Chapter Text
The sound of raucous laughter drifted through the half-open doorway of the tavern backroom, carrying with it the stench of cheap beer and sweat. Missa smiled to himself as he gave the peg of his guitar’s E string a minute twist. The crowd tonight was going to be fun, he could already tell.
He knew the Friday evening patrons of the Cat’s Claw Inn were definitely a few ales deep by this point. They wouldn’t give a rat’s ass how in-tune he sounded. Even so, Missa couldn’t help but hum in content as he strummed nimble fingers across the strings, the perfect fourths resonating in a way that seemed to make the very air sing.
The door cracked open a little further, and in poked the red-cheeked face of the inn’s owner, a half-dwarven woman named Elisa whose braided beard was longer than the hair on her head.
“You better get out there soon before that lot starts their own bloody concert,” Elisa joked, tossing a hessian bag across the room that Missa snatched deftly out of the air. “50 coins as discussed; rest of your earnings comes from whatever those drunk buggers throw at you.”
The bard tucked the coin pouch into an inner pocket of his cloak.
“Alright, alright, I won’t keep them waiting,” Missa responded with a light laugh.
Elisa flashed him a toothy grin and disappeared back into the main room. The muffled sound of her yelling at the crowd to quiet down was barely audible over the clamour.
The woman was fighting a losing battle; Missa knew from experience that it took a lot to grasp the attention of a group that rowdy. The bard stood, guitar in hand, and walked out into the tavern.
It took a moment for the townspeople to notice him, but rapidly, a hush descended upon the room. The only noise was the clack of Missa’s boots on the worn floorboards as he walked assuredly to the stool at the front of the room.
Some people would find it intimidating, but Missa revelled in the way that every pair of eyes glued to him as he moved. These moments were where he finally felt powerful, knowing that he had the entire room in the palm of his hand.
He sat, and the crowd waited with baited breath.
With a flick of his hands, the hood of Missa’s worn purple cloak fell around his shoulders, revealing strands of dark hair framing a pale wooden mask that covered the upper half of the man’s face, ending just above his lips. The mask was one of his most prized possessions. He’d carved and painted it painstakingly by hand to resemble a stylised white skull, with vibrant blue and lilac swirling around the eye sockets, teeth and cheekbones. It was a transformation of the morbid into something exciting, something uniquely his.
But more than that, the mask made him into someone larger than life. No longer was he Missa Sinfonia, a name he had tried to bury along with the rest of his past. When he put on that mask and stepped onto the stage, he was the famed “Skeleton Bard”, a musical act whose ability to entrance audiences with his song was quickly becoming the stuff of legends. Nobody knew his true face and name. There were even rumours flying around that he wasn’t even human, but rather the spirit of a long-dead musician, or a deity of the arts. Missa thought it was hilarious, and an incredible cover, so he fed into the rumours as much as he could.
Long fingers delicately rested above the strings of his instrument, and Missa looked up for a moment, scanning the sea of expectant faces.
He opened his mouth, about to speak, but his gaze snagged on a figure huddled in the very back corner of the room. They wore a large, dark cloak that was impossible to make out the colour of in the shadows of the room, and had a wide-brimmed hat lowered over their face. Missa wasn’t sure why this particular person caught his interest; they weren’t even looking towards the performance. But as Missa made to look away from the obviously uninterested bar patron, their eyes met his and he stopped short.
Icy blue irises seemed to pin him to the spot, like he was a butterfly tacked to a board, completely at the mercy of whoever had trapped him. Every instinct he had screamed DANGER, yet he found himself frozen to his seat.
Then the stranger’s gaze flicked away from him, dismissive, and it was like Missa was released from a spell and thrust back into the present.
The crowd was starting to shift and murmur in the lengthening silence.
Right. Tavern. Guitar. Singing.
Shoving that extremely weird staring contest to the very back of his mind, Missa strummed a chord that immediately silenced the room.
He was going to make a short opening speech, but screw it. What better way to take back control of a crowd’s attention than with a ballad?
His fingers began moving deftly across the instrument in familiar patterns, and he opened his mouth and began to sing.
—
Missa slammed down his tankard of ale on the bartop, the alcohol burning a familiar path down his throat as the men and women around him yelled the words of a rather out of tune shanty. He felt one of them give him a clap on the back, and he blinked as the bright lights of the oil lamps seemed to swim across his vision for a moment.
