The second message comes in a package. They find it outside the chapel as they leave Vespers. Lamorak and Aglovale bring it up to the castle and open it together—as knights they are fearless, but they are nonetheless wary, as they expect something along the lines of a human head.
The box contains no heads. Inside, wrapped in a faded swathe of dark samite, is a harp. The light of day is fading, but they can see that it is an oddly shaped instrument, bent at odd angles, carved from a very pale, strange wood. Lying on top of the samite is a small bundle wrapped in paper, and a letter, slightly wrinkled. Lamorak opens the bundle, and they find six locks of hair, tied in careful loops. Three are fair as flax, and three have tawny curls. There is no mistaking it—one snippet has been cut from the heads of each of Pellinore’s children, even the long-deceased Alyne.
There are other things, too, scattered among the soft strands. Lamorak thinks they are pearls at first, and scoops up a handful, only to recoil at the touch. Aglovale blanches as he investigates the bundle. What his brother believed to be pearls were actually teeth—milk teeth, tiny, glinting in the candlelight, more than a hundred altogether. It is then that they look back at the harp, and realize that it has been carved from bone.
Lamorak cannot hold back his curiosity. He reaches forward and plucks a harpstring. They hear nothing, but a twinge of creeping nausea shudders through their bodies until the shivering string falls still.
Dornar has few words for them. “Suffer me not to put you to the sword,” he writes. “You made me flesh and bone when you sang me into being, as a creature of fey birth—cauled in shadow, baptized in blood, and born of fear and malice. I will have what’s mine, while my wandering soul yet hungers; so sing on, sing on, sing on.”
They cast the vile instrument into the fire. The next morning they find what’s left of the harp lying in the hearth, twisted and black and jutting out from among the ashes. They bury the bones out in the woods, far away from the castle.
