only go where she led him.
So when what he thought was a standing stone on the crest of a nearby hill shouted his name, he rolled an eye at it confusedly and did not stop. The Oracular Stone, he assumed, though it sounded oddly like his father.
“Phelan!”
His fingers skipped a beat. It was his father, calling from the other side of the Turning Tower. Jonah shouted something more that got tangled up on Zoe’s voice. Phelan ducked his head, concentrated. If his father had any good advice, he thought grimly, he would have given it to himself all those centuries before. As though Jonah had read his mind, he began walking toward Phelan, a tiny, impossibly distant figure who would take days, years, eons, maybe, to cross the distance between them.
The harper wrestled the next song out of Zoe’s closing notes and leaped away with it, nearly snarling Phelan’s fingers as he scrabbled to keep up. Something strange came out of Zoe. He saw her voice curl out of her in long banners of color, fluttering and dissolving into the wind. Her harp notes scattered like tiny, glittering insects that spread bright, metallic wings and swarmed away. He laughed suddenly, breathlessly, and tried to make that magic with his fingers. Nothing sparked to life from his notes, but she smiled at him anyway, all flaming silks and windblown hair, stepping out of her shoes then to stand barefoot in the long grass. How could she smile? he wondered. How could she not be afraid, caught in that dire web of power and poetry, with his father’s fate looming like a vast doorway into timelessness and trouble in front of them both?
The harper spun the song away again; he and Zoe sang it together, voices swirling like wind songs over the plain, his deep, rough-hewn, blustery, hers soaring above it, the golds and reds and deep gray-blacks of clouds gathering to kindle the tempest. Phelan’s notes scattered like birds before the storm riding on their tail feathers.
“Phelan!”
Jonah’s voice sounded out of the weltering. Phelan couldn’t see him clearly through the blinding shafts of sunlight spearing through mists and billowings across the plain. He sounded closer, or else his voice had gotten stronger. What he could possibly do that wouldn’t plunge them all more deeply into the inexhaustible cauldron of time, Phelan couldn’t imagine. He wished Jonah would stop shouting. The incongruous sound, like a sudden voice breaking in upon a dream, made his fingers falter, miss the note that led to the next, then the next, until Zoe caught him out of his flailing, set him back where he was, balanced on the cliff’s edge by a breath, trying to keep time itself motionless beside him.
The next time Jonah shouted, he was very close, and whatever word he loosed across the plain was not Phelan’s name.
It cracked through the music like an oak bough breaking, and it silenced the old harper’s voice in the middle of a word.
The brief hesitation was astonishing enough to freeze Phelan’s fingers as well. Zoe, fending for herself, seemed impervious to the disruption. She only glanced at Jonah when he appeared on the crest of the hill beside Phelan and pulled the harp from his hands.
“What are you doing?” Phelan cried at him, wrenched off-balance and feeling as though his own misguided father had pushed him the wrong way over the cliff edge. “You can’t even whistle! Strings break when you look at them.”
Jonah ignored him. The harper flung his glinting smile at them and found his voice again; Jonah’s fingers leaped after him. Phelan stared at him, sweating, trembling, torn from the embrace of his instrument, from the embrace of the whirling, deadly current of music, to stand empty-handed on the shore, music still clamoring in his head with no way out.
Then he heard Jonah’s music melding with Zoe’s like silver braided with gold, like sunlight with sky, small birds flying out of his harp, and butterflies out of hers, their voices winding together, sweet, sinewy, strong as bone and old as stone. Together, they transfixed him, spellbound in their spell, his mouth still hanging open, and all the unplayed music in him easing out of his heart with every breath.
He didn’t notice when the old harper stopped playing. Sometime before that, the mist of stones around them had begun to float away, like clouds breaking up after a maelstrom. Phelan, sitting on the ground by then, watched wordlessly as the harper slipped the harp from his shoulder, reached for its case. Phelan saw the markings on the harp then, secrets all over it, whittled into the wood.
He found his voice finally, whispered, “Who are you? Are you Kelda?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I’m Welkin. Sometimes ...” He shrugged. “I go where the music is.”
“What is—What is your true name?”
The paler eye narrowed at him, catching light. “Ask your father. He knows.”
Phelan gazed up at his father, who was still playing as though his fingers were trying to let loose a millennium’s worth of unspent notes. “What did you do to him? He couldn’t play a blade of grass before today. He couldn’t find the beat in a pair of spoons.”
“I didn’t do anything. You did.” He slid the harp into the case, fastened the old leather ties, and patted it fondly, whereupon it disappeared. Phelan stared at the nothingness where it had been; his eyes were pulled away to follow the harper’s gesturing arm. “He’s been trapped in this tower since he tried to kill me with his music. That time, he only brought down that old watchtower. This time, he found a better way to deal with me. He turned his heart inside out to rescue you from his fate. Not,” he added, as Phelan opened his mouth, “that you were anywhere near it. But he didn’t know. He pulled down the tower walls with his music for you.”
Phelan felt his skin constrict. “Who are you?” he asked again, his voice a wisp, a tendril of itself.
The harper smiled. “Just an old stone,” he said, and became so, a weathered boulder embedded in the crown of the hill, scaly with lichen and the faint patterns of what might once have been words, drowsing in the afternoon sun.
Phelan shifted to lean against it after a while, as he listened to his father and Zoe. After a longer while, he heard the stone prophesy:
“She’ll be the next bard of this land. She’ll sing the moon down and the sun up, and not a bard will be left standing against her magic.”
After a time even longer than that, Beatrice found him.
She came up the knoll, carrying her high-heeled sandals, looking windblown, uncertain, even, he saw with astonishment, as he rose, somewhat fearful. He went to meet her, saw the tears still drying on her face. He put his arms around her, felt again the strong, sweet embrace of the music in her.
“I couldn’t see you,” he said.
“You’re all I could see. I was so frightened. I’ve never been so frightened. Everyone else had faded away, and I knew from your father’s tale where you and Zoe had gotten to. Kelda tricked you—”
He started to shake his head, then stopped and smiled crookedly. “Well. I suppose he did.”
“I tried to follow your father into the tower. But I couldn’t find my way until now. What happened to them?”
“My father managed to topple the right tower this time.”
She turned her head, looked over his shoulder; he felt her indrawn breath against his ear. “That’s Jonah. All this time I thought it was Kelda, playing with Zoe. I couldn’t see anything very clearly until now. I’ve never heard your father play before.”
“Neither have I. He finally remembered how.”
Her hair brushed his mouth as she shifted again. “Where is Kelda?”
Phelan hesitated, found it easiest just to say it. “He turned back into Welkin and reminded my father how to play again. Then he turned himself back into that.”
He gestured to the boulder breaking out of the ground. He felt the princess’s tremor of astonishment. She loosed him slowly, dropping her sandals, all her attention on the stone now, he noticed wryly, with the labyrinth of weathered lines on it.
She knelt beside it, touching it, caressing it, her splayed fingertips finding and tracing the ancient scorings, smiling even as her mouth shook with wonder and tears fell onto the sunlit stone. “The oldest words,” she whispered. “The oldest magic ... Oh, Phelan, look at this.” He crouched down beside her, drew a salty kiss from her, wishing he lay under those gently searching fingers and wondering if, in whatever dream the old bard inhabited, he felt them. “It’s the spiraling circle.”
“The what?”
