Lark's Quest: The Complete Story (The Deeds of the Ariane) Read online

  "She said she has traveled all the way from the south and is hungry," Mouse offered helpfully, repeating the story she had improvised at the inn gates earlier.

  She lowered her head and stood meekly before his inspection. She knew he would see a wiry girl, without enough curves or soft manners to earn a living as a courtesan, but with the dark-tanned skin and muscles of a peasant used to long toil in the fields. She knew that, unlike the impression he gave, no one could ever mistake her for a noble. She was tall and gangly, dark-haired and wide-faced. Brash and arrogant. That last part she hoped was not visible.

  She knew she appeared to be nothing remarkable, nothing threatening to Raven the Innkeeper. She was not beautiful, or elegant, or powerful. She was merely a teenage girl of the lowest class desperate for a means of earning her keep.

  "You don't look like a cook to me."

  "I have experience, My Lord. Please." What if he sent her away? The fear of that lent an urgency to her voice that made her sound sincere.

  She peered up at him. She really couldn't be sure. While her reaction to him had been instantaneous, that might mean only that she was distracted by a charismatic stranger.

  His face was so different from the one she remembered. He couldn't be identified by looks alone. This man might be any survivor of the chaos of the last ten years—an orphaned noble boy, a young page turned out after a debilitating injury made him useless, a bastard son of a heartless magistrate left to fend for himself. There was noble blood there, but was there something more?

  She needed more time. "Please." She put her most pleading tone into it. "I have nowhere else to go. I need the work, My Lord."

  She held her breath while he stood for what seemed a very long time. She was sure she had not fooled him, and searched her mind for another plan when this one failed. But in the end, surprisingly, he nodded. "All right. We'll give you a trial. Come on."

  •••

  The girl walked quietly behind him. Quiet as a fox, Raven thought.

  Yes, he had been asking around for a cook's assistant. Old Oxen should have help in the kitchen, though he would never so himself. But this skinny girl hardly had the air of a scullery maid about her. When he had first turned around, the look in her eyes—well, it took him back. No one looked at him like that any more.

  Folk stared, to be sure. They stared at the crippled young man whose face showed he had lived through something he should never have survived. But they didn't see what she had appeared to see.

  She wanted to be a cook's assistant at a humble inn? Then why did she seem to be sizing him up, assessing him as if he were the one begging for work and not her?

  The path was narrow, through a stand of coastal firs that grew high, reaching out of sight above the fog. Raven's shoulder brushed against a branch that caught him unaware on his blind side. It left a damp mark on his cloak. He ignored it. He leaned heavily on his walking stick. His shattered knee always seemed to hurt more when he was upset—but he was not upset, he reminded himself. Not at all.

  Mouse hurried on down the hill to the inn. Raven wondered what the boy had thought of the visitor. Her odd manner most likely meant nothing to him. He was only born a few years ago, after all. But the child wasn't stupid, and often saw more than he let on.

  And what was there to see, anyway? The girl was probably what she claimed to be. He was the one with secrets. He still worried about being recognized, even though the possibility grew more remote with each passing year. The past was far away, and it could not find him here, at the far edge of the known world.

  The past was important only to poets—and the stupid boy who had once been named Raven yr Griffon was worth nary a stanza in the saga of his people.

  His boots crunched into the cushion of faded gray fir needles as he walked. He heard her steps as well, on the path close behind him. The air hinted of pine, and the smoke of the inn's cook fires, and vaguely of the northland ponies that grazed the scattered tufts of ferns each day. But mostly the way shrouded him in salt-air fog—"whales' breath," his father had always called it. That memory brought no comfort.

  It was getting darker, and the wind was dying down. The silk moths were beginning to come out for the evening, and soon the air would be filled with their eerie, silent flights among the trees. Their iridescent blue wings were muted in the fog, making them appear almost black in the growing dimness. It was very quiet, and he felt a twinge between his shoulder blades, as if anticipating a knife in the back. The girl said nothing.

  Old Oxen would hate the news that he had a new helper. But Ox himself would be the first to tell him: keep those you don't trust where you can see them.

  Well, he didn't trust this strange girl. Time would tell whether his instincts were correct.

  •••

  She was wrong. Again she ordered her heart to stop pounding as he turned his back and walked down the hill ahead of her. Her heart did not listen.

  The stride, graceful even with the injury, just felt familiar. Something was crying out to her that this was him. Was it wishful thinking, or the truth?

  Even the limping walk of his, aided by the ebony cane, would be right. She tried to assess his injuries, tallying them against the image she had carried in her mind since she was six years old: the crippled boy limping away from a fiery tomb, his image blurred by smoke, his movements furtive and barely seen by the tiny girl lurking in the shadows.

  She had not seen his face as he fled, so the facial injuries proved nothing. She had broken her leg once in a fall. She remembered using a stick on the left to balance her injured right side. Raven held the cane on the right. The injured leg had been on the left. She tried to reconcile the memory with the man walking in front of her.

  The most convincing clue was that incredible swordwork.

