A. Juri Wolff
Eight months after the commission broke apart, Tristan is back on the road, playing taverns for a meal and a bed and collecting the songs other people have stopped singing. He found his mother’s unfinished song. He sang it whole. He thought that was the end of something.Then an old man sings him a tune he has never heard, and Tristan’s hands find the key before the second word. A stranger in a crowded room asks whether he knows The Warden’s Lament and is out the door before he can answer. And at a cairn in an empty field, the music he has always aimed at the world goes silent, until he stops trying.The others are scattered on purpose. Elara, a former Watch captain hunted by a noble family, is running short of names and starting to look for a stranger way to disappear. Vesper, deep in an old scholar’s archive in Val Soren, has found a ceremony hidden inside old texts. Silas keeps quiet track of all of them from a locked box under his floor, and has begun to wonder why he was sent on the first job at all.The stone they counterfeited has reached the people who paid for it. Inside the Order of the True Silence, a careful scholar has declared the old practice dead. A colleague with other plans needs the Order to believe the opposite, and she knows how to make a fear spread without ever naming it.And someone has been following Tristan from town to town, writing down what she sees. She thinks she knows what he is. He has no word for it yet.The Warden’s Lament is the second book in The Dark Bard Series, a fantasy of music, memory, and the old powers that live in songs handed from voice to voice until no one remembers what they were for. It picks up where The Minstrel’s Shadow left off.
