"Mercedes Lackey - Bardic Voices 03 - Eagle and the Nightingales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

no way of knowing if her dreams were a true vision of the past or only nightmares
reflective of the stories she heard. She'd had one last night, in fact, a dream of waking to
find herself surrounded by flames that reached for her with a lifelike hunger.
Such a complete disaster as the fire could not be erased over the course of weeks or
months. Even now, with the fire a year past, there were blackened chimneys and beams
standing starkly in the midst of ashes, and a taint of smoke still hung in the air.
The Faire had been profitable for just about everyone who came this year, herself
included. Knowing that the folk of Kingsford would be needing every possible article of
daily living, even so many months after the fire, merchants had flocked to the Faire-site
across the river with their wagons piled high, their pack-beasts loaded to the groaning
point. They had prospered, and they had been generous to those who came to entertain.
The Bardic Guild, bane and scourge of the Free Bards for as long as that loosely organized
group had existed, had been remarkable for its reticence during the Faire.
Her polite encounters with Guild Bards had been odd enough that they still stuck in
her mind. Time after time, she had gotten a distant nod of acknowledgement from Bard
and Guild hireling alike, and not the harassment and insults of previous years. One might
have thought that the Guild did not particularly want attention drawn to it, she mused.
The Guild simply held its auditions and performances quietly and gave no opposition to
anything that the Free Bards did. There were rumors, never verified, that the Bardic
Guild had a hand in the burning of Kingsford, and that the Church, in the person of a
Justiciar Mage and Priest called Ardis, as a consequence had its eye on them. Nightingale
discarded both rumors; there was no reason to believe the former, and the Church and
the Guild had always operated hand-in-glove in the past and it was unlikely that situation
would change any time in the future. Never mind that Ardis was reputedly the cousin of
the head of the Free Bards, Talaysen, also called Master Wren; there was only so much a
single Priest could do. And one could not change attitudes by fiat.
The meadowlark flitted off, his yellow breast with the black "V" at his throat vivid in
the morning sun. Well, I endured; nightmares, sorrow hanging like a heavy mist over
the Faire, and all. It will take more than old sorrows and nightmares to keep me from
my music. Nightingale had suffered too many lean seasons in her short life to allow
personal discomfort to get in the way of her performances. She was, after all, a
professional, however much the poseurs of the Guild might deny that. So she, too, had
passed a profitable term at the Faire, and now at the close of it found herself prosperous
enough to afford a donkey to carry her burdens for her for the first time in her life as a
musician. Heretofore when she traveled she had been forced to rely on the kindness of
fellow Free Bards or Gypsies, who would grant her a corner of their wagons to stow her
goods in. And while the company was welcome, this arrangement forced her to depend on
others, and constrained her to whatever itinerary they chose and not one of her own
choosing. When given the option, she preferred to avoid cities, towns, even larger villages
altogether. Unfortunately, such destinations were usually where her traveling
companions preferred to go.
She closed her eyes and pressed her hands against her temples for a moment; not
because she had a headache, but to remind herself to stay calm and bulwarked against
the outside world. She could not help but wish she had chosen not to come to the Faire
this year, but to stay in one of the lands held by those who were not human, or even pass
a season or two in the halls of an Elven king, perilous as that was for mortals. The Faire
had posed a trial for her ability to keep herself isolated from her own kind, and more than
once she had been tempted to give over her ambitions for a wider reputation as a
musician and simply walk away.
But all that was in the past now; there was a sweet-tempered little donkey tethered