Down in the site, helping Campion coax the line of stones out of the wall of dirt into daylight, she was so absent that Ida, sifting through the earth at her feet, asked sympathetically, “Is it getting worse?”
“Is what?”
“Being in love.”
Beatrice stared down at her. “In love. Oh—” She remembered some distant time, when she had met Kelda’s gaze and had felt it everywhere, all over her body. She flushed, wondering how she could have ever misread the power in his eyes.
“When love is gone, how little of love—” Campion intoned sonorously.
“I was never in love,” Beatrice said crossly. “It was an accident.” Even she had to smile, reluctantly, as they hooted. “A very silly mistake.”
His face was still on her mind, as she had seen it the previous evening. Phelan had opened the lounge door, and Kelda, standing at the table with students watching him, drawing a pattern on the pale wood with a burned splinter of kindling, had raised his head at the interruption. His eyes had seemed scarcely human then. The eyes of a raven, a wild horse, a toad, they seemed to recognize nothing human. He hadn’t touched his harp. The sound had come out of him, or the word he had drawn: a deep string, vibrating until it seemed to shake the floor. And then the streak of light ... When she could see again, the back door hung on its hinges, Phelan lay on the floor, and Jonah Cle had appeared out of nowhere. Everyone else had vanished.
A shadow blocked the sunlight overhead; she started, peered upward, and found Jonah leaning over the site edge, peering back at them.
“Ah, you are here, after all, Princess.”
“Barely,” she told him ruefully, aware of the tools growing quiet around her as everyone listened. “My mother was not happy with me. How is Phelan?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been home. Come up a moment?”
She mused a bit darkly, as she climbed the ladder, about the carelessness of parents. Jonah added, as though he read her mind, “You could ask him.” He helped her off the ladder. He smelled like a brewery, and his eyes squinted painfully at the cheerful sunlight. But he seemed sober enough.
“Then how do you know that Phelan made it home?” she asked patiently, stifling an unaccustomed urge to raise her voice. Jonah had put them together into a cab; Phelan was coherent by then, though he kept his eyes shut. Yes, he promised, he would call a physician; no, the princess should not see him home since the cab would pass the castle first. Yes, he would be fine if he could just fall into bed, only he had something extremely important to tell her if he could remember what it was ... He couldn’t, not before the cab left her at the castle gates. She watched it roll away with a hiss of steam; that was the last she had seen of Phelan.
“Where else would he have gone?” Jonah asked with annoying unconcern, and added, “I searched all night for Kelda. Did you see him this morning at the castle?”
She shook her head. “No. I wasn’t looking, though. Speaking of bards, my mother said something about Quennel wanting to retire, and that the city would soon be overrun by bards. Have you heard anything about that?”
“The bardic competition,” Jonah said grimly. “That’s what brought Kelda here.”
“But he didn’t—Kelda had no idea Quennel would—” She faltered, staring at him. “Are you suggesting that he planned this? He—he used his magic against Quennel?”
“Quennel choked on a word,” Jonah said harshly, and she blinked, as stray, wordlike objects in her head fit together like broken shards.
“The Circle of Days.”
His eyes narrowed at her; she had managed to astonish the jaded Master Cle. “You know about that?”
“Master Burley told me, when I remembered where I had seen the hooded face on the disk. He said it’s an ancient language in which very common words hold enormous powers. So the theory goes. Nobody has ever been able to read into the words, beneath them. I saw the pattern Kelda drew on the table. It was also on the disk. What does it mean?”
“Bread.”
“Bread.”
“Look in any bakery. You see the pattern still used on cottage loaves.”
“Really?” she said, amazed. “How fascinating. But what is its other meaning? Its secret?”
“You know that, too. You saw its power last night.”
She stared at him again, wordlessly. Standing under the bright noon sun, she felt suddenly chilled and oddly helpless. “All that power,” she whispered, “under my father’s roof.”
“Yes.”
“How—how do you know all this? Where did you first meet Kelda?”
His eyes held hers. For a moment she thought he would answer ; she could almost hear the words gather in the silence between them. Then he shifted abruptly, glancing at the city across the bridge. “Be careful of him,” he only said. “Did he see you last night?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Don’t let him find you alone.”
“But what can we do?” she pleaded. “You know this language—Do you have its power?”
He started to answer that, then stopped, and gave her instead a wry, very genuine smile. “I wish I did. Whatever he wants, he’ll wait to take it during the bardic competition. I might be able to change his path then. Just try to stay away from him. And look in on Phelan if you can.”
“Yes,” she said dazedly, and watched him pick his way across the barrens of the ruined city before she descended once again to the simpler mystery of stones.
“What was that about?” Campion asked curiously, as she picked up her brush. She answered with a vague tale of Phelan having an accident while trying to keep his father out of trouble, and his father having to rescue him instead. It sounded solid, she thought, until she glanced up and found Campion’s disconcerting gaze upon her.
“And you had nothing better to do with your evening than rattle around the Caerau waterfront chasing Jonah Cle?”
“You sound like my mother,” she complained, her mouth sliding into a smile in spite of herself. “It didn’t seem odd at the time.”
She found it difficult, after her conversation with Jonah, to keep her mind on her work. The meticulous task of coaxing what was most likely an old brick mantelpiece out of a wall of earth with the equivalent of artists’ brushes and dental tools seemed mildly absurd. It strained her patience, which she had always thought was considerable. Now she wanted to toss her brush on the floor and groan. She gritted her teeth, watched the sunlight shift with painstaking slowness across one bit of grit on the floor, then another. She only realized how the strain of her silence had spread through the site when Curran finally broke it.
“Go,” he told her gently. “Just go where you need to. You’re already out of here and away; you just haven’t caught up with yourself yet.”
She drove the steam car over the bridge, debated about changing her clothes, passed the castle without deciding, and parked along the old, quiet streets where Phelan lived. For a moment, when the ageless Sagan opened the door, she regretted her dungarees and her dusty hair.
He only murmured at a query behind him, “Princess Beatrice, Lady Sophy. Come from the archaeological digs, would be my guess.”
“Sorry,” the princess said to Sophy, wondering how many times she had overworked that word in one morning. But Sophy, who after all had married the mercurial Jonah, only saw what she chose to: the princess on her doorstep.
“How lovely of you to pay us a visit! Jonah is away, but Phelan is here, resting.”
“Yes. How is he?”
“A slight fever. I gave him some meadowsweet tea and took away his inkpots. Please, sit down.”
“I’m a bit untidy.”
“Nonsense. Sagan, please tell Phelan that Princess Beatrice is here.” Beatrice perched herself on the edge of a chair. Sophy fluttered down onto the sofa, adding, with her charming smile, “I’m not at all certain what happened last night. Phelan is vague and Jonah is—well, his usual self. Do you know?”
“Something—” Beatrice managed guardedly. “Only a little.”
