T'fyrr picked his way carefully among the cobblestones and thought about the way that the Priest had met his own direct gaze. It was very difficult for humans to meet the eyes of a Haspur, for very long. Just as the gaze of a hawk, direct and penetrating, often seemed to startle people, the gaze of a Haspur with all of the intelligence of a Haspur behind it, seemed to intimidate them. Father Ruthvere had no such troubles.
"No, I believe you," he said finally. "And I find him as disconcerting as you humans find me."
"He is one of my sources of information," she said as they turned into a street lined with vendors of various foods and drink. "We share what we've learned; he tells me what's going on inside the Church, and I tell him the rumors I've learned in Freehold and in the Palace kitchen."
T'fyrr nodded; she had already told him about her clever ploy that got her into the Lower Servants' Kitchen every day. "Well, I can add to that what I learn," he said, "though I am afraid it will be stale news to him."
She shrugged. "Maybe; maybe not. Oh_look down that street. That might be a good place for you to go if you're caught afoot and need to get into the air_"
She pointed down a dead-end street that culminated in a bulb-shaped courtyard. Unlike the rest of the street, there were no overhanging second stories there. He nodded and made a mental note of the place.
She continued to guide him through the narrow, twisting streets, pointing out flat roofs and protruding brickwork where he could land, then climb down to the street_finding places where he could get enough of a running start that he could take off again. And all the while she was showing him these things, she was also questioning him....
She was so subtle and so good at it that he didn't really notice what she was doing until he found himself clamping his beak down on a confession of what had happened to him in Gradford. It was only the fact that he made a habit of reticence that saved him. The words tried to escape from him; he put a curb on his tongue, and still his heart wanted to unburden all of his troubles to her.
So he distracted both her and himself with a description of what the High King had done that day. Or, more accurately, what the High King had not done, and how troubled he was by it all.
"There is something fundamentally wrong with the way Theovere is acting," he said finally. "My people have no equivalent to his office, but_if you allow yourself to take advantage of great privilege and great power, should you not feel guilty if you do not also accept what obligations come with it? Should that not be required, in order to enjoy the privilege?"
Tanager sighed. "You'd think so, wouldn't you?" she replied. "I know that I would feel that way."
"The King's Advisors do not," he told her. "They continue to tell him that the most important thing that a King must learn is how to delegate responsibility. They praise him for shirking his most important tasks, for ignoring the pleas of those who have nowhere else to take their grievances and concerns. I do not understand."
Tanager looked very thoughtful at that_and more like Nightingale than she had since they had begun their tour of the streets. "I think that perhaps I do," she finally said. "Let's go back to Freehold. I want to talk about this somewhere I know is safe from extra ears."
That place_somewhere safe from extra ears_turned out to be her own room in Freehold, supplied as part of her wages. T'fyrr examined it while she took a change of outfit into the bathroom and turned from Tanager to Lyrebird.
There probably had not been much supplied with the room other than the furniture_and it was, unmistakably, the Deliambren notion of "spare." But Nightingale had put her own touches on the place: the bench and bed were covered with dozens of delicately embroidered and fringed shawls, and there were extra cushions on both. The walls had been draped with more shawls, and she had hung a small collection of jewelry on hooks fastened there, as well. Her harps sat in one corner, out of the way, and a hand-drum hung on the wall above them.
"I'd begun to wonder about something lately," Nightingale told him, her voice muffled a little by the closed door. "And what you just told me confirmed it."
She emerged, gowned in the dark green dress she had taken in with her, and settled herself on the chest, leaving the bed to him. "Humans are odd creatures," she said finally. "We often go out of our way to justify things that we want to do, and do it so successfully that we come to believe the justifications ourselves."
He nodded, waiting to hear more.
"Take King Theovere," she said after a pause. "He was working hard, very hard. He was certainly one of the best High Kings that Alanda has seen for awhile. And he solved four of the most terrible problems the Twenty Kingdoms have seen, all in a very short period of time." She held up a finger. "The Bayden-Anders border dispute." A second finger. "The Grain Smut and the resulting famine." A third finger. "The Kindgode incursion." And the fourth and final finger. "The Black Baron's Revolt. All four of those took place within a single decade. Any one of them would have been enough for a single High King to fail at or solve."
T'fyrr nodded, although he hadn't heard anything about three out of the four problems she mentioned_but then again, he had just begun to scrape the top of the Palace archives, and he didn't imagine there was much about a grain smut that would make a good ballad. "Your point?" he asked.
"Theovere would have every reason to be tired, bone tired, by the end of that time. And when his Advisors began to tell him that he had done enough, that he should rest, that he deserved to take a rest, he listened to them." She tilted her head to one side and stared up into his eyes, waiting for him to think about what she had said.
