I want only to help you, the man had said. The lively flicker in his green eyes belying the silver in his hair, the creases in his face. On the third finger of his right hand a moon opal, one of the rarest of Academy rings. It was he who had somehow heard of Lin and Leander, an unlikely team considering that there were officially no female poets.
“Why would you help us?” Lin had asked. They were sitting in the common room of their inn, and she knew Leander was deathly embarrassed that Therron saw they were staying in such a place. But the Seer didn’t seem to notice the grime and noise. On his lips was a faint smile, as if he contemplated a memory that both amused and saddened him.
“There are flaws in the way things are done,” said Therron. His voice was deep. “One is that only a man may become a poet, and certainly only a man may become a Seer. You are brave to go against the tide. I would like to see that bravery rewarded.”
Now it was Lin’s turn to smile faintly. “Thank you,” she said, “but I am not brave. What I come from is far worse than anything I could choose. So in a way, I risk nothing now.”
“Even if you fail?” There was a dead weight to the question, contrasting with the din of the laborers who crowded at the other tables.
She met his eyes, strove to hold his gaze. “I will most likely fail.”
“You will if you allow no one to help you,” said Therron, taking her hand. “Take this invitation to the Gelvan ball. Make it the finest performance of your lives. The king will be there … and more important, so will the Court Poet. It may be the start of something for you.”
Lin looked down at their joined hands on the tabletop, and it occurred to her that he was not so old, and was fine-featured. And a Seer. “You have our thanks,” she said, and withdrew her hand—now holding a small parchment that she knew might be the key to their fortunes.
“Yes,” Leander echoed, starstruck. “Thank you.”
“It is with your best music that you will thank me,” said the Seer.
Now Lin turned her mind from these thoughts, attempted to focus on prayer.
Kiara, she thought. Keeper of secrets. Help us make it our best.
She opened her eyes. The old woman had gone; so had Marlen. The polished floor beneath her knees had grown warm. Lin heaved to her feet, felt an ache in her shins and knees from being pressed so long against stone.
* * *
MARLEN Humbreleigh considered returning to the shrine of Kiara to submit a prayer, but in the end decided that he did not care to after all. Let the dark goddess do her work as she saw fit. On the streets, he attracted no notice, just another poet among the hundreds who had thronged to Tamryllin for the Midsummer Fair. Once every twelve years they gathered here for the most prestigious of the contests, where the Silver Branch was won.
He passed a stand selling masks, with their hollow-eyed half faces. There were many such stands around the city these days, for the fair opened with a masque. Marlen thought it an amusing custom considering that in truth, everyone’s face was a mask.
Marlen had always been good at learning secrets. From the time he was tumbling his brothers out of apple trees in the family orchard—before they were allowed to be picking the fruit—bringing the ugliness of people’s deepest thoughts to light was … an amusement for him.
It came out in his work: critics praised Marlen and Darien for their masterful plumbing of the depths of human nature. At least half that contribution was made by Marlen, who felt the forces of his own need stir by candlelight, transform into the shadows of other, imaginary figures. He and Darien had risen to fame by subverting the heroes of bygone days. Making them human, and sometimes worse.
Some critics of their songs took a different tack, despairing that the popularity of these young poets and the men who imitated them bespoke a cynical age. Occasionally they even proposed that such songs be banned, but the humor of the poets’ satires was entertaining at court. At least, so Marlen had been told. As long as you did not mock the court itself, it was acceptable to satirize the heroes of old.
So much of the humor, he knew, came from Darien. Marlen was the shadow that danced in the periphery, sensed by critics who could not quite articulate the source of their dismay. That could be called a secret, too, he considered. The dark heart of their music.
But there was a difference between discovering a secret that could be turned into a song and one that mattered. One, for example, that could get someone killed.
Marlen had never discovered such a secret before the preceding night and now was not sure what to do.
