Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

The light bobbled so erratically then that Phelan’s face blurred into shadow. Jonah lowered it finally, moved toward the tunnel wall, slumped wearily against it. Phelan followed after a moment, leaned beside him. The light illumined two boots now, one glossy black with polished buckles, the other earth-colored, battered and cracked.

“You can’t possibly imagine,” Jonah said at last, his own voice soft, frayed, “how many times I have wanted you to know me. You, of all people in the world, could understand the poetry. But I was terrified of my own hope—that’s why I threw so many obstacles at you. I was terrified that even you might fail, might go through your life never saying my name.” He paused, finished heavily, “Or that, knowing it, you might regard me, rightfully, with utter contempt.”

Beatrice, hearing an inarticulate sound from Phelan, put her own hand over her mouth to stifle a sudden, indrawn breath.

A sharp exclamation bounced off the walls around her; the roving light caught her in the face. She stared into the dark beyond it, weeping without knowing exactly why yet but beginning to glimpse pieces of a tale as ancient as the runes above the door made of stone.

“Princess Beatrice,” Jonah Cle said, astonished.

“I was—I was following Kelda,” she whispered. “I lost him. Then I heard you.”

Phelan pushed himself away from the wall abruptly, followed the path of the light Jonah had lowered to the ground between them. He found Beatrice’s elbow, then her wrist, tugged her gently forward to join them. She leaned against the wall beside him, fumbling for the ineffectual scrap of monogrammed lace in her pocket.

“I don’t even know why I’m crying,” she said into it. “Except that you are. It sounds so desperately difficult. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t even be here—”

Phelan said nothing, just put his arm around her shoulders, tightly. She felt his lips move across her cheek, tasting her tears, then find her mouth through the monogram.

He said huskily, his forehead tilted against hers, “You understand ancient things. You love them. Where else would I want you to be?” He raised his head then, turned toward Jonah. “Who is Kelda? I can’t find him anywhere in your long life, and yet he must be far older. Old enough to know how to pronounce words that haven’t been heard for a thousand years and more. He has all that power. Why all through history has he been so silent?”

Jonah flicked the light around them as though the bard might be standing quietly in the dark as well.

“Not here,” he said tersely, and pulled himself away from the wall. Beatrice saw him put his hand on Phelan’s shoulder, very gently, and her eyes burned again. “Thank you,” he breathed. “Thank you for looking for me. I hoped you would, but it’s a cruel thing to wish upon a child.”

“You got used to yourself,” Phelan said huskily. “So will I.”

The light illumined Beatrice again: her flowery frock, her torn, soiled stockings. “Ah,” Jonah said. “Sophy did mention some sort of garden party. That explains the dress. But why did you do away with your shoes?”

“Heels,” Beatrice explained. “Far too noisy.”

“You can’t walk up into the world like that. We’d better take you back the way you came.”

“No,” she said adamantly, as her hand slid down Phelan’s arm, groped for his fingers, and gripped them. “No. I’m coming with you. You know who you are, and Phelan knows who you are, and I don’t even know for certain why you both just broke my heart. Tell me, Master Cle.”

“It’s a very long story,” he warned her. “And possibly the oldest. I thought I knew it, until I met Kelda. He taught me what it really meant, and I have been sorry ever since.”

She felt her fingers chill, even holding Phelan’s, but she walked with them through the dark toward the light of day, which she saw, as though with Jonah’s eyes, as something endlessly, tirelessly old as well, waiting patiently for yet another night.

Zoe stood near the bar in the Merry Rampion, singing to a post. It was well past midnight; beyond an open window, the moon spangled the river with its slow descent. The place was packed with musicians, so tightly wound with the imminent competition that only liberal quantities of cold beer kept them from flaring and snapping where they stood. Zoe’s voice had swept them all up into an enthusiastic fervor; they sang with her, banging pewter tankards if they had no other instruments. Even that couldn’t overpower her; she sang, as Quennel had demanded, to crack the icy heart of the moon, which from what she saw of it, was as impervious as the court bard sipping wine in the shadows.

He was the fair-haired, hard-eyed bard of the Duke of Waverlea, and he bristled with a small arsenal of instruments: harp, pipe, flute, hand drums. He alone refused to rouse to her music, much as she tuned her voice to his ears alone, loosed all her skills to make him blink, smile, even tap the table with a fingernail. But he only watched her woodenly, raising his glass to his lips now and then, sometimes glancing at the moon as though he might hear the music it made floating through the night if only Zoe would stop making such a racket.

She gave up on him at last and let the music flow from other hands, turning thirstily to the chilled wine that Chase put in front of her. He, at least, looked vaguely stunned.

“You sent chills down my spine,” he said. “It was like listening to the dead.” She squinted at him; he laughed a little, running fingers through his sunflower hair. “How they might have sung it back then, before city lights and steam trams.” He paused again, then took a kiss from her, gently. “What if you win? I’ll never see you, then.”

“What a thought,” she said in a suck of breath.

“It hadn’t occurred to you?”

“Not in this world.”

“That you’d be all busy with courtly matters and never have a moment with me?”

She stared at him mutely, uncertainly for the briefest of moments, then shook her head adamantly. “Let’s not think about it. We’ll worry about it if and when and after.”

She sang again later, playing someone else’s harp. It was nothing much, just a lullaby as old as the night to bring the crowd back down and coax a few students to bed, where they belonged. No one sang with her then; they just listened to her, motionless, silent, their eyes heavy, as though she were lulling them to sleep on their feet. Her silence, as the song ended, woke them out of a dream; they looked around blankly, rubbing their faces, picking up their instruments. A few straggled out the door, still not talking. Others drifted to the bar for one last beer. The bard from Waverlea played then, very softly, on his flute, echoing Zoe’s lullaby. The sound wove among the crowd, his flute glinting silver like the moon-spangles. He cut it short before the ending and stood up.

He said to Zoe across the silent room, “Be careful. You’ll wake the stones with that voice of yours, and you’ll find yourself in the last place you expect to be.” He smiled at her then, a thin, wry, marveling smile, slid his flute into its case on his belt, and left before she could even find her voice to answer.

She went to bed with Chase and got up again with the sun, bleary and worried about seven different things the moment she opened her eyes.

The first was getting home to wash and change before her class. That simple task was complicated, as she opened the tower door, by the sight of her father and Phelan sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of books between them. The table was otherwise bare; nothing but a teakettle stood on the stove, and even that was cold. They both glanced at her vaguely, breaking off a conversation, but expectantly, as though she had appeared at their wish expressly to cook them breakfast.