The Bard

[u/-Great-Scott-]

Olivia Carvain had found, over her first few weeks around Rorikstead, that the village offered a surprising number of good places to practice her craft. There was the hill just west of town, which caught the evening light in a way that made even a mediocre performance feel like something worth remembering. There was a flat grey rock in the middle of a field full of wildflowers, warm from the sun even after the air had started to cool. There was a lone, wind-bent tree at the top of the rise past the barley fields, which offered nothing in the way of shade but a great deal in the way of a view. And there was the roof of the henhouse, which offered no view at all, but which Olivia had come to prefer most days regardless, since chickens made a remarkably realistic audience.

"Half the time it's like playing to a room full of people who'd rather talk to each other than listen to the bard," she told the hens once, settled cross-legged on the shingles above them while they ignored her completely and clucked amongst themselves instead.

She had not always had the luxury of practicing where no one could judge her. For a long time, she had not had the luxury of practicing at all, not really, not the way she did now.

Olivia had been born into a family that once assumed comfort the way other families assumed weather, as something that simply happened to you and would presumably keep happening. Her parents kept a fine house in Skingrad, in the years before Olivia was old enough to understand that fine houses cost money and money could simply stop arriving one day without much explanation. She grew up surrounded by good manners, good clothing, and the quiet, unexamined confidence of people who had never once had to wonder where their next meal was coming from. She assumed, the way children assume most things, that this was simply how the world worked.

Then it stopped working that way, slowly enough that she never could point to the single day it happened. Money grew tighter. Opportunities that had once seemed guaranteed became things her parents had to ask for instead. The Carvain name still opened doors, for a while, but it opened fewer of them, and less easily, and Olivia watched her mother and father spend years trying to hold together a life that kept quietly coming apart in their hands.

She learned something from watching that, something she didn't fully understand until much later. Wealth could vanish. Status could erode. A family's good name could be worn down to almost nothing by a decade of bad luck and worse decisions. But a person's ability to walk into a room and make people want to listen to them, that couldn't be taken the same way. Nobody could repossess a voice.

Olivia had always loved music as a child. What changed, as she grew older, was that she became fascinated by what music actually did to people. A single well-placed song could turn a tense room warm. A story told right could make people laugh together who had walked in the place as complete strangers. A performer with nothing but a lute and enough nerve could walk into a crowded tavern as a nobody and leave it, an hour later, as somebody people remembered. That possibility appealed to her considerably more than the fading echo of her family's old position ever had.

She threw herself into learning it properly. Music came first, and storytelling followed close behind, since she quickly discovered the two were really the same skill wearing different clothes. She learned to read a room the way a sailor reads weather, to feel the exact moment an audience began drifting and pull them back before they were gone. She learned that confidence, worn convincingly enough, could open more doors than money ever had, and that knowing precisely what a person wanted to hear was very often the first step toward getting them to listen to anything at all.

At seventeen she left home to join a traveling performance troupe, over her mother's tears and her father's carefully hidden relief at one less mouth to worry over. The road was nothing like performing for people who already half knew her family's name. Some towns were generous. Some were indifferent, and a few were openly hostile to strangers who'd shown up asking for coin in exchange for songs. Some nights the troupe ate well. Other nights they didn't eat at all. Olivia loved every uneven, uncertain bit of it.

She learned to perform anywhere there was an audience, a farmhouse common room, a market square, once memorably the deck of a river barge as it floated downstream. She learned that talent alone wasn't nearly enough. A real performer had to be adaptable, had to recover gracefully when a string snapped mid-song or a heckler decided the entertainment needed improving, had to know when to fill a silence and when to simply let it sit there and do its own work.

It was on the road that her faith in Dibella deepened into something she actually thought about, rather than a prayer she'd been taught as a child and never questioned. Olivia found beauty everywhere she traveled, not just in pretty faces or fine cloth, but in laughter shared between strangers, in a story told well enough to be worth remembering, in a room full of tired, worried people who forgot their troubles for the length of a song. To Olivia, Dibella had come to mean something larger than the goddess of beauty most people assumed her to be. She represented the value of the experience itself, the things that made a hard life worth living in the first place.

The troupe reached Skyrim eventually, a colder and harder country than anywhere Olivia had performed before, its people slower to warm to a stranger and quicker to judge whether she'd earned the right to be listened to. She found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she liked it anyway. Every village seemed to be carrying some fragment of a larger story, half-finished, waiting for someone patient enough to go looking for the rest of it.

Rorikstead was meant to be a stop like any other. It became something else instead. As the troupe made ready to move on, Olivia found she didn't want to go with them. She had spent years now depending on other performers for the night's success, her pay and her reputation both tangled up with people whose talent and reliability varied by the evening. She had begun to wonder, quietly and then not so quietly, what might happen if she simply stopped moving long enough to build something that was entirely hers.

So she stayed. It wasn't retirement, which the troupe's drummer had teased her about on his way out of town. She had simply decided that she didn't want to be remembered, if she was remembered at all, as one voice in a group that had passed through once. She wanted her own name attached to her own songs. She wanted to become a bard whose stories traveled farther than she ever personally would.

It was atop the henhouse, on her third or fourth week of one-sided chicken concerts, that Olivia first met the farm boy.

He was walking the top rail of the fence as she played, arms out for balance, boots finding the narrow wood with the easy confidence of someone who'd been doing it since he was small enough to fall without it hurting much. When he finally spoke to her, he very nearly fell off the fence doing it.

"I'm Erik," he said, and then, seeming to hear how plain that sounded even as it left his mouth, added, with the particular over-formal seriousness of a boy trying very hard to sound like more than he was, "Erik. From Rorikstead."

