Shadows and Light (27 page)

“If the crowd that’s gathering doesn’t make him nervous, let him play,” Aiden said.

“His nerves are dancing, and I’ll be surprised if he manages to get out more than a word here and there, but I’m grateful to you for giving him the chance.”

Don’t be grateful for what we should have done for the people who are the Pillars of the World. Just another thing we chose to forget along the way
.

With a smile, Aiden turned away to help Lyrra set out
the instruments. He settled on the bench and tuned the harp. By the time he was done, his half-healed fingers were so sore, he knew he wouldn’t be able to play.

The next time we come by this way, I’ll play for them
.

He pondered that certainty for a moment and knew it was true. They
would
come back this way to share their songs and stories.

By the time everyone had assembled, it looked like every person within shouting distance was in the village square, crowded up as close as they could get in order to hear.

In order to keep the bargain Skelly had made, some of the musicians made their way to the front of the crowd, stood a little to one side of Aiden and Lyrra, and began to play.

The first tune was a familiar one. Aiden had heard variations of it in the Clan houses as well as in human taverns. The singer was nervous, and her voice tended to fade more often than not. But the applause from the crowd gave her and her companions more confidence, and her voice was steady for the next song.

The third song was one he’d never heard before, and he found himself leaning forward to catch the words and the tune, almost grinding his teeth when the singer kept faltering. It wasn’t until Lyrra slid over and gave him a hard jab with her elbow that he realized it was his own intense stare that was unnerving the singer. He lowered his eyes and, with effort, kept himself from leaping up and demanding that she sing it again. There was time. He’d corner her later.

After the musicians, Skelly stood up and told a story about his sweet granny, who was, apparently, the stern woman sitting on the other side of the square with her hands folded and her hair scraped back into a bun that must have made her scalp ache. It made Aiden’s scalp ache just looking at her. And the expression on her face was fierce enough to frighten any rational man.

Obviously, Skelly wasn’t a rational man, because he continued his story, gesturing now and then toward his sweet granny. When he finally got to the punch line, the first person to burst out laughing was his granny. The laughter transformed her face, and her eyes sparkled with mischief. As she pulled the pins out of her hair, she said, “Ah, Skelly. That story gets worse every time you tell it.”

Aiden heard Lyrra’s soft grunt, and he knew she, too, had taken the bait without realizing there was a hook in it. Seeing the grins on the villagers’ faces and how the old woman now
looked
like a sweet granny, he understood that the scraped-back hair and the fierce expression were props for Skelly’s story. Something he was sure everyone else in the village had known.

Then the boy came up with his small harp. After bowing to Aiden and Lyrra, he sat on the small bench Skelly brought over for him, settled himself, and began to play a song he wrote himself.

The boy had potential. Aiden felt his Bard’s gift swell with the desire to kindle that spark until it burned brightly.

The song, on the other hand…

When the boy finished, he lowered his head. The applause from the crowd was more a response to his courage than an indication of pleasure.

Then the boy raised his head, looked Aiden in the eyes, and said, “It’s not a good song.”

“No, it isn’t,” Aiden replied gently. “But it
is
a good first effort. With time and practice, you’ll write better songs.” He reached for his harp.

“Aiden,” Lyrra whispered fiercely. “You can’t play the harp yet. Your fingers aren’t healed.”

“They’re healed well enough for this song.” He set his fingers on the strings, suppressed a wince, plucked the first chord, and sang.

He watched the boy’s eyes widen in disbelief and disappointment — and something close to hope. He
watched the adult faces in the crowd settle into a painfully polite expression. And he knew by the look on Lyrra’s face that she would, at that moment, gladly deny knowing him.

It was, if one wanted to be kind, a bad song. And he sang all five verses and their refrains.

When he was done, he handed the harp to Lyrra, flexed his painfully sore hands, and smiled at the boy. “That was the first song I ever wrote. I was about your age. But with time and practice, I’ve gotten a bit better.” He took a breath and began to sing “The Green Hills of Home.” It was a song about a traveler, alone and lonely, yearning for a place far away. It was a song about a man, alone and lonely, yearning for the lover who wasn’t there. He’d written it over the winter, when he’d been traveling and Lyrra had been at Brightwood.

