Side A – Yasgrid
Challenging a Roadie’s pride was always a risky proposition. If you were lucky, you’d get slugged. If you were unlucky, they’d enact an even worse revenge.
“Gee, I don’t know. I guess if you don’t need our drums for this then the Gray Falls idiots should be able to set you up whenever you need one right?” Grash asked, looking to Horgi for support.
“Yeah. I’m sure they’ll be happy to lend you one long term.” Horgi sounded so convincing, but neither Yasgrid nor any of the other drummers were unclear on the argument they were making.
Margrada might be able to finagle a drum from Gray Falls once, but for day to day use? No Roadies anywhere, ever, were going to give a drum to drummer they weren’t going to have constant access to.
“I think what she means…” Nia started to say.
“Is that you should ask my drum what it thinks,” Margrada cut in.
Which on the face of it was ridiculous. Drums, for all that the Roadies cherished them, were objects. Not people. Any communication with a drum came from playing it and was entirely mono-directional.
Wasn’t it?
“You want to play that card? You sure?” Grash asked.
“You afraid to ask?” Margrada’s smile was exactly the sort of confident and hungry that promised the the style of mayhem which was normally blamed on Nia.
The other drummers, even Osdora, had recoiled a bit at the exchange. The Roadies might keep their own culture and beliefs close, but more than a few of those beliefs had bled over into Drummer culture. Yasgrid hadn’t noticed before how strong the ‘do not play chicken with a Roadie’ rule was, but watching the long, silent moment play out in the wake of Margrada’s challenge was a lesson in understanding for everyone involved.
Surprisingly, for all the confidence she was radiating, it was Margrada who blinked first.
“Or would that be bad for my drum?” she asked in a soft voice, letting the fire in her eyes fall away.
Grash and Horgi, turned to each other, a wordless, expressionless discussion passing between them which ended in a shrug.
“No,” Horgi said. “It wouldn’t be bad. Your drum is in good shape.”
“It was the first one we checked out,” Grash said.
“Worried the Gray Falls drums might have gotten to it?” Osdora asked, her tone half joking but serious enough to show some of the same respect Margrada was showing.
“Oh, we had so much else to check for,” Horgi said.
“We still don’t know if we checked for enough,” Grash added.
“But all the usual things seem good, and it’s still plenty sound.” Horgi glanced at Grash again.
“We’ve got a few drums that haven’t been used since the last stop we made,” Grash said. “We could get you one of those.”
“I trust any drum you have,” Margrada said. It wasn’t a ritualized response but it held the kind of reverence the Stonelings had never shown to their gods.
Yasgrid snagged that thought before it could get away.
Was that why the Stonelings had never worshipped the divine? Because they believed in each other rather than the gods?
Side B – Nia
Nia knew exactly what had just happened, even if only the M’Kellin women seemed to be aware of why the mood had grown from nearly combative to suddenly calm.
Well, the M’Kellin women and Kyra.
Nia had been surprised when Kyra asked to travel with her for a bit, but looking at the elven woman Nia saw a depth of understanding which surprised her.
Not that Elves weren’t usually cognizant of each other, but Stoneling expressions, body language, and vocal ranges were so different from Elven norms that, even with Yasgrid’s experience to help her, Nia still felt like she struggled to be sure she was reading them correctly.
Kyra didn’t seem to have that problem though. From how she was regarding both Margrada and the Roadies, she seemed both unsurprised by their exchange and oddly satisfied with it.
Or she was a lot more adept than Nia at presenting a compelling facade.
Nia suspected that wasn’t the case though.
Margrada’s softening had been genuine. As had her willingness to step up against the Roadies. The transition from combative to concerned, specifically about the state of the drums, had broken through the Roadies reservations as nothing else could because it had established a shared understanding between them. Nia had seen Naosha use similar, though less aggressive, strategies fairly often, to similarly great effect.
Kyra hadn’t lived among the Stonelings though, and she hadn’t seen Naosha in action to take notes from, which suggested that she understood the interplay between the drummer and the Roadies on a more fundamental level. She’d mentioned learning a lot about Stonelings from her future visions, but it seemed unlikely, from what Nia knew of prognostication magics, that Kyra would have been able to interact with her visions or see a variety of close outcomes to learn the nuances that she was clearly picking up on.
Unless of course she’d spent, say, months with nothing else to do but focus on visions and learn as much as she possibly could. Nia jotted that observation down for later consideration.
“We may wish to adjourn to a more central area,” Kyra said, letting the question of whether a drum would be procured or not sit as a decided ‘yes’. “From what we’ve heard of your drumming so far,” she indicated Nia with a nod, “It won’t take much for you to draw a crowd and we’re rather full in here already.”
“Yeah, and we’ll want to be near one of the portals,” Nia said. “Trust me, I know better than to even think about bring a drum to the Darkwood, but I would like the music to be able to reach there.”
“Drums are okay in the Darkwood,” Gossma said.
“Yeah. Ours worked fine there.” Osdora pointed to a drum which was sitting in a presentation case on the other side of the room.
Horgi and Grash turned slowly, visibly suppressing a wave of terror, to inspect the drums from a distance.
“We need to take those,” Horgi said.
“You might get the back,” Grash said.
“But no promises,” they said in union.