Songbird - 1
Astrid Bachderyn didn’t walk so much as saunter up to the stage in her tartan skirt, blouse cinched low enough to tease without outright scandalising anyone, rosin, lute strings, mouth pieces, and a hurdy-gurdy crank she hadn’t used in years jingling faintly in the pouch at her hip with each step.
The tavern was warm. Not just from the heat of the fire, but the press of warm bodies of every species, size, gender and colour: from towering, steel-blue-skinned goliaths with shoulders like quarried stone, to lithe, ethereal elves who barely touched the floor, to ruddy, battle-scarred orcs with olive skin and tusks like carved ivory, and a few tieflings of different hues thrown in for good measure. They laughed, talked over one another, arm wrestled, and flirted with the halfling and human girls weaving through them to collect empty tankards.
A few merchants still wore damp cloaks from the storm rolling in off the bay. A trio of dwarves were arguing over the new tariffs from the Eshkari Council. Someone had drawn a crude symbol: a stylised dragon eye wreathed in chain, into the condensation on a window. No one claimed it.
Astrid’s long, curly hair fell between her shoulder blades, and the blue in her eyes, blue as Warnpool Bay in high summer, caught the lantern light and sparkled. She looked enchanted. But no, they were about to be enchanted.
She struck a low chord and let it hum. The crowd quieted. Not all at once, but voices slowly fell away as The Songbird began to sing. It wasn’t a safe ballad, not a hymn to old battles or Gods, or Titans long dead, but a little ditty about a laundress caught between her master’s sheets and her mistress’ whip.
The room howled with laughter, shock, and roaring approval.
They didn’t know the song was about her, not really. They never did. Astrid always changed the names, the trades, locations, even the species, but the rhythm was always her own. Not all her songs were autobiographical, of course. Some were pure gossip, handed to her in dark corners by half-drunk traders and temple boys with loose tongues and twitchy eyes. Some were warnings. Disguised as bawdy jokes.
Like the one she sang last week in Kelethor, about a dragonborn noble who liked to tie up his servants and whisper prophecy in their ears. The audience had laughed. But the story wasn’t hers. It came from an elven bard she’d lost touch with in the last month. It was strange. Lucien hadn’t been one to just disappear for weeks at a time without word, but then again, he did have a tendency to hop on a ship and reappear in the tropical north a week later with a brand new repertoire and plenty of stories.
Maybe he’d fallen for a triton lord and was singing dirty songs to dolphins. But still. She felt it in her gut: something wasn’t right.
There were whispers, of course. Of cities far to the east where the music had gone silent. Town criers replaced by scale-armoured acolytes who recited morning prayers in Draconic. Of bards being arrested for “cultural subversion.” Of people disappearing in the night.
She didn’t sing those stories directly. Not yet. But they threaded themselves into the bones of her performance.
She swayed her hips with each verse, pouted as she trilled the high notes, and flashed a wicked grin or raised an eyebrow at any man who looked like he was getting too invested in the subject at hand.
Astrid thrived here. She was alive in the moment, but her thoughts also sparked across her mind like fireworks: she was already four songs ahead in her mental setlist, already gauging the mood of the crowd, marking the drunkest and clocking who might be trouble, who might be tasty…and who might be both.
The Goliath at the back caught her eye.
Easily seven-and-a-half feet tall, with granite-grey skin streaked with darker patches like storm clouds, he looked like he’d been carved from a mountain and then overfed on goat meat and sunshine. A native of the Fraktal Ryj, if she had to guess, those highland bastards were always thick as tree trunks and twice as cheerful.
He had a big, dumb grin and his shirt was half unbuttoned, revealing tattoos that coiled across muscles so exaggerated they looked like a child’s sketch of a hero come to life. His laughter boomed across the space like a war drum with every joke she sang, and when she crooked her finger during the bridge of her song about the blacksmith’s anvil, he flushed like a bashful ox and spilled his beer.
Oh yes. He’d do very nicely.