It was Darien’s fault, of course, for sticking his nose—and rather more—where he had no business. A Galician girl, and on top of that, the daughter of one of the most prominent men in Tamryllin. Marlen knew there was no use pointing out his friend’s folly to him: Darien would do as he pleased. The world had long ago taught him that he could.
The lesson Marlen had learned was rather different.
And he really didn’t have time to be thinking of such things, not with the Gelvan ball coming up. To play before the king and even the Court Poet himself … He ought to have been with Darien right now, rehearsing. But spontaneity was one of the main characteristics of their partnership, and it was too late to change old habits. Even now, at this most critical junction of their lives.
The Gelvan ball. Back to the house where Marlen had gone to investigate the space where he and Darien would be performing. Where he could not resist doing a bit of exploring while he was at it—and thereby discovered the merchant’s secret, one that could cost the man his life.
That the Gelvan family was of Galician descent, at least on Master Gelvan’s side, was well-known. That Galicians loved money was also common knowledge, and undoubtedly how Rianna’s father had famously risen from street sweeper to become one of the most powerful men in Tamryllin.
But Marlen could now prove that Master Gelvan, trusted associate of the king, still worshipped the Unnamed God of the Galicians, an offense punishable by death. His careless exploration of the man’s study had uncovered a bronze shrine behind a concealing tapestry, along with a stack of books in the Galician tongue that had been banned in Eivar for centuries. The Galician religion accepted the existence of no other god—there was only One, they said. Which of course meant that they did not accept the existence of the Three, bless their names.
In the past thousand years, most Galicians had been converted by the sword, which meant that most were dead. Master Gelvan stood as an example of how a man might shuck off an inconvenient heritage and become great in the eyes of the king and court.
And now, it turned out, he was a heretic. And tonight Marlen would drink his wine, and smile, and sing for the man’s company.
It occurred to Marlen that he could not cease to think about this, to turn it over in his mind, because he was his father’s son.
Will you always be the shadow? Marlen could almost hear him ask.
And opened the door to the inn where he and Darien were staying, into the spill of light and warmth where there was no sign, none at all, that his life was about to change.
CHAPTER
3
LIGHT assaulted her in the vast room; from overhanging lamps with their multiple slender branches, from torches in wall sconces of decorative brass, from wineglasses reflecting light like a thousand flashes of bared teeth. Master Gelvan’s house could rightly be called a palace, its parquet floors spread with intricate Kahishian carpets, wall hangings and paintings on the walls that Lin knew were each in their way special. Musicians played a teasingly frivolous, fashionable tune to which some were already dancing.
As Leander straightened his coat and glanced worriedly about them, Lin made her own calculations. The people who crowded the rooms were among the finest in the city. Added to that were contingents of foreign lords and merchants, here in Tamryllin for the week of the Midsummer Fair. Lin would have to be on her guard even more than usual. She didn’t think Rayen would accept the invitation of a Galicia
n, even one so highly placed as Master Gelvan, but she couldn’t be sure. One advantage she had: with her hair hacked off and her body whittled to nothing, he was unlikely to recognize her right away. Nonetheless, tonight was a risk.
A flash in her mind’s eye and she was in a different room: a cavernous hall hung with draperies of finest velvet and brocade, with tapestries centuries old. Faces staring from them that possessed her forehead, her eyes. And Lin herself in the midst of a whirlpool of guests who stared and whispered and no doubt speculated on her still-unmarried state. Swirling in the shadows with hissing whispers, the guests reminded her of spirits. Her goblet of wine raised to her eye as if to consider its clarity and bouquet, when in fact it was so she would have something to look at … something that was not any of those measuring eyes.
See anything you like? Rayen, a warm feather of breath in her ear. Not that it matters, love.
And then she was back beside Leander in the home of a Tamryllin merchant, on the verge of performing before the Court Poet and king.
“Lin, what are you thinking?” Leander said out the side of his mouth. He kept tugging at the cuffs of his blue coat, which she knew was a nervous gesture.
