This was turning out to be an unexpectedly fun evening. For one thing, Fell was enjoying watching the younger boys try and utterly fail to get him wasted enough that he passed out. A lifetime of feasting, drinking, and making merry had its advantages, as did being a head taller than the next tallest man here, even if many of them were broader in the shoulder than he. The key was to quaff with care, and respond to each toast with good humor and cheer, then let the other man get carried away. Let them feel they're getting away with something and they gulp greedily, leaving him to sip more moderately. If his cup was never empty, well, it was never full, either.
For another, the food was actually quite good. The bread seemed to be a bit hollow, and he watched some of the men make a sort of sandwich with thin slices of meat and roasted vegetables and soft cheese in the middle. It was unexpectedly delicious. It wasn't like the food he'd grown up with, but it was fantastic in its own way, and that was the point of seeing new places, was it not? To try new things? Not that Fell had particularly wanted to leave Northradica, but being free had its price, and one such was never being able to go home again. A sobering thought that he pushed away for now. Once he had found a new home, he could reckon with the loss of his old one.
When the Archon got up to tell a story, Fell expected to be bored, but it was unexpectedly fascinating. The last visitor, a tall Arkenai if he had his guess, seemed like a fascinating woman. He wondered what she'd made of this community, and if she had moved on because she had to or because she knew they would never truly welcome her. Certainly, if he were a woman, he was unsure what sort of welcome would have awaited him here. For instance, he had not seen a Women's House akin to the Men's House he was in right now.Surely, the women weren't expected to just tend to the children and keep the stew pots bubbling while the men idled and drank? That would be fine for most women, but not all. Some were meant to be mages, or warriors, or merchants, same as most men. He knew better than to ask such questions in such a large crowd, however.
When it was his turn to speak, Fell was prepared. He'd watched the crowd's reaction to the story and had a fair idea of the sort of thing everyone wanted. Blood, violence, treachery, and triumph. Nothing too foreign, either. It had to be understandable for the peasants here. So he finished his drink, stood up, and took his turn.
"I will tell you the tale of Osthia and the would-be Frey of Oxentide," he said. It was a story any person in Northradica knew by heart about the founding of the city, but it would likely be new to this crew of shepherds in such a farflung location.
He regaled them with the story: a noblewoman in want of a husband, her betrothed captured by a rival family and ransomed to her. Unable to intercede directly, she sent her brother to parlay on her behalf, but when he stumbled back to tell her of an ambush before dying from his wounds in her arms, she knows what she must do. As there was no head of the house, she could not declare war, so instead, she disguised herself as a maid, sneaking into the enemy's lodge and finding her betrothed. She befriends and flirts with the guards of his cell, then gets them drunk on spiked beer, snatching away the key when they are dead to the world. She then releases her affianced, who kills the men for besmirching her honor. They flee back to the town that would one day be Oxentide and are wed under the full moon so that he can become the Frey he's meant to be. Then, with her blessing, he declares war on the family that tried to ruin hers, and leads her brothers to victory in a bloody and victorious campaign that provides him with sumptuous furs, and a sword so sharp it's said to be able to cleave the world in half. In a later story, he prays to the Gods and they bid him to use the story to make the harbor that Oxentide still uses to this day for its ships.
Fell loved telling stories, and it was nice to have a rapt audience of grown ups. People in the tower, being literate, had little use for this skill of his, but clearly that would be less true in a village in Teos. He dared not do anything too unnatural using Resonance, but he was not above using it to alter his register into a falsetto for Osthia or to give her true love a manly baritone, to make his voice boom out from his chest with the kind of timbre typical of a much heartier man than to bring it down to a whisper that nonetheless carried to the ends of the lodge. It was fun, and it made the story more enthralling. In some tellings, Osthia went to war directly without rescuing her love first, but he went with the more demure version just in case the idea of a woman riding into war might make these men uncomfortable.
When he was finished, there was silence for a solid minute. Then, a cheer erupted from a crowd of young men who were not yet too drunk to follow the story. Some of the fellows who had bowed out early had returned during the story, or had woken up from their wine-induced naps. They proposed a toast to him, and then another, and then called for another story.
He looked to Andros to make sure it was okay, but when the Archon gave him the nod, he smiled and assented. By this point, he estimated almost everyone was good and drunk, and the reaction to the lewder section where the guards laid the innuendo on thick with Osthia made him think that something a bit more off color would be okay, so he introduced his next story with its standard disclaimer:
"This is a romantic story from a land slightly to the south of mine, Jorikford. It concerns a brave Knight and his lady love, and it's called Sir Johan's Ride. If I could borrow an instrument -- anything stringed -- and have a few minutes to work out the chords. Ah, thank you."
He was handed something rather odd: like a lute, but with a very long neck. Still, it was in tune, and with a few minutes of fiddling and instruction from its owner, he worked out the basic chords he needed to make up the journey of Sir Johan's Ride.
It was a personal favorite of his. It started out a bit subtle in verse one or two, with the sorts of sobriquets and euphemisms and double entendres that were easy to miss unless one's mind was already in the gutter. The younger men looked a bit distracted, even bored. A few of them booed. But the older men seemed to cotton on to the conceit of the song by the end of the second verse and they shushed the boos, allowing him to continue. Grinning, he continued into the third verse, which concerned just how long Sir Johann liked to ride, and then the fourth verse, which was about how hard he rode. As the verses continued, they got progressively filthier. By the seventh, when he was riding all night long, the crowd was singing along with the chorus, holding the note on the long "I" in "Ser Johann's Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiide," and the younger men were engaged again, laughing as he sang.
When the song ended, he gave the odd lute back to its owner, and let the next man take his turn with an old folk song that everyone but him knew. For the first time since he'd escaped, he felt warmed inside. He was still scared, but there was room for other emotions in him yet.
