"Well."

He cleared his throat, pulled at his collar with one finger.

"I went to Low Town a number of times. I mostly stayed out of trouble. I was simply curious about it. And I attended the Academy before any of the reforms. Most of the students there were from the old families. I was not, and I sometimes felt it keenly. Low Town was a place where I could feel--"

Superior, he almost said. But he knew how terrible it sounded, that he went to a place purely so he could look down at the people there. But as an adolescent, teased, mocked for a lilting accent that he only later trained out of himself, he had desperately wanted to sometimes feel superior to someone.

He briskly resumed speaking to cover his unfinished sentence.

"But I knew the songs before then. My father knew them; he is a musician and composer and he collected them for some sort of project he was working on when I was young, before I left for the Academy. The words are often a bit...ah...boisterous, but the tunes can be highly complex and sophisticated."