hanks of white hair tumbled free, caught with sparkles of unmelted ice. Then, striking and clear as a signature, a mellowed voice addressed the landlord. ‘What a storm. The passes are awful. We have silver if you’ve got quarters for extra lodgers.’
‘Oh, no!’ protested the innkeeper. ‘That is, I have rooms. All tidy. Cleanest linen on the coast side of High-scarp. But your coin stays in your purse. Every penny. Your presence will draw customers just for the news, even if you don’t care to sing.’
‘Your commons won’t go tuneless, for your kindness,’ Halliron promised. Erect despite more than eight decades of age, he had a prominent, aristocratic nose, and spaced front teeth that flashed in a smile. ‘We’ll need two beds. My apprentice will be in as soon as he’s stabled the pony.’
Crouched down to build up the fire, the landlord straightened up, horrified. ‘My boy, didn’t he meet you in the yard? Why, that laggard, no-good -’
The door latch tripped amid the tirade. Wind-driven sleet slashed in on the draught that breathed chill through the fug from the fire as a figure muffled in wet woollens entered, moving fast. Dakar’s parked bulk was side-stepped and a new voice cut in, declaiming, ‘Your anger’s misplaced. Your groom is hard at work. The harness was wet and needed oiling, and Halliron’s pony hates boys. My master would have told you, I usually tend him myself.’
Impatient with his headache and his relapsed eyesight, Dakar squinted at the latest arrival. Layered as he was in tatty mufflers and a cape-shouldered, nondescript mantle, there seemed more wool to him than man. A path cleared before him to the hearthside. Caked ice cracked from his clothing as he undid fastenings to disgorge a long, tapered bundle laced in oilskins. This he deposited carefully out of reach of the fire’s leaping heat. A pair of wet gloves flew off after, to land smartly on top of the settle.
Then movement at the corner of his vision caused the stranger swiftly to spin. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Let me.’
And Halliron, who had reached to unfasten his cloak brooch, found his wrists gently caught and restrained.
‘You must spare those fingers,’ chided the Master-bard’s apprentice. All unwittingly, he had managed to draw every eye in the room.
Too congenial to be embarrassed by public attention, the aged bard gave a hampered shrug. While younger hands worked to shed his weight of sodden mantles, the innkeeper’s spaniel-eyed sympathy raised his humour. ‘Never get old. It’s a ridiculously uncomfortable process Ath Creator should be made to find a cure for.’
Remiss for his neglected hospitality, the innkeeper barked at his barmaid. ‘Mulled wine, girl, and hot soup. And if the wife is still dallying about the kitchen, tell her to cut the fresh bread.’
While the wench hustled off, a thoughtful Dakar propped his swaying balance against the nearest trestle. As unabashed as the dart players, he stared while the bard’s apprentice left off attending his master and turned to peel off his own heavy cloak. The man revealed underneath proved to be an indeterminate age in his twenties, compactly built to the point of slenderness. Nondescript ash brown hair fell lankly over thin cheekbones, and his eyes were a muddy grey hazel.
He was nobody Dakar knew.
While the visitors settled themselves, the landlord retired behind the bar to industriously buff water spots off the few tankards he owned that had glazing. Over the flow of resumed conversation as the dart players renewed their dropped game, the high-pitched exclamations of the tavern mistress rang from the depths of a pantry closet, followed by a banging of pots and hurried footsteps. A drudge appeared with bristle brush and bucket to scour the grime from the boards, while Dakar took himself off to an unobtrusive window nook, brightened by his upturn in prospects. Penniless still, sober enough to be plagued by the granddame of all headaches, he barely winced as other steps thumped the boards over his head: some servant, dispatched no doubt to ensure the linens lived up to the innkeeper’s boasts. The back door banged. Outside, through the whirl of grey sleet, one of the innkeeper’s mop-headed children dashed to spread word that the Masterbard of Athera had taken up residence for the night.
Soon enough, the stable boy came in with the bard’s bundles of baggage. The apprentice accepted the burden and was shown upstairs to their lodgings, while the Masterbard sat by the settle to drink hot spiced wine and share news with the early arrivals. He had come down the cape coast, not through Eastwall, he told the shepherd eager to know the latest price of wool at the inland markets. When somebody else inquired if Minderl’s trade galleys had safely put in for the winter, a silence developed. Halliron admitted he had bypassed the main road and shortcut across the old, ruined trail that wound its way west from the cape.
‘And no,’ he said quickly, before someone asked, ‘I saw no Paravian ghosts. Just old marker stones covered with lichen and acres of bracken bent with rain. The old routes are shunned for no reason under sky I can see.’
‘Sorcerers use them,’ the mule drover muttered. ‘And travellers see strange lights on them at night.’
Since the subject left folk uneasy, the serving wench was sent off in a flounce of skirts to bring back a fresh round of tankards. Dakar, who held small aversion to the hauntings of ruins and unused roads, trained crafty attention toward the bar. In the interval while the girl made rounds with her tray, and the self-important innkeeper held station in the Masterbard’s circle, the beer keg stood unattended.
Something Halliron said raised a round of knee-slapping laughter. The Mad Prophet stood, and sidled, and in a move that bespoke long practice, worked his bulk between the countertop and the broached barrel. His eyes turned innocently elsewhere, he trawled through the suds in the washtub, hooked up a tankard, and positioned it upright for filling. No one looked his way, even through the ticklish task of twisting the spigot behind his back.
Dakar darted a glance toward the fireside. Aware to a hair’s-breadth of the interval needed for a large-sized tankard to brim over, and ready with a vacuous smile, he rolled furtive eyes to make sure of the passage to the kitchens.
A shadow loomed at his flank: the bard’s hazel-eyed apprentice, arrived without sound, and all but standing on top of him. The Mad Prophet gave a violent start that slopped foam in cold runnels down his backside.
‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ he assayed, caught up meanwhile in a disastrous grab to stem the copious gush of the beer. He fumbled the twist. Brew rose hissing over the tankard brim and pattered over the frayed heels of his socks.
The apprentice minstrel gave a wicked grin, leaned across, and deftly turned off the spigot. ‘I’m called Medlir. And I suggest you’re mistaken. I’m very certain I know you.’
‘From some bad line in a ballad, maybe,’ Dakar said, plaintively concerned with rescuing a soap-slicked tankard from upset as he juggled it from his backside to his front. That small victory achieved, he looked the bard’s apprentice in the eye and began pouring beer down his gullet. When the tankard was three quarters empty, it belatedly dawned that the odd little man was going to keep quiet about his theft. Dakar stopped swallowing to catch his breath. His sodden hose squelched in puddled beer as he pressed forward, intent now on making his escape.
Medlir side-stepped and blocked him. ‘Don’t be a fool.’ He tipped his head a surreptitious fraction to show the barmaid, shoving toward them in outraged determination.
The Mad Prophet’s dismay darkened to a glare shared equally between the girl and Halliron’s obstructive apprentice. ‘Ah, damn!’ He prepared in martyred pain to scuttle his purloined brew into the washtub.
