Avar planned to lie to his emperor: Avar, who was Phoran’s only friend.
The Emperor made no move to summon a messenger.
Food came at irregular intervals through a small opening near the floor that Tier had somehow missed on his first, blind, inspection of the cell. An anonymous hand opened the metal covering and shoved a tray of water and bread through, shutting and latching the cover before Tier’s eyes even adjusted to the light.
Still, he’d grown grateful for those brief moments, for the reassurance that he was not blind.
The bread was always good, flavored with salt and herbs and made with sifted wheat flour rather than the cheaper rye. Bread fit for a lord’s table, not a prison cell.
First he’d tried to fit his situation into some logical path, but nothing about his captivity made sense. Finally he’d come to the conclusion that he was lacking some information necessary for a solution.
Only then had he raged.
He’d slept when he was tired, worn-out from anger and fruitless attempts to find a way out of the cell. When he’d realized that he was losing track of time he told himself stories, the ones he’d gathered from the old people of Redern, saved word for word from one generation to the next. Some of those were songs as well as stories, ballads that took almost an hour each to sing.
When the toll of the hours grew too great, he’d quit singing, quit thinking, quit raging, and given in to despair. But even that left him alone eventually.
Finally, he developed habits to fill the empty hours. He did the exercises he’d learned when he’d been a soldier. When he ran out of the ones he could do in his confined space, he made up others. Only after he was sweating and panting, he’d sit down and tell one story. Then he’d either rest or exercise again as the impulse took him.
But it was the magic that had given him purpose.
He’d known some of the things his magic could do. Seraph had told him what she knew—and, despite the danger, he’d used it some over the years. It helped that his magic wasn’t the showy sort that people all knew about, like Seraph’s. His magic was more subtle.
He could calm an angry drunk or give a frightened man courage with his songs. Such things as any music could do, but with more effect. When he chose, he could commit a song or letter to memory and recall it, word perfect, years later. When he’d sung at the tavern in Redern, he almost always gave his last song a push to cheer his audience.
It had made him feel guilty, because Seraph had given up her magic entirely. But she’d never seemed to mind, never seemed to miss the power that she’d set aside.
He could never have set aside his music.
There were some things he’d avoided. Some things were harmful to his audience; music alone shared the darker emotions with his audience, never magic. He was very careful not to use his magic to persuade others to his will—words were enough. And then there were the things too obviously magic to use in Redern.
Alone in the darkness of his cell, he’d succeeded in creating small lights to accompany his songs the first time he tried. They were flickering, faint things, but they comforted him.
Sounds were more difficult, even though he’d accidently called them once before. After a particularly nasty battle, he and a bunch of the other officers got roaring drunk and someone thrust a small lyre, part of the spoils, into his hands. The song he’d sung had included fair maidens and barnyard animals. He was pretty certain he’d been the only one who noticed that the moos and quacks of the chorus were accompanied by the real thing.
He had been trying to re-create the experiment the first time his visitor arrived.
The constant dark had honed his other senses, and the scuff of a foot on the boards above him stopped him midword. He’d sat silently, waiting for something more.
Finally, barely audible over the burble of the water that flowed under the grating in the back corner of his cell, he’d heard it again.
It hadn’t been a rat; a rat was too light to make a stout board creak under its weight. He’d been almost certain that the noise was made by a person.
“Hello,” he’d said. “Who is there?”
The boards had given a small, surprised squeak and then there was nothing. Whoever it had been, he had left.
Some unknowable span of time later, while Tier was doing push-ups, he’d heard it again. He’d stilled, too worried that he would drive whoever it was off again if he made another move. He hadn’t heard another sound, but somehow he knew that his visitor was gone. Desperate for company, Tier turned his thoughts toward enticing his visitor to stay.
Tier awoke with the knowledge that there was someone nearby. He hadn’t heard anything, but he could feel that someone stood above him listening. He sat up, leaned his back against the wall, and began his story with the traditional words.
“It happened like this,” he said.
If he pretended that his eyes were closed, he could think himself leaning against the wall at home telling stories to his own restless children so they’d fall asleep faster. Seraph would be cleaning—she was always in motion. Maybe, he thought, she would be grumpy as she sometimes got when Rinnie was tired and the boys were restless. Her face would be serene, but the tautness of her shoulders gave her away.
I wonder if she knows that something has happened to me? Is she looking?
It was an old thought by now, and held a certain comfort.
“A boy came to be king when he was only sixteen,” Tier said, “when his own father died in battle. War was common then, and the kingdom he inherited was neither so large nor so powerful that the king could sit in safety and leave the fighting to his generals.”
The story of the Shadowed was one he knew so well that he had once told it backwards, word for word, for a half-drunken wager. He’d missed one phrase, but his comrades hadn’t noticed.
“This young man,” he said, “was a good king, which is to say that he promoted order and prosperity among his nobles and usually kept the rest from starvation. He married well, and in time was blessed with five sons. As years passed and his sons became men, his kingdom waxed in wealth because the king was skilled at keeping the neighboring kingdoms fighting among themselves rather than attacking his people.”
The floor above him made a sound, as if a listener were settling in more comfortably. Tier added his unknown listener to his audience.
A boy, he decided with no more evidence than his visitor’s willingness to travel without lights. There were spaces between the boards that would have let light into Tier’s cell, if his unknown guest had brought so much as a single candle with him.
He would be a boy old enough to be allowed to wander about on his own, but not so old as to have other duties to attend to; an adventurous boy who would venture into the dark corners where prisoners were kept.
“The king had many of the interests of his kind. He could hunt and ride as well as any of his men. He danced with grace and could play the lute. None of his guardsmen or nobles could stand long against him with sword or staff.” Tier had always had some doubt about the king’s prowess—what kind of fool would beat his king at swordplay?
Tier fought to picture the king in his mind, pulling out details that weren’t in the story. He’d be a slender young man, like Tier’s son Jes—but his hair would be the pure, red gold of the eastern nobles….
Seraph had told him that some of the Bards had been able to create pictures for their listeners, but his cell stayed dark as pitch.
“But what the king loved most was learning,” he continued, in the proper words. “He established libraries at every village, and in his capital he collected more books than had ever been assembled together then or since. Perhaps that was the reason for what happened to him.”
Tier found himself grinning as he remembered Seraph’s contemptuous sniff the first time he’d told her that part. Books weren’t evil, she’d explained loftily, what people did with the knowledge they’d gleaned was no judgment against the books that held it.