For the past hour he’d been enjoying the usual spoils of his performance- namely, nearly every patron of the bar wanting to shout him a free drink. And who was he to say no to such a generous offer?
After singing some of his more dramatic pieces, guiding the crowd through epic tales of love and war and betrayal, Missa had moved on to some rowdier songs with lyrics that would give any priest a heart attack. Once he had the whole establishment dancing and singing up on the tables, the show really passed over to them, and he was free to enjoy the fruits of his labour. Hence why he now found himself with yet another empty cup and his arm slung around the shoulder of someone whose name he couldn’t remember.
The room was filled with the beat of mugs and boots banging on tables, and loudly shouted lyrics that he was sure weren’t in the original verses, but were sung with so much passion that it was clear no one cared. There was more feeling in these songs than any fancy orchestra or opera Missa had seen in his life.
Unfortunately, the bard didn’t think he’d be sticking around to hear what debauchery the maiden and the sailor were going to get up to in the next verse, as he could feel his face flushing with the heat of a few too many drinks.
He gave a sheepish smile to his drinking mates, rubbing the back of his head.
“My friends, I’m going to step outside for some air,” Missa began, immediately met with loud protests. The singer raised his hands placatingly. “But don’t stop the fun on my account! Here, next round’s on me.”
He deftly tossed a gold coin from his pockets (which had gotten significantly heavier over the course of the show) to an amused Elisa, who was now behind the bar. The group around him erupted in cheers, disappointment immediately forgotten in the face of more liquor.
Weaving awkwardly through the crowd, Missa excused himself from being drawn into several conversations and barely dodged a flying wooden mug to the head before finally slipping out the side door of the bar into a darkened alley. The chilled night air was an abrupt relief to his senses. He loudly exhaled, leaning back against the wall.
Missa tilted his head to rest on the stone behind him. The ringing was still fading from his ears, and he was sure there was spilled beer on his shirt, but he only felt exhilaration running through his veins. The bard grinned at the cloudy night sky. There was nothing better in the world than nights like these. Singing for these people, making them experience sorrow and longing and joy together, it felt like they were all that existed in those moments. Like he could forget about everything and everyone else in the world and just let the music take him away from his problems.
In such a small space, surrounded by complete strangers, he finally felt free.
The cold spring air was starting to seep through the wool of his cloak to raise goosebumps along his skin. Missa pushed off the wall slowly, intending to head back inside, when the sound of soft footfalls on stone paving brought him to a halt. Through slightly blurred vision, the musician squinted into the darkness of the alleyway, vaguely making out a humanoid shadow slightly shorter than himself.
“Hello? If you’re a fan, you don’t have to be all creepy and hide out the back, man,” he said with a strained laugh, trying to keep his tone friendly.
The figure said nothing and stepped forward. Missa could feel the hair rising on the back of his neck. From the cold, of course, definitely not because Missa was scared. Still, he noticed his hand had drifted unconsciously to rest on the hilt of the shortsword concealed at his hip.
Missa raised an eyebrow at the approaching figure and began attempting to surreptitiously inch his way towards the tavern door.
“Hey, bro, this is kind of weird,” he said, trying to hide the slight tremor in his voice. “I’m gonna go back inside, ok?”
The bard turned towards the doorway, but before he could reach for the handle, a dagger embedded itself in the wall an inch from his frightened face.
Missa wasn’t proud of the high-pitched shriek he emitted in that moment.
He whipped his head around and pulled out his sword in the same motion, ignoring the way his vision swam slightly at the sudden movement. The figure remained the same distance away, appearing unruffled despite having obviously just thrown a blade towards Missa’s skull.
Funnily enough, the shock of it combined with the copious amounts of beer in his bloodstream seemed to have overtaken Missa’s fear enough for him to speak.
“Man, your aim is shit.”
Nope, no, fuck his lack of brain to mouth filter. Rule one of talking to people who are trying to kill you: don’t antagonise them into throwing more daggers at your head. Actually, rule one was probably “don’t talk to them at all”, but he’d definitely messed that one up too.
To his surprise and utter confusion, his would-be assassin started to laugh. And it wasn’t an evil cackle like Missa might have expected from a guy that murders drunk musicians in back-alleys. No, this was a genuine, delighted laugh, starting from the belly and quickly devolving into a wheezing chuckle.
Missa lowered his sword slightly from where he’d started to shakily raise it in the figure’s direction. Should he be running for his life right now, or taking the guy to the nearest physician?