"But he did deserve to take a rest_" T'fyrr pointed out. "At least, he deserved some rest, if those problems were as weighty to solve as you say."
"Of course he did!" she exclaimed. "I'm not saying that he didn't_but the point wasn't that he didn't deserve to rest, the point is that he couldn't rest." She licked her lips, clearly searching for an explanation. "He is the High King; he could and probably should have reorganized his duties so that he had some time to recuperate, but he could not abandon his duties! Do you see what I'm saying?"
"I think so_" T'fyrr said hesitantly. "There really isn't anyone who can do what he can, who can be the ultimate authority. So when his Advisors started telling him to rest, to delegate important business to someone else_"
"They were telling him what he wanted to hear, but not the truth," she finished for him, when he groped for words. "He could arrange to take more time in solving those problems that won't get worse with time. He can ask for help from any of the Twenty Kings. He can look to his allies for some help. He cannot tell someone else to solve them for him."
T'fyrr shook his head. "It is easy to feel sorry for him," he said, thinking back to Theovere and realizing that he had seen signs of strain that he had not noticed at the time. Perhaps even those temper tantrums were a sign of that strain. "It seems like too much of a burden for one man. No one should be expected to bear that much."
Nightingale spread her hands in a gesture of bafflement. "There's no good answer," she admitted. "There is a reason why the High King has the privileges that he has; why he lives in a place that is second only to the Fortress-City in luxury, why virtually anything he wants is given to him. Since his duties can't be made easier, his life is made easier. But do you see what our answer might be?"
T'fyrr thought it all through before he answered. "Theovere was tired; his Advisors told him what he wanted to hear_that he needed to stop working so hard, he needed to rest, he needed to give over some of his responsibility to others. So he followed their advice and found that he liked the new life_and his Advisors only reinforced his feelings when they told him that he was doing the right thing. It probably began with very little things, but by now_by now it has built up to the point that Theovere is actually doing very little in the way of his duty, and the Advisors are still telling him what a wonderful leader he is."
Nightingale nodded emphatically as she put her hair up into a complicated twis
t. "Furthermore, since they are not letting anyone in to speak to him who is likely to tell him something that contradicts what they are saying, he believes that everything is exactly as it was when he was in his prime. He wants to believe that, and the sycophants are only too happy to tell him so."
T'fyrr fanned his wings a little in the breath of moving air from the ventilator grille. "It will be difficult to turn that trend around," he offered diffidently. "I have been trying_I have been inserting songs with a particular theme, that great power demands the acceptance of responsibility, into the performances that the King has asked me to give. But as I told you, I have not seen any evidence that he has paid any more attention to them than to the story ballads or the love songs."
Nightingale's hands stopped moving for a moment. Her eyes took on the expression of someone who is looking deep into her own spirit, and T'fyrr wondered what she was thinking.
Then, with an abrupt motion, as if she had suddenly made up her mind about something, she put the last twist into her hair and folded her hands on her lap. "T'fyrr, who told you that some of the Free Bards have_magic?" she asked.
"Harperus," he replied promptly. "Harperus told me that you have it, in fact. Well, not magic, as such_he told me that many of you have some sort of power that he and his people could not weigh or measure, but that observation would prove existed. He said that you could influence peoples minds, among other things. He suspected that you could_well, see into the future. He said that some Deliambrens believe that you can influence events as well as minds, provided that the influence need only be very small. He has real evidence that you can heal people in ways that have nothing to do with medicine as he knows it."
She bit her lower lip and looked away from him for the first time. "I am not really supposed to admit to this," she said finally. "Especially not to someone connected with the Deliambrens." She looked back at him with a wan smile. "Harperus and his kind are driven mad by things they cannot measure, and if they knew we really did have abilities such as you describe, they would be plaguing us constantly to find out what it is we do and how we do it."
T'fyrr nodded but said nothing, only waited quietly for her to continue.
"There is_there is a power in music properly performed," she said after another long moment of silence, broken only by the sound of the air in the ventilators and the distant murmur of all the sounds of Freehold below them. "You might call it 'magic.' Certainly the Gypsies and the Elves do, and so does the Church, although the Churchmen have no idea how great or little that power really is. I'll put it to you briefly: some Bards are mages, and_among other things_we can influence the thoughts of others through our music. Some of us can do the other things you described as well, but it is that one particular power that pertains to our situation now. Sometimes, not often, we are powerful enough to make others act against their will. Most of us confine ourselves to very minor acts of_well, it is manipulation, and as such, it could be considered improper. Most of the time, all we do is to enhance our audiences' ability to appreciate the music."
"But you can do more," T'fyrr stated. He had no doubt that she, personally, could do much more.
