Blackveil (47 page)

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Authors: Kristen Britain

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #fantasy, #Epic

BOOK: Blackveil
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“Any requests?” she called to Dale.
“Something good and raunchy.” Her request was followed by what Alton could only perceive as suspicious snickering.
“Good and raunchy, eh?” Estral murmured, looking thoughtful and not at all taken aback, unlike Alton, but it occurred to him that she must get all kinds of requests depending on whatever venue she played and the type of audience present.
She launched into a song about a lumberjack trying to impress the innkeeper’s daughter with the size of his pine. It contained all the vulgar wordplay he was sure Dale could wish for and by the time the tune ended, Alton’s ears were burning. After the final strum, Estral smiled pleasantly at him.
“Is he blushing?” Dale asked.
“Hard to tell in the firelight,” Estral replied. “But I believe he is.”
“Hah!”
Alton glowered. Dale had wanted to make him blush in front of Estral. “Where did you learn
that
song?” he demanded. Surely this was not what they were teaching the young students at Selium. Surely not ...
“Lumber camp, of course,” Estral replied.
Alton could not imagine her in a camp full of such rough men. She’d be a tasty morsel to them. The stories one heard about their beastly behavior and crude ways! “Lumber camp? Are you mad? With all those rowdy, uncivilized brutes?”
Estral paused as if considering, then shook her head. “No, not me. My mother perhaps.”
“Your
mother?
”
Estral laughed. “Yes, my mother. She was chief of a camp north of North. I was born there, yes in those woods, in that camp, with all those
rowdy, uncivilized brutes.
She says they were all like happy papas when I came along.”
Alton scrunched his brow at the image of a group of big, grungy lumberjacks cooing at a baby. “I . . . I thought your father was—”
“Aaron Fiori? He
is
my father.”
“But . . . how?”
Laughter trickled out of Dale’s tent. “I think you need to explain to him about the lumberjack and the pine.”
Alton scowled at the tent though Dale couldn’t see him. He definitely would not travel with the two women at the same time again. “You know what I mean.”
“Of course,” Estral said, grinning. Alton’s ears just burned hotter. “My father is a minstrel and he travels. He visited the lumber camp for a spell and my mother took a shine to him. Simple as that, and when the time came for him to continue his wandering, he left, never guessing he’d made a child.”
Alton didn’t know what to say. He had imagined Estral’s mother to be some genteel lady strumming on a harp somewhere within Selium’s walls, not a lumber camp chief who ordered around a bunch of coarse, ax-wielding woodsmen.
“Of course,” Estral continued, “he figured it out about a year later when his travels led back to my mother’s lumber camp and there I was. He made a point of visiting twice yearly after that.”
“They never married?” Alton blurted before he could contain himself.
Estral shrugged. “Why would they? My mother was content at the camp and he was busy wandering. It has not been unusual over the generations of Fioris to produce heirs in this manner. A regular spouse would find it difficult to put up with a husband who was constantly away, and a Fiori can’t not travel. Most Fioris, anyway. It’s not very fair to the spouse if you think about it.”
To Alton, who’d been brought up in a noble family with all its strict codes and customs, it was difficult to imagine so casual an attitude toward bastards. As much as he disliked thinking of Estral that way, wasn’t that what she was? A bastard ? When he looked at her now across the fire, however, he did not see a bastard, but a lovely young woman with a voice gifted by the gods. Yes, what was lineage compared to that? And if that was the way the Fioris did things, and had done it for centuries, who was he to argue? It was just startling. To his way of thinking, anyway.
“Is that why,” he said more cautiously, “you go by Andovian and not Fiori? It’s your mother’s name?”
“Yep.” She strummed a chord, then silenced the strings with the flat of her hand. “When I inherit my father’s position, then I’ll become the Fiori. It’s as much a title as a name.”
The breeze shifted and Alton waved campfire smoke out of his face. He’d never thought much about the Fioris. There’d never been any reason to. Selium minstrels and Estral’s father himself had come to Woodhaven, but at the time he’d seen them as just entertainment.
Just.
Estral started plucking a lively dance tune, this time not asking Dale for a request. It was the story of a goatherd and a milkmaid, and was not at all raunchy. Alton found himself tapping his toe and nodding his head to the beat. When she finished, muffled clapping came from Dale’s tent.
“It seems our patient liked that one,” Estral said.
“I think it is time our patient got some sleep so she’s well enough to ride in the morning,” Alton replied.
Estral nodded in understanding. “Just one more bit,” she said. “Some water music to relax us all.”
Her fingers picked out a series of notes that emerged like the soothing tones of a stream trickling between mossy banks, ripples curling around rocks and beneath ferns. Alton closed his eyes and let the music wash over him. He imagined following the stream to where it flowed into a lake and the music became the give and take of gentle waves. A summer lake with the sun beating down on his shoulders. He strolled along the shore and someone was with him holding his hand. He thought it would be Karigan, but he saw Estral.
A PICNIC BASKET OF VIPERS
T
hey arrived at the encampment the following afternoon. Alton made sure Dale went straight to Leese. The mender pronounced the burn bad, but not as serious as it might have been and proceeded to make a poultice for it. She also advised that Dale spend the night with her for observation, but Dale’s protests were so vociferous that Leese gave in after Estral promised to keep an eye on the Rider.
