The Bone Queen

by Alison Croggon

  What he missed most of all was books. He had brought none with him, and there was no means of buying any in Jouan. Writing was unknown: miners kept track of their labour by making notches in sticks, and bargains were struck with a word and a handclasp, and stories told over firesides or remembered in song. Cadvan had a book of paper and a pen, hoarded in his cupboard, that he had brought with him from Lirigon, but he hadn’t thought about writing since he had been here. It was part of the life he had laid aside. He still had his lyre, which was as much a part of him as music, but he kept it upstairs, hidden in a chest: no one in the village even knew he could play. He knew another musician in the village would be welcomed – the Jouains loved music – but to play would have pained him, reminding him too much of everything he had lost.

  He sat unmoving in the kitchen for a long time, watching the light creeping across the floor. For once, his sorrow didn’t fill him with anger and self-contempt. He realized he no longer saw Jouan as an ugly, dull settlement: it was a place of complex life, of deep lore, of profound loyalties and relationships, which were no less significant than anything a Bard might study in the grand libraries of the Schools. There seemed no reason why he might not remain in Jouan for years. He might, after all, make something of his life that wasn’t a lie.

  IV

  NELAC of Lirigon, Bard of the First Circle, foremost scholar of the Speech, famed healer and mage, stifled a sigh and stared down at the table that ran the length of the meeting hall in the School of Lirigon. Cut from a single cedar trunk centuries before and constructed with impeccable craftsmanship, it was a thing of rare beauty shown to visitors as one of the city’s treasures, but Nelac was long used to its marvels. He wondered how many hours of his life had been spent sitting around this very table, listening politely to self-important fools drone on about matters of which they knew little and cared less.

  Too many hours, he thought. Even a Bard’s life, long as it was compared to others, was finite. And surely no life was long enough to compensate for the compound of tedium, exasperation and sheer, grinding depression that swept through him now. Noram of Ettinor had been speaking for the past hour, in a voice that might have been precisely judged to induce the nicest balance of boredom and irritation in its hearers. He was a thin, small-mouthed Bard who had built his scholarly reputation on an astounding ability to collect mountains of obscure facts, which he then arranged, thought Nelac, without the smallest skerrick of insight.

  “In short,” said Noram at last (here Nelac involuntarily smiled), “there is no reason whatsoever to reconsider judgement in this matter of Cadvan of Lirigon. As I have demonstrated in detail, there is no precedent in the Paur Libridha of Maninaë nor in any subsequent constitution of any of the Schools of Annar that warrants appeal against the sentence of exile for dealings with the enemy. I leave it to my learned colleagues in the Light to consider the evidence I have here compiled. More, I would suggest to those who would treat these traditions with disdain and contempt, that it is just these seemingly inconsequential examples of disregard that lead to the corruption of the Light. From such small beginnings grow the larger breaches, as the tiny breach in a dam portendeth flood.”

  Noram allowed himself a small, smug smile at this final flourish, and sat down. A number of Bards nodded and a couple clapped, but at least one of them, Nelac noticed, was doing so to cover the fact that she had dozed off. Nelac glanced at Milana, First Bard of Pellinor, who like Noram had travelled long and far to be at this meeting; she was pale with anger, her face carefully blank. Noram had supposedly been answering her, and his speech had been a calculated insult in the way it either brushed off or totally ignored her arguments.

  In the silence that followed, Nelac accidentally caught the eye of Calis of Eledh, who sat opposite him. Her face too was expressionless: all the same, Nelac knew that she shared his stunned indignation. For a moment, seeing an answering sparkle in her eye, he wanted to laugh. Then he stood up.

  “I have only one thing to say,” he said. “My ‘learned colleague’ has indeed illuminated us with a legal history of the Schools, back to their very foundations. But he has traced a very different history from that outlined by Milana. For example, I find it curious that in all his learning there has not been one mention of the Way of the Heart. If we are to honour our traditions, as Milana reminds us, it is this tradition above all that Maninaë adjured us to observe. Is it not said, on the opening page of the Paur Libridha, that the Way of the Heart is the keystone of all knowledge? And did not Maninaë also say that a Bard without compassion is no Bard at all, since love is the key to insight, and knowledge without insight is an empty husk which nourisheth not the body nor the mind nor the soul?”

