The Lark and the Wren - Chapter Seventeen

[kalinara]

So last time, our heroes decided to angst in the rain like idiot teenagers. Only one of them is actually an idiot teenager, but I suppose it's reassuring to know that both characters are about the equivalent emotional age.

They did finally get out of the rain by finding an abandoned house. So now they get to angst indoors! They're moving up in the world.



We rejoin Rune and Talaysen as they make their new shelter halfway livable. Rune is trying to clean up some of the branches and debris, while Talaysen works on making a fire. (Apparently, this is something that he's much better at, as village and city folk don't tend to have to make fires from flint and steel often.)

He does succeed finally in making a tiny fire, just beneath the window, since the chimney is choked with trash and birds' nests.

Now that there's light, Rune looks around. Something seems odd to her, for a place gone to ruin, and she eventually realizes that it looks like it had been abandoned. Everything had been left behind, and the doors and shutters had been forced out, not in.

Creepy.

Rune puts the thought aside. There's nothing here now.

So they continue getting the farmhouse livable. It's Talaysen's turn to cook, Rune gets water (not difficult right now) and eventually, Talaysen decides they're warm and dry enough to have a music lesson. She gets the instruments ready while he cooks.

So, basically Talaysen decides to have them rehearse a number of songs she's less familiar with and, well, honestly, the man's a fucking moron:

Odd, she thought, after the first few. He seemed to have chosen them all for subject-matter rather than style-every single one of them was about young women who were married off to old men and disappointed in the result. In a great many of the songs, they cuckolded their husbands with younger lovers; in the rest, they mourned their fates, shackled for life to a man whose prowess was long in the past. Sometimes the songs were comic, sometimes tragic, but in all of them the women were unhappy.

Rune, thankfully, is not an idiot. And while it takes a few songs for her to figure out what he's doing, by the FIFTEENTH, she knows exactly what he's trying to say.

...okay maybe she's a bit of an idiot too. But anyway, she's able to translate this nonsense from stereotypical man to English: he has noticed her attraction, he's also attracted, but he thinks he's much too old for her and she'll be unhappy.

Rune thinks this is ridiculous, by the way. Apparently, in Westhaven, younger girls get married to men his age a lot (usually after "they'd worn out their first wives with work and childbearing"...ick). We get a bit of casual fatphobia: "Oh, at thirty-mumble, if he had been a fat merchant, or an even fatter Guild Bard, maybe she'd have been repulsed . . . but it would have been the overstuffed condition of his body that would have come between them, not his age."

Really, Ms. Lackey?

But anyway, Rune processes this. She decides not to do anything about this until she's "had a chance to plan her course of attack". She keeps her thoughts to herself as they play to exhaustion.

For his part, Talaysen is hilariously clueless, figuring that he's got his message across and she'll stop making calf's eyes at him. Um, okay, yeah. You just keep thinking that, dude. Talaysen intends to suffer in silence, until he manages to convince himself that friendship is enough. It's enough with every other Free Bard woman, after all.

He considers having another brief fling with Nightingale, which is an interesting bit of gossip. Apparently, Nightingale "ha[s] yet to find the creature that would capture her heart," but is pretty onboard with the occasional bang. Fair enough.

Anyway, he figures that he's given Rune something to think about and the next time they meet up with a Roma caravan or free bard gathering, she'll look for someone her own age. When he sees her acting like a young fool with other young fools, he'll fall out of love.

Dumbass.

Anyway, Talaysen thinks that maybe he was too hard on Raven. (He's of course gazing at her "all shadows and fire-kissed angles"). They might have gotten on very well. But he realizes that while he was okay with the idea of her dating someone else in theory, he's not so okay with putting a face on it.

Dumbass.

He goes to sleep, but ends up awoken by harp music. And he's not in the cottage anymore. Instead, he's in a green field. There's rock overhead, not sky. And there are a lot of bright-clad folk near a silver throne.

Oops.

Eyes as amber as a cat's stared at him unblinking from under a pair of upswept brows. Hair the black of a raven's wing was confined about the wide, smooth, marble-pale brow by a band of the same silver as the throne. The band was centered by an emerald the size of Talaysen's thumb. The face was thin, with high, prominent cheekbones and a sensuous mouth, but it was as still and expressionless as a statue. Peeking through the long, straight hair were the pointed ears that told Talaysen his "host" could only be one of the elven races.

Ayep. Talaysen notes that some elves are friends and allies to humans. And a lot aren't. He's not sure about these guys, but he's leaning toward the not category.

So we get some good elvish descriptions here, the gist of it is that this is an elvish court, and Talaysen (and Rune) ventured into their territory. Talaysen doesn't deny it. He realizes that he had seen signs: the uncooperative vegetation (that had subsided when Rune drew her IRON knife.) The ring of mushrooms. The tree in the middle of the house.

The elven-king gives a bit of backstory on the house: it was build by mortals who thought that God, the Church and Iron weapons would protect him. It didn't.

Talaysen stays humble and straightforward. And the elven-king doesn't intend to kill him. Essentially, he wants to keep Talaysen as his servant. They have minstrels, but no Bards. So yay!

