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Bars tended to slide free drinks your way if you entertained their patrons, patrons tended to talk to you more if you bought them their ale. The drunk tended to be freer with their tips and impressionable, attractive adventurers liked the mystery of a musician a fair deal more than a military man. Why sleep alone when you could take home the prettiest girl or boy in the room, literally for a song? And what songwriter could lack for new material in such a state? He could find his songs one night in a love ballad to a maiden’s smile or weave a naughtier ode later in the evening to her hips, breasts. An encounter with a new adventurer with a wicked look in his eyes who promises to make <i>him</I> sing turns into an instrumental piece, seductive and a little forceful, with a rhythm to it that gets people beating tankards against tables before the end.

He doesn’t kiss and tell, but he spins each encounter into musical candy floss, some sweet and some bawdy, some fine-spun, heroic tales and some barely disguised pornography, sung when he’s drunk on wine and so is everyone else, when it’s the part of the night where everyone becomes secret-teller and confidant both and the application of a few more private bits of poetry might give him an evening full of <i>new</i> inspiration. He <i>lives</i> on music, when he can no longer live on dreams. His music comes out of tangled sheets and plied secrets, his muses eating breakfast in bed. He’s never once thought to use it for <i>battle</i>.