The scene: Tam, November, Osmorn, Winter Moon, and Martin are in an inn, sitting around the fire after dinner.
Osmorn looked up from his mandolin and looks at November. “Have I ever told you about how I became a bard?”
November shook his head as he was stroking Iris who was asleep on his lap.
“No, I don’t think so.” Osmorn shifted in his seat to make room for Winter Moon who was doing a creditable impression of Iris.
“It was shortly after I was exiled, when I first got caught by Andraste’s band. When I was learning how to do, well, anything at all. There were two humans in the camp: Thomas and Ivy. I might have mentioned them. Not sure. Anyway. Ivy was in charge of yelling at Thomas to yell at me. Thus far, I had learned to cook and even set up a cot. I was making progress.
“‘Thomas, tell Songbird to go learn how to hunt.’ Ivy said one morning.
“‘Songbird—‘
“‘I heard, I heard. So like. Bow and arrow?’
“‘That’s the easiest way,’ Thomas agreed, and handed me the weapons.”
Osmorn scritched behind Winter’s ears and picked up the story after taking a sip of mulled wine.
“Jump ahead to that evening. I had wasted ten of the twelve arrows Thomas had given me, and hadn’t hit anything apart from the ground. Oh, and one tree. I was ashamed, angry, tired, hungry, and determined not to go back to camp without something to show for it. Of course that meant I would need to be able to FIND the camp again. But that was a future problem.
“And then I saw it. An entire brace of pheasant. All roosted down for the night. There was almost no space between them. There was no WAY I could miss all of them!
“I missed all of them. Twice. They didn’t even have the grace to get spooked when my first arrow hissed past a good two yards to the left of them. The second arrow was close enough to make the entire flock take flight, and in the dark I knew I would never find them again.
“I watched them take off into the air and without knowing why I hissed out the meanest, foulest, most profane words I knew at the pheasants.
“All my frustration and humiliation went into those words. And to my extreme confusion a couple of them fell to the ground, stone dead.
“I went over to pick them up. In that moment, things that Andraste had hinted at started to make sense. She had suggested that my songs; indeed my very words had the potential for magic. She said people who shape spells from songs like that are called bards.
“And in that moment I realized what it REALLY means to be a bard: one is a bard when one can kill two birds with one’s tone.”
FIN