She smiled. “I have my wits. And as we’ve discovered tonight, I have my puppy.”
Obligingly, the wolfhound whoulfed at them from where he lay.
“Perhaps that’s why he made himself known to me,” she went on, “because he sensed a moment like this was at hand.”
“It’s too dangerous, Elora. There’s that Maizan price on your head, and who knows what repercussions from what happened at that village.” He left the line unfinished but Elora had no doubts as to the conclusion of his thoughts: and no matter how much you try to take his part I’ll not trust that dandy troubadour!
“I’ll be careful, Rool,” she told him, “I’ll be fine,” and then administered the coup de grâce. “Unless you have a better idea.”
He paced, he fumed, he worried a thumb knuckle, he would have ranted, but none of them wanted to draw the attention of the nightwatch sentries.
“Please don’t be foolish,” he implored at last, as his concession of her victory.
“Sooner you’re gone, the sooner you’re back. We’ll be waiting.”
With a rare formality, he took one of her fingers in his hand and bent at the waist in a proper court bow to kiss it. She took him in her palm and with the same regal gravity lifted him to her lips to bestow a kiss on his head where he’d been wounded weeks ago. She rose to her feet, placing Rool on her left shoulder, lifting the arm in invitation to the eagle.
Silent as any wraith, Bastian swooped out of the night, wings and body curving to embrace the air even as his claws did the same to Elora’s outheld arm. Any sane falconer would be wrapped thick in protective garb from shoulder to gauntleted wrist, yet Bastian’s touch was so considerate, his balance so exquisite, that the dagger points of his talons made hardly an indentation in the fine cloth of her blouse. He partially extended his nearside wing to form a ramp for Rool, who obligingly scampered to his perch straddling the eagle’s shoulders. Elora gave Bastian a gentle stroke along the feathers of his broad breast.
“Fly fast,” she told him. “Stay safe.”
“No less,” he replied, “than you.”
A powerful thrust of the legs propelled him from her shoulder. The moment he was clear, his wings pumped the air to gain him altitude by brute muscle power alone.
As the eagle swept across the yard Rool let out a banshee screech that turned heads and set dogs to barking throughout the stronghold, leaving Elora understandably impressed that such a wee bit of a creature could utter so caterwauling a noise.
And then she was alone. Until a weight pressed against her hip and her hand quite naturally cupped the hound’s massive head.
* * *
—
Duguay made no comment as she slipped gingerly over the threshold and hunkered down into the space he’d left her on their pallet. She’d stripped herself to pants and shirt in the washroom, divesting herself of everything that might make noise enough to wake him. She could see by her reflection in what passed there for a mirror that the body paint had survived the night remarkably intact, but even so, the twenty-odd strides to their room were the longest and most harrowing she could recall. She wedged herself into a corner and tucked her greatcloak snug about her until she was completely covered save for her head. She slept where she sat, as in a chair.
Paid for it, too, come the morning, with a grimace or a groan for every attempt to shift position. She knew he’d been awake when she returned and was grateful for his pretense, her estimation of him rising another notch when he said nothing about the absence of either Rool or Bastian. She was used, sadly, to being feared, for that was but a short step removed from the veneration accorded her in Angwyn as the Sacred Princess. It was a far different feeling to find herself, even now, respected. She still wasn’t sure she deserved it but found herself thankful just the same.
The troubadour had news, revealed after a hearty breakfast as Elora found herself led to a different floor of the hostelry and a much nicer room. Evidently Duguay’s performance had so impressed the innkeeper that, in return for a guarantee of a week’s run, minimum, she had upgraded them to a chamber with a door, together with space to move around in, a window overlooking the parade ground, and an actual bed.
By night, the pair of them worked from first seating to last, Duguay entertaining, Elora serving meals. She didn’t explain where she went for an hour or so afterward, nor did he pry, except to offer a sympathetic eye at the hollows on her features and the tension strung through her body when she returned. It wasn’t a huge bed, though a comfortable enough fit for two. The problem for Elora was that she’d never really shared one before. She of course had no siblings, and because of her status had never even shared one with a maid. She didn’t know what to expect of him or of herself and the first night she resolved the problem by curling up on the floor.
That day, Duguay took some of their earnings and presented her with a nightgown. Soft flannel, because the weather was showing far more signs of fall than summer, long-sleeved and floor length with an arrangement of delicate floral embroidery about the bodice. His generosity had limits, however. He would share the bed but not give it up.
The solution, since she didn’t much like the floor either, was to divide the bedding and the mattress equally, each of them rolling in a set of separate blankets as though they were separate sleeping bags. They might well touch as they moved about during the night, but only through a major thickness of cloth. This was a source of considerable amusement to Duguay, and of perplexed self-consciousness to Elora. She enjoyed his company when they were awake, and his proximity when they weren’t. She felt safe and secure to have him in reach, all Rool’s concerns notwithstanding. She acknowledged them but did not share them and as time passed saw less and less reason to give them any weight.
