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When I pulled out my harp that morning, I saw it in a way that I had seen for almost ten years. I caressed the wood, battered with age, and stroked the strings.
Most Bards do not have a harp of their own, and even fewer Bards-in-training. When they first come to the Bardhall, they are usually entrusted with a tambourine. After a few years they may earn the right to hold a lute or a horn. They might buy tin pipes or clay flutes in the market, and they learn to make drums. Harps, and other noble instruments, either stay in the Bardhall or are bought by Journeymen with enough gold to spare.
I had my own harp, which was not normal, but my path to the Bardhall had not been normal, either.
Before I could remember, I was apprenticed to a harpist and harp-maker in the village of Jerden. I learned to judge and shape wood, to make strings, and to repair broken pieces. I looked forward to taking the shop from his old hands, and keeping him as well as he had kept me, which was generously. But one spring, when I was eleven, he announced that I was to play for the Masters of the Bardhall in Slatten. Though old to be a Bard-in-training, I was accepted on the strength of my playing.
I then asked the old harpist why he had given me up. He handed me his harp, looked me in the eye, and told me that his life was almost ended. Indeed, he never returned to Jerden – and neither did I.
My harp, once his harp, made not by his father but by his grandfather, still held the spirit of the tree within it. I stroked my hands over the smooth, shaped wood, and wondered: How different could the flesh of a man and the wood of a tree be, if both were filled with life? Was it worse to make a flute from the bone of man than to carve a harp from the trunk of a tree? How was one wrong and the other right?
I questioned as I touched the strings, and so set my feet on a path I had not walked for many years.
