The Lark and the Wren - Chapter Nine

[kalinara]

So last time, Rune made some friends and got some clothes. She also started her lessons, which seem appropriately difficult.



As it turns out, Rune isn't popular among everyone at Amber's place. The serving girl, Carly, is not a fan and makes snide comments to the customers about how Rune's playing gives her a headache.

Fortunately, the customer disagrees. He thinks Rune's playing is very pleasant, and has a request. Rune muses about her conflict with Carly (she doesn't want to bring it to Amber, because she imagines Amber would just chide her for being unable to get along). Rune is also, though she doesn't seem to realize it, getting some interesting lessons in managing her audience. For example, Amber had told Rune to always refer to male and the occasional female customer as "my lord" and "my lady", because it makes a lot of people feel good to be taken for noble. And indeed, it makes this young man look gratified.

One thing I appreciate is how, when Rune muses about Carly's bad temper, she also notes that Carly is an expert worker who serves more tables than the others: Shawm, Maddie, and Arden. I know that's a tiny thing to praise, but I've read a lot of books where the adversary character is both awful to the lead character and terrible at their job. See, for example, Pona in Dragonsinger, who is both mean to Menolly AND a bad musician (while the nicer Audiva, we're told at the end, is actually the most talented of the girls).

I like that Carly is good at her job, because first of all, sometimes crappy people are still talented at what they do, and second of all, it adds more tension to the situation. Amber is not going to want to lose a valuable employee.

So there's been a bit of a timeskip. When Rune arrived in Nolton, it was early summer. Now it's toward the end of Autumn. Rune's been working at Amber's all this time, and has even gotten comfortable enough to drop her boy disguise. She's been very safe.

We learn a bit more about Nolton's economy. Part of the reason that Rune and the other downstairs employees are safe is because they don't wear the badge of the "Whore's Guild". Rune does note though that the absence of a licensed badge might not be as much protection in another house.

Work at Amber's House is going very well: she knows many of the regular costumers, and can tease them, and sometimes they even buy her a drink which is a nice pick-me-up. Unfortunately, her street busking is not doing as well: there are fewer people seeking lunch outside at this time of year, and things are getting colder. Her shopkeeper friends tell her that they may even have to close down during the coldest months and sell their food at the taverns instead. This means Rune's shelter will be gone.

Rune isn't doing too badly, she admits. She's got a place to live, and since her busking corner is so close to the church box, they can't accuse her of stinting them. She's pretty bitter about the tax and tithe. (She thinks she's lucky they don't know where she stays at night or they might tax her more.)

We learn a bit more about local customs: the ribbon thing is part of an unofficial uniform. Guildsmen wear purple and gold or purple and silver, and the rest wear multicolored ribbons instead. Rune's already modified her shirts to match, so she's now easily recognizable as a musician. She's even gotten a few temporary gigs that way.

At some point, Sapphire, the sex worker that Rune met last chapter, comes downstairs to play a board game with some of the guests. Rune realizes that this is part of why Carly is so cranky. Apparently Carly has aspirations to become one of the upstairs ladies, but has been found wanting. She's pretty enough that she gets some attentive glances when she serves the customers, but no one notices her when Sapphire's around.

And we tangent, a little clumsily, into Rune's thoughts about the other sex workers. She's had a chance to meet them all and learn their stories.

"Topaz" - is non-human, like the Mintak, Boony that Rune had met before. Only Topaz was nothing like Boony; she was thin and wiry and completely hairless, from her toe and finger-claws to the top of her head. Her golden eyes were set slantwise in her flat face, which could have been catlike; but she gave an impression less like a cat and far more like a lizard with her sinuosity and her curious stillness. Her skin was as gold as her eyes, a curious, metallic gold, and Rune often had the feeling that if she looked closely enough, she'd find that in place of skin Topaz really had a hide covered in tiny scales, the size of grains of dust. . . .

So anyway, Topaz's story is a lot like Boony's too. She came as a trader, ran a foul of the tax laws, and ended up in bonded servitude at a brothel. Apparently she had no real issue with "concubine duties", but there were other things that they tried to make her do. Fortunately, one of the other sex workers found out about her situation and convinced Amber to rescue her.

"Pearl" is another sex worker. She's pretty clearly fantasy Asian: "Pearl was human, altogether human, though of a different race than anyone Rune had ever seen. She was tiny and very pale, with skin as colorless as white quartz, long black hair that fell unfettered right down to the floor, and black, obliquely slanted eyes. Pearl and Topaz are very close and often speak together in a foreign language, made of sibilants. Pearl's own language, which she demonstrates for Rune, is also different.

