Lark and Wren bv-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  Tempting; it was the easy way out. It was the way her mother would have counseled. Stick with the sure thing.

  But the thought of Stara's counsel made her stiffen her back. Maybe she should-but no. That wasn't what she wanted to do. It wasn't enough. And look where Stara's counsel had gotten her.

  She gave herself a mental shake, and squared her shoulders under her pack. It wasn't enough-and besides, practically speaking, this fiddling about was a fine life in the middle of summer, but when winter came, she'd be leading a pretty miserable existence. Many inns closed entirely in the winter, and it would be much harder to travel then. Her pace would be cut to half, or a third, of what it was now. She'd be spending a lot of time begging shelter from farmers along the road. Some of them were friendly; some weren't. Then there were robbers, highwaymen, bandits-she hadn't run afoul of any of them yet, but that had been because she was lucky and didn't look worth robbing. In winter, anything was worth robbing.

  No, there was no hope for it. The original plan was the best.

  She took a deep breath, remembered the Ghost-with a bit of a chuckle to think that she was finding comfort in the memory of that creature-and joined the stream of humanity heading into the city.

  She kept her eyes on the road and the back of the cart in front of her, watching to make sure she didn't step in anything. The pace slowed as people crowded closer and closer together, finally dropping to a crawl as the road reached the outskirts of the city. There was no wall, but there was a guard of some kind on the roadway, and everyone had to stop and talk to him for a moment. Rune was behind a man with an ox cart full of sacks of new potatoes, so she didn't hear what the guard asked before she reached him herself.

  A wooden barrier dropped down in front of her, startling her into jumping back. The guard, a middle-aged, paunchy fellow, yawned and examined her with a bored squint, picking his teeth with his fingernail. She waited, stifling a cough, as he picked up a piece of board with paper fastened to it; a list of some kind. He studied it, then her, then it again.

  "Name?" he said, finally.

  "Rune," she replied, wishing her nose didn't itch. She was afraid to scratch it, lest he decide she meant something rude by the gesture. He scribbled a few things on the list in his hand.

  "Free, indentured or Guild?" came the next question. She wrinkled her forehead for a moment, puzzled by that middle term. He looked at her impatiently, and swatted at a horsefly that was buzzing around his ears.

  "What's matter, boy?" he barked. "Deaf? Or dumb?"

  For a moment she was confused, until she remembered that she had decided to wear her loose shirt, vest, and breeches rather than attract unwelcome attention. "Boy," was her. But what on Earth was he asking her? Well, she wasn't Guild, and if she didn't know what "indentured" was, she probably wasn't that, either. "No, sir," she said, hesitantly. "I-uh-"

  "Then answer the question! Free, indentured or Guild?" He swatted at the fly again.

  "Free, sir." She was relieved to see him make another note. He didn't seem angry with her, just tired and impatient. Well, she was pretty hot and tired herself; she felt a trickle of sweat running down the back of her neck, and her feet hurt.

  "From Westhaven, sir," she added. "My mother is Stara at the Hungry Bear."

  He noted that, too.

  "Profession?" That at least she could answer. She touched the strap of Lady Rose and replied with more confidence.

  "Fiddler, sir. Musician, sir, but not Guild."

  He gave her another one of those sharp glances. "Passing through, planning to stay a while?"

  She shook her head. "Going to stay, sir. Through winter, anyway."

  He snorted. "Right. They all are. All right, boy. You bein' not Guild, you can busk in the street, or you can take up with a common inn or a pleasure-house, but you can't take no gentry inns an' no gentry jobs 'less you get Guild permission, an' you stay outa the parks-an' you got a three-day to get a permit. After that, if you be caught street-buskin', you get fined, maybe thrown in gaol. Here." He shoved a chip of colored wood at her with a string around it. She took it, bewildered. "That shows what day ye come in. Show it when yer buskin' or when innkeeper asks fer it, till ye get yer permit. Mind what I said. Get that permit." He raised the barrier, and she stepped gingerly past him and into the town.

  "An' don't think t' come back through an' get another chit!" he shouted after her. "Yer down on the list! Constables will know!"

  Constables? What on Earth is a constable? She nodded as if she understood, and got out of the way of a man leading a donkey who showed the guard a piece of paper and was waved through. The fellow with the ox cart had disappeared into the warren of streets that led from the guard-post, and she moved off to the side of the road and the shade of some kind of storage building to study the situation.

  She stood at the edge of a semicircular area paved with flat stones, similar to streets she had seen in some of the larger villages and in the courtyards of the Church hostels. That only made sense; with all these people, a dirt street would be mud at the first bit of rain, and dust the rest of the time. Storage buildings, padlocked and closed up, made a kind of barricade between the open fields and the edge of town. The streets led between more of these buildings, with no sign of houses or those inns the guard spoke of.

  She watched the steady stream of travelers carefully as she rubbed her nose, looking for a system in the way people who seemed to know what they were doing selected one of the streets leading from this crossing.

