The Bards of Bone Plain

Chapter Thirteen

Phelan sat on the floor of the broken tower, surrounded by dusty tomes. There was a threadbare carpet across the stones, almost as ancient as the record books, the first of which had been started during Declan’s time. The forgotten history Phelan held in his hands made him reluctant to abscond with them; he would wait, he decided, for Bayley Wren’s permission. There were over three dozen of them, all fat, every page meticulously lined with precise and mundane detail of the school’s long past: “To Trey Sims, woodcutter, for two wagonloads of wood from the north, and for the labor of it, and the journey ... To Haley Coe for nine casks of ale and five bottles of elderberry wine ... To Gar Holm for six fat salmon from the Stirl and twice as many eel ... Accounts received for room and board of student Ansel Tige from his father, late again ... Accounts received for one night’s lodging from Master Gremmell, and two servants, on their way across the plain ...”

Why Bayley kept his office and his bedchamber within the chill walls of the tower instead of in the comfortably renovated portion of the ancient building, Phelan understood easily. The stewards charted and guarded the history of the school, and the silent walls were steeped in it. Declan himself had lived there, and had left the echoes of the music of the first Royal Bard of Belden. Phelan and Zoe had explored the place thoroughly when they were children. Worn stairs spiraled up and up the curved walls, where apertures scarcely wider than a knife blade eked out miserly glimpses of the city and the Stirl. The steps debouched now and then into a small chamber where the curious leavings of centuries, like remnants from a flood, gathered dust and owl droppings. The steward’s office was as high as it could be without using the sky for a roof. Above it, the walls were jagged with the mysterious violence that had torn through the top of the tower, left the chamber they circled open to the seasons. There, as high as they could climb up the broken steps, the young Zoe and Phelan had sat, singing to the sun and the moon rising over the plain, watching in wonder as the oldest words in the world moved to their stately rhythms by day and by night, oblivious to the busy city crusting the shores of the ancient water.

There, once, he and Zoe had made love under the moonlight on the top of the broken tower. Phelan remembered that with a smile. But they knew each other far too well, which is why the experiment had been both success and failure. They had been grateful for the knowledge but too curious to be content with one another.

“This day by my hand: Lyle Renne, Steward ...”

Phelan considered that. He closed the book, reached for another.

“This day by my hand, Farrel Renn ...”

Intrigued, he put down that book, opened another. And then another. Days flowed through months, years, centuries of detail: a new washtub for the kitchen, half a dozen student robes made by Mistress Cassell, a scullery maid promoted to cook, three bags of flour, a new master hired, a coffin for the death of an elderly master, accounts rendered to a midwife for the birth of the child of a student whose parents refused to take her back. All accounts signed for that day by some variant of Wren. Back and back Phelan looked, amazed, while the writing became awkward; letters changed shape; spelling grew fluid, arbitrary. Ren became Wren, became Renne, became Renn, and then, leaping forward through time, again Wren.

“Wren,” he murmured, and there Bayley Wren was, opening the office door, crossing the room. Phelan gazed at him, this relic of history. With his gray-gold hair and the hollows in his strong face, he did seem balanced on the cusp of forever.

“What?” the steward inquired mildly of Phelan’s expression.

“You’re in here,” Phelan marveled. “All the way back to the beginning of Belden. Like the Peverell kings.”

“There has been a Wren at the school for as long as the school has existed. One in each generation was born with a taste for detail, for order, and for paying bills. It does seem an inherited position.”

Phelan got to his feet, brushing at the dust of centuries and frowning as he contemplated the present generation. “I can’t see Zoe entering accounts rendered in the records.”

Bayley gave his rare, dry chuckle. “Nor can I. I wonder myself how history will find its way around her.” He glanced at the untidy pile at Phelan’s feet. “Something in particular?”

“Yes. Nairn.”

“Ah,” Bayley said softly.

“Also, a certain Circle of Days.”

The steward shook his head over that one. “I haven’t read all of the account books. I do remember Argot Ren’s reference to Nairn. I have no idea what he meant by the Circle of Days. If it involved accounts rendered or received, it will show up in the records somewhere.”

Phelan brooded a moment. “I have to start somewhere. It might as well be at the beginning. May I take the earliest books home with me?”

