The Bards of Bone Plain

“There.” She took his hand, guided his fingers around a circle, then into smaller and smaller rings that wound down into its heart. She looked at him, laughing through her tears. “It’s the symbol on the door stone of the tomb we’re unburying. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. I wonder if that’s his name.”

“He’s a ghost?”

“Well, maybe the tomb isn’t a tomb. Or maybe it’s still waiting for him—he hasn’t gotten around to dying yet.”

Bemused, he thought of the word Jonah had shouted that made the bard’s sure fingers skip a note with astonishment. Hearing your own name after who knew how many millennia might have that effect, he thought. He took the princess’s fingers, raised them away from the battered face of the stone to his lips, moved that she could see so clearly the words engraved in stone and all the worlds within the words.

Behind them, the music had begun to slow, fray into an unfinished phrase, a scattering of notes. Jonah laughed suddenly, a free, wondering sound unlike anything Phelan had ever heard from him.

Then the amphitheater thundered, roared, wave after wave of sound rolling across it from every point to crash together, unwieldy echoes rippling back again to meet the constant noise. They stood on stage and scaffolding again, musicians turned to stone in the suddenly appearing world, the princess looking around bewilderedly for the vanished stone, the knoll, the secret world, the ancient word beneath her hand.

Zoe came back to life first, managing a smile across the distance at Quennel, on his feet like everyone else in the place, and clapping so hard she thought his hands might fall off.

Then she turned to Jonah, held him in a long, incredulous gaze before she spoke. “Nairn?”

He looked back at her silently; Phelan glimpsed the shadow of the endless road in his eyes.

“I was young and foolish then,” he answered finally, and she shivered.

“So are we all ...”

“Maybe,” he said more gently. “But you recognized Kelda before I did. Welkin. All the magic and the poetry, the ancient voices of this land come to life, with two feet to roam on, a harp, and a pair of hands to play it with. You heard that true voice.”

Her eyes clung to him. “You played that true voice today,” she whispered.

He smiled. “I hear it every time I listen to you. You were born with it. There are always ulterior motives in mine.” He reached out to Phelan, drew him close. “I thought I was rescuing my son. That wily harper fooled me again. I seem to have rescued myself instead.”

“My father,” the princess murmured, looking over the edge of the scaffolding, “is on his way over here. And Quennel. And my mother. And my uncle, probably wanting to know where Kelda is. And my aunt. Is there anyone who particularly wants to explain all this?”

“I don’t,” Zoe said adamantly.

“Nor me,” Phelan breathed.

“That leaves me,” Jonah said dryly. “But not just this moment ...”

“The school refectory,” Zoe suggested tiredly. “I put a stew on to simmer this morning, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry in my life. It will soon be the only quiet, empty place in this city. Come back with me, and I’ll feed everyone. Phelan, what is so funny?”

“The Inexhaustible Cauldron,” he told her, throwing an arm around her and dropping a kiss on her sweat- soaked hairline. “The final detail. I wondered when you’d get around to that.”

“I’ll drive,” the princess offered promptly, looking a question at Jonah, who nodded after a moment.

“For a little while ... Then I will need to go and find the moon, drink a cup of moonlight with her.”

“You will come back,” Phelan said abruptly. Jonah gave him a bittersweet smile.

“This time,” he promised. “And all the nights that I have left ...” He tightened the hand on his son’s shoulder. “Don’t grieve for me yet, boy ; I’ve simply returned to the land of the living. I may never get used to it, and what a wonderful change that will be. Ah—” he added, at a thought, and slid the harp from his shoulder, held it out to Phelan.

Phelan shook his head, slipped the strap back over Jonah’s shoulder, “Keep it,” he said huskily, smiling crookedly at his impossible father. “Celebrate with the moon for me. You’ve finally given me an end to my paper.”

Chapter Twenty-six

The great bardic contest held on Stirl Plain on Midsummer Day at the request of King Lucien’s bard Quennel raises far too many questions to answer here. Like the precise location of Bone Plain and the origins of the poetry it engendered, the event will keep scholars as well as students working on their final papers busy for decades, if not centuries. Why did Kelda, who by most expectations would win the contest, vanish so completely at the end of it that not even the Duke of Grishold could say what happened to him? How did Jonah Cle, who by all accounts failed spectacularly at his bardic classes as a young student, end up accompanying the next Royal Bard of Belden with such stunning skill and passion and knowledge of his art that only his absolute refusal to accept any such title and responsibility kept him from being scheduled during the third and final day of the competition? And what of all the persistent, vague, and peculiar rumors about that second day? That there was yet another bard, with “a voice like a landslide and songs coming out of his fingers that only scholars could name”? A bard without a name, who vanished as completely as Kelda did? Who was this stranger? That the mysterious crack across the stonework of the amphitheater was not caused by the sheer numbers sitting in it, but by a shout so loud it became the stuff of instant legend? And what are we to make of the complaints, not only from dubious sources but from those, like the queen herself, who would be completely unlikely to be drunk at that hour of any day, of the strange mist that flowed into the amphitheater and stayed, it seemed, for a very long time, during which the music was played by unseen musicians? The few, like Quennel, who could see through the mist, could describe the musicians playing then, from which we recognize our mystery guest. What of the rumors of standing stones appearing in odd places? And the persistent smells hinting of a wonderful feast wafting through the amphitheater so entrancing that they sent any number of people adrift through the mists, bumbling against one another, falling down steps, and stumbling headfirst into vendors’ trays? And what, one might finally wonder, as the mists cleared, was the princess doing on the top of the scaffolding?

But we can only push our way through the cloud of questions, keeping our eyes stubbornly on the business of this paper: Nairn. Who, we are prepared to prove, returned after so many centuries to the site of his dismal failure to redeem himself at last and find what he had been searching for so long, and which we will describe only as what we might wish for him, though at this point the two words may be synonymous in his mind: Peace.

To that end, I have persuaded Nairn to tell us his own story, which began so long ago in the Marches. Let it stand, as does the very earliest of our poetry, as a cautionary tale for the ambitious and the powerful, as well as a glimpse into the infinitely faceted face of the past.

He sang with her like silver,
And she sang with him like gold,
Together they sang the tower down,
And the Old One back to stone.
O the Cursed is Free and the Lost is Found,
And the Fool can play again.
He freed himself and his son from the Turning Tower,
O what shall we sing of now?

ANONYMOUS: STREET BALLAD HEARD THE MORNING AFTER ZOE WREN WAS DECLARED ROYAL BARD OF BELDEN

PHELAN CLE: “AN EXPLORATION OF THE UNFORGIVEN”