The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III Read Free

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.”
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    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.
    It wasn’t just the cool air or the dark that made her shiver. Not all the warm sunlight on the road nor the cheerful greetings of her fellow travelers had been able to ease the chill Talaysen’s words had placed within her heart.
    He was warned to send me to Lyonarie in a dream, she thought, for the hundredth time that day, as she unloaded her donkey and placed the panniers and wrapped bundles on the ground beside him. What kind of a dream — and who else was in it? Wren can be the most maddening person in the world when it comes to magic — he hates to use it, and he hates to rely on it, and most of all he is the last person to ever depend on a dream to set a course for him. So why does he suddenly choose to follow the dictates of a dream now?
    There had been a great deal that Talaysen had not told her, she knew that, as well as she knew the fingerings of her harp or the lies of a faithless lover, but he had simply shut his secrets inside himself when she tried to ask him more. Perhaps if she had agreed to his scheme, he might have told her—or perhaps not. Talaysen was good at keeping his own counsel.
    She went outside the barren circle of needle-strewn ground within the arms of the black pine and found a patch of long, sweet grass to pull up for the donkey. She hadn’t named him yet; Talaysen had driven all thoughts of such trivial matters out of her head.
    Infuriating man. She hadn’t even been able to enjoy the feeling of freedom that picking and choosing her own road had given her.
    Once the donkey had been fed and hobbled, she made a sketchy camp in the gloom of dusk with the economy of someone who has performed such tasks too many times to count. She scraped dead, dry needles away from a patch of bare earth, laid a tiny fire ready to light, rigged a tripod out of green branches over it, and hung her small kettle full of the sweet water she had drawn at the last stream from the apex of the tripod. She took the tent and her bedding out of one of the panniers and dropped them both nearest to the trunk of the tree. Then she lit the fire and laid her bedding out atop the still-folded tent. Her weather-sense gave her no hint of a storm tonight, so there was no point in putting the tent up, and screen-mesh was not needed since this wasn’t the territory for bloodsuckers. She preferred to sleep out under the open sky when she could; she would sprinkle certain herbs over the smoldering remains of her fire to keep biting insects away as she slept. Sometimes the touch of the moon gave her dreams of her own, and it would be useful for one such to come to her tonight.
    The water in the kettle was soon boiling, and she poured half of it over tea leaves in her mug. She threw a handful of meal and dried berries into what remained; porridge was a perfectly good dinner, and she had feasted every night of the Faire. It would do her no harm to dine frugally tonight, and there were honeycake to break her fast on