  What kind of mid-caste boy possessed such a high level of fighting skill that he could simply choose to switch sword hands when he needed to free his right hand to carry a cane? She would have to be an idiot to believe he was a small-town innkeeper. Lark was many things, but she knew she was not an idiot.

  She had stopped believing after so many false leads. But this time. Something about him reminded her of her own Raven. It could be him.

  She had been wrong before. She had been convinced she was on the right trail, only to find her hopes dashed, again and again. She must not get ahead of herself. But it was possible. For the first time it was really possible she had found her Raven.

  For the Raven she sought might well be crippled. He might well wear a patch over his eye like this one did—for wasn't her Raven wounded terribly when she last saw him?

  He might well be living anonymously among the poor folk of Rïal—where better to hide than the most remote end of the Silver Isle?

  He might well stand anonymously on a hill looking out to sea on a Sabbath's Eve—for the quiet worship of the peasants' God had been at the heart of the problem, hadn't it?

  If her Raven lived, he might be just like this man.

  Or he might not. This young man might be a fallen noble, eking out a living at a far lower station than that of his birth. After the Revolution, there were many such people, their families caught on the wrong side of the power struggle between Ariane warriors and those loyal to the last king. Praise to the Revolution, she silently added out of habit.

  Yes, praise to the revolution to end tyranny.

  The revolution that deposed the corrupt old king and set Lady Willow y Ariane the Just in his place as Steward for the dead royal family.

  The revolution that had flared to life when the king's youngest son stood in a tomb full of guttering torches and shouted about justice and equality and the rights of the poor until his father's guards dragged him away, and he was never seen in public again....

  The king is dead.

  The silver-haired man glanced back over his shoulder and his gaze met hers.

  Long live the king.

  •••

  Raven stood aside at the inn's ent
rance and motioned her inside ahead of him.

  The wooden door bore a deeply carved bird, its eyes marked with obsidian chips that glistened in the light of the torches guttering to each side.

  The door opened directly into the great room, as befitted a public inn. No screens blocked the view of the main room from the muddy courtyard outside.

  As she stood at the entrance it took a moment for Lark's eyes to adjust. The smoky firelight inside dazzled her eyes, and for a moment Raven seemed only a shadow in the doorway, like the dreams that haunted her sleep each night. She shook off the feeling. It was just a trick of the light.

  Once her eyes had adjusted, Raven was only a man in a blue-gray cloak standing in the doorway of the inn, impatiently waiting for her to come inside so he could close out the fog.

  She stepped past him into the main room of the inn. The inn was dark and smoky after the fresh outdoor air they'd just left, but it was warm, and she could smell the delicious aromas of cooking. The smells made her mouth water after the months of wandering the wild roads of the Silver Isle. Rice cake was nourishing enough, but it wasn't food.

  The inn's great room was truly "great," larger than most she'd seen in her travels, and unusually clean, possibly thanks to Raven's noble heritage. Nobility was notoriously fastidious about that sort of thing. Cleanliness is next to Holiness, and all that. The nobles' gods disapproved of filth. Conveniently for them, the nobles never had to do the filthy work it took to keep the kingdom running.

  The inn seemed unlike the other buildings she had seen in this part of the country. Perhaps it had once been the country house of a magistrate. Certainly it was no peasant's shack.

  High walls of polished rock rose to heartwood rafters. The swooping arch of the swallowtail roof was clean and tight, with no gaps showing. The floors were of smooth slate of blush red, from local coastal quarries, no doubt. The place seemed old, probably dating back centuries. Certainly it had been built before the birth of the Raven who now kept it.

  A long table to one side of the room held bowls and cups ready for evening meal, and she could see the source of the wonderful smells through an arched doorway beyond the table.

  The old man who had first opened the inn gate to her that afternoon stood cutting steaks from what could only be a whole roasted shark, with little Mouse chattering away at him while he worked.

  The old man had worn a cloak earlier. Now he'd stripped off the cloak, and worked bare-chested over the grill. Though he must be quite elderly he had the muscles of a young man, and the scars of a warrior.

  The man was heavily marked by injury, including one puckered old scar along his temple. She hoped this wasn't a sign he had gone mad.

  He looked like a veteran of the first war, when the white devils first tried to set foot on these shores and were beaten back by a band of peasants and Ariane guards fighting side-by-side. That was before she was born. It was surprising to see someone like him; most of his generation had died long ago. But he looked alive enough, wielding his cleaver like it never left his side. He carved at a bit of meat like it was an enemy's innards.

  As she watched, Mouse gestured out the doorway toward her. The man glanced up to appraise her with one cold look, then returned to his work. He paused with another glance to be sure she watched, then quickly whittled a particularly juicy slice of fish into thin slices with a frightening accuracy.

  She wasn't easily intimidated, but the open hatred on his face brought out some pain from deep inside of her. She felt the sudden urge to turn around, go back out into the dusk, away from this place and these people. To go somewhere she was wanted. But where would that be?

  She looked around, trying to see where His Grace had gone. She shook her head. Stop that. She was thinking of him as "His Grace" before she knew if he deserved the title. He was "My Lord" only, until—and unless—he was proven otherwise. She must watch her step.

