The Bards of Bone Plain (9 page)

She found a note from the Royal Bard on the kitchen table next to the crusty frying pan when she got back.

A day later, she went down the hill again and walked in the opposite direction along the river to Peverell Castle. She wore her students' robe over the finest of her silks, long skirt and tunic and a colorful filmy scarf chosen to match the colors of the oak leaves dying and reviving on her robe. “I have several suggestions,” Quennel had written in his fine, antique hand, “as to what you might sing for the Duke of Grishold's supper. Bring your harp.”

He met her in a little antechamber off the minstrels' gallery. Decades ago, he had been a student at the school, then, briefly, a master, until the Royal Bard had suddenly and fortuitously died. Custom, which Declan himself had brought into Belden, demanded a competition of all bards interested in the position. In Declan's own turbulent times, after he had retired from Oroh's court and opened the school, the competition to choose his successor's successor had been fierce.

The numbers Quennel had bested were legendary: bards had come from all over the realm vying for the highest position; countless more had come to watch and listen. He had sung one song and everyone had put down their instruments in defeat. Or all their harp strings had snapped. Or one by one, over forty days and forty nights, he had picked them off, put them to shame, sent them packing. The truth of the matter depended on the ballad. Now he was aging, but still vigorous, a hale old man in a long robe the kingfisher blue of his eyes, his short ivory hair still springy and apt to curl if he neglected to prune it.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, smiling fondly at her. He had brought his own harp with him, itself a thing of legend. The uncut jewels on its face were said to have fallen out of Declan's harp at his death. They had wandered the realm in the pockets of thieves, in the crowns of queens, having their own extraordinary adventures until chance or story found them a haven in Quennel's harp.

“I'm honored,” Zoe answered, sitting on a bench beside him. Musicians waited their turns to play, or tuned their instruments in this room. As she took her harp from its case, she could almost hear centuries of overlapping notes echoing around her, resonating in her strings.

“Yes,” the old bard agreed cheerfully, “you are. But so are you rare and wonderful, and I do all that I can to manipulate events so that I can hear that astonishing voice of yours. Have you had any thoughts about what you would like to sing for the duke?”

“A ballad about Grishold, I think. Beyond that—” She shook her head, guessing that he had already chosen for her.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Of Grishold, most certainly.” He hesitated disingenuously, continued, “I wondered if this perhaps had suggested itself to you: ‘The Duel of the Kestrels.' Two rivals for the Duke—well, in the ballad they called him king, back then—the King of Grishold's daughter. You know it?”

“Of course. They had a competition with their falcons for the privilege of courting her. The one whose bird killed first would win her. It's a lovely song, wheeling and turning like the birds high in the air, crying out as they see what the nobles cannot: the princess in the distance, riding off with her true love.” She plucked a string, added dubiously, “Do you think he might be offended? Considering that the princess's true love trounces her father roundly when he attacks to get her back.”

“Offended by such a confection? It's a trifle, a fantasy, and your voice would make it a marvel, a shining jewel out of Grishold's past.” He paused again. “There is, of course, the question of the different endings. Which do you prefer?”

“My favorite,” she said, attuned to what was on his mind, “is the one where the kestrels fly in the opposite direction, for the language of birds is the language of love, at least once in their feathery lives, and they lead the scheming nobles away from the lovers.”

“Yes,” Quennel exclaimed happily. “My favorite as well.”

“Though I do like the long, dark notes of the ending where nobles chop off her true love's head.”

“Oh, no. Indeed, no.”

“Too dark.”

“Another supper, perhaps. Though,” he said, lowering his own sinewy voice as though the nobles were listening, “I do love those notes, too. Yet so rarely is there an appropriate occasion for them ...”

Zoe smiled, answered as softly, “We could sing it now, together. The hall is empty; the guards will never tell.”

They tuned their harps, began the centuries-old ballad, with its unhappy ending most likely as close to the truth of the matter as a bard ever got.

They hadn't yet reached it themselves when the great hall began an eerie counterpoint of its own: voices, a great many steps, some slowing, others tapping away in a spiderweb of directions, laughter, exclamations, all tangled together and becoming noisier. Quennel, looking both annoyed and perplexed, finally laid his hands flat on his strings, signaling silence. Zoe set her harp down reluctantly, regretting the unsung ending. She followed Quennel into the gallery, where they could look over the oak balustrade down into the hall.

“He's early,” Quennel murmured with surprise.

A formidable bald man in brocade and black leather was kissing the queen, whose voice was raised in surprise as well. Courtiers hurried across the hall to join her; pages were running out to summon others; the duke's wife and their entourage crowded in behind him, while footmen slipped behind them and out to see to the luggage. Zoe hung over the rail, watching the colorful crowd, the gathering of the king's children hurrying through this door, that, to greet their uncle. The cacophony reached a lively crescendo before she saw the face in the crush watching her.

