The Bards of Bone Plain (15 page)

“Princess Beatrice,” he said, bowing his head to her. His deep, warm voice seemed to resonate in her bones, set them thrumming like harp strings. “Master Cle. We have not met, but I had the privilege of seeing many of your finds this morning in the king's collection. I understand you also studied at the bardic school on the hill?”

It seemed to take forever for Jonah to answer. “Once,” he said finally, so dryly that Beatrice expected the word to puff into dust in the air.

Then the bard turned to her once more. Tall as she was, his big bones made her feel oddly birdlike, more swallow than her usual stork, as though he could carry her on his fingers. She felt her skin warm beneath the sapphires as he spoke; again, she sensed the odd, jarring, intriguing juxtaposition of ancient mystery and youthful exuberance.

“Princess, my name is Kelda. It's an old crofter's name in Grishold. What my father hoped I would become, except that he kept finding me sitting on the sty and singing to the pigs after I fed them.”

“Charming,” Jonah breathed to one of the ancestors hanging around the room, and the bard's smile turned rueful.

“We in Grishold are a plainspoken lot. I learned my ballads in some rough places, where folk still sing the most ancient songs of the realm. I thought that, considering what you were wearing this morning, Princess, you would know something about earth.”

“Yes,” she answered a trifle dazedly. “I do. In my other life, I dig things up for Master Cle.”

“Forgive my ignorance, but isn't that an unusual occupation for a king's daughter?”

“I suppose, judging from old ballads, you would think that we all sat around doing needlepoint and waiting for our true loves to ride up to our door. Doors.” She was gabbling, she felt, under his smiling eyes, and wished she had pulled a glass off the champagne tray disappearing beyond him.

“Of course I do,” he answered with disarming candor. “Tales are all I know of princesses, in Grishold. But why do you like old things?”

She flushed again, as though the question were somehow intimate, and he knew it. She answered more slowly, studying his face helplessly as she spoke, entranced by the ambiguities in it. “I like—I like recognizing—I mean finding—what's lost. Or rather what's forgotten. Piecing people's lives together with the little mysteries they leave for us. I like seeing out of earlier eyes, looking at the world when it was younger, different. Even then, that long ago, it was building the earliest foundations of my world. It's like searching for the beginning of a story. You keep going back and back, and the beginning keeps shifting, running ahead of you, always older than the puzzle piece you hold in your hand, always pointing beyond what you know.”

He nodded vigorously, his flowing hair catching rivulets of light. “That's what I feel when I come across a new ballad,” he exclaimed. “I keep listening for the older form of it, the place where language changes, hints at something past, the place where the story points even farther back.”

“Yes,” she agreed quickly, and noticed Phelan, then, coming to a stop beside the bard and gazing at her, entirely oblivious to the tray of wine intruding in front of him. Jonah took a glass promptly, and she saw it then, the older story: the flick of perceptive amusement in the young bard's face, the faint, narrowed, teasing glance, the odd familiarity with the man he had never met. She stood with her mouth left hanging gracelessly open, forgetting even to reach for wine herself. Then Phelan greeted her, and she closed her mouth again quickly.

“Princess Beatrice,” he said, looking so innocently amazed, she could have kissed him. “You've stepped out of an old fairy tale.”

“Let me guess,” she heard herself babble breathlessly, just to keep her startled eyes off the bard. “The one about the maiden who cleans hearths by day and dances with the prince by moonlight.”

He nodded, smiling. “She rises from the ashes, phoenixlike, under the fires of the moon. I suppose that tale would be apt, though ash bins were farthest from my mind.”

She felt the bard's dark gaze drawing at her as Phelan spoke; somehow, in that crush, she heard his indrawn breath, gathering words to speak, to force her to look at him. But another voice blundered into his, deep and jovial, trained to command attention and overwhelm the competition.

“Ah, good. Here you are, Master Kelda. I would like you to meet Zoe Wren, whose voice you will hear tonight. She is a young bard from the school, nearly finished with her studies there. We are, of course, also eagerly anticipating your own performance.”

The impervious Royal Bard Quennel, his white hair tufted like a skylark's crest, beamed upon the gathering. Zoe, in flowing, twilight-colored silks, greeted the princess first with her usual courtesy, then shifted her sharp, lovely eyes to the bard. She seemed oddly impervious to his charms.

“Master Kelda,” she said briskly in her strong, sweet voice. “I do look forward to your playing. I expect you will work magic in the great hall.”

That caused Jonah Cle to snort in his wine for some reason. Kelda regarded Zoe with interest, as though she were an unfamiliar species. “I have heard your voice,” he remarked. “Very clearly, when we all arrived. It was, as Master Quennel says, astonishing.”

