Elan swiped his sword from a dead noble. Some silk-shirted idiot who had offended a blackwood runner in the taverna one night; a situation that ended with a dagger sprouting from silk-shirt’s jugular. Immediately following, the taverna had emptied in a stampede of smugglers, fallen nobility, and others of questionable virtue. Elanzah Andrej, then a very wise twelve-year-old (maybe eleven, but probably twelve), took advantage of the confusion to swipe the dead man’s sword and spirit it into his little loft above the stables.
Now a smirking, wiser still, (probably) fifteen-year-old Elan ran his fingers over the cage of the elegant hilt and down the sweet watered steel. He’d taken the stone out of the crossguard ages ago, since it was bad enough that a taverna boy would have a sword at allΒ β and not strictly legal. A sword with a sapphire the size of his thumbprint embedded in it would definitely draw attention.
He’d put it back in its setting someday. The day he turned seventeen and enlisted in the Mirador Elite.
This moment of appreciation accomplished, he rolled his sword into unassuming burlap, tucked it under his arm, and trotted down to the Taverna Miralina proper to meet Severan. The dark of the tap room wrapped him up, the smell of fermented honey and unwashed men. The smell of home. Several men high on l’anisea liquor lolled at a table, lost in the gods knew what kind of hallucinations. A more conventionally sodden man sang an ode to the bored prostitute leaning over his table. Elan picked his way through similar scenes until the sour mead smell shifted, and a nearby hookah bubbled. Honeyed tobacco, fresh and sweet.
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