The Bards of Bone Plain (17 page)

The sun came out then, unexpectedly, slipping a sudden, astonishing shaft of light between the sullen clouds. It struck the tower, ignited the crown of ice to golden fire, and Nairn's breath caught in his throat. The word in his head kindled as well, light running along the ancient pattern like a finger across harp strings, as the sun was doing, making a music of its own on a winter's morning. The word in Nairn's head leaped up to meet the fire within the ice.

There was a sudden crack just as, below, the scholarly Drue, bundled like a sausage, opened the door and stepped out.

The icicle struck him with all the force of a spear thrown from the battlements. Nairn, the breath turned to ice in his mouth, watched him spin and crumple, heard the ice shatter against the threshold stone. The sunlight faded. A swath of blood, the only color in the world, melted the snow around Drue's head. Nairn, frozen in that slow, amber moment of time, saw a flicker at the tower window above the door: Declan, disturbed in his music room, looking down, then across the yard at Nairn.

He vanished. A student, come to shut the open front door, stared out instead, and shouted. Others crowded behind him, pushed him out as Declan's own voice, still calm but louder than usual, bade them make way.

Nairn began to shake. He had cried so rarely in his life that he barely recognized the word, but he felt something like melted ice slide and chill on his face. The students came out, made a ring around the fallen Drue; Declan knelt in the snow beside him. Nairn moved finally, unsteadily, feeling vast mountains of snow shift at every step.

“Poor Drue,” Shea said, her peremptory voice trembling. “Master Declan, is he dead?”

“Yes,” Declan said briefly. He looked up as Nairn finally crossed some vast chasm of time and reached the edge of the circle.

“Nairn,” Blayse said abruptly, noticing from which direction he had come. “Were you out here? You must have seen what happened.”

Nairn opened his mouth. No words came out. There seemed none he knew for what had happened. How could he say sunlight, ice, the mystery within the word for ice, the sudden beauty that echoed so powerfully, so disastrously in his heart?

They were all looking at him then, their faces turned away from Declan, who held Nairn's eyes, waiting, it seemed, like the others, for his answer.

Declan lifted his hand, held one finger briefly to his lips: another ancient word. Then he dropped his hand and his eyes, and Nairn heard himself speak.

“The ice broke from the top of the tower, fell on him just as he came out.”

Their eyes loosed him, too, drifted back to the unfortunate Drue, silent for once, and gazing with interest, it seemed, at the splinter of bone whiter than the snow that protruded down from his eyebrow.

“His father will be rabid,” Osprey murmured, awed.

“His father will be grieved,” Declan said, shifting Drue's arm from behind his back. “He'll understand that it was an accident. Help me get him inside. Shea, go and get Salix.”

“For what?” she asked bewilderedly. “He's dead as a doornail.” He glanced at her, a quick flash of metal under his red brows, and she backed a step reluctantly. “Oh, all right.”

“We want to be able to tell his family that we did everything we could for him.”

Nairn helped lift the body, heard, as they brought him indoors, soft, moist, swollen noises of shock and sorrow following in the wake.

“Nairn,” Declan said, as they let the body fall on Drue's tousled, fur-covered pallet. “Go up to the battlements and take an ax to the hanging ice. Blayse, you guard the door so that we don't lose another student.”

“Watch out for Shea coming back,” someone said anxiously. “And Salix.”

“Yes,” Nairn said tightly.

Declan looked at him again; his eyes withheld expression. “When you're done, come and let me know.”

“Yes,” he said again, hearing the implicit message within the request. “I'll tell you.”

He realized, as he swung the ax and sent ice flying into the air to thump harmlessly into the snow, that even then, between the loveliness of the singing light and the sudden monstrosity of Drue's death, he still had no answer to Salix's question.

As the long winter finally ebbed and wild lilies bloomed in the melting snow, Declan sent out his message to all the bards of Belden, high and low, near and far, inviting them to the school for a great competition, on Midsummer Day, for the position of Royal Bard at King Oroh's court.

