"Well?"
"A lad of mine bears news--a black-eyed rogue from the hills of Carlyath, sharp as a sword's point, quaint as an elf. I sent him gleaning, and he has done bravely. You would hear his tale from his own lips?"
She nodded and seemed distraught.
"Yes. Bring him in to me," she said.
Fulviac left her, to return with a slim youth sidling in behind him like a shadow. The lad had a nut-brown skin and ruddy cheeks, a pair of twinkling eyes, a thatch of black hair over his forehead. Bred amid the hills of Carlyath, where the women were scarlet Eves, and the land a paradise, he had served in Gilderoy as apprentice to an armourer. Carlyath's wilds and the city's roguery had mingled in him fantastic strains of extravagant sentiment and cunning. Half urchin, half elf, he stood with bent knees and slouched shoulders, his black eyes alert on Fulviac, his lord.
The man thrust him forward by the collar, with an eloquent gesture.
"The whole tale. Try your wit."
The Carlyath lad advanced one foot, and with an impudent southern smirk, remarked--
"This, madame, is an infatuated world."
Thus, sententiously delivered, he plunged into a declamation with a picturesque and fanciful extravagance that he had imbibed from the strolling romancers of his own land.