Master Wren hesitated at that, looking as though Phelan had asked to make off with his fingers. “Those books have never left this tower. If you can persuade them to cross the threshold ...”

Phelan left with the three oldest, pledging his father’s fortune as collateral if he left them on a tram or dropped them into the Stirl. The house was quiet when he came in. Sophy and Jonah were both out, he suspected on wildly different errands on opposite sides of the city. He settled himself on the sofa, opened the first account book, and, within a dozen pages, fell headlong into it.

He surfaced sometime later, at a query from Sagan as to whether he might like a lamp turned on, and would he be dining at home that evening?

“No,” he said dazedly, rolling off the sofa. He collected the books, feeling off-balance in that world, two vastly different centuries clamoring for precedence in his brain. “I’m going out, thanks.”

“Shall I take those books for you?”

“No,” he said again, quickly, having a vision of his drunken father finding them, riffling through his bookmarks and snorting with laughter at the latest moldy turn of Phelan’s paper. “I’ll hide them myself.”

He walked along the river, vaguely aware of the lights flickering on in the twilight, from streetlamps and buildings, streaking the water with their colorful reflections. The evening was warm; market skiffs still plied the waters among the gilded, lantern-lit barges that had rowed out for a meal or a party on the water. He wondered if his mother was on one of them. Jonah was probably sitting on top of a standing stone with a bottle in hand, trying to pick an argument with the moon. Phelan had little idea where he was going; he let his feet lead him. When, a mile or two later, they turned into the city’s oldest tavern on the waterfront, the Merry Rampion, he was not surprised.

The crowd was a noisy mix of students and masters, dockers and fishers on their way home, and well-dressed patrons out on the town. He glanced around for Jonah, was relieved not to find him there. Chase Rampion greeted him genially, brought him beer, and left him alone in the crush, gazing out of the grimy, whorled window at the gulls wheeling above the darkening water.

Something portentous had happened between the time Nairn had first appeared in the records and when his name was no longer mentioned. Exactly what lay between the lines. The first school steward, Dower Ren, must have written his entries with his teeth clenched, so terse were they: “This day accounts rendered to Wil Homely, stonemason, for repairs to what is now the tower roof, and for removing the fallen stones from the school grounds.” A day or two earlier, accounts had been rendered “to Salix, for tending to the minor wounds of the school steward, and to Brixton Mar, carpenter, for a new desk and bed frame for same. Ink and a new pot procured with thanks rendered to Salix, and to the school kitchen.”

The old school tower had apparently fallen in, or blown itself up, or cracked in two, right in the middle of the first bardic competition. Struck by age, by an errant wind, by an earthquake, by an oak tree falling on it? The steward did not say. Whatever happened was beyond the pale of accounts rendered and received.

“Phelan.”

He started. Someone had slipped into the empty chair at his tiny table. Zoe, he saw with relief; at least he would not have to make inane noises.

She had an odd expression on her face. A new one, he realized with surprise, after all those years of knowing her. The tavern keeper came to greet her, carrying a glass of her favorite wine.

“Thank you, Chase,” she said, kissing him; he lingered a moment, puzzling, like Phelan, over the distraction in her eyes and the deep frown between them.

Then someone called him away, and she took a deep breath.

“Phelan,” she said again, very softly, touching his wrist; her fingers were cold.

“What?” he asked abruptly. “Is it your father? Mine?”

“No—it’s Quennel.”

“Is he dead?”

She shook her head quickly, leaned even closer to him. “No. He’s—he’s going to call a bardic competition. He wants to retire.”

Phelan sat back in his creaky chair, astonished. “Now? I thought he’d die on the job in a decade or two, with his harp strings breaking along with his heart.”

“No.” She hesitated; he waited, riveted. “He—he said things—I don’t know if he’s imagining them or not. He wants—Phelan, are you going to compete?”

He stared at her, appalled. “Of course not.”

“Oh, good. I didn’t want to compete against you. Quennel said—Well, he asked me to.”

“Of course he would want you to replace him.”

“I tried to persuade him not to retire, but he seems to have lost heart.” She took a swallow of wine, her frown deepening. Phelan watched her.

“What,” he wondered, “are you not telling me?”

“Just something Quennel said.” She put her glass down, dipped a finger absently, and ran it along the rim of the glass, brooding again, as the glass sang. “I want to be sure he’s right, before ... So don’t ask. I’ll tell you when I need to.”

