The Bards of Bone Plain

Chapter Twenty-three

Phelan woke the sleeping princess with a kiss. She stirred, blinked puzzledly at his bedroom ceiling, then rolled over swiftly, groping for her wristwatch.

“What time is it?”

“The trumpets just sounded. I have to go.” He didn’t move, sat there in a riffled puddle of purple silk sheets, watched her push her tangled curls out of her eyes and smile at him, a little, private smile full of memories. Then the memory changed, and she sat up abruptly.

“I must have heard them in my sleep. I dreamed that my mother was competing to become the Royal Bard. She was playing an antique ear trumpet. She won.”

He laughed. “No.”

“Yes.” She was silent, then, her smile fading, studying his face. She put a hand on his bare shoulder, kissed him gently. “I’m glad you can laugh. If I were you, I’d be terrified.”

He shrugged the shoulder under her long fingers, slid his own hand over them. “I don’t have such an exalted opinion of my gifts to be afraid of losing. I’m just there to keep Zoe’s mind off Kelda.”

“Kelda.” She shivered lightly; he drew her hand from his shoulder, kissed her palm. “Will he win?”

“My father says over his dead body. That sounds like wishful thinking to me. And my father can’t play even an ear trumpet. He doesn’t have a chance of stopping Kelda.”

She drew her knees up under the sheets, dropped her face against them. Her voice came, muffled by silk and her disheveled hair. “I’m still trying to absorb what he told us. It’s hard not to want for him what he wants, but it’s also the last thing you or I would want.”

“Yes,” he said softly. He touched the band of lace and satin that had slid off one shoulder, added, “I would never have imagined you in that color.”

“What color have you imagined me in?”

He opened his mouth, stopped himself, and smiled. “Well. Not orange.”

“Tangerine,” she amended. “My lady-in-waiting refuses to let me wear the color in public. So I have to keep it hidden in my underwear.” She raised her head, sighing. “We have our scant hours between the trumpets and the tide this morning. At least I’ll be able to come for the opening ceremonies. Then I really must put in a few hours at the site. And then go home and face my mother.”

“My father doesn’t expect you to—”

She shook her head quickly. “I know. But I want to, today. I have explored every curve of the great dour keep where kings used to imprison recalcitrant nobles. I want to understand what we’ve found before I get locked up.”

“I’ll come and rescue you.”

She gave him her sidelong smile. “You’ll be busy helping Zoe. Surely I’ve learned enough working for your father to dig myself out of anything.”

He dressed hastily and left the princess in Sophy’s amiable care, discussing whether they should chance the traffic in Beatrice’s car or take a barge upriver. As usual, Jonah was nowhere in sight. Phelan hoped his father hadn’t gone after Kelda with a cobblestone. He took a tram crammed with whey-faced musicians and musical instruments of every size and shape to the huge stone amphitheater on the north edge of Caerau, built by the school four hundred years earlier for bardic competitions and used, between times, for everything from early steam-car racing to coronations.

The elaborate scaffolding rose like a wedding cake out of the center of the amphitheater to support the stage, the whole festooned with banners and garlands, and littered with equipment so that even those ensconced on distant hillocks, under the shade of a solitary tree, could hear the musicians compete. Even that early, the sheer numbers spread out over the grass looked like an invading army, laying siege to the old stonework. The thousands waiting to be seated inside spilled beyond every gate but two: the Royal Gate, from which a long purple carpet ran halfway to the barge docks, and the Musicians Gate. Phelan joined the crowd making for that humble entrance, on the shadowy side of morning. Around him, the competitors were mostly silent, bleary, and grim, some looking as though they were about to lose their breakfasts. As they entered and gave their names, they were handed a schedule. Phelan cast a glance over it and almost lost his. By some twisted luck of the draw, he was scheduled to play first.

He wandered inside dazedly, made his way through the labyrinth of instruments strewn all over the floor and musicians waking up their fingers and voices. The place sounded like a flock of demented mythological birds. He finally found an empty corner, put down his instruments, and looked around for Zoe.

As though he had made a wish, she was there beside him: an eyeful of bright multicolored silks, colors such as only ancient Royal Bards were once permitted to wear.

He smiled, dazzled by crimson and purple, gold and orange. Tangerine, he amended, and wondered if Beatrice would be there long enough to hear him play.

