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

in the morning, an indulgence she had not been able to resist when she passed through the last village this afternoon.
    The moon rose, serene as always. Its silver light filtered through the branches of the tree she sheltered beneath. The donkey dozed, standing hip-shot with his head hanging, the firelight flickering over him but not waking him. Somewhere in the further distance, an owl called.
    Nightingale strained her ears for the notes of her namesake bird, but there was no sweet, sad song wafting on the warm air tonight. It was the wrong season for a nightingale to be singing, but she never drifted off to sleep without listening for one, no matter where she was or what time of year it might be. Nearby crickets sang cheerfully enough that she didn’t miss the absence of that song too much.
    Although it was very lonely out here . . .
    Abruptly, a whistle joined the cricket chorus, and Nightingale sat bolt upright on her sleeping-pad. That was no nightbird song, that was the first few bars of “Lonely Road”! There was someone out there—someone near enough to see the light of her tiny fire, even through the masking branches!
    “Might a friend come in to your fire, Bird of the Night?” asked a voice out of the darkness. It was a clear voice, a silvery tenor, a voice of a kind that a trained musician would recognize, although she did not recognize who the speaker was. It held that peculiar lack of passion that only Elves projected.
    An Elf? First Master Wren, and now one of the Elvenkin? The chill that had threaded Nightingale’s spine since her meeting with Master Wren deepened.
    Elves did not often call themselves the “friend” of a mortal, not even a Gypsy. Though Nightingale could boast of such a distinction if she cared to, she was very far from the hills and halls of those few of the Elvenkin who normally called her “friend.”
    “Any friend is welcome to share my fire,” she replied cautiously. “But an unfriend in the guise of a friend—”
    “—should be aware that the fierce Horned Owl is as much a bird of the night as the Nightingale,” the voice replied, with a hollow chuckle. “Your reputation as a hunter in the dark also precedes you.” The branches parted, with no hand to part them, as if servants held two halves of a curtain apart, and the speaker stepped through them as into a hall of state.
    It was, quite unmistakably, one of the Elven lords, though the circlet of silver he wore betokened him a lord only, and of no higher estate than that. Amber cat-eyes regarded her with a remote amusement from beneath a pair of upswept brows; the unadorned circlet confined hair as golden as the true metal, cut to fall precisely just below his shoulders. His thin face, pale as marble, was as lovely as a statue carved of marble and quite as expressionless. Prominent cheekbones, tapering chin, and thin lips all combined to enhance the impression of “not-human.” The tips of his pointed ears, peeking through the liquid fail of his hair, only reinforced that impression.
    He was ill-dressed for walking through a forest in the dead of night, though that never seemed to bother the Elvenkin much. He wore black, from his collar to the tips of his soft leather boots, black velvet with a pattern of silver spider webs, velvet as soft as a caress and fragile as the wings of a moth. Nightingale had worn cloth like that herself, when she spent time beneath the Hills.
    “Call me a friend of a friend, Bird of the Night,” the Elven lord continued, as the branches closed behind him without even snagging so much as a sleeve. Nightingale sighed; the Elves always made such a performance out of the simplest of things—but that was their nature. “And in token of this, I have been asked to gift you with another such as the gift you already bear, the maker of which sends his greetings—”
    He held out his hand, and in it was a bracelet, a slender ring of silver hardly thicker than a thread. It had a liquid sheen that