“All right,” he said, mystified. Her eyes shifted beyond him, widened, and he turned, hearing a roil of boots and voices flowing through the open door, breaking across the room. Someone cried Zoe’s name; she closed her eyes briefly. Then she put a smile on her face as Frazer reached her, with Kelda so close behind him they might have been racing, Phelan thought dourly, though if he had placed a bet, it wouldn’t have been on Frazer.

“Come with us,” the young man pleaded. He added, belatedly, “And you, too, Phelan.”

“No, thanks. I’m leaving.”

Frazer lowered his voice a trifle. “There’s a group in the back waiting for Kelda. He’s going to teach us an ancient language. He says the letters are magical. We hoped to find you—you must join us, Zoe. We’re going to form a secret society—” He stopped, reddening, as Kelda chuckled. “Well, not secret now, I suppose, after my babbling.” Zoe’s eyes moved from his ardent face to Lord Grishold’s bard, her expression complex again, reserved and oddly wary, despite her vivid smile.

“Magical?” she echoed.

“Grishold folklore,” Kelda explained easily. “Something I picked up in my wanderings. It probably evolved from an ancient bardic exercise. Frazer brought up the subject—”

Phelan laughed; the bard’s dark eyes queried him. “It’s Frazer’s constant question, these days. I’m glad someone can finally give him an answer. I’m tone-deaf when it comes to the subject of magic.”

“Yes, so I thought,” the bard said cheerfully without bothering to explain himself.

“Please join us,” Frazer urged Zoe. “Kelda says that your voice alone is sorcery, and you understood, that day, what I was asking you. You know you did—I felt it.”

For a moment, her smile became genuine. “Well, I would like to know what Kelda said that took the scowl off your face.” She drew breath, held it, then stood up recklessly. “Why not? I’ll come and listen, at least.”

“Good!” Kelda dropped a hand on Phelan’s shoulder, effectively keeping him in his seat. “You are welcome, too, of course. But since you seem to have someplace to be ...”

“Yes,” Phelan said without moving, watching Zoe’s hand tremble as she brought her wineglass to her lips. She finished half of it in a couple of swallows and smiled brightly without meeting Phelan’s eyes.

“Where are we going?”

“Back out the door,” Kelda said, gesturing to the group waiting for him along the far wall, “to a much quieter place. Only as far as that, this evening. How far later, who knows?”

“I do,” a sinewy, drunken voice said from behind Phelan as they moved away, and he closed his eyes, stifling a groan. Kelda, his back to the voice, halted almost imperceptively midstep, then changed his mind and kept going toward the door. Frazer flung a startled glance behind them, but Zoe, her backbone rigid, relegated the problem to Phelan and drew Frazer along in her wake.

Phelan rose quickly; Jonah, who hadn’t noticed him, blinked befuddledly at the apparition.

“What are you doing here?”

“Drinking a beer,” Phelan answered. “Join me?”

“No, thank you. I intend to join the party that just left.”

“I don’t believe you were invited. Anyway, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“Ask me later. I have a bone to pick with that bard. A salmon bone.”

“Pick it later,” Phelan pleaded, not wanting to chase his father down the street to forestall a brawl. “I need to know what caused the top of the school’s tower to blow apart during the first bardic competition and rain down all over the grounds and nearly kill the school steward.”

Jonah stared at him. Forgetting his query for the moment, he sat down slowly on the only vacant chair left in the place. “What have you been reading, boy?”

“The school steward’s records.”

“Dower Ren wrote all that down?”

“Accounts were rendered for a new roof, for someone to clean up the grounds, and to Salish for healing—”

“Salix.”

“Whoever he was, for taking care of the steward’s scrapes when the roof fell into his chamber.”

“She.”

“Dower Ren was a woman?”

“No, Salix.”

“If it cost money, he wrote it down. Dower Ren did.” He paused, eyeing his father. “You’ve read this, then?”

“No. I had no idea ... It couldn’t possibly have been ... What exactly did he say about the broken tower?”

“Nothing much more. Only accounts rendered for three coffins for the remains of two students who were killed by the stones to be sent home in—”

“Two students.”

