a supper laid out in the gallery for the musicians.”
She nodded, her eyes moving again to Kelda. “Maybe I’ll go up there, while he’s down here.”
Phelan regarded her curiously. “You’re avoiding him? He seems harmless enough. Very gifted, as well as very ambitious. A bit crude, suggesting that Quennel might like to retire.”
“I suspect that Quennel thought Kelda was trying to help him retire.”
“Forcing him to choke on a swallow of salmon mousse?”
“A salmon bone.”
“Well.” His mouth crooked. “There is poetic precedence in that. Taste the salmon and understand all things.”
“Including your own death,” she said somberly. “No wonder Quennel is frothing.”
She went up to the gallery, where the musicians were rollicking happily along with whatever Kelda tossed to them. She made a hasty meal of roast beef studded with garlic, leeks braised in cream, strawberry tart. Then she hurried back through the castle, the noisy party receding again behind her, to the bard’s chamber.
He was still awake, still brooding, still not inclined to share his thoughts. He watched as she came to settle in the chair beside him.
“Do you want me to send for some supper?” she asked. “Are you hungry?”
“I’ve swallowed enough for one night,” he said grimly. “Is he good?”
“Yes. He’s beyond good. Some of the things he’s playing are more suitable to a country court than for a formal supper given by the king. But he brought the entire hall to silence—and much of it to tears—with his playing of ‘The Knight Returned to Grenewell Hall.’ His voice could charm a fish into a frying pan.”
He stirred peevishly. “Don’t talk about fish.” Then he was silent for so long that Zoe thought he had fallen asleep. He sighed finally, and spoke, his voice hoarse; she could hear the weariness in it. “I’ll take that sleeping draught now. I’m finished.”
She poured it quickly into his cup, added water and a little wine as the physician had instructed, and watched him drink.
“Shall I stay with you until you fall asleep?”
“No.” He put the cup down and reached for her hand, smiling finally. “Thank you, my dear, for staying with me. Come and see me tomorrow. I want to talk to you then.”
“I will,” she promised, mystified, and sent his servant in to turn down the lamps.
She sensed Kelda at the school before she saw him the next day. Rumors of his playing had wasted no time getting up the hill. The masters’ refectory was full of the invisible bard when Zoe came up for breakfast. His name had somehow melted into the butter for the breakfast toast, insinuated itself under the shells and into the yolks of coddled eggs, so that a single bite transformed itself and fell as “Kelda” from everyone’s lips. The masters were preoccupied with him, their expressions complex as they spoke softly together; wonder vied with envy, even a touch of wariness, in their faces. Small knots of students chirped and twittered together in hallways, and under the oak trees when Zoe passed to teach her singing class. Exclamations, moans, and fervid sighs escaped them with all the mindless, irresistible force of steam spewing out of a kettle spout. He was to visit this class, she heard, and then that, and then at noon, he would play for everyone.
She was pacing around her very young students, enjoying their high sweet voices and adding her own to keep them in time, when she came face-to-face with the bard in her doorway.
He nearly dislodged the note in her throat. Years of discipline kept it tuned, though it came out with more emphasis than she intended. His impeccable ear picked out what, from anyone else, would have been a startled squeak. The glint of a smile in his eye teased her. He waited, his face impassive, until the children finished their song; and then he came into the room, clapping for them.
Some of the masters followed in his wake, and a dozen students, Frazer among them, looking dazed.
“How wonderful all of this is,” the bard marveled. “Declan’s school, the standing stones, the oak—the perfect background for passing on the ancient bardic heritage. I envy you.” He spoke so simply that for the moment she believed him. “I plucked my own skills from bush and bramble, from rutted back roads and the echoes within the empty ruins. I tuned my harp to the icy whine out of the back teeth of the wind, and to the oldest voices—”
“Of the standing stones plucked by the fingers of the moon,” Frazer finished breathlessly, and was rewarded by Kelda’s sudden, flashing smile.
“Yes! You astonish me. You know those hoary lines?”
“They teach us everything here,” the boy said diffidently, deeply flushed.
“How wonderful,” the bard breathed again, and turned his warmth upon Zoe. “I didn’t see you in the hall last night. I was sorry you didn’t sing.”
“I was sitting at Master Quennel’s bedside.”
“Yes. I’m in awe of the little I heard from you just now. Will you come and listen to me play later?”
“I heard you play last night. ‘Grenewell Hall.’ You nearly brought me to tears.”
“Nearly?”
“It seemed magical,” she answered slowly. “For a moment. Whatever brambles and hedgerows taught you to play like that must have been enchanted themselves. Master Quennel, since you didn’t ask, was resting quietly when I left him.”
“I didn’t need to ask since I was told this morning.” Again his faint smile teased, mocked, challenged. “Will you come and listen anyway? It’s an easy matter to raise a tear when emotions are already raw with the sudden illness of a friend. Not so easy in the clear and genial light of day.”
That made her smile, which annoyed her almost as much as her tears had. He saw that, too. There was no hiding from him, she realized, when he held her fixed within his sights.
“I’ll come,” she said abruptly, both her curiosity and her hackles raised, but by what exactly she had no clue. He nodded and left her to her transfixed students; she watched Frazer turn into his wake, drift after him as helplessly as a feather on the flood.
At noon, students and masters, their paths braiding along the garden paths as they sought their classes or the libraries or refectories, stopped midpace when harping, strong and mysterious, rippled out of the still, shadowy trees. Zoe, walking out of the tower door, watched absorbed and purposeful moving bodies suddenly forget where they were headed and why. Their heads turned toward the trees. They veered from their chosen paths, seemed to float along the grass as though the music they heard had pulled them beyond time and gravity as well as memory. It seemed to come from the memory of trees, the singing voices of the ghosts of the first oak as they taught the first bard to play.
Zoe followed as mindlessly and as single-mindedly as any around her. They knew secrets, she realized for the first time. Those old oaks sang mysteries. If only she could get close enough, begin to understand their language of sun, rain, wind, night. They knew something she wanted. They knew the first songs of the world, the first word forged out of the lightning trapped in their boughs, shirred free of the fire and glowing among their roots like a fallen star. If she could get close enough to see ... She was scarcely aware of the crowd around her, students and masters emptying the buildings to gather in the grove, all mute, as though they had not yet begun to learn this new language.
She stopped at the edge of the great circle around the singing tree and saw the face of the music.
She blinked, shaken out of a dream, she felt, and waking to a conundrum.
The bard was singing, not the trees. The bard was Kelda, who had watched an old man choke on a bite of salmon. All around her, entranced faces still seemed caught in the dream; transfixed bodies scarcely breathed. The bard, engrossed in his expert playing, dreamed as well, drawing his listeners ever more deeply into his wonderful vision.
“He’s good,” someone murmured beside her. “I’ll give him that. Zoe, do you know where I can find your father?”
She closed her eyes, opened them again, finally shaken fully awake and astonished at herself. She turned her head, met Phelan’s preoccupied eyes.
“Didn’t you hear that?” she whispered.
“Of course I did. I followed you out here.”
“I mean—the trees singing. Didn’t you hear the oak sing?”
He shook his head. “I must have missed that part.” He was silent a moment, peering at her; then he smiled.
