The Bards of Bone Plain (19 page)

The stranger came at the forefront of the flow of musicians on the plain, so soon after Declan had sent out word of the competition that it seemed only the trees and stones of Stirl Plain could have gotten the word any earlier. Sometime afterwards, Nairn realized that was exactly so; earlier, he was simply surprised at the efficiency of Declan's methods. The bard spoke; the harper appeared almost before the moon had decided to change the expression on her face.

The students of the Circle of Days had grown oddly closer since Drue's death. With all their spiky differences and sharp opinions, they were bound not only by an ancient, secret language, but by a vision of the breathtaking randomness of life: not even they, possessing the oldest name for death, could see it coming. Sometime during the ebb of the endless winter, they had begun to meet, in the evening once or twice a week, at the tavern Shea's father the brewer had built on the other side of the river. They drank his ale, drew runes with burned twigs on his rackety tables and in the ashes sifting out of the grate, and challenged one another obliquely, in one language, to answer with the patterns of another.

Nairn, still struggling with the power and deadly potential of the ancient words, played their tavern games cautiously and ventured few opinions about what value Master Declan's list of words might have when the students finally learned them all. They had no clue, Nairn learned with wonder. The thought that he had flung his heart into a burning icicle and sent it plunging down onto Drue's oblivious head would never have crossed their minds.

“Do you think they would have believed you if you had blamed yourself?” Declan asked succinctly when Nairn had come to explain to him how Drue died. “You're the crofter's son who sang his first songs to the pigs in the sty, and who can barely write his own name. You couldn't claim such power without having to prove it, and how would you do that with all the fear that festers in you now? Drue's death was an accident. Let it lie.”

“And lie and lie,” Nairn retorted bitterly, white with horror and pacing circles around the bard in his work chamber. The golden eyes flashed at him, but Declan stayed silent. “And you're right. I am afraid, now. I don't know enough to know how to be careful. It was like killing someone with a love song you were playing to someone else entirely. Death was the last thing on my mind. Then it was all.”

“Accept it. It happened. Learn from it so that it never happens again.”

“I could just stop. Just. Stop. I don't need magic. Only my harp and the road—”

“You have gone too far, learned too much, to return to innocence,” Declan said evenly. “Better to learn to control your great power than to carry such potential for disaster around with you and always be afraid of it.” Nairn opened his mouth; the bard, reading his expression or his mind, interrupted. “Think,” he urged. “You can live in ignorance and uncertainty, or with the knowledge and the certainty that you will never kill again without intent. Either way, you must live with the power. With yourself. Think. Then tell me what you want.”

The bard was right, Nairn realized as days passed. About that, and about the other thing: his fellow students of the Circle of Days would have fallen out of their chairs laughing over Nairn's pretensions and arrogance if he had tried to claim Drue's death.

None of them, not even Nairn, noticed the stranger in the tavern when he first appeared. Nairn's eyes wandered toward a dark mass at a table in the shadows that was farthest from the fire. Something about it, or within it, made his glance glide over it as though it were a bench or a floorboard, a thing too familiar to bother naming. They were all nearing the bottom of their first beers, and wildly guessing, since Shea's father was back in the brewery and they seemed the only company, what mysteries lay hidden within the twig-words, when out of nowhere came the unmistakable sound of a harp being tuned.

They all jumped. Osprey knocked over the last of his beer. The man in the shadows, his craggy face oddly visible now above the harp in his broad, blunt hands, spoke first as they stared.

“You're students of his, then? Master Declan? The one who called the competition?”

Shea swallowed audibly, then cleared her throat of any remnants of twig language. “Yes,” she said, and, unwontedly flustered, she got to her feet and barked for her father. “Da! Company!”

“Coming!” her father bellowed back briskly.

“You got here fast,” Osprey remarked, righting his mug.

“I was passing across the plain.” His voice was deep and gravelly, a sough of stones dragged in the undertow. “Am I first, then?”

“But for us,” Blayse answered pointedly, and a smile, or a sudden flare of light from the fire, glided over the man's face.

“But for you. You were here first.” He thumbed a string, then raised his brows uncertainly. “I doubt you'll want to spare a coin for my harping, being bards yourselves, then. But I'm all out, and as dry as any stone.”

“Play if you want,” Shea answered, shrugging. “Others might come in and think you're worth—”

“Play,” Nairn said abruptly, interrupting her. “I'll buy you a beer.”

“Me, too,” the genial Osprey echoed, and the man's smile was more than illusion, this time.

“That's good of you,” he murmured.

His fingers seemed a trifle stiff on the strings, as though he had not played in some time. But his notes were sweet and true. Nairn, listening intently as was his habit, heard the familiar phrase now and then, but always it wandered off in an unexpected direction. Wherever he had learned his music, it was not in the Marches, nor in any kingdom Nairn had passed through, including Stirl Plain. It sounded old to him: simple and lovely and haunted with ghosts of music he knew.

