Nairn stopped at the threshold, looked at him again. “Were you waiting for me tonight?”
“You kept me awake. Of course I was waiting.”
Thus began Nairn’s brief and disastrous exploration of the most ancient bardic arts.
The circle of his own days lost their boundaries then, became fluid, unpredictable. When he wasn’t learning exacting courtly music from Declan, he drifted like a dreamer or a drunkard, enchanted by every spoken word, every silent named thing around him, without paying attention to who had spoken, or what responsibility he might take for the things he saw: the dwindling pile of wood beside the fire, the candle guttering, drowning its wick in its wax, drawing the sudden dark behind it. He saw “wood,” “fire,” “dark” as separate, powerful entities; what they meant to him changed with every glimpse of them. He had no idea how the other students in the circle had fared with the task Declan had given them. They spoke around him; he might have been hearing their voices underwater, so intently did he separate their words from any human origin. Only that mattered: the word, spoken, and the image, the burning rose of power that blossomed at the sound.
He heard Muire’s voice occasionally; it held another kind of power.
“I miss you in the kitchen,” she said one morning when he came down for breakfast. “You used to scatter words like little gifts in odd places. You used to see what I needed done almost before I did.”
He mumbled something absently around a bite of bread and butter, swallowed, and saw her face with unexpected clarity, instead of an indistinguishable blur in the background of his thoughts. It looked wistful, uncertain, words he hadn’t learned yet from the “Circle of Days.”
“I’m finding my way into something,” he said a trifle incoherently. “I’ll come back one of these days, I think.”
She nodded. “That’s what Salix told me. She asked about you.”
Salix. She had words, he remembered, all over her jars and boxes, sewn into cloth bags full of dried things. Already Muire’s face was fading; the unknown words glowing in his head, brighter than all the old, familiar words surrounding him.
“Salix.” He tore another piece from the loaf, shambled off with it. “I’ll go and see her.”
He did so, wandering out the door with his breakfast in one hand, his cloak in the other. He hardly noticed the steady fall of snow the clouds were sifting out of themselves, and how he slid on the fresh layers as he walked down the hill. He entered Salix’s cottage without knocking, prowled silently around, examining the collection of twigs she left like a secret path he was compelled to follow, all the while a tall, white-haired figure stood just beyond his attention, stirring and stirring her cauldron over the fire.
“What are you doing?” he heard, and then himself, just as distantly:
“Taking your words.”
“Nairn,” she said, and he blinked. Another world fell into place around him: the old healer’s cottage, with her weavings on the floor, across the backs of chairs, her tidy shelves full of all her makings, neatly stored and labeled.
He looked at her and blinked again, feeling as though she had shaken him awake. So she had, he realized; she had said the word that meant him.
She gave him a smile that was somewhere between exasperated and amused. “Muire said you had become entirely impossible. ‘Distracted’ was the word she used. ‘Witless’ was maybe what she thought. Do you need a potion?”
“A potion?”
“Is there anything,” she said slowly and clearly, “I can make for you?”
“Oh.” He shook his head. “I think there’s no cure for what I’ve got.”
“Is there a name for it?”
“I think—” He hesitated, looking at it, this ravening monster in him that ate words like fire ate twigs. “I think its name is magic. It goes where it goes. I follow.” He added, pulling up a useful word that he’d all but forgotten: “Sorry.”
“Ah, well,” she said ruefully. “I wish I had been able to understand it better. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Do you know that yet?”
“No.” Already the warm cottage walls were wavering, blurring behind all the words he had learned within them. “Not yet. I’ll tell you when I know.”
The snow had stopped falling; the world around him, as he walked back up the hill, seemed mute as midnight. Even the river, narrowed to a slit of dark water between encroaching boundaries of ice, ran silently under the pallid sky. The school on the hill seemed shrunken, huddled against the cold. The narrow tower windows, the tiny, thick panes in the students’ chambers, were barred with frozen tears of ice. The tower’s battlements were a thick, upside-down crown of ice, from which jagged, fist-thick shards hung down like barbaric jewels. Nairn, busy patterning everything he saw with ancient letters, forgot, for a brief moment, the shape of the word for ice. He stopped, gazing up at the massive icicles hanging high on the battlements and saw the patterns of the twigs in the way the icicles fell: long and short, long and long and short, randomly, the way the world sometimes made things. Or was it only the tiniest fragment of a pattern so vast, so intricate, that it would take a different kind of vision to see the whole?
The sun came out then, unexpectedly, slipping a sudden, astonishing shaft of light between the sullen clouds. It struck the tower, ignited the crown of ice to golden fire, and Nairn’s breath caught in his throat. The word in his head kindled as well, light running along the ancient pattern like a finger across harp strings, as the sun was doing, making a music of its own on a winter’s morning. The word in Nairn’s head leaped up to meet the fire within the ice.
There was a sudden crack just as, below, the scholarly Drue, bundled like a sausage, opened the door and stepped out.
The icicle struck him with all the force of a spear thrown from the battlements. Nairn, the breath turned to ice in his mouth, watched him spin and crumple, heard the ice shatter against the threshold stone. The sunlight faded. A swath of blood, the only color in the world, melted the snow around Drue’s head. Nairn, frozen in that slow, amber moment of time, saw a flicker at the tower window above the door: Declan, disturbed in his music room, looking down, then across the yard at Nairn.
He vanished. A student, come to shut the open front door, stared out instead, and shouted. Others crowded behind him, pushed him out as Declan’s own voice, still calm but louder than usual, bade them make way.
Nairn began to shake. He had cried so rarely in his life that he barely recognized the word, but he felt something like melted ice slide and chill on his face. The students came out, made a ring around the fallen Drue; Declan knelt in the snow beside him. Nairn moved finally, unsteadily, feeling vast mountains of snow shift at every step.
“Poor Drue,” Shea said, her peremptory voice trembling. “Master Declan, is he dead?”
“Yes,” Declan said briefly. He looked up as Nairn finally crossed some vast chasm of time and reached the edge of the circle.
“Nairn,” Blayse said abruptly, noticing from which direction he had come. “Were you out here? You must have seen what happened.”
Nairn opened his mouth. No words came out. There seemed none he knew for what had happened. How could he say sunlight, ice, the mystery within the word for ice, the sudden beauty that echoed so powerfully, so disastrously in his heart?
They were all looking at him then, their faces turned away from Declan, who held Nairn’s eyes, waiting, it seemed, like the others, for his answer.
Declan lifted his hand, held one finger briefly to his lips: another ancient word. Then he dropped his hand and his eyes, and Nairn heard himself speak.
“The ice broke from the top of the tower, fell on him just as he came out.”
Their eyes loosed him, too, drifted back to the unfortunate Drue, silent for once, and gazing with interest, it seemed, at the splinter of bone whiter than the snow that protruded down from his eyebrow.
“His father will be rabid,” Osprey murmured, awed.
“His father will be grieved,” Declan said, shifting Drue’s arm from behind his back. “He’ll understand that it was an accident. Help me get him inside. Shea, go and get Salix.”
“For what?” she asked bewilderedly. “He’s dead as a doornail.” He glanced at her, a quick flash of metal under his red brows, and she backed a step reluctantly. “Oh, all right.”
