The Bards of Bone Plain

The princess looked reluctantly up from under the earth toward the end of the day, deliberately not thinking of what lay ahead, only wondering how Phelan had fared. He had sung to her all afternoon, the tender ballad echoing in her head, in a lovely diversion, like a songbird on her shoulder as she brushed and probed and sweated under the cascade of midsummer light. Finally, the light faded, went elsewhere; around her, tools began to slow.

“It has to be,” Campion said tiredly, leaving streaks from his fingers across his face as he rubbed an eyebrow. They all wore a pelt of dust over clothes and skin, as though they were slowly turning into strange burrowing creatures who measured their days by the hours they could spend underground and left their thoughts there when they came up, blinking, into the world.

The massive wall of yellow stone was riddled everywhere with runes, except for what they called the door stone; the center of that squat, massive oblong held only one symbol: a dot that coiled around and around itself until it ended in a perfect circle. Ida had uncovered it earlier, absently chattering to them all the while, telling some story of a disastrous party while her vigorous brushing was revealing another story entirely.

“Doors,” Curran pointed out, “are meant to be used. Unless they’re meant to open once, then close something inside. Has to be a tomb. Likely we’ll never know, the way that stone is wedged in there now—looks so old it’s slumped and melted into itself.”

“He’s been at the competition,” Beatrice said, adding as they looked at her questioningly, “Phelan is playing.” She felt the warmth in her face as she said his name; luckily, she was so grimy nobody noticed.

They clambered out then, leaving the mystery to the moon. They washed their faces in water and leftover tea from the thermoses, and pounded the dust off their clothes. Beatrice gave them a ride across the bridge, dropped them to catch their various trams, and turned reluctantly toward the awaiting squall. The last she had seen of the queen had been at the garden party. Beatrice had sent her a message from Jonah Cle’s house that evening, a rather incoherent one, she recalled, but who could be entirely rational after emerging in tattered stockings and a party dress out of a sewer in the company of a thousand-year-old legend?

“Good. She said that you ran away after a party two days ago and were seen this morning in the company of Sophy Cle.” He picked up an ancient bone rattle, shook it absently, the whirling bones clicking wildly, to Master Burley’s consternation. “Anything you need to talk about?”

“Well.” His hand hovered over a fine, very early piece of pottery. Master Burley closed his eyes. Beatrice watched her father’s expression change slowly, as he mused. He dropped his hand abruptly, leaving the pottery intact. “Well,” he said again, looking hopeful. “That could work. Couldn’t it? It gets tedious, trying to discuss antiquities with your brothers and Marcus. Anything else upsetting your mother?”

“Good. Then we can move on to what you’ve unearthed in that dig of Jonah’s. Your mother said it was all you could talk about at her party. What on earth did you find?”

“Father, it’s the most amazing thing,” she told him eagerly. “A great creamy yellow stone tomb-looking sort of thing completely covered with runes. Except for the door. At least we think it’s a door. There’s only one symbol on that.”

He disappeared, came back with pencil, paper, and an armload of books. Beatrice drew the spiral within the circle, and they all pored among the books, draping themselves in various positions over the collection cases: Beatrice with both elbows on the glass covering a case of early spear and ax heads, studying a translation from the runic; the king leaning against a cupboard full of pottery pieces and flipping through a dictionary of early symbols.

“Anything?” the king murmured. Master Burley, poised like a bookend on the other side of the pottery cupboard, shut one book, opened another impatiently.

“Lucien!” the queen said despairingly, and the cases rattled alarmingly as they all straightened. She eyed her daughter frostily, then tossed her hands. “I give up, I really do. Have you even tried, Lucien? Have you spoken to your daughter at all?”

“Of course I have. She says everything is fine. Oh, and that it may well be a tomb.” The queen stared at him. He smiled at her. “Shall I take your brother there tomorrow, show him what Beatrice has found? He fell asleep during the bardic competition today. Perhaps he prefers tombs.”

She gazed at her father without seeing him, seeing instead the dark, mystifying face of the bard, his teasing smile hinting of ambiguities. “What the symbol is. He knows them all, the old runes.”

“Good. We’ll invite him to supper tonight and ask him. That is, unless Jonah is joining us,” he added. “There seems some odd tension between them. Do you understand it, Beatrice?”

“Of course not, how could you? Some sort of misunderstanding, very likely.” He glanced around at a strangled sound from the queen. “What is it, Harriet? Are we late for something?”

Neither Jonah nor Kelda appeared in the hall that evening. Quennel played alone, slow, old ballads and ancient court dances. There was an odd, distant look on his face, as though, beneath his own music, he could hear the music all over the plain as bards contended in private bouts in taverns, on hillocks under the moon, among the standing stones. His brows were drawn; his expression, on one of his final nights as Royal Bard, seemed more harsh than nostalgic. Beatrice guessed whose music he listened for, drifting across the long summer evening, and was both relieved and disturbed that the young bard with his raptor’s glance, his perceptive smile, was nowhere in sight.

It was a smaller family gathering than usual around the tables. Charlotte and her family had left for the country, the queen told Beatrice, who was sitting in her sister’s customary place beside their mother. Damon and Daphne were at yet another engagement supper; even Harold was out somewhere. The king was left to make desultory conversation with Lord Grishold. The queen’s voice, carefully modulated, had lost some of its implacable resolve. Beatrice wondered if she was already regretting the loss of Quennel, who had played at every important occasion in the castle since her marriage. Even Lord Grishold, the most unmusical of men, seemed to respond to the change in the Royal Bard.

