The Bards of Bone Plain

He hadn’t made a coherent decision to do so. Reason had nothing to do with it. Why he found himself in peculiar places at odd hours of day or night, hiding behind a trash bin or an elegant steam carriage and watching to see where Jonah went next, he didn’t bother trying to explain even to himself. Some nuggets of research he’d tripped over, a conjunction of wildly disparate facts he could barely remember, had sparked against each other like flint against steel. The light had fallen upon Jonah. Once he saw what he saw in that light, Phelan couldn’t stop looking. He could not have discussed it rationally with anyone else, least of all Jonah. He was looking for something he had glimpsed beyond language, between the lines, and it drove him, as nothing his father had ever done, to resolve the conundrum that was Jonah Cle.

So distracted, he rarely noticed the constant influx of musicians into the city, except when the streets and taverns were so full of strangers that they hindered his pursuit of Jonah. Sometimes, an unfamiliar song caught his ear, as a would-be bard from some far corner of Belden was moved by the ancient history and legends of the occasion to add to it on the sidewalk. Phelan, pausing in surprise, would remember why Caerau was filling with music and people. Then he would hear the phrase that had stopped him in his tracks echoing in his heart, and he would place it to memory, as he had been taught, music woven into the smell of fish chowder, the clamor of gulls on the docks, the glitter of light along the musician’s instrument, for future reference, and move on.

When Jonah eluded him completely, left the house in the odd hours Phelan slept, fitfully and most often with a book over his face, he would find himself retracing his father’s haunts: the museums, forgotten dig sites, standing stones along the Stirl, where the footprints, the bottles dropped into the mud, might well be Jonah’s. He remembered to teach his class; he worked on his paper sporadically on the rare occasions when he and Jonah were in the house together. The pile of pages was slowly growing as he rummaged through the school library or the steward’s records. Like his thoughts, the pages of his paper were homing toward something that could not yet emerge into the light of language; he could not finish it until he had found his own way through the labyrinth of fact, conjecture, and wild improbability that was Jonah’s life.

Phelan realized that after the third court occasion that Jonah had turned up at sober, on time, and without elaborate machinations on Sophy’s part. He could, Phelan noted, pass intelligent and appropriate comments while seeming to absorb the young bard’s music through the black, implacable gaze he trained on Kelda during every note. Kelda was never at all discomposed by it. Meeting Jonah in a crush, he would exchange a genial remark, generally about the impending bardic contest, which would only render Jonah’s expression even more bleak until, satisfied, Kelda wandered off with a smile to charm a fairer face.

I am watching you, Jonah’s eyes said. I have my eye on you. But to what end, Phelan wasn’t sure; Jonah’s only response to the imminence of Kelda was to reach for the nearest passing drink. So Phelan thought, at any rate until he found himself following Jonah through an abandoned sewer.

It had already been a long day and seemed about to get a great deal longer. Officially, it had begun early enough, at breakfast with Zoe before his class. They found each other that morning in the masters’ refectory, among a scattering of teachers and retired bards who still woke at the dawn song of the birds. Phelan, entering, saw Zoe sitting alone at a table, with the colors of the high stained-glass windows around the hall cascading over her. Red-eyed and disheveled, hunched over her teacup, she looked the way he felt. He pulled out a chair beside her, and she jumped, unaccustomedly nervy. The impending contest, he guessed. It would make anyone skittish as a cat. Unofficially, his day had never begun, just melted into light out of the previous night, when he had followed Jonah to an ancient tavern in south Caerau that stood in a ring of standing stones and had attracted, for most of the night, half the visiting musicians in Caerau.

“I think it was called Dockers Haven,” he answered through a yawn. “It smelled fishy enough.” A server put coffee down in front of him; he dived down, took a deep breath of it. He added, after a scorching swallow, “It was up to the rafters with musicians.”

