She nodded, gazing at him a moment longer, sensing things awry, hidden behind his smile. She turned back to the old iron stove, dropped a lump of butter into the pan heating on it. Her own elegant face, lean and brown, hid little and flashed color, from her shrewd green eyes and her holly-berry mouth. Phelan’s pale coloring had first caught her curious gaze when she had come out of the refectory kitchen upstairs where her mother was cooking, and saw the small boy with his duck-fluff hair and his wide eyes as opaque as mist, sitting silently, expressionlessly beside his father.
“I stayed with Chase,” she said over her shoulder. “Some bards out of the north came down to hear what kind of music the students play. They taught us some wonderfully rowdy songs. I just got back. How is your father?”
“Why?”
“You have that expression on your face.”
She heard him lean back hard in his chair until it creaked. He answered dispassionately enough. “I found him in the wasteland across Dockers Bridge at dawn yesterday. That gave him a few hours to get cleaned up for the king’s party. He was sitting in the mud by the river, singing to the standing stones. He wonders how I find him, but even he is predictable. I just look around his most recent dig site.” He paused, added restively, “I don’t know what he’s looking for. I wish I did. Once I thought he was wandering around Caerau digging graves, trying to find his own death. But he keeps finding treasures instead ...”
Zoe upended a chopping board full of onions, chives, sausages, into the frothing butter. She stirred them, said slowly, “Death is easy enough to find. Isn’t it? If you truly want it. So he must want something else.”
“He has everything else,” Phelan said, then paused. His mouth crooked. “Except music. But if he put me in this school to make up for his own abysmal failure here, it makes no sense to let me turn my back to all I’ve learned and walk away—”
“No,” Zoe said pointedly, rapping the spoon on the pan for emphasis. “No more than it makes sense for you to want to.”
He ignored that. “He’s rich in so much else. Everything he touches turns to gold. The King of Belden calls him friend despite his eccentricities. Even my mother still loves him.”
She glanced back at him. “Even you do.”
He flung up a hand. “But why?”
Zoe thought, but had nothing to add to the familiar litany of conjectures about Jonah that they had strung together through the years. She added salt to the mix, stirred it, sent the smells swirling through the kitchen.
“How was your class this morning?” she asked to get them off the labyrinthine subject. “Everyone awake?”
“Except me. I’ve started them memorizing the ninety verses of the ‘Catalog of Virtues.’ It’s enough to drive everyone to slavering mayhem in the streets of Caerau. Except for Frazer. He’s inhaling it all in through his pores. He thinks there’s magic between the lines.”
Her eyes widened at the word; she stared hard into the pan, turning things mindlessly with her fork until the onion fumes bit at her eyes. She blinked. “Magic.”
“I don’t know what he’s talking about. Except what you did yesterday at the king’s party. That song—I swear it nearly melted the expression on my father’s face. That was magic.”
She smiled. “Thank you.”
“Where did you find it? It sounded as though you dug it out of a barrow.”
She nodded, peppering the eggs vigorously. “It’s very old. Quennel taught it to me.”
“The Royal Bard? That Quennel?”
“Yes.”
“He wouldn’t part with a song if you held fire to his feet.”
“He likes me,” she answered cheerfully. “He says I’m what the plain would sound like if it sang, wind, bird, bone, and stone. Don’t ask me. That’s what he said. What exactly did Frazer say to you?”
“Exactly, I don’t remember. Something about secrets. The secrets of the bardic arts. When he would be taught them.”
“Strange,” she breathed. “Maybe you should do your research paper on that.”
“On what? A connection between magic and poetry?”
“When Oroh fought his only battle in the Marches, according to the ‘The Lament for the Marches,’ his bard Declan raised a fog with his poetry that blinded King Anstan’s army so badly they could not recognize one another’s faces. Anstan’s army fought itself; Oroh’s mostly stood and watched.” Phelan was silent behind her. “The magic was in the words. The words were the magic.”
“That’s one reference,” he said dryly. “I just want to get out of here, not spend half my life tracking down obscure incidents of bardic magic. Let Frazer write that paper.”
“Maybe I’ll write it,” she said recklessly. She beat the eggs until they frothed, then added them to the pan, musing over the question. “I wonder what caused Frazer to ask.”
“I think something he read.”
“Well, what?”
“I have no idea.” His voice shrugged the subject away. “Some old ballad, probably. He’ll figure it out, whatever it is he wants to know. He’s bright enough.”
She drew breath to speak, then stared down into the pan again, without moving, wondering what in her head had leaped at the word without understanding the question at all, and what in Phelan, with all his gifts, failed to resonate with any interest whatsoever.
She heard her father’s steps on the tower stairs and reached for a spatula to turn the eggs. The smells had wafted to him, pulled him out of the ancient room he used for his office. The chambers of the school steward were as old as the school itself: the four tower rooms up the winding stairs, the hoary kitchen at the bottom, with its huge maw of a hearth that could roast an entire sheep in the days when one sheep could feed the entire student body. Zoe loved the tower. The smoke-stained walls, their stones dug out of field and river, still spoke, she thought, of a time so long ago that the school on the hill with its broken tower and the tiny village called Caerau were surrounded only by grass and fields and the great standing stones so old nobody remembered when or how they had come to the plain.
Now the oldest school building housed the masters in elegant rooms pieced together out of the hive of tiny stone cells the early school had occupied. The masters’ cook was upstairs in the pristine modern kitchen, supervising their breakfasts. Zoe’s mother had been the cook there until she died. She taught her very small daughter this and that when she was very young, to keep her from running underfoot in the busy kitchen. Even then, tiny Zoe’s singing, vigorous and pure as she stirred the flour and butter and pan juices into gravy, riveted the masters’ attention.
She pulled plates out of the cupboard, lined them on the table, and divided the eggs between them. The butter was on the table, the fruit in its bowl, the bread already cut on its board. She sat finally. Her father, a tall, spare, graying man with the tidy habits becoming to a steward, greeted Phelan without surprise and asked about his paper. Zoe watched their faces together: the son her father hadn’t gotten around to having, the intelligent, calm, unambiguous father Phelan wished he had. Her thoughts strayed. The Royal Bard had invited her to sing again, during the visit of Queen Harriet’s brother. He was Lord Grishold, Duke of what was once one of the five kingdoms, in the mountains of west Belden. His new bard would be traveling with him. Zoe had never met him. The previous bard in Lord Grishold’s court had forgotten his verses, or mistuned a string, or otherwise embarrassed himself, and had relinquished his position several months before, pleading age. He was upstairs now, eating breakfast in the masters’ refectory, preferring to live out his years in the genial city rather than among the gloomy crags of Grishold.
She mentioned as much to Phelan as they lingered over cups of tea and coffee, trying to delay the day.
“I’ve been asked to sing during the formal supper for the guests from Grishold. Are you coming?”
He looked blank. “I can’t remember if we’ve been invited. I hope not.”
Bayley Wren set his cup down, asked gently, “Is he missing again?”
“Vanished like the dew upon the sloe berry, after the birthday party. I don’t think he even went home to change his clothes. I’m not sure where I’d look for him so soon. It’s easier to find him when he’s running out of money.”
The steward raised his cup an inch, his pale eyes lowered, then set it down again. “You might try looking in
