"I… I am not certain I am ready to perform for them myself," he told I'uzzle. "But I will help you. A new song, perhaps?"
"Aye, truly? Something I could dedicate to Lord Tolly…?" As Puzzle paused to consider this and its possible results, Tinwright noticed move¬ment on the wall of the Inner Keep where it passed around Wolfstooth Spire, a short arrow's flight from the residence garden where he and Puz¬zle had met to share some cooking wine that Puzzle had filched from the lesser buttery. For a moment he thought it was a phantom, a transparent thing of dark mists, but then he realized that the woman walking atop the wall was wearing veils and a net shawl over her black dress and he knew at once who it was.
"We will talk later, yes?" he said to Puzzle, giving the jester a clap on the back that almost knocked the old man over. "There is something I need to do."
Tinwright ran across the garden, dodging wandering sheep and goats as though in some village festival game. He knew Puzzle must be staring at his sudden retreat as though he were mad, but if this was madness it was the sweetest kind, the sort that a man could catch and never wish to lose.
He slowed near the armory and wiped the perspiration from his fore¬head with a sleeve, then straightened his breeches and hose. It was strange: he felt almost a little shamefaced, as though he were betraying his patroness Briony Eddon, but he shrugged the feeling away. Just because he did not wish to recite his poems before the whole of the Tolly contingent did not mean that he had no ambitions whatsoever.
He walked around the base of Wolfstooth Spire and made his way up its outer staircase, so that when he reached the wall he should seem to be en¬countering her by accident. He was gratified to see she had not continued on, which would have necessitated him trying to hide the fact of walking swiftly after her to catch up. She was leaning on the high top of the outer wall, peering out through a crenellation across the Outer Keep, her weeds fluttering about her.
When he thought he was close enough to be heard above the fluting of
the wind, he cleared his throat. "Oh! Your pardon, Lady. I did not know anyone else was walking on the walls. It is something 1 like to do- to dunk, to feel the air." He hoped that sounded sufficiently poetic. The truth was, it was cold and damp here at the edge of the Inner Keep with the bay churning just below them. Were it not for her, he would much rather be under roof and by a fire, with a cup full of something to warm his guts.
She turned toward him and brushed back the veil to stare with cool, gray eyes. Her skin would be pale at the best of times, but here, on this dank, overcast day, with her black clothes and hat, her face almost disappeared ex¬cept for her eyes and fever-red mouth. "Who are you?"
He suppressed an exultant shout. She had asked his name! "Matthias Tinwright, my lady." He made his best bow and prepared to kiss her hand, but it did not emerge from the dark folds of her cloak. "A humble poet. I was bard to Princess Briony." He realized phrasing things that way might seem disloyal, not to mention suggesting he was out of work. "I am bard to Princess Briony," he said, putting on his best, most pious aspect. "Because, with the mercy of Zoria and the Three, she will come back to us."
An expression he could not read passed across Elan M'Cory's face as she turned slowly back to the view. Why did she wear those widow's clothes, when he knew for a fact-he had pursued the questionacarefully-that she was not married? Was it truly in mourning for Gailon Tolly? They had not even been betrothed, or so at least the servants said. Many of them thought her a little mad, but Tinwright didn't care. One view of her with her hair hanging copper-brown against her white neck, her large, sad eyes watching nothing as the rest laughed and gibed at one of Puzzle's entertainments, and he had been smitten.
He hesitated, unsure of whether to go or not.
"A poet," she said suddenly. "Truly?"
He suppressed a boast and thus surprised himself."I have long called my¬self so. Sometimes I doubt my skills."
She turned again and looked at him with a little more interest. "But surely this is a poet's world, Master…"
"Tinwright."
"Master Tinwright. Surely this your time of glory. Legends of the old days walk beneath the sun. Men are killed and no one can say why. Ghosts walk the battlements." She smiled, but it was not pleasant to see. Tinwright took a step back. "Do you know, I have even heard that mariners have lately returned with tales of a new continent in the west beyond the Smoking IsKinds,a great, unexplored land full of savages and gold.'Think of it! I'erhaps there are plaees where life still runs strong, where people are full of hope."
"Why should that not be true of this place, Lady Elan? Are we truly so weak and hopeless?"
She laughed, a small sound like scissors cutting string. "This place? Our world is old, Master Tinwright. Old and palsied-doddering, and even the young ones gasping in their cots. The end is coming soon, don't you think?"
While he was considering what to say to this strange assertion, he heard noises and looked up to see two young women hurrying along the battle¬ments toward them, slipping a little on the wet stones in their haste. He rec¬ognized them as Princess Briony's ladies-in-waiting-the yellow-haired one was Rose or some other such flower name. They looked at Tinwright suspiciously as they approached, and for the first time he wished he was wearing better clothes. Oddly, it had not occurred to him during his con¬versation with Elan M'Cory.
"Lady Elan," the dark one cried, "you should not be walking here by yourself! Not after what happened to the princess!
She laughed. "What, you think someone will climb the wall of the Inner Keep and steal me away? I can promise you, I have nothing to offer any kidnapper."
Ah, but you are wrong, thought Tinwright: if Briony Eddon was the bright morning sun, Elan M'Cory was the sullen, alluring moon. In truth, he thought, his mind as always leaping to the tropes of myth and story, the goddess Mesiya must look much like this, so pale and mysterious, she who walks the night sky with her retinue oj clouds.
He remembered then that Mesiya was the wife of Erivor and mother of the Eddon family line, or so it was claimed, her wolf their battle-standard. How quickly these poetic thoughts grew muddled…
"Come with us," the two ladies-in-waiting were saying, tugging gently at the black-clad Elan's arms. "It is damp here-you will catch your death."
"Ho!" a voice cried from below, lazy and cheerful. "There you are."
"Never fear," Elan M'Cory said, but so quietly that only Tinwright heard her. "It has caught me instead."
Hendon Tolly stood at the base of the wall on the Inner Keep side, a small crowd of guardsmen in Tolly livery standing near him but at a re¬spectful distance. "Come down, good lady. I have been looking for you."
"Surely you should go and lie down instead," said yellow-haired Rose, almost whispering. "Let us take care of you, Lady Elan."
"No, if my brother-in-law calls me, I must go." She turned to Tinwright "It has been good speaking with you, Master Poet. If you think ol any, an-swer to my question, I shall be interested to know. It seems to me that things move more quickly toward an ending every day."
"I am waiting, my lady!" Hendon Tolly seemed full of rich humor, as though at a joke only he understood. "I have things I wish to show you."
She turned and walked behind the ladies, heading back toward the steps that Tinwright had climbed and the waiting master of Southmarch.Just be fore she reached them, when Tolly had looked away to talk to his guards, she turned back toward Tinwright for a brief moment. He thought she might nod or give some other sign of farewell, but she only looked at him with an expression as bizarrely full of mixed shame and excitement as a dog who has been caught gorging on the last of the family's dinner, who knows he will be fiercely beaten but cannot even run.