She nodded reluctantly. "This might be a case where doing more is justified. Would you care to add me, and my magic, to your performances for the King? All you need do is bring me in as your accompanist, and I can do the rest. Between the two of us, we may be able to reawaken his sleeping conscience and rouse his slumbering sense of duty. But I won't lie to you; this is interference in someone's mind, his thoughts. Before you take me up on this, you need to think about that_and if you would appreciate having something like this done to you, if your situation and his were reversed."
Now that she had put it baldly and offered her services, and now that she had admitted that this "magic" was as much a form of manipulation as the overt form that Theovere's Advisors were doing, the idea wasn't as attractive as it had been. In point of fact, the notion made him feel rather_shaken up inside.
Did he want to do this? If he were the King_if he were in Theovere's place_
If he were thinking clearly, thinking as his old self, he might. But doesn't this preclude his thinking clearly? Wouldn't we be clouding his mind as much as all that bad advice?
"It is a great power," Nightingale said softly. "This is why we so seldom use it. It is far too tempting to misuse it."
He took a deep breath. "It is also too great an issue to decide on impulse," he told her firmly. "I need to think about this at length."
And I wish there was someone, anyone, who I could ask for advice!
He was afraid that Nightingale would be annoyed with him for prevaricating after she had taken the great step of not only admitting she had this power, but offering to help him with it. But she only nodded, as if she had expected him to say something like that.
"You should see what you can do on your own," she told him. "You haven't been doing this for very long; you may be able to stir the King's conscience without any outside influence. That would be better_for him, and for you, I think."
She did understand. "I promise, I will think about this, the morality of it," he told her, and grimaced. "It may well be that the morality of manipulating one person's mind to rid him of bad influences is of less moment than the welfare of all the people, human and otherwise, in the Twenty Kingdoms."
"There is that," she agreed. "But I am not the one in the position to make the decision; you are. And I will not make your decisions for you."
"But what would you do if you were in my place?" he asked_no, begged.
She sighed and shook her head. "If I were in your place_I have traveled the roads of several of the kingdoms, and seen some of the worst places in this one. I can see what I think are unpleasant trends that are only going to continue if the High King remains neglectful. I am prejudiced; the people most immediately affected are friends of mine, my own people, and the Free Bards. There are other people who will prosper if things go as I believe they will, and they would certainly not thank us for interfering." She smiled a little. "This is a long explanation for a short answer, so that you can see why I feel the way I do. In your place, having weighed all the options and outcomes, I would use the magic and see what happened. You may not come to the same conclusion. If you do not, I cannot and will not fault you for it."
Silence hung between them for a long time. She broke it first.
"It may be that by using the magic this way, we are making ourselves into worse monsters than even the Church believes us to be. The next time we are tempted, we might not resist. And the time after that, for something purely selfish? We might be able to justify it to ourselves as easily as the King justifies his current neglect. That is the danger."
He could see that. Oh, how easily he could see that! "I understand," he said very softly.
She rose. "And I must go, to the legitimate uses of my magic," she said, lightly, although he thought she was covering a heavy heart with her light tone. "You know the way to the roof?"
"I do," he replied, and then formed his beak into something like a human smile. "But I have time enough to let you work some of that magic on me, before I go."
He thought for a moment that he had startled her, but it might only have been a sudden shadow as she moved. In the next breath, she looked as serene as always.
"Well, then, shall we go down?" she asked. "I should be happy to include you in the spell."
"Perhaps one day, I shall ask you to weave a magic for me alone," he said playfully, opening the door for her as she picked up her harp to carry it down the stairs.
Once again, that startled look came over her face, but this time, when she turned to look at him, her expression was not as serene. There was a shadow there, and a hint of speculation.
"Perhaps you shall," was all she said. "And_perhaps I shall oblige you."
T'fyrr looked up from his reading as someone rapped on the door to the suite, but he did not rise to answer it. He knew better, now, after several sharp lec
tures from Nob about the propriety of the King's Chief Musician answering his own door. Nob answered the summons instead; he spoke briefly with someone there and came back to T'fyrr with a message in his hand.
"There's someone to see you, T'fyrr," he said with a grin. "That Deliambren who dresses like a tailor's worst nightmare." He handed the small piece of paper to T'fyrr, who found it was simply a note from Harperus asking if he was free. "Shall I tell the page to bring him up?"
"Certainly!" T'fyrr replied. "Absolutely!" At the moment he couldn't think of anyone he wanted to see more.
Except Nightingale, perhaps_
He shook the thought away. The one person he dared not think about was Nightingale, not now, not with Harperus around. While she hadn't exactly sworn him to secrecy about her magic, she had certainly told him in no uncertain terms that she did not want the Deliambrens to know she was in the city. If he thought about Nightingale, he might let that fact slip.
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