She smiled cheerfully. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

A platter of tiny glazed tarts shaped like scallop shells carrying an oyster beside a black pearl of roe presented itself and was ignored, except by Beatrice, who nibbled when she was unnerved by undercurrents, and by Quennel, who swallowed the briny mouthful whole and engulfed them all again in his pleasure.

“Tell us, Master Kelda, do you travel often beyond Grishold? I don't believe we have seen you before in King Lucien's court. Nor, indeed, in his father's, though you might have been a student then. I have been here in this court so long I lose track of the years.”

Kelda shook his head, causing Jonah to emit another peculiar noise. “I travel rarely. And I have never been in the ancient school on the hill.”

“You must go, then!”

“Yes, tomorrow. The masters have invited me, and Lord Grishold will not need me. But surely, Master Quennel, you have played for three kings in this court: King Lucien's grandfather as well.”

“Ah, yes—I became Royal Bard just before he died. I'm surprised that you remembered. I did not.”

“We listen greedily in Grishold for news of Caerau. It takes the chill out of the long winter evenings. I'm in awe of your stamina. Your musicianship. You have been in this position for so long that surely you are tempted, now and then, to yield such strenuous duties to a younger bard?”

“Never,” Quennel said complacently. “I have the voice and fingers of a far younger man, and a memory rigorously trained in the school on the hill. I forget that I am old when I play.”

“You make us all forget,” Phelan murmured, glancing askance at the visiting bard and the turn he had given the pleasantries. That brought him Kelda's attention.

“You are also at the school, I believe?”

“I am,” Phelan answered, sounding like Jonah at his most arid. “But I have no ambitions and no interest at all in trying to fill Quennel's boots. He is a very great bard, an example to us all, and I can only wish him to keep playing for the Peverell kings as long as he himself wishes.”

“Which would be,” Quennel added, smiling, “until I draw my final breath between lines and leave one last verse unsung to haunt these old stones forever.”

“Admirable,” Kelda said with enthusiasm, and stopped a tray of toast points bearing minute molds of salmon, with capers for eyes. “We can all learn from your example.”

“You see,” Quennel began affably, and paused to pop a salmon into his mouth before he continued. He swallowed, paused again, swallowed again. Beatrice, working on her own fish, saw his face flush the hue of well-cooked salmon, then of uncooked beef. She nearly inhaled her own bite. Jonah said something sharply to Quennel, who was beginning to sag oddly against the startled Zoe. She struggled to hold him upright. As he slid, Jonah threw out his arm; it struck the old man hard below his ribs. The wine in Jonah's hand splashed all over Quennel, and the salmon flew out of him like the final word on the subject before he slumped to the floor at their feet.

And so death was the seed planted in Declan's mind that split and sent up a shoot that leafed and branched and finally flowered into the first bardic competition held in the Kingdom of Belden.

Before he announced it, even to his own students, he gathered the few who had been struggling over his twig-scratches and finally allowed them to see one another's faces.

They met in one of the rooms that Declan occupied midway up the tower, in which he kept his instruments and counseled his students. The students, grateful for rugs and fur underfoot, huddled close to the fire and eyed one another with dour surprise. None in the mangy, winter-bitten lot seemed to emit any kind of particular brilliance; they all worked hard, played well, sang well, and seemed to have no inkling of what in any of the others had persuaded Declan that they should be included in his secret circle.

There were five: the handsome, arrogant, ivory-haired Blayse, son of a Grishold nobleman; the plump and earnest Drue, whose father was a wealthy merchant in Estmere; the lovely, lanky Shea, with her hard violet eyes and a horse's tail of chestnut hair, whose father owned the village brewery; the angular scarecrow Osprey, whose father was steward in one of the great houses of what was once the southern kingdom of Waverlea; and Nairn the crofter's son.

They encountered one another daily; none were particularly close, not even Nairn and Shea, who had shared a summer's eve in passing, once, on a flowery riverbank. It seemed a very long time ago, Nairn thought, and in a green, warm, sweetly scented world long vanished from the plain. Shea, dripping with a cold, cast a brief, bleary glance in his direction and sniffed, maybe a comment, maybe not.

“My father taught me how to write,” she said, “to do accounts. But nothing ever like this.”

“Nobody taught me,” Nairn said. “I thought that this is how everyone writes.”

Blayse made a faint, rude noise. The pedantic Drue said solemnly, “I can understand how you could make such a mistake if you had never tried to write before. But you would have realized soon enough that you had run out of words. For instance, there would be, I think, no word for ‘innkeeper,' or even ‘garden,' such concepts being unimaginable to primitive people who did not differentiate between—”

“Or for ‘tavern,' ” Osprey interrupted irreverently. “Or, for that matter, ‘beer.' ”

“There have been hops grown on the plain for centuries, my father says,” Shea argued. “My father says—”