Once outside, his steps faltered. He’d worn Skew out this morning, so it hardly seemed fair to take him out again. He could walk—but it wasn’t exercise he needed, it was escape.

The Hero’s Welcome was a tavern and an inn, a conglomeration of several older buildings, and the first building on the road through Redern. It was seldom empty, and when Tier entered it there were a number of men sitting near the kitchen entrance gossiping with each other while the tanner’s father, Ciro, coaxed soft music from his viol.

It made Tier think of his grandfather and the grand concerts he and Ciro, who had been the tanner himself then, had put on. If Seraph ever heard the old man play, she’d know why Tier would never consider himself a bard in any sense of the word.

He seated himself beside these men he’d known since he was a child and greeted them by name, older men, all of them, contemporaries of his grandfather. The younger men would come in later, when they were finished with their work and chores.

One of the men had been a soldier in his youth, and Tier spent a little time exchanging stories. The innkeeper, noticing that there was a newcomer, offered Tier ale. He took it, but merely nursed it because the oblivion he sought wouldn’t come from alcohol.

Ciro gradually shifted from playing broken bits and pieces into a recognizable song, and an old, toothless man began humming, his tone uncertain with age, but his pitch absolutely true. One after the other the old men began to sing. Tier joined in and let the healing music make the present fade away.

They sang song after song, sometimes pausing while one man tried to hum enough of something he’d heard long ago for Ciro to remember it, too—that man had a memory for music that Tier had only seen his grandfather equal.

It was the first time that he was happy to be home.

“Boy,” said Ciro, “sing ‘The Hills of Home’ with me.”

Tier grinned at the familiar appellation. It no longer fit as well as it had when he’d tagged along after his grandfather. He stood and let the first few notes of the viol pull him into the song. He took the low part of the duet, the part that had been his grandfather’s, while the old man’s warm tenor flung itself into the more difficult melody. Singing a duet rather than blending with a group, Tier loosed the power of his voice and realized with momentary surprise that Ciro didn’t have to hold back. For the first time, Tier’s singing held its own with the old musician’s. Then the old words left no more room for thought. It was one of the magic times, when no note could possibly go astray and any foray into countermelody or harmony worked perfectly. When they finished the last note they were greeted with a respectful silence.

“In all my wandering, I’ve never heard the like. Not even in the palace of the Emperor himself.” A stranger’s voice broke the silence.

Tier turned to see a man of about fifty, a well-preserved, athletic fifty, wearing plain-colored clothes of a cut and fit that would have done for a wealthy merchant or lower nobleman, but somehow didn’t seem out of place in a rural tavern full of brightly dressed Rederni. His iron-grey hair, a shade darker than his short beard, was tied behind his head in a fashion that belonged to the western seaboard.

He smiled warmly at Tier. “I’ve heard a great deal about you from these rascals since you returned—and they didn’t lie when they said that your song was a rare treat. Willon, retired Master Trader, at your service. You can be no one but Tieragan Baker back from war.” He held his hand out, and Tier took it, liking the man immediately.

As Tier sat down again, the retired master trader pulled a chair in between two of the others so he sat opposite Tier at the table.

Ciro smiled and said in his shy speaking voice, so at odds with his singing, “Master Willon has built a fine little store near the end of the road. You should go there and see it, full of bits and things he’s collected.”

“You are young to be retiring,” observed Tier. “And Redern is an odd place to choose for retirement—these mountains get cold in the winter.”

Master Willon had one of those faces that appeared to be smiling even in repose—which robbed his grin of not a bit of its effect.

“My son made Master last year,” he said. “He’s got a fire that will take him far—but not if he spends all of his days competing with me for control of the business. So I retired.”

Willon laughed quietly and shook his head. “But it wasn’t as easy as that. The men who serve my house had been mine for thirty years. They’d listen to my son, nod their heads, and come to me to see if I liked their orders. So I had to take myself out of Taela, and Redern came to mind.”

He raised his tankard to Ciro. “My first trip as a caravan master I came by this very inn and was treated to the rarest entertainment I’d ever heard—two men who sang as if the gods themselves were their audience. I thought I’d heard the finest musicians in the world in Taela’s courts, but I’d never heard anything like that. Business is business, gentlemen. But music is in my soul—if not my voice.”

“If it’s music you like, there’s plenty here,” said Tier agreeably as a small group of younger men came through the inn door.

“Well look what decided to drop by at last,” said one of them. “You wiggle out from under your sister’s thumb, Tier?”

Tier had greeted them all since he’d returned from war, of course, but that had been under different circumstances, when they were customers or he was. The tavern doors made them all kindred.

Too much so.

With the younger men came less music and more talk—and they must have been talking to his mother because most of the talk had to do with his upcoming marriage. The question was not when he was going to marry; it was to whom.

Tier excused himself earlier than he had expected to and found himself leaving with Master Willon.

“Don’t let them fret you,” Willon said.

“I won’t,” Tier said. He almost stopped there, but couldn’t quite halt his bitterness—maybe because a stranger might understand better than any of his friends and kin he’d left behind in the tavern. “There’s more to life than wedding and breeding and baking bread.”

He started walking and Willon fell into step beside him. “I’ve heard as much praise for your baking as I have for your singing. You don’t want to be a baker?”

“Baking…” Tier struggled to put a finger on the thing that bothered him about his family’s business. “Baking is like washing—the results are equally temporary.” He gave a half-laugh. “That’s arrogant of me, isn’t it? That I’d like to do something that means more, something that will outlast me the way these buildings have outlasted the men who built them.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way before,” said Willon slowly. “But immortality… I think that’s a basic instinct rather than the product of pride. It goes toward the same things that they were trying to push you into. How did you put it? Wedding and breeding. A man’s immortality can be found in his children.”

Children? Tier hadn’t been aware that he’d thought about the matter at all, but the need was there, buried beneath the “I can’t breathe with the weight of my family’s wishes” tightness in his chest.

“So what do you want to do, if not bake?” asked Willon, betraying his foreignness with the question. No Rederni would have suggested that he do anything else. “Would you go back to fighting if there were a war to be had?”

“Not soldiering,” Tier said firmly. “I’ve killed more than any man ought—the only product of warmaking is death.” Tier took a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly as he thought. Maybe it was seeing his little valley again on his morning ride, but something inside of him vibrated like one of Ciro’s viol strings when he finally said, “I’d like to farm.”

Willon laughed, but it was a comforting laugh. “I’d not think that growing crops would be much more permanent than baking bread—just takes a bit longer to get to the final product.”