that I find and train the bards most capable of magic in this land. I am doing so. Think about all this. Then decide to stay or go. If you stay, that is what I offer you, in the name of the king.”
“You didn’t answer—”
“You’ll never know, will you? If you leave.”
Nairn stood, mute again, gazing down at the shadowy figure as Declan picked up his harp, ran his fingers down it, shook a glitter of notes into the moonlight.
He said haltingly, as Declan began to play again, “When I—when I went up the tower steps to talk to Dower Ren, I saw, out of one window, a great, dark tower on the flat land at the bottom of the hill, rising so high that it seemed to stretch into the stars, and they became part of it. Is that what you mean by the power of the land? You must have seen it, too. You were out here playing, then.”
The harp stilled midphrase; it seemed, for a moment, that Declan’s voice had frozen with his fingers. Nairn heard him draw breath, hesitate; he answered finally, looking up at Nairn, his face in shadow but for his moonstruck eyes.
“I was out here, yes. I was watching the moonrise and thinking about the music of my own land, wondering how much of it will be remembered without its history, how much will wither on this foreign soil. The bell jangled when you opened the front door. It pulled me out of my memories; I began to play, then.
“I saw no tower. I heard no harping but my own. All the magic was for you.”
The formal invitation to the queen’s supper in honor of her brother, Lord Grishold, reached Phelan, as usual, in haphazard fashion. He had wandered out of bed after a long night at the Merry Rampion to be faced with the impending day, which offered nothing, no matter which way he looked at it, but a vast, empty blankness of paper upon which he was expected to write. His father’s house stood on the bank of the Stirl, not far above Peverell Castle, where the city streets, broad and lined with huge old trees, grew quiet. The water traffic there tended toward rich barges and sailboats; working vessels rarely came that far beyond the docks except to pursue a run of fish. The house, built of fieldstone centuries earlier, retained a few of its early eccentricities, including a pair of unmatched windows inset on a side wall as awkwardly as flounders’ eyes. Inside, time sped forward into oak and marble walls, thick rugs and carpets, softly glowing lamps that revealed Jonah’s enormous collection of oddments from everywhere in the world, including several places that Phelan couldn’t find on a map. His mother, Sophy, herself an heiress with family connections to the Peverells, favored all the modern conveniences, only drawing the line at keeping a car. They were slow, she said, and noisy, and you couldn’t tell them what to do.
Sophy, fully dressed and wrestling with a skintight glove as she came upon the yawning Phelan in the living room, left a kiss somewhere in the vicinity of her son’s jaw and asked briskly, “Have you found your father?”
“Am I looking for him?”
Sophy nodded vigorously. Phelan had inherited her pale hair and gray eyes, even her charming smile, but not, he realized early, her stubbornly temperate disposition, which provided a formidable barrier to any questions about Jonah’s behavior. “I told you, didn’t I?”
“No.”
“Oh, dear. Well, you must find him for Lord Grishold’s supper—” She stopped, loosed a chuckle. “Not that the duke is planning to take a knife and fork to him, but we must all attend. The king wrote a tiny note on our invitation that he expressly desired Jonah’s presence, to finish a certain conversation.”
“When?”
“When, what, dear?”
“The supper?”
“Oh. In a day or two—I’ve forgotten—” She smiled at him brightly, patted his cheek. “Just find him, Phelan. You’re always so good at it. The invitation is around here somewhere. I must rush away. We are knitting socks today for Caerau’s poor, and then Ursula Baris’s cook’s grandmother will teach us how to divine the future in a bird’s nest.”
She left Phelan wordless, awake at last. He moved finally, stepped toward the cluttered desk in her study to look for the invitation, then veered abruptly at the door. It didn’t matter: clean, fed, his pockets clinking again, Jonah might be anywhere in the city. Phelan would either stumble across him in time for the occasion or not. He had a paper to write; his father could wait.
He did turn from his chosen path, walking across Dockers Bridge again for a quick search around the dig site, before he buried himself in the school library. In the clear morning light, the desolation lost its mystery and became simply the sad ruins of an earlier century, walls slumped into one another, charred window frames staring empty- eyed at the colorful buildings across the river, ruined warehouses and broken pilings haunting the abandoned waterfront. Fire had gutted it; everyone had gone to more prosperous parts of the city; no one had found a need to rebuild the waste. Still, in the eerie silence, Phelan heard voices, brisk and cheerful, with no visible owners and seemingly from underground.
He walked to the edge of Jonah’s latest project and looked down at the top of a head ascending. It was covered with a soft cloth hat; he couldn’t see the lowered face talking to someone below.
He did recognize the voice.
“Princess Beatrice,” he said, and the head came up abruptly. She smiled at him; the hat slid, its tie catching at her throat, loosing a burnished curl or two from her rigorously pinned hair.
“Phelan.” She accepted his hand briefly, politely, as she stepped off the ladder, then let go and beat a cloud of dust from her clothes. “Sorry,” she added as she stepped back, laughing. “I’m not fit for civilized company after I’ve been down here. Are you looking for your father?”
“Yes. Have you seen him?”
“He was here earlier for just a few moments; then he went off.”
“Do you have any idea where?” he asked without hope.
She pulled pins out of her hair, shook it again as it fell, releasing more dust. “I don’t.” She paused, thinking. Behind her, below ground, Phelan could hear the soft whisk of brushes, the cautious tink of a pick, an occasional word. The princess’s calm eyes shifted from Phelan’s face to the city beyond his shoulder. They were, he realized, the same inky blue as the asters growing out of a nearby midden. “I know he’s been asked to court, but that’s no help to you if that’s why you’re looking for him.” She turned abruptly, called down, “Does anybody know where Master Cle might have gone?”
There was a faint, ragged chorus of amusement; Phelan’s mouth crooked.
“Ah, well. I’ll find him. If you see him—”
“Yes, of course. I’m driving home now. Lady Hartshorn is giving a lunch for Lady Grishold that I couldn’t get out—I promised I’d attend. Can I drop you somewhere along the way?”
“Yes,” he said before he thought, then changed his answer reluctantly. “No. I should stay, look around here a little; it’s where I found him last. And I can spot him better on foot. I know a few of his favorite places.”
“If I do see him, can I give him a message?”
“Thank you, Princess. Just tell him we need him home.”
He sat at a table in the school library later, thinking idly of the encounter, then of Jonah, and then ruthlessly clearing his head to think of nothing at all. He gazed intensely at a sheet of paper, breath suspended, a word on the quivering point of his pen poised and waiting to fall. Monoliths of books and manuscripts rose around him. All were crammed with words, words packed as solidly as bricks in a wall, armies of them marching endlessly on from one page to the next without pause. He forced the pen in his tight grip a hairsbreadth closer to the paper so that the word stubbornly clinging to it might yield finally, flow onto the vast emptiness. Point and paper met. Kissed. Froze.
He sat back, breath spilling abruptly out of him, the pen laden with unformed words dangling now over the floor in his lax fingers. How, he wondered incredulously, did all those books and papers come into existence? In what faceted jewel of amber secreted in what invisible compartment of what hidden casket did others find that one word to begin the sentence that layered itself into a paragraph, that built itself into a page, that went on to the next page, and on, and on?
