One of the gentlemen with her, who Rune had suspected for some time really was nobly born, had said, ingenuously, 'What situation?' That had pretty much confirmed Rune's suspicions, since it would have been hard to be a commoner and not have heard 'Two Fair Maids' often enough to know every word of every variant.
Diamond, however, had simply explained it to him without betraying that. 'It's about two sisters in love with the same man,' she told him. 'He's been sleeping with the older one, who thinks he's going to have to marry her-but he proposes to the younger one, who accepts. When the older one finds out, she shoves the younger one in the river.' She turned to Rune, then, and included her in the conversation. 'Rune, what are all the various versions of it after that?'
'Well,' Rune had answered, thinking, 'There's three variations on how she dies. One, the older girl holds her under; two, she gets carried off by the current and pulled under the millrace; three, that the miller sees her, wants her gold ring, and drowns her. But in all of the versions, a wandering harpist-Bard finds her-or rather, what's left of her after the fish get done-and makes a harp of her bones and strings it with her long, gold hair.'
'Dear God!' the gentleman exclaimed. 'That's certainly gruesome!'
'And pretty stupid,' Rune added, to Diamond's great delight. 'I can't imagine why any musician would go making an instrument out of human bone when there are perfectly good pieces of wood around that are much better suited to the purpose! And I can't imagine why anyone would want to play such a thing!' She shivered. 'I should think you'd drive customers into the next kingdom the first time they caught sight of it! But anyway, that's what this fool does, and he takes it to court and plays it for the Sire. And, of course, the moment the older sister shows up, the harp begins to play by itself, and sing about how the little idiot got herself drowned. And of course, the sister is burned, and the miller is hung, and the bastard that started it in the first place by seducing the first sister gets off free.' She curled her lip a little. 'In fact, in one of the versions he gets all kinds of sympathy from other stupid women because his syrupy little true love drowned.'
'And that's what I mean by I wish that someone would write a sensible version,' Diamond said, taking up where Rune left off. 'I mean, if I was the wronged sister, I wouldn't blame my brainless sib, I'd go after the motherless wretch that betrayed me! And if I was the younger sister, if I found out about it, I'd help her!' She turned to Rune, then, with a mischievous look on her face that made her pale blue eyes sparkle like the stone she was named for. 'You're a musician,' she said, gleefully. 'Why don't you do it?'
At first Rune could only think of all the reasons why it wouldn't work-that people were used to the old song and would hate the new version, that the Bardic Guild would hate it because their members had written a great many of the variants, and that it wasn't properly romantic.
But then she thought of all the reasons why, if she chose her audience properly, picking mostly young people who were in a mood to laugh, it would work. There were not a great many comic songs out in the world, and she could, if she managed this successfully, get quite a following for herself based on the fact that she had written one. In fact, there were a great many really stupid, sentimental ballads like 'Two Fair Maids' in existence; if she wrote parodies of them, she could have an entire repertory of comic songs.
And songs like that were much more suited to the casual atmosphere of street-busking than the maudlin ones were.
She'd started on the project in late spring; she already had four. She'd moved to a new corner, vacated by one of the buskers-that-weren't, on a very busy crossroads. It wasn't a venue usually suited to busking, but she'd made a bargain with one of the Gypsy-dancers who had reappeared at the fountain in Flower Street with the spring birds. Rune would play the fiddle for her to dance from exactly midday until second bell and split the take, if the Gypsies would hold the corner for her to play from two hours before midday till the dancer showed up. No one wanted to argue with the Gypsies, who were known to have tempers and be very quick with their knives, so the corner was Rune's without dispute.
Now what she had planned to do, was to alternate lively fiddling with comic songs, to see how well they did, and if she could hold a rowdy crowd with them.
She had discovered this afternoon that not only could she hold the crowd, she now had a reputation for knowing the funny songs, and there were people coming to her corner at lunch just to hear them.
