A song Nairn had never heard, the ballad of a dying young warrior, melted through his heart. The old bard sang out of the harsh beginnings of time and song, both stripped to their essences. It sounded eerie, haunting, as though a stone on the plain were singing to itself. Nairn’s skin prickled again with sudden, cold terror. He was going to lose this contest. The scruffy wanderer with the mismatched eyes and a voice like a collision of old bones and shards, knew the songs that had been buried with these wraiths. Where Welkin had heard them, what graves he had sat on, listening to the singing of the brambles growing out of hollow skulls, Nairn could not imagine. But somewhere in his travels, Welkin had learned the songs of the dead.
He would walk out of this tomb triumphant and alive and take his place as Royal Bard in King Oroh’s court. Wealth, honor, and all the music of the realm would be his. And there Nairn would be, as ever, outside the walls, outside the windows, looking in at what he could not have.
At that unlikely moment, as he stood within the heart of the oldest secret of the plain, Nairn heard Declan’s voice.
The magic is in the harp ...
The young lover died; the crows descended. There was not a word, not so much as a flash of fire lit silver or running thread of gold from the motionless listeners.
Then a third wraith spoke. “Pig-Singer. ‘The Journey of the Wheel.’ ”
Nairn raised his harp, hoping against hope that his fingers would know the song that he was certain, in all his rambles, he had never encountered. They hovered, silent. The wraiths stood as silently, waiting.
Then his fingers moved to the deepest string on the harp, played that one string all at once, echoing the deep, fierce longings, despair, and certainty strung along Nairn’s sinews, reverberating in his bones, that Welkin cheated, that Welkin had no great gifts, that all the ancient power belonged to his harp, and Nairn could break those strings with a wish and prove it.
One string in Welkin’s harp did snap, before the old bard himself gave an anguished, untuned cry. The harp dropped first, then the harper, following it to earth.
From out of the suddenly starry sky, stones began to fall.
Chapter Seventeen
Quennel sent his message to the school before the day ended: a formal request, brilliant with colored ink and the king’s seal, that a search for a new Royal Bard should be called without delay across the land, and all musicians from village to high court be welcomed to compete on Stirl Plain on the first day of summer. Zoe was stunned by the date. It seemed scant breaths away, one final smile from the moon at spring before it turned its face toward summer. But, she realized, any day within the next century that pitted her against Kelda would be too soon.
“I can’t do it,” she whispered numbly as she stood staring at the parchment pinned to the board where all could see. Students and teachers jostled around her, exclaiming, laughing with excitement; she could almost feel the air tuned to their tension as they mentally tightened their strings and calculated their chances. “Quennel, I can’t win this thing for you.”
She could hear his answer, his aged, light eyes fierce and burning: Do it anyway.
“Zoe.”
She started. It was Phelan beside her, whom she hadn’t seen since the previous evening, when he had appeared so unexpectedly in the fussy little inn, his father blowing in the back door like a squall at the same time. Kelda had said something, or maybe Jonah had. Then she had found herself hurrying along the walkway between herbaceous borders, caught in a scurry of students fleeing the place as though they had been discovered stealing the tea service.
Phelan’s fingers coaxed her out of the crowd; she looked at him silently, puzzled, when they stopped under the shadow of an oak tree. He seemed weary, oddly bruised around the edges. His father, she thought instantly. But that wasn’t what came out first.
“What made you go off with Kelda last night?” he asked her bewilderedly.
She gazed at him a moment longer, not entirely sure herself. Then she gave him the simplest answer. “Something Quennel told me. I wanted to know if it’s true.”
“Is it?”
She paused, searching his face again. They had known one another so long and so well it seemed by now there would be nothing she couldn’t read in his eyes. He looked unsettled, wary and strangely distant, as though half his mind had gone off on some wayward road she didn’t know existed. They both had secrets, she realized then, from each other.
“I don’t know,” she answered, to her own surprise. “Maybe. I don’t know yet. I have to find out. Phelan ... I’m not really sure what happened at the inn. I heard a word spoken when you came in, and—”
He shook his head. “It was a harp note.”