“That I’ve already begun to itch.” It was true: so long had it been since she had worn a dress that her body now rebelled.
They had made the proper greeting to Master Gelvan where he stood by the entrance to greet guests, framed beneath an arch of fluted marble. He was a slender, tired-looking man with pale hair verging toward grey. His attire was scarlet, slashed with gold-threaded brocade. She could imagine the cost of obtaining that color. A ruby pendant on a chain rested on the merchant’s chest, a plain gold ring on his left hand—though she knew his wife had been gone many years. He had acknowledged Lin and Leander with a nod, without indicating surprise at a female poet. She was grateful for that.
Now surveying the crowds, Lin said, “Oh, dear.”
Leander jumped. Everything before a performance made him anxious. “What?”
She had caught sight of two black-clad men, impeccably groomed and indisputably handsome. Each wore an ornate harp strapped at his waist on a tooled leather baldric. “Them.”
Following her gaze, Leander swore under his breath. Lin sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I knew they would be here. I met Marlen today in the temple, and he told me. Quite pleased with himself, of course, though that is probably his permanent state of mind.”
They made a striking pair: Marlen tall and brooding, Darien slender and blond, with those mischievous blue eyes. Both were the most celebrated poets of their year at the Academy, and possibly of the decade. In just a year out of the Academy, they had made a name even some Seers might have envied.
And who might compete with them? Lin thought. A female poet of little training? An Academy graduate who had, thus far, failed to make a mark?
She knew what her partner was thinking. “Leander, listen to me,” she said. “Therron sent us here because he believed we have talent. A Seer sent us. We don’t have to be intimidated by these men.”
“They’re better than we are,” he said. “And they have two harps, which means they can do the more complicated duets. Where’s the wine?”
She caught his arm in a way that she hoped was inconspicuous. They could not be seen to quarrel, not here. “You know what happens to your concentration when you drink,” she said. “We can’t afford any wrong notes tonight.”
“You’ll deny me wine from Master Gelvan’s cellar after months of cheap ale?” said Leander. “Lin, where is your heart?”
She smiled, relieved that his good humor was returning. “Afterward,” she said. “To celebrate a song well played.”
And when that time came, she thought, she could do with a glass of wine herself. Pale gold from the mountain vineyards and poured to the brim, in the style of a northern man (or woman). The heat of summer hung upon them here, but she still was who she was.
Strains of a new piece of music were beginning, this one even more tinkling and lighthearted than the last. The musicians played on fiddles, tabors, and lutes, instruments of the moment. The merchant was nothing if not fashionable.
Avoiding eye contact with any of the guests, Lin saw that someone else had joined Master Gelvan under the arch: a stunning girl, gowned in emerald green. Her golden hair had been curled elaborately and then allowed to cascade from a hairpin crusted with diamonds.
That would be Master Gelvan’s daughter, without any doubt.
The merchant had many treasures, but Lin thought, seeing Rianna Gelvan, it was apparent which was most dear.
Leander had left her side, off to seek wine against her wishes, or perhaps only women. He labored under the misapprehension that a poet’s ring was all that was needed to make him an attractive prospect—that and his family’s estate in a green valley to the southwest. Like many southern men, she thought, he had an exaggeratedly optimistic view of the world. A name for Tamryllin in more sentimental songs was “City of Dreams,” but it seemed to Lin that dreams were just as likely to be killed here as they were to come alive.
Still, it was to this city that she had come, from dark forests and cold. Nothing else could frighten her now. And then Lin felt a shiver, smiled a little, at the bravado she knew was false.
In that moment she spotted the Seer Therron in an alcove to the side, out of sight of most of the guests. Their eyes met and he smiled, and it occurred to Lin that he might have been watching her.
No fear, Lin told herself, and moved to join him.