She held her breath, gazing into her tea, then looked at him a little, genuine smile underscoring her eyes. “I wish you would. It might inspire me. It may not help me play better than Kelda—I’m not sure anything could do that—but you would make me play better than myself.”

She lowered her eyes, reading tea leaves again. “Yes. No. Why should I be? Why wouldn’t I be?” She straightened, shifting her elbows for a plate the server, a student in his other life, put down between them. That morning’s breakfast was thin herb omelets rolled around asparagus, strawberries in cream, biscuits studded with onion and chives. His brow cocked a question at Phelan.

“Please,” Phelan said, and studied Zoe again while he waited. She ate hungrily, ignoring him or avoiding his eyes, he wasn’t sure which. His own breakfast came up promptly, and he lost himself in it for a few bites until he heard her say,

“Play in the competition. To keep me company.” She was watching him now, fork suspended over her plate, her eyes luminous, troubled. He shifted, murmuring inarticulately, reluctant and annoyed that the bard from Grishold could cast his shadow even over private decisions made between them. “If you do,” she added, inspired, “you could write your paper on the competition instead. It will be brilliant—the first formal piece written from the point of view of a musician who played in it. You said you’ve been having trouble with your topic.”

She only said, after a moment, “Good. Then you’ll be that much less distracted by it. I understand why you’re not interested in the competition. But there are reasons—” Her voice caught, making him stare. She ducked her face, hiding behind her hair, such an unusual impulse that he put his fork down, astonished. “Things,” she went on finally, “that I’m not so certain about, and I want you to see them, too.”

She shook her head quickly; he saw her face again, her fine profile rising against the dark, and then her eyes, nearly black in their intensity. She said softly, her voice trembling, “I would be very grateful if you would play your heart beside me like the most magical instrument in the world. I’m not certain what to expect from this competition, but I think, that at the very least, it will be like nothing anyone could ever predict. Play to win. You’ll need to, against Kelda. You’ll need all that your heart can give.”

A fragment of what he had glimpsed in his research slipped into his mind. He went rigid, recognizing it in what she saw: the oldest competition in Belden, in the five kingdoms, and older even than that.

He taught his class, from which Frazer was markedly absent, probably recovering from a more compelling subject the night before. No one there focused very well on the rigors of memory; the students forgot their verses without compunction and only wanted to talk about the bardic competition, and whether or not Phelan thought there could possibly be a bard in the realm better than Kelda.

He didn’t expect to find Jonah at home asleep in his bed after tumbling into it at dawn. But he checked there first, anyway, and found his mother at the breakfast table, with a pair of half-moons balanced on her elegant nose, sipping her morning coffee and reading his unfinished paper.

“He does seem to have something on his mind, though, doesn’t he?” She aimed the half-moons at him, her fair brows raised. “Do you think it’s the bardic competition? You are going to compete, of course, aren’t you?” He nodded wordlessly. “I wonder if he wishes he could. Do you think so? Yesterday—I think it was yesterday. Yes. We served up our annual fish-chowder luncheon on the royal docks for the Relief of Widows and Orphans of the Stirl. It was a great success. He sent me flowers.”

“That’s exactly it, isn’t it? He’s always where he should be, these past days. Just keep an eye on him, will you? Discreetly, of course. You might let me know if he’s in any kind of trouble. Beyond the usual, I mean. Do you mind?”

He took a steam tram down the river road, spent some time wandering through the streets, following the music that seeped out of doorways, blew down piers, drew crowds on street corners. The music gave him a place to look, at least, gave his meanderings a pattern. Mostly, he moved on the assumption that if he kept Jonah in the forefront of his thoughts, Jonah would appear. Which was not at all hard to do, considering his own crack-brained suspicions. Sometimes, though, Sophy tugged at his thoughts, the vision of his unpredictable mother reading his scholarly paper in her dressing gown. And Zoe. What had she persuaded him to do? The last thing in the world he wanted ...