  She turned her back to the cookroom doorway and looked over the rest of the room. A dozen people milled about, talking among themselves. They seemed to be local fishermen and moth-keepers from the actual village of Rïal in the valley below the inn. She had secured lodgings in Rïal earlier today, assuming this visit would take little time. Now she would have to reassess the situation.

  She nodded cordially to the peasant folk as she walked past the little groups. Some stood around the table, some sat near one of the two fireplaces at opposite corners of the far wall. Conversation stopped as she passed, and no one did more than politely nod in her direction. She continued to look around, trying to get the layout of the inn memorized, in case she needed to make any sudden moves.

  One of the fireplaces along the wall had a single chair in front of it, an overstuffed leather one, not unlike the one the Lady Willow had at the Ariane Temple. It could only belong to the inn's esteemed keeper. But it stood empty, and Lark saw no sign of him. He must have slipped away while she was looking around.

  She noticed that no one sat in his chair, though that might only be deference to his status as owner of this place.

  She wondered if any of these simple folk held private theories about their host's identity. Certainly they would know he was not from a humble family line—even more than his silver hair, his very bearing made him stand out, though she wasn't sure he realized it. But that alone would not make people suspicious. These were unsettled times, and minimizing one's past was hardly unusual these days.

  The question was, what story had he told these people about his past? For someone his age to own an inn would require that he had come from a family with money. That would require an explanation. What had he told people about his family?That would make all the difference, for he could, of course, not tell any lies about himself.

  That would be the ultimate test, wouldn't it?

  In the last twenty years it seemed half the boy children, and even a few girls, had been named "Raven" in honor of the young prince. After seeing her fifth Raven some days, she occasionally wondered if she would have been better off if he could have changed his name.

  But the man she sought was trapped by his own identity. And she was counting on that. This journey to seek out every Raven-named man in the Silver Isle would be pointless if her quarry could have slipped off into the countryside under an assumed name. Ironically, her Raven's royal Griffon name prevented him from doing just that.

  Someone of royal blood, descended from the line of kings as old as the land itself, must tell the truth. The taboo was older than this ancient inn, older than the city of Chÿar itself, older perhaps than the people of the Silver Isle. No falsehoods could pass the lips of a royal.

  Oh, her Raven could withhold information, he could change the subject, he could parry words with the best of them, his speech's truth balanced on an edge of meaning as fine as a sword. But he couldn't cross the line to a lie.

  His words, therefore, carried a weight no other man's could.

  He couldn't lie.

  But she could. She could do all the dishonorable things it took to catch a man of honor. And she would. Because if she didn't, Raven yr Griffon, Lord of the Center of the World, Keeper of the Silk and Water, last heir to the throne of the Silver Isle, and the most admired man in the land, would die uncrowned.

  In the face of that, one angry old cook was hardly an obstacle.

  She resolutely entered the kitchen.

  "I told him you were the new helper," Mouse said. "Raven wants her," he added to the old man.

  "I heard you the first time, boy." The man's voice was rough, with the heavy accent of the basest peasant, but the expression in his eyes was intelligent as he looked her over.

  "So?" he said by way of welcome. He pointed with the cleaver to a pile of roots on a table in the corner, then turned his back on her.

  With a sigh, Lark got to work.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was later that evening before Lark found a moment to return to the great room.

  She stood in the kitchen doorway, dishrag in hand. Abou
t a dozen folk lingered in the room, waiting for the food to be served. She wondered how so many could afford to eat at an inn when it was no feast day, but they appeared to be regulars.

  It seemed the inn was a gathering place for the locals, since she was sure all of these people were from the village or nearby farms. They all had the look of northern folk, and the accents.

  She herself had trouble remembering to put the extra lilt in her voice when she spoke. The more she listened to them, the easier it would be. She knew no one would mistake her for a native of the area, but she didn't want to sound too different: too southern, too educated, too upper-caste.

  She wondered what they would think of her. She was dark haired and round-faced like they were, so she was clearly no noblewoman. But she didn't fit in with them any more than she did with the nobles. That was nothing new. All her life she had been trying to figure out where she did fit in. But she worried they could see her profession written all over her—from her walk to the tilt of her head. She tried to bend her shoulders more, to look more meek and humble.

  Finally Lord Raven appeared. She caught sight of him coming down a hallway leading into the far end of the room. His walking stick was gone, she noticed, though he stepped carefully and his limp was obvious.

  He had shed his cloak, and appeared even taller indoors, with the ceiling of this ancient building only a few handspans above his silver hair. He walked past her, nodding a cool greeting in her direction, but not stopping.

  The denizens of the Black Bird greeted him as he passed, most warmly, familiarly, with some deference—he had an air about him that seemed to assume deference, though he never appeared to ask for it. Even those much older than him nodded respectfully and stepped aside as he passed. But certainly she saw no sign of intimidation on the people's part, and she grew more certain that he was completely entrenched in his role of mild townsman.

  Raven made his way to the stuffed chair by the hearth, and eased into it just as the cook, little Mouse at his heels, brought platters of shark steaks and rice, and tureens of the seaweed soup for which the coast was famous, and set all on the table to the laughs and murmurs of appreciation from the people.