Raven's Shadow (Raven #1)(14)

It was the first time that he was happy to be home.

"Boy," said Ciro, "sing 'The Hills of Home' with me."

Tier grinned at the familiar appellation. It no longer fit as well as it had when he'd tagged along after his grandfather. He stood and let the first few notes of the viol pull him into the song. He took the low part of the duet, the part that had been his grandfather's, while the old man's warm tenor flung itself into the more difficult melody. Singing a duet rather than blending with a group, Tier loosed the power of his voice and realized with momentary surprise that Ciro didn't have to hold back. For the first time, Tier's singing held its own with the old musician's. Then the old words left no more room for thought. It was one of the magic times, when no note could possibly go astray and any foray into countermelody or harmony worked perfectly. When they finished the last note they were greeted with a respectful silence.

"In all my wandering, I've never heard the like. Not even in the palace of the Emperor himself." A stranger's voice broke the silence.

Tier turned to see a man of about fifty, a well-preserved, athletic fifty, wearing plain-colored clothes of a cut and fit that would have done for a wealthy merchant or lower nobleman, but somehow didn't seem out of place in a rural tavern full of brightly dressed Rederni. His iron-grey hair, a shade darker than his short beard, was tied behind his head in a fashion that belonged to the western seaboard.

He smiled warmly at Tier. "I've heard a great deal about you from these rascals since you returned - and they didn't lie when they said that your song was a rare treat. Willon, retired Master Trader, at your service. You can be no one but Tieragan Baker back from war." He held his hand out, and Tier took it, liking the man immediately.

As Tier sat down again, the retired master trader pulled a chair in between two of the others so he sat opposite Tier at the table.

Ciro smiled and said in his shy speaking voice, so at odds with his singing, "Master Willon has built a fine little store near the end of the road. You should go there and see it, full of bits and things he's collected."

"You are young to be retiring," observed Tier. "And Redern is an odd place to choose for retirement - these mountains get cold in the winter."

Master Willon had one of those faces that appeared to be smiling even in repose - which robbed his grin of not a bit of its effect.

"My son made Master last year," he said. "He's got a fire that will take him far - but not if he spends all of his days competing with me for control of the business. So I retired."

Willon laughed quietly and shook his head. "But it wasn't as easy as that. The men who serve my house had been mine for thirty years. They'd listen to my son, nod their heads, and come to me to see if I liked their orders. So I had to take myself out of Taela, and Redern came to mind."

He raised his tankard to Ciro. "My first trip as a caravan master I came by this very inn and was treated to the rarest entertainment I'd ever heard - two men who sang as if the gods themselves were their audience. I thought I'd heard the finest musicians in the world in Taela's courts, but I'd never heard anything like that. Business is business, gentlemen. But music is in my soul - if not my voice."

"If it's music you like, there's plenty here," said Tier agreeably as a small group of younger men came through the inn door.

"Well look what decided to drop by at last," said one of them. "You wiggle out from under your sister's thumb, Tier?"

Tier had greeted them all since he'd returned from war, of course, but that had been under different circumstances, when they were customers or he was. The tavern doors made them all kindred.

Too much so.

With the younger men came less music and more talk - and they must have been talking to his mother because most of the talk had to do with his upcoming marriage. The question was not when he was going to marry; it was to whom.

Tier excused himself earlier than he had expected to and found himself leaving with Master Willon.

"Don't let them fret you," Willon said.

"I won't," Tier said. He almost stopped there, but couldn't quite halt his bitterness - maybe because a stranger might understand better than any of his friends and kin he'd left behind in the tavern. "There's more to life than wedding and breeding and baking bread."

He started walking and Willon fell into step beside him. "I've heard as much praise for your baking as I have for your singing. You don't want to be a baker?"

"Baking..." Tier struggled to put a finger on the thing that bothered him about his family's business. "Baking is like washing - the results are equally temporary." He gave a half-laugh. "That's arrogant of me, isn't it? That I'd like to do something that means more, something that will outlast me the way these buildings have outlasted the men who built them."

"I hadn't thought of it that way before," said Willon slowly. "But immortality... I think that's a basic instinct rather than the product of pride. It goes toward the same things that they were trying to push you into. How did you put it? Wedding and breeding. A man's immortality can be found in his children."

Children? Tier hadn't been aware that he'd thought about the matter at all, but the need was there, buried beneath the "I can't breathe with the weight of my family's wishes" tightness in his chest.