Gerald

Background

He played the flute at the Broken Shield in Loshev, badly, and the first night the company heard him nobody in the room had a name for him. He volunteered to fetch Elliot for two copper and went off at a run without stopping for his travel cloak. He was named the following night.

There was schooling behind him. At the end of that winter he left Loshev saying he was sick of the place and going back to his college, and Mikhail, who studied at the University in Durwyn, says the two of them were students together. Where the college stood and what he read there was never written down. What worried Mikhail was the thought of him back among their old classmates, spreading every rumor there had ever been.

Personality

Thin-skinned. Mikhail heckled his pitch in front of a full room on the night they met, which was a small cruelty dressed as advice, and Gerald was at war from that night on. He came back the next evening with open hate in his face, stood through Mikhail’s set with his flute in one hand and his arms folded, and when he finally had the stage he chose a piece written for wind and famously thin on strings, purely to make the contest harder to lose. He lost it anyway, jumped down off the stage and stormed out of the building, and then had to come back in for the cloak.

He is not a good musician, and everybody in Loshev except one man knows it. Cleven Gemsmith is his sole and devoted admirer, once tipped him six silver and told him it was always a pleasure to hear him play; after the duel even Cleven allowed that perhaps he was not as good as he had thought.

He did get better. When Mikhail next heard him, two seasons on and in another city, there was real improvement in the playing, enough that it would have deserved saying so to somebody worth saying it to.

The Cautionary Tale

He went to Haudh-Gwenn, which he had announced he would, and he was the night’s performer in a tavern there when the party walked in wearing merchants’ faces. His second number he introduced as a cautionary tale, in the way a man says a title, and it was a commissioned smear against the Valiant Few: a verse for Aldo and the dagger where his morals had been, a verse for Koa strutting into town and waking the farms with late-night crowing, a verse for Mikhail’s brooding eyes and vintage wine. A dozen of the guards in the room knew the chorus and sang it with him, which is how the party learned the audience was planted.

Then he sang a fourth verse that was not in the commission, about Lord Beltran dressed so fine, a polished lie in a structured spine, who writes the laws and breaks them clean and dines on gold while the streets go without. Nobody sang along to that one. The guards came up out of their chairs and he went out the back.

They found him hours later behind a locked door in the Silver Web’s sewer den, where Whent and three others were beating him for going off script. He was bleeding inside and near death by the time they reached him, and it cost the party the last healing potion they had to make him fit to move.

On the wagon out he explained himself. Beltran’s people had offered him a job writing songs about the Valiant Few, the coin was decent, so he took it, and every time he sang them it felt wrong. Then, unasked, he said the thing that turned out to matter: that Beltran surrounds himself with the worst kind of people, that Whent was not merely sick but kept on purpose, that he is not the only such dog on that leash, and that the whole of Beltran’s close circle has lately gone sunken-eyed and worn in exactly the same way. The party had been trying to work out what was wrong with Whent. Gerald had already told them.

He apologized to Mikhail in the middle of it, for having decided two years earlier that a man correcting his pitch was stealing his light rather than trying to help him. That was the end of the rivalry.

Koa set him down in Westwood with two gold and seven silver and left him to take a room and rest, which was as much as anybody was willing to trust him with. He meant to hitch back to Durwyn from there, and whether he got there was never discovered. He was talked about afterwards and never seen again.