Lark and Wren bv-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  "And who is this 'Robin'?" she asked curiously.

  "Me," Gwyna said, flushing again. "Gypsies don't like strangers knowing their real names, so we take names that anyone can use, names that say something about what our Craft is. A horse-tamer might be Roan, Tamer, or Cob, for instance. All musicians take bird-names, and the Free Bards have started doing the same, because it makes it harder for the Church and cities to keep track of us for taxes and tithes and-other things."

  Yes, and I can imagine what those other things are. Trouble like I got myself into.

  She turned a face back to Rune that might never have been flushed, once again the cheerful, careless girl she'd been a moment earlier. "Talaysen is Wren, Erdric is Owl, I'm Robin, Daran-that's the tall fellow that knew you-is Heron, Alain is Sparrow, Aysah is Nightingale. My cousin, the one who's making up your medicines, is Redbird. Reshan is Raven, you know him, too, the fellow who looks like a bandit. He's not here yet; we expect him in about a week." She tilted her head to one side, and surveyed Rune thoughtfully. "We need a name for you, although I think Wren tagged you with the one that will stick. Lark. Lady Lark."

  Rune rolled the flavor of it around on her tongue, and decided she liked it. Not that she was likely to have much choice in the matter. . . . These folk tended to hit you like a wild wind, and like the wind, they took you where they wanted, without warning.

  There's a song in that-

  But she was not allowed to catch it; not yet. Erdric advanced across the tent-floor towards her, guitar in hand, and a look of determination on his face. She was a bit surprised at that; she hadn't thought there was anything anyone could want from her as badly as all that.

  "My voice isn't what it was," Erdric said, as he sat down beside her. "It's going on the top and the bottom, and frankly, the best way I can coax money from listeners is with comedy. Now, I understand you have about a dozen comic songs that no one else knows. That's nothing short of a miracle, especially for me. You've no idea how hard it is to find comic songs."

  "So the time's come to earn my bread, hmm?" she asked. He nodded.

  "If you can't go out, you should share your songs with those that need them," Erdric replied. "I do a love song well enough, but I've no gift for satire. Besides, can you see a dried-up old stick like me a-singing a love ballad?" He snorted. "I'll give the love songs to you youngsters. You teach me your comedy. I promise you, I'll do justice to it."

  "All right, that's only fair," she acknowledged. "Let's start with 'Two Fair Maids.' "

  The Free Bards all came trickling back by ones and twos as the sun set, but only to eat and drink and rest a bit, and then they were off again. Mostly they didn't even stop to talk, although some of them did change into slightly richer clothing, and the dancers changed into much gaudier gear.

  Erdric, his grandson, and Gwyna did quite a bit more than merely "watch the tent," she noticed. There was plain food and drink waiting for anyone who hadn't eaten at the Faire-though those were few, since it seemed a musician could usually coax at least a free meal out of a cook-tent owner by playing at his site. Still, there was fresh bread, cheese, and fresh raw vegetables waiting for any who needed it, and plenty of cold, clean water. And when darkness fell, it was Gwyna and Erdric who saw to it that the lanterns were lit, that there was a fire burning outside the tent entrance, and that torches were placed up the path leading to the Free Bard enclave to guide the wanderers home no matter how weary they might be.

  Talaysen had not returned with the rest; he came in well after dark, and threw himself down on the cushions next to Rune with a sigh. He looked very tired, and just a trifle angry, though she couldn't think why that would be. Erdric brought him wine without his asking for it, and another dose of medicine for Rune, which she drank without thinking about it.

  "A long day, Master Wren?" Erdric asked, sympathetically. "Anything we can do?"

  "Very long," Talaysen replied. "Long enough that I shall go and steal the use of the bath before anyone else returns. And then, apprentice-" he cocked an eyebrow at Rune "-you'll teach me in that Ghost song." He drained half the mug in a single gulp. "There's been a lot of rumor around the Faire about the boy-or girl, the rumors differ-who won the trials yesterday, and yet has vanished quite out of ken. No one is talking, and no one is telling the truth." His expression grew just a little angrier. "The Guild judges presented the winners today, and they had their exhibition-and they all looked so damned smug I wanted to break their instruments over their heads. I intend the Guild to know you're with us and if they touch you, there'll be equal retribution."

  "Equal retribution?" Rune asked, swallowing a lump that had appeared in her throat when he'd mentioned broken instruments.

  "When Master Wren came to us, the Guild didn't like it," Gwyna said, bringing Talaysen a slice of bread and cheese. " 'Twas at this very Faire that he first began to play with us in public. He wasn't calling himself Gwydain, but the Guildsmen knew him anyway. They set on him-they didn't break his arm, but they almost broke his head. We Gypsies went after every Guild Bard we caught alone the next day."

  Talaysen shook his head. "It was all I could do to keep them from setting on the Guildsmen with knives instead of fists."

  Erdric laughed, but it wasn't a laugh of humor. "If they'd hurt you more than bruises, you wouldn't have. They didn't dare walk the Faire without a guard-even when they wandered about in twos and threes, they're so soft 'twas no great task to beat them all black and blue. When we reckoned they'd gotten the point and when they started hiring great guards to go about with 'em, we left them alone. They haven't touched one of us since, any place there're are Gypsies about."

