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. Indeed,
she seemed to have forgotten or be forgetting such things,
rapt in a story of lances and of high battle, the like of which
I could not know, with all my imagining, with all my
waiting. And forgive me, kind lady who copies my words to
an absent brother, but now it seems that flowers and
scarves, the tedious attention to hair, to the slope of a dress
on the shoulders - it seems that such things are distant now,
the meaningless steps to a dance I have left early, no longer
able to see my partner. More important now is the memory
of the elf maiden, kneeling and glittering perhaps less
brightly than I remember but as brightly as I saw her at the
time, above the lances she had brought for the defense of
the tower, offering to instruct us in their use, had we not
been so rigid and scornful and dazzled as to refuse her
teaching.
For the lances were the great mystery as we waited, what
Breca might have called the wild card in the deck, the
painted shard of lead that served as the spot on the die. But
not at all like a die so loaded, the lances seemed larger and
heavier than they were, lying in the courtyard of the fortress
- larger and heavier because of the legends around them
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