Zoe sat with the old bard as he lay in his chambers. She watched him silently. His eyes were closed, but he was awake, she guessed from the hard lines converging just above the bridge of his nose. He was silent as well. The king's physician had examined him; he had let fall a miserly word or two then, grudging even those. He had choked on an errant salmon bone, he was told. Master Cle's flailing arm had accidentally caught him where it did the most good; he had some bruises from his fall, but nothing sprained or broken. He would be fit as the proverbial fiddle tomorrow, the physician promised, and left him something that would put him to sleep when he drank it.

He did not drink it.

His servants had undressed him and put him to bed, while Zoe returned to the hall to ask Phelan to sing in her place. He was surprised, but he didn't care. He had a fine, sinewy voice; he could perform the ancient Grishold love ballad as easily as pull on a boot. She went to give her excuses to the musicians in the gallery and to ask them to do what they could to replace Quennel, so that Lord Grishold's bard would not be pressed to entertain the entire long evening. Lord Grishold's bard was already there, tuning his harp and watching the guests below take their places for supper in the great hall.

She studied his absorbed face a moment and realized she would not want him to examine too closely the expression on hers. She turned away quickly without speaking and went back to Quennel's chambers. He didn't look at her or speak, even after she sent his servants away. She waited. He drifted a little at first, she thought, until she felt the deep focus of his thoughts, worrying at some kernel of truth within a husk held in the beak of some dark bird that held him fixed in the reflection of its black, black eye.

“Zoe.”

She opened her own eyes, blinked the sumptuous room around her, the bright tapestries and carpets, the ancient, legendary instruments that Quennel had collected through the decades, each in its special place. She struggled between dreams and memory, straightening in the armchair, and remembered the bard tucked into silk and fur and glowing damask, safe in his bed beside her. She turned to him, smiling; the smile smacked like a fledgling against hard glass, dropped.

He had finally opened his own eyes, but the grooves of the frown between them had only dug deeper.

“Master Quennel. Are you in pain?”

“Did you sing?”

“Without you? Of course not.”

“Then that bard from Grishold who wants my life is in the great hall playing for the king.”

She felt her own brows draw together, but answered gently, “Many bards in this kingdom want your position. This bard will be gone like a spell of nasty weather in a few days, and you will be playing for the king again tomorrow.”

He sought her eyes finally. “You don't like him, either.”

“Not for a moment.” She hesitated, feeling him want more, his weary gaze drawing at her. “I'm not sure why,” she added finally. “Except that what we see—what he tells us to see—seems false. He is simply not convincing as a country innocent from the lonely tors of Grishold.”

“Have you heard him play tonight?”

“No. I've been mostly here with you.”

“Go and listen to him.”

She hesitated, reluctant to leave him. “He must have stopped by now.”

“No. I can hear him.” How, in that ancient wing of the castle, through walls thick with history, Zoe could not imagine. She listened, heard only the endless silence of stone. “Go and come back and tell me if he's any good.”

Quennel must have been playing the bard's music in his own head, Zoe guessed as she hurried down the stairways and quiet corridors, passing from rough-hewn walls and flagstones to marble floors and oak wainscoting before she heard the distant, muted din from the hall. As she drew closer, the noise ebbed oddly, like a tide withdrawing, into absolute, astonishing silence.

A harp note broke the silence.

She entered the great hall from the back and found the guests motionless in their chairs, as though some enchantment had been flung over them. The enchanter loosed a mournful cascade of notes, and she stopped, stood unobtrusively in the shadows between the wall sconces. Kelda sat at the Royal Bard's customary place, on a gilded stool in the center of the broad square formed by the tables. He faced the dais table, where the royal family and the visitors from Grishold seemed to have forgotten the food on their plates. A single wine cup flashed among the statues; as it fell again, clinking against cutlery, Zoe saw Jonah Cle behind it. Nobody else moved.

The bard struck a chord, and she recognized the ancient Grishold ballad he began.

