In no time they had raised two small tents and sparked a campfire. They installed Dale in one of the tents and now Estral was brewing tea.
“I’ve some excellent willowbark tea that should help Dale,” she said. “There’s an apothecary in Selium who has only the best quality stuff, and I’ve been getting the willowbark from him for years. Headaches. I get them.”
“Ah.”
When the tea had steeped to her satisfaction, she took a mug into the tent where Dale rested. Meanwhile, Alton prepared a simple meal of bread, cold beef, and cheese for each of them. They ate in silence as the sky deepened into midnight blue above and the stars punched through with brilliant light. The horses munched on their ration of grain nearby and there were scurrying sounds of small animals in the underbrush. An owl hooted in the distance.
“I want music!” Dale yelled from her tent, shattering the tranquility.
Alton almost sputtered his tea.
“Well, then,” Estral said, “I guess I have my orders.” She set aside the remains of her meal and opened her lute case, and once again tuned up the strings.
“Any requests?” she called to Dale.
“Something good and raunchy.” Her request was followed by what Alton could only perceive as suspicious snickering.
“Good and raunchy, eh?” Estral murmured, looking thoughtful and not at all taken aback, unlike Alton, but it occurred to him that she must get all kinds of requests depending on whatever venue she played and the type of audience present.
She launched into a song about a lumberjack trying to impress the innkeeper’s daughter with the size of his pine. It contained all the vulgar wordplay he was sure Dale could wish for and by the time the tune ended, Alton’s ears were burning. After the final strum, Estral smiled pleasantly at him.
“Is he blushing?” Dale asked.
“Hard to tell in the firelight,” Estral replied. “But I believe he is.”
“Hah!”
Alton glowered. Dale had wanted to make him blush in front of Estral. “Where did you learn that song?” he demanded. Surely this was not what they were teaching the young students at Selium. Surely not ...
“Lumber camp, of course,” Estral replied.
Alton could not imagine her in a camp full of such rough men. She’d be a tasty morsel to them. The stories one heard about their beastly behavior and crude ways! “Lumber camp? Are you mad? With all those rowdy, uncivilized brutes?”
Estral paused as if considering, then shook her head. “No, not me. My mother perhaps.”
“Your mother?”
Estral laughed. “Yes, my mother. She was chief of a camp north of North. I was born there, yes in those woods, in that camp, with all those rowdy, uncivilized brutes. She says they were all like happy papas when I came along.”
Alton scrunched his brow at the image of a group of big, grungy lumberjacks cooing at a baby. “I . . . I thought your father was—”
“Aaron Fiori? He is my father.”
“But . . . how?”
Laughter trickled out of Dale’s tent. “I think you need to explain to him about the lumberjack and the pine.”
Alton scowled at the tent though Dale couldn’t see him. He definitely would not travel with the two women at the same time again. “You know what I mean.”
“Of course,” Estral said, grinning. Alton’s ears just burned hotter. “My father is a minstrel and he travels. He visited the lumber camp for a spell and my mother took a shine to him. Simple as that, and when the time came for him to continue his wandering, he left, never guessing he’d made a child.”
Alton didn’t know what to say. He had imagined Estral’s mother to be some genteel lady strumming on a harp somewhere within Selium’s walls, not a lumber camp chief who ordered around a bunch of coarse, ax-wielding woodsmen.
“Of course,” Estral continued, “he figured it out about a year later when his travels led back to my mother’s lumber camp and there I was. He made a point of visiting twice yearly after that.”
“They never married?” Alton blurted before he could contain himself.
Estral shrugged. “Why would they? My mother was content at the camp and he was busy wandering. It has not been unusual over the generations of Fioris to produce heirs in this manner. A regular spouse would find it difficult to put up with a husband who was constantly away, and a Fiori can’t not travel. Most Fioris, anyway. It’s not very fair to the spouse if you think about it.”
To Alton, who’d been brought up in a noble family with all its strict codes and customs, it was difficult to imagine so casual an attitude toward bastards. As much as he disliked thinking of Estral that way, wasn’t that what she was? A bastard ? When he looked at her now across the fire, however, he did not see a bastard, but a lovely young woman with a voice gifted by the gods. Yes, what was lineage compared to that? And if that was the way the Fioris did things, and had done it for centuries, who was he to argue? It was just startling. To his way of thinking, anyway.
“Is that why,” he said more cautiously, “you go by Andovian and not Fiori? It’s your mother’s name?”
“Yep.” She strummed a chord, then silenced the strings with the flat of her hand. “When I inherit my father’s position, then I’ll become the Fiori. It’s as much a title as a name.”
The breeze shifted and Alton waved campfire smoke out of his face. He’d never thought much about the Fioris. There’d never been any reason to. Selium minstrels and Estral’s father himself had come to Woodhaven, but at the time he’d seen them as just entertainment. Just.