  She took off her hat and fanned herself with it, the sweat she had worked up cooling in the shade of the building. No one seemed inclined to make her move on, which was a relief. Finally she thought she had a pattern worked out. There weren't so many streets as she had thought; just a half dozen or so. The people with the bits of paper, the ones with beasts laden with foodstuffs, were taking the street farthest left.

  That probably leads to a market. There won't be any inns there; too noisy and too smelly.

  The three streets on the right were being followed by folks who were plainly Church, Guild or noble; mounted and well-dressed. The street directly before her was taken only by commoner folk, or by guards, they were all people who'd been waved through without being stopped, so it probably led to homes. A wide assortment of folks, the kind questioned by the guard before he let them in, were taking the market-street or the one next to it. After a moment, she decided to take the latter.

  She made her way across the fan-shaped crossing-area, darting under the noses of placid oxen, following in the wake of a peddler leading a donkey loaded with what looked like rolls of cloth. As she had hoped, he took that second street, and she continued to follow him, being jostled at every turn before she got the knack of avoiding people. It was a little like a dance; you had to watch what they were going to do, but there was a kind of rhythm to it, although she lost her guide before she figured it all out. After a few moments, she settled into the pace, a kind of bobbing walk in which she took steps far shorter than she was used to, and began looking around her with interest.

  All the buildings here were of wood with slate roofs, two or three stories tall; the upper stories overhung the street, and some were near enough to each other that folk sat in their open windows and gossiped above the heads of the the crowd like neighbors over a fence. For the most part there was scarcely enough room for a dog to squeeze between the buildings, and the street itself was several degrees darker for being overshadowed. A gutter ran down the center of the street, and she assumed at first that it was for the dung of the beasts-but a moment later, she saw a little old man with a barrow and a shovel, adroitly skipping about his side of the street and scooping up every fragrant horse-apple in sight, often before anyone had a chance to tread on it.

  He acted as if he was collecting something valuable; he certainly didn't miss much. And what he didn't get, the sparrows lining the rooftops swooped down on, scattered it, and picked it over, looking for undigested grain.

  Be
hind the fellow with the barrow came another, with a dog cart drawn by a huge mongrel, holding a barrel with boards bulging and sprung so that it leaked water in every direction. Rune stared at it, aghast at what she thought was his loss through foolishness or senility-and then realized it was on purpose. The water washed whatever the dung-collector had missed into the gutter, where it ran away, somewhere.

  It wasn't the arrangement itself that caught her by surprise, it was what it implied. Here were people who spent all day, every day, presumably making a living-keeping the streets clean. The very idea would have made someone from her own village stare and question the sanity of anyone who proposed such an outlandish notion. This was not just a new world she'd jumped into, it was one that entertained things she'd never even dreamed of as commonplaces.

  She felt dizzy, rootless-and terribly alone. How could she have enough in common with these townsfolk to even begin to entertain them?

  But the next moment she heard the familiar sounds of a jig she knew well-"Half a Penny"-played on some kind of fife or pipe. She craned her neck to try and spot the player, waiting impatiently for the flow of the traffic to take her close enough to see him. Finally she spotted him, wedged in a little nook under the overhanging second story of one of the houses, with his hat on the stones in front of him, and a bit of paper pinned to his hat. He was surrounded by a mix of people, none very well-born, but of all ages and trades, clapping in time to his piping.

  She focused on that brightly colored bit of paper. That must be the permit the guard told me I had to get-

  She tried to get over to him, to ask him where he'd gotten it, but the crowd carried her past and she wasn't sure enough of her way to try and fight her way back. Still, his hat had held a fair amount of coin-which meant that someone thought country jigs were good enough entertainment. . . .

  The houses began to hold shops on the lower level, with young 'prentices outside, crying the contents. The street widened a bit as well, and she began to spot roving peddlers of the sort that walked the Faires, trays of goods carried about their necks. The peddlers seemed mostly to be crying foodstuffs: meat pies, roast turnips, nuts; bread-and-cheese, muffins, and sweets. One of them passed near enough to her that she got a good whiff of his meat-pies, and the aroma made her stomach growl and her mouth water. It had been a long time since noon and her hoarded turnip.

  But it wasn't only caution that kept her from reaching for her purse of coppers; it was common sense. No use in letting any thief know where her money was; she'd felt ghostly fingers plucking at her outer sash-belt a number of times, and at her pack, but the clever knots she'd tied the pack with foiled them, and the pouch, lean as it was, she had tucked inside her belt. If she let pickpockets see where that pouch was, she had a shrewd idea it wouldn't stay there long. She mentally blessed Raven for warning her to make a cloth belt to wear inside her clothes for most of any money she had, once she was on the road.

  "It won't keep you safe from true robbers," he'd said, "Not the kind that hit you over the head and strip you-but it'll save you from cut-purses."

