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After I dressed, I practiced on my harp, moving from scales to a tune I had never played within the walls of Songless. Sharp had reminded me of it, and my fingers stumbled as I taught them long forgotten strains, but before the morning was over I had it slipping easily into the air. With no words to voice the story, I could only weave the tale of a hunstman and his swan lover with notes.
I finished, put away my harp, and rose to leave the room. Stiff from the chill and from kneeling so long, I needed to walk, to explore the castle, to have some time alone.
Charles fell into step behind me.
I tried to pretend he was not there, and for a time he kept his silence.
I wandered through the keep, then through the garrison in the outer curtain wall. I passed servants and soldiers, a few of whom I recognized but whose gaze slid smoothly away from my face. I walked through the armory, where Charles looked longingly at the practice floor, but I shook my head and climbed to the parapets. There I looked over the wall, and saw that the whole of the Dragon’s Mouth Mountains draped in fog. Only the nearest slope could be seen, its scrubby trees and flinty boulders fading into the mist like ghosts.
"Seems like we’re cut off from the rest of the world," Charles said, leaning on the wall beside me.
"This castle is hanging onto the rock, but the rock is floating in a big pond of nothingness. This is the way the world began, isn’t it? A monster dragging itself from a lake of milk?"
Something like that, I thought as I nodded to the knight. Though Master Meiltung would have groaned at such a simplistic retelling.
