The trouble with the Cintran lower-city taverns was that they wanted honesty in their music, and Jaskier had spent the better part of the evening trying to give them the opposite.
Not because he was dishonest — Jaskier was, he felt, unusually honest for a bard, in that the lies he told were beautiful and therefore a form of higher truth — but because the song he’d been building for three days had a line in the second verse about the harvest’s golden bounty and every time he sang it, the room went quiet in the specific way rooms went quiet when they recognized a lie being presented as a fact.
He’d tried the grain-store’s gathered plenty.
Same silence.
He’d tried Cintra’s fields run bright and true, which was worse, because at least one woman in the corner had made an audible sound that was not appreciation.
The song was about the Lion of Cintra.
It had a tremendous hook — she who bends no knee to night — and the middle eight was genuinely the best work he’d done in a month.
The problem was that the Cintran lower city, on this particular evening two days before everything fell apart, did not want a song about Calanthe the Unconquered.
They wanted either a drinking song or a dirge, and he had come with a triumph.
“It’s a wonderful song,” the barmaid told him, in the flat tone of someone managing a difficult customer.
“Very rousing.
Very inspiring.” She put a cup of something brown and warm near his elbow and went away.
The cup was an improvement on the situation.
Jaskier drank from it and looked around the room and revised his opinion of his audience.
They were frightened.
Not the obvious kind of frightened — not the kind that packed bags and ran.
The kind that sat in rooms it knew and drank what it could and didn’t look at the door too directly, because looking at the door meant acknowledging that the door might be worth looking at.
Jaskier had played enough bad-news rooms to know the register.
The harvest east of the city had burned.
Three different merchants had packed their families north in the past four days.
The price of bread had doubled.
He tried a different song — a road-song, nothing heroic, just the familiar comfort of a tune that went somewhere — and the room relaxed by approximately half an inch, which was progress.
He was three verses in when the boy snagged his attention.
Corner table, alone, which was unusual for a lower-city tavern where space was not being wasted on privacy.
White hair — genuinely white, not bleached, the kind of pale that belonged on a much older face.
He was perhaps thirteen, which meant either a servant running an errand or a refugee who’d gotten into the tavern for the warmth, neither of which explained why he was sitting with the particular stillness of someone who wasn’t hiding so much as simply declining to be noticed by force of will.
Jaskier sang the chorus.
The boy didn’t react.
He sang the second verse, and included the harvest’s golden bounty again out of professional stubbornness, and the boy flinched.
Not much.
A small tightening around the eyes, a fractional stillness where there had already been stillness.
The kind of reaction a person made when they heard something they knew was wrong and were deciding whether to say so.
Jaskier finished the verse, ended on a chord, and leaned across the gap between tables.
“You don’t like the harvest line,” he said.
The boy looked at him with the measured patience of someone who had been doing this — managing curious adults at a distance — for longer than Jaskier expected of a child his age. Visit novelping(.)com for the full chapter.
“The song’s fine,” the boy said.
“That’s not a no.”
“The song’s fine.”
Jaskier studied him.
In his experience, people who did not want to be interesting generally fell into one of two camps: people who were genuinely boring, and people who were extremely interesting and had decided that being boring was strategically superior.
The boy’s hair was white and his eyes were too steady and he’d flinched at a lyric about a harvest that, from what Jaskier had gathered, no longer existed.
“You know something,” Jaskier said.
“I know a lot of things,” the boy said.
“I know this tavern’s wine is worse than the sign promises.
I know you’ve been trying to find a better second verse for half an hour and you keep going back to the same one.
I know—” a fractional pause, “—that the two guards by the door are about to decide your song is insufficiently cheerful and ask you to stop.”
Jaskier turned.
The two guards by the door were, in fact, looking at him with the expressions of men who had opinions about the current musical selection.
He went to a different song immediately — a love ballad, politically neutral, nobody’s harvest in it — and the guards’ expressions eased.
When he looked back, the boy was watching him with something that might have been approval, if approval were the kind of thing you showed in very small quantities and then put away.
“You’re fast,” the boy said.
“It’s a survival skill.” Jaskier settled back on his stool.
“In my profession, reading the room is the difference between a good night and a broken lute.” He played a quiet chord.
“In yours?”
“I don’t have a profession.”
“You have a manner,” Jaskier said.
“Most boys your age are either afraid of something or showing off about something.
You’re doing neither.
You’re just—” he searched for the word, “—waiting.”
The boy said nothing.
He drank from his cup, which appeared to contain water, which told Jaskier something about his finances.
“Where are you going?” Jaskier asked.
“After.”
“After what.”
“After here.” Jaskier waved at the general situation.
“You’re not staying.
Nobody intelligent is staying.
Where are you going.”
The boy turned his cup in his hands, a slow rotation, looking at it rather than at Jaskier.
In the lamplight his white hair looked less strange and more like something that had simply decided to be that color, decisive about it in the way that very determined things were decisive. Read the latest chapters at novelping(.)com.
“North,” the boy said, finally.
“Eventually.”
“Mm.
I’m going north as well, eventually.” Jaskier began picking out a quieter melody, more thinking-music than performance.
“I’m working on a song about all this.
The tragic kind.
You’re in it, currently.”
The boy looked up.
“I’m a bard,” Jaskier said, pleasantly.
“It’s what I do.
Don’t take it personally.
You have excellent features for tragedy — the hair, the stillness, the way you flinch at things everyone else is pretending not to see.” He let the melody drift.
“You sing like a man who’s already heard the last verse.”
The boy absorbed this the way he absorbed everything — quietly, without telegraphing whether it had landed.
“That’s a terrible quality to have in a ballad,” the boy said.
“It’s a wonderful quality in a ballad,” Jaskier said.
“It’s a terrible quality to have in real life.”
The guards were moving again, this time with genuine intent, and Jaskier picked up his lute bag and shifted toward the door at the speed of a man who had had this conversation with authority before and preferred to have it somewhere else.
At the door he looked back.
The boy was already looking at the door as if calculating whether Jaskier’s exit had changed anything about the balance of attention in the room.
Finding it hadn’t, he looked down at his cup.
The street outside smelled wrong.
Not the low-market smell of the lower city — that was fish and wool and woodsmoke and the general concentrated odor of too many people.
This was something underneath it, faint, that Jaskier had spent three days trying not to notice because noticing it led somewhere he wasn’t ready to go.
Smoke.
Not from a cookfire.
Different.
The smoke that came before fire arrived rather than after.
He stood in the street with his lute bag over his shoulder and thought about the triumph in the second verse — she who bends no knee to night, which was a great line, genuinely — and understood for the first time why the boy had flinched at the harvest.
He’d been singing the wrong song.
Jaskier went to find somewhere to sleep and started, in the back of his head where the work happened quietly, the first note of something different.
Not a triumph.
Not yet a dirge.
Something in between; the shape of a song about a city that didn’t know it was ending, and a boy in a corner who did.