Mikhail's rapier & lute

Mikhail came out of southern Idir with almost nothing. He had paid a couple of copper for a place in the back of a merchant wagon and agreed to play in the evenings, on the understanding that it would carry him as far as Forven. The wagoners (a mumbling old man and his son) worked him for free labor and free music for three nights, fed him scraps, and left him in the grasslands with his pack gone: the silver, the borrowed University books, most of his supplies.

What he kept was the lute in its case, a dagger, and about two silver and five copper. The rapier he nearly lost. It had gone out of the back of the wagon somewhere on the road, and he only found it walking back the way he had come, by a glint of metal at the roadside. He drew it there in the grass to look at it. He had never seen a more beautiful sword, and it was his mother Elira’s.

The blade itself was never much. Trugs reforged it for him at the end of that first year on the road: a proper rapier now, set on the original guard, because the guard was the part that mattered.

The lute was his father’s before it was his. Elira gave it to Alaric, which is how one instrument came down from both parents. Mikhail lent it out once, to Aldo, who asked pointedly for the loan of it to write a song mocking Dan, and it came back with its tuning ruined. He carried it until a better one reached him from home. What became of it after that was never written down.