Kael had watched, sick and twisted. "That rotten mother's son ordered her smashed! He couldn't find me, so he played it safe and killed them all!"
He went mad for a little while, and Flaith clung to him with sharp nails digging into his arm and back, screaming in his ear. Only when she buried her teeth in his neck and tasted blood did he come back to sanity.
Now, remembering all that, and knowing how the death of his father and the destruction of the Eclipse ate in his middle with a sort of sharp, acid bitterness, Flaith watched the McCanahan lift the harp from where he had flung it. A silvern string was curled up, snapped by the rocks across which it had skidded.
"Now, how can we replace that?" Kael wondered. And then his fingers were slipping off his boot and lifting loose the harpstring he had taken from his dead father's wrist.
"It isn't a d-note," he told Flaith, "but it will have to do. I'll not touch it oftener than I must."
He attached the string, and tested it with sweeping fingers. He growled, "Only Ossian himself would know the difference."
The McCanahan brooded less and less in the days that followed, and as they moved along the road that bent in a wide arc about Drekkora and beyond the snowtopped hills of Sharn, he slipped back into the Kael McCanahan she had known in the taverns. Laughter came back to his lips, and he turned more and more to the harp, coaxing magic from its strings, that seemed to soothe his spirit.
As he played, Flaith hummed with him, and words came to her lips, words that matched the wild, clear music, and she sang these words to the ancient melodies, and at last they came to Clonn Fell.
The stalls that lined the Square of the Balang were hung with priceless tapestries from the looms of Beinoll and Drithdraga, and were bright with the potteries of Lamanneen. Men and women of city house and desert tent brushed through the stalls, fingering the wares, haggling over prices, dipping into leather purses for stored coins. Many there were whose fingers waved to the sounds that came from the big fountain in the square where a tall man sat and played a silver harp.