Mikhail's Lymeran (masterwork) lute

It arrived in a package, with a note apologizing for a missed birthday. Inside was a masterwork lute, years of bench work, from Danil, a friend of Mikhail’s from the university at Durwyn. Danil’s own family made it. They are the Lymerans, who have been building instruments in that city for as long as anyone troubles to reckon and who also put the song out against the Draus, and a lute off their bench is years of work and is commissioned rather than bought. Mikhail had meant to commission one himself and had never had the money for it, which is why this one came as a gift and not a purchase.

What it replaced was his father’s lute, which his mother had given his father and which had come down to him from the pair of them. He sat with the two instruments side by side, laid a hand on the old one and told his mother it would get to retire soon. Danil’s note was less tender: lose this lute and I won’t be as forgiving as your mother was.

No description of the lute itself was ever set down: no wood, no ornament, no maker’s mark. What it does is plain enough. Two points to any performance given on it, and nothing to the bardic work that shares the name.

Its first performance came at a river camp on the road north, before an escort of the devout. A run of humiliating fumbles, and then the best playing of his life. Bread was broken, the camp was reduced to tears, the escort dropped its guard, and even Aldo was taken aback. Riding out the next morning Koa asked what magic had been put into the instrument. There was none. It was only very good, and made by people who have been making them a long time. Since then it has knocked a wall in the dark and very nearly brought a sentry down on them, and it has shaken a crystal loose from the roots under the Twisted Grove, quietly enough not to wake what was sleeping in that chamber.