The Bards of Bone Plain

A single harp note.

Chapter Fourteen

The steward’s records indicate none of the problems that Declan surely faced as he tried to fashion a fair and organized competition with the unwieldy number of musicians at every level of ability on the plain. This was not, beyond the occasional request for lodging, a matter of accounts rendered or received. For such detail we must explore other chronicles, letters, and court records, and even the ballads that took root in those scant days. The bard of the Duke of Grishold complained to the duke’s chronicler of having, on that first day, to compete with “minstrels, street pipers, and others of such ilk,” along with several bards well educated in the courtly traditions. He is happier on the second day, after the rigors of the first pared away novices, dilettantes, street and tavern players, and those without the hope of a chance, who could play a cheerful tune or two, and mostly had just come to listen.

It is difficult for the city dweller to imagine what Stirl Plain must have looked like to those used to the lonely silent stretches of grass and standing stones. From “sunrise to moonset,” as one writer put it, the plain was covered with tents, wagons, campfires, pavilions, horses, oxen, dogs, with all the attendant noises, smells, colors. The school steward does list several of King Oroh’s nobles whom Declan invited to stay at the school. In various chronicles and private letters, they comment on the vivid crowd, the motley of musicians, and though, in the opinion of Lord Cleaver, King Oroh’s general and himself a musician, there are those “of great talent with their instruments, none seem trained in the necessary arts which King Oroh will expect of his bard, and which Declan brought with him to this benighted land.”

None except, perhaps, for an unusual harper.

This musician, of little charm, no wealth, and vague background, summons such art out of his simple harp that even the rich instruments of the high-court bards grow mute as he plays. Whence he comes he does not say, and his only name is Welkin.

FROM “ON STIRL PLAIN” VIRUH STAID, CHRONICLER TO THE DUKE OF GRISHOLD

By the end of the first day of the first bardic competition on Stirl Plain, one word fell from everyone’s lips like an enchanted jewel that contained the entire range of human feeling. Awe, disgust, envy, perplexity, suspicion, adoration, longing, curiosity, delight, and chagrin infused that single word; it changed every time it was spoken. That a craggy, threadbare, unknown musician with a battered harp, no family name or history, and only a vague direction as a place of origin, could render experienced court bards incoherent with his playing stunned everyone. On that first day, his name was most often followed by a more familiar word: Who?

Who was Welkin? Out of what nowhere had he come? Where had he learned to play like that? As though his harp were strung with the sinews of the heart, with sounds from the deep, shifting bones of the earth, with all the memories of music in the world before day ever opened its eye and night and time began?

Declan, moving through the crowds with his usual composure, confessed himself as ignorant as anyone of the harper’s past. Nairn, who had spent his life listening for such wonders, was transfixed by the harper’s skill until a skewed vision of Welkin dressed in leather and silk, riding at King Oroh’s side, counseling the king and using his magic at Oroh’s whim, bumped up against the homespun harper with the mysterious past, the glint in his eyes, and powers even Declan could only guess at.

Declan, only in private and only to Nairn, betrayed the one word that Welkin’s harping truly inspired in him.

“Do something,” he demanded of Nairn, when the contenders stopped to eat before they played the sun down.

“What exactly?” Nairn asked, disconcerted by Declan’s fear. “He plays better than I do.”

“Listen to him.”

“I do. I have been, all day. How could I not? He plays—he plays music the standing stones must have heard when they were new.”

“Listen to the magic,” Declan insisted. “He uses those words I taught you in his music.”

“How—”

“Learn that from him. You know the words; you have the power. Learn to use it. I can’t teach you that. You must find it in yourself. You were born with it. I breathe the air of this land, I walk on its earth, but I was not born out of it, rooted in it, the way you and Welkin are. I carry the powers, the music I was born with; there are overtones, undertones I will never hear in yours. You must learn from him, now. He knows the language of your power.”

“I don’t understand,” Nairn said, genuinely bewildered. “He wants to be King Oroh’s bard. He has what the king needs. He’s why you called this competition. Why are you so afraid he’ll win?”

Declan, pacing restlessly through his private chamber like an empty vessel pushed back and forth on a roil of tide, swung impatiently. “Use your head. You saw those words on his harp. He’s something ancient pulled out of this plain by words I’ve wakened and by the hope of another chance.”

“A chance.”

“A chance to die, if we are fortunate. That could be all he wants. But I doubt it. This time, I think he wants everything he failed to get the first time. He wants all the powers within the Three Great Treasures. All that, he will take to the court of this foreign invader, and he will bring it down with a single plucked string.”

Nairn swallowed something like an old, dry twist of rootwork in his throat. He backed a step or two until he felt the solid stones, and leaned against them.

“What are you saying?” His voice gyrated wildly around his question. “Are you saying that it’s true? That old poem you gave us?”

“What do you think poetry is?” Declan demanded. “Something decorative? A pretty tapestry of words instead of threads? Tales that old stay alive for a reason. I think that, who knows how long ago, this harper challenged himself against the Three Trials of Bone Plain. He lost all three. The poem is very clear about what happens to the failed bard.”

“No song,” Nairn whispered numbly. “No peace. No poetry.”

“No end of days.”

“He has—he—you heard him play. He did not lose that power.”

“Didn’t he?” Declan stopped pacing finally, amid a rumpled froth of sheepskin. “I think it’s in his harp, that power. Maybe he stole it; maybe he found it somewhere; it was given to him out of pity by a dying bard. I think if he tried to play any other instrument, even a simple pipe, his notes would wither into breath. Harp strings would warp out of tune; reeds would dry and split.”

“But he can still—you saw him vanish into air!”

“He’s been around a very long time. Who knows what he’s been able to learn through the centuries?” He shook his head. “Maybe we did not translate the words precisely—they mean other things as well—Who knows?” He paused, gazing heavily at the shaken Nairn. “Suppose he does open the way back to that plain, that tower? What would you do to possess such gifts? If the heart of this land opened itself up and showed you what you could be, offered you all the songs it holds, would you refuse? Or would you do exactly what you’ve done since the day you ran away from that pigsty? You have followed the music. To this plain. To this challenge.” He turned abruptly again, without waiting for Nairn’s answer. “Go down, listen again to that harper, and think about this: What would you do to play like him? If you can’t answer that, he will take everything that I chose for you.”

Nairn took himself wordlessly out of the tower and down the hill to the plain, which glowed back at the stars with its own constellations of fires. He picked Welkin’s music easily out of the merry confusion of sounds. He circled it warily, again and again, pacing as Declan had, listening from a distance until gradually he came to realize that his circles spiraled more and more into themselves. He orbited the last around the great crowd sitting and listening to Welkin and one of the court bards, who were exchanging songs. There he came to a halt behind the gathering.

Welkin played a complex accompaniment to a courtly love ballad. Even in the firelight, he seemed something