dirty, smelling slightly of must and stale sweat.
“I hope we didn’t pay too much for this,” Tavis said, eyeing the beds doubtfully.
“It wasn’t a lot, though it was more than the room’s worth.”
“How much of my father’s gold-?”
He never finished the question. From the streets below the room’s lone shuttered window, Tavis heard shouts and, after a moment, a loud cheer. Grinsa strode to the window and threw open the shutters.
A large group of men had gathered in the lane, many of them bearing torches. There was a good deal of laughter, and Tavis could hear shouts and cheering from further off, as if the scene was repeating itself throughout the city.
“What is it?” he asked.
The gleaner
shook his head. “I don’t know.” He shuttered the window again and crossed to the door. “But we should find out.”
They hurried back down the stairs, and finding the tavern empty, stepped out into the street. The barman was there, as were his Qirsi patrons. But it was the Eandi who were making most of the noise, shouting back and forth to each other, most of them grinning.
“What’s happened?” Grinsa asked.
The barman looked at him for a moment, as if unsure whether or not to speak with him.
“A messenger just arrived from Solkara,” he said at last, watching the Eandi once more. “The king is dead.”
Grinsa gaped at him. “What? How did he die?”
“The man didn’t say.”
Tavis looked at the gleaner, their eyes meeting briefly. Had the king been murdered as well?
“Did he refuse to say, or did no one ask?”
The barman offered a dark smile. “Look at them,” he said, gesturing toward the people in the street. “They don’t care how the man died. They care only that their duke has been avenged. He had Chago garroted, and now the Deceiver has taken him as well. Songs will be written of this day.”
“He was your king,” Tavis said.
The boy regretted speaking the moment the words passed his lips, and Grinsa cast a withering look his way. But with all the noise from the revelers, the barman did not seem to notice his accent.
“Perhaps he was your king,” the man said. “But in Bistari, he was just another Solkaran tyrant.”
“So it’s like this here every time a king dies?” Grinsa asked.
“I was just a boy when Farrad the Sixth died. I don’t remember it that well. But when Tomaz died, people danced in the streets, yes. Maybe not like this-Carden was more hated than most of the Solkaran kings, and he dies without an heir, which gives the people here some hope that another house will claim the throne.”
Tavis couldn’t have said for certain how old Carden the Third had been. Not old, though. He knew that much. He had died young, with no heir, and of some cause alarming or private enough to be excluded from the message announcing his death. Abruptly, the young lord knew where he and Grinsa would be journeying next.
“Will Bistari challenge for the crown?” Grinsa asked.
The barman shook his head, apparently eager to talk now that the conversation wouldn’t affect his business. “Hard to say. If the old duke were still alive I’d think so, but Silbron, his son, is only just past his Determining, and he and his mother still grieve.”
“Then who?”
“Dantrielle might try, or Mertesse. Maybe even Orvinti. In the end, though, the crown will fall to Grigor.”
“Grigor?”
The man turned to look at Grinsa once more. “The oldest of the king’s brothers. You’re not Aneiran, are you?”
“We’re from Wethyrn,” the gleaner said. “Jistingham, to be precise.”
“You’ve come a long way to look for your singer.”
“We’re eager to find him. Eager enough to pay for the names of those he met in your tavern.” Grinsa glanced around them for a moment. “Your customers are gone now,” he said, lowering his voice. “My friend and I are the only ones listening. And we’ve got gold.”
The man gave a thin smile. “I told you already: I never saw him with anyone.”
“Very well.” Grinsa started toward the tavern again. “Come, Xaver,” he said, beckoning to Tavis with a wave of his hand. “There’s nothing more we can learn here.”
The young lord followed him back into the inn.
“He refused gold,” the gleaner said as they climbed the steps again.
“I heard.”
“That tells me it wasn’t us he feared, but rather the person he saw with the assassin.”
“A minister, perhaps?”
Grinsa glanced at him. “Perhaps.”
“Since when are you so interested in the affairs of the Aneiran houses?” Tavis asked him, once they were back in their room. “By revealing that we weren’t from Aneira you might have made him even more suspicious than he already was.”
“True, but it was worth the risk. Knowing who stood to gain the most from Carden’s death may tell us where to go next.”
“After Solkara, you mean.”
The gleaner nodded. “Yes. After Solkara.”
Chapter Ten
Dantrielle, Aneira
“Play another, lad!” one of the men called to him, drawing shouts of agreement from the others. “Do you know ‘Tanith’s Threnody’?”
Dario shook his head, though he continued to look down at his fingers as he plucked idly at the strings of his lute. “No,” he said. “Never learned it.”