Her voice joined his, harmonizing. She didn’t even try to play the harp, so there was nothing but their voices, filled with the same remembered yearning.

When the last note faded, he watched people brush away tears — and felt the sting of tears in his own eyes.

Lyrra began plucking a simple tune on the harp, something that had no words. Aiden chose one of the whistles and joined her, letting the song flow through him. They used it as a transition song, when the audience needed time to settle again. Then he sang the song about the Black Coats — and watched the adult faces turn grim. Lyrra followed it with the poem about witches that he’d set to music. After that, they did a few romantic songs, gradually moving toward songs that were lighter and humorous. By the time they got to “The Mouse Song,” people were grinning and stifling chuckles — but a lot of them seemed to be watching something over Aiden’s shoulder.

That’s when he felt the presence of something moving softly behind him, coming closer and closer. He could almost feel the heat from a body, warm breath against his cheek. His nerves jumped, but he didn’t turn around. If
there were some danger, surely the people watching would give him warning.

Lyrra glanced around. Her eyes widened. She choked back a laugh and kept on singing. But she couldn’t manage the annoyed tone she usually did with that song.

When they finished, Aiden slowly turned his head toward the warm breath just above his left shoulder. He stared at the black muzzle, the nostrils breathing in his scent. He looked up into a brown eye. He noticed the pricked ears. Slowly raising one hand, he rested it lightly on the muzzle, and whispered, “A dark horse. It’s a dark horse.”

“A herd of them came up from the south last summer,” Skelly’s granny said. “A few stayed in the southern end of the Mother’s Hills. The rest kept moving north. Some of them wintered here. When spring came, they continued heading north. All but this one.”

Aiden twisted on the bench to get a better look at the animal. The dark horses had disappeared after Ahern, the Lord of the Horse, died last summer. Fae horses were more intelligent than human horses, and the dark horses — Ahern’s “special” horses — were the most intelligent of all. None of the Fae had been able to find out what happened to them. Had Ahern given some last command that had sent them into the Mother’s Hills instead of going up one of the shining roads to Tir Alainn? Or had it been instinct that had driven them here?

“Who does he belong to?” Aiden asked.

“No one,” Skelly replied. “I’ve had a saddle on him a time or two, and he’s well trained. But he’s made it clear he wasn’t for any of us. We’ve had the impression he’s been waiting for something.”

“Sing another song, Bard,” Skelly’s granny said. “Sing another song.”

Lyrra quietly plucked the introduction to “Love’s Jewels.” Aiden sang, unable to turn away from the horse focused so intently on him. Seeing a dark horse,
remembering Ahern, it made the events of last summer flood back, and by the time he’d reached the last line of the song, his throat was tight.

“I’m sorry,” Aiden said to the horse. “I can’t sing any more tonight.”

The horse snorted softly, a disappointed sound.

“There will be time enough to sing him another tune,” Skelly said, smiling.

Puzzled, Aiden turned toward the man.

“Looks to me like he’s chosen his rider,” Skelly said. “And you have a horse.”

I
t was late afternoon when Morag, Ashk, the merchant captain, and his two men crested the low hill and looked down on the tidy village spilling out from the bottom of the hills toward the harbor and the deep blue of the sea. A little ways out, a string of islands formed a breakwall that protected the harbor from the sea’s moods.

To Morag’s untrained eye, the harbor looked like the sort of place sailors would be keen to tuck their ships into when they weren’t out earning their living on the water. So why weren’t there more than two large ships moored to the docks? Why did all the boats but those two look like small fishing boats?

And what was it about this tidy village that bothered her?

She glanced at Mihail, saw the way he flinched while trying to pretend he didn’t notice that glance. He’d been tense and taciturn all through the journey back to this village. The tension had increased as they got closer — and the shadows continued to flicker across his face.

She suppressed a sigh. She’d hoped those shadows would go away once they’d left Padrick’s estate, hoped that whatever trouble might draw Death to this man had been left behind. But the shadows had remained, no more constant than they’d been when she’d first seen them, but there nonetheless.

