BARD CITY B-SIDES
NATHANIEL WEBB
INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS CRIS PUGA MAP MIKAEL ASIKAINEN COVER PAINTING LUCAS MARQUES OLIVEIRA
Copyright © 2023 Nathaniel Webb
Wyngraf copyright © 2023 Young Needles Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by Lucas Marques Oliveira
Interior art by Cris Puga
Map by Mikael Asikainen (www.orbigraphia.com)
CONTENTS
A Gift to Suit
The Underbender
Kid Gloves
The Sea King’s Eyes
Bard City Blues Official Playlist
About the Author
Kickstarter Backers
This one’s for all the writers, reviewers, and (most of all) readers who have supported Wyngraf. Thank you for sharing my cozy dream.
A GIFT TO SUIT
May Featherlight wiped her hands on her apron, gazed around the shop, and nodded with satisfaction. She had named it Immaculate Miscellany when it opened two years ago, and today it really did look immaculate. Just like a soap shop should.
The teak floors shone from a fresh mopping, the heartwood columns and rafters showed not a speck of dust, and the four tables that ran the length of the room were pin-straight. The tables were the perfect height for a halfling like May, which meant her customers from the taller folk had to stoop a little, but that was fine by her. A double row of wooden bowls marched down each table—May had just finished dusting and nudging them into tidy lines—each holding a different aromatic ingredient for soapmaking. Vanilla and lavender, chocolate and coffee, cut grass and jasmine… they all mingled together in the air of Immaculate Miscellany’s smellroom, making a warm and welcoming blend, but May’s discriminating nose picked out every note.
She nodded again, making her auburn curls bounce. Everything was perfect.
“Maylily Dogblossom Featherlight!” howled a voice from the closet near the back of the smellroom. The door was only slightly ajar, but that voice had a way of carrying. “What is all this junk?”
May sighed, her good humor dissolving swiftly. “What junk, Mum?”
She pulled a kerchief from an apron pocket and tied her hair up as she crossed the smellroom. Of course her mother would find something to criticize. Mum had come to Lackmore from the Reeve—“upriver all the way, and with winter coming on, no less!”—to help with May’s seasonal cleaning, and to Pansy Featherlight, helping and criticizing were one and the same.
“All those boxes and bags and things!” The closet door swung open and out rolled Mum, brushing dust from her best blue travelling dress. “I was nearly buried under all that.”
“Buried?” May stopped short. “Did the pile topple over?”
Mum raised her chin. Her own curls, though more gray now than auburn, had lost none of their springiness and bounced proudly around her face. “No, but it could have.”
“But it didn’t?”
“You know,” said Mum, “if you had someone tall around here to lend a hand—a man, maybe—they’ve got all sorts in the big city…”
“Mum!”
Her mother shrugged, the picture of maternal innocence. “I’m not criticizing. Running a shop on Coin Hill’s an awful lot for one halfling girl to handle all on her own, that’s all. It’s only an observation.”
“We’ll just leave those things where they are, then,” May said. “It’s nothing I need for the shop.”
“If not, we should toss them.”
“No—”
“Then what is all that? I raised six good halfling children, Maylily, and I know none of them’s a hoarder.”
May sighed. Mum had a way of wearing you down. “They’re gifts.”
“Maylily Dogblossom, the manners on you! You’ve not even opened them!”
“I opened some of them,” May said miserably. She edged around her mother toward the closet. “Those are the ones I haven’t. There’s too many, Mum. At first I thought I’d just store them as they came in, and open everything once a week or so, but they just kept coming, and I kept stowing them away, and before I knew it…” She shut the closet door with a clunk. “Well, you saw.”
“Oh, May.” Mum stepped forward and took her hand. “You should have told me.”
May blinked. “I should have?”
“The same thing happened to me at your age. It’s the hair, you know. Boys are enchanted.” Mum smiled, dimpling her cheeks, and May had to admit she could imagine the halfling lads of the Reeve lining up for a chance at young Pansy’s hand. “Girls, too. Everyone really. Well, I had so many suitors I simply froze. Spent the longest spring of my life tossing pebbles in the Weeping River, wondering whomever to choose. Half of them had married other girls before I made up my mind. I swear, sometimes I think your father won on sheer dogged patience alone.”
“Mum, that’s not the problem,” May said. “I don’t want to marry—”
“The wrong one, yes, I understand, darling.”
“No—”
“Luckily, your mum has just the solution.”
May let go of her mother’s hand. She had planned to keep arguing, had steeled herself for Mum’s next emotional assault, but she found herself so curious what in the world her mother was thinking that she felt a perverse and overwhelming urge to go along with it simply to find out what it was.
