The final effect was striking. Elora looked utterly wild, with more than a deliberate hint of Faery to her features.
“The main idea for now, though,” he told her in what was meant to be reassurance, “is to make sure they look more at your face than anywhere else.”
“For now?”
“Face facts, you don’t have that distracting a body.”
She hit him for that. He got his revenge by producing the costume he wanted her to wear. She held the gauze scarf before her face and looked at him right through it.
“I don’t think so,” she said warningly.
As it turned out, her apprehensions were pretty much unfounded. There were light sandals for her feet and thin silk trousers that hugged legs and bottom like a second skin. They didn’t reach her waist, however, like proper pants, but sat right atop the line of her hips, as did the flounce skirt that tied over them, itself made of a gauzy fabric similar to her scarf, ankle length and laced through with spangles and beads designed to reflect and refract the light with every movement. Despite its seeming lack of substance, the skirt was weighted to allow it to flow with her movements, billowing outward when she turned with a sleek and sensuous grace that by rights should be doing justice to a woman who knew how to use it. A set of golden chains encircled her waist, with dangles of metal and crystal hanging from where it clasped together over her navel.
The bodice was an equally theatrical mix of the fantastic and the practical. A shirt of fine cotton that had the feel and presentation of silk, fitting snugly to her shoulders and billowing outward where its bell sleeves fastened around her wrists. A high collar swept around to a neckline that plunged to the blouse’s hem, right below her breasts, cut in a way that masked her lack of prominence there. The sleeves were slashed from top to bottom, exposing the full length of her arms, which were decorated with bangles and bracelets galore, as well as with a set of stylized tattoos which Duguay painted on in ink as black as her new hair. The designs represented nothing Elora was familiar with, they were abstract shapes that she best described to herself as interlocking spear points.
More jewelry for her face, a clip-on ring for the septum of her nose, with a double line of light chain attached to rings at the tip and lobe of her left ear. A broad choker necklace, more gold, around her throat, rings for every finger and one of her big toes.
“Might this not be considered,” she wondered as the session progressed, “a tad gaudy?”
Duguay grinned so infectiously she had to respond in kind. “You haven’t seen me yet.”
The thought of that set her to laughing outright.
“You’re painted in hot colors,” he told her, “clothed in warm ones, accented in gold, rubies, amethysts. Every element is intended to take the watcher as far as possible from a vision of you as you truly are.”
“Will it work?”
“Ask me tomorrow.”
“I find that so comforting. What about Ryn?”
“Your furry friend?”
“His name is Ryn Taksemanyin.”
“We establish our own rightful place here first, then we can begin to maneuver about. The one thing we cannot do is rush.”
“All this preparation doesn’t matter a damn if we lose him!”
“Then you’ll have to trust that the Fates aren’t in a malicious mood.”
She stuck out her tongue at him, and then settled back to watch as he began to ready himself for the evening’s performance.
Duguay was very good, there was no denying that.
He charmed the crowd as individuals and as a whole, and possessed that rare gift of making a song sound as if it had just been written right then and there, a personal creation for every person in the room. The dining hall was an imposing space, broad more than deep, with room for two impressive hearths along one of the long walls. Its twelve-foot ceiling was broken at intervals by the massive beams necessary to support the upper floors of the building. Rough wood all around, creating a dominant impression of rustic strength and solidity rather than elegance. This was a functional building, with few pretensions, like the people it served.
Light was courtesy mainly of the hearth fires, plus a multitude of thick-bodied candles on standards and lamps arrayed throughout the room. Meals were served on a line of trestle tables and benches, with the high table on a dais along the wall between the two hearths and beneath a magnificent rack of antlers, so broad and thick with points that many visitors assumed it couldn’t be real.
All around Elora, the hall shook with the raucous assemblage of permanent residents and transients, all of whom were in a mood to enjoy the troubadour’s ribald and occasionally acerbic wit. In return, Duguay entertained them with songs and stories that made men bellow with laughter and their lady companions blush and giggle. A beat later he would come back to those same tables with a selection that provoked entirely the opposite response, howls and scandalized shrieks of delight from the womenfolk and grumbles of bluff discomfiture from their mates.
At the same time the room was a frenetic bustle of activity as a veritable army of serving men and maids rushed to and fro, laden with trays of food and drink from the kitchen, equally weighed down by dirty dishes on their return. For the most part table manners were atrocious, as the several courses of the dinner were attacked with a ferocity that would have put many so-called animals to shame. Elora was a bit taken aback by all this manic hubbub. Growing up, she always sat at the high table at meals, and was the one waited on. Since those were invariably state dinners, the most formal and dignified of occasions, she found them deadly dull. She had little experience working the other side of the table, especially in a crowd like this.
As a consequence, after Duguay made his entrance she kept close by the wall, trying her best to follow his injunction that at the very least she look decorative and suspecting she was making a royal botch of it. She felt stiff and frighteningly ill at ease, certain her disguise was a joke, that any moment she’d be denounced and seized. Or, far worse to her way of thinking, the crowd would fix on her every imperfection and laugh at her pretensions to prettiness. Because she’d never done this before and didn’t know any better, she cared too much what the audience thought of her, and that very nearly proved her downfall as she took advantage of Duguay’s opening ballad to slink toward the nearest hidey-hole.
