"As the executioner took her by the hand, she threw the tunics over the backs of the eleven swans. Suddenly eleven comely young princes stood before the astonished crowd, but the youngest had a swan's wing in place of an arm, for his sister had not had time enough to finish the sleeve of his tunic."
       --"The Wild Swans," Hans Christian Anderson
       
       The wandering singer came to the village in December, through the snow that covered the roads. The innkeeper was glad to have him; strangers were rare at this time of year, and even if he hadn't had a lute slung over his shoulder, he would have attracted business from the local gossips.
       For most of the evening, he sat in front of the fire, but though it was blazing warm and bright, he stayed wrapped in his cloak. At last, in the early darkness of the winter sunset, just after the sun had disappeared past the horizon, he let the cloak fall from his shoulders, shook out his left arm as if it had been asleep, took up his lute, and without warning or introduction, began to play.
       The patrons of the inn turned to look at him, slowly going quiet as the music carried itself to their ears. The young man shifted so his back was to the fire and played outwards to the room, his eyes closed, his head bent over the instrument. It was a sad song, one they all knew well, and the innkeeper was about to protest, say that his guests needed something to keep their spirits up on such a cold winter night, when the man began to sing.
       His voice grasped everyone in the room by the heart and pulled.
       The words of the song didn't matter. All that mattered was the low, wild sound of his voice, a cry of leave-taking, like the calls of migrating birds across the sky on a fall morning.
       He held them: young romantics, burly farmhands, jaded cynics. All of them listened, rapt.
       The room was suddenly crowded with gentle ghosts. One man sighed at the memory of his lover's fingers in his hair; she was gone, and he hadn't thought of her in years without anger, until now. A woman saw her mother as she had been before a cruel illness bent her down and took her life; back straight and tall, laughing with delight at one of her daughter's jokes. To each listener, something lost was given back: the smile of a son estranged, the smell of a childhood home, the taste of apples from a tree that blew down in a storm. Something bitter was once again made sweet.
       The song ended and faded away, leaving silence. The singer looked up from his instrument with a shy smile and said, almost apologetically, "I always play a sad song first. It makes the rest even more joyful."
       And many joyful songs he played then, and there was music and dancing late into the night. But that first song lingered, its touch a gentle stillness in the mind, and everyone who had heard it went to their beds a little lighter, and slept a little better, than they had the night before.
       The next morning, the young man left early, though the innkeeper and his wife entreated him to stay. He said he was heading south, following the birds, and maybe he would return in the spring. He ate breakfast bundled in his cloak and slung his lute one-handed over his shoulder. The innkeeper's wife packed him a lunch to take; he accepted it gratefully and set off down the silent, snow-blanketed road.
       Later, the innkeeper's wife went into the room where the stranger had stayed to clean it and change the linens. She was thinking of the day her husband had proposed to her; how happy she'd been, and how frightened at the same time. They'd had their disagreements in the years since, but she smiled as she gathered up the bed linens, recalling his fond words to her the night before. She'd been reassured that in his heart, he was the same awkward youth she'd fallen in love with so long ago, and still loved despite his faults.
       A flash of white drifted to the floor from the shaken sheets; she reached down and picked it up, then held it up to the morning light coming in through the window. A single pinion from the wing of a wild swan, polished smooth and sharp from wind and blowing snow and the bittersweet memory of flight.