The Eagle And The Nightingales

about to be deflected.

'I know I can trust you, and that I can trust you to be sensible,' he continued. 'Those are traits this task will need as much as mastery of magic.'

'Which is why you are not entrusting this to Peregrine?' she asked. 'You could trust him, but he is not always sensible, especially when he sees an injustice.'

'He does not do well in cities, any more than you do,' Talaysen pointed out. 'And he won't abide in them unless he must under direct threat to himself or his clan.'

And because I have a large sense of duty, I will endure them if I must, she thought with misgiving. I had better have a very good reason_other than that Wren wants me to, however.

'What could possibly be so pressing as to send me across half the Twenty Kingdoms?' she replied, favoring him with a frown. 'And there, of all places. Peregrine may not like cities, but neither do I, and I have better reason than he to avoid them.' Her frown deepened. 'I'm not minded to risk another witch-hunt because I seem to know a little too much for someone's comfort_or just because I am a Gypsy.'

'Not in Lyonarie_' he began, but she interrupted him.

'So you say, but no one had word of what was chancing in Gradford until Robin stirred the nest and the wasps came flying out to sting,' she retorted. Talaysen did not wince this time; instead he looked ever more determined. 'And I ask again, what is so pressing as to send me there?'

Now Talaysen's changeable eyes grew troubled, and the signs of stress that had not been there before appeared, faintly etched into his brow and the corners of his generous mouth. 'King Rolend is concerned, and as Laurel Bard and leader of the Free Bards he often asks me for my opinion. High King Theovere has been_neglectful.'

Now Nightingale snorted. 'This is hardly news; his neglect has been growing since before Lady Lark joined us. And so just what is it that I am supposed to do? March up to the High King and charge him with neglecting his duty?'

Talaysen smiled, faintly. 'Scarcely, though I suspect you could and would do just that if it suited you. No, what Rolend and I both want is the reason why Theovere has become this way. He wasn't always like this_he was a very good ruler and kept the power neatly balanced among the Twenty Kings, the Guilds and the Church. He's mature, but not all that old, and there has been no suggestion that he has become senile, and he hasn't been ill_and besides, his father lived thirty years more than he has already, and he was vigorous and alert to the last.'

She shook her head, though, rather than agreeing to take on Talaysen's little wild-goose hunt with no more prompting than that. 'I won't promise,' she said, as the dim sense of foreboding only increased with Talaysen's explanations. 'I will think about it, but I won't promise. All I will say is that I will take my travels in the direction of Lyonarie.' As Master Wren's face reflected his disappointment, she hardened her heart. 'I won't promise because I have no way of knowing if I can actually reach Lyonarie,' she pointed out. 'I'm afoot, remember? You and Rune came here in a fine wagon with a pair of horses to pull you and the baby_travel is harder when you walk, not ride. You ought to remember that. A hundred things could delay me, and I won't promise what I am not sure I can deliver.'

'But if you reach Lyonarie?' Talaysen persisted, and she wondered at his insistence. Surely he_and the King of Birnam_had more and better sources of information than one lone Gypsy!

'If I decide to go that far and if I reach Lyonarie any time before the next Kingsford Faire, I will reconsider,' she said at last. 'I will see what I can do. More, I won't promise.'

He wasn't satisfied, but he accepted that, she saw it in his face.

'You still haven't answered the other question,' she continued, suspiciously. 'Why choose me?'

His answer was not one calculated to quell her growing unease, nor warm the prickle of chill prescience that threaded her back.

'Much as I hate to admit this,' said Talaysen, wielder of Bardic Magics and friend to the High King of the Elves, 'I was warned that this situation was more hazardous than we knew, and told to send you and only you, in a dream.'

Three weeks from the day she had left Talaysen beside the river, Nightingale guided her little donkey in among the sheltering branches of a black pine as twilight thickened and the crickets and frogs of early evening started up their songs. Black pines were often called 'shelter-pines,' for their trunks were bare to a height of many feet, and their huge, heavy branches bent down to touch the ground around them like the sides of a tent. The ground beneath those branches was bare except for a thick carpet of dead needles. Nightingale held a heavy, resin-scented branch aside with one hand, while she led the donkey beneath it; her hair was wet, for she had bathed in a stream earlier that afternoon, and the still, cool darkness beneath the branches made her shiver.