First, the blurb. Aidan is a bard, blessed with such talent that everyone agrees he is beloved of the gods. For his entire life he has wandered, performing for anyone who asked it of him, rich or poor, and accepting no payment for it save food and shelter. So it comes as a surprise when his cousin the king has him arrested for treason, thrown in prison and tortured for 17 years, his hands broken again and again so he can never again play his harp and his voice atrophied from a decade of silence. On being freed, a broken man, no longer able to hear voice of the gods in his heart, he starts to unravel the mystery of why all this was done to him. His only clue is that it has something to do with the dragons: terrible, ravening, barely-controlled beasts and the source of the kingdom's power and security.
There's a quality that certain books have that's hard to define. I'm going to just call it "magic," and I know it when I see it. They're usually standalone, often with a basis in fairy tales. Worldbuilding isn't really there, nor is there anything resembling hard magic. You don't need a map to enjoy them. The Last Unicorn is one great example. Stardust is another. Janny Wurts' stuff, Uprooted, The Bear and the Nightingale, and Deerskin are some other examples I can name. They have a sense of mystery to them, a depth, a sense of a much larger and older world than the one we can understand. They have a beauty to them, even and perhaps especially when things get really dark and ugly. They're usually sad, no matter what the ending is.
Anyway, to move beyond my waxing rhapsodic, this book has all of that. I read it because on the Bingo rec thread someone said it counted as artist-protagonist hard mode, and because I recognized the name "Carol Berg." That's all I knew.
Aidan is a wonderful character. The mystery of why he was put through seventeen years of torture is spun out gradually and deftly - each time I thought I knew the score, Berg gently pointed to some things that didn't really make sense or some questions that weren't answered, and I realized (along with Aidan) that there were more layers yet to be uncovered. This book was uplifting, heartwarming, and very bittersweet.
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