shoulder, and stared into the swirl of broken light.
There was a dead man. He was small. His shadow
swayed back and forth in a room of wood and stone,
dappling the floor below him with dark, then light, then
dark. His fine clothing fluttered and his hood lifted slightly.
I saw his face . . . his arms . . .
“The scars. Lady, they are like mine. Who is he?”
“Orestes,” she replied, stirring the water. “Pyrrhus
Orestes. Your father, hanged with a harp string.”
“And . . . WHO?” I asked, my sudden urge for
vengeance stabbing as hot as the BEATHA, as the burning.
“By his own hand, Dove,” L’Indasha said. “When he
thought he could neither redeem nor . . . continue the line.”
REDEEM NOR CONTINUE. It was quite confusing and
I was muddled from the potion and the hour.
L’Indasha’s face reflected off the fractured ice in the
bucket: it was older, wounded, a map of lost lands. “You
weren’t told. But Orestes got his desire and now the scars
have ripened.”
Mother clutched my shoulder. The pain relented a bit.
“Continue what? Lady, ’tis a riddle.”
A riddle the druidess answered, there in the vaulted
cave, as the weather outside turned colder still and colder,
on a night like those on which the fisherman claim you
could walk on ice from Caergoth across the waters to
Eastport.
She told me that my father, Orestes, had ridden
desperately westward as the peninsula burned at the hands
of the invaders. He rode with freebooters – with Nerakans
and the goblins from Throt, and they were rough customers,
but he passed through Caergoth unharmed. None of them
knew he was the son of Pyrrhus Alecto – “the Firebringer,”
as the songs called my grandfather.
“Why did he … why DIDN’T he …” I began to ask. I
was only fourteen.
The druidess understood and lifted her hand. “He was just
one, and young. And there is a harder reason. Orestes, NOT
YOUR GRANDFATHER, had brought the fires to the
peninsula. You see, he murdered his master. Your
grandmother had fostered his apprenticeship with Anon of
Coastlund. She taught him from childhood that he must
recover his father’s honor at any cost. Your grandfather’s
honor. So he killed Arion, that he should sing no longer of
your grandfather’s shame.”
Mother’s grip tightened on my shoulder. I shrugged her
away yet again. Again the scars on my neck and face bit
and nettled.
“Go on.”
“Then the goblins came, when they heard the new song
Orestes sang. …”
When Orestes saw what his words had wrought, he ran.
It was at the last village seawards – Endaf, where the coast
tumbles into the Cape of Caergoth – that Orestes could
abide no more of the plunder and burning. Caergoth was in
flames behind him, and Ebrill, where the bandits first
camped, then Llun and Mercher, vanished forever in the
goblin’s torchlight.
He was just one man, and he was young, but even so,
surely it shamed him as much as it angered him.
At Endaf he stopped and turned into the fray. He
dismounted, broke through the goblins, and joined in a
frantic attempt to rescue a woman from a burning inn.
Orestes was sent to the rooftop, or he asked to go. The
beams gave way with him, and the goblins watched and
laughed as Orestes fell into the attic, which fell around him
in turn, crashing down and up again in a rapture of fire.
But he lived. He was fire-marked, hated of men, and
they would know him by his scars henceforth. The burns
had bitten deep and his face was forever changed into a
stiffened mask of grief. A fugitive and a vagabond he was
upon Krynn, and wherever he traveled, they turned him
away. To Kaolin he went, and to Garnet, as far north as
Thelgaard Keep and south to the coast of Abanasinia. In all
places, his scars and his story arrived before him – the tale
of a bard who, with a single verse of a song, had set his
country to blaze and ruin.
He took to bride a woman from Mercher, orphaned by the