Somewhere to the east before a white arras, gilded with laurel and gold adulation, the bard sings a lie in a listening house, and Caergoth burns in the world's imagining, while the bard holds something back from his singing, something resembling the truth.
But let not the breath of the fire touch your father,
Orestes, my son, my arm in the dwindling world, my own truth my prophecy, soothed the effacing mother, and darkly and silently
Orestes listened, the deadly harp poised in his hand circuitous.
And the word turned to deed and the song to a journey by night, and the listening years to a cloak and a borrowed name, as the boy matured in his mother's word, and the harp strings droned in the facing wind as he rode out alone, seeking Arion.
V
High on the battlements of Vingaard Keep as the wind plunged over the snow-covered walls,
Orestes perched in a dark cloak huddled, the window below him gabled in light, and he muttered and listened, his honored impatience grown loud at the song of the bard by the fire.
Melodiously, Arion sang of the world's beginning, the shape of us all retrieved by the hands of the gods from chaos, the oceans inscribing the dream of the plains, the sun and the moons appointing the country with light and the passage of summer to winter, the bright land's corners lovely with trees, the leaves quick with life with nations of kestrel with immaculate navies of doves, with the first plainsong of the summer sparrow and the song from the bard sustaining it all, breathing the phase of the moon's awakening, singing the births and the deaths of the heroes, all of it rising to the ears of Orestes.
And rising beyond him it peopled the winter stars with a light that hovered and stilled above him, as nightly in song the old constellations resumed their imagined shapes, breathing the fire of the first creation over the years to the time that the song descends in a rain of light today on your shoulder with a frail incandescence of music and memory and the last fading green of a garden that never and always invented itself.
For the bard's song is a distant belief, a belief in the shape of distance.
All the while as the singing arose from the hearth and the hall, alone in the suffering wind, Orestes crouched and listened slowly, reluctantly beginning to sing, his dreams of murder quiet in the rapture of harp strings.
VI
Hieronymo he called himself,
Hieronymo when down from the battlements he came, supplanted and nameless entering the hall in the wake of the wind and darkness.
Arion dreamt by the fire, and his words were a low, shaping melody: the tongue of the flame inclined in the hall of his breath and the heart of the burning was a map in the eye of Orestes, who crouched by the hearth and offered his harp to his father's slanderer, smiling and smiling his villainous rubric,
Teach me your singing, Arion, he said, adopting the voice and the eye of imagined Hieronymo deep in disguises, and none in the court knew Alecto's son -
Teach me your singing, memorable bard,
The light in the heart of winter,
Singer of origins, framer of history,
Drive my dead thoughts over the winter plains
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
Old Arion smiled at the boy's supplication at the fracture of coals, at the bright hearth's flutter at the nothing that swirled at the heart of the fire: for something had passed in his distant imagining, dark as a wing on the snow-settled battlements, a step on a grave he could only imagine there in the warmth of the keep where the thoughts were of song and of music and memory, where something still darker was enjoining the bard to take on the lad who knelt in the firelight.
Some things, he said,
The poet brings forth.
Others the poet holds back:
For words and the silence
Defining each other
In spaces of holiness.
Softly the old hand rose and descended, the harp-handling fingers at rest on the brow of the bold and mysterious boy.
The apprenticeship was sealed in Orestes's bravado, the name of HIERONYMO fixed to the terms of indenture, all in the luck of an hour, and depth of a season, but somewhere within it a darker invention that sprawled in the depths of the heart and the dwindling earth.
VII
So masked in intention, in a sacred name for a year and a day
Orestes surrendered his anger to music and wind, apprenticeship honed on the laddered wires of a harp that the gods whispered over, of a wandering in lore and the cloudy geographies tied to the fractured past, and he dwelt by the poet and traveled to Dargaard to the heart of Solanthus, to imperiled Thelgaard, to nameless castles of memory where the knights abided in yearning for something that moved in the channels of history, redeeming the damaged blood of the rose, while the story that Arion sang, his back to the dream and incredulous fire, discovered the years and the fading arm of the sword.
Seven songs of instruction arose from the fire and the dreaming: the spiral of Quen love's first geometry the wing of Habbakuk brooding above the world the circle of Solin rash and recurrent heart the arc of Jolith dividing intention from deed the white fire of Paladine perfected song of the dragon the prayer of Matheri merciful grammar of thought and the last one the high one light of Branchala that measures all song in the shape of words
Alone in the margin of darkness, Orestes surrendered and listened singing reluctantly, joyfully, as the gods and the planets and the cycle of years devolved in a long dream of murder and the cleansing of harp strings.
VIII
A year and a day the seasons encircled, according to fable and ancient decrees of enchantment, as the gnats' choir of autumn surrendered to ice and the turn of the year approached like a death and the listening castles mislaid under snow.
Orestes's apprenticeship led to a circle of fire, where the harp he had mastered and the seven songs and the fourteen modes of incalculable magic circled him back to the night and the keep and the wintry eyes of the bard singing memory into flesh, into stone, into dreaming and wind, and
Arion, he said, and Arion, tell me of time
Of the rending of Krynn and betrayals.
The bard took the harp in the foreseen night: for his memory darkened the edge of the past when knowing devises the shape of creation, and the Rending changed as he spoke of its birth in the spiral of prophecy, the brush of its wing on the glittering domes and spires of Istar the swelling of moons and the stars' convergence and voices and thunderings and lightnings and earthquakes and Arion told us that night by the hearth that hail and fire in a downpour of blood tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass, and the mountains were burning, and the sea became blood and above and below us the heavens were scattered, and locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the planet, as Arion told us, and Orestes leaned closer and ARION, he said, and
Arion, teach me of time
Of the famine and plague and Pyrrhus Alecto.
Arion stroked the harp and began, his white hair cascading across the gold arm of the harp as though he were falling through song into sleep and the winter stilled at the touch of the string, and he sang the last verses as hidden Orestes reclined and remembered and listened:
Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:
Pyrrhus Alecto, The knight of the night of betrayals
Firebrand of burning that clouded the straits of Hylo,
The oil and ash on the water, ignited country.
Forever and ever the villages burn in his passage,
And the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies