Bardic Voices

In this world a tune is never only a tune. Play it true and it can coax a ghost off a haunted hill, unmask a counterfeit miracle, or steady a panicked crowd — for music here carries real magic, and the ones who wield it best are the ones forbidden to. The Bardic Guild licenses every note performed for coin; the Free Bards, the buskers and Gypsy fiddlers and road-worn minstrels who won't kneel to it, keep their own harmony and their own liberty. Mercedes Lackey names each book for a pair of birds and the two players it follows. The Lark and the Wren lifts a tavern drudge named Rune out of the mud on the strength of her fiddle; The Robin and the Kestrel sets a Gypsy singer and a stammering runaway lord against a fraudulent shrine; The Eagle and the Nightingales sends a Free Bard and T'fyrr, a hawk-winged Haspur, into a rotting royal court; and Four & Twenty Blackbirds turns those same streets into a hunt for a killer. A Cast of Corbies, written with Josepha Sherman, walks a player-troupe through the same broad country of hidden Elves, gadget-clever Deliambrens, and open road. Expect warmth over grimness: outsiders who win by craft and kindness, found family, a thread of romance, a mystery to solve. Newcomers begin where Rune does, with The Lark and the Wren, and follow the flight from there.