Breaking the Sword

The Rose Witch (II)

The bard from The Broken Sword Inn turned back to the bar after only a few moments, evidently not finding anything in the taproom that caught his interest. But Tigraine was certain it was the same man whose departure had kicked up such a fuss in that other taproom so many miles away.

Tigraine, as Dane had had much occasion to remark on, was superstitious. She did not believe in coincidence. And so, egged on by four whiskeys, a certainty that this was what she was meant to do, and it must be said, a rather determined streak of independency, Tigraine gathered up her empty glasses and made for the barstool beside the bard.

"What happened to the sick aunt in Belmar?" Tigraine asked as she sat, lining up the glasses on top of the bar.

The dark-haired man jumped and looked her full in the face. "Have we met?"

"Not formally," Tigraine said, offering him her hand. "I was a witness to your noisy departure from The Broken Sword Inn in Darev. Tigraine Alsarra."

The bard shook her hand. "Tristram Ilestik." He grinned, a little abashed. Still, it was a charming smile. "The aunt is a rather convenient excuse. Not quite so dire as a sick parent or sibling, and less worn out than the poor ailing grandmother."

"I hadn't guessed," Tigraine replied drily.

The bard considered her closely. "Are you following me, Tigraine Alsarra?"

"I was about to ask you the same question, Tristram Ilestik."

The bard smiled again, but this time it did not reach his eyes. He ordered another drink for each of them. Tigraine let him; she was fairly confident she could drink him under the table.

"So what brings you to these parts?" he asked, apparently more concerned with pondering the half-emptiness of his glass.

Tigraine was smart enough to know when she was being pumped for information and took it in stride. It was not as if she had any secrets to keep. She did wonder what it was the bard had to hide. "I'm traveling to Belmar with my wizard of a lover in search of clues to help me find the parents who abandoned me when I was a child." She was careful, however, to keep her tone pitched so only he, and not the entire room, would hear this information.

"Now that," said the bard, putting his glass down hard on the bar for emphasis, "sounds like a tale worth telling." And he ordered them both another drink before Tigraine even had a chance to touch the first one he'd bought her.

As the evening wore on, it became easier and easier to squander her pocket money on ever increasing amounts of alcohol, until finally Tristram topped her by buying a round for the entire taproom, by this time almost full with the dinner crowd. He was an excellent drinking partner, full of a never-ending string of jokes and stories, and not half so good at dice as he seemed to think. Tigraine hoped, in a careless, drunk sort of way, that come morning he wouldn't be missing too sorely the gold she had drunk and won off him.

He also managed, with the ease of a collector, to coax some of her own stories out of her. He listened raptly to her tales of the battles she had fought and of the soldiers she had fought with. However he seemed most interested in the other work she did, that of an Imperial Phoenix, and Tigraine supposed she couldn't blame him.

"You actually hunt ghosts?" he asked, leaning over the table to get a closer look at her face, probably to better judge if she were kidding him. They had by this time relocated from the bar and secured a table where they could talk and dice more privately.

"Hunt 'sbetter applied to manticores and griffins," Tigraine observed, searching for her current flagon among the cups and glasses that lined the table like the walls and battlements of a fort. "Things that're closer to animals. With ghosts, 'smore a matter of investigating the cause of death, resolving unfinished business. That sort of thing."

"But you've spoken with ghosts?"

"I've spoken at ghosts," she answered, finding her drink at last. "Most of 'm, those a Phoenix deals with, 're so old, they don't really remember being human. They lose control as they age 'n can get pretty violent."

"They say age's like a second infancy."

"Only this baby's capable of throwing a three-hundred-pound bookcase across a room. Or dropping your cat out a sixth story window."

"What did the cat do to the ghost?"

"Pissed on the Corathian rug that was a wedding gift from her father, 's I understand." Tristram burst out laughing. Tigraine grinned and added, "Not that I blame the cat; the rug was hideous."

They continued in drunken giddiness for a number of minutes, trading jokes and laughing, until Tristram said, looking toward the front of the inn, "I say, who is that fellow with the thundercloud for a face, standing in the doorway and staring at us? Doesn't he know how unlucky it is, standing in doorways?"

"Ah," Tigraine said, her smile fading as she followed the direction of his gaze. She rose, adding ironically, "Pardon me. The wife."

"Oh," the bard said, burying his face in his tankard. "Gods gra'mercy."

Tigraine nodded her own farewell and crossed the room toward where Dane stood, pleased that she did not wobble one bit, even though the room seemed to have taken on dubious foundations. At about four feet out, Dane's eyes locked with hers, and the sensible part of Tigraine's brain, which remained even when she was drunk to suggest things she probably had better do, whispered that she probably had better go quietly to bed. The look on her wizard lover's face spoke plainly of a rather ugly fight brewing.

Tristram, observing from the other side of the room, thought he could almost see the power radiating off the dark-skinned wizard in the doorway, and was personally very glad that the man hadn't turned his attention from his lover to her erstwhile drinking companion. The bard decided to hunker down in his fortress of glass and clay cups and avoid all eye contact for the time being.

Tigraine, however, possessed a certain predisposition for walking straight into danger. It was one of the things that gave her an advantage as a Phoenix. Thus she approached her glowering partner with a rather goofy grin of her own. She was, after all, feeling rather fine and content with the world. When she was less than a foot away, closer than he was usually comfortable with in public, she reached tenderly for his face.

Dane flinched away from her with a violence that threw her off balance. Without saying a word, still radiating his anger like a man-sized sun, he took hold of her arm and pulled her out of the taproom, heading for the stairs. Her nerves dulled, Tigraine did not feel the pain of his grip then, but she would feel the hand-shaped bruise on her forearm come the morning.

"Tigraine Alsarra," he spat as he dragged her up the stairs, her name sounding like a curse, "you are drunk!"

Finally getting her feet back under her, Tigraine grabbed on to the railing and pulled back. "So what?!"

Dane stumbled on the step, but he did not let go of her arm.

"You are disgracing yourself, drinking excessively in a strange tavern with some strange man like some common hussy! I've never been ashamed of you–"

"Well then now's no time to start!" she shot back, prying at his fingers with her other hand. Was he using magic that his grip was so unbreakable? "I had a few drinks and struck up an acquaintance. Plenty of people do that. Plenty of normal people, anyway."

"Normal's just another word for unremarkable," the wizard hissed. To her very great surprise, he let her go. "But fine. Go be drunk and giddy and stupid. Go be normal. Drink yourself into some stranger's bed. Or hell, ten strangers' beds. See if I care."

He left her on the stairs feeling bewildered and halfway sober. She did go back downstairs, but not into some stranger's bed, nor even back to the taproom. Instead, she went for a long walk along the lake shore in the still pouring rain and did not return to The Rose Witch until her head felt clear.

Then, not feeling up to rejoining battle, she joined Potami in her stall in the stables, stripping down to her damp small clothes and burrowing into a pile of hay for warmth and dry bedding. She was asleep in moments, but dreamed troubled dreams.