I Read What?!

So last time in the Lark and the Wren, Rune found herself a teacher, got her second instrument, and her teacher may have found a job for her at a brothel.

Since Rune has, in the past, been rather judgmental toward the idea of sex work, this could be interesting.



So we rejoin Rune as she accompanies Tonno through town. He's a good tour guide in one way, as apparently he keeps pointing out landmarks and giving her some background info on them. He's a poor tour guide in another way, though, since it's getting a bit too dark to actually see said landmarks. Rune finds herself just nodding along with what he's saying, and sheepishly admitting to herself that he can't see the nod anyway.

So Tonno takes her to a very well lit street. She catches sight of a group of musicians busking by the fountain and realizes they're dressed in the same "gaudy" way that the Roma who traveled with Nightingale were. She wonders if they might let her join them if things don't work out with Tonno's friend, Amber. They don't have a fiddler with them, and perhaps they'll recognize Nightingale's name and let her join based on a shared acquaintance.

I don't think all Roma people know each other, Rune. But they are musicians, so maybe that does increase the likelihood.

Rune also notices how many of the buildings are large, well lit, and have very attractive women leaning over balconies and out of windows. She realizes that this is a red light district, but feels like she's probably fairly safe as she's dressed as a boy and there's no indication that any of these brothels feature boys or men.

She ends up led to a much smaller, quieter place, with no balcony and no women leaning out. The place, inside, is well lit and busy. It's smaller than her old inn, and people are served real meals on real plates, with mugs and fork. She meets Amber, the host, and can't help but compare her to Stara:

Across the room, a woman presiding over a small desk beside a staircase saw them, smiled, and rose to greet them. She was middle-aged; probably a little older than Stara, and Rune couldn't help thinking that this was what Stara was trying to achieve with her paints and her low-cut bodices, and failing. Her tumbling russet curls were bound back in a style that looked careless, and probably took half an hour to achieve. Her heart-shaped face, with a wide, generous mouth, and huge eyes, seemed utterly ageless-but content with whatever age it happened to be, rather than being the face of a woman trying to hold off the years at any cost. The coloring of her complexion was so carelessly perfect that if Rune hadn't been looking for the signs, and seen the artfully painted shadows on lids and the perfect rose of the cheeks, she'd never have guessed the woman used cosmetics. Her dress, of a warm, rich brown, was of modest cut-but clung to her figure as if it had been molded to it, before falling in graceful folds to the floor.

Any woman, presented with Stara and this woman Amber, when asked to pick out the trollop, would point without hesitation to Stara, ignoring the other entirely. And Rune sensed instinctively that any man, when asked which was the youngest, most nubile, attractive, would select Amber every time. The first impression of Amber was of generosity and happiness; the first impression of Stara was of discontent, petulance, and bitterness.

I really do wish Rune would cut her mother a little more slack. I'm not saying she has to like the woman, since it's pretty clear that Stara was never much in the way of an actual mother, but this woman is clearly much more prosperous than Stara will ever be.

So Amber greets Tonno like an old friend and is welcoming to Rune, both before and after Tonno tells her that Rune is a girl. She compliments Rune on her choice of disguise as a means to avoid trouble. Amber also proves herself capable of great sensitivity. She initially offers to talk over dinner, but when she sees Rune's discomfort with the idea (the food is clearly outside of Rune's price range), she takes them to her office to talk instead.

There's a point where Rune gets a little pompous and judgy in her monologue:

Amber nodded, her lips pursed. "So you've ambitions, then. I can't blame you; the life of a common minstrel is not an easy one, and the life of a Guild musician is comfortable and assured."

Rune shrugged; there was more to it than that, much more, but perhaps Amber wouldn't understand the other desires that fired her-the need to find the company of others like herself, the thirst to learn more, much more, about the power she sensed in music-and most especially, the drive to leave something of herself in the world, if only one song. As she knew the names of the Bards who had composed nearly every song in her repertory except the Gypsy ballads, so she wanted to know that in some far-off day some other young musician would learn a piece of hers, and find it worth repeating. Perhaps even-find it beautiful.

No, she'd never understand that.