  "But elsewhere?" Rune winced as her head throbbed. "Gypsies and Free Bards can't be everywhere."

  "Quite true, but I doubt that's occurred to them," Talaysen said. "At any rate"-he flicked a drop of water at her from his mug-"there. You're Rune no more. Rune is gone; Lark stands-or rather, sits-in her place. The quarrel the Bardic Guild has is with Rune, and I don't know anyone by that name."

  "As you say, Master," she replied, mock-meekly.

  He saw through the seeming, and grinned. "I'm for a bath. Then the song; I'll see it sung all over the Faire tomorrow, and they'll know you're ours. When you come out with the rest of us in a week or two, they'll know better than to touch you."

  "Come out? In two weeks?" she exclaimed. "But my arm-"

  "Hasn't hurt your voice any," Talaysen replied. "You can come with me and sing the female parts; teach me the rest of your songs, and I'll play while you sing." He fixed her with a fierce glare. "You're a Free Bard, aren't you?"

  She nodded, slowly.

  "Then you stand up to the Guild, to the Faire, to everyone; you stand up to them, and you let them know that nothing keeps a Free Bard from her music!" He looked around at the rest of the Free Bards gathered in the tent; so did Rune, and she saw every head nodding in agreement.

  "Yes, sir!" she replied, with more bravery than she felt. She was afraid of the Guild; of the bullies that the Guild could hire, of the connection the Guild seemed to have with the Church. And the Church was everywhere. If the Church took a mind to get involved, no silly renaming would make her safe.

  She hadn't been so shaken since Westhaven, when those boys had tried to rape her.

  Talaysen seemed to sense her fear. He reached forward and took her good hand in his. "Believe in us, Lady Lark," he said, his voice trembling with intensity. "Believe in us-and believe in yourself. Together we can do anything, so long as we believe it. I know. Trust me."

  She looked into his green eyes, deep as the sea, and as restless, hiding as many things beneath their surface, and revealing some of them to her. There was passion there, that he probably didn't display very often. She found herself smiling, tremulously.

  And nodded, because she couldn't speak.

  He took that at face value; released her hand, and pulled himself up to his feet. "I'll be back," he said gravely, but with a twinkle. "And the apprentice had bette
r be ready to teach when I return." He left the tent with a remarkably light step, and her eyes followed him.

  When she pulled her eyes back to the rest, Rune didn't miss the significant glance that Erdric and Gwyna exchanged, but somehow she didn't resent it. Talaysen, though, might. She remembered all the questions that Sparrow had asked, and the tone of them, and decided to keep her observations to herself. It was more than enough that the greatest living Bard had taken her as his apprentice. Anything else would either happen or not happen.

  A week later, it was Talaysen's turn to mind the tent, that duty shared by Rune's old friend Raven.

  Raven had appeared the previous evening, to be greeted by all of his kin with loud and enthusiastic cries, and then underwent a series of kisses and backslapping greetings with each of the Free Bards.

  Then he was brought to Rune's corner of the tent; she hadn't seen who had come in and had been dying of curiosity to see who it was. Raven was loudly pleased to see her, dismayed to see the fading marks of her beating, and angered by what had happened. It was all Talaysen and the others could do to keep him from charging out then and there, and beating up a few of the Guild Bards in retaliation. The judges in particular; he had the same notion as Talaysen, to break their instruments over their heads.

  They managed to calm him, but after due thought, he judged that it was best he not go playing in the "streets" for a while, so he took his tent-duty early. He played mock-court to Rune, who blushed to think that she'd ever thought he might want to be her lover.

  I didn't know anything then, she realized, as he bowed over her hand, but kept a sharp watch for Nightingale. She knew that once Nightingale appeared, he'd leave her side in a moment. She was not his type; not even in the Gypsy-garb she'd taken to wearing, finding skirts and loose blouses much more suited to handling one-handed than breeches and vests. All of his gallantry was in fun, and designed to keep her distracted and in good humor.

  Oddly enough, Talaysen seemed to take Raven's mock-courtship seriously. He watched them with a faint frown on his face most of the morning. After lunch, he took the younger man aside and had a long talk with him. What they said, Rune had no idea, until Raven returned with a face full of suppressed merriment and his hands full of her lunch and her medicines.

  "I've never in all me life had quite such a not-lecture," he whispered to her, when Talaysen had gone to see about something. "He takes being your Master right seriously, young Rune. I've just been warned that if I intend to break your heart by flirting with you, your Master there will be most unamused. He seems to think a broken heart would interfere more with your learning than yon broken arm. In fact, he offered to trade me a broken head for a broken heart."

  Rune didn't know whether to gape or giggle; she finally did both. Talaysen found them both laughing, as Rune poked fun at Raven's gallantry, and Raven pretended to be crushed. Talaysen immediately relaxed.

  But then he shooed Raven off and sat down beside her himself.