She hoped the kindness that had guided him to take the books from the bookseller in the first place and then make the journey to Padrick’s house wouldn’t be repaid with pain.

Ashk had ordered the footmen to put the boxes of books in the library. After her reluctant guests had gone to bed, she and Morag had gone back to the library and opened the boxes.

Women’s names stamped on the books’ covers below the titles. All women. And only one copy of each work. But as the two of them opened the boxes, wiping away stray tears now and then, they’d realized the bookseller had tried to gather up as many as he could to save them from being confiscated by the magistrate’s guards and burned.

Only one precious copy of each work. There might be others, tucked away in gentry libraries throughout Sylvalan. If, somehow, the spread of the Black Coats’ poisoned words could be stopped, perhaps other copies would escape the fire. But if they were lost, the stories those women had shaped out of words and heart would exist only in that room where she and Ashk had sat, both of them wondering if those writers would find some comfort in knowing their stories were still in the world.

As they descended toward the village, Morag noticed the other things. Scattered houses surrounded by pastureland where cows, horses, and sheep grazed. Other houses with large plots of plowed land full of the bright green of young plants.

Did the humans in this village divide their skills and the goods this way? Did some raise the cattle for the milk, meat, and leather while others raised sheep for wool and meat, and still others did the spinning and weaving to supply the cloth for the clothes they’d all wear?

Whatever curiosity she had about the humans who lived here vanished when she looked to her right and saw the stream that tumbled down the hills to feed a tiny lake. The mouth of the lake dropped in a series of small waterfalls before the stream reclaimed the water and finished making its way down to the sea. But it was the odd gathering of stones on one side of the waterfall that captured Morag’s
attention as well as the attention of Mihail and his men. She reined in to take a longer look at the same time Mihail halted the wagon.

Ashk, who had been riding a little ahead of them, looked back and grinned, then rode back to join them. “Those are fish stairs.”

Morag gave Ashk a stare of her own.

Ashk’s grin widened. “Fish stairs,” she repeated. “While the salmon are fine leapers, especially when they have the incentive to return to their home stream to spawn, only the strongest were managing to get back up the falls and return to the stream. At some point, someone argued that, while it was a fine thing for the best leapers to get back to the spawning grounds to breed, if they found some way for the second-best leapers to make it back to the spawning grounds, there would be more fish to catch and eat and sell. And a salmon doesn’t have to be the best leaper in the world to taste good. So they built the stairs — and the fish have shown abundant gratitude ever since.”

“It’s a marvelous idea,” Mihail said. “It’s a wonder I’ve never seen the likes of it before.”

“All it takes to build one is muscle and desire — or a connection with earth and water,” Ashk said.

Morag watched Mihail’s face change from open curiosity to shuttered tension. What had there been in Ashk’s last comment that he heard as a threat?

They rode silently down into the village, and as they passed the oddly clustered houses and shops, Morag noticed the number of villagers who came to their doors to study the strangers — and then follow them down to the harbor. Mihail and his men noticed, but Ashk, who usually paid attention to everything, ignored the growing crowd.

By the time they reached the harbor, Mihail was so tense, it was almost unbearable to be near him. There was already a crowd of hard-eyed men near the long pier where one of the larger ships was moored.

Morag shifted in her saddle. Those men glanced at her, then averted their eyes. She suspected that meant they recognized who she was. Good. Perhaps they would think twice about causing any trouble while the Gatherer rode in their midst.

Aman stepped forward and placed one hand on the cart horse’s reins. “I can take him for you now,” he told Mihail.

After murmuring his thanks, Mihail climbed down from the cart, his eyes on his ship — and on the two boys standing at the bow waving to him. He lifted his hand to return the greeting, but Morag saw worry in his eyes.

Mihail turned to Ashk, who had dismounted and was now studying him calmly. “Lady Ashk,” he said, giving her a small bow as any merchant would when addressing a baron’s wife. “I thank you for your hospitality, but now it is time for us to continue on our journey.”