The king, who had appeared in the doorway, said perplexedly, “I’ve just been handed the most amazing message from your brother.” He broke off, noticing his daughter. “Beatrice! Why are you still here? You’ll miss the ebb tide.”
She escaped with relief, before she accidentally committed herself to children, dogs, and endless country garden parties.
Down in the site, helping Campion coax the line of stones out of the wall of dirt into daylight, she was so absent that Ida, sifting through the earth at her feet, asked sympathetically, “Is it getting worse?”
“Is what?”
“Being in love.”
Beatrice stared down at her. “In love. Oh—” She remembered some distant time, when she had met Kelda’s gaze and had felt it everywhere, all over her body. She flushed, wondering how she could have ever misread the power in his eyes.
“When love is gone, how little of love—” Campion intoned sonorously.
“I was never in love,” Beatrice said crossly. “It was an accident.” Even she had to smile, reluctantly, as they hooted. “A very silly mistake.”
His face was still on her mind, as she had seen it the previous evening. Phelan had opened the lounge door, and Kelda, standing at the table with students watching him, drawing a pattern on the pale wood with a burned splinter of kindling, had raised his head at the interruption. His eyes had seemed scarcely human then. The eyes of a raven, a wild horse, a toad, they seemed to recognize nothing human. He hadn’t touched his harp. The sound had come out of him, or the word he had drawn: a deep string, vibrating until it seemed to shake the floor. And then the streak of light ... When she could see again, the back door hung on its hinges, Phelan lay on the floor, and Jonah Cle had appeared out of nowhere. Everyone else had vanished.
A shadow blocked the sunlight overhead; she started, peered upward, and found Jonah leaning over the site edge, peering back at them.
“Ah, you are here, after all, Princess.”
“Barely,” she told him ruefully, aware of the tools growing quiet around her as everyone listened. “My mother was not happy with me. How is Phelan?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been home. Come up a moment?”
She mused a bit darkly, as she climbed the ladder, about the carelessness of parents. Jonah added, as though he read her mind, “You could ask him.” He helped her off the ladder. He smelled like a brewery, and his eyes squinted painfully at the cheerful sunlight. But he seemed sober enough.
“Then how do you know that Phelan made it home?” she asked patiently, stifling an unaccustomed urge to raise her voice. Jonah had put them together into a cab; Phelan was coherent by then, though he kept his eyes shut. Yes, he promised, he would call a physician; no, the princess should not see him home since the cab would pass the castle first. Yes, he would be fine if he could just fall into bed, only he had something extremely important to tell her if he could remember what it was ... He couldn’t, not before the cab left her at the castle gates. She watched it roll away with a hiss of steam; that was the last she had seen of Phelan.
“Where else would he have gone?” Jonah asked with annoying unconcern, and added, “I searched all night for Kelda. Did you see him this morning at the castle?”
She shook her head. “No. I wasn’t looking, though. Speaking of bards, my mother said something about Quennel wanting to retire, and that the city would soon be overrun by bards. Have you heard anything about that?”
“The bardic competition,” Jonah said grimly. “That’s what brought Kelda here.”
“But he didn’t—Kelda had no idea Quennel would—” She faltered, staring at him. “Are you suggesting that he planned this? He—he used his magic against Quennel?”
“Quennel choked on a word,” Jonah said harshly, and she blinked, as stray, wordlike objects in her head fit together like broken shards.
“The Circle of Days.”
His eyes narrowed at her; she had managed to astonish the jaded Master Cle. “You know about that?”
“Master Burley told me, when I remembered where I had seen the hooded face on the disk. He said it’s an ancient language in which very common words hold enormous powers. So the theory goes. Nobody has ever been able to read into the words, beneath them. I saw the pattern Kelda drew on the table. It was also on the disk. What does it mean?”
“Bread.”
“Bread.”
“Look in any bakery. You see the pattern still used on cottage loaves.”
“Really?” she said, amazed. “How fascinating. But what is its other meaning? Its secret?”
“You know that, too. You saw its power last night.”
She stared at him again, wordlessly. Standing under the bright noon sun, she felt suddenly chilled and oddly helpless. “All that power,” she whispered, “under my father’s roof.”
“Yes.”
“How—how do you know all this? Where did you first meet Kelda?”
His eyes held hers. For a moment she thought he would answer ; she could almost hear the words gather in the silence between them. Then he shifted abruptly, glancing at the city across the bridge. “Be careful of him,” he only said. “Did he see you last night?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Don’t let him find you alone.”
“But what can we do?” she pleaded. “You know this language—Do you have its power?”
He started to answer that, then stopped, and gave her instead a wry, very genuine smile. “I wish I did. Whatever he wants, he’ll wait to take it during the bardic competition. I might be able to change his path then. Just try to stay away from him. And look in on Phelan if you can.”
“Yes,” she said dazedly, and watched him pick his way across the barrens of the ruined city before she descended once again to the simpler mystery of stones.
“What was that about?” Campion asked curiously, as she picked up her brush. She answered with a vague tale of Phelan having an accident while trying to keep his father out of trouble, and his father having to rescue him instead. It sounded solid, she thought, until she glanced up and found Campion’s disconcerting gaze upon her.
