The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III (37 page)

All attempts to silence T’fyrr, open and covert had failed. But their foe had not yet tried magic. If ever there was a time when he
—

Or she,
Nightingale reminded herself, yet again.

—
or she, would use magic, it was now.

They had a little time before the Freehold meeting, and Nightingale used it.

T’fyrr was in the bathroom, and he was a most enthusiastic bather. He would be in there for some time, giving her a space all to herself.

She settled herself cross-legged on her bed as T’fyrr splashed water all over her bathroom, and laid her right wrist in her lap. The thin band of Elven silver gleamed beneath the lights of her room, a circlet of starlight or moonlight made solid.

She had been given a gift, she had thought; could it be that it was not a gift after all, but a promise? The Elves had a flexible view of time; sometimes their vision slipped ahead of human vision—seeing not what
would
be, but all of the possibilities of what
might
be. And sometimes, when one was markedly better than the rest, they would move to see that it came to pass.

No one with ambition for ruling all the Twenty Kingdoms could afford to let the Elves live in peace,
she thought soberly.
They are too random an element: unpredictable and unreliable, and most of all, ungovernable. Whoever this person is, he cannot allow the Elves to remain within human borders. So perhaps that is why the second bracelet came to me.

She laid her left hand over the warm circle of silver and closed her eyes. As she held her mind in stillness, listening, she caught the distant melody of Elven Magic, so utterly unlike any other music except that of the Gypsies.

She added her own to it, brought it in, and strengthened it. It must carry her message for her, and it had a long, long way to travel.

She sang to it, deep within her mind, weaving her words into the melody, to be read by every Elf that encountered it. The more that knew, the better.

First, her Name, which was more than just a name; it was the signature of her own power, her history, and her place among her Elven allies.
Bird of song, and bird of night,
she sang,
Healing Hands and Eyeless Sight Bird of passage, Elven friend, walks the road without an end. Pass the wall that has no door, sail the sea that has no shore—

No one but the Elves would know what three-fourths of that meant; it was all in riddles and allusions, and if there was anything that the Elves loved, it was the indirect. There was more of it, and she sang it all. One did not scant on ceremony with the Elves, especially not with
their
High King. He might have been her lover, once—but that had been a long time ago, before he became their High King. It had been nothing more than a moment’s recreation for him, and scarcely more for her. He had been the ease after Raven—a physical release. She had been—amusement. Later she became more than that, once he learned of her power and heard her play;
that
was what had made her an Elven friend, not the idyll amid the pillows of his most private bower.

But that was part of her history with them, and she could not leave it out without insulting him.

When she came to the end of her Name, she began the message; first, a condensation of everything she had learned here, beginning with the fact that it was the Elves who had asked her to come here in the first place.

And lastly, her request, a simple one. It was couched in complicated rhyme, but the essence was not at all complicated.
I may need you and your Magic, and if I do, my need will be a desperate one. You know me, you know that I would not ask this frivolously; if I call, will you come?

She had not expected an answer immediately. She had no idea, after all, how far this message would have to travel, or how many times it would be debated in the Elven councils before a reply was vouchsafed her.

She had most definitely not expected a
simple
answer. She had never gotten a simple answer more than a handful of times in all the years she had known them.

So when she sent the message out, and sat for a moment with her mind empty and her hand still clasping her bracelet, it was not with any expectation of something more than a moment of respite before T’fyrr emerged from his bath.

But she got far more than she had reckoned on.

The spell of music and message she had sent out had been a delicate, braided band of silver and shadow. The reply caught her unawares and wrapped her in a rushing wind, spun her around in a dizzying spiral of steel-strong starlight, surrounded her with bared blades of ice and moonbeams, and sang serenely into her heart in a voice of trumpets and the pounding sea.

And all of it, a simple, single word.

YES.

When T’fyrr emerged from the bathroom, he found her still shaking with reaction and the certainty that if their reply had been so ready and so simple, there must be a reason. So she sat, and trembled, and she could not even tell him why. She could only smile and tell him it was nothing to worry about.

She moved through the day holding onto each moment, savoring every scrap of time with him—but trying her best to act as if nothing had changed between them. He knew there was something wrong, of course, but she was able to convince him that it was only her own fears getting the best of her. She told him that she would be all right; and she bound herself up in the rags of her courage and went on with all their plans.

But when the blow came, as she had known it would, it still came as a shock.

He had spent the night at the Palace, hoping for a summons from the High King, but not really expecting one. She was expecting him in midmorning, as always; she sensed his wild surge of delight as he took to the air, and went to the roof to await his arrival.

She shaded her eyes with her hand and peered upwards into the blue and cloudless sky, even though she knew she would never see him up there. It would take the eyes of an eagle to pick out the tiny dot up there; if she’d had a hawk on her wrist, it
might
have looked up and hunched down on her fist, feathers slicked down in fear, all of its instincts telling it that a huge eagle flew up there. Nothing less than a hawk’s keen senses would find T’fyrr in the hot blue sky, until the moment he flattened out his dive into a landing.

But she always looked, anyway.

She was looking up when the blow struck her heart, and she collapsed onto the baked surface of the roof, breath caught in her throat, mouth opened in a soundless cry of anguish.

It was pain, the mingling of a hundred fears, a wash of dizziness and a wave of darkness. She could not breathe—could not see
—

She blacked out for a moment, but fought herself free of the tangling shroud of unconsciousness, and dragged herself back to reality with the sure knowledge that her worst nightmare had come to pass.

They had taken T’fyrr, snatched him out of the sky by Magic.

And there was nothing that anyone could have done to prevent it, for the sky was the one place where they had thought he was safe.

T’fyrr was gone.

