The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

And now on Headless Over Heels, a musical interlude.

Out in the brightly lit center of the taphouse they’d cleared the crockery from a banquet table, and a pair of musicians—a mitegrinder and a fiddler—were taking requests. “Don’t be shy, now!” The mitegrinder snapped shut the trap on his boxy instrument’s toggle and its low drone began. “For a solitar we’ll play what you please. For a brace we’ll play it sober.”

“Hey!” Seth whistled and waved a score coin. “Do The Verdugo and the Maiden!”

“Where’d you get that—” Annalise patted her pocket. “Oh, you blighter.”

“C’mon,” Seth said. “This is your profession’s anthem. Don’t tell me you don’t love it.”

Annalise snatched her purse back from him with a dry laugh. “I dunno if I’ve heard it, pet.”

The musicians were looking askance at the clutch of unlit. “Begging your pardon, master.” The fiddler’s swallow bobbed his instrument where it lay at his neck. “Perhaps it’s not a song for a mixed crowd.”

“She loves it. Don’t worry about it.” Seth added a second score to his palm. “C’mon now. You gonna catch these?”

Annalise scoffed. “How the feck d’you keep robbing me.”

“You need to pay me more regularly.”

“He’s got the Forked Tongue on his back,” Ofelia called to the dithering players. “He’ll join in.”

“C’mon then, goodman,” the fiddler cried. “And bring your braces.”

Seth balked. “Oh, hold on now. It’s, uh—it’s not active.”

“Yes it is.” Ofelia gave him a kick forward from their booth. “Get up on that table, Mr. il Gutierre. That’s an order.”

“You don’t give me orders.”

“I do,” Annalise said. “And I’m apparently paying good money for this. Get up there, Seth.”

Seth scrambled onto the table as the music rose, and with his new colleagues, he sang.

The Verdugo with his thirsty sword came riding on his bay...

The Verdugo with his thirsty sword came riding on his bay

Sing who’s the one whose pretty head I’ll have for me today

He startled himself with the sound of his own voice. The Forked Tongue hadn’t applied much to his conversation; maybe a bit more bass to his brogue, but nothing more. He’d been vaguely disappointed. Now, though, singing, he felt it. Felt all the imperfections stripped away as if by an acidic bright dip bath. Annalise beamed.

And up the scaffwood he did climb, and whistling all the way

The Legion calls and one must fall whose head I’ll take today

A head, a head, a pretty head! A head for me today!

Seth had never been particularly afraid to sing, especially once you got some corn whiskey in him. But he wasn’t a singer. Not a one you’d beg to hear, or toss braces at his feet. And yet here they were. Clattering by the toes of his boots. He laughed aloud at the joy of it. He was soaring like a songbird over the hairy-headed revelry. He was good.

Forward came a maiden fair with dainty doily dread

O Verdugo all in black, O mercy lord, she said

My father stole a stallion, yet I’d weep to see him dead

So spare the man your thirsty sword and take my maiden head

O take, and take, and take again! And take my maiden head!

There were four more verses, each more obvious than the last. By the finale Seth had been outfitted with not one but two straw hats.

And okay: when the reels and dances began, the first girl who offered her arm blanched with sudden remembrance and snatched it back before it could graze unlit skin. But Seth already knew who he wanted to dance with, and she never hesitated to touch him.

“Was it worth your scores, Madam Verdugo?” he asked, as she twirled him off the table.

“It was a bleeding slag,” she said. “But I love how you sang it.”

Her utter fearlessness of the world’s attention, when she kissed him, screamed in the face of his thief training. A life spent in the shadows, now dragged into the light and kissed by a gorgeous, indulgent giant. It would take practice to get used to this.

Wet, wonderful practice, he reflected, as Annalise led him back toward the table from whence they’d come.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...the-maiden
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2536840/