Alton thought he caught a muttered, “Stubborn Riders,” from Leese before she returned to her tent.
Once Alton reached the secondary encampment, he tended Night Hawk and then headed straight to Tower of the Heavens to tell Merdigen about the previous day’s adventures. By the time he finished, the mage was pacing.
“This is exceedingly alarming,” he said. “The part about the music is interesting and even hopeful, but the rest?” He shook his head.
“What do you make of it?” Alton asked.
“I haven’t the faintest. This is beyond my experience. You saw no sign of Haurris?”
“No, unless that was his skeleton on the floor.”
Merdigen stopped in his tracks and gazed thoughtfully into the dark upper reaches of the tower. “No, I can’t see how. His corporeal self ought to have been burned upon a pyre when he passed on. It’s what we do, and what the keepers were instructed to do to us in the end. Unless . . . unless his corporeal self existed long beyond the rest of us, and even beyond the keepers. It’s not likely, but it’s not inconceivable either.”
Alton yawned and his stomach rumbled. It had been a long couple days.
“I need to consult with the others,” Merdigen said. “And you need to get some food and rest. Do not be concerned if I am not here next time you visit.”
Alton did not need much persuading to call it a day. He left the tower for the sharp air outside, amazed to find afternoon had turned into evening. He headed for the kitchen tent wondering in which tower the mages would assemble. Of course it would only be seven of them since Radiscar and Mad Leaf were cut off by the breach. There was a way for them to circumvent the breach, but it required a lengthy journey. He often wondered if it were an illusionary journey, or if magical projections truly experienced the concepts of time, distance, and danger. The mages seemed to think they could, and that’s all that counted.
At the kitchen tent he filled up on a couple of bowls of stew before returning to his own tent. As he approached it, he was surprised to find the canvas walls aglow with light and soft music being played within. When he folded aside the flap, he discovered Estral sitting on one of his campaign chairs, the lute on her lap, and a lamp at low burn on his table.
“Hello,” she said as he stepped in.
“Hello.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but Dale’s tent was, er, rather busy.”
“Busy?” Alton dropped into the chair across the table from her. “I thought you were supposed to be keeping watch over her.”
Estral made a face. “Her friend, Captain Wallace, is, um, taking care of her.”
“Captain Wallace?” Alton asked, perplexed. “Why would
he
be taking care of her?”
“Her
friend,
Captain Wallace,” Estral stressed.
Alton scratched his head. “Friend?”
“More than a friend, I daresay.”
“More than a ... ? Ooh!” Alton’s cheeks warmed. How dense could he be? He had not seen . . . had no idea.
“In fact,” Estral said, “it was darn uncomfortable for me to stay there. Busy, like I said. Usually they go to his cabin.”
Alton coughed. “I see. Wallace? Really?” How had he been so unobservant?
Estral nodded. “I didn’t know where else to go. If it’s a problem, I’ll leave.”
“N-no. Don’t go out into the cold. We could . . . we could talk.”
Estral plucked a series of notes on her lute. “We could. What do you want to talk about?”
“Well ... I—” Alton fumbled about thinking hard for several moments, finally grabbing something out of the air. “The lumber camp. You! I mean, I’d like to hear more about that. When did you leave the lumber camp for Selium?”
Estral stopped playing and furrowed her brow. “When I was six. After an accident.”
Alton groaned inwardly at having managed to pick what was undoubtedly a painful topic. “Karigan mentioned something about that once,” he began hesitantly.
Estral appeared unsurprised. “Yes. I had wandered onto the frozen edges of the river and fell through the ice. I got real sick after, with a bad ear infection. I suppose I’m lucky I suffered no worse thanks to one of the men who saw me go in and pulled me out.”
Alton recalled Karigan telling him the illness had destroyed the hearing in one of Estral’s ears. So hard to believe when she was so fine a musician.
“After that,” she explained, “my parents agreed it was time for me to go to Selium to live with my father. It was safer and more civilized and all that. I’ve been there ever since. Well, that is, until now.”
“Do you miss it?” he asked. “Selium?”
“Well, I’m not much of a traveler—not at all like my father. I’m a homebody. So this has been a bit of an adjustment for me, but a fascinating one.” She smiled.
That smile left Alton feeling much too warm. He glanced away. “Fascinating, eh?”
“Very. It’s good to leave behind all that is comfortable and known every so often. It opens one’s mind to the wide world. You and Dale walking through walls, for instance, is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.”
Alton often took for granted how it must look to those without magical abilities. For most people, it certainly was not an everyday occurrence. To his surprise, Estral then commandeered the conversation, asking him about stone working and how, as was the tradition in his clan, he’d been schooled in stonecutting and masonry at a young age. He found himself describing how a stonecutter could sense the grain of the stone and how cutting against the grain could mean an imperfect piece, and how a blacksmith was essential to the process because someone had to keep the tools sharp.
He was flattered by her interest in what he considered the mundane details of his life. Her questions were intelligently framed and not too deeply probing. She appeared to listen to his answers with her full attention.
Suddenly he clamped his mouth shut realizing he’d been talking
a lot.
About himself. Had Karigan ever taken such an interest in him, or was all the questioning by Estral simply something minstrels were good at?

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