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. Each
would take me in of a night for the sake of my grandfather.
These families would nurse me on occasion, for my scars
burned with growing intensity as the seasons turned and the
fires to the west raged and the years passed by me.
Sometimes the knights let me stay for a week, perhaps two,
but the peasants would clamor, would talk of traitors and
firebrands, and I would be asked to leave, would be
escorted from Solamnic holdings by a handful of armed
cavalry.
The knights would apologize there at the borders, and
tell me that their hearts were heavy for me ... that the
welfare of the order and the people took precedence . . .
that, had there been another way, they would have been
glad to ...
In all those high places, I asked after Arion's song.
Solamnia was, after all, the bard's sanctuary, the harp's
haven. All of the schooled poets had retreated to these
courts, and all knew the works of Arion of Coastlund.
I showed around the scratched and amended passage
near the poem's end. All the bards remembered it, and
remembered no other version. As I sat alone in the vaulted
hall of Vingaard Keep, my thickened hands strumming
Father's harp in the vast and echoing silence, it almost
seemed to me that the walls shuddered with my clumsy
music, the one string still and always missing.
*****
In my seventeenth year, the peninsula had burned clear
up to Finn's own holdings.
Out of the stronghold of his lair in the seaside caverns
at Endaf, from which his horsemen could harry the trade
routes north from Abanasinia and his notorious ships, the
NUITARI and the VIPER, could find safe harbor, Finn
terrorized the cape and covered the shore with the husks of
schooners and brigantines, off course in the smoke from the
mainland
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