And furthermore, they were willing to pay to hear them. Every time she'd tried to go back to the fiddle today, someone had called out for one of her songs. And when she'd demurred, protesting that she'd already done it, or that people must be getting tired of it, at least three coins were tossed into her hat as an incentive. In the end, she had made as much during her stint alone as she and the dancer had together.
She explained all that to Tonno, who looked pleased at first, then troubled. 'You didn't write anything-satiric, did you?' he asked, worriedly. 'These were just silly parodies of common songs, am I understanding you correctly?'
She sighed, exasperated. He was beating around the bush again, rather than asking her directly what he wanted to know, and she was tired of it. 'Tonno, just what, exactly, are you asking me? Get to the point, will you? I'm not one of your Scholar customers, that you have to build a tower of logic for before you get a straight answer.'
He blinked in surprise. 'I suppose-did you make fun of anyone high-ranking enough to cause you trouble? Or did you sing anything satirical about the Church?'
'If anybody in one of those songs resembles someone in Nolton, I don't know about it,' she told him in complete honesty. 'And I must admit that I had considered doing something about a corrupt Priest, but I decided against it, after seeing Carly leaving my room. It would be just like her to take a copy to the Church with her, when she goes to one of her stupid Prayer Meetings, and find a way to get me in trouble.'
Tonno let out a deep sigh of relief. 'I'd advise you to keep to that decision,' he said, passing his hand over his hair. 'At least for now, when you have no one to protect you. Later, perhaps, when you have Guild status and protection, you can write whatever you choose.' He smiled, weakly. 'Who knows; with the force of a Guild Bard behind a satiric song, you might become an influence for good within the Church.'
'What are you so worried about, really?' she asked, putting her instruments down on the counter. 'Did Brother Bryan tell you something? Is the Church planning on backing more of those ordinances you don't like?'
He shook his head. 'No-no, it's that I've been debating doing something for a while, and I've been putting it off because I didn't have the connections. Remember when I started sending you to other people for lessons this spring?'
She nodded. 'Mandar Cray for lute, and Geor Baker for voice. You told me you weren't going to be useful for anything with me except for reading and writing.' Mandar and Geor were two of the people she had considered as teachers when she first came to Nolton, as it turned out. Both of them were Guild musicians; both had very wealthy students. Had she approached them on her own, she probably would have gotten brushed off.
But both were clients and friends of both Tonno and Amber, and both had heard her sing and play. They were two very different men; Mandar tall and ascetic, Geor short and muscular; Mandar hardly every ate, at least at Amber's, and Geor ate everything in sight. Mandar fainted at the thought of bloodshed, let alone the sight of blood, and Geor was a champion swordsman. But they had one other thing in common besides being clients and friends of Amber and Tonno-they both adored music. For the opportunity to teach someone who loved it as much as they did, and had talent, as opposed to the rich, bored children who were enduring their lessons, both of them cut their lesson-rates to next-to-nothing.
They wouldn't teach her for free-for one thing, that could get them in trouble with the Guild-for another, they felt, like Tonno, that paying for something tended to make one pay attention to it. But they weren't charging her any more than Tonno had, and she was learning a great deal he simply could not show her.
'I've been wanting to find someone who could teach you composition,' Tonno said, his expression still worried, 'But the only Bards I knew of in the city were either in a Great Household, or-in the Church.'
Rune's mouth formed a silent 'O' of understanding. Now all of Tonno's fussing made some sense. If he'd wanted to find her a teacher and she'd gotten herself in trouble with the Church-
But he wasn't finished. 'I didn't have the contacts to get you lessons with any of the Church Bards,' he continued. 'But last week Brother Bryan mentioned that he'd listened to you playing out on the street and that he thought you were amazing. He still thinks you're a boy, you understand-'
Rune nodded. Brother Bryan had never seen her in female garb; she and Tonno had judged that the best idea. Many Church men felt very uneasy around females for one thing-and it seemed no bad idea to have her female persona unknown to the Church, after all the ordinances and the snooping Carly was doing. They might not connect the 'Rune' that busked with the 'Rune' that played at Amber's. And even if they did, they might not know that Rune