  Noram flushed with anger, but before he could say anything, the other Bard bowed.

  “I must now beg your indulgence,” Nelac said. “I have even now an appointment for which I am unforgivably late, as this meeting has continued much longer than I realized it would. I ask your pardon, but I must leave. I have nothing further to add to what I’ve already said, and you all know my decision on this question. I ask Calis to register my vote in my absence.”

  Calis nodded gravely, and the Bards watched Nelac in silence as he left the room and the heavy doors swung shut behind them. No one saw Nelac of Lirigon, Bard of the First Circle, foremost scholar of the Speech, famed healer and mage, viciously kick the wall outside in an uncharacteristic eruption of fury. He stood there for some time, breathing hard, staring blindly at the stone, until a student passing by on some errand jogged him out of his abstraction. He turned to leave and only realized then how badly he had hurt his foot: he could hardly walk.

  The student paused and asked if she could help. Nelac smiled ruefully.

  “I seem to have had a foolish accident,” he said. “I may have broken a toe. I’d be grateful for your shoulder, if you could manage that. My rooms are not far away…”

  It was, as Nelac had said, only a short walk to his rooms in the Bardhouse, but by the time he arrived, leaning heavily on his helper’s shoulder, he was sweating with effort. Luckily the young Bard was strong: she was as tall as Nelac, broad-shouldered and well muscled, and her red, curly hair was cropped short. In answer to his polite queries, she told Nelac her name was Selmana, that she was seventeen years old and had been at the School for six years, and that she studied the Making with Calis.

  As they entered, Selmana looked around with ill-concealed curiosity: in all her years in Lirigon, she had never been inside Nelac’s sanctum. It was a dull midwinter day and, aside from the grey light that filtered through the latticed windows, a fire crackling in a small hearth was the only illumination. Rich colours leapt in the shadows. Three couches were arranged around a low table by the hearth; they were covered in vivid crimson silk, echoing a hanging on the opposite wall that was worked in rich reds and blues. The other walls were shelved to the ceiling, and glowed with the gilt bindings of books and a myriad of curious objects: brass astrolabes and quadrants; zithers and lyres and flutes; a collection of unusual stones, steel-blue celestite and silver pyrite and rose quartz crystal. A table in the centre of the room was piled with scrolls and books and drifts of paper.

  Selmana assisted Nelac onto one of the couches, and he breathed out with relief. “I think we could do with some light,” he said. “Would you mind…?”

  She saw a lamp by the low table and lit it with a word. It made the day outside seem even gloomier: although it was only mid-afternoon, the sky was heavily overcast.

  “I swear it’s going to rain,” she said, to fill the silence.

  Nelac grunted, glumly easing off his sandal and inspecting his foot. His little toe was poking out at an odd angle and was already turning black. He studied it dispassionately, and then, grimacing, set the toe straight. Once it was at the correct angle he pressed his hand over the foot. For a few moments he glowed with Bardic light. He set his foot on the floor, testing, and winced.

  “Ah, well,” he said. “Too much to h
ope that the bruising would vanish, but at least I can walk now. It’s astonishing that breaking something as tiny as a toe can be so crippling.”

  Selmana had been watching him interestedly. “Did you mend the bone?” she asked. “I can’t do that. I broke my toe once and I couldn’t walk for weeks.”

  Nelac smiled. “Easy enough, when you’ve had as much practice as I have. I hope yours wasn’t as absurd an accident as mine.”

  “Me, I kicked an anvil because my father wouldn’t let me be a smith,” she said. “And I was really, really angry.”

  “How old were you?” asked Nelac.

  “I think I was about eight.”

  “I kicked the wall because I was really, really angry,” said Nelac. “But I am twenty-two times older than you were, so I have no excuse at all.”

