Lad with all the hair? Coach with no horses? Dear Lady, that cant be_oh surely not_
"Coo, ye should'a seen what came w' him!" said another, one of the chief cooks. " 'Tis a great bird man, 'twas, w' wings an' all, an' a great evil beak like a hawk i' the middle'v his face! An' claws! I wouldn' want t' get on the wrong side uv him!"
Tanager sat frozen, her hands wrapped around her empty cup. It was! It was Harperus_and with him, T'fyrr! It must be! But why here, and why now?
"Ah, but ye haven't heard the best of it," said a third girl knowingly. "My second cousin is best friend t' Lord Atrovel's secretary's valet, an' this birdy-man like to set the whole Court on its ear!"
As Tanager sat in stunned silence, the girl gleefully told the entire story, while the rest of the kitchen worked and put in a word or two of commentary. According to the girl, a nonhuman who had to be a Deliambren from the description, and another who was either T'fyrr or another of his race, had come in yesterday afternoon to Court. They had been announced as some kind of envoy, and at that point, for a reason that the girl either didn't know or couldn't explain, the bird-man broke into song. From there, her version differed slightly from the ones offered by a few others. The others claimed that the bird-man had challenged the King's Musicians to a contest and had won it; the girl maintained that he had simply begun singing, as a sample of what he could do.
At any rate, when it was all over, the King had appointed the bird-man to be his Chief Musician (the others claimed Laurel Bard), the rest of the Court Musicians were furious (no one differed on that), and most of the King's Advisors were beside themselves over the fact that the King had overruled them.
Ah, but if the first girl was to be believed, the King had not only appointed the Haspur_for it must be a Haspur, even if it wasn't T'fyrr_as his Chief Musician, he had appointed him directly to the Royal Household, made a Sire out of him, and installed him in a suite in the royal wing of the Palace!
I only hoped to hear something about the Law of Degree, Tanager thought dazedly, not this_
Could it be T'fyrr and Old Owl? She didn't know of any other Haspur and Deliambrens traveling together. But why would they come here?
Why am I here? Whoever these strangers are, it is for the same reason, surely.
Now she was very grateful that she had been so careful to keep her real identity and purpose here a secret. With two sets of agents blundering about, it would have been appallingly easy for them to trip each other up.
Now I need only watch for them, and avoid getting entangled in whatever scheme they have going. Oh, yes, need only. If it is Harperus, that will be like trying to avoid the garbage in the streets! He's more clever than twenty Gypsies in his own way, and encompasses everyone he meets in his grand plots in some way or another. Ah, well, at least he doesn't know I'm here; I just hope he doesn't get T'fyrr in trouble....
Somehow she managed to pull herself together and continue singing and playing for the rest of the morning. That was all the time she ever spent here_and that was reasonable, for Tanager. Mornings were fairly useless for a street-musician; the afternoon meant better pickings, and Tanager would now, presumably, go on to whatever street corner she had staked out as her own. There she could expect to earn "hard currency" for her work; pins, mostly, with a sprinkling of copper coins, and some food.
As usual, she spread out a threadbare napkin, and the chief cook filled it with her "pay"_mostly leftover bread, with a bit of bacon and a scrap of cheese, some of last nights roast from the Upper Servant's Kitchen that was too tough and stringy to even go into soup today. Tanager thanked her with a little bobbing curtsey, tied it all up into a bundle, and slipped out the door just in time to avoid the lunchtime rush.
She always hurried across the cobbles to the gate, but today she had more reason to half-run than usual. She wanted to find out if anyone in the city had heard anything about the bird-man, or the Law of Degree, and to that end, there were two places she needed to go. First, as Nightingale, the Chapel of Saint Gurd. Second, the square just down the street from Freehold where she generally met Maddy and the rest of her army of urchins just after lunch.
Surely, between them, Father Ruthvere or the children would have heard or seen something. And at the moment, she was not certain whether she wanted to hear more about the Law of Degree or_T'fyrr.
If that was who the feathered wonder was.
Nightingale slipped back into Freehold by the back door feeling quite frustrated. There had been nothing worth bothering about in the way of news at the Chapel; the Priest, Father Ruthvere, had heard nothing about a "Law of Degree," but he promised Nightingale fiercely that he would do his best to find out about it.
Father Ruthvere was something of an odd character, and Nightingale never would have trusted him with her true Bard-name if it had not been that he had recognized her Free Bard ribbons during one of her visits (not as Tanager) and had asked her how Master Wren and Lady Lark were faring. It turned out that he had some sort of connection to that cousin of Talaysen's who was also in the Church. He had been promoted to his own Chapel here, and he had promised Priest Justiciar Ardis when he was sent on to Lyonarie that he would keep an eye out for Free Bards and help them when he could.
That in itself was either an example of how small a world it truly was_or that there was something in the way of Fate dogging her footsteps.
The convoluted twists that this little mission of hers was taking were beginning to make her head spin.
For the meantime, however, Father Ruthvere was an ally she was only too glad to have found. He was one of the faction that followed the "we are all brothers" faith, and that made him doubly valuable to her, and vice versa. He knew what was going on, to a limited extent, within the Church_she had her information from the street and the Court. Together they found they could put together some interesting wholes out of bits and pieces.
Maddy and her crew hadn't come up with anything either, though as usual they were glad enough for her bag of leftovers and the pennies she gave them all. The only thing that one of the boys knew was that his brother had actually seen the horseless wagon on its way to the Palace. It had not been pulled or pushed by any beasts, and from the description, it could have been the wagon that Harperus used.
But then again, she thought to herself, as she scrambled up the staircase, wouldn't any Deliambren wagon look like any other? I don't know for a fact that Harperus is the only one traveling about the countryside.