“The third was never found. Blown up like the tower, most likely, though the steward doesn’t speculate. He only wrote that since Nairn’s family was unknown, and there was no body to put into the third coffin, said coffin went back to the maker, and accounts already rendered for it were returned.” He paused, studying Jonah speculatively, while a waiter flourished his bar towel at a splash of Zoe’s wine and set a foaming mug down in front of Jonah. “Odd,” Phelan murmured finally. “That’s one thing I did notice.” Jonah, frowning down at his beer without tasting it, raised a brow at his son absently. “He never wrote that Salix was a woman. I had an image of a kindly, crusty village doctor in my head, with a huge hoary beard and hair in his ears. What have you read about those early years?”

“I haven’t.”

“Then how did you know—”

“I don’t. Leave it—”

“I can’t,” Phelan told him recklessly. “I’ve decided to do my paper on Nairn and the mysterious Circle of Days. Do you know anything about that?”

Jonah glowered at him for no particular reason that Phelan could see. He raised his beer finally, downed half of it. “It’s been translated a dozen times,” he answered testily, coming up for air. “Mostly badly.”

“How would you know?” Phelan asked curiously, and his father lurched up, beer dripping over his fingers.

“You are foul company tonight,” he complained. “Not even your mother pesters me with questions like this. I have business with that bard.”

Phelan sighed. “I’ll come with you.”

“No, you won’t.” Again Phelan was weighed into his seat, this time by Jonah’s far heavier hand. “I don’t want you anywhere near him. I’ll deal with him. Somehow.”

“Fine,” Phelan said wearily, hoping that Kelda and his band of disciples had vanished by now into the back streets of Caerau. “You do that. Let me know where you end up when I have to bail you out.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

What was it with everyone that evening? he wondered, watching Jonah wind his way through the merry company, gulping the last of his beer and pushing the mug into an outstretched hand raised in greeting. Kelda at his most annoying, Zoe trailing impulsively after him despite all her reservations, Jonah prickly as a hedgehog and threatening mayhem, everyone hinting of mysteries they particularly did not want Phelan to know ... The night revolved around Lord Grishold’s bard, it seemed, and Phelan stood abruptly, finishing his beer on the way up, yielding to the pull of Kelda’s oddly powerful orbit, into which his father seemed in imminent danger of falling facedown.

He hovered on the top step outside the tavern door, peering over heads to find his father, shifting this way and that at the flow around him. He glimpsed the back of Jonah’s head finally, moving downriver along the road. Then a blur of purple coming up the steps hid Jonah again.

“What are we looking for?”

Phelan blinked. Princess Beatrice, in purple silks trimmed with blue the color of her eyes, her tawny hair in a tumble of curls down her back, had stopped on the step beside him to peer down the street.

“My father,” Phelan explained tersely. “He’s out looking for trouble, in the shape of Lord Grishold’s bard.” He realized he was effectively blocking a very well dressed group of her friends, and shifted quickly. “I’m sorry, Princess.”

She didn’t move. “Kelda. Yes, they seemed to know each other, didn’t they, last night?”

“Did they?” he said, surprised.

“Maybe it was my imagination.”

He gazed at her silently, struck by her perception. “No. You’re right,” he said slowly. “Either they’ve met before, or my father feels a mystifying animosity toward a complete stranger.”

“I’m coming with you,” she said abruptly.

“Princess Beatrice—”

“I like working for your father, and I don’t want to lose my job because of some scandal to which my mother is forced to pay attention.” She turned for a word to her listening friends, who laughed and began to disappear into the Merry Rampion. “Which way did he go?” she asked, following Phelan into the street.

“Downriver. But, Princess, surely you have more diverting plans for the evening than watching my father try to brain someone with a tavern sign—”

“No,” she said with a suck of breath. “Has he really—”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, we were only going on to a breathtakingly boring party where my sister-in-law-to-be will chatter endlessly about swatches and ruches.”

“Is that some weird new kind of hairstyle?”

“You don’t want to know. Isn’t that your father? Just passing the fish-market stalls?”

“Yes,” he said, tautly. “Thank you, Princess. Your presence might actually check some of his more lunatic impulses. But his brain is such a morass when he’s like this, you might find it tedious listening to him.”

“He can’t be more tedious than my brother’s betrothed,” she murmured, hurrying beside him effortlessly it seemed, her high violet heels tapping briskly along the worn cobbles. “He’s going into the fish market ... Would Kelda likely be there?”

