Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

He swallowed too quickly; the pain made his voice harsh. “Declan.”

“King Oroh’s bard. You harp; you must have heard of him. He came here to live when he relinquished his position at King Oroh’s court two years ago. He fell in love with this plain. He says that wind and leaves and stones here speak the oldest language in the world and that he can teach us to understand it. By then, he had played everywhere in the five—Belden, it is now. He wasn’t alone here long. Rumor found him, and then we did.”

“How?” His voice still sounded seared. “How did rumor find a way across this emptiness?”

“Who knows? A bird told a fox who told a tinker’s mule ... Word traveled. Declan played for my father, Lord Deste, at his court in Estmere when I was fifteen, six months after my brothers battled King Oroh for Estmere. I left home to come to Stirl Plain the day I learned Declan was here. My father and brothers tried to stop me, but ... His music has that effect. I wasn’t his first student, and more musicians kept coming after I did. Winter here is pitiless, and this tower grew too small for us. So we began to build around it.”

A ragged flow of voices preceded the clatter of feet down the ancient watchtower steps behind her. Nairn shifted his eyes, a bite of mutton frozen between his teeth. The lean, fox-haired bard spiraled into view first, his harp over his shoulder, and a shepherd’s pipe in one hand. He looked back at Nairn without surprise.

“You took your time,” he commented.

Nairn, still transfixed, stared at him, as the students, a motley crowd of men and women of varying ages and circumstances, jostled past them. He felt his skin constrict suddenly, as he guessed that those owl’s eyes must have watched every step he had taken across the plain, and maybe even down his secret, crooked path before that.

“The third time,” he whispered, hearing the charm behind him begin to ladle stew for the others. “How did you know I would find you?”

“Where else,” Declan asked, his voice mingling patience and exasperation, “in this utterly oblivious land, could you go?”

It was a while before Nairn understood that question, a little longer than that before he realized how right the bard was, and far too late when he understood at last how wrong.

The guest bard, Zoe Wren, was cooking breakfast for her father in the ancient cavern of the tower kitchen when Phelan knocked and walked in. She broke off midline of the ribald song she had encountered at the Merry Rampion sometime in the wee hours after the king’s birthday and reached for a couple more eggs without bothering to look. She knew the sound of his knuckle and the sound of his knock in exactly the middle of which slat in the door ever since they were both five, and the knock was a lot lower down on the door. They had known each other that long. Wood wailed against stone as he pulled out a chair. The scarred deal table creaked as his knee hit a leg; the glass teapot and butter dish lids trembled; one elbow thumped as she broke an egg. It splashed, as the other thumped, into the bowl of liquid, floating suns.

He spoke then. “Someday,” he warned. “Someday you’ll think it’s me, and it won’t be—”

“Nonsense. I feel you come in like an old familiar song, only without the sound.” She turned finally, laughing at herself. “You know what I mean.”

“No. I don’t.” He was smiling, maybe at the sight of her bare feet, the sleeves of her school robe shoved back to her elbows over yesterday’s silks, a strand of her rumpled dark hair trying to join the eggs in the bowl. “Late night?”

She nodded, gazing at him a moment longer, sensing things awry, hidden behind his smile. She turned back to the old iron stove, dropped a lump of butter into the pan heating on it. Her own elegant face, lean and brown, hid little and flashed color, from her shrewd green eyes and her holly-berry mouth. Phelan’s pale coloring had first caught her curious gaze when she had come out of the refectory kitchen upstairs where her mother was cooking, and saw the small boy with his duck-fluff hair and his wide eyes as opaque as mist, sitting silently, expressionlessly beside his father.

“I stayed with Chase,” she said over her shoulder. “Some bards out of the north came down to hear what kind of music the students play. They taught us some wonderfully rowdy songs. I just got back. How is your father?”

“Why?”

“You have that expression on your face.”

She heard him lean back hard in his chair until it creaked. He answered dispassionately enough. “I found him in the wasteland across Dockers Bridge at dawn yesterday. That gave him a few hours to get cleaned up for the king’s party. He was sitting in the mud by the river, singing to the standing stones. He wonders how I find him, but even he is predictable. I just look around his most recent dig site.” He paused, added restively, “I don’t know what he’s looking for. I wish I did. Once I thought he was wandering around Caerau digging graves, trying to find his own death. But he keeps finding treasures instead ...”

Zoe upended a chopping board full of onions, chives, sausages, into the frothing butter. She stirred them, said slowly, “Death is easy enough to find. Isn’t it? If you truly want it. So he must want something else.”

“He has everything else,” Phelan said, then paused. His mouth crooked. “Except music. But if he put me in this school to make up for his own abysmal failure here, it makes no sense to let me turn my back to all I’ve learned and walk away—”

“No,” Zoe said pointedly, rapping the spoon on the pan for emphasis. “No more than it makes sense for you to want to.”

He ignored that. “He’s rich in so much else. Everything he touches turns to gold. The King of Belden calls him friend despite his eccentricities. Even my mother still loves him.”

She glanced back at him. “Even you do.”

He flung up a hand. “But why?”

Zoe thought, but had nothing to add to the familiar litany of conjectures about Jonah that they had strung together through the years. She added salt to the mix, stirred it, sent the smells swirling through the kitchen.

“How was your class this morning?” she asked to get them off the labyrinthine subject. “Everyone awake?”

“Except me. I’ve started them memorizing the ninety verses of the ‘Catalog of Virtues.’ It’s enough to drive everyone to slavering mayhem in the streets of Caerau. Except for Frazer. He’s inhaling it all in through his pores. He thinks there’s magic between the lines.”

Her eyes widened at the word; she stared hard into the pan, turning things mindlessly with her fork until the onion fumes bit at her eyes. She blinked. “Magic.”

“I don’t know what he’s talking about. Except what you did yesterday at the king’s party. That song—I swear it nearly melted the expression on my father’s face. That was magic.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”

“Where did you find it? It sounded as though you dug it out of a barrow.”

She nodded, peppering the eggs vigorously. “It’s very old. Quennel taught it to me.”

“The Royal Bard? That Quennel?”

“Yes.”

“He wouldn’t part with a song if you held fire to his feet.”

“He likes me,” she answered cheerfully. “He says I’m what the plain would sound like if it sang, wind, bird, bone, and stone. Don’t ask me. That’s what he said. What exactly did Frazer say to you?”

“Exactly, I don’t remember. Something about secrets. The secrets of the bardic arts. When he would be taught them.”

“Strange,” she breathed. “Maybe you should do your research paper on that.”