Chapter Text
Prologue
In the land of Faerûn, where such things as displacer beasts and magical rings exist, ‘tis quite a misfortune to be a travelling bard. Everyone knows you are the one who is first to fail, the worst, if there is already a minstrel in the local principality.
Ginny Bottlesong, falsely advertised as Ginny Lastcall, the near-sober Nightingale, was one of those bards.
She was not even a terrible singer, which might have given her some chance of success.
She was instead quite good in a way that made people listen for almost forty seconds, and then begin to suspect they were being asked for money.
This was not altogether unfair.
They were.
At three o’clock in the morning, in the Elfsong Tavern, Ginny Bottlesong stood upon a chair that’d already given one warning creak and was now living on faith.
The tavern was low-lit by the mean orange swell of a few exhausted lamps.
The tables were crowded with sailors, suspicious merchants, and three elderly men who had made one pickled herring look like a formal ceremony.
The Elfsong was famous for its ghostly elven singer, and, in stricter hours, it didn’t allow other music at all.
Ginny had decided that this rule was more compliment than law.
She plucked her lute.
It made a noise like a startled hen.
“Good evening,” Ginny announced.
“'Tis mornin’,” drawled someone.
“Good morning, then,” said Ginny, “I am Ginny Lastcall, the near-sober Nightingale, recently applauded in Beregost by no fewer than two men and a mule.”
“Was the mule dead?” chortled a voice from the back.
Ginny shaded her eyes and peered through the smoke. “Sir, I can already tell you’ve the face of a man whose mother apologised to the midwife.”
There was a great delighted groan from the nearby tables.
This encouraged Ginny, which was unfortunate for everyone.
She began to sing.
The song was an old thing, much loved by taverns and much hated by wives.
It concerned a cooper, a priest, a fishwife, and a misunderstanding with a goose.
Ginny had known the proper words once.
She’d learned them from a tiefling with golden teeth outside Elturel, and he’d been very particular about rhythm. But that was four bottles ago, and by the second verse she’d begun improving it.
The cooper became a duke.
The priest became a paladin.
The goose became - for reasons unclear even to Ginny - a Harper spy in a feathered cloak.
By the fourth verse, several people were singing along with expressions of fierce concentration, trying to fit the old tune around this new damage.
Ginny stamped one boot upon the chair.
The chair objected.
She ignored it.
“Oh the duke went down to the cellar below,
With a wink and a wish and a candle - ”
“That’s not how it goes!” booed the heckler from the back.
Ginny stopped. Her fingers remained in a heroic shape over the strings.
The tavern leaned in as one, bright-eyed and mean, every soul in it suddenly grateful that the night’s disgrace belonged to someone else.
The heckler was a large man with a square jaw and a red nose. He’d both elbows on the table and an empty tankard in front of him.
Ginny distrusted men with empty tankards.
They had nothing better to do with their hands.
“Pardon?” she tilted her head.
“I said, that’s not how it goes.”
“No,” said Ginny. “This one has nuance.”
“It’s rubbish!”
“And still not the worst noise in the room.”
A few sailors slapped the table. Someone whistled. The large man stood.
Ginny saw at once that this had been a strategic error. He was taller standing up. This was generally the problem with people.
“You call yourself a bard?” he demanded.
Ginny considered this. “Only professionally.”
“You sound like a goat fallin' down some stairs!”
“That,” crowed Ginny, “was my mother’s favourite lullaby.”
“Get down!”
“I shall not.”
“Get down, you little bottle-rat.”
There are moments in every bard’s life when charm, wit, and musical training must come together in a perfect expression of art.
Ginny hit him with the lute.
It wasn’t, to be fair, a very good lute. It had been bought in Waterdeep from a man who kept saying, “No refunds after curses,” which Ginny had taken for salesmanship.
It had a crack along the belly, three pegs from three different instruments, and a stubborn smell of onions.
But it had accompanied her through rain, debt, one regrettable engagement, and a night in a hayloft with a cleric of Loviatar who’d called her “educational.”
It deserved better than to end on a heckler’s head.
There was a hollow, magnificent thwong.
The man sat down.
The lute, after a brief pause for dignity, shed two strings and part of its neck.
Ginny stared at it in horror.
“You catastrophic man,” she whined, “that lute was supporting us both!”
Then the tavern erupted.
Someone laughed. Someone shouted for the Fists. Someone else shouted for Ginny to do it again. The bartender, who had the expression of a man who'd survived many minstrels and intended to survive one more, came around the bar with alarming speed.
Ginny tucked the wounded lute under one arm.
“I was leaving anyway,” she said, though she had not been.
Two bouncers appeared from nowhere. This is a talent bouncers have, like conjurers and creditors.
One seized Ginny by the collar. The other took her by the belt.
“Careful,” Ginny slurred,“I’m a delicate instrument.”
“You’re barred,” said the bartender.
“I haven’t finished the song!”
“You’ve finished the lute.”
“'Tis not the same thing.”
The doors opened.
Cold night air slapped the smoke from her face. Then the bouncers swung her once, twice, with professional rhythm, and tossed her out into the street.
Ginny landed on the cobbles with a splash.
For a moment she lay there, looking up at the narrow slice of sky between leaning rooftops.
'Twas not a romantic sky. It was grey-black, wet, and full of chimney smoke.
Rain had turned the street to sludge, and the sludge had been improved by horse dung, fish guts, and whatever came out of the tavern kitchens when nobody respectable was looking.
The Elfsong door shut behind her.
A cheer went up inside.
Ginny lifted her head.
Her hair had come loose. Her cheek was wet. Her left boot was in a puddle. Her lute gave a tiny, broken twang; like a dying accusation.
“Well,” she said to it. “I think that went rather well.”
The lute said nothing.
Ginny sat up. Her stomach rolled. The world took a step to the left, thought better of it, and leaned against a wall.
She patted her pockets.
Three copper pieces. A button. A cork. Half a biscuit of unknown age. No room key. No patron. No bed. No second lute.
This, Ginny felt, was exactly the sort of moment in which stories liked to produce a mysterious stranger.
She looked hopefully up and down the street.
There was no mysterious stranger.
There was only a rat, sitting on a drainpipe and watching her with deep interest.
“Don’t start,” mumbled Ginny.
The rat twitched its whiskers.
From somewhere above, behind the shuttered windows of the Elfsong, the ghostly elven voice began to sing.
It was soft. Mournful. Beautiful in a way that made the street seem briefly cleaner than it was.
Ginny listened, unwillingly moved.
Then she looked down at her broken lute and her three copper pieces.
“Oh, shut up,” she told the ghost.
And because she had nowhee to sleep, no money to drink, and no sense left at all, Ginny Bottlesong got to her feet, tucked the remains of her instrument under her arm, and began walking toward the darkest alley in the Lower City.
***