* * *
SHE watched him. As those around her sipped wine or chatted in sedate groups, Rianna kept her eye on Callum. Clad in his best jacket, he was pacing the room with a decanter of red wine, filling glasses for the guests. But at the very start, she noticed that after filling the glass of a particular guest—a middle-aged woman Rianna did not recognize—Callum had pocketed a note.
An itemized note on the body had his name, he had told Master Gelvan.
Her eyes narrowed, Rianna almost didn’t notice Ned until he was nearly knocking into her. “What?” she snapped. “Oh, sorry. Really, Ned, I’m sorry.” It had been his clumsiness, but she knew that was something he was just about helpless to control, long limbs getting away from him.
“What is it that has you so occupied?” he asked with a strained smile. Rianna sensed the hurt behind that smile, regretted that she had lost patience even for a moment. He deserved better from her. If she was going to elope with a poet instead of marrying Ned Alterra, she could at least be kind.
“What do you know of Master Beylint’s murder?” she said, leaning forward so only he would hear.
His brow furrowed. “That’s not something I’d expect you to be curious about.”
“Why not?” she said. “He’s a friend of my father’s, or rather he was.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” said Ned. “The Beylint family was supposed to attend tonight, but now of course they are not. My father donated for an elegy at the Eldest Sanctuary … I’m sure yours did as well.”
“But Ned, what do you think is going on?” said Rianna. “Don’t you think it’s strange that he was killed exactly like those poor people in the streets?”
Ned shrugged. “Could be some sort of imitation. I don’t know, Rianna. I hadn’t thought about it, I admit.” He ran a hand through his hair, a nervous habit that never failed to make it stand on end. “I didn’t exactly come here to talk about a murder. I thought … I was wondering … would you like to dance?”
Then she saw it happen: Callum approached Master Gelvan, refilled his glass. And in a movement so quick it was almost sleight of hand, the note found its way to her father’s pocket. Rianna drew a sharp breath.
“What is it?” said Ned.
“Nothing,” said Rianna. She forced a smile. “Of course we must dance.”
* * *
DARIEN noticed that Marlen was already working his way through a second cup of wine. It was unusual for him to do that b
efore a performance. Though Marlen did pride himself on his ability to do anything while inebriated … and if women were to be believed, he did mean anything.
“I suppose you miss Marilla,” Darien said acidly. “Why didn’t you bring her?”
Marlen barked a laugh. “I’m not yet important enough to bring my whore to events like this. Besides, she’d probably try to seduce whomever she believed the most powerful man in the room. It would be embarrassing.” He drained the rest of his glass. “This wine’s foul.”
Darien watched him narrowly. He’d begun to wonder if Marlen’s taste of life in the capital had somehow … changed him. Talk of Marilla brought out a savagery in him that Darien had seen rarely in the years they’d been friends.
And women must come second, always, to the music. In more ways than one, one of Darien’s lovers had once wryly observed.
He could not imagine Rianna saying such things, ever. It was at once wrenching and gratifying to be able to watch her from across the room, without—of course—ever daring to approach. But from a distance he was free to observe her gleaming like a jewel by light of the overhanging lamps. And then at her side—a lank interloper—there was the suitor. Rianna had told Darien his name, but he had stubbornly forgotten it, willed it into nonexistence. And in truth, the man looked almost nonexistent anyway.
“Before you get to thinking that I’m too wrapped up in my wench, you ought to see how you’re ogling that child,” said Marlen, startling him. “And not that it’s your business, but I haven’t seen Marilla in nearly a month.”
“It’s not my business,” Darien said curtly. “And Rianna’s no child. For the love of Thalion, she’s about to marry that stick over there.”
“Him?” Marlen raised an eyebrow, amused. “My. He must have money, or title. Something … not apparent to the eye.”
Darien was about to reply when he noticed that a hush was overtaking the room: the music had stopped, the chatter all but ceased. Twelve men in the red and black livery of the palace had entered, each bearing a horn.
Last Song Before Night Page 3
