Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

Welkin tossed him a smile again. “I am grateful to you,” he said. “I haven’t heard that language, even in anyone’s thoughts, for—oh, longer than you’d care to know.”

“Who are you?”

Welkin touched a ram’s horn with holes whittled down the curve, its openings ringed with gold. He said softly, “On a plain of bone, in a ring of stone ...”

“Is that what you said just now?” Declan asked hoarsely.

“It is.” He opened his harp case, took out the instrument to show Declan the twig-words carved over every possible space. Nairn recognized them, then. “I cut them there to remind myself. ” He touched a letter, then looked up to hold Declan’s gaze with his mismatched eyes. “It’s all I’ve got, this battered old harp, to play against the fine, complex instruments of the court bards out there. It might do. I’m hoping it will. So you see, I have everything to lose all over again, and I will do what I can to win.” He loosed Declan’s eyes finally, gave a glance out the broader window the bard had built into the stones. “That’s a pleasant sight, the river there. Well. If there’s nothing else, I’ll see you on the day, then.” He nodded to the completely bewildered Nairn and to the bard just opening his mouth to speak.

Then, like a shaft of sunlight melting into cloud, he was gone.

Nairn felt the breath rush out of him. Declan closed his mouth, looking astonished, and so grim Nairn scarcely recognized him.

“Who is he?” Nairn demanded, his voice shaking. “Who in the world is he?”

Declan tried to answer; answers tangled, apparently; he could not speak. He went to Nairn, put a hand on his shoulder; his hold grew so tight he might have been falling headlong out of his window and struggling to hold on.

“You must win this competition,” he said tightly, and shook Nairn a little to rattle the notion into his head and settle it there. “Win it. Or he will, and I have no idea what I will be loosing into King Oroh’s court.”

“But—”

“Just win it.” The owl’s eyes caught Nairn’s fiercely, held them. “Any way you can.”

Phelan sat on the floor of the broken tower, surrounded by dusty tomes. There was a threadbare carpet across the stones, almost as ancient as the record books, the first of which had been started during Declan’s time. The forgotten history Phelan held in his hands made him reluctant to abscond with them; he would wait, he decided, for Bayley Wren’s permission. There were over three dozen of them, all fat, every page meticulously lined with precise and mundane detail of the school’s long past: “To Trey Sims, woodcutter, for two wagonloads of wood from the north, and for the labor of it, and the journey ... To Haley Coe for nine casks of ale and five bottles of elderberry wine ... To Gar Holm for six fat salmon from the Stirl and twice as many eel ... Accounts received for room and board of student Ansel Tige from his father, late again ... Accounts received for one night’s lodging from Master Gremmell, and two servants, on their way across the plain ...”

Why Bayley kept his office and his bedchamber within the chill walls of the tower instead of in the comfortably renovated portion of the ancient building, Phelan understood easily. The stewards charted and guarded the history of the school, and the silent walls were steeped in it. Declan himself had lived there, and had left the echoes of the music of the first Royal Bard of Belden. Phelan and Zoe had explored the place thoroughly when they were children. Worn stairs spiraled up and up the curved walls, where apertures scarcely wider than a knife blade eked out miserly glimpses of the city and the Stirl. The steps debouched now and then into a small chamber where the curious leavings of centuries, like remnants from a flood, gathered dust and owl droppings. The steward’s office was as high as it could be without using the sky for a roof. Above it, the walls were jagged with the mysterious violence that had torn through the top of the tower, left the chamber they circled open to the seasons. There, as high as they could climb up the broken steps, the young Zoe and Phelan had sat, singing to the sun and the moon rising over the plain, watching in wonder as the oldest words in the world moved to their stately rhythms by day and by night, oblivious to the busy city crusting the shores of the ancient water.

There, once, he and Zoe had made love under the moonlight on the top of the broken tower. Phelan remembered that with a smile. But they knew each other far too well, which is why the experiment had been both success and failure. They had been grateful for the knowledge but too curious to be content with one another.

“This day by my hand: Lyle Renne, Steward ...”

Phelan considered that. He closed the book, reached for another.

“This day by my hand, Farrel Renn ...”

Intrigued, he put down that book, opened another. And then another. Days flowed through months, years, centuries of detail: a new washtub for the kitchen, half a dozen student robes made by Mistress Cassell, a scullery maid promoted to cook, three bags of flour, a new master hired, a coffin for the death of an elderly master, accounts rendered to a midwife for the birth of the child of a student whose parents refused to take her back. All accounts signed for that day by some variant of Wren. Back and back Phelan looked, amazed, while the writing became awkward; letters changed shape; spelling grew fluid, arbitrary. Ren became Wren, became Renne, became Renn, and then, leaping forward through time, again Wren.

“Wren,” he murmured, and there Bayley Wren was, opening the office door, crossing the room. Phelan gazed at him, this relic of history. With his gray-gold hair and the hollows in his strong face, he did seem balanced on the cusp of forever.

“What?” the steward inquired mildly of Phelan’s expression.

“You’re in here,” Phelan marveled. “All the way back to the beginning of Belden. Like the Peverell kings.”

“There has been a Wren at the school for as long as the school has existed. One in each generation was born with a taste for detail, for order, and for paying bills. It does seem an inherited position.”

Phelan got to his feet, brushing at the dust of centuries and frowning as he contemplated the present generation. “I can’t see Zoe entering accounts rendered in the records.”

Bayley gave his rare, dry chuckle. “Nor can I. I wonder myself how history will find its way around her.” He glanced at the untidy pile at Phelan’s feet. “Something in particular?”

“Yes. Nairn.”

“Ah,” Bayley said softly.

“Also, a certain Circle of Days.”

The steward shook his head over that one. “I haven’t read all of the account books. I do remember Argot Ren’s reference to Nairn. I have no idea what he meant by the Circle of Days. If it involved accounts rendered or received, it will show up in the records somewhere.”

Phelan brooded a moment. “I have to start somewhere. It might as well be at the beginning. May I take the earliest books home with me?”

Master Wren hesitated at that, looking as though Phelan had asked to make off with his fingers. “Those books have never left this tower. If you can persuade them to cross the threshold ...”

Phelan left with the three oldest, pledging his father’s fortune as collateral if he left them on a tram or dropped them into the Stirl. The house was quiet when he came in. Sophy and Jonah were both out, he suspected on wildly different errands on opposite sides of the city. He settled himself on the sofa, opened the first account book, and, within a dozen pages, fell headlong into it.

He surfaced sometime later, at a query from Sagan as to whether he might like a lamp turned on, and would he be dining at home that evening?