The Bards of Bone Plain

Princess Beatrice heard about the Royal Bard’s decision from her mother, who summoned her before she could flee the castle in her dungarees. The tide had turned in the river; the work crew would be waiting near Dockers Bridge for her to pick them up. She had hoped for a word with Master Burley before she left about the hen scratches she had seen the evening before, drawn with charcoal on the lounge table at the inn. But no: work crew, hen scratches, and any thought about Phelan had to wait while she attended the queen in her mauve-appointed morning room.

As usual, the sight of her daughter in pants and grubby boots caused Queen Harriet to close her eyes and delicately pinch the bridge of her nose. That, as usual, caused her daughter to wonder why, after so many digs, her mother was not inured by now. It was as though she thought she had two daughters named Beatrice and a vague hope that one of them would disappear entirely.

The queen opened her eyes again and frowned. “You never appeared at Lady Phillipa’s party for Damen and Daphne’s engagement yesterday. It was noticed. You were missed.”

“I was told you went off somewhere with Phelan Cle. And yet no one can tell me where. No one we know, that is. You vanish into dank holes during the day; I feel very strongly, and so does your father, that you should not begin to disappear at night as well.”

“I know. The bill for that ‘slight accident’ arrived on Grishold’s breakfast tray earlier this morning.” Beatrice’s eyes widened; her lips tightened over a startled laugh. Her mother’s voice thinned. “The back door and doorframe of an inn, historical though it might be and with period door hinges, in a not entirely reputable quarter of the docks. And his bard blamed for the damage. Your uncle was nearly incoherent. Such details should never have come to his attention. Nor mine. Apparently Jonah Cle offered recompense for all damages, but the innkeeper felt that, in his dissolute state, he wouldn’t remember a thing the next morning, and so he sent his claim to my brother. Why were you anywhere near this sordid little scene? Explain to me again?”

“Yes, Mother.” She glanced at the antique water clock on the mantelpiece and thought despairingly of the tide. “I really am sorry. Phelan was worried about his father, so I—I went with him to help.”

“Worried with good reason, apparently. Really, Beatrice. You abandoned your friends and went trailing off after the soused Master Cle, who has left a litter of broken things across the entire city of Caerau.”

“I really don’t want to know,” her mother said adamantly. “Bards should make music, not scenes, and now we have another incident, so soon after Quennel’s accident with the salmon mousse, and I’m told that the city will very shortly be overrun with bards.”

“It most certainly will if your father can’t persuade Quennel not to retire. It’s absurd of him, of course—Quennel, I mean—he’s perfectly fine now, except for a slight sore throat, and there’s no reason for him to inflict such a competition on us all now.”

The hen scratches, the glint in the young bard’s eye, the powerful flash of light that had come out of the charcoal scribbles on the table merged suddenly in Beatrice’s head. She breathed, illumined, “Kelda.”

Beatrice wished she could inhale the name back out of the air. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she said yet again. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I really will try not to be so impulsive.”

“I was going to say—” Queen Harriet paused, inspired by the sight of her daughter’s outfit, to bring up another subject now that Beatrice was in a placatory mood. “I think,” she began slowly, “that you should give some serious thought to your own future. Your father allows you to indulge your whims because you have similar interests. With him it’s a hobby; with you it’s becoming a career. A rather undignified and completely unnecessary one. You’ve played in the dirt long enough. It’s time you followed the example of your sister, Charlotte. Yes, Lucien, I’m just speaking to your daughter. What is it?”

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.”

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?”

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.

“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.

“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?”

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?”

“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?”

“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?”

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.”

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?”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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?”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

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—”

“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.”

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—”

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—”

“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—”

“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—”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.

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 around Kelda, listening to him play.