opening at their approach. “I will come,” he said huskily; his eyes clung to her as she turned, a shapeless bundle of furs helped into the well-appointed wagon by her ladies.
As the students gathered around the retinue, a couple piping their farewells, Odelet’s brother stopped his mount beside Declan.
“Thank you,” he said. “This is most likely the only way she would have permitted herself to be taken home.” He paused, shook his head like a restive horse, and added, “I forgot. I was asked to give you a message from King Oroh, who is staying with my father. The bard you chose as your replacement died in an unfortunate accident. The king wants you to find him a new bard.” He paused, squinting into the rare winter sunlight and pulled words slowly out of memory. “You know what he needs, the king said, and he will be patient. This must be a bard to bring honor to the new realm of Belden, and he has utmost trust in you that you will recognize the bard he needs.”
He raised his hand in farewell and shouted to the wagon driver, leaving the old bard still as a standing stone in the snow, and even more wordless.
Princess Beatrice found the face on the disk in her father’s private collection of antiquities. It lay in a case of rosewood and glass, this time on the page of an open book. She could not read the language; it was all in chicken- track runes, probably carved on stone originally, and comprehensible only to those chosen few who kept its secrets. Whoever had copied them had sketched the disk as well: the hooded face on the circle, its beaky profile already grown nebulous with centuries. The book had lain there, open to that page, for years. She must have glanced at it many times in passing until it imprinted itself into her memory, and the memory had stirred to wake when Curran’s shovel brought the face to light at the bottom of the dig site.
But who was it? she wondered. Or did that matter? Was it simply the recognition of a symbol among those in the know that mattered?
She rang a little bell hung to one side of a shadowy oak corridor to summon the curator. He appeared out of his mysterious warren of offices, workrooms, storage closets. He was a tall, bulky man who always dressed in black; his portentous and slightly annoyed expression melted away when he saw Beatrice.
“Princess,” he exclaimed, smiling.
“Good morning, Master Burley.” He had been down that corridor all her life, looking much the same, beetle- browed and bald as a bedpost, even in the early years when she had to stand on her toes to see into the cases.
“On your way to work, I see.”
“Yes,” she agreed, cheerfully. Her digging clothes appalled her mother, so Beatrice usually made a point of fleeing out the nearest door of the castle as soon as she had pulled on her dungarees and boots. But she had taken the detour on impulse that morning, guessing that her father, occupied with business and guests, would not have had time to delve into the mystery yet. “I wonder if you could tell me something about this face?”
Master Burley followed her through the dustless, softly lit, spaciously enclosed spoils of history: jeweled chests and weapons, pipes and harps, coins and clothes, ornately carved cups and platters, to the case in the corner.
He looked at the face, and said softly, “Ah.”
“What does ‘ah’ mean? Master Cle laughed inordinately when he saw it. What would make him do that?”
“Really? I had no idea he knew how. That particular face—what we can see of it—has appeared here and there through the centuries, on the odd metal disk or coin at its earliest; later on this seal, as the frontispiece of this book, even stamped into the silver guard of this sword.” He moved as he spoke, taking her from case to case, from century to random century. “Here we see it even on this delicate ivory cameo. So we must conclude that the face is suggestive of many different things: secrets, scholarship, violence, love, power.”
“All that,” she said, entranced. “But, Master Burley, who in the world is it?”
“No one,” he answered with more complacency than she could have summoned. Apparently, he had learned to live with this mystery. “Scholars have suggested various possibilities. The only thing they agree on is that the importance seems a matter not of identity—the owner of the face, or the original artist having died centuries ago— but of symbolism. Of recognition.”
“Of what?” she demanded.
“We don’t know that, either, Princess. Perhaps of the language. Or the secrets it hides.”
“So if you recognize the face, you are one who knows the secrets?”
“Roughly,” he agreed.
“Well, then, what does the secret language say? Surely somebody has translated it.”
He nodded. “There have been several translations.”
“And?”
“Well.” He passed a hand over his smooth head, looking bemused. “Scholars agreed on a common title for the work: ‘The Circle of Days.’ It seems to be a sort of journal of the daily lives of early dwellers in this land. Cooking, planting, chipping arrowheads, making clothes, washing them—”
“Laundry?” she said incredulously.
“That sort of thing.”
“Who would keep a journal about laundry when you have to whittle the letters onto tree bark or stone?”
“That has come up in scholarly debates.”
“The secrets,” she guessed abruptly, “are hidden in the laundry. Cooking, carving—they all mean something else. Something secret.”
Master Burley nodded. “Exactly, Princess. And there we stand. At the edge of the mystery, without a clue as to what anything might mean.”
She pondered that and smiled a little, reluctantly. “I suppose that’s why Master Cle laughed. He recognized the face of the inexplicable. So that’s as far as we can go.”
“Until the scholar is born who can understand the riddles inherent in primitive methods of laundry, we are indeed at a standstill.”
“How extraordinarily peculiar.” She stood a moment longer, reluctant to give up on the question but having nowhere else to go for a better answer. “Well. Thank you, Master Burley. My father will probably be in to ask the same thing. I’ll tell him what you’ve told me, of course, but he’ll think I’ve missed something, or you have, or generations of—”
The doors opened suddenly, and there he was, the king, strolling through the cases with an entourage of guests: Lord Grishold, his wife, Lady Petris, assorted courtiers and elderly cousins at whose names Beatrice faltered, and the big, dark-eyed man who was Lord Grishold’s bard, come, no doubt, to view the antique instruments. And here she was, the princess remembered suddenly, dressed like a bricklayer in yesterday’s laundry, for all the world to see.
She quelled a laugh and an urge to hide herself in the curator’s closets. It was too late, anyway. Her father saw her face above the cases, and, as he grew closer, the rest of her. His expression didn’t flicker; most likely he didn’t notice, having a broad tolerance for peculiar objects. Lady Petris did: her painted brows tried to leap off her face.
“My dear,” she said, bravely dropping a kiss near Beatrice’s face. “How unusual you look.”
“Don’t I? I’m just on my way to dig.”
“To dig. Yes.”
“My daughter has unusual interests,” the king said briskly. “She drives herself across the Stirl and vanishes underground for much of the day, then comes home, if we are fortunate, with forgotten pieces of history. Such as this.” He flashed the disk he was carrying, and the aged cousins murmured. Lord Grishold leaned in for a closer look. The king added to Beatrice, “Your uncle has taken an interest in antiquities.”
“Yes, they are always plowing up the odd bits in my fields,” he murmured. His bard was taking a long look at the disk as well. Beatrice found herself taking a long look at him as he did so. She couldn’t tell immediately if he was unusually handsome or simply compelling, the way he seemed to inhabit more space than he physically
