Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

Beatrice slid off her heel, bent, and shook the crumbs out of it. Before she straightened, she realized what had put the edge in her voice, and that it had little to do with a hoary stone covered with incomprehensible words.

Her mother wanted her to go.

Phelan’s mother wanted her to stay.

“We’ll discuss this later,” the queen said calmly, and with that the fascinated faces around them had to be satisfied.

The queen signaled an end to the harping soon after; Kelda packed up his instrument and slipped away. The guests began taking their leave of her and Lady Petris. Beatrice drifted with them unobtrusively back into the house, then angled down a quieter hallway toward her father’s collection, where she could consult with Master Burley about the new find and hide from her mother for a while until the queen got distracted by more interesting matters than her dusty daughter.

A black back vanishing into a wall in an empty guest chamber caught her eye. A door in the wainscoting clicked shut and became invisible. She stopped, blinking. She knew that secret door: she had discovered it when she was a child exploring the ancient castle. It had been there for centuries and last used, according to chronicles shown to her by Master Burley, by King Severin to visit his mistress late at night when his queen, in her bed-cap, put down her book and her sherry glass and began to snore.

It wasn’t the ghost of Severin Peverell blurring into the walls. He didn’t have that black, glossy, engagingly disheveled hair, nor could he have played a note on the harp hanging from the broad, black-clad shoulder.

It was Kelda, sneaking around in her father’s house. Kelda, who knew the language of the Circle of Days and had loosed its power at Phelan. Beatrice stepped out of her heels, picked them up, and stuffed them under the pillows on the bed as she passed it. She pressed the wainscoting until a panel gave under her hand, and the narrow door opened. Ahead, in the dark, she could see the light Kelda had kindled and carried on his palm as easily as a stolen jewel.

She followed him.

He had led her, she guessed from the cessation of random, distant noises on the other side of the walls, and the change under her stockinged feet from floorboards to flagstones and then to dirt, beyond the castle and underneath the main courtyard, when she lost him. The glow in his palm vanished, left her stranded in the dark, abruptly motionless, and breathing as quietly as possible. She strained her ears, listening for a shift of earth, a soft footfall too close to her. Her skin prickled, anticipating the harper’s touch out of the blackness.

Nothing happened. Kelda had just gone his way without her. Perhaps he had sensed someone following. Maybe he had simply turned down a side path, an old sewage channel connected to a different part of the castle. They all merged into a main passage that went to the river, she knew. She could find her way back, if she didn’t go wandering off perpetually down side paths. Her mouth crooked at a thought: what the queen would say if she caught her shoeless daughter coming back through the wrong door in the castle with filthy stockings and cobwebs in her hair.

It wouldn’t just be summer in the country with Charlotte; it would be the rest of her life there.

She took a step forward and heard voices.

She froze again. They seemed to be coming toward her, and they weren’t trying for secrecy. The students in Kelda’s Circle of Days, meeting out of sight in the abandoned shaft? Was that where Kelda was headed, to teach his dangerous magic practically under her father’s feet? The voices, both male, their words distorted slightly, bounding flatly off earth and stone, became suddenly, hauntingly familiar. Her brows, already quirked over the headstrong bard, leaped even higher. Phelan and Jonah Cle seemed to be arguing underground and in the dark somewhere ahead of her.

“What on earth are you doing down here?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m following you. You know who I am now; will you get that light out of my face?”

“What exactly are you researching, boy?” Jonah demanded, sounding intensely irritated. “The ancient sewage system of Caerau? Or that insidious bard?”

“What?”

Beatrice couldn’t see so much as a glimmer of light; she blundered on helplessly, feeling her way along the stone-and-dirt walls, in the general direction of the argument.

“Do you have any idea what dangers you are tracking?”

“Don’t tell me Kelda is down here, too,” Phelan said incredulously.

“Beneath the castle of the Peverell kings,” Jonah reminded him pointedly.

“What are you suggesting? That he’s intending to blow the place up with his magic? If he’s that powerful, he doesn’t have to skulk around underground to do it, does he? Anyway—”

“Kelda—”

“Kelda has nothing to do with why I’m here. I saw you come in. I wanted to know why—I wanted to know—”

His voice veered suddenly off-balance. He stopped; so did Beatrice, struck by the strange uncertainty in him. She stood motionless, scarcely breathing, trying to hear in the silence what she could not see in the dark.

“What I do is my business,” Jonah said finally, harshly. “You should not have followed me. Period.”

“How was I supposed to know that you were sober at this hour of the day?” Phelan retorted weakly. “You could have gotten completely lost down here.”

“And which of us is carrying the light?”

“How was I to know that until you switched it on? Why would I turn around then and walk out of here without the slightest curiosity about what my father might be doing wandering around underground? And why did you bring the light?”

“So that I could see what fumble-footed creature was stumbling after me, why else? Now that you’re here, let me show you the way out.”

Princess Beatrice moved forward again at that. She couldn’t see their light yet; they must be down a side path, but there was no reason why Jonah, crotchety as he sounded, shouldn’t rescue her as well. She wondered how he had figured out that the bard might be in this unlikely place. Finding Phelan on his heels explained his fit of temper. But Phelan seemed oddly shaken by something beyond his father’s acerbity, and she wanted, deeply and irrationally, to know what.

“You’re looking for Kelda,” Phelan said, echoing her thoughts. There was that odd tone in his voice, that mingling of wonder, fear, and uncertainty that halted the princess again, midstep. “And I’m searching, through a thousand years of poetry, for you.”

There was dead silence in the tunnel. Beatrice was overwhelmed with a sudden, urgent need to see their faces. She lifted one foot, set it down in a cautious, silent step, not wanting so much as the sound of a shifted pebble to distract them.

Phelan continued finally, to the wall of Jonah’s silence. His voice shook again, badly. “On a plain of bone, in a ring of stone ... That’s when you last played your harp. You brought down the school tower. And then you vanished. You were supposed to be in that third coffin that Dower Ren wrote into the school records. But nobody found your body. Because. Because you hadn’t died. You are Nairn. You are the bard who failed the Three Trials of Bone Plain, and now there is no end of days. And no forgetting.”

Beatrice took a step, felt air beside her instead of earth. She turned toward it, saw them finally. Or at least she saw Phelan’s face, completely illumined by the electric torch Jonah sent glaring into it. Jonah himself was hardly visible: only a sleeve, a hand that had begun to tremble, making the light waver on Phelan. Beatrice had no idea what Phelan was saying, but her own eyes welled as she saw the tear flare down his face, disappear into the dark.