Talaysen groaned. Rune sighed. This would be funny if it weren't so stupid. And if they weren't trussed up like a couple pigs on the way to market. It might get distinctly unfunny, if their guard decided that the application of his boot to their bodies would get them standing up . . . she contemplated her knees, rather than antagonize him by staring at him.
She looked up at the sound of footsteps approaching; yet another man-at-arms neared, this one in a tunic and breeches that were of slightly better quality and showing less wear than the other man's.
"Never mind, Hollis," said the newcomer. "I decided to come have a look at them myself." He surveyed them with an air of vacant boredom. "Well, what do you spies have to say for yourselves?"
"Spies?" Talaysen barked in sheer outrage. "Spies? Where in God's Sacred Name did you get that idea?"
Rune fixed the "captain," if that was what he was, with an icy glare. "Since when do spies camp openly beside a road, and carry musical instruments?" she growled. "Dear God, the only weapons we have are a couple of dull knives! What were we supposed to do with those, dig our way into your castle? That would only take ten or twenty years, I'm sure!"
The captain looked surprised, as if he hadn't expected either of them to talk back to him. If all he's caught so far are poor, frightened farmers, I suppose no one has.
He blinked at them doubtfully. "Well," he said at last, "if you aren't spies, then you're conscripts." As Talaysen stared at him in complete silence, he continued, looking them over as if they were a pair of sheep. "You-with the gray hair-you're a bit long in the tooth, but the boy there-"
"I'm not a boy," Rune replied crisply. "I'm a woman, and I'm his wife. And you can go ahead and conscript me, if you want, but having me around isn't going to make your men any easier to handle. And they're going to be even harder to handle after I castrate the first man who lays a hand on me."
The captain blanched, but recovered. "Well, if you're in disguise as a boy, then you're obviously a spy after all-"
"It's not a disguise," Talaysen said between clenched teeth. "It's simply easier for my wife to travel in breeches. It's not her fault you can't tell a woman in breeches from a boy. I'm sure you'll find half the women in this area working the fields in breeches. Are you going to arrest them for spying, too?" The captain bit his lip. "You must be spies," he continued stubbornly. "Otherwise why were you out there on the road? You're not peddlers, and the Faires are over. Nobody travels that road this time of year."
"We're musicians," Rune said, as if she was speaking to a very simple child. "We are carrying musical instruments. We play and sing. We were going to Kardown Faire and your road was the only way to get there-"
"How do I know you're really musicians?" he said, suspiciously. "Spies could be carrying musical instruments, too." He smiled at his own cleverness.
Talaysen cursed under his breath; Rune caught several references to the fact that brothers and sisters should not marry, and more to the inadvisability of intercourse with sheep, for this man was surely the lamentable offspring of such an encounter.
"Why don't you untie us and give us our instruments, and we'll prove we're musicians?" she said. "Spies wouldn't know how to play, now, would they?"
"I-suppose not," the captain replied, obviously groping after an objection to her logic, and unable to find one. "But I don't know-"
Obviously, she thought; but she smiled charmingly. "Just think, you'll get a free show, as well. We're really quite good. We've played before Dukes and Barons. If you don't trust both of us, just cut me loose and let me play."
Not quite a lie. I'm sure there were plenty of Dukes and Barons who were passing by at Kingsford when we were playing.
"What are you up to?" Talaysen hissed, as she continued to keep her mouth stretched in that ingenuous smile.
"I have an idea," she muttered back out of the corner of her mouth. And as the captain continued to ponder, she laughed. "Oh come now, you aren't afraid of one little woman, are you?"
That did it. He drew his dagger and cut first the hobbles at her ankles, then the bonds at her wrists. She got up slowly, her backside aching, her shoulders screaming, her hands tingling with unpleasant pins-and-needles sensations.
She did have an idea. If she could work some of the same magic on this stupid lout that she'd worked on the elves, she might be able to get him to turn them loose. She'd noticed lately that when they really needed money, she'd been able to coax it from normally unresponsive crowds-as long as she followed that strange little inner melody she'd heard when she had played for the elven-king. It was always a variation on whatever she happened to be playing; one just a little different from the original. The moment she matched with it, whatever she needed to have happen would occur. She was slowly evolving a theory about it; how it wasn't so much that the melody itself was important, it was that the melody was how she "heard" and controlled magic. Somehow she was tapping magic through music.
But she couldn't explain that to Talaysen. Or rather, she couldn't explain it right now. Later, maybe. If this really worked.
The captain poked their packs with his toe as she stood there rubbing her wrists. "Which one is yours?" he asked, without any real interest.
"That one, there," she told him. "Why don't you hand me that fiddle-that's right, that one. A spy would never be able to learn to play this, it takes years-"
"A spy could learn to play a couple of tunes on it," the captain said, in a sudden burst of completely unexpected thought. "That's all a spy would need."