Lymeran family

The Lymerans build instruments in Durwyn, and they have been building them for as long as anyone in the city troubles to reckon. The bench works in wood, lyres before anything else and lutes after. One lute is years of work, which is why a Lymeran instrument is commissioned rather than bought off a wall, and why Mikhail never had one of his own: he had meant to commission one and had never had the money for it.

They are also the house that made the song. Not long before Mikhail left the university a Lymeran piece went up in a tavern in the city, scathing, tearing into the Draus, and he thought it a rough piece of work even as he was still turning it over days later on the road east.

That was not the only thing of theirs he took with him. A few nights out of the city, asked by a wagoner’s boy to play his favorite, he declined to, because that one meant too much to hand to a stranger’s son at a campfire. He reached instead for a tune out of the feud, played off what the Lymerans had built and put his own turns and lyrical lines over the top of it. The boy heard it out and told him he supposed that one was not for country boys.

Danil is of the house, son of the artisan who kept the bench, and he knew Mikhail at the university. The family later made Mikhail a masterwork lute, and Danil sent it east as a birthday present some months late.