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beyond it, down a long neck fraught with tuning frets.
    â€œI am Loyt Singerson,” he said, “and I think you are a legend.”
    â€œAn’ legends drink beer,” Ruana answered, “then there be many a legend here tonight.”
    Singerson smiled. “So they may say in the North. In the South, they say legend is bound in the strings of the harp. My poor loyt is not a harp, but she will serve for a song.”
    He set a wooden bowl upon the table, and put his foot upon the bench where Ruana sat to steady his instrument, and swept his hand across its strings. All around him, talk quieted as the first notes struck the air.
    He sang of kings out of Lostland, of changeling children who found their way home only to find home gone to dust with time. He sang of heroes, of dragonslayers, and a queen who had taken a sword for a lover.
    A person with a suspicious mind, Ruana decided, might think that last tale based on herself.
    By the time his singing was done, Loyt’s wooden bowl was full with copper coin, and no one cared any longer about the stranger with the sword.
    Those who drank there were working men, tied to the land and their crafts. They left by ones and twos, and soon only Loyt and Ruana remained, dicing in the corner by the fire. She had luck and the skill of years, and he was very good at cheating. Nevertheless, she had won much of his store of coin from him by the time he chose to speak.
    She had known it would come to speaking, soon or late.
    â€œIn the hills, a day’s ride from here—north, that would be—lies a village much troubled. By what, the villagers of Paloe cannot say, for they do not know. But it screams in the night like a woman in childbed, so they say. And the women there weep for lost children. That they know.”
    Ruana smiled grimly and drank from her wooden mug. “An’ tha knew me to tell me this, why did tha not name me to them? Yon bowl mought have held silver as well as copper.”
    Loyt smiled, and his white teeth flashed. “They would not thank me to bring them a legend in the flesh, Twiceborn.”
    He did not ask to see the sword she carried, then or later.
    Once upon a time there was a boy called Moonflute. As in Starharp and Moonflute; two great gaudy nonexistent legends that you could throw away your whole life over and at the end of it not know whether you’d gotten anything worth having, or, indeed, anything at all.
    He was called Moonflute because he didn’t have any other name at all; a child-of-the-mist, as the saying goes, left on the priest’s doorstep nine months and a bit after some big feast-day, born to a woman who thought it better to leave town. The gold she left around his neck went for his keep, and the priest was careful to melt it down before he sold it. Some patrimonies aren’t worth claiming.
    The boy grew, and was apprenticed, and was called an airy handful of things until he was old enough to have opinions and ensure that one name stuck.
    Moonflute. The Starharp’s shadow, that would make the Starharp show itself so that it could be played; so that playing it would wake the Crownking, who would summon the quarreling gods to order and bring peace to the world. A suitable name for a big-eyed boy who looked too much like the lord of Corchado for anyone’s peace and who believed, fiercely, in the singer’s tales of nobility and grandeur chanted for a coin in the dooryard of the alehouse where he served.
    He grew tall on his father’s blood, lean on scraps, and fast on numerous would-be beatings. The likeness didn’t disappear with age.
    The year that he was twelve, a passing traveler, a bit too well-dressed to be where he was, asked his name. When told it, with defiance, the traveler did not laugh. He spoke, afterward and at length, to Moonflute’s master, who spoke in turn to Moonflute. The innkeeper said nothing to the point, but gifted his startled scullion with a generous