We return to Rune, who wakes up just in time to see Talaysen disappear into the rock at the back of the cavern. She screams and pounds the rock for a while, but eventually realizes what she'd seen. Like Talaysen, she puts together the visual signs she missed.

She realizes the door must be magic, and she tries to use the Iron knife to force it open. No luck. She thinks about what she knows about Elves. She remembers that the Roma people work with them sometimes, and have something called "elf-touched". Finally she clicks on something from one of Nightingale's songs: elves can't resist music.

She gets her fiddle and starts to play. Eventually something interesting happens, and she starts hearing some kind of echo of a slightly different melody. Instinctively, she matches it, and starts feeling a tingle down her arms: a similar one as she felt when Gwyna was transformed back into a human.

As she gets into synch with it, the wall cracks open. Rune ventures forward. She hears Talaysen's lute, but he's not singing. She hears a stiffness to his playing, as though it's against his will.

She barges into the Court and before anyone can do anything, she starts to play a wild dance tune called "The Faerie Reel". She hopes the name means something, and indeed, they start to dance wildly.

She keeps playing, doing three sets of each dance tune. (Roma songs say three is an important number). She plays as fiercely as she does for the Ghost, and well, the ability to play all night is helpful here as the elves start dropping with exhaustion.

Then she goes into Nightingale's laments. They start weeping. They're too tired and too wrought to do anything. The elf king surrenders, acknowledging her power. He'd known Talaysen was powerful, so he had carefully bespelled him, but he'd figured Rune was harmless. Oops.

He begs her not to play again:

"All right," she replied steadily, speaking aloud for the first time in this encounter, controlling her voice as Talaysen had taught her, though her knees trembled with fear and her stomach was one ice-cold knot of panic. "Maybe I won't. If you give me what I want."

"What?" the elven-king replied swiftly. "Ask and you shall have it. Gold, jewels, the treasures of the Earth, objects of enchantment-"

"Him," she interrupted, before he could continue the litany, and perhaps distract her long enough to work against both of them. "I want my lover back again."

Oops.

The elf king apparently is a sex detector, like F'nor in Dragonquest, and calls out the lie. But he recognizes they are in love, which is part of what gave her so much power. She points out that keeping Talaysen is impossible, he'd die in captivity. And she, of course, would be his enemy.

The elven king has to agree, though he notes that Rune is made of sterner, more flexible stuff than Talaysen. SHE wouldn't pine away in a cage. He asks if she'd trade her freedom for his. She says Yes, but Talaysen has snapped out of it and shouts No.

The elf realizes that if he keeps Rune, Talaysen will come after him. So lose/lose. He shouts at them to leave. Rune is clever. She starts to play another phrase on her fiddle and demands his pledge for safety. No ambush! Talaysen supplies the words of the pledge: "By the Moon our Mother, the blood of the stars, and the honor of the Clan,"

Rune boasts that she's played all night before, she can do it again. The elf pledges, and they make it out.

Not being idiots, they pack quickly. The storm is getting really bad, supernaturally bad, and Talaysen realizes it's the elf-king's revenge. He can't touch them directly, but a lightning strike...

Rune thinks Elves should be Churchmen, or lawyers, heh. They figure a moving target is harder to hit, and run for it.

They almost make it out of the elf-king's range, but he has one last attack: basically a big wall of wind and water. Talaysen manages to drop into the gully by the streambed, but Rune is farther way and gets thwapped by a tree limb into the water. He gets to her. Her head isn't underwater, thank goodness, but she's pinned. He can't lift it, but eventually finds another limb to wedge it off of her.

He heaves her over his shoulders with his packs. (He complains about his aging body, which amuses me more now than when I was a kid, because I'm pretty sure he and I are around the same age.)

He lucks out and spots a cave. There's an animal inside, but fuck it. He gets himself and Rune in. He extracts the instruments. His lute's fine. Her lute is cracked, but possibly repairable. Penny whistle and small harp are fine. The drum is punctured, and his harp needs strings. Hah.

He finds dry bedding at the very bottom of the packs. Also, her fiddle wrapped up in there, perfectly safe. He gets Rune stripped and bundled into the bedding, he strips down too, and we get shameless hypothermia cuddling.

The animals come out: otters. They all curl up on Rune and Talaysen which finally gets both of them warmed up. They fall asleep.

So Rune wakes up with a headache, and someone sleeping with her. Someone, still asleep, with slightly wandering hands and something poking in her back. Heh. She feels him freeze when he wakes up.

"If you stop," she said conversationally, "I am going to be very angry with you. I thought you taught me to always finish a tune you've started." He starts freaking out a bit, but Rune's pretty persuasive, pointing out that he's hardly abusing his power if she's the one that's been trying to waylay him.

That's not entirely true. But well, this is kind of a different case. She also doesn't mind the age difference. She wouldn't play a brand new instrument or drink month old wine.

Finally, he yields to her superior logic and the chapter fades to black as they bang. Hah.

I'm still not enamored with the age difference, but I admit, it's a nice novelty to reach a sex scene in which the consent is clear and unmistakable.