Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

“How early can we get back tomorrow?” Ida asked. Hadrian consulted his tide table; they scheduled a time to meet where the princess picked them up near the bridge. She dropped them there before she drove the crowded road upriver to the castle, puzzling over their find and scarcely hearing the music rising from one corner of the street and running into the next, played by musicians in every kind of antique costume.

She left the car in the chauffeur’s hands and made her usual path through the back gardens toward the door nearest her chambers. The harping she heard then seemed so much a familiar part of the city those days that she only noticed it when she realized that she had stepped into a garden full of women in flowing silks and flowery hats. With an inner jolt of dismay, she remembered she had promised to be there among them two hours earlier.

Of all the faces turning to stare at the dust-plastered apparition wandering into the queen’s garden party for Lady Petris, she saw her mother’s first, rigid as an ice sculpture and as chilly. Her aunt Petris seemed equally frozen; only her eyelids moved, blinking rapidly above brows about to take flight. Beyond them, Kelda harped a love ballad, watching the princess gravely. Everybody else had gotten very quiet for a crowd of women carrying plates full of exquisite morsels and glasses of champagne. Only Sophy Cle, reaching for a salmon croquette at the table, missed being transfixed. She turned around, caught an eyeful of the walking disaster that was Beatrice, and smiled with pleasure, stepping immediately toward her.

But the queen got to her daughter first.

“I am so sorry,” Beatrice said softly.

“Go and change, please.”

“I forgot. We found something—something very old, I think, and wonderful—”

“Bea,” Charlotte interrupted. “You look as though you’ve been buried alive. Marcus, stop patting the dust clouds from Bea’s boots; they’re unspeakable.”

“We found—” the princess tried again, desperately. “Well, we hardly know what it is, but Father will be so intrigued, and Master Cle—”

The queen closed glacial blue eyes, opened them again. “Please.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“We’ll talk when you are presentable.”

She sounded dubious. The princess made her escape, found her lady-in-waiting patiently waiting, and was delivered in short order out of her clothes and into a bath, where the patina of centuries rained gently from her hair to float upon the water.

Neatly coiffed and disguised from collarbone to shin in flowers, she went back to the garden party, hoping that her mother would mistake this aspect of her for the good and dutiful Beatrice and forget she ever saw the other one. Suddenly ravenous, she lingered at the table, filling a plate with the odd bits still remaining of smoked trout, marinated vegetables in aspic, little pastries shaped like the suits of playing cards and filled with a bright concoction of sweet red peppers and hearts of palm. She could hear her mother’s voice as she ate, reassuringly at a distance. Her brother’s betrothed drifted up to talk to Beatrice about wedding-candle colors, so Beatrice could let her own thoughts flow underground again to puzzle at the mystery, while suitable noises came now and then out of her mouth.

“Beatrice,” Charlotte interrupted, descending out of nowhere, it seemed, onto the tool-strewn floor of the dig with a jam-faced child in her arms. “Our mother and I have come up with the most perfect solution. Idea, I mean. You must come and spend the summer in the country with me and Great Marcus and Small Marcus and Tiny Thomasina.” Beatrice, appalled, inhaled a crumb; while she coughed, Charlotte tumbled on, a glint in her eye alarmingly like their mother’s. “Just think a moment about it. Small Marcus adores you, and it would get you out of a city swarming with ragtag musicians from every corner of Belden—”

“But—”

“But what about Damon’s wedding, you mean? We’ll all come back for that, of course. And I do so want you to meet one of our neighbors, so charming, connected to a distant branch of Peverell cousins, with a stableful of horses and running what he calls his hobby farm.”

“I can’t just—”

“Of course you can. We’d love to have you, wouldn’t we, Marcus? Marcus. Where did that child run off to? Oh, Marcus, leave the bee alone!”

Marcus, poking at a rose on a bush nearby, opened his mouth suddenly, so hugely that he seemed about to devour the flower. Then came the wail, like a steam tram trying to break for a drunken sailor. Charlotte darted off to rescue him. Beatrice, watching, mute and horrified, absently crammed an entire diamond pastry into her mouth.

“Princess Beatrice.”

She turned, chewing hastily and trying to smile at the same time. It was Sophy, she found to her relief, who chattered amiably about the lilies blooming in the fish pool, until Beatrice could swallow her bite.

“Of course, I really came over to ask you what you unearthed—besides yourself, I mean. You looked positively extraordinary, earlier, like a walking artifact. Your mantelpiece at last?”

Beatrice nodded, grateful for the chance to talk about it. “Yes,” she said, and lowered her voice so that her mother wouldn’t hear. “Only it’s covered with runes, and we’re thinking it’s not part of a fireplace at all.”

“Oh, how marvelous. Does Jonah know?”

“We haven’t seen him yet. Please, tell him when you do. We’re all so excited, and dying to know what it is.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother on the move, looking purposeful, still chatting as she pulled Lady Petris and an entourage in her wake, a bouquet of hats, it looked like, on colorful, slowly swaying stalks. On the other side of her, Charlotte had pacified Marcus with another jam tart and was leading him to Beatrice’s side.

“It sounds quite mystifying and exciting,” Sophy said, seemingly oblivious to the gathering forces. “Along with something else I learned today. I wasn’t sure he would actually do it, he’s seemed so distracted lately with his paper—which is finally coming into being and so brilliant, I think—but he is, and I couldn’t be more pleased.”

“About what, Sophy?” the queen asked curiously, she and her bevy reaching them at the same moment that Beatrice felt Marcus sit on her feet to eat his tart.

“Phelan,” Sophy said happily.

“What?” Charlotte demanded. “Is he engaged, too?”

“No, I don’t think so. At least, I haven’t heard. He is going to enter the bardic competition, compete for Quennel’s place. I’m so thoroughly proud of him. Of course, you must stop your digging, Princess, long enough to listen to him play. I’m sure Jonah will understand even though he’ll be so impatient for you to continue work on such an important find.” She turned her candid gaze to the queen. “Of course, the king will be impatient as well, when he hears, Lady Harriet, don’t you think? Our children are accomplishing such amazing things.”

The queen looked slightly dazed for a moment. Charlotte said blankly, “Well. Beatrice can’t, of course, do any of that. She’s coming to spend summer in the country with us.”

Sophy found nothing to say to that, only smiled pleasantly, rather bemusedly, into the sudden silence. Beatrice, eyeing the table helplessly, felt something already in her mouth, growing and clamoring for exit, like an irritated wasp.

She let it out finally. “No.” She swallowed under Charlotte’s stare, and said it again. “No. Thank you, Charlotte. I will be extremely busy this summer here in the city. And I would so very much appreciate it if you would stop Marcus from trying to stuff his tart into my shoe.”

“Marcus!” Charlotte cried, glancing down without interest. “Stop that. But, Beatrice. We’re already expecting you.”