the school’s household records.”
“For my father?”
“Well. I was thinking more of your paper.”
“For some legendary stones?” Phelan said, still bewildered. “What would they be doing among the price of beer or a mended hole in a master’s boot?”
Bayley gave his slow, thin smile that bracketed his mouth with lines inscribed, Zoe thought, by decades of such painstaking entries. “You’d be surprised at the odd things you can find in those records. They go back centuries, all the way to the first summer, when the first students began to put up the stone walls around this tower.”
“But Bone Plain—it’s likely no more than a poem. A legend. A communal dream that got handed down from imagination to imagination through the centuries. That’s what most of the papers about it say. There’s no proof it existed in any real place. Every standing stone in Belden has been linked to Bone Plain in one paper or another, and every argument to prove it circles back to poetry. More myth and dreams.”
“Is it?” He sipped his cooling coffee. Zoe wondered, not for the first time, what was on his mind. “You said you’d picked it for an easy topic. It doesn’t sound easy at all.”
“It will be,” Phelan insisted. “I’ll write it with my eyes closed as soon as I figure out how to begin.”
He took himself off to the library soon after. Bayley refilled his cup and carried it up into the tower. Zoe surveyed the mess in the kitchen, decided that it wasn’t going anywhere, and went to give singing lessons to half a dozen beginning students.
They attracted an audience, the children with their pure, fluting voices, and Zoe tempering her own to roam in a high, sweet descant above theirs. A shadow crossed the open doorway of the small classroom, lingered. She flicked her eyes along it to its owner: the young, golden-haired Frazer, with his wolfish jaw-line and his light blue eyes burning with impatience, longing for mysteries, bewildered by his impulses and his own changing bones. Her voice had lured him, she realized; he was entranced, his eyes wide and cloudy, staring at her without recognition as though she had just sprung fully formed and unnamed from between the floorboards.
He waited there until she finished the lesson and sent the students flowing out the door around him. Then he stirred, and finally spoke.
“Zoe.” Like Phelan, she was on that indeterminate border between student and master, given authority but as yet untitled. “I was wondering ... I wanted to ask you something.”
“About magic?” she guessed, and he flushed, his face tightening.
“I thought it was secret,” he protested.
“It’s so secret I don’t know anything about it either. What made you ask Phelan? I mean—I know why you would choose Phelan to ask, but what made you ask at all? Something you read?”
He was looking at her incredulously by then; he wandered into the room toward her, pulled by some private, wayward path. “How can you ask me that? I hear it in you. Every word you sing says magic. Says power. How could the word itself exist if it means nothing?”
She gazed back at him, startled, trying to imagine what he felt, what he meant.
He came closer, his burning eyes haunted with a passion he could scarcely name. Somehow, in the way she could sense Phelan before she saw him, or her father, she felt Frazer’s blind hunger, his frustration, like something unruly, undefined, blundering its way into being.
He passed it to her, like a gift or a curse, she couldn’t tell; she only knew that in that inexplicable, wordless moment, she recognized what it was he wanted.
He spoke finally, huskily. “Tell me what it is.”
“I don’t know.” Her own voice had vanished. “I have glimpsed it, here and there, within the notes of ancient ballads, between the lines: the shadow, the footprint, of something ancient, powerful. Memories, maybe. Resonances.”
“Yes,” he said urgently. “Yes. Where do I go to learn more?”
“I don’t know.”
Still, his eyes clung to hers, wanting, willing answers out of her. You see it, too, he told her without words. You want it, too.
“Who will you ask?” she heard, and was uncertain which of them had spoken aloud.
She stepped back finally, drawing breath deeply as though she had been submerged in some timeless, nameless realm and had, for a moment, forgotten that she was human.
“I don’t know,” she said a third time, feeling at once shaken and inordinately curious. “We may—we may be seeing only the remnants of something long gone from this world. Maybe you and I were just born with primitive eyes. Or hearts. Born with a gift for something that doesn’t exist anywhere any longer, and the recognition, the longing for it is all we’ll ever know.”
He swayed toward her, as though she, understanding it, had become part of his longing. His face, at once ardent and tentative, looked suddenly very young. She had learned to dance around such impulses; she slipped past him, was at the door as he turned, surprised, searching for her.
She said simply, “If I do stumble into an answer, I’ll tell you. And you must tell me. Promise.”
He nodded after a moment, said finally, “I promise,” and she left him there, still wondering, from the look on his face, what had or hadn’t happened.
She returned to the tower, went upstairs to take off her robe in her room, and downstairs again to see if the kitchen had somehow cleaned itself. It hadn’t. But something of Frazer’s chaotic impulses still clung to her thoughts; the chaos in the kitchen seemed to mirror them. She turned abruptly, went outside, across the school grounds, scarcely seeing the tranquil gardens, the lawns, the gnarled oak, the dreaming stones. She walked down the hill until she spotted a lumbering steam tram, and took it to the bottom. There, along the noisy waterfront, she walked again, on ancient cobbles past docks and fish markets and every kind of shop, until she reached a doorway with a painted sign above it: blue lilies cavorting in a ring beneath the sun’s smiling face. The Merry Rampion, the sign proclaimed, and she went in.
There she found Chase Rampion drying glasses behind the bar. He noticed her and smiled like the sun, cheerful and benign, golden rays of his uncombed curly hair petaling out around his face. She went behind the bar, threw her arm around his neck, and kissed him, feeling like the parched traveler in the desert stumbling into the unexpected spring. When she loosed him finally, the world within her head had straightened itself out, grown familiar again. The handful scattered among the little wooden tables were chuckling; so was he, when he could finally speak.
“Good morning to you, too, love. What was that for?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and sat down with him awhile to talk of everything but.
She found a note from the Royal Bard on the kitchen table next to the crusty frying pan when she got back.
A day later, she went down the hill again and walked in the opposite direction along the river to Peverell Castle. She wore her students’ robe over the finest of her silks, long skirt and tunic and a colorful filmy scarf chosen to match the colors of the oak leaves dying and reviving on her robe. “I have several suggestions,” Quennel had written in his fine, antique hand, “as to what you might sing for the Duke of Grishold’s supper. Bring your harp.”
He met her in a little antechamber off the minstrels’ gallery. Decades ago, he had been a student at the school, then, briefly, a master, until the Royal Bard had suddenly and fortuitously died. Custom, which Declan himself had brought into Belden, demanded a competition of all bards interested in the position. In Declan’s own turbulent times, after he had retired from Oroh’s court and opened the school, the competition to choose his successor’s successor had been fierce.
The numbers Quennel had bested were legendary: bards had come from all over the realm vying for the highest position; countless more had come to watch and listen. He had sung one song and everyone had put down their instruments in defeat. Or all their harp strings had snapped. Or one by one, over forty days and forty nights, he had picked them off, put them to shame, sent them packing. The truth of the matter depended on the ballad. Now he was aging, but still vigorous, a hale old man in a long robe the kingfisher blue of his eyes, his short ivory hair still springy and apt to curl if he neglected to prune it.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, smiling fondly at her. He had brought his own harp with him, itself a thing of legend. The uncut jewels on its face were said to have fallen out of Declan’s harp at his death. They had wandered