“And you had nothing better to do with your evening than rattle around the Caerau waterfront chasing Jonah Cle?”
“You sound like my mother,” she complained, her mouth sliding into a smile in spite of herself. “It didn’t seem odd at the time.”
She found it difficult, after her conversation with Jonah, to keep her mind on her work. The meticulous task of coaxing what was most likely an old brick mantelpiece out of a wall of earth with the equivalent of artists’ brushes and dental tools seemed mildly absurd. It strained her patience, which she had always thought was considerable. Now she wanted to toss her brush on the floor and groan. She gritted her teeth, watched the sunlight shift with painstaking slowness across one bit of grit on the floor, then another. She only realized how the strain of her silence had spread through the site when Curran finally broke it.
“Go,” he told her gently. “Just go where you need to. You’re already out of here and away; you just haven’t caught up with yourself yet.”
She drove the steam car over the bridge, debated about changing her clothes, passed the castle without deciding, and parked along the old, quiet streets where Phelan lived. For a moment, when the ageless Sagan opened the door, she regretted her dungarees and her dusty hair.
He only murmured at a query behind him, “Princess Beatrice, Lady Sophy. Come from the archaeological digs, would be my guess.”
“Sorry,” the princess said to Sophy, wondering how many times she had overworked that word in one morning. But Sophy, who after all had married the mercurial Jonah, only saw what she chose to: the princess on her doorstep.
“How lovely of you to pay us a visit! Jonah is away, but Phelan is here, resting.”
“Yes. How is he?”
“A slight fever. I gave him some meadowsweet tea and took away his inkpots. Please, sit down.”
“I’m
a bit untidy.”
“Nonsense. Sagan, please tell Phelan that Princess Beatrice is here.” Beatrice perched herself on the edge of a chair. Sophy fluttered down onto the sofa, adding, with her charming smile, “I’m not at all certain what happened last night. Phelan is vague and Jonah is—well, his usual self. Do you know?”
“Something—” Beatrice managed guardedly. “Only a little.”
The gray eyes, so like Phelan’s, regarded her temperately. There was, Beatrice realized for the first time, a great deal of focus beneath the disarming flightiness Sophy scattered around her as a distraction. It kept her from having to answer questions about her impossible husband. It didn’t keep her from wondering. And now she was asking.
“Yes,” Beatrice blurted. “I know some of it. I don’t understand it all. It’s complex.”
“Well, it would be, wouldn’t it, considering Jonah. Nothing trivial, nothing predictable ... And now, Phelan. I must go out in a few moments. A women’s party: we have secured a barge for Lady Petris, to row her upriver and picnic along the water at a place with a very fine view of the plain. You would be entirely welcome to join us.”
“I’m hardly dressed—”
“And you have come to talk to Phelan. Straight from your dig, and wearing the dust of antiquity in your hair.”
Beatrice brushed at it. “I think it’s barely a couple of centuries old.”
“Not likely to be of great interest, then.”
“Some kind of common brickwork. No. I came rather impulsively.” She hesitated, added as impulsively, “I am sorry to be so mysterious. I simply don’t know exactly what I’m looking at.”
“Jonah does have that effect ... Yes, Sagan?”
“Phelan seems to have gone out,” the butler said apologetically. “Sometime ago, and by way of the kitchen, so he could take his breakfast with him. The cook said he was carrying books; perhaps he’s at the school.”
Sophy ticked her tongue. “My fault entirely: I should have let him work.”
Beatrice stood up. “I’ll look there, then.”
“I have the perfect skirt, Princess Beatrice.”
“I beg—”
“Yes, I’m sure it would fit you, though a bit shorter than you’re used to, since so am I.”
Beatrice smiled. “I’m glad you reminded me. Yes, I would be grateful; I won’t have to stop at home, then.” And sneak around hiding behind pots and doors to elude both my mother and the bard, she did not say. “Thank you, Sophy.”
Her scruffy boots partially hidden under Sophy’s skirt, and most of the dust out of her hair, she drove back down the river road. She turned up the hill to the school, startling a matched pair of skittish grays when she changed gears, and the car let out one of its goose-honks. Halfway up the hill, she braked abruptly, with another clamor of gears and a snort, beside the pale-haired man with an armload of books trudging toward the school.
“Phelan! Get in.”
He cast his brooding glance in her direction, then the thoughts startled out of his eyes. He pulled the door open; he and his books tumbled into the seat beside her. “Princess Beatrice.” He was sweating like a candle and about as pale; his eyes glittered a bit like Jonah’s did after a wild night. “What are you doing up above ground in broad daylight?”
“I came looking for you. Your father couldn’t tell me whether or not you had gotten home safely, and you successfully eluded me when I stopped at your house. Couldn’t you have taken the tram up?”
He shrugged, a smile flickering suddenly into his pained eyes. “I was waiting for you to come by, I suppose. I need more books for my research. And I completely missed my morning class. My students are probably still languishing hopelessly under the oak.”
“No doubt. Surely your father’s library—”
The smile faded. “My father doesn’t keep what I want to know,” Phelan answered restively. “He gets it out of the house, buries it in someone else’s shelves. Last night in the cab—”
“Yes.”
