With my bare hands. And dance on his corpse.
She told herself she had to relax; at the moment, it was no more than a rumor, and she had only heard about it here. No one had mentioned it in the High King's servants' kitchen this morning, nor even in the Chapels friendly to all species. It might be nothing. It might only be a distortion of one of the other laws being considered.
It might even be a rumor deliberately started by the Church in order to make some of the other things they were trying to have passed look less unappetizing.
Or to allow them to slip something else past while the nonhumans are agitating about the rumor.
She would wait until the morning, and see what was in the kitchens and on the street.
She took a deep breath_after a first, cautious sniff to make sure that the wind was not in the "wrong" direction. She let it out again, slowly, exhaling her tension with her breath. This was an old exercise, one that was second nature to her now. As always, it worked, as did her mental admonition that there was nothing she could do now, this moment. It would have to wait until tomorrow, so she might as well get the rest she needed to deal with it.
When she finally felt as if she would be able to sleep, she got to her feet and picked her way across the rooftop, avoiding the places where she knew that some of her fellow staff might be sheltering together, star-watching. Supposedly the Deliambren who owned this place was considering a rooftop dining area, but so far nothing had materialized, and the staff had it all to themselves.
And a good thing, too. The streets hereabouts aren't safe for star-watching or nighttime strolls before bed. When customers of wealth came here, they came armed, or they came with guards. Not only were there thieves in plenty, but there were people who hated those who were not human, who would sometimes lie in wait to attack customers coming in or out of Freehold. They seldom confined their beatings to nonhumans_they were just as happy to get their hands on a "Fuzzy-lover" and teach him a lesson about the drawbacks of tolerance.
Once or twice a week, some of the staff would turn the tables on them, but that was a dangerous game, for it was difficult to prove who was the attacker and who the victim in a case like that. If the night-watch happened to hear the commotion and come to break it up instead of running the other way as they often did, the Freehold staff often found themselves cooling their heels in gaol until someone came to pay their fines. The law was just as likely to punish Freehold staff as the members of the gang that had ambushed the customers.
Nightingale was still ambivalent about joining one of those expeditions; she could add a good margin of safety for the group if she used Bardic magic to make gang members utterly forget who their attackers had been. But if she was caught doing something like that, and fell into the hands of the Church_
Flame is not my best color, she thought, trying to drive away fear with flippancy.
She reached the roof door to the staircase going down, and turned to take one last look up at the stars. And she thought, oddly enough, of T'fyrr.
I am glad he is safe with Old Owl, the Deliambren, she thought soberly. If any of the rumors are true, he would be in grave danger. At least, with Harperus, he has protection and a quick way out of any danger that should come.
So at least one person she cared for was safe. And with that thought to comfort her, she took the stairs down to the staff quarters, and to her empty bed.
Nightingale slipped out into the early morning mist by way of a back staircase. She had learned about it from one of the waiters, the second day of her arrival at Freehold. It was mostly in use by night, rather than by day; it locked behind you as you went out, but Nightingale had learned from that waiter that she already had a key. Every staff member had a ring of keys they got when they settled in; Nightingale didn't know even yet what half of them went to, but one of them locked the door to her room, and one unlocked this back staircase door.
She had visited the used-clothing market soon after setting up her network of children, and had acquired a wardrobe there that she really didn't want too many people in Freehold to know about. It was not in keeping with Lyrebird, or with the sober and dignified woman she had portrayed herself as when she arrived.
In fact, she rather doubted that she would have had a hearing if she'd shown up at the door in these patched and worn clothes. They were clean, scrupulously clean, but they did not betoken any great degree of prosperity. That was fine; she wasn't trying to look prosperous, she was trying to look like the kind of musician who would be happy to sing in the corner of a kitchen in exchange for a basket of leftovers.
She made one concession to city life that she hoped no one would notice, for it was quite out of keeping with her costume. She wore shoes. She had no stockings, and the shoes were as patched as her skirts, but she did have them, and no one as poor as she was supposed to be would own such a thing.
But I'm not going out into a mucky street or traipse around on cobblestones all day without something to protect my feet, she thought stubbornly, as she crossed the street headed east, skipped over a puddle and skirted the edge of a heap of something best left unidentified. There was just so much she would do to protect her persona, and there was such a thing as carrying authenticity too far.
She did not carry a harp at all, only a pair of bones and a small hand-drum, the only things a musician as poor as she would be able to afford.
The mist here beneath the overhanging upper stories of the buildings chilled the skin and left clothing damp and clammy, but in an hour or so it would be horribly hot, and the one advantage this costume had was that it was the coolest clothing she had to wear, other than the Elven silks. That was mostly because the fabric was so threadbare as to be transparent in places. It was all of a light beige, impossible to tell what the original color had been now. The skirt had probably once been a sturdy hempen canvas, but now was so worn and limp that it hung in soft folds like cheesecloth, and was as cool to wear as the most finely woven linen. She didn't have a bodice; no woman this poor would own one. Nor did she have a shirt. Only a shift, which if she really was this impoverished, would serve as shirt, petticoat, and nightclothes, all one. It was sleeveless, darned in so many places she wondered if any of the original fabric was left, and had at one time been gathered at the neck with a ribbon. Now it was gathered at the neck with a colorless string, tied in a limp little bow.
She hurried along the streets, sometimes following in the wake of one of the water-carts that was meant to clean the streets of debris and wash it all into the gutters. In the better parts of town, that was probably what it did do_but the street-cleaners were paid by the number of streets they covered, and every time they had to go back to the river filling-station to get more water, they lost time. So in this neighborhood, the water sprinkling the street was the barest trickle, scarcely enough to dampen the cobbles, and certainly not enough to wash anything into the gutters. Those few businesses who cared about appearances, like Freehold, sent their own people out to wash the street in front of the building. And there were those who lived here who didn't particularly care for having garbage festering at the front door, who did the same. But mostly she had to pick her way carefully along the paths worn clean by carts and rag-pickers.