If he ruffles up the feathers on my cuckoo’s nest.

Well some likes the lassies that are gay well dressed,

And some likes the lassies that are tight about the waist,

But it’s in between the blankets, that they all likes the best,

For to have a jolly rattle at my cuckoo’s nest.

I met him in the morning and he had me in the night,

I’d never been that way before and wished to do it right,

But he never would have found it, and he never would have guessed,

If I had not shown him where to find the cuckoo’s nest.

I showed him where to find it and I showed him where to go,

In amongst the stickers, where the young cuckoos grow,

And ever since he found it, he will never let me rest,

’Til he ruffles up the feathers on my cuckoo’s nest.

It’s thorny and it’s sprinkled and it’s compassed all around,

It’s tucked into a corner where it isn’t easy found,

I said, “Young man you blunder…” and he said, “It isn’t true!”

And he left me with the makings of a young cuckoo.

Her voice wasn’t beautiful—it had a bit of a squawk to it, more like a parrot than a nightingale, as Wilful Murder said to his cronies. But she was loud, and raucous, and everyone knew the tune and the chorus.

Everyone, in this case, being everyone in the common room of the great stone inn under the Ings of Dorling, widely reputed to be the largest inn on the whole of the world. The common room had arches and bays, like a church, and massive pillars set straight onto stone piers that went down into the cellars below—cellars that were themselves famous. The walls were twice the height of a man, and more, hung with tapestries so old and so caked in old soot and ash and six hundred years of smoke as to be nearly indecipherable, although there appeared to be a great dragon on the longest wall, the back wall, against which ran the Keeper’s long counter where the staff, and a few favoured customers, took refuge from the army of customers out on the floor.

Because on this, the coldest spring night of Martius yet, with snow outside on their tents, the Company of the Red Knight—that is, that part of the company not snug in barracks back in Liviapolis—packed the inn and its barns to the rafters, along with several hundred Moreans, some Hillmen from the drove, and a startling assortment of sell-swords and mercenaries, whores, travelling players, and foolish young men and women in search of what they no doubt hoped would be “adventure,” including twenty hot-headed young Occitan knights, their pet troubadour and their squires, all armed to the teeth and eager to be tested.