A young, big, restive man with dark eyes, his long hair black and gleaming like a racehorse, had tossed his head back to scan the gallery. He heard us, Zoe thought with astonishment. All that noise around him, and he looked for the hidden musicians.

“Who—” she began, and stopped herself, knowing who, of course, he must be, even before she spotted his harp.

The duke's bard smiled at her as though he had heard, through the tumult, even that fragment of a question. Her hands tightened a little on the wood. She amended her first impression.

“Who is that kelpie?”

She realized, at Quennel's dry chuckle, that she had spoken aloud, and, from the glint in the midnight eyes, the sudden flash of teeth, that the kelpie had heard her as well.

He would have walked away from Declan's school without one last glance at his unfinished stew, but for that one unexpected thunderbolt: Lord Deste's daughter. He had sung a thousand times a thousand tales and ballads about love and never felt it once. It was, he realized starkly the longer he lingered, like singing about fire without ever experiencing its warmth and wonders, its pain, its absolute necessity. He had strewn the word as freely as wildflowers along his path through the world, tossing it here, there, like a small, pleasing gift that cost nothing and would be forgotten even before it withered. He had never before come up against his own absolute ignorance of it.

Declan tended to dwell on the question of Nairn's ignorance as well, though he seemed to be complaining about something entirely different, when Nairn bothered to pay attention to him. Mostly he did not. He did whatever he was asked: he carried stones, shaped wood for beams and rafters, shared songs of the Marches with the other students, learned their songs, learned to read, without thinking about much of anything but the long-fingered, green-eyed beauty in the kitchen. Why Declan wanted him to learn his letters eluded him. His memory was faultless and inexhaustible. If the words were already in his head, why bother learning to write them? But he did what he was told, only for the privilege, twice or thrice a day, of putting himself next to Odelet, receiving a plate, a cup from her hands, and taking the memory of her expression, her low, sweet, voice, whatever words she spoke, away with him to contemplate during the rest of the busy, meaningless day.

Declan snagged his attention once, when he told Nairn not to show his writing or speak of it to anyone. It seemed a suspicious request since the purpose of writing was to be seen, shared. But turn the request every which way and on its head as he did, Nairn made no sense of it.

“You're far too old to be learning to read and write,” Declan told him briskly when he finally asked. “But it must be done, so do it quickly and quietly, and no one you care about will laugh at you. I have asked a few of the others to learn, too,” he added. “They will keep it secret as well, as I require.”

It seemed easy enough to master. A few straight twiggy ink scratches turned this way and that fashioned a word that meant “shirt” or “egg” or “eye” depending on the pattern. They had other meanings as well, Declan told him, but did not say what, only that the meaning at its simplest contained its power.

That much Nairn understood: he was learning daily the peculiar, poignant turmoil of the simplest, most common of words.

“Heart” for instance. He was vaguely aware, from its rhythms, of the position of his heart in his body. But for the first time in his life, he was stumbling, will he, nil he, into an awareness of why so many emotions and abstractions in song and poetry were attached to that faithfully thumping organ. It acquired an unusual life of its own. It expressed itself in odd ways, pounding almost painfully at an unexpected view of Odelet in the kitchen garden, her graceful hands searching through green leaves for pea pods. At the sight of her emerging from the henhouse with an egg basket, her slender neck bending gracefully under the lintel, his heart would send the blood flashing through him with all the force and silent thunder of distant lightning. Around her his throat dried, his palms sweated, his feet grew enormous. He whispered her name to anything that would listen: the sun, the moon, the carrot tassels in the garden. Practicing his secret writing one morning, he felt an overwhelming urge to watch her name flow out of his quill. But none of the words he had learned from Declan came close to it.

How many twiglet-strokes and in what pattern would mean “Odelet”?

He could not ask her, and he would torment himself into oblivion before he opened his heart to Declan. His heart, a delicate object those days, would not permit him to bring the matter anywhere near Declan. It would shrivel within him at the bard's amusement, cringe like a cur, and try to slink out of sight behind some stronger organ. No matter how he shaped the request, even at its simplest it would bring to life an impossible image: the lowly Pig-Singer casting his eyes at the daughter of an Estmere noble. Even in ballads, such tangles rarely ended happily. Usually someone died. Nairn doubted that Odelet, who seemed obliviously unruffled around him, would burst into the traditional storm of grief over him. She might, he imagined, let fall one cool pearl of pity at the idea of his torment, then promptly forget all about him.