Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [33]
And all of them created Traditional paths that ensured that Led Belarus was living up to the songs.
He’d taken the precaution of filling a wallet with food, but as it happened, he didn’t need to eat what he’d brought, for around about noon, he ran into a wedding.
Now this was the best possible encounter for his purpose. Everyone knew Sasha the Fool, and when people knew they would not be the butt of his foolery, they welcomed him. When he was walking about with instrument in hand, he could go just about anywhere and be welcomed.
Especially at a wedding.
His wanderings had taken him down to the little village of Chersk down below the Palace, and he encountered the wedding party coming out of the church. They swept him up in their wake and the next thing he knew, he was being plied alternately with food and drink and requests to sing.
He embarrassed the bride, of course—it was expected that he sing at least one song about all the fat, happy babies she was going to produce, with some sly innuendos that no one was going to be very strict in counting the number of months between the wedding and the first of them. People would have been disappointed if he hadn’t made the bride blush. He also managed to work in some songs about weddings in general that he hoped would shove The Tradition in the direction of a nice bride for his brother. Someone pretty, and pleasant, who was prepared to make friends with her husband. Just because this was going to be a marriage of state, it didn’t follow that husband and wife needed to make each other miserable.
The wedding feast was “peasant fare,” but Sasha had learned long ago never to ask what was in his sausage. He ate and drank and sang with a will, and heard no complaints from anyone. He played a few harmless pranks, things guaranteed to make sober and nervous people comfortable.
Then, as the afternoon passed into evening, he returned to the Palace long enough to pack a saddlebag and get his horse. It was time to make his rounds of the Kingdom and for that he would need several days. He told Yasha where he was going; that was enough warning. It wasn’t as if anyone at the Palace needed him specifically.
Whenever he decided to make a round of the Kingdom, it was always like this—on impulse.
By the time he finished packing and carried his bags out to the stable, his horse was waiting, saddled and bridled. This was a solid, calm beast of the North Wind get; the gelding had none of the North Wind horses’ good looks, but a great deal of sense and an unflappable nature. Sasha needed that…just in case.
Because he wasn’t just singing prosperity into the land. As soon as the sun went down, Sasha went hunting when he made his rounds.
The signs that evil was trying to make its way into Led Belarus were obvious. And they should be, as Sasha had specified in his songs exactly what evil-doers said and did the moment they entered his Kingdom and started on their own nefarious plans. They might think they were acting on their own, but The Tradition, directed by Sasha, was making them give telltale signs. All Sasha had to do was look for them….
And on his third day out, he found them, too.
There it was. A stretch along the border where the woods suddenly turned…dark. Haunted. Where the trees looked as if they might actually snatch you up and use you as fertilizer, and where every path seemed to close in on you the moment you set foot on it.
Sasha smiled to see it. This was precisely as he wanted it.
He turned back on the road to the village he had just passed through. And he knew without even asking that the villagers would tell him not to go there. So he didn’t trouble them with what he was going to do. After all, he knew what he was doing; he’d written the song.
Sasha left his horse at the inn and walked about the village, making