No Jonah in the cheerful morning light. On impulse, he walked across Dockers Bridge to look for his father down a hole. Or maybe asleep on a midden full of the previous century’s rubbish. Perhaps the princess would know.

Beatrice came up to talk to him, already grimy and sweating in the warmth. She took her straw hat off, fanned herself. He watched curly tendrils of gold, escaped from her ruthless pins, flutter around her face.

“He was here earlier,” she told Phelan. “He wanted to know if I’d seen Kelda before I left the castle this morning. Of course I hadn’t—I try not to see anyone when I’m dressed like this. That’s all your father said, really. He went off, and I went back down to dust my mantelpiece. I have no idea where he might have gone.” She paused, her cobalt eyes querying him through the mask of grit. “I’ve seen the way he looks at Kelda lately, during gatherings at court.”

“Yes,” Phelan answered tightly. “I think there’s something between them in their past, despite everything Kelda says. I’m trying to keep an eye on my father. I’m trying to understand.”

She put her hat back on, studied him under the shadow. “It makes no sense,” she breathed. “None of it. Kelda—he shouldn’t know what he knows. He couldn’t be as young as he says if he has a past with Jonah in it.”

“Because you’d both be in danger, then.” Her mouth pinched a moment, then she loosed a breath gustily. “I do so want to help you look. If I get into trouble again, my mother will send me to my sister Charlotte’s home in the country to be influenced by children and apple orchards and cows. It would be maddening.”

She thought about that, clamping her hat on her head to keep it from flying into the Stirl. “I suppose that’s where it began, isn’t it ... The language of endlessly repeating days ... Was the magic there from the beginning? Have we just forgotten it?”

“Kelda didn’t forget.” He shivered suddenly, there under the full noonday sun, as he glimpsed again strands of an impossible tale. The princess in her dungarees, coated like a sweetmeat with the dusting of centuries, watched him gravely.

Can you? he wondered. Can any of us? He nodded wordlessly and turned toward the bridge again. He looked back once, found her still watching him. She gave him a little sidelong smile and turned. He watched her disappear step by step down the ladder into the earth.

The crowds had grown thick with musicians carrying their instruments, visitors come to listen to the legendary contest, everyone drawn in the midday maelstrom toward food and drink and company. He heard his own name called from an open tavern door; friends waved him in. He joined them, wanting food and some cheerful, mindless conversation. The tavern was so packed that musicians ate standing with their instruments dangling out windows over the water. No one talked of anything but the competition: what they would play or sing first, what bards of which great courts had been seen already in Caerau, what odds were being given where and by whom on who might take Quennel’s place. Kelda was the odds-on favorite, of course. But he was, after all, just a country bard out of Grishold, and who knew what amazements from other distant courts might be even now wending their ways to the city?

“Are you competing?” someone asked Phelan, and he remembered, with surprise, that he was. Pressed, he admitted to little preparation and less ambition to win; it would be something to tell his children when they started wondering if he had ever done anything remotely interesting with his life. He lingered there over his beer, listening to various musicians, caught again in the web of excitement, speculation, and song spun over the entire city.

Jonah was walking upriver quickly and purposefully; he hadn’t seen Phelan. Phelan followed his undeviating path a long way, trying not to trip over instrument cases lying open on the side-walks, or careen into too many pedestrians. The crowds thinned past the docks. Jonah was easier to keep in sight, though if he glanced back, there were fewer bodies for Phelan to hide behind. He didn’t. Closer to the castle, where there were still random knots around visiting minstrels, and he could feel the cooler edge of the late-afternoon breezes flowing off the water, he saw his father finally veer from his determinedly straight path, go over the embankment, and down out of view.

Phelan quickened his pace, eased cautiously across the tree-lined embankment, and peered upriver from behind a trunk. Jonah was down on the tidal mudflats, leaving footprints in the muck. He veered again, as Phelan watched, toward a large pipe half-overgrown with brush, left from a time before sluices, canals, and newer water systems had shifted the shape of the ancient riverbed.