That's a fairly large assumption, Rune. You don't know anything about this woman, and for all you know, she may have her own artistic leanings. That said, I rather like this bit because it does feel like something a teenager would think. "Oh, you could never understand MY struggle."

So Amber is willing to accept Tonno's judgment of Rune's abilities, and she makes an offer: Rune gets a room and one meal a day, and her duty is to play in the common room from sundown until midnight bell. She warns that Rune probably won't make much by way of tips, since it's not really that kind of establishment. Amber also emphasizes that Rune will NOT be serving above stairs.

Basically, her establishment serves an exclusive set of clients by appointment only, and while Rune is a pleasant girl, the women who work upstairs are, well, quite a bit beyond that. (There's a cute moment where Rune feels a little put out by that. She admits it's irrational, but I think it's realistic. No girl wants to hear that she doesn't measure up, even if it's not a position that she'd ever want.)

So anyway, the offer is very tempting. One meal a day at a place like this means something much fancier than she'd get on her own. She'd have morning and part of the afternoon to busk, and she'd get her lessons after that. And when it gets too cold to busk, she'd be able to stay somewhere safe and warm. But she's still uneasy about the brothel element, especially if Amber wants her to dress like a girl.

Amber actually relieves her of that notion. She says it's fine if Rune keeps dressing like a boy (though, she'd like her to get some clothes that are a bit less worn, and notes that Tonno can help her with that), and asserts that there are two serving girls and two serving boys on the staff and all can attest to their safety. Boundaries are very clear in this place.

So Rune accepts, and Amber gives her a trial run: she gets her free meal today as dinner with Amber and Tonno, and then plays for the evening. She'll get the room for the night even if it doesn't work out.

Of course it does work out. But it's interesting to see Rune adapt to a place where expectations are different. Unlike the inns she worked at before, Amber isn't interested in getting people excited and thirsty, so no dance tunes. She's also not interested in sad lamentations. She wants Rune to "seduce" the audience with her music and get them relaxed and in a good mood.

So Rune gets to play romantic music instead, the kind of stuff that she used to save for the occasional wedding, and she keeps the volume low and atmospheric. And she realizes that most of her audience here is made up of upper class men, who likely have musicians on staff at home. And that makes for a different transactional arrangement. These men would house, clothe and feed the musicians, but they're not going to be tipping them just for doing their jobs. And this is a very likely outcome for Rune herself, once she becomes a Guild musician, so she knows she'll have to get used to the idea.

Anyway, the audition goes well and the time flies by. There's an interesting point where Rune starts noticing a very young man who looks nervous, and she decides to try to use her music to soothe him directly. She switches to lullabies for a bit, and then when she sees him relax, she switches back to love songs: but seduction songs instead of ballads, so that the boy can imagine himself as the successful lover. It seems to work, but Rune starts having ethical qualms, wondering if she had actually manipulated him, and if it was okay to do so.

She also starts thinking about the women upstairs, wondering if they enjoy what they're doing, if they're doing it by choice, and what kind of place this is. All fair questions.

Once the midnight bell rings, Amber leads her upstairs and shows her a secret entrance into another hall. (It's a secret entrance because apparently customers get annoyingly curious about inaccessible areas in a brothel). This is where the private quarters are located.

Rune has a brief moment of ableism, when Amber tells her that Parro, a member of the staff who is small and wizened looking, has carried her things up to her room. But Amber gently tells her that Parro is perfectly capable and proud of his strength.

She shows Rune into a very nice, albeit plain room, and hints delicately that there's hot water available if Rune wants to wash up. And Rune takes the hint. She's also pretty thrilled to have her own room, which includes a REAL BED, something she's never had before. (And one much too small to share with another person, which reassures Rune.). It even has a latch on the inside!

So Rune washes up, eats the cheese and bread that Mathe had gave her that morning, and goes to sleep.

We go pretty abruptly to the next morning, where Rune realizes that she's slept longer than she meant to. She goes downstairs and meets the most beautiful woman she's ever seen. This woman is Sapphire, and she's one of the upstairs ladies.

