Harp Strings - Open RP

~Nadeann~

The cold was not affecting her old bones anywhere near as much this morning.  As though she had not slept under a hedge the night before, Nadeann walked the few remaining miles to Cairhien.  Had she worn the multicoloured cloak of a Gleeman, she doubted she would have had to suffer the night’s cold fingers on her aching back, but the divide between men and women still remained in some areas.  Women were expected to be delicate and pretty, or else still delicate and pretty and an Aes Sedai.  My, I’ve become so cynical in my old age!  The situation isn’t half as bad as I make out, but with regards to matters of performance, people want either something to look at or a table singer; a performer such as myself is not what they want to look at!    Nadeann snorted at her own thoughts and trudged onwards over the grassy countryside until she rejoined the main road leading to the Foregate.

To look at her, a person would not credit her with the forty-eight years she carried.  Her hair may have been streaked with silver, but her posture and outlook where very much that of a younger woman, and her flexibility and stamina was greater than most of her own age group.  She put that down to the lifestyle and the amount of walking she did.  Certainly no extra pounds had attached themselves to her backside in soft comfort! 

Nadeann’s satchel banged against her hip.  She was tempted to sit down and enjoy the morning’s sunshine before heading into town, but the Lords and Ladies of this land would not wait for her, a mere performer, to dally among the daisies.  The small pots of minerals she carried, ready to be mixed with egg or oil to make paints, banged together in the satchel with each step, giving her approach a percussive counterpoint.  In Cairhien, if she could survive the daggers and Daes Dae’mar, Nadeann would make enough money to retire.  The life was everything; she would not give that up, but at least she could gain enough coin to buy a wagon and horse, and travel in a much more comfortable fashion than her own two feet provided.

It had been sketching the flowers in the forests that had first given her the idea.  A flower was so temporary, living a few days, perhaps weeks, and then dying until the next time.  She had sketched a friend of hers, now long dead, but the little parchment scrap that Nadeann carried in her belt pouch held the likeness forever and it would not now be lost to memory.  When she had discovered just how much the nobility would pay for having a decent portrait, Nadeann had practiced her work and used pigments and minerals found naturally to create longer lasting paints.  Her first commission had been a minor Murandian Lord that had proudly displayed his likeness for all that came to his manor to see.  Naturally, it sparked off fighting as his peers did not take kindly to it, and Nadeann had been in work for quite some time.

A patron would give her housing and food for the duration of the commission and she asked for enough coin up front to cover the cost of the canvases only, the rest being paid on a satisfactory portrait.  It supplemented her income from performing nicely and still allowed her to roam the lands, tied to no one but herself or, for a time, her patron.  Now, age was catching up to her and the wagon she wanted was becoming more of a necessity with each night she had to spend sleeping under a bush.  There were nobles a-plenty in Cairhien, each of them impressed with their own success and with enough coin to make the ownership of her wagon a lot closer.  And so she trudged closer to the Foregate, wondering whom she would meet first.  An inn was her first port of call, bed and board exchanged for performances until she could find a patron, and a hot meal was just what she needed.