WATER MUSIC
Alton wished he could come up with something clever
or witty to say while they waited, but it was as if he no longer
knew how. He was out of practice. All his attention had been
centered on the wall, which did not require making small talk with
others. In fact, for the longest time he hadn’t cared much about
conversing with anyone at all, except maybe Dale and Merdigen. But
now he found himself wanting to talk to Estral just to hear her
voice, her ringing laugh. Her responding to him.
Karigan. He would
have liked to talk to Karigan if only she’d been assigned to the
wall as he’d requested, but she was not here. If only she would
write him! He was so unsure of her, of how she felt toward him, or
if she even thought of him at all. He had wanted to ask Estral
about Karigan, but did not know how. An appropriate moment never
seemed to materialize and, he realized with no small amount of
surprise, he hadn’t been dwelling much on her of late. He’d been .
. . distracted.
As if picking up on
the subject of his rumination, or maybe also feeling the need to
fill in the silence with conversation, Estral said, “After the
excitement at the tower, I think I now have a sense of what
Karigan’s adventures are like.”
An opening. Alton
leaped on it. “Do you hear from her much?”
Estral chuckled.
“Oh, you know Karigan—not the best of correspondents. Occasionally
I receive a letter, but usually she’s woefully terse on details.
More often I get the bigger news, like the rescue of Lady Estora,
secondhand.”
“Secondhand?”
“Other minstrels.
Sometimes Mel has a tidbit or two from your captain.”
Alton had forgotten
the captain’s daughter, Mel, was studying at Selium.
“Yep,” Estral
continued, “Karigan hasn’t written me a single word about her part
in the rescue of Lady Estora. We did have a big old talk, though,
when she came through in the fall searching for the Silverwood
book.”
“Did she ... did she
say anything about me? Besides that I was, um, mean to her?” He
grimaced when he heard himself, and felt a blush warm his
cheeks.
Estral glanced away,
perhaps considering how to respond. He did not think it boded
well.
“That did come up,”
Estral said. “Your anger toward her really hurt her.”
“I
know.”
“She understood
you’d been under immense strain here at the wall, but she didn’t
understand why it made you angry at her. Despite that, she never
stopped caring for you.”
Alton felt a rush of
guilt. Yes, he’d been forgiven, but he wasn’t sure he could forgive
himself. “How . . . how much does she care? For me?”
Estral did not
answer, but darted her gaze into the woods where Dale staggered out
of the underbrush. In the waning late afternoon light, Dale’s face
looked drawn and pale. When she reached Plover, she couldn’t seem
to get her toe in the stirrup to mount. Alton immediately shoved
all personal concerns to the back of his mind.
“Dale?” he asked.
“How are you doing?”
She ignored him and
tried to mount again, but Plover swerved away out of reach. Alton
knew messenger horses tended to be more sensible than their Riders
at times, so he slipped off Night Hawk and took Dale’s arm. She was
shivering and he could see the pain in her eyes. He checked the
burn. It was an angry, swollen red and blistering.
“We’re stopping for
the night,” he declared. “We’ve still got a long ride ahead and I
think it would be better if you got some rest before we continue
on.”
It was a measure of
the pain Dale felt that she did not protest. Alton made her sit on
a rock, wrapped in his greatcoat, while he and Estral tended the
horses and set up camp.
He watched Estral
from the corner of his eye as she collected firewood and dumped it
in a pile before setting off to find more. She worked efficiently,
silently, and without complaint, not at all like the citified
noblewoman he had expected, but as competent as any Green Rider.
His lips curled into a smile. Then he cleared his throat and
straightened his features, remembering what Dale had said earlier
about him smiling a lot more lately.
In no time they had
raised two small tents and sparked a campfire. They installed Dale
in one of the tents and now Estral was brewing tea.
“I’ve some excellent
willowbark tea that should help Dale,” she said. “There’s an
apothecary in Selium who has only the best quality stuff, and I’ve
been getting the willowbark from him for years. Headaches. I get
them.”
“Ah.”
When the tea had
steeped to her satisfaction, she took a mug into the tent where
Dale rested. Meanwhile, Alton prepared a simple meal of bread, cold
beef, and cheese for each of them. They ate in silence as the sky
deepened into midnight blue above and the stars punched through
with brilliant light. The horses munched on their ration of grain
nearby and there were scurrying sounds of small animals in the
underbrush. An owl hooted in the distance.
“I want music!” Dale
yelled from her tent, shattering the tranquility.
Alton almost
sputtered his tea.
“Well, then,” Estral
said, “I guess I have my orders.” She set aside the remains of her
meal and opened her lute case, and once again tuned up the
strings.
“Any requests?” she
called to Dale.
“Something good and
raunchy.” Her request was followed by what Alton could only
perceive as suspicious snickering.
