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Much as you'd like to drop everything and pursue this mysterious invitation, all will have to wait until after this job. Yngley-above-the-Sea* is to the southwest, reachable only by the ships which moor at Mothmoon bay. On very clear nights, the anchored city is visible from atop certain hills in your home village, suspended like candle's flame upon a dark sconce. It is the ancient city of learned men, the gathering place of scholars, sorcerers, physics and philosophers. A place that seems totally opposite your father's unrefined appetites. You tell Lester Cartman you will obey the summons and he makes you promise to satisfy his curiosity regarding the message.
In the morning, the old man, Helmod, is already at the gate when you arrive (though you had thought to come early). He has with him a walking stick and a large bundle, fastened around his body with rope. The first part of the journey, to the village of Amethyston, is by a main road, snaking through a wood and across a river. Eventually you come to a fork, the sign indicating Amethyston to the south and the Temple of the Golden Lion, a place of pilgrimage, though now it stands as a ruin. Other than a few innocuous travelers on the road, you encounter no one. The only real nuisance is the summer heat.
As twilight falls, you arrive at the village of Amethyston, narrow roads surrounded by stone and wood houses with a small market square around the village well. The villagers are gruff, and there is no inn as such, but you are able to find a place to stay for the night in the house of a local. Helmod does not seem to mind the crude accommodations (you've set up together in a drafty garret above the main floor, with your only your own blankets for bedding), and he is so exhausted that he falls straight to sleep. You, however, being a younger man, for the first time in your life in a wholly foreign place, are restless.
Your host intimated (albeit reluctantly) that your accommodations included board as well as bed, but when you descend to the commons you find no one there except for a young woman, a little older than your sister, whom you remember your host rebuking sharply when he discovered her peeking at you through a crack in her door as you mounted the ladder to the attic. Her hair is tied and covered in a white coif and wimple, observing all the proper modesties of a girl of her adult (and unmarried) status. Spotting you at the threshold, she is slightly startled, and nearly drops the large communal dish on which are arranged a small wheel of cheese, flatbread, a large covered bowl, and a smaller bowl of boiled peas. Mastering herself, she places the tray on the rough hewn trestle table, on which, given the quantity of wood shavings that litter it, your host must eat, as well as win, his bread.
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