“I wore them for luck,” Zoe said, reading his thoughts. “And hearing you will give me courage. I don’t play until after noon.” She stopped, studying him silently, quizzically, until he felt himself flush. She said slowly, “No one has ever put that expression on your face before. Not even me.”

“How can you even pay attention to such things,” he demanded, “at a time like this?”

She shrugged, her own warm skin ivory around the edges. “I can’t help what I see, especially in those I love. I can’t stop noticing, can I? What are you going to play?”

“One of three things.”

She laughed, an incongruous sound among the broken flutings and tunings and ragged runs of notes. “I suppose you’ll make up your mind at the last moment.” Her lips brushed his cheek lightly, a kiss from the dead, judging from the chill in them. “Stay with me,” she pleaded. “Give me something to think about besides Kelda and Quennel.”

He glanced around for the big, dark-haired bard who, scheduled to play later that morning, would no doubt choose his own moment to appear. “I will,” he promised, though how, he had no idea; he fully expected his first song to be his last, judging by the music coming from the formidable court bards around them.

An hour later, he sat among the hundreds of musicians grouped around the foot of the scaffolding, gazing up through the layers of ornate grillwork to the top, where a master from the school gave a brief history of the competition, then the king welcomed everyone to Caerau, and, finally, Quennel repeated the traditional summons to the gathering of the bards, thanked them for coming, and wished them well. Phelan had been sent up the stairs during that, an endless walk into the welkin where he waited, wondering what he thought he was doing there, hovering between earth and sky, in a position he had never in his life intended to put himself.

Somehow, among all those faces, numerous as the stars and as remote, he caught sight of Beatrice.

She was sitting near the top beside Sophy, under the Royal Pavilion, leaning forward in her seat as though to see him better, the morning sun illumining her pale green silks, the wind blowing her hair into a froth. He couldn’t see her expression at that distance, except in his mind’s eye: her blue eyes very dark, calm, one corner of her mouth quirked upward in her familiar slanting smile.

In that moment, he knew what he would play for her.

He scarcely heard himself; the scant moments passed like a dream as he harped an old love ballad and sang to the woman who had wakened with the dawn beside him. He heard little of the applause afterward, just assumed everyone was relieved that he hadn’t forgotten his words or lost his voice but had given the competition an opening note of grace. He passed the next musician at the top of the stairs, one of the court bards from Estmere, who ignored him entirely, then another on a landing, whom Phelan had seen piping along the river road and who looked as though he might topple over the scaffolding out of terror.

At the bottom of the stairs, he found his father, who drew him with a compelling hand away from the musicians, back into the stone archway from which they had emerged.

“What are you doing?” Jonah demanded, when they were out of earshot.

Phelan gazed at him wordlessly, seeing again that strange double vision of his father: Nairn the Deathless, the Unforgiven, imposed over the father he had grown up with, history pleated endlessly across a moment in time.

“Nothing,” he said finally. “Just playing. Zoe asked me to.”

“Get yourself disqualified,” Jonah said succinctly.

“Oh, I will. I probably already have.”

“Not playing like that you won’t.”

Phelan looked at him silently again, trying to imagine what Jonah thought he saw. “I played it for Beatrice,” he said finally, his only explanation for any power the ballad had beyond the ordinary. “What are you afraid of? There are court bards here who play songs as old as the five kingdoms. They could blow me off the scaffold with a riffle of flute notes.”

“That’s not the point,” Jonah said irritably.

“What is the point?”

“If Kelda is who I think he is, you could be in grave danger, that’s the point. He destroyed my music. I won’t let him take you from me as well. That would destroy me all over again. I couldn’t live with that, and I am not able to die. So stop playing to the princess. Stop playing with your heart.”

Phelan opened his mouth; nothing came out. He shook himself out of Jonah’s grip, finally, and pulled his father back to the end of the archway, where they could hear the court bard playing above. “Listen,” he said fiercely, trying to keep his voice down. “Listen to that.” The bard was playing three instruments at once, it sounded like, and singing at the same time. “That’s what he plays every morning for the Duke of Estmere’s breakfast. Do you think that any world exists in which I can compete with that?”

“His heart’s not in it,” Jonah muttered doggedly.