There's a rather funny bit where Rune thinks to herself that no one that beautiful could also be intelligent, only for Sapphire to tell her that she's basically Amber's apprentice and bookkeeper. Sapphire doesn't seem to mind Rune's obvious surprise.

Things take on a bit more of a melancholy turn, as Amber notes that all four girls who work upstairs have brains and ambition, and would probably be very influential courtesans and mistresses. But not wives, Sapphire notes bitterly.

Basically, what comes out is that Sapphire (and Amber herself, implicitly) had been a commoner girl who had been abducted against her will by a wealthy young man who then abandoned her once she became pregnant. She's rather understandably bitter about it, though she's grateful and happy to work at Amber's now.

This is eye-opening for Rune, and a glimpse into a part of life that she'd never encountered before:

They both seemed to have forgotten she was there; she felt very uncomfortable. This was not the sort of thing one heard in ballads. . . .

Well, yes and no. There were plenty of ballads where beautiful women were seduced, or taken against their will. But in those ballads, they died tragically, often murdered, and their spirits pursued their ravagers and brought them to otherworldly justice. Or else they retired to a life in a convent, and only saw their erstwhile despoilers when the villains were at death's door, brought there by some other rash action.

Apparently, it wasn't considered to be in good taste to survive one's despoiling as anything other than a nun.

Well, as feminist messages go, it's not particularly subtle. But it's not a bad one either. Both Sapphire and Amber have survived their horrible experiences and are thriving now. It also gives us a glimpse of the way that things are weighted against women in this setting.

(It should probably be noted that we'll hear the stories of the other women working for Amber, and not all of them involve sexual assault. That's also a good thing in my opinion, as people have many reasons for becoming sex workers, after all.)

Anyway, Sapphire and Amber cheer themselves up quickly enough, noting that they prefer their lives now to their hypothetical fantasies about where their lives would have been otherwise. (Sapphire, for example, thinks she'd have married someone named Bert, raised pigs, and died in childbirth.) She then asks Rune where she comes from, and in the process, reveals two interesting things.

First: Rune's accent reminds her of her own birthplace. Which makes me wonder about parallels between Sapphire and Stara. Second: she'd notices that Rune soothed the young man last night, as did Amber, and both of them are quite happy about it. In fact, that's when Amber decided to hire her, figuring that Rune might also be helpful in soothing a potentially violent customer. (That's not something Amber allows among the regulars, but sometimes new clients come in, and some of them come to a sex-worker, because they hate women and can't bear relationships.)

Rune muses a little about the oddness of asking a moral question to sex workers, but she realizes that she does believe that Amber and Sapphire are moral people. And she's starting to understand what Amber says when she says that her staff are "more than whores".

So Sapphire asks Rune her story, and Rune shares it with some alterations. She downplays her own travails, feeling that Sapphire's experiences sounded much more harrowing, and omits the Ghost entirely. She wants to save that for a song.

Sapphire seems very interested, though Rune does recognize that part of that is probably a job skill. Still Sapphire toasts her as "a young lady who refused to keep to her place as decreed by men and God . . . and had the gumption to pack up and set out on her own."

Rune heads out after that (she's decided to have her promised meal be the evening one, because the food is really good), and starts processing everything she's learned.

We get a more explicit version of the lesson we saw earlier with Jeoff and Mathe. Rune is realizing that nothing is what she thought it would be. The Church is penny pinching and manipulative. The ladies of the brothel had gone out of their way to be kind and helpful. Of course, now she's got a busy day ahead of her and she'll need to focus on that as the chapter ends.

So this was a pretty interesting chapter, I think. Rune had started out the book as very slut-shaming, equating Stara's unpleasant personality and her ineptitude as a mother with her promiscuity and sexual behavior. But she's learning now that those things aren't actually connected. Stara IS an awful person, but she'd be awful even if she were a prudish and moral, as Rose was.

It's not just the sex work though. Rune's learning a lot about assumptions in other ways. She's learned that the clients of the brothel aren't necessarily the kind of people she thought they'd be. She's learned that Tonno is apparently quite a bit worldlier than he seemed at first. She's learned that just because someone looks small and weak, doesn't mean that they are.

It's a really good beat for Rune, giving her growth and character momentum, which is something I always love to see.