'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 better 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. . .
