47

You're also planning on retrieving the Demonsight Stone. You'll want to know when there's magic around.

You make your way to your mansion, tucked away on one of the smaller streets in the noble district. Sorting out your plans and theories is distracting enough that you're halfway up your front walk before you notice the music. You raise your head to discover someone sprawled across your front steps, strumming a stringed instrument and singing, in a rich, honeyed voice, a song that you abruptly realize is about you.

At the crossroads they met, on a dark summer night,

With the shame of their crime on their backs,

Though they knew not the threat they'd been called forth to fight,

Or the cause of the mayor's dread acts.

Next

The singer smiles up at you, as though they've visited a thousand times. Their shining black hair falls loosely to their shoulders, the simple style contrasting with their foreign and elaborate purple-and-silver robe. You're not certain if it's a man's robe, a woman's, or neither, though it's too formal to be lounging in on other people's stairs regardless.

"It's a pleasure, Jun," they say, offering you their hand as they come to their feet. Their accent is unfamiliar, too. "I've been wondering if you would ever come to a performance. Is that vain?"

"I think you have me at a disadvantage," you say. There are too many other questions rolling around your mind right now.

They dip into a half-bow with a flourish. "My name is Min. I arrived from Sienha a few months ago. You might have heard my songs about your journey at the Eternal Seal, or the Blessed Crown, or any of the taverns and theaters in Archa."

A Sienhan bard chronicling your journey does sound vaguely familiar. Sienha's refused to trade with Ithos for more than a century, so any Sienhan traveler arriving from across the ocean is rare enough to attract attention, but it's too difficult to keep track of everyone who writes songs about you.

Next

That might have to change, though. That reference to meeting at a crossroads was unnerving. No one should know the details of how you met in Elith, let alone someone who, to the best of your knowledge, wasn't in Ithos at the time.

"I thought you deserved a chance to judge a song early," Min says.