Do you play an instrument, Frederick? If so, what instrument do you play? If not, is there an instrument you would like to master, provided you had enough time to do so?
“A year or so back, I owned a lute, which I had purchased from a vendor in Ferox some years earlier. It was my hope that I could help Olivia and a few of the others entertain the rest of the Shepherds. As someone with absolutely no history of musical experience, a simple strumming instrument seemed to be the best fit… Gods, how wrong I was.
Apparently, I was so horrendously bad at strumming my lute that Lord Chrom asked me to practice at a considerable distance away from camp. Cordelia, who is quite gifted with a harp, offered to show me the basics. For a time, I watched her and Stahl plucking their harps, eventually gathering enough from the movement of their fingers to give it another try… Lady Lissa likened my playing to the sounds of a screeching cat clawing at a chalkboard.
After a while, I decided that music was not my forte, and gave my lute away to a young girl in a village we passed by. Some time later, I would learn that this same girl had become quite a popular bard in eastern Valm. No doubt, this meant that I was entirely unfit to play the lute at all.
Regardless, my failure left me rather glum for a while... that was until young Donnel asked me to lend him a hand with a folk song he wanted to sing by the camp fire one night. I hadn’t any idea that a pair of spoons could be used as an instrument, but Donnel insists that I am ‘somethin’ else’ when I rattle along to his singing. Now the young lad wishes to find someone with a fiddle, so that we could play a concert after the war. I suppose my spoons and I shall be at the ready.”
