The Bards of Bone Plain (32 page)

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 incredulously.

“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.

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.

He said to Zoe across the silent room, “Be careful. You'll wake the stones with that voice of yours, and you'll find yourself in the last place you expect to be.” He smiled at her then, a thin, wry, marveling smile, slid his flute into its case on his belt, and left before she could even find her voice to answer.

She went to bed with Chase and got up again with the sun, bleary and worried about seven different things the moment she opened her eyes.

The first was getting home to wash and change before her class. That simple task was complicated, as she opened the tower door, by the sight of her father and Phelan sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of books between them. The table was otherwise bare; nothing but a teakettle stood on the stove, and even that was cold. They both glanced at her vaguely, breaking off a conversation, but expectantly, as though she had appeared at their wish expressly to cook them breakfast.

She felt a moment's annoyance and desperation, that they couldn't anticipate how harried she might be and figure out how to crack an egg for themselves. Phelan looked as hag-ridden as she was, his hair on end from raking it with his fingers, his eyes so remote, she couldn't begin to guess at his thoughts. Her father had a peculiar expression on his face as well. She wondered for a moment if one or the other had got somebody with child.

Then she summoned some rag end of patience, for she was hungry, too, and pulled a pan off its hook.

“Good morning to you, too.”

Phelan stirred, finally, in his chair. “Sorry.”

“Good morning, lass,” Bayley said absently. “Phelan just brought back more record books.”

“You didn't offer him coffee? Oh, you haven't made it yet. No, don't bother. I'll do it.” She heard him subside back into his seat, and she sighed soundlessly. She put the kettle on for herself as well and rummaged for bread, eggs, fruit, listening, as a halting conversation started up again behind her.

“You've finished your paper, then?”

“Nearly. I'm very close to an ending. There's only one thing I need to understand. To research.”

“Anything I might have?”

“I don't think so. I found the name in other sources: letters, court chronicles. A bard called Welkin. He's not listed as an account rendered or received.”

“Welkin ...” her father mused.