Her days quickly proved far from free, for Duguay took her role as his apprentice quite seriously. They didn’t work anywhere within the fort, she was far too shy for that, but each morning he would lead her along the river to find a stand of rocks or a clearing within a grove of standing trees. He started her with scales to warm up her voice, and exercises to unlimber her body, and then push both to their limits.
For all her initial protestations, Elora discovered that she had a voice, and a surprisingly good one. It lacked the purity of classic sopranos, she was no match for the soloists among the stronghold choir and probably not for any of the chorus, either. Those weren’t the kind of songs she sang, anyway. Hers was a bar voice, meant for smoky rooms where the competition was wine and conversation and the occasional thump of knuckles on nose, and the counterpoint to a good line of verse was the crash of pewter dinnerware, or worse, china, hitting the floor. She had a fairly broad range for someone without training, and she hit her notes the way a master swordsman crosses blades, sharp and clear and with an edge that cuts. Better yet, she had the endurance to sustain those notes and the diaphragm strength to make them heard.
It was her passion, though, that had the power to make her memorable. Duguay found within her the talent to present a love song with the innocence of someone who’d never even been kissed, for whom the whole of life was nothing but possibilities and dreams. Or lament a loss so piercing she’d surely wrest tears from hardened campaigners. By lesson, and example in the evenings when he took the stage, Duguay taught her to gauge the mood of her audience and pitch her performance accordingly, sedate one moment, roguish the next, drawing heat from them or striking out at them with her own, as if it was a weapon.
At the same time he made improvements to the design of her makeup, offered suggestions for her costuming, switching conversational subjects from one line to the next, as though they all ran along parallel tracks, allowing him to jump randomly from one to another and back again.
“Do you really believe this works?” she asked him.
“I didn’t hear any shouts of discovery last night, or the night before, or during either day.”
“That’s because everyone was looking at you.”
“I rest my case. As my apprentice, you have a place and an identity. Your function is to draw attention to yourself, because that draws attention to me, and that is how we bards earn our living. But when people look at you, they see what they expect to see, a troubadour in training, not that far removed—in the eyes of so-called quality folk—from the village tart. They can’t be bothered to look past the prejudice to see the fugitive beneath, especially if that fugitive is supposed to be some kind of royalty. They resolve the conundrum according to their bias: royalty dresses a certain way, acts a certain way, you neither dress nor act like royalty, therefore you cannot be royalty. Therefore, ultimately, you cannot be the personage everyone’s looking for. By contrast, a girl traveling alone, folks might wonder why. Wondering why, they’ll wonder who you are, where you hail from, what you’re doing here. Wondering who and where and what, they’ll pick at any disguise until they know.”
“You’re as twisted a trickster as a brownie.”
“I trust that’s a compliment. A touch more kohl for the eyes, I daresay, to seat them deeper in the sockets, hmnh yes, and enhance your general air of exotica and mystery.”
“Will this ever come off?” she wondered with a dollop of concern.
“Undoubtedly, and at the most inconvenient moment.”
“Oh joy.”
“First law of the universe, everybody knows that—Whatever can go wrong, will. Or is it, I’m making this up as I go along? Hoy, Elora, stop giggling there, you wretched creature, these lines have to run straight.” Then, a while later: “How’s your friend?”
She knew whom he meant. “Better,” she said. “Looks worse than ever but I’ve done what I could for his wounds.”
“Obviously, from your tone and expression, there’s more to it.”
“Someone did this to him, Duguay.”
“That’s the way of sorcery, ’lora. There always has to be a victim.”
“Every spell has its counter!”
“That’s the hope. But does every poison have an antidote, every sickness a cure?”
“You sound like all the people in the fort.”
“All? In what way?”
“They’re giving up. A lot of them have given up. It’s like they’re dead, only none of them knows it yet.”
“So do something about it!”
“I’d love to! If I only had the power and the knowledge I could cage the Maizan before they could conquer another city, and make the Great Realms behave. There was a Demon Queen once named Bavmorda….”
“I’ve heard songs about her.”
“I’ll just bet. She was as evil as could be but there are times I’d love nothing more than to wave my arms like her and cry the proper arrangement of syllables, and presto, turn a whole invading army into pigs.”
“And that would make things right, you figure?”
“It’s a place to start, isn’t it? At least it’d bring some order and peace to people’s lives.”
“Is that what they want?”
“Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t anyone?”
“Blessed if I know, Elora. Why not find out for yourself? That’s what a bard does mostly—listen, to the ebb and flow of conversation, who’s doing what to whom and why, where folk come from, what they dream of, what they fear. Stir it all together, offer it back to them in songs to make them laugh or cry or think, but always to feel. I mean, it’s all very well to be a legend”—she shot him a sharp and piercing glance from under lowered lids—“but who do you think spreads the word?”
His face moved close to hers, his breath warm across her cheek. Somehow, though, the touch of it on her skin made her shiver as a chill breeze never did.
“Tonight, I think,” he mused, “we’ll go a bit bloody.”
He was talking about lip paint and nail polish and quickly mixed a color that was both darker and more red than burgundy wine. The application made her mouth stand out dramatically, even against the backdrop of her painted face, and he used a variation on the shade to accent her eyes.
