Trasall Ti Remmont, High Songstress of Gelmorre, thrice-appointed to the court of Her Worshipped, the Eighth Crystalvoice (and soundmaker of note besides), watched the launch depart and really wished that someone had thought to give her a hand with her damned luggage before they left her alone on the dock with only an old rowboat for company. True, she only had two small trunks, but it was the principle of the thing. What was the point in being famous if people didn’t do things like that for you?
Grumbling aside, she set to her belongings and set up the path. The dirt path. Rustic, she supposed, but there was no accounting for taste among the rich and powerful. At least two of the most obscenely wealthy people she’d performed for in her life had lived in conditions fit to make a street-philosopher raise an eyebrow and scrub her wrists self-consciously. And there was no questioning that her latest client had access to a level of prestige that they would have envied
Matagan had ten thousand children, it was said. Maybe it was right. Maybe it was less. Most likely, it was more. But each of those ten-thousand-plus/minus Spawn of Gant were more precious than a fistful of diamonds and a hatful of Sill-shooms. You get a little speck of rock with your name on it and maybe enough space to build half a cabin, that’s when you know you’ve made it in Matagan. That’s when you know you’re somebody.
Trasall was mostly somebody these days. Much to her mother’s annoyance, she was sure.
The island she was walking on was big enough that she’d lost sight of the dockhouse entirely and was over her third hill with no end to the trail in sight. Now, what sort of thing did you have to go and do to get that, hmm?
She turned over the memory of getting the letter, since the letter itself was packed in the bottom of her smaller trunk. Addressed High Songstress, as plainly as Baker. A Request with a capital Politeness. Brisk, brief, blunt, one week of performance please and thank you, and attached to a figure that made her eyebrows raise a little without her really noticing. Signed, Mistress Scout.
War hero. That was her best guess. A bit awkward for a Galm to go perform for a jumped-up ‘Gan who’d likely gotten rich off’ve stabbing her countrymen or luring them into starving gyrwolf packs in the backwoods, but then again, she was no patriot and surely no soldier. Let Her Worshipped and her couriers and her hosts and her brigades pick fights, Trasall was an entertainer, and history had shown her that so long as you stayed smartly away from politics at the afterparties you could host anything short of a thing from the Terramac on the grace of a calm smile and a bit of boozing alone.
War hero from what, though? There were tales of the…incidents out there, Afar. And there was some stir around the Stone, but that had nothing to do with the ‘Gans. Probably. The Greywood Campaign? She’d be surprised if there were any veterans living from that who had the fortitude to feed themselves, let alone live out here in nowhere. Maybe someone from the War in the Cracks? No, that wasn’t even over yet. Too soon for anyone to retire on well-earned rests. And then there was the title… she didn’t know of many scouts who got much more than medals. The real glory was usually hogged for the generals and colonels. And she’d never heard of a Mistress-Scout before. A special rank?
Then Trasall pulled up short because she’d come to the house and it wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting but it wasn’t what she wasn’t expecting to expect. Exactly.
The door was a full fifteen feet tall and also open. With a bit of heaving, a little swearing, and at last a full-body shove, it begrudged her a crack as she caught her breath.
Inside was no less strange. The tall, tall roof she’d observed from outside enclosed just a single floor; the rafters swinging bare overhead. Two halls stretched to either side of her, floors gaping bare and scratched to the nines, a single, oddly-shaped door sat ahead of her. It took her a moment to realize it was the only thing in the building that wasn’t outsized.
Well, that and the table at her elbow. An envelope sat on it, a single, capital T sat on that.
She opened it and enough cash to move a slumlord into a count fell out, along with a single piece of paper.
Tonight, dusk. The porch.
Trasall used the rest of the day to get comfortable. Her room – as indicated by another helpfully terse letter – was the tiny one. She could have fit half her childhood home into it, but there was no room because it looked like someone else had got to that first. A kitchen, a water closet, a pantry, bookcases, dresser… it was as if someone had condensed all the rest of the building’s contents into one place. It would have been cramped without the tall, tall walls looming over it and up to the ceiling; as it was it merely felt lost, like a mismanaged dollhouse.
It wasn’t the creepiest place she’d ever performed at. Maybe the top twenty. But the liquor cabinet helped. And she sang better buzzed anyway.
The sun dipped low and the glass filled up and Trasall Ti Remmont, High Songstress of Gelmorre, stood on the porch and packed her lungs with green, cool-breezed air.
When she let it out again, it made the trees stop and listen.
And again.
And again.
There’d been no specific requests on any of the messages. A little annoying, but it gave her room to have some fun. She did a quick cycle of old slumland nightsongs, slid from there into a hill-ballad, topped it off with one or two of her classic early works, and then (because the brandy was low and she felt mischievous) an old marching tune whose ambiguity left the nationality of the singer in just enough doubt to be tasteful.
She drained the glass, took a bow, and walked inside.
Trasall woke up uncomfortably close to morning, with a gentle, velvety headache, a slightly sore mouth, and a real need for coffee – which, mercifully, she found in a ten-pound sack.
