Chapter One
The vestibulejust outside the busy kitchens hummed with conversation and the thump of wet boots. One by one, the musicians shed their footwear for the clean shoes they’d carried with them during the slow wagon ride up the castle hill.
Brida Gazi laced her shoes with shaking fingers, still cold from the winds blowing off the Gray to scour the bluff on which Castle Banat perched. She blew on her hands to warm them before tucking them under her arms for additional heat. “I can hardly tie my shoes,” she complained to the woman seated next to her. “I won’t be much good on the flute if I can’t move my fingers.”
Haniss nodded, eyeing the fire they glimpsed in the kitchen with a longing gaze, flames dancing merrily in the giant hearth. “Maybe they’ll let us stand by the cooking hearth for a few moments to warm up and dry off a little.” She caressed the mandolin in her lap as if it were a favorite cat. “It isn’t just us who’ll need warming before we play. I don’t even want to hear what these strings sound like right now.”
The trip had been a miserable one with the salty mists spraying off the Gray to descend upon them in a light drizzle. She had huddled in her thin cloak, clutching her flute with one hand and holding her place on the low-sided dray wagon with the other.
Autumn had brought the annual rains, and this evening had been much like the ones before it for the past fortnight—wet and chilly. It could have been worse. Thunder boomed in the distance, heard even in the depths of the keep, behind thick stone walls. At their arrival in the bailey, the wagon driver had given their troupe a brief frown and a warning as he glanced at the horizon where lightning bolts split the heavy clouds.
“Be prepared for a drenching on the way home,” Odon Imre said. “And a long ride as well. I’ll not be pushing Voreg here to go fast on muddy roads. I’d rather get you home late than dead.”
A scullery maid appeared at the threshold between vestibule and kitchen, a spoon in one hand. She offered the musicians a quick smile. “Cook says you can gather by the fire to warm yourselves. Just don’t get in the way or have a chat-up with the rest of us.”
She leapt back to keep from being trampled as the five of them bolted for the kitchen and the promise of heat the hearth offered. Brida was the last to leave, and she paused before the wide-eyed maid. “I saw your mama today, Aliz. She wanted me to tell you not to forget that pot of pepper you promised when you come home in a few days.” She chuckled at the maid’s frustrated eyeroll.
“I wish I’d never said anything about it. You’re the fourth person who’s delivered that message to me. If I were my da, I’d start to feel jealous over the attention she’s paying to a container of spice!”
The various scents of food stewing in pots, roasting on spits, and frying in pans made Brida’s mouth water. She’d eaten at home a few hours earlier, but the meal had been nothing as tempting as the smells wafting through the great kitchen at the moment.
The castle’s cook, a tall, whip-thin man with a stare sharper than the knife he currently wielded, stalked toward them. Maids and undercooks scurried out of his path. He gestured with the blade and addressed them in a startlingly dulcet voice.
“Once you get the cold out of your hands, you can have something to eat over there.” He pointed the knife to a long table set against the far wall. “Lord Frantisek says a well-fed musician plays better, and he expects you to give your best tonight.”
Exclamations of delight greeted his announcement, along with assurances that each musician would offer up their best performance for the pleasure of his lordship’s guests.
Haniss leaned down to whisper in Brida’s ear. “His lordship is much different from his wife, I think. If it were up to Ziga’s sister, we’d be playing in the bailey in the downpour.”
“If it were up to Lady Frantisek, we wouldn’t be here at all.” Brida had met the lady of the castle very briefly years earlier, before her marriage to Andras Frantisek. A brittle, high-born girl, very aware of her station in life, she had grown into a beauty who captured the attention of the powerful Frantisek family as a possible bride for the heir before their fall from grace. Sometimes Brida found it hard to believe the pragmatic Zigana Imre was her ladyship’s bastard sister. The two women were nothing alike in character.
After time in front of the hearth and a quick supper, the castle steward appeared to escort them to a chamber similar to the first vestibule, except that it was much warmer and contained a staircase that led to a balcony overlooking the great hall. Another doorway opening to the hall itself gave Brida a glimpse of the guests gathering for Lord Frantisek’s party to celebrate his wife’s naming day.
These were not the elite aristocracy who populated King Sangur’s court in Pricid. None of those nobles would deign to travel so far—or even so near—to attend a celebration hosted by the Frantisek Exile. Tonight’s guests were the more lowly gentry from the towns and villages within the lord’s demesne, eager to brush shoulders and have conversation with the last remaining members of a once-powerful family.
Regardless of their lower ranking, Brida was in awe of the gathering. Many who couldn’t claim elevated bloodlines possessed fat purses, and their adornment tonight—silks and fine linens, sparkling jewels, and rare perfumes that scented the air—proved lower-born didn’t equate to poverty-stricken.
She would have been content to stare at the pageantry all evening if she wasn’t here to perform a task. She turned her attention to the steward when he cleared his throat.
“You may tune your instruments in here. Lord Frantisek has said he will speak with you all. Once he’s finished, you’ll climb to the balcony and begin your performance.” He left them to disappear amid the growing crowd of guests filling the great hall.
“Best get to it then,” Janen said as he unpacked his fiddle from its case and prepared to rosin his bow. “Once his lordship arrives, we won’t have any more time to tune.”
As the oldest and most skilled musician in Ancilar, Janen had accepted Lord Frantisek’s invitation on the group’s behalf and immediately selected the other four musicians who would join him in a quintet to perform at the castle. He’d approached Brida last.
“Are you interested?” he’d asked once she listened to the details such as payment and what was expected.
His offer had surprised her. She wasn’t the only flautist in the village, nor was she the best, and she told Janen so.
He’d shrugged. “Onastis is a better flute player, but there’s something about your flute, and the way you play it, Brida, that makes one either weep or laugh, depending on the music. This is what I want played at his lordship’s celebration.”
She’d agreed, nervous about performing for a crowd of strangers in an unfamiliar environment but grateful for the money she would earn from the event. Every little bit would help her brother and his wife. There were a lot of children to feed.
She unwrapped her flute from its protective covering of cloth that kept it dry. Made from a bone her father had found on the beach and brought back with him, he’d spent hours of drilling out the chamber and finger holes, carving the designs and sanding the bone smooth before presenting it to Brida. It had been his gift to her on her wedding day, the last one he gave her before his death, and she treasured it above all her other possessions.
Klen Gazi had no idea what creature the bone had belonged to, only that he thought it might be something which once lived in the Gray instead of drowned in it. Whatever it was, the flute produced ethereal notes that bewitched people when Brida played it. She didn’t fool herself that it was her playing affecting people so much. The flute possessed a magic of its own. She felt it in her fingers and on her lips every time she played.
Despite its sorcery, it was still a flute, and a cold one never sounded good. Brida joined the other troubadours in tuning their instruments, the sounds they produced a discordant cacophony that both drew people to investigate or flinch and flee to the other side of the hall, away from the noise.
