DAVID COE - Seeds of Betrayal

“I’d rather not let it be known too widely that we’re looking for him. He may still be nearby; we shouldn’t do anything to scare him off.”

The boy smiled. “It seems we won’t be going north to find Shurik after all.”

Grinsa gave a reluctant nod. “Not yet, at least.”

After finishing their ales, Grinsa paid the barman for a room and he and Tavis ascended a creaking wooden stairway to the tavern’s upper floor. Their room was the first one on the hallway. In most ways it was no different from every other room in which they had stayed since leaving Eibithar: small, dirty, smelling slightly of must and stale sweat.

“I hope we didn’t pay too much for this,” Tavis said, eyeing the beds doubtfully.

“It wasn’t a lot, though it was more than the room’s worth.”

“How much of my father’s gold-?”

He never finished the question. From the streets below the room’s lone shuttered window, Tavis heard shouts and, after a moment, a loud cheer. Grinsa strode to the window and threw open the shutters.

A large group of men had gathered in the lane, many of them bearing torches. There was a good deal of laughter, and Tavis could hear shouts and cheering from further off, as if the scene was repeating itself throughout the city.

“What is it?” he asked.

The gleaner shook his head. “I don’t know.” He shuttered the window again and crossed to the door. “But we should find out.”

They hurried back down the stairs, and finding the tavern empty, stepped out into the street. The barman was there, as were his Qirsi patrons. But it was the Eandi who were making most of the noise, shouting back and forth to each other, most of them grinning.

“What’s happened?” Grinsa asked.

The barman looked at him for a moment, as if unsure whether or not to speak with him.

“A messenger just arrived from Solkara,” he said at last, watching the Eandi once more. “The king is dead.”

Grinsa gaped at him. “What? How did he die?”

“The man didn’t say.”

Tavis looked at the gleaner, their eyes meeting briefly. Had the king been murdered as well?

“Did he refuse to say, or did no one ask?”

The barman offered a dark smile. “Look at them,” he said, gesturing toward the people in the street. “They don’t care how the man died. They care only that their duke has been avenged. He had Chago garroted, and now the Deceiver has taken him as well. Songs will be written of this day.”

“He was your king,” Tavis said.

The boy regretted speaking the moment the words passed his lips, and Grinsa cast a withering look his way. But with all the noise from the revelers, the barman did not seem to notice his accent.

“Perhaps he was your king,” the man said. “But in Bistari, he was just another Solkaran tyrant.”

“So it’s like this here every time a king dies?” Grinsa asked.

“I was just a boy when Farrad the Sixth died. I don’t remember it that well. But when Tomaz died, people danced in the streets, yes. Maybe not like this-Carden was more hated than most of the Solkaran kings, and he dies without an heir, which gives the people here some hope that another house will claim the throne.”

Tavis couldn’t have said for certain how old Carden the Third had been. Not old, though. He knew that much. He had died young, with no heir, and of some cause alarming or private enough to be excluded from the message announcing his death. Abruptly, the young lord knew where he and Grinsa would be journeying next.

“Will Bistari challenge for the crown?” Grinsa asked.

The barman shook his head, apparently eager to talk now that the conversation wouldn’t affect his business. “Hard to say. If the old duke were still alive I’d think so, but Silbron, his son, is only just past his Determining, and he and his mother still grieve.”

“Then who?”

“Dantrielle might try, or Mertesse. Maybe even Orvinti. In the end, though, the crown will fall to Grigor.”

“Grigor?”

The man turned to look at Grinsa once more. “The oldest of the king’s brothers. You’re not Aneiran, are you?”

“We’re from Wethyrn,” the gleaner said. “Jistingham, to be precise.”

“You’ve come a long way to look for your singer.”

“We’re eager to find him. Eager enough to pay for the names of those he met in your tavern.” Grinsa glanced around them for a moment. “Your customers are gone now,” he said, lowering his voice. “My friend and I are the only ones listening. And we’ve got gold.”

The man gave a thin smile. “I told you already: I never saw him with anyone.”

“Very well.” Grinsa started toward the tavern again. “Come, Xaver,” he said, beckoning to Tavis with a wave of his hand. “There’s nothing more we can learn here.”

The young lord followed him back into the inn.

“He refused gold,” the gleaner said as they climbed the steps again.

“I heard.”

“That tells me it wasn’t us he feared, but rather the person he saw with the assassin.”

“A minister, perhaps?”

Grinsa glanced at him. “Perhaps.”

“Since when are you so interested in the affairs of the Aneiran houses?” Tavis asked him, once they were back in their room. “By revealing that we weren’t from Aneira you might have made him even more suspicious than he already was.”

“True, but it was worth the risk. Knowing who stood to gain the most from Carden’s death may tell us where to go next.”

“After Solkara, you mean.”

The gleaner nodded. “Yes. After Solkara.”

Dantrielle, Aneira

“Play another, lad!” one of the men called to him, drawing shouts of agreement from the others. “Do you know ‘Tanith’s Threnody’?”

Dario shook his head, though he continued to look down at his fingers as he plucked idly at the strings of his lute. “No,” he said. “Never learned it.”

It was a lie, of course. Every lutenist in Aneira knew the threnody, because it was all anyone ever asked them to play. He had already played it this day, and he heard snickers in the far corner of the tavern, probably from someone who had heard him perform it earlier.

“Then play anything,” the man said.

Dario’s fingers throbbed-he had been playing since just after the ringing of the midday bells. They were barely paying him enough to make eight or nine songs worth his while, and he had already done more than a dozen. The tavern shouldn’t have even been open. For one thing, this was the day of Bohdan’s Night, when men should have been with their families rather than drinking at a bar. Most of the men who frequented the Red Boar, however, had no families. More to the point though, with the king dead, every other tavern in the city had been shut down. The duke’s guards never came to the Red Boar, however. They were afraid to. So it remained open, as if nothing had happened, as if it were just an ordinary day in Dantrielle.

One of the serving women put another ale before him and gave him a warm smile.

“They like you,” she whispered.

“Another song or two and my fingers will be bloody.”

She glanced around the tavern and nodded toward the men who crowded the tables and bar. “If you stop now, they’re liable to bloody a good deal more than your fingers.”

She had a point. It was never a good idea for a musician to anger a tavernful of listeners, and this was particularly true in the Red Boar.

“One more,” he said. “And then I need to drink my ale.”

“Fair enough,” another man said. “The lad deserves a bit of rest.”

The others nodded, and Dario began to play. It was one of his own pieces, as the last several had been. He had made up so many that he stopped titling them long ago. But he still remembered where he found each one, and in his own mind he called them by those names. This one was “Moors of Durril,” where he had been early in the last harvest when he first played it.