The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I can’t just—”

  “Of course you can. We’d love to have you, wouldn’t we, Marcus? Marcus. Where did that child run off to? Oh, Marcus, leave the bee alone!”

  Marcus, poking at a rose on a bush nearby, opened his mouth suddenly, so hugely that he seemed about to devour the flower. Then came the wail, like a steam tram trying to break for a drunken sailor. Charlotte darted off to rescue him. Beatrice, watching, mute and horrified, absently crammed an entire diamond pastry into her mouth.

  “Princess Beatrice.”

  She turned, chewing hastily and trying to smile at the same time. It was Sophy, she found to her relief, who chattered amiably about the lilies blooming in the fish pool, until Beatrice could swallow her bite.

  “Of course, I really came over to ask you what you unearthed—besides yourself, I mean. You looked positively extraordinary, earlier, like a walking artifact. Your mantelpiece at last?”

  Beatrice nodded, grateful for the chance to talk about it. “Yes,” she said, and lowered her voice so that her mother wouldn’t hear. “Only it’s covered with runes, and we’re thinking it’s not part of a fireplace at all.”

  “Oh, how marvelous. Does Jonah know?”

  “We haven’t seen him yet. Please, tell him when you do. We’re all so excited, and dying to know what it is.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother on the move, looking purposeful, still chatting as she pulled Lady Petris and an entourage in her wake, a bouquet of hats, it looked like, on colorful, slowly swaying stalks. On the other side of her, Charlotte had pacified Marcus with another jam tart and was leading him to Beatrice’s side.

  “It sounds quite mystifying and exciting,” Sophy said, seemingly oblivious to the gathering forces. “Along with something else I learned today. I wasn’t sure he would actually do it, he’s seemed so distracted lately with his paper—which is finally coming into being and so brilliant, I think—but he is, and I couldn’t be more pleased.”

  “About what, Sophy?” the queen asked curiously, she and her bevy reaching them at the same moment that Beatrice felt Marcus sit on her feet to eat his tart.

  “Phelan,” Sophy said happily.

  “What?” Charlotte demanded. “Is he engaged, too?”

  “No, I don’t think so. At least, I haven’t heard. He is going to enter the bardic competition, compete for Quennel’s place. I’m so thoroughly proud of him. Of course, you must stop your digging, Princess, long enough to listen to him play. I’m sure Jonah will understand even though he’ll be so impatient for you to continue work on such an important find.” She turned her candid gaze to the queen. “Of course, the king will be impatient as well, when he hears, Lady Harriet, don’t you think? Our children are accomplishing such amazing things.”

  The queen looked slightly dazed for a moment. Charlotte said blankly, “Well. Beatrice can’t, of course, do any of that. She’s coming to spend summer in the country with us.”

  Sophy found nothing to say to that, only smiled pleasantly, rather bemusedly, into the sudden silence. Beatrice, eyeing the table helplessly, felt something already in her mouth, growing and clamoring for exit, like an irritated wasp.

  She let it out finally. “No.” She swallowed under Charlotte’s stare, and said it again. “No. Thank you, Charlotte. I will be extremely busy this summer here in the city. And I would so very much appreciate it if you would stop Marcus from trying to stuff his tart into my shoe.”

  “Marcus!” Charlotte cried, glancing down without interest. “Stop that. But, Beatrice. We’re already expecting you.”

  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 i
ncredulously.

  “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.

  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.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  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.