She shook her head quickly, leaned even closer to him. “No. He’s—he’s going to call a bardic competition. He wants to retire.”
Phelan sat back in his creaky chair, astonished. “Now? I thought he’d die on the job in a decade or two, with his harp strings breaking along with his heart.”
“No.” She hesitated; he waited, riveted. “He—he said things—I don’t know if he’s imagining them or not. He wants—Phelan, are you going to compete?”
He stared at her, appalled. “Of course not.”
“Oh, good. I didn’t want to compete against you. Quennel said—Well, he asked me to.”
“Of course he would want you to replace him.”
“I tried to persuade him not to retire, but he seems to have lost heart.” She took a swallow of wine, her frown deepening. Phelan watched her.
“What,” he wondered, “are you not telling me?”
“Just something Quennel said.” She put her glass down, dipped a finger absently, and ran it along the rim of the glass, brooding again, as the glass sang. “I want to be sure he’s right, before ... So don’t ask. I’ll tell you when I need to.”
“All right,” he said, mystified. Her eyes shifted beyond him, widened, and he turned, hearing a roil of boots and voices flowing through the open door, breaking across the room. Someone cried Zoe’s name; she closed her eyes briefly. Then she put a smile on her face as Frazer reached her, with Kelda so close behind him they might have been racing, Phelan thought dourly, though if he had placed a bet, it wouldn’t have been on Frazer.
“Come with us,” the young man pleaded. He added, belatedly, “And you, too, Phelan.”
“No, thanks. I’m leaving.”
Frazer lowered his voice a trifle. “There’s a group in the back waiting for Kelda. He’s going to teach us an ancient language. He says the letters are magical. We hoped to find you—you must join us, Zoe. We’re going to form a secret society—” He stopped, reddening, as Kelda chuckled. “Well, not secret now, I suppose, after my babbling.” Zoe’s eyes moved from his ardent face to Lord Grishold’s bard, her expression complex again, reserved and oddly wary, despite her vivid smile.
“Magical?” she echoed.
“Grishold folklore,” Kelda explained easily. “Something I picked up in my wanderings. It probably evolved from an ancient bardic exercise. Frazer brought up the subject—”
Phelan laughed; the bard’s dark eyes queried him. “It’s Frazer’s constant question, these days. I’m glad someone can finally give him an answer. I’m tone-deaf when it comes to the subject of magic.”
“Yes, so I thought,” the bard said cheerfully without bothering to explain himself.
“Please join us,” Frazer urged Zoe. “Kelda says that your voice alone is sorcery, and you understood, that day, what I was asking you. You know you did—I felt it.”
For a moment, her smile became genuine. “Well, I would like to know what Kelda said that took the scowl off your face.” She drew breath, held it, then stood up recklessly. “Why not? I’ll come and listen, at least.”
“Good!” Kelda dropped a hand on Phelan’s shoulder, effectively keeping him in his seat. “You are welcome, too, of course. But since you seem to have someplace to be ...”
“Yes,” Phelan said without moving, watching Zoe’s hand tremble as she brought her wineglass to her lips. She finished half of it in a couple of swallows and smiled brightly without meeting Phelan’s eyes.
“Where are we going?”
“Back out the door,” Kelda said, gesturing to the group waiting for him along the far wall, “to a much quieter place. Only as far as that, this evening. How far later, who knows?”
“I do,” a sinewy, drunken voice said from behind Phelan as they moved away, and he closed his eyes, stifling a groan. Kelda, his back to the voice, halted almost imperceptively midstep, then changed his mind and kept going toward the door. Frazer flung a startled glance behind them, but Zoe, her backbone rigid, relegated the problem to Phelan and drew Frazer along in her wake.
Phelan rose quickly; Jonah, who hadn’t noticed him, blinked befuddledly at the apparition.
“What are you doing here?”
“Drinking a beer,” Phelan answered. “Join me?”
“No, thank you. I intend to join the party that just left.”
“I don’t believe you were invited. Anyway, there’s something I want to ask you.”
“Ask me later. I have a bone to pick with that bard. A salmon bone.”
“Pick it later,” Phelan pleaded, not wanting to chase his father down the street to forestall a brawl. “I need to know what caused the top of the school’s tower to blow apart during the first bardic competition and rain down all over the grounds and nearly kill the school steward.”
Jonah stared at him. Forgetting his query for the moment, he sat down slowly on the only vacant chair left in the place. “What have you been reading, boy?”
“The school steward’s records.”
“Dower Ren wrote all that down?”
“Accounts were rendered for a new roof, for someone to clean up the grounds, and to Salish for healing —”
“Salix.”
“Whoever he was, for taking care of the steward’s scrapes when the roof fell into his chamber.”
“She.”
“Dower Ren was a woman?”
“No, Salix.”
“If it cost money, he wrote it down. Dower Ren did.” He paused, eyeing his father. “You’ve read this, then?”
“No. I had no idea ... It couldn’t possibly have been ... What exactly did he say about the broken tower?”
“Nothing much more. Only accounts rendered for three coffins for the remains of two students who were killed by the stones to be sent home in—”
“Two students.”
“The third was never found. Blown up like the tower, most likely, though the steward doesn’t speculate. He only wrote that since Nairn’s family was unknown, and there was no body to put into the third coffin, said coffin went back to the maker, and accounts already rendered for it were returned.” He paused, studying Jonah speculatively, while a waiter flourished his bar towel at a splash of Zoe’s wine and set a foaming mug down in front of Jonah. “Odd,” Phelan murmured finally. “That’s one thing I did notice.” Jonah, frowning down at his beer without tasting it, raised a brow at his son absently. “He never wrote that Salix was a woman. I had an image of a kindly, crusty village doctor in my head, with a huge hoary beard and hair in his ears. What have you read about those early years?”
“I haven’t.”
“Then how did you know—”
“I don’t. Leave it—”
“I can’t,” Phelan told him recklessly. “I’ve decided to do my paper on Nairn and the mysterious Circle of Days. Do you know anything about that?”
Jonah glowered at him for no particular reason that Phelan could see. He raised his beer finally, downed half of it. “It’s been translated a dozen times,” he answered testily, coming up for air. “Mostly badly.”
“How would you know?” Phelan asked curiously, and his father lurched up, beer dripping over his fingers.
“You are foul company tonight,” he complained. “Not even your mother pesters me with questions like this. I have business with that bard.”
Phelan sighed. “I’ll come with you.”
“No, you won’t.” Again Phelan was weighed into his seat, this time by Jonah’s far heavier hand. “I don’t want you anywhere near him. I’ll deal with him. Somehow.”
“Fine,” Phelan said wearily, hoping that Kelda and his band of disciples had vanished by now into the back streets of Caerau. “You do that. Let me know where you end up when I have to bail you out.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
