Chapter Text
Despite the humanoid body and the absence of wings, kenkus were still a lot like birds. Ravens, specifically. Something Vers noted as the bird-person—sex unclear, but she was leaning toward female—stared enraptured at the glittering gems dangling in her hair and at her pointed green ears. Whenever Vers sensed the kenku’s attention shifting elsewhere, back to the stage behind them or the bell above the tavern door, she made a point of drawing their eye back to the jewelry. Gold-encrusted rose quartz, emeralds, and peridots, given that spring was taking hold and as an eladrin, Vers’s appearance was changing to match.
She had not come to Durpar for this, but as she’d arrived in Vaelan, she’d come across the tavern and its sign outside advertising live music. Not something she was drawn to immediately, given that human music in human taverns often led to sticky, spilled drinks on clothes and the floor, and to the grubby hands of drunkards trying to touch her. No, she didn’t care for being their fascination for the night, which is why she felt a bit hypocritical sitting at the table she currently occupied alongside her own fascination. Under LIVE MUSIC the acts had briefly been listed, with one line reading KENKU BARD: RIKI DARKFEATHER—almost certainly an oxymoron. Despite her aversion to humans and their noise, she’d felt compelled to discover how such a thing could be possible.
And now she sat, a notebook she’d magicked from between the planes in one hand and a pen in the other, trying to interview the kenku.
Vers sighed. “I’m not sure how to go about this, given your kind can’t exactly…speak. My hope is that you’re literate enough to write answers to my questions, though that may take a while.”
Riki tilted their head to the side, eyes dilating wide beneath the hood of their yellow cloak. Half a second later Vers heard the bell ring and rolled her eyes. One more movement, bracelet jangling as she pushed a lock of hair behind her ear, letting the light catch the golden hoops threaded through it. Slowly, the kenku’s attention roved back.
“Are you paying attention to me?” asked Vers. “Can you even understand Common?”
One long, slow blink. Then, “Yes, I’m paying attention. Yes, I can understand you perfectly well.”
It was Vers’s turn to blink. The bard’s voice was not smooth, with little chops and breaks here and there, but by far the most fluid speaking voice she’d heard from a kenku before. In the past, she’d heard kenkus string one word at a time, mimicking fragments of speech from people they’d overheard, to make grammatically incorrect sentences…but this was new.
And new was fascinating.
“You can speak?”
“Yes, I can speak. Must we keep going like this?” Riki shifted in their seat, perching narrow elbows on the wooden tabletop. “You should see your face, fey. There’s nothing more enjoyable than a know-it-all elf discovering that they do not, in fact, know it all.”
Vers leaned forward and hissed, “How?”
“I imagine for the very same reason you tried to lure me over here with baubles.” If birds could smile, she was sure the kenku would be smirking at her. “You saw a kenku who claimed to be a bard and wondered, ‘How could that possibly be?’ Yet you did not spend much time thinking about what a kenku might gain by studying to become a bard. When you can mimic anything you’ve heard perfectly, if you hear enough things, you can overcome the inability to form sentences yourself.”
“...Impressive,” she conceded. “And just how long did it take you to accumulate that many words and phrases?”
“Not long at all given that we are in a tavern surrounded by humans who will talk about just about anything, in the middle of a city of forty-five thousand.” co*cky, Vers was sure that was the expression Riki wore—still hard to tell, given the musculature of their face and the lack of tone in their words. “I have also traveled through much of the kingdom, which has certainly helped with regional dialects.”
With Riki still sitting at Vers’s table, the band struck up a new song without the bard—something lively that quickly led to foot-stamping from the crowd, humans having risen from their seats to join the dance. Distantly, Vers noted the bell above the tavern door resonating with a high-pitched Ding!
“Want to hear a joke?” asked Riki, ignoring Vers’s sharp No and continuing along, “Alright, two humans and a mind flayer walk into a tavern—”
“What kind of buffoon do you take me for?” Vers started to rise from her stool, but the kenku’s hand shot forward, gripping her wrist in their talons. The answering defensive curl of her magic was instinctual, but she tamped it down. “What?”
Riki inclined their head, which Vers initially mistook as another bird-like habit, before realizing the bard was nodding toward the entrance to the tavern. The bell, she remembered. Turning her head would be suspicious, and the last thing she desired was to draw unwanted attention from an aberration.