It was a simple, powerful tale of a knight returning to his home in the western mountains after battle and imprisonment to find that all he remembered and loved had vanished. Only the birds in the rafters of his ruined hall were left to give him a message from his wife, to tell him what had happened in a language, like the harping, best understood by the heart.

Zoe felt her eyes burn at the sinuous, melting voice. She blinked away the tears, astonished at herself. On the dais, a couple of the young women were weeping openly, smiling through their tears at the bard. One of the household guards standing behind the king raised a hand to flick away something at the corner of his eye. The knight wandered away finally, exiled to his memories, riding forever into his past.

There was dead silence while the last chord flared like an ember and slowly died.

Then a sloppy, unwieldy wave of noise flooded the hall. Cups flashed, thumped; porcelain and cutlery collided; servants moved again, proffering dishes that had, for a time, been forgotten. It was as though the entire court had been spellbound, Zoe thought. Kelda put down his harp, then everyone could speak again. He accepted their accolades with a smile, enjoying the warmth flowing to him from all over the hall. Finally, he picked up his harp again, began a light, familiar dance that the musicians in the gallery above him knew, and one by one they leaped in after him.

Someone came down from the gallery stairs near Zoe and saw her. She recognized Phelan's pale head under the lamplight and realized then how tensely she stood, hands gripping her elbows, her whole body harp-string taut, waiting, it seemed, for the descent of the harper's hand. Phelan came over, leaned against the wall beside her.

“How is Master Quennel?”

“Physically fine, the physician said. Mentally—” She hesitated. “He's in a powerful stew. About what, I'm not sure. Death, maybe.” She searched Phelan's eyes, found him unsurprised. “I've never seen him so dark. He sent me down here to listen to Kelda. I think—though it makes no sense—that Quennel blames him for the accident.”

Phelan loosed the ghost of a laugh. “So does my father. I have no idea why, either. Have you eaten? There's a supper laid out in the gallery for the musicians.”

She nodded, her eyes moving again to Kelda. “Maybe I'll go up there, while he's down here.”

Phelan regarded her curiously. “You're avoiding him? He seems harmless enough. Very gifted, as well as very ambitious. A bit crude, suggesting that Quennel might like to retire.”

“I suspect that Quennel thought Kelda was trying to help him retire.”

“Forcing him to choke on a swallow of salmon mousse?”

“A salmon bone.”

“Well.” His mouth crooked. “There is poetic precedence in that. Taste the salmon and understand all things.”

“Including your own death,” she said somberly. “No wonder Quennel is frothing.”

She went up to the gallery, where the musicians were rollicking happily along with whatever Kelda tossed to them. She made a hasty meal of roast beef studded with garlic, leeks braised in cream, strawberry tart. Then she hurried back through the castle, the noisy party receding again behind her, to the bard's chamber.

He was still awake, still brooding, still not inclined to share his thoughts. He watched as she came to settle in the chair beside him.

“Do you want me to send for some supper?” she asked. “Are you hungry?”

“I've swallowed enough for one night,” he said grimly. “Is he good?”

“Yes. He's beyond good. Some of the things he's playing are more suitable to a country court than for a formal supper given by the king. But he brought the entire hall to silence—and much of it to tears—with his playing of ‘The Knight Returned to Grenewell Hall.' His voice could charm a fish into a frying pan.”

He stirred peevishly. “Don't talk about fish.” Then he was silent for so long that Zoe thought he had fallen asleep. He sighed finally, and spoke, his voice hoarse; she could hear the weariness in it. “I'll take that sleeping draught now. I'm finished.”

She poured it quickly into his cup, added water and a little wine as the physician had instructed, and watched him drink.

“Shall I stay with you until you fall asleep?”

“No.” He put the cup down and reached for her hand, smiling finally. “Thank you, my dear, for staying with me. Come and see me tomorrow. I want to talk to you then.”

“I will,” she promised, mystified, and sent his servant in to turn down the lamps.