“No—One of them—Kelda or your father—said—”
“You think it was my father?” he asked incredulously. “He didn’t have a harp.”
“I didn’t hear a harp note.”
“That’s what I heard. The power was in the harp. That’s what—Well.” He looked away from her briefly, at the memory. “Who did what is not so important at this moment. What’s important is: you’re doing this for Quennel?”
She nodded, and wasn’t, in the next moment, entirely sure that was true. “He’s afraid of Kelda,” she told him. “I want to find out why.”
Some of the confusion lifted; his eyes became familiar again, seeing what he thought he knew. But he was still frowning. “Be careful,” he pleaded. “I’m not sure myself what happened, but Quennel may well be right to be afraid. My father would say so.”
“Would you?” she asked quickly. “You seemed indifferent to Kelda yesterday.”
“I’m not anymore. Not after last night. Somebody blew the back door of the inn off its hinges, and Kelda was the one with the harp.” She stared at him; his mouth crooked. “Magic,” he admitted, and she felt the word flow like water through cracked, parched earth.
“Yes.” She shook her head, half-laughing suddenly, and stepped into light. She lifted her face to it, let it burn the edges of her vision, let the wind blow her hair like leaves. “Yes.”
“You’re bewitched,” Phelan breathed, watching from the shadow.
“I’m fascinated,” she amended. “That’s better than being afraid.”
“Zoe—”
“Don’t worry. I promise I will be careful. You, too. Stay away from flying doors and strings that speak.”
She left him with that, all she had to give him at the moment, for Kelda was crossing the lawn toward them, and suddenly the last thing she wanted was the two of them face-to-face. Fortunately, Phelan, after giving her a skewed glance, took himself off in the opposite direction, toward the library, with an inexplicable amount of energy and purpose. Zoe turned to meet the bard.
Time elongated as she watched him, slowed and lingered over each long stride, each ruffle of black silk tunic in the wind, each spark of light along the brass studs patterning his harp strap. He seemed to walk a long way across the grass and the intricate patterns of oak shadows, as though he moved out of some distant past, his expression blurred, unreadable. Then light drew his features clear, and time caught up with itself. He reached her in a step or two, speaking before he stopped. For once he was not smiling.
“Was that Phelan Cle? I wanted to apologize to him.”
“For what? Exactly?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“For what happened last night. I seem to raise his father’s hackles for some reason. Maybe my ancestors offended his. Or he is simply enraged at the sight of me for no particular reason. Did Phelan mention anything?”
“Only vaguely,” she said carefully. “I couldn’t make the incident any clearer to him. One moment we were sitting around the table in a perfectly ordinary lounge discussing eggs or clouds or cauliflower, the next we were all out skulking through the back garden as though we were trying to avoid the innkeeper’s bill. What did happen?”
“A bit of carelessness,” he answered ruefully, “between Jonah Cle and me. It was unf
ortunate. I’ll see that it doesn’t happen again. There are far more private places where we can meet. Have you seen Quennel’s announcement? I found it astonishing.”
“Did you?”
“Well, of course. He told us all that he wanted to die midsong in the king’s hall. I believed him. You didn’t?”
He paused for an answer, one brow raised innocently; she felt her own hackles stir.
“Of course,” she said, settling them ruthlessly. “And you? Are you going to compete?”
“I wouldn’t miss this competition if it meant my death,” he said complacently. “And I intend to win.” He flashed his glowing smile finally. “But, please, don’t let that make you hesitate to compete with me. I love hearing your voice. And Phelan? Will he compete?”
“He says no.”
“Pity. Try to get him to change his mind, will you? The better the competition, the better I play. I feed on challenge. You may have noticed.”
Indeed, you feed on something, she thought grimly, and saw his eyes narrow, glinting with amusement as though he had read her mind.
She backed a step. “I must go. My father will want his supper.”
