The Dark Queen by Michael Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

for the seventh year, five green-robed bardsrepresenting
     earth, air, fire, water, and memoryended her brief apprenticeship. They all said it was
     for her own good, so that she could sooner return to her own kind. She received the
     lorebook and her chosen companion, a young hawk she named Lucasan out- landish bird whose
     bright green eyes, strikingly unusual for his species, promised that he could be schooled
     to magic.
    The next decision rested with the college: the instrument, to be presented to the graduate
     by the resident bards of high Silvanost. Larken had fully expected a drum, since that was
     the perfect musical complement for her voice, rough and rhythmical, the instrument of her
     people when they summoned the water or prepared for a distant battle. Yes, the drum would
     be most fitting.
    But they gave her the lyre instead. How appropriately taunting, they mused. A chamber
     musician's pretty little harp. A stringed dainty to be used to soothe some lord from his
     day's troubles. An instrument of peace, a fine thing if in the hand of one who cared not
     for battle and the rising of the blood and the clash of war. They had chosen her trophy
     with a last, biting meanness in mind, and the message was clear: Be quiet, and be gone. To
     ensure this, they consulted a dark mage near Waylorn's Tower, a Master Calotte, who, with
     a curious smile, gave them the harp, and then loaned them his preoccupied apprentice to
     burden the young bard with a binding curse. Larken could never compose an original melody,
     said the curse. A talented mimic, she was sentenced to mine her memory for songs recalled
     and half heard in a marginal childhood and in as marginal a stay at the bardic college.
     But the apprentice botched the complicated spell. Nodding over the components, he mixed
     one moss with another, then reversed two words in the long incantation, so that although
     Larken was cursed to compose no original music, only her spoken words were affected,
     discredited. That seemed bad enough, for whenever Larken spoke, she spoke discordantly.
     Those around her thought they heard only the wind, or they forgot instantly what she said.
     So her masters had promoted her and abused her at the same time. They set her on the road,
     far from Silvanost and the haunts of the Thon-Thalas, bound in a last tutelage to Arion
     Corvus, a master among traveling bards. When that was done, Larken was sent home, far more
     angry than when she'd left. But old Corvus was wise, and knowing in the way that a bard is
     knowing. At Larken's departure, he gave her the drum she carried nowa light, sturdy
     instrument with a head of sheer glain opal. The drum was stone, and the sound from it was
     muffled, even ungainly. But Corvus insisted that it was the drum for her. Muffled.
     Ungainly. And useful, he added, a strange gleam in his ancient eyes. The drum is your
     companion. It will protect you. Since that time Larken had wandered with the Que-Nara. Now
     she was Fordus's bard. She had come to sing the cause of the downtrodden, come to stand
     with him against the cold white rigors of Istar and its adamant righteousness, to free the
     thousands of Plainsmen who wore the collars of Istarian slavery. She believed Fordus could
     eventually break any curse, even her misplaced one. She was the muse of sand and plateau
     and arroyo, taking the deeds of a rebel commander and breathing them full of poetry and
     legend and light. Through her song and the thousand cadences of her odd glain drum, Fordus
     the Water Prophet had become Fordus the Storm, Lord of the Rebels ... Fordus the hero.
     Still, the curse of Calotte's apprentice stayed with her, and when Larken spoke, her words
     fell into a great void. The result of this ludicrous situation was that she never spoke at
     all anymore, except to Lucas. The hawk seemed to understand her words, no matter how
     jumbled they sounded to human ears. Over the years she