"Tell me, Bird of Night," he said as calmly as if he had not appeared out of thin air in her room, so alien to his kind; as serenely as if he had not heard the tears of her heart calling. "Tell me what you need of me."
She told him in the same words that she had told Tyladen and Harperus, and it did not get any easier to bear for the retelling. He nodded and waited for her to answer his second question.
"From you, my lord, I need protection," she said. "Protection from the spells of human mages, for myself, and for the one who once wore this_"
She handed the Elf a feather, shed only yesterday from T'fyrr's wing. He took it and smoothed it between his fingers.
"A mage-musician, with wings in truth," he said, as his eyes took on the appearance of one who is gazing into the far distance. "But he is in a place that is dark to me; I cannot find him."
"I can find him," she said promptly. "But I cannot protect myself from the magics that stole him, nor can I protect him from the spells of our enemy, once I find him."
"I can," the Elven mage replied, with a lifted brow. "There is no mortal born who can set a spell that can break my protections, if those protections are set with consent."
She nodded, understanding his meaning. With consent, the mage was not limited to his own power in setting a protection; he could draw upon the strength of the spirit of the one he protected as well.
"You have mine," she promised him instantly, "and you will have his, once I reach him."
"Then I will be away," the mage replied, and as she widened her eyes in alarm, he smiled thinly. "Fear not, I do not desert you, nor shall I travel far, but I must go to a place more congenial to my kind. Your walls and metals interfere with my working. I have his feather, you have your Silver. That will be enough. When you need the protections, clasp your hand about the band of Silver, and call me." He regarded her with an unwinking gaze, and then added, "I am Fioreth."
She bowed slightly, acknowledging the fact that he had given her part of his Name, enough to call him with. It was a tremendous act of trust on the part of an Elf. He bowed in return, then the room hummed a four-fold chord of power once more, and he was gone.
Now there was only one thing left to do.
Find him.
The pain in her heart had a direction: north, and a little east. She needed to follow that_
Someone pounded at her door, and before she could answer it, the door flew open.
"Lady!" gasped one of the younger serving boys, panting with the effort of running up four flights of stairs. "Lady, there are guards at the door, and they want you! They say they have a warrant_"
"What colors are they wearing?" she asked instantly.
The boy blinked at her for a moment, obviously thinking that she was crazy. "Green and blue, but_"
"Then they aren't the High King's men; they're someone's private guards," she replied. "They can't have a warrant; they probably just have a piece of paper to wave, counting on the rest of us not to know it has to be signed and sealed. Since I'm T'fyrr's Second, they would have to have a warrant signed by Theovere directly, and he would have sent his own bodyguards. Tell Tyladen to demand the warrant and if it isn't signed and sealed with Theovere's seal, it isn't valid. That should delay them. And tell him to tell Harperus!"
Before the boy's scandalized eyes, she stripped off her skirts. "Give me your breeches!" she ordered.
"What?" he gasped.
"Your breeches! I can't climb in skirts! Now!" She put enough of the power in her order that he obeyed her, blushing to the roots of his hair, and she pulled his breeches on, leaving him to look frantically for something to cover himself with.
Which is ridiculous; he's wearing more now than some of the male dancers wear on stage.
"Go!" she snapped at him, running for the stairs to the roof. "Tell Tyladen what I just told you!"
She didn't wait to see how he solved his embarrassing quandary; time was not on her side.
The King can't know about this; that means that this arrest is on a trumped-up charge at worst. That means I won't have to dodge every guard in the city, only the ones in blue-and-green livery.
They would probably bully their way inside, and might even get as far as her room before Tyladen called in enough help to throw them out again.
And I left my harps!
But T'fyrr was worth all the harps in the world. The Elves could make her a new pair of harps; all the universe could not make her a new T'fyrr.
She scampered across the roof in a bent-over crouch, in case someone was watching from one of the other rooftops. When she got to the edge, she scanned the area for a lookout.
There was one, but he wasn't very good; she spotted him before he saw her, and commotion down on the street caught his attention long enough for her to get over the side away from him and down onto one of the walkways. She paused just long enough to coil up her hair and knot it on top of her head_then, from a distance, she was just a gangly boy, not a woman at all.
She stood up and shoved her hands in her pockets, and strolled in a leisurely manner along the walkway until she got to the building across the street. No shouts followed her, and she did not sense any eyes on her for more than a disinterested few heartbeats.
She took care not to seem to be in any hurry; she even stopped once to look down with interest at the milling knot of guards at the side door of Freehold. One or two of them looked up, then ignored her.
Then she reached the haven of the next building and threw her leg over the side of the roof there, climbing up onto it, rather than going down to street level. Just as if she had been sent on an errand over to Freehold and was returning.
When she was reasonably certain that no one was watching her, she sprinted across to the other side of the roof. There was another walkway down the side of the building there, and this one went all the way to the ground if you knew how to release the catch on the last staircase.
All Freeholders, of course, did.
She careened down the metal staircase, knocking painfully into the handrails and slipping on the steps in her hurry. She tumbled down to the drop-steps, hit the catch, and let her weight take the steps down into the noisome alley below.
Then, at last, she was in the street, and it would take a better tracker than a noble's guard to find her.
I had not known it was possible to hurt so much. T'fyrr had always thought that when you were injured, you lost track of the lesser pains in the face of the greater. Evidently, I was mistaken, he thought, far back in the fog of pain and background fear. Odd how it was possible to think rationally in the midst of the most irrational circumstances. Probably that ironic little mental voice would go right on commenting up until the moment he died, since it seemed more likely that he would die of his many wounds rather than maddening hunger.