“You cook as well? Fortunate man. Tomorrow, then? The Circle of Days?” He waited, neither complacent nor challenging now, but as though, she felt, something important to him depended on her answer. She gave a short nod. “Good,” he said softly. “I have some time in the late afternoon before Quennel plays at the king’s supper, and I must go and be polite. I’ll find a more suitable place to meet and let everyone else know.”
He turned in time to greet a multitude of students just out of class, eager to share with him their excitement about Quennel’s announcement. Zoe went her way, feeling buffeted within by inarticulate questions, and went to the tower kitchen to chop up a chicken while she tried to ignore them.
The bard walked in and out of her thoughts many times that day and the next, to her annoyance. He exuded ambiguities, she decided: that was his fascination. His mouth spoke; his eyes said something other; his smile belied everything. He was a crofter’s son from Grishold; he had never been anywhere else. So he said, while he made his way easily through Caerau without a map. He dabbled, he said, in magic; he played with the language of the Circle of Days like a child with an arsenal of twigs. His music said otherwise; it seemed to echo through time out of a past as old as the stones on the hill. He lied with every note he played. Or, in his music, he finally told the truth.
What that truth was, Zoe glimpsed only fitfully: crazed, scattered notions that flitted like bats in the twilight around the edges of coherent thought, scarcely visible, gone when she tried to make sense of them. Lost in thought, she only noticed Phelan as something as familiar as furniture, when he appeared at the table reading some ancient book of her father’s, or when she found him coming down the tower steps with his arms full of them. He was as preoccupied, as distracted as she; when she came out of her brooding enough to wonder and ask him, he only murmured something vague and got out of her way. He was possessed by his paper, she guessed, and about time. What was it about? Bone Plain? Apparently he had found something at last to say about it, that maybe had been said only a dozen times, not a hundred.
The place that Kelda chose for the next meeting of the Circle of Days took her breath away.
It was under the king’s own roof, or at least under his courtyard.
“One of the queen’s ladies showed it to me,” he said disingenuously. “It’s a very old passageway, connecting several inner chambers of the castle to the riverbank. No doubt it had many uses through the centuries, for trysts and spying, for escape under siege. Likely it was an ancient sewage channel; it’s locked tight now against the curious and the malignant. I doubt that even Jonah Cle will find us there.”
“It seems—it seems so clandestine. As though we are plotting under the king’s very nose.”
“Yes, doesn’t it?” He gave her his kelpie’s smile, all innocence and complicity. “At least it will be private. Lord Grishold requested no more inexplicable incidents involving door hinges and inn-keepers’ bills. What could possibly happen in a place everybody has forgotten?”
What indeed? Zoe wondered, as the reckless, cheerful group of students gathered like conspirators at an iron grate sealing a vaulted stone channel that began under the shadow of the broad Royal Bridge near the castle. She would have sworn the grate was locked the moment Kelda opened it as easily as a nursery door. They filed inside quickly, followed the dry, musty sluice. When they left the lowering sun behind, Kelda produced fire from somewhere—out of his sleeve or a pocket—causing ripples of awe that echoed off the stones to drift against the murmuring tide behind them. Zoe, startled, felt eager fingers lock around her wrist, heard Frazer’s indrawn breath.
“Did you see that? He kindles fire out of air—out of shadow—”
“I saw it.”
“I was right! I knew there was magic in the words, and he knows it. Zoe, he can teach it to us!”
“Yes,” she answered, chilled under the empty, secret path that led to the heart of the king’s house. Frazer’s fierce hold loosened, but his fingers brushed her now and then, cold with excitement, she guessed, and reassuring himself with her presence. She had no such reassurance: every step she took over the uneven ground led her closer to the enigmatic heart of the kelpie. She walked that pathway alone, she knew; there was no mistrust, only eagerness and wonder in the hushed voices around her.
For a man who had never been to Caerau before, the bard led them with astonishing certainty, ignoring or choosing passageways that shunted this way and that under the castle grounds, until he reached, to his own satisfaction, a place that looked like any other in the long vault, and stopped there.