  There was more advice he'd given her, and now that she was a little more used to the city, some of it was coming back, though she hadn't paid a lot of attention to it originally. The lessons in music had seemed a lot more important.

  "Never ask for directions except from somebody wearing a uniform or from an innkeeper. If you find yourself on a street that's growing deserted, turn around and retrace your steps quickly, especially if the street seems very dirty and dark, with the buildings closed up or in bad repair. If a friendly passerby comes up out of nowhere and offers to help you, ignore him; walk away from him or get by him before he can touch you. Never do anything that marks you as a stranger, especially as a stranger from the country. That'll show you as an easy mark for robbers or worse."

  All right then, exactly how was she going to find an inn, and a place where she might be able to set herself up as the resident musician?

  This was a street of shops-but sooner or later there had to be an inn, didn't there?

  Maybe. Then again, maybe not. There were other streets branching off this one; maybe the inns were on these side streets. She'd never know-

  She spotted a dusty hat just ahead of her; a hat that had once been bright red, but had faded to a soft rose under sun and rain. Something about the set of the rooster feathers in it seemed familiar; when the crowd parted a little, she realized that it belonged to one of the journeymen who had been in the same inn she'd played at last night, and had tossed her a copper when she played the tune he'd requested.

  She'd overheard him talking quite a bit to a fellow in the Apothecary's Guild. She remembered now that he had said he wasn't from Nolton himself, but he was familiar with the city, and had recommended a number of inns and had given directions to the other man. She hadn't paid attention then-the more fool her-she'd thought she would have no trouble, as an inn-brat herself, in finding plenty of places.

  But he bobbed along in the crowd with a purposeful stride; he obviously knew exactly where he was going. An inn? It was very likely, given the time of day. And any inn he frequented would likely be the sort where her playing would be welcome.

  She darted between two goodwives with shopping baskets over their arms, and scraped along a shop front past a clutch of slower-paced old men who frowned at her as she scooted by. The feathers bounced in the breeze just ahead of her, tantalizingly near, yet far enough away that she could all too easily lose their owner in the press. She found herself stuck behind a brown-clad, overweight nursemaid with a gaggle of chattering children on their way home from the Church school. The two eldest, both girls, one in scarlet and one in blue, and both wearing clothing that cost more than every item she'd ever owned in her life bundled together, looked down their noses at her in a vaguely threatening fashion when she made as if to get past them. She decided not to try to push her way by. They might think she was a thief, and get a guard or something. In fact, they might do it just to be spiteful; the pinched look about their eyes put her in mind of some of the more disagreeable village girls. She loitered behind them, and fumed.

  But they were moving awfully slow, as the nursemaid called back the littler ones from darting explorations of store fronts, time and time again. The rooster feathers were bobbing away, getting ahead of her, their owner making a faster pace than she dared.

  Then, suddenly, as she strained her neck and her eyes, trying to keep them in sight, Red-Hat turned into a side street, the rooster feathers swishing jauntily as he ducked his head to cut across the flow of traffic. Then hat and feathers and all disappeared behind a building.

  Oh, no- Heedless now of what the unfriendly girls might say or do, Rune dashed between them at the first break, ignoring their gasps of outrage as she wormed her way through the crowd to the place where Red-Hat had vanished. She used her elbows and thin body to advantage, ignoring the protests of those whose feet she stepped on or who got an elbow in the ribs, taking care only to protect Lady Rose and her pack.

  She broke out of the crowd directly under the nose of a coach horse.

  It snorted in surprise, and came to a hoof-clattering halt. She flung herself against the wall, plastering herself against the brick to let the coach pass. The driver cursed her and the other foot-travelers roundly, but the well-trained, placid horse simply snorted again at her, as if to register his surprise when she had appeared under his nose, and ignored her once she was out of his way. The wheels of the coach rumbled by her feet, missing them by scant inches, the driver now too busy cursing at the other folk in his way to pay any more attention to her.

  She sighed, and wiped her sweating brow when he had passed. That was a lot closer than she cared to come to getting run over, and if the horse hadn't been a particularly stolid beast, she could have gotten trampled or started a runaway. But now that the coach was gone, she saw that this street carried a lot less traffic than the main street; it should be easy to find Red-Hat.

  She peered
down the cobblestone street, but the conspicuous hat was nowhere to be seen. For a moment her heart sank, but then she raised her eyes a little, and couldn't help but grin. There, not twenty feet from her, swung a big, hand-painted sign proclaiming the "Crowned Corn Public House, Drink and Vittles," superimposed over a garish yellow painting of a barley-sheaf with a crown holding the straws in place. Beside it swung a huge wooden mug with carved and white-painted foam spilling over the sides, for the benefit of the illiterate. Whether or not Red Hat was in there, the presence of the beer mug meant that it was a "common" place, and its clientele shouldn't be too different from the travelers she'd been entertaining. If she couldn't strike up a bargain here, she could probably get directions to a place that could use a musician. If the owner proved unfriendly, at least now she knew that the inns were on the side streets.