It was a lie, of course. Every lutenist in Aneira knew the threnody, because it was all anyone ever asked them to play. He had already played it this day, and he heard snickers in the far corner of the tavern, probably from someone who had heard him perform it earlier.
“Then play anything,” the man said.
Dario’s fingers throbbed-he had been playing since just after the ringing of the midday bells. They were barely paying him enough to make eight or nine songs worth his while, and he had already done more than a dozen. The tavern shouldn’t have even been open. For one thing, this was the day of Bohdan’s Night, when men should have been with their families rather than drinking at a bar. Most of the men who frequented the Red Boar, however, had no families. More to the point though, with the king dead, every other tavern in the city had been shut down. The duke’s guards never came to the Red Boar, however. They were afraid to. So it remained open, as if nothing had happened, as if it were just an ordinary day in Dantrielle.
One of the serving women put another ale before him and gave him a warm smile.
“They like you,” she whispered.
“Another song or two and my fingers will be bloody.”
She glanced around the tavern and nodded toward the men who crowded the tables and bar. “If you stop now, they’re liable to bloody a good deal more than your fingers.”
She had a point. It was never a good idea for a musician to anger a tavernful of listeners, and this was particularly true in the Red Boar.
“One more,” he said. “And then I need to drink my ale.”
“Fair enough,” another man said. “The lad deserves a bit of rest.”
The others nodded, and Dario began to play. It was one of his own pieces, as the last several had been. He had made up so many that he stopped titling them long ago. But he still remembered where he found each one, and in his own mind he called them by those names. This one was “Moors of Durril,” where he had been early in the last harvest when he first played it.
Each element of the piece was fairly simple-the melody line he plucked from the upper strings, and the bass counterpoint he played on the lower ones. But together they created an intricate pattern that recalled for Dario the grasses of the moor, dancing in a light wind, and the brilliant sunset Morna had offered him that evening. The melody turned three rounds in the piece, each a bit lower in pitch and slower in tempo than the last, before the delicate ending climbed upward once more. It was Dario’s best, and he always saved it for the end of a performance.
Despite their rough appearance and cruel reputations, the men of the Red Boar appreciated good music. They cheered lustily when he finished, and several of them offered to buy him ales, though he had barely touched the one he carried, along with his lute, to the rear of the tavern.
“Fine playing, lad!” the first man said, clapping him on the back as Dario walked past. “You can play for me anytime.”
Dario smiled and nodded, but he didn’t stop to talk. He might have been a musician, but he also had a profession, just as they did, and he had been living on a lutenist’s wage for too long.
He took his customary seat near one of the back windows and laid the lute carefully on the chair beside him. After taking a long drink of ale, he pulled his father’s old pipe from his pocket, f
illed the bowl with Trescam leaf, and lit it. He leaned back in his chair, blowing a great cloud of smoke toward the ceiling and closing his eyes.
He remained that way for some time, only opening his eyes again when he heard the chair across the table from him squeak.
A man was sitting there, one Dario had seen in the Red Boar before.
Like so many of the others, he had the look of a road brigand to him. He hadn’t shaved in several days, and he wore his black hair long and untied. He was built like Dano, neither brawny nor tall, but lean and muscular, like a festival tumbler. Even though they were both sitting, the lutenist could tell that the man could handle himself in a fight.
“Is there something I can do for you?” Dario asked him, puffing on his pipe again.
The man stared at him with dark eyes, a small smile on his thin lips. “Crebin sent me to tell you that he wants his gold, and that he’s tired of waiting.”
Dario frowned. “I think you have the wrong man. I don’t know anyone named Crebin.‘
“He also told me that you’d say that. We’ve all enjoyed your playing, lad. None of us wants to see you floating facedown in the Rassor with a blade in your back.”
“Well, I’m glad to know that we’re in agreement on that point,” Dario said, eyeing the man as he would a new instrument. He had never seen the man fight, so he didn’t know his tendencies or his weaknesses. Dario was near the back of the inn, but he wasn’t against the back wall. If he moved fast enough, he could stand and kick away his chair, clearing himself some room to draw his dagger and meet an assault. He opened his hands, as if to show the man that he held no weapon. “There’s obviously been some misunderstanding, but I’m sure that you and I can work it out. Perhaps you can start by telling me what this Crebin looks like.”
“Don’t try my patience, boy. You may think you can handle yourself in a fight, but you’ve never fought me.”
“You know, I’m tired of people calling me lad and boy all the time,” Dario said, his hand snaking down toward his calf, where he held his spare blade. “I’m seven years past my Fating, and still everyone treats me like I’m little more than a child.” He cocked his head to the side, just as the fingers on his throwing hand unfastened the strap that held the blade in place and closed around the smooth wooden hilt. “Recently I’ve thought of letting my beard grow in. Do you think that would help?”