She never made it, the troubadour didn’t let her. His hand caught her by the scruff of the neck, and without missing a lyric or a beat of his song, he paraded her before the mob. She thought she would die, and then determined not to go without killing him first.
Thankfully, at least Rool wasn’t here to see this humiliation. (Though, chances were, he’d make a great show of enjoying every moment and would never, ever, let her forget it.) She’d cut him loose before following Duguay inside, to find where Ryn was incarcerated and see how he was. Later, when the show was done, she’d follow and together they’d work out a plan to set him free. She couldn’t help wondering how the wily Wyr had been captured in the first place and what sort of mission had brought him so far from Thorn. She tried not to think about the moment of their collision. In the midst of their struggle she’d called out to him with voice and mindspeech, but there’s been no reply. No acknowledgment of his name, and worse, not the faintest awareness of her. She might as well have been yelling at a brick.
Gradually it dawned on her that hardly anyone in the audience was paying her the slightest bit of attention. They had far more important things on their minds, she was simply part of the background, to be admired momentarily and then soundly ignored just like the antlers on the wall.
This revelation, of course, left her so miffed that she had to laugh out loud.
It was a liberating realization and with it she cast aside much of her stiffness and reserve. The smile that had till now looked pasted on her face, and badly, came more spontaneously and began to draw equally genu
ine responses. She watched the serving staff as they slipped and sidled their way along the narrow passages between the tables and let her own body adopt their rhythms and manners. It wasn’t as easy as it looked, she quickly discovered as she found herself drafted into service.
There was a challenge to keeping track of orders and delivering them promptly, and as well to handling trays of food that were nearly as broad across as she was tall. The tables allowed precious little clearance between them and anything that spilled was likely to land on a paying customer, which meant that was to be avoided at all costs. The problem was dealing with louts and yobbos who took her mere presence as an invitation to be rude.
Quality folk were tabled right below the dais and its high table and were accorded the privilege of choosing their dinner from a menu. They were presented with a selection of wines as well, for which they were handsomely charged. Everyone else, who actually had better seats, since their tables fronted both hearths, enjoyed whatever repast the cook had in mind. Tonight, that meant a hearty game stew—mostly bison, with leftover boar and venison from the night before, mixed in a rich, spiced broth with potatoes, leeks, carrots, onions, and other assorted vegetables—served in cast-iron pots that went straight from kitchen fire to table, each kettle serving a dozen customers. No wine for the cheap seats, either, only beer or plain water. Unfortunately there were thirsts to match a fair number of equally considerable appetites, which kept the staff busy with refills from the first plating of the night to the last. The only saving grace was that the crowd forced the Commandant to banish the fort’s resident pack of wolf- and elkhounds to their kennels for the evening, thereby removing one formidable hurdle from the tavern’s nightly obstacle course.
Through it all, Elora obeyed Duguay’s injunction to watch and listen. She worked as hard as she ever had in her life (as hard, she concluded with a groan when she realized that the evening was barely half over, as in the whole rest of my life put together), and she learned more.
“What’s a lovely lass like you doing in a dump like this?” she was asked by a strapping young man too altogether certain of his ability to set ladies’ hearts to fluttering.
“Why,” she replied in the tone of a breathless ingenue, as she’d seen the other girls do, and stealing one of their lines as well, “hoping beyond hope to meet a wonder such as yourself!”
She fluttered her lashes becomingly (at least, that was the idea) and made a moue with her lips. Then Elora’s eyes met a fellow serving maid’s, who made the exact same expression back at her, and the false mood of the moment was thoroughly shattered by a mutual attack of the giggles. The lad didn’t get the joke, and rose up to take righteous umbrage, but the other maid flicked a foot lightly between both of his and the next the young man knew he’d dropped hard back down onto his bench without the slightest clue as to how he’d just lost his balance. The maid immediately topped off his mug with beer, gave him her brightest smile and a kiss on the cheek; by the time he realized he’d been abandoned, he was altogether smitten, and she and Elora an entire table length away.
“Weren’t our fault, what happened!” she heard from a middle-aged man, among a clutch of people determined to resist the general merriment. She recognized some faces from earlier in the day and knew without another word that these were from the wagon train encamped outside the gates. Immediately, Elora sidled closer to hear what they had to say.
“Weren’t right, Maug, what they did,” countered another, half again as old, as deep in his cups, as haunted in his eyes.
“You sayin’ those poor devils deserved what happened to ’em?” Maug cried. “By the Realms, Hobi, there was children slaughtered in Ganthem’s Crossing!”
So, Elora thought, the village had a name.
“There was babies, man. An’ you know how ogres love the taste o’ meat that fresh!”
