shoulders of the crouching footmen, once climbing the back
of a rather tall archer for a closer look at the proceedings,
only to be shaken off like a dog shakes off water. On that
occasion I asked Breca if it would hurt to let the little fellow
play, and he told me that I had yet to learn the difference
between disdain and respect. Told me that compassion
toward a kender was the ruin of fortunes, or some such rural
proverb I scorned until later that night, when I had lost a
substantial amount of money to the little creature, trying to
guess under which of three walnut shells he had placed a
piece of dried corn.
Indeed, I was no gambler, but I was drawn by the
kender, by the sense of childhood and of play, by the sense
that he felt distracted from his true business by the
preparations for siege. It reminded me of how things stood
with me ten years ago, when I was six and put away
childish things in the service of Solamnia, and perhaps
those memories lost me even more money at dice, for I
challenged the kender at gaming often, trying to decide
whether I pitied him or envied him.
The other outlandish folk were more distant, in keeping
with the customs of their people. The dwarf was impatient
for battle, at the ramparts often, wrapped in metal and furs
and a sullen quiet, brandishing his wicked-looking axe and
staring out over the expanse of snow for dragons, armies,
movement. I had little to say to him, and suspected he
preferred it that way.
Nor had I much to say to the elf maiden, exotic, distant,
and a little frightening in her shining and most unfeminine
armor. Golden hair, green eyes – the legend that their
women are more beautiful than ours cannot be proved true
or false by one example, one woman, but if it could, no
doubt the elves would have sent this one for comparison.
Yet unlike many of the girls of our country, posing,
giggling, bearing garlands and gloves for the knight of their
fancy, for any boy at the borders of knighthood, this one,
this Laurana, was not caught up in her own beauty. Indeed,
she seemed to have forgotten or be forgetting such things,
rapt in a story of lances and of high battle, the like of which
I could not know, with all my imagining, with all my
waiting. And forgive me, kind lady who copies my words to
an absent brother, but now it seems that flowers and
scarves, the tedious attention to hair, to the slope of a dress
on the shoulders – it seems that such things are distant now,
the meaningless steps to a dance I have left early, no longer
able to see my partner. More important now is the memory
of the elf maiden, kneeling and glittering perhaps less
brightly than I remember but as brightly as I saw her at the
time, above the lances she had brought for the defense of
the tower, offering to instruct us in their use, had we not
been so rigid and scornful and dazzled as to refuse her
teaching.
For the lances were the great mystery as we waited, what
Breca might have called the wild card in the deck, the
painted shard of lead that served as the spot on the die. But
not at all like a die so loaded, the lances seemed larger and
heavier than they were, lying in the courtyard of the fortress
– larger and heavier because of the legends around them.
For you remember the SONG OF HUMA, that HE TOOK
UP THE DRAGONLANCE, HE TOOK UP THE STORY,
and the story, whatever it was, lay somewhere upon each of
the weapons, so at times you might imagine that they
gleamed with some light beyond polishing, beyond tricks of
reflected sun or moonlight.
But I had grown up among legends, and though I had to
admire the workmanship of the lances, had handled several
of them in the long days of waiting, like the most Measured
of our knights I believed this light, this mystery, was the