The mists were out and prowling through the trees, and as she sat on the porch and sipped at her scalding (grainy) drink and chewed on an old oatcake she’d dug from a cupboard she could almost understand why this place had been built.
Well, besides the floorplan. She still had no idea what the two halls were for. Between them they possessed nine-tenths of the building and not one stick of furniture beyond a rug she could’ve made a circus tent out of. And it was old, all of it. Creaking and grumbling and settling. This place had been built before she was born, and for what? A giant with a crippling phobia of furnishings?
Sunlight glimmered through her thoughts, and she shook away their cobwebs. The fog was lifting, the air was shining, and somewhere a bird was making cross noises that only succeeded in sounding adorable. You would have to be a cold-hearted city-dweller indeed to not feel that pull, and although Tristall considered herself just that within the hour she relented and took her heels into the backwoods, armed with a sandwich.
She regretted her decision right away, but not quite right away enough to actually do anything about it. The light loose-leafed foliage turned thick and thorny without warning, the trees seemed to lay their roots precisely wherever her ankle was attempting to move, and by the time Trasall stopped to eat her bad-tempered sandwich the birds had become a gang of scolding thugs that would’ve put a murder of crows to shame.
Nature, she reminded herself between bites of cheese and anonymous meat, is well and good, but you don’t want to step in it. Her mother had been very firm on that and she wondered how she’d forgotten it. Then she remembered all the terrible advice the old bat had given her on finding a decent job and keeping her head out of the clouds and felt better just in time to recognize that prickle in her shoulderblades.
It was a familiar feeling. Most times it was a good one. It meant she was doing her job properly, it meant the audience was too focused to even cough.
Someone was watching her.
Also, the birds had shut up. That was probably a bad sign.
Slowly, calmly, as alarmingly casual as she could manage, she slid off the rock she’d turned into a table and began to retrace her steps in her head.
A bush rustled.
By the time Trasall’s brain had calmed down enough to form memories again, she was halfway through the door of the cabin and there were little specks of some sort of dry foam at the corners of her mouth. They reminded her of a sort of frothy dessert she’d had three days ago in a court in a city on the mainland where she was surrounded by people and not alone on a rock singing to a host who’d gone past ‘reclusive’ and into ‘invisible.’
Oh. Her host.
She suddenly felt very stupid. And not just because she’d left her only shoes somewhere out there.
Of course. That had been her host. She’d probably come across them taking a rest, the same as her. It was probably a good thing she’d left so fast. That was all that had happened, just a chance encounter. A little bad luck. Nothing strange. It wasn’t even as if there were any animals – any BIG animals – in the Spawn of Gant. Nothing bigger than a shy deer, say. Yes, she could’ve frightened a deer, too. A deer or her host. Both very harmless. Nothing strange.
Still, she took an extra glass of brandy before she sang that evening. And she stuck to lively tunes. Songs that stamped their feet and filled her head with choruses and beat back the too-quiet night to a more respectable, reasonable distance.
And she kept the giant door open a crack the whole time. And the bottle at her elbow. And her eyes moving.
That night Trasall dreamed that she lay awake with a half-moon lightning the corner of her room and listened to the front door creak and soft breath puff. Shadows slid across the edge of her door, and soft scuffing echoed from the rafters. She dreamed these things and shivered in her (old, woolen, but very thick) blankets and when she woke up it was dawn and the door was open a crack to let the fog in.
She had a drink with breakfast to steady her nerves. And a drink with lunch to hold them there. And then she had a drink while she carefully poked around the rest of the building and found nothing but more nothing. Empty walls. Not even paintings. A rug. A room for her. Nothing more. Nothing more than the scratched and worn floorboards, which she was starting to feel unspeakably uneasy about.
A tune came to mind – a long-song of a beautiful young manservant who married a mysterious noblewoman, only to find she was a spider and devoured him whole – and she realized to her annoyance that she’d been humming it since she’d woken up.
The fog wouldn’t lift. And she wouldn’t go out. When dusk came she brought a chair from her room and a bottle and she sat at the little side-table at the door and sang low sad songs of missing ships and lost lights and families that faded away like dew in the morning. And when the last glow of the sun sank behind the dark waters and black pines, she wiped her face and sang Long-By-Way, the lullaby her mother had used to keep her quiet when she was small and sick.
Then she stopped singing, and listened. Because as those last echoes of her voice slid away into the bays and stones and trees, she heard, not too far away, the closing notes of a long, soft howl.
Trasall opened her eyes and looked up at the rafters and realized she hadn’t slept.
In her defense, of course, she had been busy. Her back hurt, her arms ached, and her neck was still stiff from the odd angle she’d been forced to rest at after incorporating her bed into the superstructure of the odds-and-ends barricade she’d rigged up in front of the door.
Well, she’d sleep when she was dead or preferably when she was off the island. The rowboat, that was the key. She’d use the rowboat. And she only REALLY needed what was in her small trunk anyways.
