Servants and Followers (The Legends of Arria, Volume 2) by Courtney Bowen Page B

this morning.” Smidge said.
    “ What is that
supposed to mean?” She asked, looking up at him.
    “ Nothing, just
commenting.” Smidge said, a little offended at her rudeness to him.
“I just think that a nice compliment is something that you deserve,
after all, for all of the hard work that you’ve agreed to do while
your daughter is sick. I wish I had a mother half as considerate as
you. By the way, when will your daughter be back?”
    “ A week or so, I
don’t know,” Brigga said. “Nisa is very sick, it could take a while
for her to recover.”
    “ Well, give her my
regard,” Smidge said, turning away from her to serve a
customer.
    Brigga continued working, but felt a
growing sense of unease inside of her, especially as she thought of
Smidge watching her. Why did she have to accept Nisa’s commitment
to go off and protect those boys Basha and Oaka, working in her
stead as well at the inn? She should have spoken out against Nisa’s
compulsion, and told her that her father should do his own work,
and leave her alone for once.
    Brigga
had tried to keep Nisa away from him for the first few years of her
life, hoping that Nisa might be able to live a normal life like the
rest of the townspeople, but once her daughter had started sneaking
off to be with him, Brigga knew that, in a sense, she had lost this
battle, and that the Old Man
might win over her in the end when it came to their daughter’s
affection and attention. The Old Man, she should never have gotten
involved with him in the first place, even though Nisa had been
born from such a union. She should never have gotten close to the
old storyteller, he just made things more complicated, and he
ruined everything that he touched in her life.
    To think that for all
of these years she had bent over backward, allowing Nisa to go off
and do … not evil things with her father, but certainly slightly
immoral, watching Basha without his consent at the very least . It
was wrong, yet Nisa was protecting him, wasn’t she? What could Brigga have done in the
end to stop all of this from happening? She couldn’t keep Nisa away
from her father, the Old Man had some right to see his daughter,
and Nisa was stubborn, just like her parents, she would have
eventually broken loose from Brigga. As for what they were doing,
apparently there was a pretty good reason for it, when it came to
protecting Basha from evil, but Brigga
didn’t know what to think about this whole charade. What sort of evil things could be trying to harm a boy like
him? And what sort of things was her daughter doing to protect him?
S o she just tried to protect her daughter,
and covered for her , even
though she hated it with all of her heart. She wanted Nisa to be
normal.
     
    “ Did you know that
there are flocks of other royal messenger birds at the palace
besides me?” Fato asked from the pommel of Basha’s saddle, which he
took to be his perch when he wasn’t flying. “What do you think of
that?”
    “ I’ll tell you what I
think of that, but it might stun the feathers off of you.” Oaka
muttered darkly.
    “ I think I may have
seen a couple of small birds, sparrows perhaps, fly in and out of
the mail office next to city council hall several times in the
past. I did not get to see them well enough, or hear them if they
were able to speak like humans. Were those royal messenger birds?”
Basha asked.
    “ Most likely.” Fato
nodded. “We don’t deliver too many messages this far north, to Coe
Baba especially, but one or two … yes, sparrows probably would be
sent to Coe Baba, especially if the messages were insignificant
enough.” Fato said, glancing at Oaka. “Not many sparrows last too
long in the service, for it is a very dangerous business to a
bird.” Fato added, “We don’t fly in flocks, for one thing, because
of hunters , hunters shoot at flocks of birds. And a flock is
only as good as its weakest member, so flocks are generally slow,
with the youngest … ”
    “ And