  "It's time we had a real lesson," he said. "If you're going to insist I act like a Master, I'll give you a Master's lessoning." He then began a ruthless interrogation, having Rune go over every song she'd ever written. First he had her sing them until he'd picked them up, then he'd critique them, with more skill-and (which surprised her) he criticized them much harder even than Brother Pell had.

  Of her comic songs, he said, "It's all very well to have a set of those for busking during the day, either in cities or at Faires, but there's more to music than parody, and you very well know it. If you're going to be a Bard, you have to live up to the title. You can't confine yourself to something as limited as one style; you can't even be known for just one style. You have to know all of them, and people must be aware that you're versed in all of them."

  Of "Fiddler Girl," he approved of the tune, except that-"It's too limited. You need to expand your bridges into a whole new set of tunes. Make the listener feel what it was like to fiddle all night long, with Death waiting if you slipped! In fact, don't ever play it twice the same. Improvise! Match your fiddle-music to the crowd, play scraps of what you played then, so that they recognize you're recreating the experience, you're not just telling someone else's story."

  And of the lyrics, he was a little kinder, but he felt that they were too difficult to sing for most people. "You and I and most of the Free Bards can manage them-if we're sober, if we aren't having a tongue-tied day-but what about the poor busker in the street? They look as if you just wrote them down with no notion of how hard they'd be to sing."

  When she admitted that was exactly what she'd done, he shook his head at her. "At least recite them first. Nothing's ever carved in stone, Rune. Be willing to change."

  The rest of her serious songs he dismissed as being "good for filling in between difficult numbers. Easy songs with ordinary lyrics." Those were the ones she'd composed according to Brother Pell's rules for his class, and while it hurt a bit to have them dismissed as "ordinary," it didn't hurt as much as it might have. She'd chafed more than a bit at those rules; to have the things she'd done right out of her head given some praise, and the ones she'd done according to the "rules" called "common" wasn't so bad. . . .

  Or at least, it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

  Then he set her a task: write him a song, something about elves. "They're always popular," he said. "Try something-where a ruler makes a bargain with an elf, then breaks it. Make the retribution something original. No thunder and lightning, being turned into a toad, or dragged off to hell. None of that nonsense; it's trite."

  She nodded, and set to it as soon as he left. But she could see that he had not lied to her. He was not going to be an easy Master.

  Talaysen left his instruments in the tent, and walked off into the Faire with nothing about him to identify who or what he was. He preferred to leave it that way, given that he was going to visit the cathedral-and that the Bardic Guild tent was pitched right up against the cathedral walls. Of course, there was always the chance that one of his old colleagues would recognize him, but now, at night, that chance was vanishingly slim. They would all be entertaining the high and the wealthy-either their own masters, or someone who had hired them for the night. The few that weren't would be huddled together in self-satisfied smugness-though perhaps that attitude might be marred a little, since he'd begun singing "Fiddler Girl" about the Faire. The real story of the contest was spreading, through the medium of the Free Bards and the gypsies. In another couple of weeks it should be safe enough for Rune to show her face at this Faire.

  He was worried about his young charge, though, because she troubled him. So he was going to talk with an old friend, one who had known him for most of his life, to see if she could help him to sort his thoughts out.

  He skirted the bounds of the Guild tent carefully, even though a confrontation was unlikely. His bones were much older than the last time he'd been beaten, and they didn't heal as quickly anymore. But the tent was dark; no one holding revels in there, not at the moment. Just as well, really.

  He sought out a special gate in the cathedral wall, and opened it with a key he took from his belt-pouch, locking the gate behind him again once he'd entered. The well-oiled mechanism made hardly a sound, but something alerted the guardian of that gate, who came out of the building to see who had entered the little odd-shaped courtyard.

  "I'd like to see Lady Ardis," Talaysen told the black-clad guard, who nodded soberly, but said nothing. "Could you see if she is available to a visitor?"

  The guard turned and left, still without a word; Talaysen waited patiently in the tiny courtyard, thinking that a musician has many opportunities to learn patience in a lifetime. It seems as if I am always waiting for something. . . .

  This was, at least, a pleasant place to wait. Unlike the courtyards of most Church buildings, this one, though paved, boasted greenery in the form of plants spilling from tiers of wooden boxes, and trees growing from huge ceramic pots. Lanterns hanging from the wall of the cloister prov
ided soft yellow light. Against the wall of the courtyard, a tiny waterfall trickled down a set of stacked rocks, providing a breath of moisture and the restful sounds of falling water.

  At least, it did when the Faire wasn't camped on the other side of the wall. Music, crowd-noise, and laughter spilled over the walls, ruffling the serenity of the place.

  He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned. A tall, scarlet-clad woman whose close-cropped blond hair held about the same amount of gray as his, held out her hands to him. "Gwydain!" she exclaimed. "I wondered when you'd get around to visiting me!"

  He strode towards her, and clasped both her hands in his. "I was busy, and so were you, my dear cousin. I truly intended to pay my respects when the trials were over. Then my latest little songbird got herself into a brawl with the Guild, and I had to extract her from the mess my lack of foresight put her in."

  "Her?" One winglike brow rose sharply, and Ardis showed her interest. "I heard something of that. Was she badly hurt?"