  The girl’s eyebrows shot up, and she looked faintly shocked. Nelac was far too old and serious a Bard to have such a tantrum.

  “Oh,” she said blankly.

  “But I forget my courtesy,” said Nelac. “My thanks for helping me. So Calis is your mentor, eh? A fine Bard, Calis. And a great Maker.”

  “Oh, she is!” said Selmana, her face lighting with sudden passion. “I don’t know if I’ll ever make things as beautiful as Calis does, but maybe one day… And I have to learn all these other things, and I’m not very good at the Reading. All those books!” She rolled her eyes in comic dismay, and Nelac laughed.

  “I suppose she’s given you Poryphia’s Aximidiaë?” Nelac named a huge tome, the standard authority on working ore and metals.

  “She did. It’s hard going, you know. So big! But I expect you’ve read it through and through…” Selmana suddenly recalled that she was speaking to one of the most important Bards in all Annar, and blushed vividly. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t – I’m taking up your time—”

  “Should you be elsewhere?”

  “Well, not really…”

  “If not, perhaps you would like to share a wine with me. I have nothing important to do either. I told the Council I had an urgent meeting, but I lied. I had to escape, or I would have strangled someone.”

  Selmana gave Nelac a long, frank look. “You’re not at all what I imagined,” she said at last. “You always look so…” She stumbled, and blushed again.

  “So…?”

  “Oh, you know, important, and solemn, and serious.”

  “I am certainly all of those things,” said Nelac gravely. “And I would thank you to keep any reports of my solemnity and seriousness unsullied.”

  At this, Selmana laughed out loud. Nelac limped over to a table on which stood a green bottle stoppered with a large cork.

  “I think we deserve something special, no?” he said, turning to smile at Selmana as he twisted the cork and drew it from the neck. He poured out two glasses of straw-coloured wine, handing one to Selmana. She sipped it hesitantly, and wrinkled her nose. Nelac regarded her with amusement.

  “It’s an excellent wine, you know,” he said. “It’s made from the white grapes picked on the slopes of Til Amon, which are justly renowned for their flavour.”

  “The bubbles went up my nose,” she said. “But it is nice.” She paused, and then spoke in a rush. “Were you are that meeting … it was about Cadvan, wasn’t it? Did they decide to – are they going to let him come back?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nelac. “I left before the vote. And even if they did, I don’t know whether he would return. Do you think we should allow him to?”

  Selmana looked surprised at being asked, and then frowned, seriously considering the question. “If it were up to me? Yes, I think so. He did wrong things, and terrible things happened. And on top of that, many people don’t like him, because they say he is arrogant and vain. And he is, you know. That doesn’t make him a – a bad person. There are lots of Bards much more vain than him.”

  “Do you know him?” asked Nelac.

  “I wasn’t a friend of his, but I did, a little. Ceredin was my cousin…” A deep sadness flickered over Selmana’s face. Nelac, his attention arrested, glanced at her sharply, and then looked away. There was a long silence.

  “I miss Ceredin, so much. Every day I miss her.” Selmana swallowed hard. “She – we are the only Bards in the family, and she looked after me, when I first came here and it was so strange. When she was killed, I hated Cadvan. I thought no punishment would atone for what he had done.”

  “And yet you believe he should be allowed to return?”

  Selmana met Nelac’s eyes. “I didn’t think so for a long time. He wanted to talk to me, after, but I wouldn’t speak to him, not for a whole year. But one morning I woke up, and it seemed clear to me. Ceredin came to me in a dream. And I remembered that she really loved Cadvan, and he really loved her. And she wouldn’t have loved him like that without reason. She wasn’t – foolish…”

  “Ceredin was one of the most gifted Bards I have taught,” said Nelac gruffly.

  “She was kind. She was one of the kindest people I ever knew. I know what she would say. She would say that sending Cadvan away won’t bring her back. Nothing will ever bring her back. And everything that happened was just a horrible accident…”

  “Ceredin’s death was wholly caused by Cadvan’s folly, and worse, by his dealing with the Dark,” said Nelac, his voice hard. “Were it not for that, she would be alive today.”