“Empty stalls are far quieter than the Merry Rampion ... Kelda was trailing a horde of disciples when he left, whom he promised to instruct in ancient magical arts.”

She slowed, turning a wide-eyed gaze at him. “Magic. How strange ... so that’s what’s in his eyes.”

“Whose?”

“Kelda’s.” Then she flushed quickly, vividly, under a streetlight. Phelan, watching, opened his mouth; she shook her head quickly. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” Phelan suggested softly. “Please, Princess. If you saw something in him, then it might explain what my father sees, or thinks he does.”

“I’m sorry.” She met his eyes again, patting her curls to order, it seemed, in lieu of her thoughts. “He confuses me, Kelda does.”

“You aren’t alone, there,” he breathed grimly, thinking of the wine trembling in Zoe’s glass, his father’s incomprehensible obsession. “What is it about this bard that sets everyone on edge? He’s coming back out of the stalls.”

She turned her head quickly. “Kelda?”

“My father.”

“He’s crossing the street.”

“He’s going into—”

“The Wharf Rat.” Her long fingers closed briefly on his wrist, surprisingly strong. “Phelan—”

“I’m not taking you in there,” he said adamantly. “It’s full of—”

“Wharf rats? I suppose that would be high on the list of things that would cause my mother to pack me off to the country. No matter—he’s coming back out.”

Windmilling back out, more precisely, Phelan thought, watching his father, on the next block, grappling at the air for balance as though he had been pushed out the door.

Luck held him upright, though a couple of passing dockers Jonah careened against were not so fortunate. They hauled themselves off the cobbles, cursing Jonah loudly. But he had already rounded the corner into a side street, and Phelan picked up his pace.

“There,” Princess Beatrice said quickly, as they took the turn onto the narrower, shadowy street in time to see Jonah walk through the gate of a low white picket fence without bothering to open it. “Well. There goes that herbaceous border. Is it an inn, or someone’s house?”

Phelan sighed, recognizing the bowed front windows fashioned from ovals of warped glass, the picturesque walls covered with neatly pruned ivy. “The Stonedancer Inn. They know my father. The last time I found him in there, he was sitting on the floor surrounded by the contents of an entire tea trolley, with potsherds on his shoulders and the lid on his head.”

“He’s going in—” The princess’s voice wobbled, steadied. “No. He’s going around the back.”

“Then we’ll go in the front. Meet him halfway.”

“But what would make him think that Kelda might be here?” the princess wondered, hurrying down the brick walkway after Phelan. “Kelda hardly knows his way around the castle, let alone the back streets of the Caerau waterfront. And why this prim little inn?”

Phelan opened the door. The proprietor had abandoned the quaint reception desk. Doors along the creaky hallway were closed. Painted hands on signs pointed the directions of The Breakfast Room, The Library, The Lounge. Phelan turned to follow that finger.

“Wait for me in the library?” he suggested to Princess Beatrice, who ignored him.

He opened the door to the lounge abruptly, glimpsed a round table full of shadowy people next to a huge old hearth, whose fire provided the only light in the room. Then he heard a familiar sound that grew too loud, too fast, filling his ears, then the room, like the formless bellow of something as old as the world that had erupted from its sleep to rage at him.

The sound flooded into him; he felt it vibrate through every bone in his body from skull to toe, and in that brief moment, he listened for the sound that his thrumming bones might make, astonished that there could be so many. Then he heard his father’s voice. The string that he had become keened and snapped, and he rattled down like a limp marionette onto the floor.

He opened his eyes a moment or a night later. From that angle, under the table, he saw the lounge’s back door hanging open on broken hinges. A pair of strange boots seemed to be arguing vehemently with a pair of familiar boots that were cracked with misadventure and old enough to have attracted a crust of barnacles. A third pair of shoes, pretty violet heels, came toward him, slowed, stood motionlessly for a moment at the table. He remembered them, and lifted his head dizzily to see the princess’s face.

She was staring at something on the table. Phelan heard her voice very clearly, somehow, beneath the escalating battle of voices belonging to the boots.

“The Circle of Days.”

Then her shoes spoke, coming toward him again, and he recognized the overwhelming sound that had driven into the marrow of his bones.

A single harp note.