“I can do this,” she told him as he expertly drew a brush across her nails.
“It’s my pleasure,” was his offhand reply.
Mine, too. The thought popped unbidden into her head.
Her hand lay on his thigh, just above the knee, the two of them sharing a seat on a flat-topped slab of a boulder overlooking the river. There weren’t many trees along this stretch of bank, the ground cover was a mixture of grass and wildflowers. He finished her last finger—making a better job of it, she conceded easily to herself, than I possibly could—but otherwise made no move. Toward her or away. His gaze had to be intense, though every other aspect of his body was casual and relaxed, but Elora couldn’t bring herself to lift her eyes to his for confirmation.
He extended a pair of fingers and lightly stroked the tendons of her hand as if they were guitar strings.
She started to say “please,” but couldn’t decide what was to come next: “stop” or “more.” That was when the dog coughed.
The wolfhound sat at a discreet remove, tongue lolling as direct sunlight warmed his sable coat. He was the picture of innocence and as effective a mood breaker as any chaperon.
“How does anything that big”—Duguay marveled—“approach so silently?”
He patted her hand, a more companionable gesture, and proceeded to pack away his pots and potions. “I must say, Elora,” he told her, “you make the most damnably infernal friends.”
“Being one, Master Faralorn”—she laughed—“you should know.”
Where the hound roamed, Luc-Jon wasn’t far behind. Or perhaps it was that he knew the hound would invariably lead him to Elora. Either way, she didn’t mind as the young man rambled over to where she sat, Duguay having returned to the fort to prepare for this evening’s performance.
The sky was supernally clear, with a crispness to the air that held more than a promise of winter, though by the calendar it wasn’t yet autumn. Luc-Jon pulled his collar tight and made to gather Elora close, to share some of that warmth. He was tactful enough not to press the point when she didn’t take his hint.
“Cold?” he inquired.
“Is it?” she queried back. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Dressed like that, I figured you’d be the first.”
She dropped her eyes and felt her cheeks grow warm. He left her in peace again and occupied himself by tossing a stick for the hound to fetch. The dog hardly seemed to make an effort, yet not a single time in a half-score tries did that stick touch the ground once it had been thrown. The hound would mark its line of flight and be there to catch it, eating up the distance between with a stride that would put a horse to shame.
“Bears move like that’cha know,” said Luc-Jon.
“How do you mean?”
“Ya sees ’em,” Luc-Jon explained, “they look like these big, plush, stuffy toys, all fat an’ lazy like. They see something they want, summat that angers ’em like, they get really rollin’, boy you better watch out. They’ll be on you quick as lightning.”
He tried to fake a toss, but the hound merely gave him a look of such patience and contempt that Luc-Jon didn’t even try the bluff he’d prepared but heaved the piece of wood as far as he could.
“Do you work with dogs?” Elora asked him.
“Na, jus’ like ’em is all. I’m an apprentice.”
“Me, too.”
“So, you’ll sing an’ play someday, like hisself in there?”
She shrugged and shifted the subject back to him. “What about you?”
“Scribe, that’s me.”
“You’re not!”
“What, I look that much a thickwit?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.” She flushed, she stammered, she lost
all pretense of mystery and found herself once more acting her age. “It’s just, I thought, I mean, I am, I am so sorry.”
“Not to worry,” he told her, enjoying her discomfiture even as he tried his best to ease it. “Ain’t the first to react that way, given the way I talk. I know the woods—can’t grow up here’bouts without learnin’ that—know animals. I can ride fair an’ I’m decent with bow and blade; I can stand my place with the militia. But the best at what I do is letters. A sure an’ elegant hand, my master says.”
“I’m impressed.”
“First one in my whole house, I am, can read an’ write. First one as far back as any can remember in my family. Problem is, the knack I got with words on paper, it don’t carry over as easy to speech.”
“What do you write?”
They were strolling with apparent aimlessness toward the compound, the wolfhound pacing behind them. Luc-Jon took her hand in his for a bit, she didn’t mind, but he let her loose in short order because he used his hands when he spoke, weaving his pictures like a born storyteller with gestures as well as words.
“Letters, o’ course. I read ’em also, them what arrive in the post. Contracts an’ the like, though the master’s seal has to go on all formal documents, to make ’em all proper an’ legal. An’ it’s fun sometimes, t’ take the stories I hear an’ put ’em down in ink.”
He paused, but clearly there was more to tell, so Elora prompted him with her expression. He looked endearingly shy.
“I change ’em when I do. A little.”
“In what way?”
“T’ add some spice, maybe make the characters a little more like local folk might recognize but also mix in some of what I’ve heard an’ read ’bout folks from other lands. Sort of what the world might be if it was all mine to make over. I mean”—another pause as he searched around him for inspiration—“this is home an’ all, an’ it’s a place of wonder for those with wit to truly look, but it’s still wood an’ hill an’ meadow an’ stream, as it’s been my whole life. The same old, same old. My dreams, they’re full of all these places I’ve never seen. If I can make ’em real in my words, it’s as good as goin’.”
Shadow Dawn Page 22