Элейн Каннингем - Elfsong

Excited now, Lucia pushed the other garments aside and began to search the inside of the wardrobe. After several minutes, her seeking fingers found a tiny button hidden in the swirling pattern of the wood. She pressed it, and a small door on the back panel slid silently open, releasing the robe and revealing a hidden shelf. Lucia reached inside and drew out a black helmet covered with a thick veil.

She slipped the helm over her head and spun to view her reflection in a standing mirror. Though she could see with perfect clarity, her features were completely obscured by the veil. She sang a few notes of a Tethyrian folk song, and the voice was not recognizably her own. In fact, it was not recognizably anything. The voice could have been male or female, old or young. A peal of exultant laughter burst from her, and it, too, was magically disguised by the helm of a Lord of Waterdeep.

So! Her young lover actually held the place she had long pretended to! Caladorn could deny her nothing, and with knowledge gleaned from him she could easily placate Garnet A smile curved her lips, and the burden of worry fell from her narrow shoulders.

Lucia removed the helm and replaced it in the cabinet Before she shut the door, she carefully placed the hem of the lavender robe where it would again be caught in the hidden door. She arranged the other garments as she had found them, making it appear that the wardrobe had not been disturbed, and she dressed herself in the clothes she had worn the night before. When the room was in order, she sauntered out of Caladorn’s home in the direction of Mother Tathlorn’s House of Pleasure and Healing. With the morning’s success behind her, she felt well justified in treating herself to a massage, a manicure, and perhaps a little something more.

Taskerleigh lay two days’ travel behind him, but Danilo had yet to come up with an explanation for his current predicament.

By Dan’s reckoning, Elaith Craulnober would rather wed a troll than travel in his company, yet here they were. Danilo had ruefully dubbed their combined forces “Music and Mayhem,” and the name stuck. That was not, in his opinion, a good omen.

Theirs was beyond doubt the most uneasy alliance the Harper had ever encountered. The elf held all the prejudices of his race and had no love of dwarves, but to Dan’s surprise Elaith treated Wyn Ashgrove no better than he did Morgalla. The elven minstrel was spared the sharp edge of Elaith’s tongue, but he pointedly ignored Wyn’s presence among the travelers. Several times, though, Elaith’s eyes rested on the gold elf, and the pure hatred in their amber depths chilled Danilo. For his part, Wyn treated everyone with the same distant courtesy, and he seemed to take no notice of his fellow elf’s bad manners. If there was a common thread weaving together the disparate adventurers, it was Vartain. The riddlemaster seemed to annoy everyone in equal measure.

But Elaith’s mercenaries, especially the huge black-bearded man known as Balindar, were quite taken with the dwarf maid. When they learned that Morgalla was a veteran of the Alliance War, the men plied her with eager questions. Waterdeep had not sent an army to help turn back the barbarian invaders, and many sell-swords of the Northlands felt they’d missed out on the greatest, most glorious adventure of their lifetimes. The dwarf was hesitant at first, but she warmed to their interest, and by mid-morning of the second day, she was helping to pass the tedium of travel with one well-told tale after another. Dan listened to snatches of their conversations, enjoying the dwarf’s mellow voice and skilled storytelling. He remembered Morgalla’s gruff rejection of the title “dwarven bard,” but to his ears, she deserved to be accounted so even if there was no music in her soul. And that lack, he doubted. Every night since they’d left Waterdeep, Morgalla had persuaded him to play his lute and sing. Never would she join him, but she listened to every air and ballad with a rapt expression of mingled joy and longing on her broad face.

Danilo glanced over at Elaith, who was riding apart from the others, as alert and wary as the silver fox he resembled. He could not imagine what treasure induced the elf to take to the road. It was widely rumored in Waterdeep that the moon elf was wealthy almost beyond calculation. Elaith often hired mercenary bands and sent them on trips of exploration and adventure, but in recent years he had remained in Waterdeep, making his dark deals and reaping the reward from others’ blood and toils. The Harper didn’t trust Elaith for a moment, and the sooner he knew the elf’s hidden purpose, the better his little band’s chances of survival. Danilo reined his bay, a fast and sturdy horse he favored for long trips, over to the elf’s fine-boned black steed.

“How does Cleddish?” the Harper asked, nodding toward a mercenary who had been wounded in the harpy attack. Cleddish was one of five men who had been turned into living statues by the harpy charm song. The effect had finally worn off this morning, and Danilo would long remember the man’s horrible, keening screams when he awoke. Danilo carried a number of tiny vials containing potions that sped healing or countered poisons, and he’d given one of each to Cleddish. This precaution closed the gashes made by the harpy’s filthy talons and would probably stave off putrefaction, but the man had lost a good deal of blood. Danilo suspected that Cleddish had sustained hidden wounds, as well. The mercenary sat his horse with grim, stoic determination, but he had spoken little since the attack, and his face was almost as gray as the single braid of hair that hung over his wounded shoulder. Still, Cleddish was more fortunate than his comrade, a Northman who had been blinded by the harpy’s venom. At Elaith’s order, the blinded man had been put out of his agony and his body left beside the trail.

“Cleddish seems rather subdued, and his color is poor,” Danilo pointed out, “but I don’t know him well enough to judge whether or not this is normal for him.”

Elaith turned a long-suffering gaze to the human, his expression plainly indicating that he tolerated this interruption as but one indignity among many. “Cleddish is a hired sword, not some beloved cousin. You know him as well as I.”

“Ah. Well, that exhausts that topic,” Danilo said dryly.

“I should hope so.”

After a moment’s silence, the nobleman tried again. “In all candor, I can’t envision you joining forces with bards and Harpers.”

The elf responded with an enigmatic smile. “Let’s say that I’ve become a patron of the arts.”

“Most commendable. I must say, it was a surprise to learn that you’ve taken up adventuring again. I trust your expedition to Taskerleigh was a success?”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t be so trusting.” The rejoinder was offered in silky, pleasant tones, but it was nonetheless a warning.

Danilo decided not to take it “Hit a nerve there, did I?” he said cheerfully. “Well, if your men expected treasure and were disappointed, one way of keeping up morale would be offering them a green dragon’s hoard.” He left an unspoken question hanging in the air.

“A gracious offer.” Elaith made the Harper a small, mock bow. “On behalf of my men, I accept. Now, if you’ll excuse me, one of us should watch the road.” The elf kicked his horse into a trot, putting several lengths’ distance between himself and the Harper.

Danilo grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck with both hands. That went about as well as he’d expected. Still, the elf had a point The terrain through which the adventurers rode was rugged and inhospitable, and caution was definitely in order. The village of Taskerleigh lay near Ganstar’s Creek, in hilly and fertile land northwest of the Goldenfield temple farms. The roads through it had fallen into disrepair, for rumors of monsters and the disappearance of more than one adventuring party had discouraged resettlement. The main road that led westward from the deserted village was also lightly traveled, for only the heartiest travelers ventured into the High Forest, and even fewer emerged. The path that Music and Mayhem followed skirted the rock-strewn hills marking the grave of the Fallen Kingdom, a long-ago settlement of humans, elves, and dwarves. The land had long since become wild: fields had been reclaimed by scrub forest, buildings had been reduced to occasional heaps of stone, dwarven tunnels had either collapsed or become home to underground monsters. To Danilo, the scene was an ominous suggestion of what befell humans, elves, and dwarves who tried to cast their lots together.