Free The Quartered Sea by Tanya Huff Page A

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    "I hardly think it's treason to have a different opinion than the queen." I "What about acting opposite to the queen's desires?"
     
    "We do not act opposite to the queen's desires. We merely keep our mouths shut."
     
    Edite's tone suggested that the discussion was over and she backed it up by rising and nodding toward the door.
     
    Too angry for caution, Benedikt paused, half over the threshold and without turning, threw one last protest back over his shoulder. "When bards keep their mouths shut, it is an action."
     
     
     
    Later that evening, in the largest ale house in Vidor, Benedikt took his quintara out of her case, wiped damp palms against his thighs, tried not to think of how many eyes, how many ears, were on him, and sang "The Dark Sailor."
     
    The queen had remembered him, had acknowledged his work, had put her trust, her life in his Song.
     
    He would not join this conspiracy of silence against her.
     
    By the time he sought his bed, he'd sung the haunting ballad in three more ale houses and to a group of Riverfolk down by the docks. Although he couldn't see the air kigh swooping around his head, the night had become distinctly breezy by the final chorus.
     
    The next morning, fingers white around the handle of his instrument case, he managed to look Edite in the eye and calmly say, "Am I not as entitled to have a different opinion to the Bardic Captain as he is to have a different opinion to the queen?"
     
    "You don't Sing air," Edite told him sharply. "You don't know what other bards are thinking."
     
    It was the first time any of them had ever come right out and said it. He only Sang water. He wasn't as good as the rest of them. Well, bugger them, too.
     
    "I don't Sing air," he snarled, "so I think for myself."
     
    He carried the look on Edite's face with him from the room—eyes wide, mouth opening and closing, she looked like a fish out of water. And if he'd alienated the people he had to spend the rest of his life with, well, he didn't Sing air, did he, so how would he know?
     
    The anger prodded him to sing "The Dark Sailor" in every inn along the River Road.
     
    * * *
     
    Tadeus ran into an old friend on his way to the River Maiden so, what with one thing and another—mostly another—it was late evening by the time he arrived at the inn. Stomach growling, guided as much by his nose as by the kigh, he hurried across the landward yard toward the closest entrance.
     
    "Fried fish and potatoes. Fresh fiddleheads in butter. And, if I'm lucky," he told the breeze by his cheek, "stewed pears in custard."
     
    One foot on the porch step, he stopped and cocked his head, a pair of breezes dancing through the silvered curls above his ears. There was a bard already inside and he was about to sing. When the kigh told him which bard, he whistled softly.
     
    That changed things. The River Maiden had long been one of Tadeus' favorite inns, and he'd long been a favorite of the inn's regulars—his sudden appearance would pull attention away from the younger bard. That kind of grandstanding would be rude at the best of times. Tadeus wasn't sure what it might be called in these particular times.
     
    " In spite of everything I tried during his training, Benedikt has hung on tightly to his feelings of inadequacy ." Magda's shrug had admitted a weary defeat. " But Benedikt is the queen's choice and I don't even want to consider what will happen should Kovar convince him not to go on this voyage ."
     
    Padding noiselessly across the porch, he cracked open one of the double doors and slipped into the broad hall that ran the width of the building. Designed to keep Fourth Quarter winds from blowing in on the paying customers, it held a number of pegs for wet weather gear and a Bard's Closet tucked under a locked flight of stairs.
     
    The noise from the common room masked any sound he may have made as he crossed the hall and quietly Sang the notes to open the closet door. Sifting the din into its