Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

He glanced around for the big, dark-haired bard who, scheduled to play later that morning, would no doubt choose his own moment to appear. “I will,” he promised, though how, he had no idea; he fully expected his first song to be his last, judging by the music coming from the formidable court bards around them.

An hour later, he sat among the hundreds of musicians grouped around the foot of the scaffolding, gazing up through the layers of ornate grillwork to the top, where a master from the school gave a brief history of the competition, then the king welcomed everyone to Caerau, and, finally, Quennel repeated the traditional summons to the gathering of the bards, thanked them for coming, and wished them well. Phelan had been sent up the stairs during that, an endless walk into the welkin where he waited, wondering what he thought he was doing there, hovering between earth and sky, in a position he had never in his life intended to put himself.

Somehow, among all those faces, numerous as the stars and as remote, he caught sight of Beatrice.

She was sitting near the top beside Sophy, under the Royal Pavilion, leaning forward in her seat as though to see him better, the morning sun illumining her pale green silks, the wind blowing her hair into a froth. He couldn’t see her expression at that distance, except in his mind’s eye: her blue eyes very dark, calm, one corner of her mouth quirked upward in her familiar slanting smile.

In that moment, he knew what he would play for her.

He scarcely heard himself; the scant moments passed like a dream as he harped an old love ballad and sang to the woman who had wakened with the dawn beside him. He heard little of the applause afterward, just assumed everyone was relieved that he hadn’t forgotten his words or lost his voice but had given the competition an opening note of grace. He passed the next musician at the top of the stairs, one of the court bards from Estmere, who ignored him entirely, then another on a landing, whom Phelan had seen piping along the river road and who looked as though he might topple over the scaffolding out of terror.

At the bottom of the stairs, he found his father, who drew him with a compelling hand away from the musicians, back into the stone archway from which they had emerged.

“What are you doing?” Jonah demanded, when they were out of earshot.

Phelan gazed at him wordlessly, seeing again that strange double vision of his father: Nairn the Deathless, the Unforgiven, imposed over the father he had grown up with, history pleated endlessly across a moment in time.

“Nothing,” he said finally. “Just playing. Zoe asked me to.”

“Get yourself disqualified,” Jonah said succinctly.

“Oh, I will. I probably already have.”

“Not playing like that you won’t.”

Phelan looked at him silently again, trying to imagine what Jonah thought he saw. “I played it for Beatrice,” he said finally, his only explanation for any power the ballad had beyond the ordinary. “What are you afraid of? There are court bards here who play songs as old as the five kingdoms. They could blow me off the scaffold with a riffle of flute notes.”

“That’s not the point,” Jonah said irritably.

“What is the point?”

“If Kelda is who I think he is, you could be in grave danger, that’s the point. He destroyed my music. I won’t let him take you from me as well. That would destroy me all over again. I couldn’t live with that, and I am not able to die. So stop playing to the princess. Stop playing with your heart.”

Phelan opened his mouth; nothing came out. He shook himself out of Jonah’s grip, finally, and pulled his father back to the end of the archway, where they could hear the court bard playing above. “Listen,” he said fiercely, trying to keep his voice down. “Listen to that.” The bard was playing three instruments at once, it sounded like, and singing at the same time. “That’s what he plays every morning for the Duke of Estmere’s breakfast. Do you think that any world exists in which I can compete with that?”

“His heart’s not in it,” Jonah muttered doggedly.

“You’re being unreasonable.” He heard himself and laughed shortly. “What am I saying. You’ve been unreasonable all your life. Now I understand why, but Kelda isn’t interested in either one of us. He has his eye on Zoe, and I promised her I’d give her all I had just to stay in the competition.” Jonah groaned. “I barely remembered I had a heart, then,” Phelan added dryly. “Even so, nobody has ever suggested that it’s any kind of substitute for skill.”

“How could you fall in love at a time like this?” his father said, exasperated. “Anyway, that’s not the point, either. The point is—”

“I don’t see the point of arguing about it,” Phelan said, exasperated himself, “if you can’t tell me what the point is. Sit with me and listen to the music.”

“I’ve heard it all before,” Jonah said inarguably.

Phelan sighed. “Well, I haven’t. Try to stay out of trouble while I listen.”

He saw Beatrice leave at midmorning. He watched the empty place where she had sat for some time after, hoping she would change her mind, decide not to join the digging crew and reappear as the one point in the dizzying multitudes of faces where his eyes could rest. Attendants passed among the musicians, offered water, fruit, tea, juices, and more hefty fare for the nerveless. Phelan, sipping chilled citrus juice, listened to Kelda work his magic over the crowd, causing vendors roaming the tiered stone walkways to stop in their tracks as the deep, honed voice flooded the amphitheater and the plain, until the distant hillocks seemed to take up and echo his song. Phelan, moved in spite of himself by the unfortunate lovers in the ballad, searched for Beatrice again and found his father instead, sitting beside Sophy and drinking something no doubt forbidden to the vendors to sell. Or maybe it was just tea; he offered the flask to Sophy, and she accepted it. Phelan’s attention lingered on his father, as applause roared like a sea-wave around him. Still stunned by Jonah’s tale, and hopelessly trying to imagine such a life, he knew that it would be his own lifelong predicament to wonder at the mystery until he watched Jonah watch him die.

He was rescued abruptly from such dark thoughts by the first wild, exuberant note out of the next musician’s throat. He felt his skin prickle. He barely recognized the voice; it seemed as though one of the ancient stones, warmed by the bright smile of the sun, had broken into song. It made him yearn for an instrument—anything, a blade of grass, a singing reed—to play along with her. She seemed as serenely confident of her powers as a full moon drifting to airy nothing above the horizon, as strong as an old oak tree carrying generations of nests in its enormous boughs or a mischievous wind blowing any thought of death away as lightly as last year’s dried leaf. He laughed, even as tears stung his eyes. Kelda could not matter against this. Nothing mattered, only the exhilaration and generosity in the voice that must have swept across the plain to startle the eagles on the crags of Grishold and make the old stones dance along the edge of the northern sea.

The musicians rose, clapping for her, even Kelda, as she came back downstairs. The unfortunate who had to follow her dropped a kiss on Zoe’s cheek, laughing as they passed on the stairs. Zoe found Phelan; the musician beside him moved aside for her to sit with him.

The little, taut smile on her face, the absolute fearlessness in her eyes made him stare at her with awe.

“You’ve declared war,” he breathed.

She shook her head. “Not war,” she whispered tightly, as the musician on the stage above them began her song. “Not yet.”