“Shut’cher damn hole, Maug,” snapped another. “There’s women here with babies, an’ folks with kids, who want no more’n for folks to mind their business an’ their manners so’s we can all eat a decent meal in peace!”
“We earned that land of ours fair an’ proper, Asa,” Maug said. “We shoulda stayed.”
“Go back, then,” came a challenge. “See how long you last before it’s your head decoratin’ a Faery pikestaff!”
A mug was hammered down on the tabletop, spilling much of its contents. Maug was pulled back down by his fellows before he could respond in kind or worse and cause an incident. The fort was peace-bonded, no weapons allowed to any save its own detachment of soldiers, and there were always proctors close at hand to quell any disturbance. This was only a flashfire altercation, yet Elora spotted two of those deputies looking their way. They’d already marked these refugees as potential trouble.
“Behave, Maug,” snapped one of the others, “else we’ll have the law toss you in with that damnable beastie for the night, see who walks out come the morn.”
“Meant no harm, not words nor deed,” Maug said, but from the way he cringed in his seat, Elora knew he took the threat seriously.
“Those raiders from Elfland, they meant plenty harm.”
“We lived in peace, our kind an’ theirs, for as long as always.”
“What can I say, Maug, or any of us? Times have changed. Looks like there be new powers beyond the Veil don’t care for peace. Don’t care for Daikinis. They want us gone from their land, or they want us dead.”
“Give it a rest, Hobi,” someone demanded. “You’re as bad as Maug.”
“Whole world’s gone to hell,” lamented Maug over a fresh beer.
“Teach you to believe in that damn ‘Sacred Princess’ nonsense, ya dumb duffer.”
“She was hope.”
“For who?” “Sure, not for us.” “B’sides, you seen that poster, she’s gone missing.” “Ahhh, but if we could find her…” “Dream on.” A clutch of voices, overlapping as one.
“More money there than all of us put together could dream of spending,” Hobi proposed enticingly, “if we had all our lifetimes to try. We could start again.”
“If wishes were pigs…” scoffed Asa.
“Where can we live,” said Maug, “that the lords of Greater Faery won’t claim for their own?”
“Among the Maizan, maybe,” Hobi offered.
“Aye,” agreed another at the table. “It’s said none of the Veil hold any sway in Maizan land.”
“How long’ll that last?”
“It’s better’n we got now.”
“Girly!” With a start, and after a second and third call for her attention, Elora realized that call was for her. “More ale!”
“It’s hope, damn it!” said Hobi, but Maug shook his grizzled head.
“We got no hope,” he said. “We got no hope.”
Elora topped off their mugs, cleared what plates were ready, allowed herself to drift around the periphery of the room. She didn’t need any special abilities to see now how forced and almost desperate the general good humor was. That it existed at all was because too many of those present refused to consider anything more than the immediate here and now. The analogy that came most readily to her mind was of the calm surface of the water, hiding the vicious riptides that lurked a body length below to doom any unwary swimmer. Ryn had told her a long time ago that one of the first things that young Wyrrn learned was how to recognize those treacherous strips of water because even the strongest swimmer could find himself in deadly trouble if he let himself be caught.
The image turned her thoughts to Ryn but there was still too much to do in the dining hall, she had no opportunity to slip away. What bothered her was hearing no news from Rool.
A stocky figure of average height paused a moment in the doorway, returning the wave of an officer at a front table and quickly threading his way through the crowd toward him. He caught Elora’s elbow as he went and gave her a rushed order for food and wat
er. He wore mail, his surcoat emblazoned with the sigil of the Sandeni cavalry corps and the piping of a captain. There was dust all over him, worked deep into the creases of his mouth, and he smelled of both human sweat and horse. He was armed with long sword, short sword, and daggers but he’d left his helmet at the door. His stiff gait and the way his legs bowed told her he’d just come from a long ride, as did the way he eased himself onto the proffered bench.
He drained a full glass of water the moment she set it before him, so she brought a large carafe with his meal, returning in time to catch him in mid-conversation.
“No word from the Paradise River patrol?” he was asking his fellow officer who’d cried the greeting.
“No reason to expect any, Sam, they’re not due for a week yet.”
“This is black business, Ran, an’ that’s no error. Baraclough’s Station, up by Tooley Crest…”
“I know the place.”
“Gone. As bad as Ganthem’s, so my scryscouts said.”
“You didn’t press on to see for yourself?”
“No, I did not. I’ll tell you what I just told the Colonel, I’ll not be throwing away good men we’ll likely be needing before winter.”
“Your scouts couldn’t establish contact with the Paradise patrol?”
The Captain shook his head. “That’s what’s got me scared. The raiders, I think they let us see Baraclough’s same as they did Ganthem’s, so’s we’d spread the word across the whole of these highlands. I’m also thinkin’, any settlement that isn’t down here by week’s end, they won’t be comin’ at all.” He blinked, surprised to find a bowl of steaming stew beneath his nose, plus a plate with extra bread. His hunger matched his thirst and he ate wolfishly, shoveling the food into his mouth without regard for its taste. He could have been eating swill for all he appeared to notice.
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