###

“You’re sure?” Tyladen said for the tenth time. She bit her lip, and said nothing. She’d already told him everything there was to say, at least three times over.

But Harperus, who had a listening device of his own, growled at both of them from his room in the Palace, his voice coming through a box on Tyladen’s desk. “Of course she is sure, you fool! Didn’t I just tell you that he left here an hour ago? He went straight from my balcony—and he was going directly to Freehold! If Nightingale says he was kidnapped, then you can take it as fact!”

“B-but magic
—
” Tyladen stuttered. “How can you kidnap someone with something that doesn’t
—
”

“These people believe that what we do is magic, child,” Harperus interrupted. “If you must, assume it’s a different technology; for all
we
know, that’s exactly what it is! Just accept it and have done! Nightingale, what can we do, if anything?”

She had thought this out as best she could, given that her stomach was in knots, her throat sore from the sobs she would not give way to, and her heart ready to burst with grief and fear. “I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “I’m not certain how you can combat magic. I have to do something myself—I was promised help from the Elves, and I’m going to get mat help when I am through talking to you. I think that I can find T’fyrr myself, or at least find the general area where he’s being held. After that—I may need some of your devices, if there are any that could find exactly where he is in a limited area.” She had some vague notion there were devices that could probably do that, some Deliambren equivalent of a bloodhound, but that those devices probably had a limited range. They couldn’t scour the whole city for her, but if she could give them a small area, they might be able to narrow down the search to a specific building. “I do need someone to watch the High King and the Advisors around him. Father Ruthvere will provide sanctuary if we are being hunted from the Palace, or by someone connected with the Palace, but I need to be warned if someone comes up with a charge against us. If you can think of anything
—
”

“I will take care of it,” Harperus promised. “Now—you go do what you can.”

“I will
—
” Then her voice did break on a sob as she told him the one thing she
did
know. “Old Owl, wherever he is, he’s hurt. He’s hurt badly. I don’t know
how
badly, but all I can feel from him is pain
—
”

Harperus swore in his own language, a snarl of pure rage. She had never heard him so angry in her life.

“Go
—
” he urged. “This youngster and I will work together.”

She rubbed at her burning eyes with the back of her hand, got up from her seat, pushed open the office door half-blinded with tears, and fled up the stairs to her room. She had not yet called in her promise from the Elves, and she needed to prepare the room before she could do that.

The Elves did not care for the human cities and did not like to walk among the artificial buildings, but it seemed that for her sake, they would put their dislikes aside. She put the bed up into the wall, and pushed all the furniture out of the way. She put her harps in the bathroom. She swept every vestige of dust and dirt from the floor so that it was as white and shiny as the day the surface was laid. Only then did she lay ready the circle with a thin trickle of blue sand on the white floor, inscribing a pattern that the Elven mage she had been pledged service from would be able to use as a target.

Then she stood outside the circle, clasped her hand around her bracelet, and let her heart cry out a wordless wail of anguish and a plea for help.

The air in her room vibrated with a single, deep tone, like the groaning of the earth in an earthquake; the floor sang a harmonic note to the air, the walls a second, the ceiling a third, the whole room humming with a four-part chord of dreadful power.

Then the blue sand exploded upward in a puff of displaced air.

She did not recognize the Elven mage who stood where the circle had been, blinking slowly at her with his amber eyes slitted against the light. His hair was as amber as his eyes; his clothing of deep black silk, a simple tunic and trews without ornamentation or embroidery of any kind. By that, she knew he was more powerful than any Elven mage she had ever yet met; only a mage of great power would be confident enough to do without the trappings of power.

“Tell me, Bird of Night,” he said as calmly as if he had not appeared out of thin air in her room, so alien to his kind; as serenely as if he had not heard the tears of her heart calling. “Tell me what you need of me.”

She told him in the same words that she had told Tyladen and Harperus, and it did not get any easier to bear for the retelling. He nodded and waited for her to answer his second question.

“From you, my lord, I need protection,” she said. “Protection from the spells of human mages, for myself, and for the one who once wore this
—
”

She handed the Elf a feather, shed only yesterday from T’fyrr’s wing. He took it and smoothed it between his fingers.

“A mage-musician, with wings in truth,” he said, as his eyes took on the appearance of one who is gazing into the far distance. “But he is in a place that is dark to me; I cannot find him.”

“I can find him,” she said promptly. “But I cannot protect myself from the magics that stole him, nor can I protect him from the spells of our enemy, once I find him.”

“I can,” the Elven mage replied, with a lifted brow. “There is no mortal born who can set a spell that can break my protections, if those protections are set with consent.”

She nodded, understanding his meaning. With consent, the mage was not limited to his own power in setting a protection; he could draw upon the strength of the spirit of the one he protected as well.

“You have mine,” she promised him instantly, “and you will have his, once I reach him.”

“Then I will be away,” the mage replied, and as she widened her eyes in alarm, he smiled thinly. “Fear not, I do not desert you, nor shall I travel far, but I must go to a place more congenial to my kind. Your walls and metals interfere with my working. I have his feather, you have your Silver. That will be enough. When you need the protections, clasp your hand about the band of Silver, and call me.” He regarded her with an unwinking gaze, and then added, “I am Fioreth.”

She bowed slightly, acknowledging the fact that he had given her part of his Name, enough to call him with. It was a tremendous act of trust on the part of an Elf. He bowed in return, then the room hummed a four-fold chord of power once more, and he was gone.

Now there was only one thing left to do.

Find him.

The pain in her heart had a direction: north, and a little east. She needed to follow that
—

Someone pounded at her door, and before she could answer it, the door flew open.

“Lady!” gasped one of the younger serving boys, panting with the effort of running up four flights of stairs. “Lady, there are guards at the door, and they want
you!
They say they have a warrant
—
”