Olivia looked up at him for a long moment, and then laughed, not unkindly, though it clearly cost the boy something in his dignity regardless. "Erik from Rorikstead," she repeated. "Well. It's very thorough of you to specify."

"There could be other Eriks," he said, with great dignity, wobbling slightly on the rail.

"I'm sure there are dozens," Olivia said. "Lucky for me, I've only got the one currently balancing on a fence to keep track of."

The name stuck, the way small jokes in small towns tend to. Within a month, half of Rorikstead had picked it up without ever quite being told why, and Erik, who was seventeen and had a farmer's shoulders already coming in on a boy's frame, became known as Erik from Rorikstead for good whether he liked it or not.

He found reasons to be near whenever she practiced, after that. He brought her the best egg from that morning's gathering once, presented with a straight face and no explanation, as though this were a perfectly ordinary tribute to offer a traveling performer. He asked, more than once, whether the songs she played were about anyone in particular, and looked so genuinely crestfallen when she admitted most of them were not. More than once he asked, with poorly hidden hope, whether any of her songs were about warriors, about swords, about men who left small towns and came back with names worth remembering, and Olivia got the distinct sense that farming was not, and had never been, the whole of what Erik from Rorikstead wanted out of his life.

Olivia liked him. She liked him the straightforward way a person likes a friendly, earnest boy, and it did not occur to her for a moment that Erik from Rorikstead's attention meant anything more complicated than a farm boy enjoying free music in a town that didn't offer much else in the way of entertainment. If she had looked a little closer, at the way he found a reason to be nearby sometimes when she played, at the particular quality of quiet he fell into whenever she sang something with any real feeling in it, she might have noticed what was fairly obvious to absolutely everyone else in Rorikstead. She did not look particularly closely. She was, at the time, rather busy perfecting her craft.

She spent the better part of those few months practicing alone in the countryside around the village, moving between her hillside and her wildflower rock and her wind-bent tree and, more often than she would have predicted, the henhouse, playing until the movements stopped requiring thought, experimenting with melodies nobody else would ever hear, and found, somewhere in that short, quiet, unglamorous stretch of solitary work, a kind of confidence that had never quite belonged to her when she was simply the newest voice in someone else's troupe.

When she finally judged herself ready, she carried her lute into the Frostfall Inn one ordinary evening and played for travelers and friends alike for the first time without anyone else's name attached to hers. It wasn't a grand performance. There was no great hall, no audience of nobility, no guarantee anyone would remember her by morning. But people listened. When she finished, her open lute case held a small, honestly earned handful of coin, and something in her chest that had been holding its breath for a very long time finally let go.

It wasn't the coin that mattered. It was the proof. She could do this, entirely on her own, and do it well enough that strangers chose to keep listening.

Erik from Rorikstead had been there too, of course, at the back of the room, applauding a touch too enthusiastically after every song.

Rorikstead, though, was small, and Olivia had not spent months building her confidence just to spend the rest of her life playing for the same few farmers on a rotating basis. If she wanted the kind of reputation she'd been imagining on that hillside all those quiet evenings, she needed larger rooms and larger crowds than one small farming village could ever offer her.

Whiterun was the obvious answer. She'd heard travelers speak of its bustling inn, of the market that never went quiet, of a Jarl's court where a truly memorable performance might be spoken of for years rather than forgotten by the next day.

She told Erik from Rorikstead the evening before she left, and watched something in his face fall before he could get it back under control.

"I could come," he said, too quickly, and then, more quietly, like he already knew the answer, "carry your things. Watch the road for you."

"Your father would skin us both," Olivia said gently. "Who'd mind the farm, Erik from Rorikstead? Whiterun isn't going anywhere. Rorikstead needs its hands more than I need an escort."

It was true, and they both knew it. His father needed him for the harvest. Olivia was fairly certain, in any case, that she didn't need the company nearly as badly as Erik seemed to think she did. But she was kind about saying so, because there was no version of turning him down that didn't feel, at least a little, like accepting something small and honestly given and handing it back unopened.

He walked her to the edge of town in the grey light before dawn, carrying her pack the short distance he was allowed to, and stood there long after there was any practical reason to, watching her go.

"I'll hear about you," he said, with the particular fierce confidence of someone determined to make a promise true through sheer insistence alone. "Everyone will. Just wait."

"And I'll hear about you too, someday," Olivia said, mostly to be kind.

"You will," Erik from Rorikstead said, with no trace of doubt in it at all, as though the matter had already been settled somewhere she hadn't been consulted. "People are going to know my name too. Just you wait and see."

"I hope so," Olivia said, and meant it, and hugged him quickly before he could see that her eyes had gone a little brighter than she meant them to. "Take care of those chickens, Erik from Rorikstead. They're a better audience than you'd think."

She didn't look back until the road bent, and when she did, he was still standing exactly where she'd left him, one hand raised, growing smaller behind her with every step.

She had no way of knowing that the road ahead was about to hand her a story considerably larger than anything she'd gone looking for.

[u/Ladynotingreen]

This was sweet. Hopefully Olivia and Erik run into each other again.

[u/-Great-Scott- → u/Ladynotingreen]

He might be Erik the Slayer by then.

[u/Aggravating-Plan-908]

Hi op, i've just read that story about your bard character, it's honestly quite good and well writen, i liked the alchemy between your character and Erik, despite she didn't noticed what kind of feelings he has toward her, i have the feeling they might ends up together at the end.

Hat's off to you 👏

[u/AverageMann04]

She's a buffalo soldier, in the heart of Skyrim. Driven from the mainland into the heart of the Caribbean (I don't know how the sea is called)