“I understand I might have to find another bard myself,” Beatrice overheard him say to her father. “I’ve heard the odds are on Kelda to win. People tell me his voice is magical. I can’t hear it myself; music all sounds alike to me, like bees—can’t tell one note from another. But Petris and our daughters will miss him.”

“Charlotte’s invitation to you still stands, of course,” the queen murmured to Beatrice. “In the event that, after a little time, you need a place to think things over.”

About Phelan, her mother meant. In case he turned out to be as exasperating as his father, and Beatrice, having lost her heart to one who broke it, lost her job as well. How her mother imagined that Beatrice could have a solitary moment to trail through dewy mornings, scattering wildflower petals and brooding, with Small Marcus and Tiny Thomasina always with her, she had no idea.

“There are other digs,” she answered calmly. “I think quite clearly when I’m working.” She heard her mother’s sigh under the genial clatter of cutlery, and added, somewhere between humor and exasperation herself, “It’s what I do. If you don’t want to look at me in my dungarees, I’ll go up north. They’re digging up an entire ancient village in the Marches.” The queen flung her a horrified glance. “I am sorry, Mother,” Beatrice added softly. “Truly. But, honestly, how long could you stand living among country roads and cows and hobby farms? If you insist I go there, I’ll only find the nearest dig site and disappear into it. There are some wonderful barrows and tombs in that part of the country.”

Her mother’s knife scraped gracelessly across the porcelain. “At least Charlotte talks about shoes at the supper table,” she said darkly. “Not tombs. You really are hopelessly like your father.”

“Shoes?” she exclaimed, actually drawing a second syllable out of the word. “I adore them, don’t you? I have so many I had to turn the old nursery into a closet. Tell me, Harriet—”

Jonah found the princess at midmorning the next day, alone at the site except for the guard in the car, who glanced up from his book and recognized the interloper. Everyone else had gone to the competition for a few hours, to experience the historical anomaly of it, as Campion put it. Beatrice had been drawn back to the runes. Only for an hour, she told herself, brushing dirt out of the deep scores in the stone. They had haunted her dreams the night before, like mute faces trying to speak. She searched for the rayed circle within the silent, continuous chatter patterning the face of the tomb. The sudden shadow falling over her startled her as deeply as if one of the runes had spoken.

“They went off to hear the music. I just came—I had to see this again.” She gestured inarticulately at the mystery. “I couldn’t help myself. Master Cle, have you ever seen anything like this?” He did not answer; she took her eyes off it finally to glance at him. “Master Cle?”

He was utterly motionless, not even breathing, as far as she could tell, his face so white she thought he might collapse there at the bottom of the dig. She touched him. He moved then, gripped her fingers.

“Yes,” he said harshly. “I have seen it before. Or something very like it.” He dropped her hand, turned abruptly toward the ladder. “Come with me.”

“But what is it? What does it say? I don’t recognize that symbol at all. We searched for it—my father and Master Burley and I—in all the runic dictionaries, and we couldn’t find it.”

She guessed anyway. “Kelda,” she said abruptly. “You think—Master Cle, I have no idea what you’re thinking. What would happen to Phelan in front of everyone in the middle of the competition ?”

“Only when he thinks of you. I want to be where I can see him. And Kelda.” He gave her a hand onto the upper ground, paused briefly to take in her impossible attire.

“Good,” he said with relief, and added, dourly, “If it’s still standing. Kelda has already played once this morning. The place might be a heap of rubble by now, with all the shouting and stomping he caused.”

Beatrice told the guard to park the car down by the royal barge, got out of her dig clothes and into a frock in the private rooms reserved for king and courtiers. She went outside and climbed to the highest circle, at a level with the stage on its scaffolding, where she found Sophy under the flapping pavilion. It was Quennel’s preferred spot as well, Beatrice noticed; the old bard sat along the rim, wearing his formal robe of kingfisher blue, his ivory hair in a tuft, his expression as tense as Jonah’s.

“He went to speak to Phelan,” Sophy told her, before she could ask. “Isn’t that your aunt Petris under that wonderful hat? All those plumes look as though they’re about to fly away with her.”

“Better, I’m sure, now that you’re here. He’s playing—” She paused to put her spectacles on, study the program. “Quite soon, I think. With Zoe.”

“There’s my mother,” Beatrice breathed, startled as she recognized the flowery hat next to the plumes. “I hardly thought she’d be interested ...” She applauded at the sound of it around her, as one bard’s song ended and a court bard took her place, wearing instruments like body armor that flared with light at every note, as though the sun played his music for him.

Her thoughts strayed again; she tried to find Phelan, sitting in the shadows under the scaffolding. She missed him; maybe he was somewhere with Jonah. But Jonah had come back, sat down next to Sophy, before the sun’s song came to an end. Beatrice’s hands moved mechanically; her face turned to Jonah’s grim, closed face, a question pending for when the noise died down again. She drew breath to ask it, then lost it again as Zoe began to sing.

Beatrice stared at the stage, forgetting entirely to close her mouth. Two figures, one dark-haired, dressed in silks like blowing flames, the other pale-haired, in blue shot with silver threads down which light rilled like water, seemed to pull music not from their voices, their instruments, but out of the grass roots of the plain, the lichen on the ancient stones, the words carved into them as old as Belden. She felt her eyes burn, put a hand to her mouth. Surely, that was the sound of the spiraling circle on the tomb: that was its voice; the music pouring into her heart was the word itself, saying its name. The world blurred around her, flashing, melting. As the tears finally fell, she heard Jonah’s sudden exclamation.