In the end, the bard did neither of those things, and instead opted to open and close his mouth like a confused goldfish who had incorrectly convinced itself it was able to speak.
The laughter died off with an amused sigh, the silhouette moving their arms to their face as if to wipe away tears.
“Sorry, mate, it’s just-”
They wheezed again, fighting down another bout of laughter. Missa continued to stare in bewilderment.
“Sorry, sorry. No one’s insulted my aim in over a century, let alone a target,” they snorted.
Their tone was so casual that Missa almost missed the last part. He tensed and prepared to make a run for it, when the moon suddenly shifted out from behind a cloud and illuminated the two of them, like they were centre stage in a play. Missa’s eyes widened in recognition.
Amongst all the sing-alongs and mugs of ale, he’d nearly forgotten about the cloaked stranger from earlier in the night, but that crystalline blue gaze was unmistakable. In the bright moonlight, he could finally make out the rest of the man standing before him.
His face was framed by shoulder-length golden hair, some braided into strands of colourful beads, with matching stubble lining his chin. However, most of the blond’s head was concealed beneath the floppy brim of a green and white striped hat, the rim of which was adorned with various ribbons, feathers, and even a glimmering emerald. A high-necked grey undershirt covered the beginnings of what appeared to be a tattoo peeking out below the man’s left ear, but the rest of his clothing was concealed by his cloak. The dark green swathes of fabric made his shoulders and back appear oddly bulky, at odds with the rest of the man’s more slender figure and soft features.
Did he have more weapons under there? Missa couldn’t be sure with how the cloak fell around the man’s body, but he was fairly sure the glint of metal at the man’s waist wasn’t just a belt buckle. He didn’t appear to be wearing any armour, however. In fact, in lieu of boots, the man had on a pair of rustic wooden sandals.
The lack of protection could simply be overconfidence, but the unease in Missa’s gut had his grip tightening on the hilt of his sword.
The man had begun to casually approach him, still talking in that light tone like they were the best of pals, although a sharp glint in his eye told Missa that he hadn’t missed the way the bard was sizing him up.
“Loved the show, by the way, I’m a big fan of your songs,” the blond continued lightly.
Missa stayed stock still, painfully aware of the knife still stuck next to his head. With the practised way the man’s wooden shoes fell almost silently on the cobblestones as he neared, the masked singer felt a bit like an insect trapped in a spider’s web.
“I just couldn’t get past how original it all was,” the stranger raved, sounding genuinely passionate. “Every tavern song these days is just another retelling of some boring myth- I swear if I hear another boring epic about the Angel of Death I’m gonna lose it.”
Personally, Missa loved that particular tale, but he had enough of a sense of self-preservation that he wasn’t about to start debating music with a madman.
“But that first ballad you did, now that was really heartbreaking. You know, the one with the nobleman who fled from the warlord that had overthrown his kingdom?”
The bard stiffened. The Coward’s Lament. Of course he knew it, he wrote the damn thing.
Missa drew in a shaky breath, raising his sword. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but you should know that I’m a lot harder to kill than your average bard.”
He wasn’t entirely bluffing; Missa knew that his swordplay was probably better than most of the soldiers in the Federation’s entire army. The stranger might have caught him off guard with the dagger, but that didn’t mean he’d be able to defeat him in an actual fight.
He just prayed to any gods listening that his adrenaline would make up for the alcohol still wreaking havoc on his coordination.
The stranger raised a pale eyebrow. “Oh, I’m not here to kill you, Príncipe.”
Missa’s blood ran cold. “How-”
Before the bard could utter another syllable, the man moved, and Missa’s sword was struck from his hand to land with a clatter a few metres away.
Shit.
The blond was now directly in front of him, having pulled a black katana from beneath his cloak, which he now held lightly to Missa’s throat. The disarming smile had vanished from his face. Missa had seen that blank expression before; this was a man who wasn’t afraid to follow through when he made a threat.
Missa inhaled sharply as the cool metal dug into his neck, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to remind him how very easily the man could slit his throat if he made one wrong move.
The blond leaned in, and Missa fought the urge to flinch away, sweat beginning to coalesce on his forehead despite the chilled night air.
“Luckily for you,” the blond murmured quietly, the sardonic words sending an involuntary shiver of fear down the bard’s spine, “you’re worth more if I bring you in alive, your highness.”
The last thing Missa saw was that cold blue stare, before a sharp-scented cloth shoved beneath his mask and over his airways and he was dragged into unconsciousness.