He said nothing to the students gathered around him, just set his fire on the ground and motioned for them to sit around it. He pulled the case from his shoulder, took out the strange harp he had carried to the inn. It seemed very old, unadorned by metal or jewels, only by what looked to Zoe’s perplexed eye like the random knife-whittlings of a very bored harper.
Kelda spoke then, holding the harp over the fire so they could see more clearly. “I was shown this harp by an old villager whose fingers had stiffened too badly for him to play it any longer. He liked my harping, and thought I’d find it interesting. He couldn’t read the words on it, nor could his own father. He thought his great-grandmother might have learned them, so the family lore went. There was another bit of lore handed down as well: that the harp traveled its own path, went where it would, gave itself to whom it chose.” He smiled. “I felt that it chose me, and so I took it. I learned to play it. I have learned to play it very well ...” He touched a string lightly; the fire responded, a flame leaping upward, bright, coiling in currents that must have been stirred by the string. “You might have heard it the other night. If not, no matter. You will hear it tonight, I promise. And in a short time, all of Caerau will hear it.”
“The Circle of Days,” Frazer broke in abruptly, his eyes riveted to the harp. “Those are the words you’re teaching us, carved all over the wood.”
“The harp speaks that language,” Kelda said simply, “if you know how to ask it.”
Zoe felt a tremor deep within her, as though the harp had already sounded, and her heart’s blood had answered in terror, in wonder, in desire. She closed her eyes briefly, tried to remember why, exactly, she had followed this harper underground, to such a secret place so far from anything she knew, so close to the oblivious royal court above their heads that if Kelda played a note wrong, the king himself might tumble into their circle along with the stones overhead.
She opened her eyes to meet Kelda’s dark gaze, at once masked and illuminated with fire.
He said, “Listen.”
He struck a note so pure and sweet that her heart melted with astonishment. She closed her eyes again, breathing in the notes that followed, taking them deep into bone and marrow, into the place where tears began.
So where are we now in the story of Nairn? He dies in history during the destruction of the school tower. But where his life goes blank in history, it springs to life again in poetry, generally in the kinds of ballads that are sung long before they are transcribed to paper. From bawdy street jingles to elegant court ballads, he appears again and again, without introductory comment, as though his name and his story have become so familiar across the centuries that he needs no explanation. He is “The Failed Bard,” “The Wanderer,” “The Lost,” the beggar-minstrel whose harp is perpetually out of tune, who is more laughed at than shunned, or “The Cursed,” the tragic figure of cautionary tales: the bard gifted enough to attempt the Three Trials of Bone Plain and foolish enough to fail them all.
He is “the Unforgiven.”
As poetry, he is of no interest to the historian, in whose eyes the vanished become footnotes and the dead remain dead. But if the historian is in a mood to speculate and has an ear for the musical and symbolic footprints of the centuries, the nature of Nairn’s disappearance takes a fascinating, albeit fantastic, turn.
He leaves no obvious path to follow between poetry and history. In the utterly prosaic accounts of the school steward, he is assumed dead at the end of the bardic competition, and is not mentioned again by Dower Ren or by any subsequent Renne or Wren for centuries. Declan himself, ever loyal to King Oroh, taught at the school for some years after the competition, trying, we must assume, to train a more suitable replacement for the Royal Bard. Blasson Purser of Waverley, the king’s chronicler comments, “... pleases the king greatly with his music, but is deaf to any notion of other bardic powers the king so sorely covets.”
The founder of the first bardic school in Belden died in his sleep twelve years after the competition. Accounts were duly rendered for “a coffin made of finest oak and ash, hinged and rimmed with gold, to contain the body of Belden’s first Royal Bard,” as well as for “the burial and the funeral feast.” Those sums, as well as the cost of three days of lodging for nobles from the court, were subtracted from “accounts received from the king’s envoys in the form of the king’s most generous donation to the school.”
The Bards of Bone Plain Page 20