A five-hour trip here from Matagan. She couldn’t do that in a boat. But she could find a more normal island out there in the Spawn of Gant, with a normal elderly madman who could lend her a ride or something in exchange for five minutes of awkward small talk while trying not to stare at her chest. Even that, god yes.
She slid the base of the door open. Fog wafted in against her nose and she pawed it away, cursing. It stuck to her fingers.
She looked more closely. Not fog, fur. Grey fur. And there were fresh scratches on the porch. She could fit her finger in them.
Trasall had a good two decades of fine food and finer drink between her and her last guttersprint, but in her heyday she’d outrun children twice her size. It was a matter of three masteries: tight turns, quick reflexes, and the realization that shorter legs just mean you can move them faster. It was thanks to a combination of these things that she made the trip down to the dock in less than two minutes, barefoot. Just like old times.
She punted the rowboat into the water, swearing at the pain in her arms and legs, threw her trunk into it with a hollow thud, and realized there were no oars and she was stuck. Again, just like old times.
No, no, no, her memory softly reminded her, and she listened to it. Her memory had won her races, it had won her teachers, it had won her place in the world. There’s a dockhouse, a little wooden dockhouse, barely a shack. There’ll be oars in there. There will be.
So Trasall was in a calm and contemplative state of mind when she turned around and found a bear between herself and the dockhouse and the shore and the entire world.
No big animals in the Spawn of Gant. Besides the ones that could swim.
She’d seen stuffed bears. She’d seen caged bears. This one seemed so much larger, as if the trees and water and misty air had inflated it with purpose and strength and above all else surety. It was staring at her with an open curiosity that was so much worse than an open snarl, brown eyes nested under beetled brown brows. Trasall had seen that look before, on the faces of dukes and farmers and bully-boys and who knew what. It was the considering, calculating expression of someone who was deciding exactly what it was that they were about to get away with.
She looked at her trunk in the rowboat, and decided against it. Moving seemed like a terrible plan, and the handle on the damned thing was barely attached already. She’d get one shot and that would just be enough to irritate it.
Then she looked back up and the bear was charging.
Then as she fell over backwards, half-swearing, half-screaming, she looked farther up and saw the fog move, grey on grey, and grow teeth.
Cold water.
Trasall couldn’t swim. She didn’t dwell on it, she didn’t fret on it, she didn’t shy from the touch or sight of water. It was just another relic of having a childhood too busy and too crammed to fit anything as large and rich as a lake or pool in it, and of all those heirlooms it was by far one of the smallest and least noteworthy.
At most times. Right now, as she was surrounded by ice that was trying to pry open her face and the mouth, it seemed very important indeed. The world was sliding away above her and opening up beneath her and no matter where she waved her arms they just got tired and her clothing was a lead sack and
sharp teeth. above her.
something sank into the scruff of her outfit, the nape of her clothing, and dragged her up, up, up out of the cold and murk and into the hazy morning air, gasping and dripping.
Thunk went the dock. She hugged it. Something warm and huge nuzzled her back gently, and she rolled over and looked into the biggest, bloodiest set of teeth she’d ever seen. Small specks of brown fur were caught in between them.
Ah, her memory said. Ah ah. That was the colour of the bear.
The teeth slid aside and were replaced by an extremely large nose, which nudged her again. She stood up, leaning on it for support, and there they were for the first time, face to face.
Trasall looked up at a wolf that measured twelve foot at the shoulder, and a few things clicked and snapped into place.
“Mistress Scout,” she said aloud again. And she giggled. “Pleased to meet you.”
Her tail wagged. That was a good sign.
The rest of the week was much more relaxing. Scout was still shy, but it was a more natural, wholesome shyness, the kind that Trasall recognized from some of her younger sisters, not the compulsive nerviness that had been driving both of them since Trasall’s boat had left.
“Scared of scaring me?” she’d asked as they walked back to the house, and the gyrwolf had nodded her huge grey head.
It made sense, she thought, as they dug through her barricade cabinet by cabinet. You spend half your – considerable – lifespan sneaking through forests (thirty foot of sneak) and tracking down armies for Matagan and then you come home old and grizzly and get a nice retirement where you never have to see anybody and when somebody shows up, what do you do?
Well, besides get lonely.
“First things first,” said Trasall, as she dug out the last of the brandy. “Now, second things.”
She swirled the glass for a little less than half a second, then downed it. “You prefer accompaniment, or want to trade solos?”
Four days later, Trasall Ti Remmont, High Songstress of Gelmorre, thrice-appointed to the court of Her Worshipped, the Eighth Crystalvoice (and soundmaker of note besides), and the only living human to have sung a duet with a gyrwolf, watched the island recede as she slouched in her seat, cheerily drunk, and waved. A greyness among the trees moved in rhythm with her hand, and she sighed happily at what might have happened at the edges of her eyes.
“Not so bad,” she told the pilot, who nodded in the way of all diplomats. “Not so bad at all.”
Trasall leaned back further still, head bonking gently against the broken handle of her trunk, and noticed she was humming again.
She wondered if she could learn to howl properly.