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."
But it wasn't. It was different. Tier stopped walking so that he could encompass that difference in words that didn't sound as stupid out loud as they did to himself, stupid but true.
"I've known farmers," he said slowly. "A lot of the men who fought the Fahlarn were farmers, fighting for their lands. They are as much a part of their lands as flour is a part of bread." He shook his head at himself and grinned sheepishly because it sounded stupider out