Page 3 of Awariye

I could respect a king like that, one who protected his people and allowed them to live their lives.

The part of me that held onto sunshine optimism despite my circumstances wondered whether this king was looking for a court bard.

We crested one last hill, and the castle came into view just after a shallow valley. My horse took me the final stretch. At the gate I offered my services, and the messenger returned to let me in.

I relinquished my horse to be returned to the relay station. The messenger informed me that the king and his close fighters and family members were just finishing up dinner, but Ulbrecht was willing to have a bard come and sing and would thus pay to care for the relay horse.

Patting down my clothes, I pulled myself together. With the last of my energy, I followed the guard and strode into the hall with all the pride and dignity my vocation commanded.

"The bard, my king," the guard announced, and as the room quieted down, I planted my feet.

Inhaling slowly, I summoned magic from the air around me and set my life force billowing through my body, fueling one last blow of force. This was my chance. If this fell through, my goal would become to simply not die by the side of the road.

"Your name, bard?" a member of the dinner party asked.

"My name is Awariye, from the Diana Monastery, in the forests at your border with Helvetica," I replied, projecting my voice to fill the hall.

The chatter quieted down while I gathered what remained of my resolve. Lungs full, I lifted my eyes and began to sing.

CHAPTERTWO

IGOR

Iwas seated next to Evelyn as she and Sören attempted to keep their little ones entertained and eating their dinner when I noticed someone being let into the hall. My training kicked in, even though I knew there was a guard and a guard dog on both sides of the door. Amid the din of people talking and plates being removed, the guest announced himself as Awariye of Helvetica.

A few people heard it and looked around while everyone else carried on eating and conversing. What caught my attention was the gasp of the man sitting across the table from me, right next to his lover, Ulbrecht the king. Wren was also from Helvetica, a mage from a monastery there, and from the way he grabbed Ulbrecht's arm and flew to standing, he seemed to know this Awariye.

Following Wren's gaze to a young man about our age in his mid-twenties, my breath caught at his sheer beauty. Then worry suffused my surprise when I scanned his form and noticed how skinny he was beneath his robes and cloak. He was tall, nearly as tall as myself and our warriors, with muted brown hair that held waves and flopped around.

His eyes were of a beautiful shape, but I could not make out their color at this distance. He had high cheek bones and a chiseled jaw, a pert nose that made me want to pinch him and tease, and beautiful, shapely lips. I just wished he didn't have those dark circles under his eyes, and though his bone structure no doubt highlighted it, the worn-out hue of his lean form just made me want to feed him.

Yet despite his evident exhaustion, he planted his feet and straightened his back, puffing his chest out and taking a deep breath, clearly at home in a theatre or on a stage. Though I knew next to nothing about his discipline, this man was clearly a bard. He was the kind of person who could command an entire hall full of courtiers and petty kings, so at home in his own soul that he did not question whether he deserved the honor of attention from our precious Danubian High King.

Projecting to the back of the hall, so powerful he could have been standing right next to us, his voice filled the chamber and took my breath away. The sheer force of it echoing off the stone walls astounded me, and yet he made it look effortless. In just a moment, everyone ceased their conversation to listen to his sung words, rendered with such skill we had all likely never heard someone of this caliber before.

If the man himself was handsome, then the beauty of his voice was divine. Indeed, just sitting in the presence of such artistry seemed to lift me upwards, beyond the common worries of everyday existence and into a black night glittering with stars, in which the distant, still gods watched coldly over us. The imagery conjured in my mind's eye from his singing had me wishing for the warm protection of the lanterns burning elsewhere in the castle.

A rich tenor, if I remembered that term correctly, undulated in an evocation of our mighty king, comparing him to the Winter King who, like ours, had defended his land from invaders. To liken Ulbrecht the Great to King Arthur of Wales was no small compliment. Yet it was richly deserved if my humble opinion were anything to go by, for I had followed Ulbrecht and fought for him for eight years.

Ulbrecht tugged on Wren, who leaned down and whispered in Ulbrecht's ear. I watched as my king brightened in surprise and then joy, and an eager hope filled my chest. If this Awariye was indeed a friend of Wren's, then maybe he would stay for a while, and I might find the chance to meet him and get to know him.

CHAPTERTHREE

AWARIYE

When the bards from the last dark age, after the fall of Rome, sang to a brutal warlord and likened him to a righteous king of legend, that was done for a layered, magical purpose. Singing to a vicious warrior and calling him as noble and gracious as King Arthur did not mean the statement was accurate, as it often wasn't. What it did do, however, was challenge the warrior or petty king to consider himself in the light of such a mighty and benevolent High King, which could not only orient his personality toward such heroic aspirations, but also magically align him on the more subtle planes of existence.

And thus I chose a tale from legend to sing to Ulbrecht the Great.

The story was that of the twin dragons, one red and one white, that revealed the young Merlin as a magical being who told the northern Welsh king Vortigern of the coming of Arthur. Merlin had beheld two dragons fighting on Vortigern's land and, rising in the astral planes, had tapped into the divine current which usually is too potent for a human body to bear. Young Myrddin Emrys in Welsh, or Merlinus in Latin, had burst into tears as the divine current touched him, and he had foretold the coming of a great king.

Would that we could have such a great king here two thousand years later, and in such troubled central Danubian lands.

My voice filled the hall with a strength I had not known in months. My life force billowed with fervor and suffused me with a vitality that was all but impossible given my recent impoverished rations. There were secular bards that focused on their memory techniques and specialized in paid performances, along more theatrical and entertaining lines, but I had been trained at the Diana Monastery of Helvetica, and thus I was also a mage.

Bardic mages were more rare compared to poetic bards who did not combine spirituality with their craft. We who trained ourselves in magic and gave our lives over to the spiritual forces of the world dedicated ourselves to guiding the cascading current of the divine light down into physical manifestation in human society. I not only sang of the virtues of a noble king, but I guided down the spirit of such force and funneled it through myself and into the hall. By means of mythological symbolism, if the audience opened themselves up to that influence and if they were ready, they would be lifted upward toward that divine light.

I had sung to powerful people before and had developed a process. I never dared to look them in the eyes in the beginning, instead sweeping my regard across the hall and bringing their friends, family members, and guests into the story. Casting my gaze over the long table, I had some idea of who the people here might be, based on rumors in Helvetica and the coming-and-going conversations among the everyday people here in what was once western and central Austria.