The Bards of Bone Plain (27 page)

What that truth was, Zoe glimpsed only fitfully: crazed, scattered notions that flitted like bats in the twilight around the edges of coherent thought, scarcely visible, gone when she tried to make sense of them. Lost in thought, she only noticed Phelan as something as familiar as furniture, when he appeared at the table reading some ancient book of her father's, or when she found him coming down the tower steps with his arms full of them. He was as preoccupied, as distracted as she; when she came out of her brooding enough to wonder and ask him, he only murmured something vague and got out of her way. He was possessed by his paper, she guessed, and about time. What was it about? Bone Plain? Apparently he had found something at last to say about it, that maybe had been said only a dozen times, not a hundred.

The place that Kelda chose for the next meeting of the Circle of Days took her breath away.

It was under the king's own roof, or at least under his courtyard.

“One of the queen's ladies showed it to me,” he said disingenuously. “It's a very old passageway, connecting several inner chambers of the castle to the riverbank. No doubt it had many uses through the centuries, for trysts and spying, for escape under siege. Likely it was an ancient sewage channel; it's locked tight now against the curious and the malignant. I doubt that even Jonah Cle will find us there.”

“It seems—it seems so clandestine. As though we are plotting under the king's very nose.”

“Yes, doesn't it?” He gave her his kelpie's smile, all innocence and complicity. “At least it will be private. Lord Grishold requested no more inexplicable incidents involving door hinges and inn-keepers' bills. What could possibly happen in a place everybody has forgotten?”

What indeed? Zoe wondered, as the reckless, cheerful group of students gathered like conspirators at an iron grate sealing a vaulted stone channel that began under the shadow of the broad Royal Bridge near the castle. She would have sworn the grate was locked the moment Kelda opened it as easily as a nursery door. They filed inside quickly, followed the dry, musty sluice. When they left the lowering sun behind, Kelda produced fire from somewhere—out of his sleeve or a pocket—causing ripples of awe that echoed off the stones to drift against the murmuring tide behind them. Zoe, startled, felt eager fingers lock around her wrist, heard Frazer's indrawn breath.

“Did you see that? He kindles fire out of air—out of shadow—”

“I saw it.”

“I was right! I knew there was magic in the words, and he knows it. Zoe, he can teach it to us!”

“Yes,” she answered, chilled under the empty, secret path that led to the heart of the king's house. Frazer's fierce hold loosened, but his fingers brushed her now and then, cold with excitement, she guessed, and reassuring himself with her presence. She had no such reassurance: every step she took over the uneven ground led her closer to the enigmatic heart of the kelpie. She walked that pathway alone, she knew; there was no mistrust, only eagerness and wonder in the hushed voices around her.

For a man who had never been to Caerau before, the bard led them with astonishing certainty, ignoring or choosing passageways that shunted this way and that under the castle grounds, until he reached, to his own satisfaction, a place that looked like any other in the long vault, and stopped there.

He said nothing to the students gathered around him, just set his fire on the ground and motioned for them to sit around it. He pulled the case from his shoulder, took out the strange harp he had carried to the inn. It seemed very old, unadorned by metal or jewels, only by what looked to Zoe's perplexed eye like the random knife-whittlings of a very bored harper.

Kelda spoke then, holding the harp over the fire so they could see more clearly. “I was shown this harp by an old villager whose fingers had stiffened too badly for him to play it any longer. He liked my harping, and thought I'd find it interesting. He couldn't read the words on it, nor could his own father. He thought his great-grandmother might have learned them, so the family lore went. There was another bit of lore handed down as well: that the harp traveled its own path, went where it would, gave itself to whom it chose.” He smiled. “I felt that it chose me, and so I took it. I learned to play it. I have learned to play it very well ...” He touched a string lightly; the fire responded, a flame leaping upward, bright, coiling in currents that must have been stirred by the string. “You might have heard it the other night. If not, no matter. You will hear it tonight, I promise. And in a short time, all of Caerau will hear it.”

“The Circle of Days,” Frazer broke in abruptly, his eyes riveted to the harp. “Those are the words you're teaching us, carved all over the wood.”

“The harp speaks that language,” Kelda said simply, “if you know how to ask it.”

