Tales of the Dragon's Bard, Volume 1: Eventide by Tracy Hickman, Laura Hickman Page B

the centaur farmer put restraining hands on the youth’s shoulders.
    “Courage, lad!” Edvard said to Jarod. “We’ve crossed the threshold into uncharted realms where lesser mortal men fear to tread! That is the very nature of a quest!”
    “Perhaps,” Merinda asked, “if you could describe this hat that you wish to order?”
    “Well,” Jarod said, obviously gathering up every ounce of courage he hoped to possess, “it’s . . . it has to look like a quest hat.”
    “A quest hat,” Merinda coaxed, picking up her pencil once more. “And just what does a quest hat look like?”
    “It has to look like the greatest prize in the world!”
    “Greatest prize in the world,” Merinda repeated as she scribbled on the parchment scrap. “What shape would the greatest prize have? Loaf? Conical? Pie?”
    “Well . . . it needs to be perfect.”
    Merinda was feeling her frustration mount. The one time men came into her shop and her husband had just left town. Who could possibly translate for her now? She decided to try herself. “Wide? Narrow? Short? Tall? Feathered? Wrap? Train? Brim?”
    “Those all sound fine . . .”
    “Pelt? Felt? Straw? Wool? Cloth?” Merinda continued, hoping that something she said would make sense to the boy. “Knit? Bonnet? Cap?”
    “Anything . . . so long as it’s perfect.”
    Jarod had answered her with such an expression of earnest desire that a single laugh escaped Merinda Oakman’s tightly drawn lips before she could stifle it. “Of course, Master Klum,” Merinda nodded. “A perfect hat.”
    “A perfect quest hat,” Edvard added.
    Merinda paused, drew a line through her last note, and added, “One perfect quest hat.”
    Merinda hopped down off her chair in frustration. She had negotiated a price for the quest hat that was nearly double her usual rate—“no one wants a cheap quest hat”—which should have pleased her. Now, however, in the night, with the wind howling outside her window, and faced with the prospect of having to create the perfect quest hat for a woman whose identity Jarod refused to divulge, she was beginning to feel she may have gotten the worst part of the deal.
    She gazed again out the window at the raging storm without. Harv was supposed to have come home sometime in these last two days, and now she was worried. She hated to be away from her dear husband for any period of time; it was not like him to be late. No doubt the storm was delaying his return to her. She offered a short, heartfelt prayer to Plania, the god of travelers, that Harv would have the good sense to wait out the storm and not try to foolishly push through its dangerous fury.
    Something beyond the glass, in the swirling eddies of blowing snow, caught her eye. She was not sure she had seen it at first, but—there it was again, a streak of bright light falling outside her window. She considered for a moment that it might be a trick of her flaring lamp reflected in the glass, so she turned and, with a quick puff, extinguished the flame.
    The workroom fell into instant darkness, and it took Merinda a moment for her eyes to get accustomed to it. The alley beyond slowly emerged in the window, lit with a faint blue light that she could not recall seeing before. She leaned closer to the window, trying to see the source of the strange, dim light.
    A third brilliant streak fell almost against the glass. Merinda leaped backward with a yelp, pushing over her chair. As her breath came quickly, three more streaks of light plunged downward beyond the glass in the alley, and then a cascade of light falling like a sudden, driving rain filled the glass for a moment. She heard the soft impacts in the snow piled up in the alley, dull thuds that came at her through the shop wall.
    Just as suddenly, the falling lights stopped and a deep winter silence filled the workroom.
    Merinda reached for her lamp, consciously steadying her hand as she took it from the workbench. She held still for a moment,