“Good and raunchy,
eh?” Estral murmured, looking thoughtful and not at all taken
aback, unlike Alton, but it occurred to him that she must get all
kinds of requests depending on whatever venue she played and the
type of audience present.
She launched into a
song about a lumberjack trying to impress the innkeeper’s daughter
with the size of his pine. It contained all the vulgar wordplay he
was sure Dale could wish for and by the time the tune ended,
Alton’s ears were burning. After the final strum, Estral smiled
pleasantly at him.
“Is he blushing?”
Dale asked.
“Hard to tell in the
firelight,” Estral replied. “But I believe he is.”
“Hah!”
Alton glowered. Dale
had wanted to make him blush in front of Estral. “Where did you
learn that song?” he demanded. Surely
this was not what they were teaching the young students at Selium.
Surely not ...
“Lumber camp, of
course,” Estral replied.
Alton could not
imagine her in a camp full of such rough men. She’d be a tasty
morsel to them. The stories one heard about their beastly behavior
and crude ways! “Lumber camp? Are you mad? With all those rowdy,
uncivilized brutes?”
Estral paused as if
considering, then shook her head. “No, not me. My mother
perhaps.”
“Your mother?”
Estral laughed.
“Yes, my mother. She was chief of a camp north of North. I was born
there, yes in those woods, in that camp, with all those
rowdy, uncivilized brutes. She says
they were all like happy papas when I came along.”
Alton scrunched his
brow at the image of a group of big, grungy lumberjacks cooing at a
baby. “I . . . I thought your father was—”
“Aaron Fiori? He
is my father.”
“But . . .
how?”
Laughter trickled
out of Dale’s tent. “I think you need to explain to him about the
lumberjack and the pine.”
Alton scowled at the
tent though Dale couldn’t see him. He definitely would not travel
with the two women at the same time again. “You know what I
mean.”
“Of course,” Estral
said, grinning. Alton’s ears just burned hotter. “My father is a
minstrel and he travels. He visited the lumber camp for a spell and
my mother took a shine to him. Simple as that, and when the time
came for him to continue his wandering, he left, never guessing
he’d made a child.”
Alton didn’t know
what to say. He had imagined Estral’s mother to be some genteel
lady strumming on a harp somewhere within Selium’s walls, not a
lumber camp chief who ordered around a bunch of coarse, ax-wielding
woodsmen.
“Of course,” Estral
continued, “he figured it out about a year later when his travels
led back to my mother’s lumber camp and there I was. He made a
point of visiting twice yearly after that.”
“They never
married?” Alton blurted before he could contain
himself.
Estral shrugged.
“Why would they? My mother was content at the camp and he was busy
wandering. It has not been unusual over the generations of Fioris
to produce heirs in this manner. A regular spouse would find it
difficult to put up with a husband who was constantly away, and a
Fiori can’t not travel. Most Fioris, anyway. It’s not very fair to
the spouse if you think about it.”
To Alton, who’d been
brought up in a noble family with all its strict codes and customs,
it was difficult to imagine so casual an attitude toward bastards.
As much as he disliked thinking of Estral that way, wasn’t that
what she was? A bastard ? When he looked at her now across the
fire, however, he did not see a bastard, but a lovely young woman
with a voice gifted by the gods. Yes, what was lineage compared to
that? And if that was the way the Fioris did things, and had done
it for centuries, who was he to argue? It was just startling. To
his way of thinking, anyway.
“Is that why,” he
said more cautiously, “you go by Andovian and not Fiori? It’s your
mother’s name?”
“Yep.” She strummed
a chord, then silenced the strings with the flat of her hand. “When
I inherit my father’s position, then I’ll become the Fiori. It’s as
much a title as a name.”
The breeze shifted
and Alton waved campfire smoke out of his face. He’d never thought
much about the Fioris. There’d never been any reason to. Selium
minstrels and Estral’s father himself had come to Woodhaven, but at
the time he’d seen them as just entertainment. Just.
Estral started
plucking a lively dance tune, this time not asking Dale for a
request. It was the story of a goatherd and a milkmaid, and was not
at all raunchy. Alton found himself tapping his toe and nodding his
head to the beat. When she finished, muffled clapping came from
Dale’s tent.
“It seems our
patient liked that one,” Estral said.
“I think it is time
our patient got some sleep so she’s well enough to ride in the
morning,” Alton replied.
Estral nodded in
understanding. “Just one more bit,” she said. “Some water music to
relax us all.”
Her fingers picked
out a series of notes that emerged like the soothing tones of a
stream trickling between mossy banks, ripples curling around rocks
and beneath ferns. Alton closed his eyes and let the music wash
over him. He imagined following the stream to where it flowed into
a lake and the music became the give and take of gentle waves. A
summer lake with the sun beating down on his shoulders. He strolled
along the shore and someone was with him holding his hand. He
thought it would be Karigan, but he saw Estral.