Zoe felt a tremor deep within her, as though the harp had already sounded, and her heart's blood had answered in terror, in wonder, in desire. She closed her eyes briefly, tried to remember why, exactly, she had followed this harper underground, to such a secret place so far from anything she knew, so close to the oblivious royal court above their heads that if Kelda played a note wrong, the king himself might tumble into their circle along with the stones overhead.

She opened her eyes to meet Kelda's dark gaze, at once masked and illuminated with fire.

He said, “Listen.”

He struck a note so pure and sweet that her heart melted with astonishment. She closed her eyes again, breathing in the notes that followed, taking them deep into bone and marrow, into the place where tears began.

For the second time in his life, Nairn, creeping in utter ignominy out of eyesight, felt as low as any earthworm. Lower: even the worms underfoot were good and useful creatures, leading unselfish and productive lives. He, by contrast, belonged nowhere, had nothing anyone could need or want. The poem, he thought grimly, tripping over rootwork and bouncing off trees in the dark, had left a few things out. Even the hero crushed beneath the dragon's claw could breathe his last knowing that his intentions were worthy, his courage unfaltering; he had done all he could. His failure was honorable. The bard on Bone Plain, failing every trial, had no such consolation. The list of his failures was precise; judgment was unrelenting. What the poem had left out was the taste in the back of his throat, as though he had eaten the charred, dry, bitter ashes of yesterday's fire. The poem had not mentioned that even his bones seemed to radiate shame. There was no comfortable place anywhere in his body that he could crawl into and hide. Unlike the hero, he could not even find release in the dragon's claw ripping apart his heart.

That was not the worst of it.

The worst he discovered slowly through days and weeks and months. His harp would not stay in tune; his ears could no longer distinguish the point at which the tightening string spoke true. His fingers might as well have been overstuffed sausages, for all the dexterity left in them. He forgot lines, verses, sometimes entire songs. He could earn a coin or two on a village street playing for pity: the fool pulling tatters of a dance or a ballad out of his pitiful mind. It was as though he had burned himself to the heartwood playing against Kelda, and there was nothing left of his music but a few feeble, slowly fading embers.

The poet had not mentioned those things.

Nor had the poem warned of the constant loneliness, the need to hide himself, to change his name, to move constantly, but with none of the earlier curiosity and joy he had taken in his wanderings. Now he moved to escape himself and always took himself along. All this he learned in the first seasons of his changed life: that cruelly sweet, golden summer from which he had exiled himself, the first bright fires of autumn. Other things he learned took much longer. Still others took centuries.

He dreamed incessantly during those first long months: the same terrible, fragmented visions of the tower. The idea that it might somehow return, and he could enter it again, remake his past and future, kept him hovering along the edges of the plain, in small farming villages near the forests, where he could find some mindless work, even a little money, move on, never any farther than where he could turn his head and see the wide, broad emptiness flowing green to the edges of the world, the gentle hillocks, the random, gnarled tree growing alone here and there in all that green, isolated and mysterious as a standing stone. Then he could almost hear the music within the wind, blown from the school, perhaps, or maybe from the memories of the plain itself. Then, he could almost remember what he had once loved.

At night, if there was a standing stone close by, he would sleep against it, taking cold comfort in its own agelessness and hoping against hope that it might somehow merge with his dreams to shape the endlessly spiraling stones around him again, the place where he had entangled himself inextricably within the image and the word and the power.

It took a few decades before he fully admitted the truth of the matter. Gradually, as years passed, he was almost able to forget the poem itself in the sheer ordinariness of his life. Crofter's son he was born, crofter he became, working for others at first, then on his own piece of land at the edge of the plain. He built his house, relegated his harp to a forgotten corner of it, took a wife who bore him children, all of which made it easier for him to expect for himself the predictable fate of every other living thing. It was with stark horror that he found himself outliving everyone he knew in his tiny world, including his children. He would outlive his grandchildren, who would begin to eye him warily, soon enough, and count backward on their fingers to find his true age. No one living knew exactly how old he had been when he first put down a root in that particular patch of earth, but still ... It wasn't natural. Time didn't write his life on his face the way it did on others'; he seemed at once ageless and unfinished.

He finally took his harp out of the cobwebs, walked out the door, and admitted who he was: the Unforgiven. He had no idea how to live with himself, and with nothing else occurring to him beyond sheer despair, he made his way back to the school.