Pearl's story is that she came as a concubine to a foreign trader. The trader died, and rather than being sent back as "property", which apparently she was according to the laws of her own land, she was "freed" and therefore no one was willing to pay to send her home.

Pearl had heard of Amber's and came looking for a place. Initially she was just going to work to save up for money to return home, but now she's decided that she likes it here. She's working instead toward a happy retirement where she can devote herself to her hobby, which is painting tiny pictures on eggshells.

Sapphire, we met, and heard part of her story already. Rune knows more details now: she'd been a country girl carried off and raped by a merchant's son, who abandoned her when she got pregnant. Tonno befriended her and took her to Amber. Rune doesn't know what happened to the child, though she suspects that Amber might have helped Sapphire get rid of it. Amber realized that Sapphire was a beautiful woman under her haggard state, and helped bring her back to "full bloom".

The last girl is "Ruby", who is an aggressive, athletic redhead. Rune contrasts Ruby with calm, placid Sapphire and notes that of course they are best friends. Her story isn't sad at all. Rather, her parents were uptight churchgoers and she was a wild girl. They tried to put her in a convent, but she ran away, slept with a minstrel, and learned that she really liked sex and had a talent for it. She "worked her way" to Nolton, where she examined each brothel and decided she liked Amber's best. She walked in and demanded a job. Amber, amused and impressed, gave her a trial period, which she rocked.

So this segue into the girls' appearances and backstory is a pretty clumsy info dump. I find it hard to believe that Rune is just mentally monologuing about each girl's appearance and backstory. But that said, I like a lot about what's established here.

I like that there's a real attempt to portray each of the sex workers as an individual person, with her own life and experiences, outside of her brief interaction with Rune. They have their own friendships and ambitions. They have a variety of backstories and reasons that they entered into this career path.

We also hear a bit more about the below stairs staff, by the way, though it's mostly in the context of the gemstone ladies. Maddie, the girl Rune met last chapter, utterly adores Pearl. Of the boys, Shawm is very shy and bashful, while Arden is a gregarious little brother (though he seems to have a crush on Ruby.)

Rune is realizing that between the upstairs ladies and Maddie, she actually has female friends for the first time in her life. She really feels like Amber's place is a home, and I'm happy for her.

So anyway, Sapphire eventually comes over to ask if Rune would play five more songs. She thinks one of her board game partners is almost ready to, ahem, take things a bit further. Rune is happy to do so, and Sapphire makes a point to say something very nice:

But then she turned back a moment. "You know, I must have thought this a thousand times, and I never told you. I am terribly envious of your talent, Rune. You were good when you first arrived-you're quite good now-and some day, people are going to praise your name from one end of this land to the other. I wish I had your gift."

"Well-" Rune said cautiously, "I don't know about that. I've a long way to go before I'm that good, and a hundred things could happen to prevent it. Besides-" she grinned. "It's one Guild Bard in a thousand that ever gets that much renown, and I doubt I'm going to be that one."

But Sapphire shook her head. "I tell you true, Rune. And I'll tell you something else; for all the money and the soft living and the rest of it, if I had a fraction of your talent, I'd never set foot upstairs. I'd stay in the common room and be an entertainer for the rest of my life. All four of us know how very hard you work, we admire you tremendously, and I want you to know that."

Aw. Rune is very flattered. She thinks this is the first time she's ever been admired by anyone before. She's on cloud nine.

Now we move to Rune's next lesson with Tonno. She's playing a very fancy, complex piece on the lute that, earlier in the summer, she had thought impossible. Then she plays it again on the fiddle.

Tonno is impressed and tells her something very momentous, when it comes to music, she's beyond him. He can't teach her anymore. Musically, that is. There is still a lot for her to learn otherwise, though, because she's not yet ready for the Trials. (She's both relieved and disappointed to hear that.)

He thinks she shouldn't settle for less than a Bardic position, but there are only a handful of openings and she's not good enough yet to beat the other ninety-nine contenders.

So now, what she has to do is DRILL and PRACTICE. Tonno's going to find all of his really complicated stuff, the stuff he put away as beyond him, and she's going to practice them all. She's going to transpose all of it too. Practice-practice-practice.

Also, she's got other lessons. She can read music now, but he's going to teach her to write it by-ear, without playing it first. He's going to teach her what he knows of different styles and the work of the "Great Bards", and then, as if to answer one of my many complaints about Harper Hall: he's going to drill her in reading, ESPECIALLY history.

I had complained about the lack of everything except music training in Harper Hall, especially because of the way the Harpers are presented as so much more than just performers. Sebell is clearly a spy. Elgion was a diplomat. How the hell does that work, when they don't seem to have any lessons about these matters.