“You’re being unreasonable.” He heard himself and laughed shortly. “What am I saying. You’ve been unreasonable all your life. Now I understand why, but Kelda isn’t interested in either one of us. He has his eye on Zoe, and I promised her I’d give her all I had just to stay in the competition.” Jonah groaned. “I barely remembered I had a heart, then,” Phelan added dryly. “Even so, nobody has ever suggested that it’s any kind of substitute for skill.”

“How could you fall in love at a time like this?” his father said, exasperated. “Anyway, that’s not the point, either. The point is—”

“I don’t see the point of arguing about it,” Phelan said, exasperated himself, “if you can’t tell me what the point is. Sit with me and listen to the music.”

“I’ve heard it all before,” Jonah said inarguably.

Phelan sighed. “Well, I haven’t. Try to stay out of trouble while I listen.”

He saw Beatrice leave at midmorning. He watched the empty place where she had sat for some time after, hoping she would change her mind, decide not to join the digging crew and reappear as the one point in the dizzying multitudes of faces where his eyes could rest. Attendants passed among the musicians, offered water, fruit, tea, juices, and more hefty fare for the nerveless. Phelan, sipping chilled citrus juice, listened to Kelda work his magic over the crowd, causing vendors roaming the tiered stone walkways to stop in their tracks as the deep, honed voice flooded the amphitheater and the plain, until the distant hillocks seemed to take up and echo his song. Phelan, moved in spite of himself by the unfortunate lovers in the ballad, searched for Beatrice again and found his father instead, sitting beside Sophy and drinking something no doubt forbidden to the vendors to sell. Or maybe it was just tea; he offered the flask to Sophy, and she accepted it. Phelan’s attention lingered on his father, as applause roared like a sea-wave around him. Still stunned by Jonah’s tale, and hopelessly trying to imagine such a life, he knew that it would be his own lifelong predicament to wonder at the mystery until he watched Jonah watch him die.

He was rescued abruptly from such dark thoughts by the first wild, exuberant note out of the next musician’s throat. He felt his skin prickle. He barely recognized the voice; it seemed as though one of the ancient stones, warmed by the bright smile of the sun, had broken into song. It made him yearn for an instrument—anything, a blade of grass, a singing reed—to play along with her. She seemed as serenely confident of her powers as a full moon drifting to airy nothing above the horizon, as strong as an old oak tree carrying generations of nests in its enormous boughs or a mischievous wind blowing any thought of death away as lightly as last year’s dried leaf. He laughed, even as tears stung his eyes. Kelda could not matter against this. Nothing mattered, only the exhilaration and generosity in the voice that must have swept across the plain to startle the eagles on the crags of Grishold and make the old stones dance along the edge of the northern sea.

The musicians rose, clapping for her, even Kelda, as she came back downstairs. The unfortunate who had to follow her dropped a kiss on Zoe’s cheek, laughing as they passed on the stairs. Zoe found Phelan; the musician beside him moved aside for her to sit with him.

The little, taut smile on her face, the absolute fearlessness in her eyes made him stare at her with awe.

“You’ve declared war,” he breathed.

She shook her head. “Not war,” she whispered tightly, as the musician on the stage above them began her song. “Not yet.”

Late in the afternoon, the last of the competitors played, a dilettante so inept he didn’t bother to finish his song, just broke off with a laugh and a wave. The musicians stretched their legs, had a bite to eat, talked tensely as they awaited the first round of eliminations. The amphitheater began to empty. An hour later the list of the musicians requested to return on the second day was read by one of the masters on the stage.

To his surprise, Phelan was among them.

“Good,” Zoe said simply, when they heard. “We are allowed to play with each other and against each other, tomorrow, if we request it. I’ll put us down together.”

“Why bother?” Phelan asked. “You should play against someone who might win. One of the court bards.” She only laughed at that. “Kelda, then.”

“That will come,” she said softly, seeing it, her smile gone for the moment. Then she looked at him again, and it returned. “Who would you rather lose to, than me?”

He smiled. “All right. Just tell me what to practice.”

She told him, then left to find Chase in the crowd lingering outside the amphitheater. Phelan looked for Beatrice, saw only Jonah, and went out another way to elude the argument waiting for him outside the Musicians Gate.