With Riki still touching her wrist, Vers cast Gaze of Two Minds, shifting into the bard’s senses. She could feel herself squinting in her own body, trying to make up for kenku’s piss-poor vision. Standing in front of the now-shut door, beneath the bell, were three human men. Three. Not two and a mind flayer. Three men who appeared to have come straight from the smiths, still donning their aprons, sweat sticking their rolled-up sleeves to their arms.
Why on Toril would there be an illithid outside of the Underdark, up on the surface of Faerün? Why would she even fall for the bard’s poor joke? The thought was ludicrous. Yes, mind flayers came to the surface to hunt, but to willingly enter a human city? They were too smart to embark on such a clear suicide mission.
Vers held the connection as she said, “You need to work on your vision, bird.”
“No, fey, I believe it is you who needs to work on your vision.”
A haze shifted over their vision, stripping all magic away from the inside of the tavern. Makeup smudged, revealing pock-marked skin and blemishes, and stains reappeared in clothing, and on one of the human blacksmiths…skin sagged in unnatural ways, hairline going crooked. The longer they looked, the more clear it was that this was not a human man, but something else dressed as one, who had used magic to perfect the disguise where the costume lacked.
“‘True Sight’? Really?” whispered Vers. “What kind of bard are you?”
“You claim to be a scholar, yet you know nothing about anything.” Riki clucked—a true cluck—their disapproval. “What do you even think a bard is?”
“Don’t you all just traipse around and play the lute?”
“You can’t possibly be serious. You aren’t serious, are you?” At Vers’s silence, Riki continued, “Music, magic, maulings—I’m a jack of all trades, and it would be to your benefit to remember that next time you cast a spell on me.” With a mental shove, they ejected the eladrin from their mind, sending Vers reeling back into her own senses, her returned awareness tingling throughout her body. Despite Vers’s vision, magic settled back over the tavern’s denizens, fixing their features.
“So they’re not human. How do you know they’re a…mind flayer?”
“I cast ‘Locate Creature’.”
“All this and yet you play for coppers in a tavern in Vaelan.”
“Silvers.” Riki shrugged. “Is there something wrong with that? I’m comfortable and the locals like me well enough. And as I said, I travel.”
Vers arched an emerald brow. “Why is there a mind flayer here?”
“If I were to hazard a guess, a rowdy drunk crowd is an ideal hunting ground for cornering an easy victim. Just wait for one to peel off and attack them in the alley.”
“I—hmm.”
“I see you’re awestruck by my dizzying intellect.”
“What were the odds that the only kenku capable of a proper conversation happens to use that ability to be incredibly annoying?” asked Vers.
“Higher than you’d expect. We’re all annoying, you lot are just fortunate enough that we can’t speak well.”
Vers considered it for a moment—the kenku before her, the situation at large. If a kenku might be a bard, was it not all possible that a mind flayer was in the tavern? It seemed that the stars were aligning to favor peculiarities. Perhaps it was Corellon’s intention for her to encounter these oddities during her adventure in the Prime Material plane and report on them once she returned to the Feywild. Such information would be an appreciated addition to the libraries of Mithrendain. The scholars would thank her profusely. Yes. The notes from her adventures would please Corellon, and his acolytes would prostrate before her.
It was these thoughts that had Vers rising again from her stool, this time without being halted by Riki. At least not physically, as Vers imagined the kenku didn’t want to accidentally reestablish the connection she had forged. Instead, Riki only hissed, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Vers half shut her eyes, looking down at Riki from beneath her lashes. “If an illithid has come to a tavern then I am compelled to investigate.”
“Should I assume you’re from a different plane where mind flayers don’t exist? Do they not teach you about the whole ‘mind flaying’ thing in the Feywild? A fey brain would be quite the meal for one, and they prefer to consume them while their prey are still alive. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
With a wave of her hand, Vers’s notes and pen returned to the plane from which she had plucked them, replaced with an elven thinblade. “I come armed.”
“Of course you do.” Riki stared at her for a long moment. “Well, good luck with all that then. It was nice knowing you.”
Vers furrowed her brow. Odd, but no matter. She’d learned what she needed of the bard, and now it was off to interrogate the next individual. As she turned to face the direction she’d last seen the illithid, she thumped into something—someone, she realized belatedly.
Your thoughts are loud, elf. The voice echoed in her skull, rasping, yet echoing all at once.
Vers lifted her head to look at the person before her, the man who stared directly back at her from the same height. Time crawled to a slow as she co*cked her head to the side, squinting to focus on his face. The uncanny valley effect. Not quite right.
I don’t like loud brains. They make for tough meat.
f*ck, thought Vers.
And then things sped up.
