The guard's grim face grew a bit grimmer, and he himself disappeared for a moment or two, leaving his fellow twice as vigilant. When he returned, it was with his own Captain striding by his side. Nightingale recognized the Captain from the High King's suite; he was one of the ones usually close at Theovere's side.
"I understand you have not heard the latest of our incidents, Sire T'fyrr," the Captain said with careful courtesy. "I can tell it to you in brief: the Palace does not normally hold prisoners. Normally we send them elsewhere, within the city, which has better gaols than we. This time, however, it was deemed better to keep the man here, in one of the storage rooms in the cellars, with a guard on his door. Not," he added, with a wry lift of an eyebrow, "one of us. This was merely a Palace guard, not one of the Elite."
T'fyrr nodded, and the Captain went on. "I am told that at about dinner time, according to the guard left on duty, a woman appeared with whom several of the guards were familiar, he among them. She is ostensibly a maid here, and yet no one will admit now to having her in their service. At any rate, there was supposedly a good reason for her to be in the storage area, and when she saw the guard who knew her, she flirted with him as she has often done in the past. He allowed his caution to slip; she was only a woman after all, and alone."
"She then incapacitated the guard and let the prisoner escape," T'fyrr concluded, seeing the obvious direction the tale was heading.
"She didn't bloody incapacitate him; she knocked him cold with a single punch!" the Captain corrected bitterly. "A single woman, no taller than his chin! It's unnatural! I've never seen nor heard of the like, for a woman half a man's size to take him down with one blow, even if he didn't expect it!"
Nightingale had, of course, but she kept her peace. There was no point in getting suspicion pointed in her own direction. The regular guards by now were smarting with the disgrace; they would be looking for an easy suspect, and she was in no mood to provide them with one. It would be all too easy for someone to claim that she had somehow slipped down to the cellar, perhaps during one of the brief times she had gone to fetch something for T'fyrr from his suite.
Especially since she had been seen in the Lower Kitchen and could have been mistaken for a maid, with a long stretch of the imagination. There were cooks and the like who would be perfectly able to identify her as "Tanager," and for a noble, there wasn't a great deal of difference between a "maid" and a "street-musician."
"So the man is gone, and we have no suspects whatsoever." T'fyrr clacked his beak with anger. "This is not cheerful news, Captain."
"Do tell," the man retorted heatedly. "At the moment our best hope is that Lord Harperus regains consciousness and can tell us what he saw. That is probably why the physician was sent_I expect it was by the Captain of the Watch." The Captains tone turned condescending. "I'm afraid that he hasn't had much experience with injuries. I am certain he thought a head injury was no more serious than a drunken stupor and could be dealt with in much the same way."
His tone implied that the Watch Captain had no combat experience, which was probably true_and the scars on his own face and hands spoke volumes for his expertise.
"So your best hope is to keep him safe." T'fyrr turned the full force of his gaze on the Captain. "I am the nearest you have to an expert on Deliambren medicine_although, if you want a real expert, there is a Deliambren running a tavern in the city, a place called Freehold. His name is Tyladen. He probably has a great deal more knowledge than I."
"I know the place," the captain replied. "Many of my men have been there, now and again, and they speak highly of the place. I've been there myself."
For entertainment? Not primarily, I warrant. Probably to see if it was a hotbed of Fuzzy subversion. But it wasn't, and so he permits his men to visit it recreationally.
"Tyladen of Freehold might be persuaded to come attend to his fellow countryman's needs," T'fyrr said, and Nightingale sensed his fragment of ironic pleasure at the notion that Tyladen just might be forced to do something besides sit in his office like a spider in a web, collecting information at no cost or danger to himself. She was beginning to have a very poor opinion of Tyladen's courage, and she knew T'fyrr shared it. "Other than Tyladen, I am your nearest source, and I assure you, it would be much better to wait until Lord Harperus wakes of his own accord. It could be dangerous to try to bring him to consciousness at this point."
The Captain acknowledged T'fyrr's expertise with an unwilling nod. "I'll have that noted, Sire T'fyrr," he added politely. "Now, by your leave, I'll take mine."
T'fyrr bowed slightly, and the Captain walked out, at a slightly faster pace than he'd arrived. T'fyrr had impressed him with a level head and good sense, at any rate.
They both returned to their seats beside Harperus' bed. Nob had long since closed the curtains against the night and lit a lamp or two, turning them low. Most of the room was in shadow; the rest in half-light. Curtains pulled halfway around the bed to keep the light from disturbing the occupant left the bed itself in deep shadows, in which Harperus' white hair gleamed softly against the pillow.
The Haspur turned to Nightingale and touched her hand, as lightly as a puff of down, with the talon that had just come close to crushing the wrist of the interfering physician. She smiled tremulously at him.
"When do you think he'll wake?" he asked her in a tense whisper.
She closed her eyes and again dropped briefly into the healing-spell with three key notes of the chant. The song Harperus wove about himself was coming to a close, winding in and around itself the way that all Deliambren music ended, in a reprise of the beginning, a serpent swallowing its own tail. "Soon, very soon," she said, opening her eyes again. "Within an hour or two at the very most, I suspect."
T'fyrr sighed with relief. "It cannot be too soon for me."
"Nor for me," she replied. "I still need to invoke healing on you again_"
"And I on you," he interrupted, and a gentle warmth washed over her as he touched the back of her hand again. "But we may be sitting here guarding Harperus until_"
"Until what?" came a weak voice from the shadows. "Until the moon turns blue? Until the Second Cataclysm?"
"Until you wake, old fool!" T'fyrr said, turning quickly toward the head of the bed. "By the winds, you had us worried!"
"Not half so much as I worried myself," Harperus replied with a groan and a sigh as he tried to sit up. "I'm too old to be practicing self-healing. It is a bad habit to get into, relying on self-healing too much."
"It is a worse habit to put yourself in situations where you need to practice it," Nightingale scolded. By now the guards just outside the bedchamber had heard the third voice, and one had come to investigate. He had come in at least twice so far today, fooled by T'fyrr's mimicking ability while they were practicing their music.
"Lord Harperus is awake and ready to speak," T'fyrr told him, as the man opened his mouth to ask what was going on. "While you are notifying those in authority, you ought to send a servant to bring some food for Lord Harperus_"