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.
It was rumored by some that an ancient evil had returned,
in those brief years before the War of the Lance. Finn was
one of those who harbored them, the populace whispered.
For in the depths of his seaside cavern lay an intricate web
of still larger caverns, tunnel devolving on tunnel, the
darkness slick and echoing. This was the legendary Finn’s
Ear, where it was supposed that all sounds muttered in
shelter of stone eventually and eternally circled and spoke.
At the heart of Finn’s labyrinth was said to lay a monster,
his black scales glittering with cold malice and devouring
acid.
They said that the beast and the bandit had struck an
uneasy truce: Finn soothed the monster with the music of
well paid but exhausted bards, and, lulled by continual
song, the great creature received in turn the company of the
bandit king’s uncooperative prisoners. And as to the fate of
those poor wretches, even the rumormongers were silent.
In the rough border country between Lemish and
Southlund, cooling myself in the high foothills of the
Garnet Mountains, I pondered the looming necessity of
actually going to Finn’s Ear, where the bards were singing
and the caverns echoing. It was the only place I had not
searched for the song.
Hooded as always to hide my livid scars, I crossed that
border and stalked through the burning peninsula, keeping
the towers of Caergoth to the north as I traveled toward the
little villages in the west. My route took me within Finn’s
own sight, had he cared to leave his rocky throne and look
west from the beetling cliffs.
For days I wandered through hot country and distant
rising smoke. I would stand outside the village pubs,
hooded and shrouded like a highwayman or a self-important
mage, and through open windows I heard the nervous talk,
the despair of farmer and villager alike.
Spontaneous fires arose in the dry grain fields, leaving
the countryside a wasteland of ash and cinder. In droves the
farmers were leaving, no longer able to fight the flames. All
this disaster, they claimed, had enraged Finn to the point
where, in the search for remedy, he had offered an
extravagant bounty to any bard or enchanter who could
extinguish the fires with song or incantation.
Hard words about a curse drifted through one of the
windows. I heard the name of my father. It lightened my
steps somehow, as I passed through the deserted village of
Ebrill in the early morning, then over the ruins of Llun and
Mercher, moving ever westward, believing now that my
quest would at last be done. Endaf was the last place Finn
would look for a far-flung quarry, and my father’s name
rode on the smoky air.
It was midmorning when I reached Endaf. I wandered
the village for a while, weaving a path amid the deserted
cottages and charred huts and lean-tos, all looking like a
grim memory of a village. And it was odd walking there,
passing the old flame-gutted ruins of the inn and knowing
that somewhere in its vanished upper story my father had
received the scars I had mysteriously inherited.
I turned abruptly from the ashes. I was eighteen and
impatient, and had come very far for the truth. The old acrid