"I remember," he said, prodding the fire to life, "when you played like that in Ohrid. You were up on the top of the high watchtower and you either didn't know or didn't care that the whole valley could hear you. I stood there listening and wondering at the kind of courage that allowed you to throw so much of yourself into the music." He swallowed and locked his eyes on her face. "Can we go back?"
She shrugged, flute cradled against the curve of her body. "How far?"
"To the beginning? We had the time you were in Ohrid and one terrific night together and we've been assuming we know each other ever since. We don't. But we need to." When she hesitated, he added, "Our lives are irrevocably entwined, Annice. We can't change that. We've already proven we know enough to hurt each other. We have to learn enough to stop."
"I wouldn't know how to start." He gestured at her flute. "You've already started."
"All right. Then I wouldn't know how to go on."
"How do people usually get to know each other?" He half smiled. "They ask questions."
"What kind of questions? Things like, uh…" She searched for something frivolous. It wasn't easy. There didn't seem to be a lot frivolous between them. Everything came weighted with the life she carried. "… like, what's your favorite color?"
His open hands sketched compromise in the air. "I don't think we have time to be quite so thorough."
Annice nodded. "You're right." There was really only one question she wanted to ask, but she suspected it was the one question he couldn't answer. Not directly. Not in so many words. She knew how complicated her own reasons for wanting the baby were and—in spite of what His Grace might believe—wasn't egotistical enough to suppose his were any less complex.
Start thinking about this man, Annice. Stop merely reacting to him. You're a bard. Finding truth in information is pan of what you do.
"Pjerin?" She used his name to lift his gaze to hers. "What was your father like?"
The rain fell straight down, securing the open shed behind translucent walls.
Pjerin shifted uneasily. "My father?" It wasn't the question he'd expected. Perhaps he didn't have the courage of her music, but he'd be unenclosed if he didn't at least try to meet her halfway. "He was, well, he was very strong."
"Did he love you?"
"Yes." The fire had burned down enough so that he couldn't see her face, only a constant shadow amid the flickering ones. It made it easier to respond. It almost seemed as though he were talking to himself. "I was lucky, I never doubted it."
"How did he do it? How did you know?"
Pjerin thought he heard an undercurrent of yearning in her voice, almost dismissed it, and then remembered who she was. Who her father had been. As a monarch, the late king had the reputation of being a shrewd politician and, as a father, of being a monarch. Although it should have been her turn to hand over a piece of her soul, he answered anyway. "It's hard to explain. I always knew that I was the center of his life. My earliest memory of him is of the day he fought and got me back from my mother."
"From your mother?" Annice repeated. She had a strong suspicion she knew what accusations the old due had shouted as he retrieved his son and heir. Oh, baby, it isn't going to be easy to get your daddy to let go. "Were you a contract birth?"
"No. They were joined." Pjerin could hear the bitterness in his voice and didn't bother trying to soften it. "My father was an attractive man and a due. She saw him in Marienka; she wanted him; she got him. She didn't think much of Ohrid, though; there was no one there to appreciate her prize. You've been in the keep. It wasn't the kind of place to keep a woman like her happy. She wanted bright lights, attention; love wasn't enough."
"How old were you when she left?" A flash of lightning lit the distance and the thunder grumbled overhead.
"She didn't know I existed when she left. Father finally heard she'd had a child, found her, and got me back three years later."
And told you these stones all your life. Well, that answers my question. Annice shifted position and traced comforting circles against the taut drum of her skin. She braced herself for the inevitable question about her father, about her family, about leaving them, about being alone. "Your turn."
"What does it mean to be a bard?" All at once, she wished she could still see his face. "Why?"
"Because I have a good idea of what it is to be a princess and I want to know why you gave it up."
He's more than just a pretty face, baby. But, to be fair, she already knew that. If he'd answered her questions less than honestly, she could've spun him a story with enough truth in it to satisfy. As it was…
"Bards are the eyes and ears and voice of the country." It was what she'd told Jurgis when he'd asked. A thousand years ago. "We bring the mountains to the coast and the coast to the river and the river to the forest and the forest to the cities. We're what keeps all the little bits of Shkoder together—the people, the land, the kigh. We keep the pattern whole. We harmonize the physical and the spiritual, the intellectual and the emotional, joining body and soul." But that was only what bards were, what they did, not what it meant to be one.
Lifting the flute, she traced circles in the air. "Most people are aware of only their own little Song. Bards find the connections between Songs, find them and gift them to others. To keep someone with the ability and the desire from the training to use it, is to condemn them to glimpses of the world through prison bars.
She paused for breath, then raised a hand too late to stop the shaky laugh that followed. "It just occurred to me that I should've probably told all that to Theron."
"Probably," Pjerin agreed, not the least surprised that she hadn't. "What did you tell him?"
Her second laugh held little more humor. "Essentially, that he'd be sorry if he tried to push me around."
Pjerin knew he was treading close to dangerous ground but he had to ask. "And now you're calling his bluff?"
"You created an innocent life just to throw it in your brother's face." Annice recognized the gentler version. "No. I want with this child what you have with Gerek. Is that so hard to understand?"
"No." He stood. "But so do I."
"Then we're back where we started."
"We're a long way from where we started." He smiled down at her. Annice remembered that smile. The last time she'd seen it, they'd made a baby. "We've managed to stop the bleeding from the damage we inflicted earlier. Not a bad evening's work. Let's get some sleep." Without waiting for an answer, he moved into the darkness at the far end of the shed to check on the mule—dubbed Milena after Annice's older sister and tethered inside with a small pile of hastily gathered forage lest she destroy the surrounding shoots of flax.
And he dares to call me imperious. He's pushy, isn't he, baby? But I think I might be starting to like him.
A little while later, the packed dirt floor of the shed having shifted about to cradle her bulges almost comfortably, she peered across the fire pit and sleepily asked, "Pjerin, what is your favorite color?"
"Blue," he murmured, then, to her surprise, went on. "The sapphire blue of the sky over the keep just after sunset. When the day's gone but the night hasn't quite arrived over the mountains."
If they hadn't been treading around each other so carefully, she'd have accused him of being bardic.