Chapter 86

Elandor asked whether he might play for me on a night with no moon.

He asked it from the threshold of my mother’s room, with his hands behind his back. I had been in Ellisar for nearly a month, and he had never once come further into a room than I had nodded at him. I nodded him to the chair by the hearth.

He had brought it under his cloak: a small harp, the kind you hold on your knee, of dark wood gone almost black with handling, with a neck that curved like a swan’s. A crack in the soundboard had been mended long ago with a strip of paler wood, very neatly.

“It was hers,” he said. “She brought it from Vaelmoor. Nobody has played it since.” He turned a peg a quarter turn, and listened. “I have been tuning it all week. I did not know whether you would want to hear it.”

We both knew what he meant to play. I had sat at my mother’s table with her songbook under my palms and seen what the tune was: a thread, laid round and round a child until not even she could f