“Things kept fragmenting in my head. I wanted to tell you something, but I couldn’t sustain a coherent thought. Now they’re piecing themselves back together.”
“What thoughts?”
He frowned, concentrating. “When I was with my father in the Merry Rampion, he told me details about these books that he said he had never read.” He shook his head abruptly, then closed his eyes tightly a moment as though to quiet a sudden welter of pain. “He must be mistaken; his brain must be a sieve by now—”
“Last night you said it is a morass. You can’t have it both ways.”
He smiled, and pleaded, “Please don’t interrupt, Princess. My own brain is a rotting fishing net; things keep getting away from me. But I can’t stop thinking about that moment in the Merry Rampion when I tried to distract my father to keep him from chasing after Kelda. I went back and forth through these books with a jeweler’s eyepiece, and—”
“Very weighty tomes,” she said, impressed. “What are they?”
“The school’s household records. They go back to the very first year that Declan built his school. Nobody ever reads them. They aren’t even kept in the archives. Bayley Wren hides them up in the tower. Wren. That’s another thing—”
“Try,” she begged, “to keep to one thought at a time. That’s all I’m used to in my line of work.”
“This is the same thought, I promise. My father knew the name of the first school steward though he said he hadn’t read the records.”
“Surely that’s not uncommon knowledge, with everybody doing papers about everything.”
“And he knew about the tower falling then, in that first year. And that Salix was a woman—”
Beatrice closed her eyes, opened them again, hastily, as the steam tram chugged past. “Salix.”
“I thought she was a man; my father said I was wrong. The school steward never says one way or the other. How would my father have known that?” Beatrice opened her mouth. “And there’s the third coffin—”
“Coffin?”
“That Nairn would have been buried in after he was killed by the falling tower stones. But nobody ever found his body. So the coffin became accounts returned.”
Beatrice turned onto the school grounds, pulled into the paved area where the steam trams turned around, and parked. “I’m not,” she said apologetically, “entirely understanding this, though I know it is very important to you.”
“Well, it would certainly explain a few things.”
“I’m sure it would. I couldn’t with any degree of certainty tell you what those things might be. Perhaps your father read different books about the first year of the school? Got his facts somewhere else?” She waited. He had turned to gaze at the oak grove, pursuing his own perplexing vision. “Phelan? What’s on your mind?”
“Always,” he breathed. “Always my father ... It’s impossible. But it would explain ... I need to know what happened at that first bardic competition. And I need to know where Kelda came from.”
“Grishold,” she said, but again without any degree of certainty. “He speaks the language of the Circle of Days ... Is that common knowledge in Grishold?”
Phelan turned his head abruptly, his eyes, heavy and feverish, clinging to her. “You recognized it last night.”
“So did your father.” Her voice sounded faint, distant; she felt the imperative intensity of his gaze, searching, waiting. “Master Burley said no one had ever been able to translate it beyond— beyond—what the words say into the secrets they conceal. Phelan, what exactly are you thinking?”
“That I need to finish my research on Nairn as soon as possible. Look.” He loosed her eyes finally, nodded toward the trees, where a circle of students sat around the dark-haired harper, in the shadows of the ancient oak.
“Kelda,” the princess breathed.
Phelan looked at her again, his face colorless, harrowed with light, his mouth clamped tight. She saw what he was not saying: Zoe in the transfixed circle aro
und Kelda, listening to him play.
Chapter Sixteen
On the third day of the bardic competition, the tower blew apart, and Nairn disappeared again from history.
Both events are transformed into accounts rendered or received in the steward’s records. Dower Ren himself makes an appearance as an account rendered for the wounds he suffered when the roof and the battlement stones crashed down into his chambers; he gives his shattered inkpot more mention than he does himself. Two students were killed by the broken tower; one vanished. The names of the two sent home in their coffins appear in their own families’ household records, and in chronicles of the period. They had both heard Declan play during King Oroh’s visits to his nobles and had left their comfortable homes to meet their fates in the school on the hill.
The third student, Nairn, seems to have been missed by no one, at least for a couple of centuries, except for some sharp-eyed bards and minstrels, who had glimpsed something more on the plain than is anywhere recorded outside of poetry.
The foremost question the historian must ask, in attempting to understand the events of the third day within the rigorous boundaries of the field is: What did those on the plain actually see?
The household records of Dower Ren deal only with the after-math of the day, and they are terse to the extreme. Before then, when the two bards, Welkin and Nairn, were the only ones left to compete for the highest honor in the realm, we must explore other sources. Like the steward, Declan himself was mute about that last, intense struggle between musicians. His comments come later, in a letter to King Oroh:
“... we send you the best the land has left to offer, with my hope that, in the following year or two, I might again find one of such gifts to which you are accustomed in your bard, and so proceed with the training.” That’s all. He makes no reference either to his student, in whom he had placed such hope, or in the harper out of nowhere who challenged him. What happened to Welkin, at the end of the day? Why did one or the other not claim victory? Who knows?
Declan, of all, might have, but he will not say.
The Bards of Bone Plain Page 18
