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"And that was all?" I asked. "All of this trouble over a
poem?" I hated poetry.
I gave voice to her answer as she held forth rapidly, as
the words slipped from her fingers into my breath and
voice. "No, Trugon, not over that, over the other one."
She did not know the words of the other poem. She had
not even seen or heard it. It was the poem of trouble, she
insisted, crouching nervously by the door of our cottage. It
was the poem that Father . . .
"Changed?"
She nodded, moving toward Father's old strongbox.
"Then Father lied as well as betrayed?"
Mother shook her head, brushed her hair back. She
opened the strongbox.
I knew what was inside. Three books, a penny whistle,
a damaged harp. I had never asked to see them. I hated
poetry.
Mother held up one of the books.
It was the story of the times since the Rending, since
the world had opened under Istar. The work of the bard
Arion, it was, but more. It was his words and the words of
others before him: remote names like Gwion and Henricus
and Naso, out of the time when Solamnia was in confusion.
The book was battered, its leather spine scratched and
cracked. As Mother held it out to me, it opened by nature to
a page near its end, as though use and care had trained it to
fall at the same spot, to the same lines.
She gestured that the lines were in Father's hand.
Indeed, the whole book was in Father's hand, for neither
Arion nor any of the bards before him had written down
their songs and tales, preferring to pass them on to a
listening apprentice, storing their songs in the long
dreaming vaults of their memories
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