  “I know.” Selmana frowned again. “That’s exactly what he said to me, before he went away. He came to tell me – to say sorry. He said he understood there could be no forgiveness, that no punishment was enough. Maybe he’s right. But exiling him for ever seems – it’s such a waste! People say we need good Bards now, and I know he’s a good Bard. Maybe if he wasn’t before, he is now.”

  “You comfort me, Selmana,” said Nelac. He lifted his wine and saluted her. “And even if you struggle with the Reading, you know more of the Way of the Heart than some very deeply learned Bards I know.” He drained his glass, and set it down precisely on the table. “For what it’s worth, I think exactly as you do. Well, I’ve done my best. We’ll all know the decision soon.”

  V

  WHEN Selmana left, Nelac sat unmoving for a long time, staring into the fire. He wondered at his earlier anger: he had long mastered his temper, and the arguments today had hardly been unexpected. Yet he felt a compelling urgency that had nothing to do with these arguments. Was it simply that he loved the boy? He frowned, dispassionately examining his feelings. There was no doubt that he did love him: but his desire that Cadvan be permitted back into the world of Barding was surely more than that?

  He called into his mind the image of the young man he had known. Cadvan was sensitive towards any kind of snobbery, and reacted aggressively. It was a juvenile hangover which Nelac had sought, without success, to discourage: some young Bards, envious of the drama that surrounded Cadvan’s arrival in the School and of his obvious talents, had teased him mercilessly in his first years there. From such petty things could disaster grow…

  The facts were bald enough. When he was made full Bard, Cadvan had come in contact again with Likod, who had shown him some sorceries that dated from the days of the Great Silence. As Cadvan admitted later, tormented by shame and regret, his curiosity overrode the strict laws that forbade sorcery; more, he had thought himself a powerful enough Bard to control the forces these sorceries summoned. And so the shadow rooted itself, and grew insensibly inside all his actions.

  Nelac entertained an uneasy suspicion that Likod was a Hull, one of the corrupt Bards who exchanged their Truenames for endless life. Very few Bards attracted by the arts of sorcery became Hulls: indeed, Hulls had been unknown in Annar for centuries, although it was said some still lived, if living it was, in the south. If Likod was a Hull, he had made his bargain quite recently, within the past hundred years or so. As they outlived their natural lifetimes, the bodies of Hulls shrivelled and became skeletal. They could conceal this easily enough from most people, but it was hard to hide from Bards. It could be
that there was a new cabal of Hulls. This possibility, as much as anything else that had happened, disturbed Nelac deeply. If it were true, it would mean that the Dark was returning: only the Nameless One knew how to take the Name of a Bard.

  Certainly, what followed bore all the hallmarks of the Dark. The arrival of Dernhil, the famous poet from Gent, had catalysed Cadvan’s actions into disaster. Dernhil was a year younger than Cadvan, and his equal in intellect and magery. Cadvan conceived an irrational dislike of him, which stemmed from an unbecoming jealousy at having a worthy rival for his place as undisputed star of Lirigon. His dislike was fanned by Dernhil’s amused responses to his provocations: Dernhil refused to rise to any of Cadvan’s baiting. Eventually, Cadvan, a noted poet himself, had challenged Dernhil to a duel of poems. Dernhil won easily, and Cadvan took the loss badly. In a towering rage, he had told Dernhil that, although he might be better at the mere crafting of words, Cadvan was the greater mage. He challenged him to a duel of magery.

  Dernhil, with a rare display of temper, had accepted the challenge. Cadvan had told him to meet him at the Inkadh Grove, a dingle surrounded by ancient pines less than a mile from the School, at midnight. Later that day, perhaps from a sudden doubt, he had confessed to Ceredin what he planned to do. She had known nothing of his secret study of sorcery and was horrified. She begged him to lay aside his rivalry, but Cadvan was a man possessed and refused to listen. In the end, attempting to protect Cadvan from his own folly, Ceredin had also gone to the Grove. Out of loyalty, she had told no one else. Nelac bitterly regretted that she had not come to him.