The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page B

to second-guess them.
    However, this area would be a good one in which to start her search. However much she disliked the crowding, she could hide herself better in a crowd than in more exclusive surroundings.
    At the first sign of a tiny cross-street, she pulled the donkey out of the stream of traffic and into the valley between two buildings, looking for a child of about nine or ten, one who was not playing with others, but clearly looking for someone for whom he could run an errand. Such a child would know where every inn and tavern was in his neighborhood, and would probably know which ones needed an entertainer.
    And people think that children know nothing . . .
    ###
    Nightingale kept her back quite stiff with indignation as she pulled her donkey away from the door of the Muleteer. Her guide—a girl-child with dirty hair that might have been blond if one could hold her under a stream of water long enough to find out—sighed with vexation. It was an unconscious imitation of Nightingale’s own sigh, and was close enough to bring a reluctant smile to the Gypsy’s lips.
    “Honest, mum, if I’d’a thunk he was gonna ast ye pony up more’n music, I’d’a not hev brung ye here,” the girl said apologetically.
    Nightingale patted the girl on one thin shoulder, and resolved to add the remains of her travel rations to the child’s copper penny. “You couldn’t have known,” she told the little girl, who only shook her head stubbornly and led Nightingale to a little alcove holding only a door that had been bricked up ages ago. There they paused out of the traffic, while the girl bit her lip and knitted her brows in thought.
    “Ye set me a job, mum, an’ I hevn’t dorfe it,” the child replied, and Nightingale added another mental note—to make this girl the first of her recruits. Her thin face hardened with businesslike determination. “I’ll find ye a place, I swear! Jest—was it only wee inns an taverns ye wanted?”
    Something about the wistful hope in the girl’s eyes made Nightingale wonder if she had phrased her own request poorly. “I thought that only small inns or taverns would want a singer like me,” she told the girl. “I’m not a Guild musician, and the harp isn’t a very loud instrument—”
    “So ye don’ mind playin’ where there’s others playin’ too?” the girl persisted. “Ye don’ mind sharin’ th’ take an’ th’ audience an’ all?”
    Well, that was an interesting question. She shook her head and waited to reply until after a rickety cart passed by. “Not at all. I’m used to ‘sharing’; all of us do at Faires, for instance.”
    A huge smile crossed the child’s face, showing a gap where her two front teeth were missing. “I thunk ye didn’ like other players, mum, so I bin takin’ ye places where they ain’t got but one place. Oh, I got a tavern-place that’s like a Faire, ’tis, an’ they don’ take to no Guildsmen neither. Ye foiler me, mum, an’ see if ye don’ like this place!”
    The child scampered off in the opposite direction in which they had been going, and Nightingale hauled the donkey along in her wake. The girl all but skipped, she was so pleased to have thought of this “tavern-place,” whatever it was, and her enthusiasm was quite infectious. Nightingale found herself hoping that this would be a suitable venue, and not just because her feet hurt, she was wilting with the heat, and her shoulders ached from hauling the increasingly tired and stubborn donkey.
    She also wanted to be able to reward this child, and not have to thread her way out of the neighborhood the little girl knew and hunt up a new guide. The streets were all in shadow now, although the heat hadn’t abated; much longer and it would be twilight. She would have to find at least a safe place to spend the night, then; it wasn’t wise for a stranger to be out in a neighborhood like this one after dark. In a smaller city she wouldn’t have worried so much, but she had