Now Rune IS trying to be only a performer, but even a performer needs to know this stuff. Like Tonno says here:

"Oh, yes," he told her, with a smile. "If you're going to become a Guild Bard, you're going to have to compete with boys who've been learning from Scholars all their lives. You're going to have to know plenty about the past-who's who, and more importantly, why, because if you inadvertently offend the wrong person-"

He sliced his finger dramatically across his neck.

And this is why I got so frustrated by Harper Hall. Because okay, Menolly is the best musician ever. I can accept that part. I can even accept that she got all of her skills off screen. But that doesn't mean she had nothing to learn! McCaffrey could have given us a satisfying plot of Menolly learning all of the non-musical skills that she needs to know.

Rune, like Menolly, has moved past her teacher musically. But she's not done learning. She's going to EARN her easy win at the Bardic Trials. (Spoiler, sorry.)

Tonno isn't done though. Now that Rune's gotten this far, he thinks she needs to know some pretty hard truths and what exactly she has ahead of her.

And this is ANOTHER thing that I feel is almost a response to Harper Hall, where I constantly bitched that no one ever bothered to tell Menolly what to expect or what they wanted from her.

I don't KNOW that this series was written as a response to Harper Hall, but I do know that it hits basically every single complaint I've had about that series.

So he's out with it, point blank:

He wrapped an old comforter around himself, and raised his bushy gray eyebrows at her. "Now, first of all, as far as I know, there are no girls in the Guild," he stated flatly. "So right from the beginning, you're going to have a problem."

Rune isn't completely surprised. She has realized that whenever she busks in feminine clothing, she gets propositioned. Apparently it's a practice of freelance sex-workers to play at being musicians (the busking permit is cheaper than the fees for the Whore's Guild). So female musicians have a bad reputation, but Rune figures that the auditions should be enough to weed the less serious ones out.

Maybe so, but Tonno drops a bombshell: women aren't even allowed to audition. Rune is furious that he never bothered to tell her this, but Tonno has a plan: basically, Rune has done very well at playing at being a boy for so long that she should be able to get her audition as a boy and come clean afterward.

Rune asks if they'll be angry, but the idealistic Tonno thinks that she'll be able to wow them enough that, "if they are any kind of musician at all" they'll over look it. She might have to stay disguised during apprenticeship but as a master bard, she can do what she likes.

Rune thinks that this makes sense. She remembers one master bard who let enemies in to murder his patron. The man was tried and convinced, but he still got to keep his title.

So anyway, Tonno verifies that Rune wants to be a Guild Bard, rather than just a Guild Minstrel. The difference is apparently a matter of skill and rank. Bards get to have patrons and backing. He brings up someone named Gwydain, and well, this may be significant later, so I'll post it:

"Oh, like Master Bard Gwydain," Tonno replied, his eyes focused somewhere past her head, as if he was remembering something. "I heard him play, once, you know. Amazing. He couldn't have been more than twenty, but he played like no one I've ever heard-and that was twenty years ago, before he was at the height of his powers. Ten years ago, the High King himself rewarded Master Gwydain-made him Laurel Sire Gwydain, and gave him lands and a royal pension. A great many of the songs I've been teaching you are his-'Spellbound Captive,' 'Dream of the Heart,' 'That Wild Ocean,' 'Black Rose,' oh, he must have written hundreds before he was through. Amazing."

Rune is curious by this. She does the math and realizes that if Tonno's recollection is correct, then this Gwydain can't be more than forty years old. So what happened to the guy?

Tonno doesn't know. He vanished about five or ten years ago. There are rumors: he'd taken holy orders or he died. But Tonno has his doubts. If the guy had become a priest, he'd be writing amazing church music. If the guy died, there'd have been some kind of fancy funeral. It's a mystery.

Rune is intrigued by this mystery too, and mulls on it even as she goes back to Amber's. She agrees with Tonno that she can't imagine a Bard giving up music. Unless she were at death's door or crippled in some way, she wouldn't be able to stop. If he was dead, then someone should know...

Rune decides that when she gets into the Guild, she'll solve this mystery.

And the chapter ends.

So like I said in the review proper, this is one of those chapters that really feel like a direct response to Menolly. Even though the bulk of Rune's actual training is off page, we still saw enough to feel a genuine sense of progression. And we can see that her training encompasses more than just playing pretty music. And we learn that Rune's life outside of her lessons is also valuable in its own way. She has friends! She's learning skills outside of her standard lessons. There are people around her that feel like actual people, with their own lives beyond just serving a purpose in Rune's storyline. I like it a lot.