Slowly and with great care, Debdlyn knelt and removed the shingle-drum from his pack while the young woman who led their party addressed the little king-man. He had not been prepared for how tiny the man was, even having seen humans before. But, he mused while tightening the rawhide bindings that held down the hrutar hide cover across the thin frame of the drum, that when one thought of monarchs, they tended toward thoughts of the grandiose.

  His own queen, Morag Avol Nighean-Jochschlann, long may she reign, was a handsome woman by any Orc’s standard. She was a full two feet taller than Debdlyn’s own seven feet tall that he knew himself to be.

  Now, he thought as he slowly stood back up with his drum in hand, she was a queen a bard could really sing about. This young man? He looked a little like the child who had come to their village with the Gray Mage years ago and interrupted a small war they had been having.

  Is that the same boy, he wondered. Has he not grown at all these last ten years? What has he been doing with himself that he couldn’t be bothered to grow a few feet?

  As he focused his old eyes, Debdlyn thought that he could see the Gray Mage standing behind the little king’s fancy chair. His scarred brows knotted and raised slightly at the sight of the odd colored human. He knew that the man they called “Lord Ashe” was the most dangerous thing in this anthill of a city. He shook himself to be rid of the feelings of foreboding at seeing the human who burned the eyes from so many healthy Orc warriors on that cold day a decade gone.

  The young heir to his own Queen Morag, Badba, was finishing up her banter with the little king, and so Debdlyn began his humming that heralded the beginning of his Singing In the Parlay, a tradition as old as the Mountains themselves, and he would be damned a thousand deaths before he failed to do his duty by the Lays, Laws, and Lore.

  As his humming started, Badba gave him a glance of irritation. It almost made Debdlyn break his rhythm and laugh. He remembered being young and filled with the need to dance like the hares on the mountain side in the presence of the opposite sex, though he questioned her flirting with the little human. Surely he wasn’t a serious contender for her affections, was he?

  Not only did he look tiny compared to herself, but from where he stood, the young man was even missing a foot. An ENTIRE foot! Was the boy trying to get even smaller? The elderly bard just would never understand young women. Certainly not this young woman. Maybe it was all down to how she had been raised, her grandmother was known to enjoy reading foreign books. His own people rarely produced books, but when they did, all of the tribes would read the book. Learning quickly what another took a lifetime to gain was not regarded as virtuous by most Orcs, but knowledge was knowledge once gotten, and if it was found to be akin to truth, to turn it down was an insult.

  Taking up the rhythm of his humming, he began to strike the front of his shingle-drum with the cipin. The stubby, dual sided drum stick spun in his broad fingers as he wound up to begin beating out the meter of his song. ARound the outer circumference of the drum, along its frame, there were small cavities that held cymbals of finely knapped rock crystals. The “shingles” that gave the drum its name began to dance and sing along with the rhythm as he played.

  In the old language, the true language of his people, he began to sing, filling the hall with his baritone voice as he called for the blessings of the Goddesses of the Mountains and the Skies. It was not the song that Badba was expecting, but with how she and the little human king were making eyes at one another like the silly, besotted hruturi that they were.

  I am Wind in the Valley,

  I am Waving of the Heath,

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  I am Roar of Mountain Storm,

  I am the Lightning from on High,

  I am an Drake on the Cliff,

  I am a Tear of Rhoona,

  I am the rarest Flower,

  I am the rooting Boar,

  I am the Swift Salmon,

  I am the clear Tarn in the Pass,

  I am the Forest Lord,

  I am the Talent of Art,

  I am the Spear, Battle Hardened.

  In the hand of your Queen.

  They are the gods, who put Fire in the Mind.

  Who but I know the Cycles of the Brothers’ Moons?

  Who but I know the place where Rhoona Sleeps?

  The little king grinned broadly at Debdlyn as he played and sang, before he started nodding his head and lightly clapping his little hands along with the beat. Several of the crowd surrounding their party began, as if to imitate their king, to clap and nod along with this song they didn’t know.

  The boy at least has rhythm, Debdlyn thought. I guess that’s something to look for in a mate.

  It was then that he noticed the looks of horror on both the face of the Gray Mage and on that of his Queen’s heir, Badba. Badba’s face was slowly wandering away from horror and picking its careful way through the thorny mazes of anger and trying to reach the plateaus of refined rage.

  Debdlyn smiled as he continued. Just barely escaping ruining his performance with laughter as he sang and played.

  In the fertile Valley,

  Clothes laid across the Waving of the Heath,

  We Roar upon Mountain, and mimic the Storm,

  He is the Lightning from on High,

  Drakes fly over the flowering fields,

  With a cry like mighty Rhoona,

  I am the rarest Flower,

  As strong as the charging Boar,

  As swift as the Sun Kissed Salmon,

  The Tarn’s Waters feed the Pass,

  Oh, the Forest Lord,

  Of Talent and of Art,

  Be the Spear, Battle Hardened.

  In the hand of your Queen.

  Debdlyn finished with a flourish in a clear tenor, and the shale cymbals along the outer edge of the drum’s frame chimed in a final crescendo.

  The hall around their party erupted in clapping and cheers as though this were some kind of knees-up at the local tavern. Badba, no longer wearing her coat, looked at him with the banked rage of someone who cannot throttle you in public, being surrounded by strangers who might tattle on you to your mother. Or, gods and goddesses forfend, your grandmother.

  “Debdlyn, my dearest uncle, when next it rains, I will steal all of your socks.”

  She spoke softly, and in the Old Tongue. As was only proper.

  The king laughed and said in that same language, shocking Debdlyn, “Put wet rot moss in his spare pants, too. That might teach him.” The lad’s voice was unaccented, or possibly carried the lilting Cleft Peaks accent that all three members of the party spoke. But he also had the beautiful intonations and meter of someone who might be training to be a bard themselves.

  Badba smiled at the elderly Orcish bard, her wide mouth stretching in a rictus of unexpected embarrassment at the inappropriate song that matched her widened eyes as she learned that Myrl spoke their language. And he spoke it as well as a poet.

  Debdlyn’s eyes widened at the implication.

  The king heard the song, and knew exactly the kind of song of sex in the Spring time it had been.

  Debdlyn began to blush furiously.

  Up on his throne, King Myrl launched into a long peel of laughter.