“Where are you from?” he asked, when the brewer had brought the harper his beer. He waited while the man drank half of it. Somewhere past young, he looked, hale and brawny as a blacksmith; his leather boots and trousers were old and stained with travel. His dark hair and the stubble on his chin were streaked with white. His harp seemed worn as well, plain and scarred with time, like the harper. He had strange eyes, both blue, but one pale and one dark, as though he saw out of one by day and the other by twilight. Both held the same narrowed, curious expression; both seemed always on the verge of smiling.

The man set his tankard down finally. “Upriver.”

“Upriver. The Stirl?”

He nodded. “At the northernmost edge of the plain. My name is Welkin.”

“You walked a ways. I don't suppose you're hungry as well?”

The man, riffling over the harp strings, stilled his fingers and gave Nairn an unfathomable look. “Depends,” he said finally, doubtfully. “How do you like my harping?”

Nairn smiled. “Very much. You play songs I've never heard.”

“Ah, it's all old. You're a kind young man.”

“I've done my share of walking. I know how the road goes.” He glanced at Shea, who huffed an exasperated sigh and got to her feet.

“Da! Food!”

“Coming!”

She threw her cloak around her, added tersely to Nairn, “I'm going back up, now we're finished talking. Coming?” she demanded of Blayse, and he shifted reluctantly, finished his beer on the way up. “Well, I'm not walking up in the dark by myself. Not after what happened to Drue.”

“I'll stay to walk with you,” Osprey said gravely to Nairn. “Fend off the slavering icicles.”

“It's not funny,” Shea snapped, and flounced out with Blayse in her wake. “Da! Night!”

“Good night, girl!”

Nairn and Osprey stayed to drink beer and listen, after Welkin emptied another tankard and a bowl of root vegetables and mutton stewed in beer. When Osprey laid his face on the table and began to snore, Nairn woke him with a scatter of moldy coins from the Marches and stood up. The brewer, a big, beefy man with florid cheeks, heard the sound of money through the music and appeared to bid them farewell. Welkin finished his song and moved to warm himself before he, too, wandered out into the night.

“Where will you stay?” Nairn asked him.

“I'll find a place,” the harper answered vaguely. “That's never a problem.” He set his harp on the table, opened his hands to the fire.

“You might find a bed at the school.”

“Maybe. One of these nights.”

Nairn wrapped himself against the brittle cold, taking a closer look at Welkin's harp. The scores on it were deliberate, he saw, made with a knife. Then the lines arranged themselves into some very familiar patterns, and his thoughts froze.

The harper took one hand away from the warmth, as though he had heard the sound of Nairn's brain stumbling over itself, and reached back to pick up his harp. “I'm grateful for the beer and food,” he said. Nairn shifted his eyes to follow the path of the harp, saw it disappear into its matted sheepskin case. He met the harper's eyes then; the faint, enigmatic smile had deepened. “Good night to you, young masters.”

“Stay,” the brewer said abruptly. “Sleep by the fire there. It's brutal out tonight.”

The harper shook his head. “I'll find my own way, but thank you, master brewer.”

He opened the door. Osprey, yawning hugely, followed. Nairn bumped into him as the door closed; he was stopped dead and peering bewilderedly here and there at the tangled moon shadows of tree limbs.

“He just vanished, the harper did. Just—” His teeth had already begun to chatter.

“Never mind,” Nairn said, pulling him into motion again. “You heard him.”

“But—”

“He can take care of himself.”

 

 

 

By the time Nairn saw the harper again, the cruel winter had finally melted away into spring. Grass flowed over the plain again, green to the farthest horizons; its gentle hillocks melted into vivid blue. The Stirl melted and surged, bringing musicians, workers and wood for building, farm animals to feed the visitors. The plain buried its stillness deep in the earth; what went on above it was now a constant clatter of hammering, wagons coming and going, people camping on it, keeping a wild, colorful motley of music going that reminded Nairn of a barnyard before breakfast. Rich pavilions went up next to small tents that had mushroomed into circles on the grass overnight. Stalls selling anything imaginable rose on their ramshackle frames; fires burned from dawn to midnight as food was cooked and sold to the arriving bards. The village, so sparse and coldly gray during the winter, became, half a season later, unrecognizable, buildings flying up like magic, some for the few months before the competition, others to last past a lifetime.

Nairn searched constantly among the strangers for the mysterious harper who knew the language of the standing stones and had carved it onto his harp. What the harp said, he didn't know; the twig-letters, vanishing so swiftly into the harp case, were a complete jumble in his head.

What Declan said when Nairn told him about the harper, he remembered very clearly, once the bard had finally retrieved his voice.

“Find him,” he said sharply. “Bring him to me.” He was silent again, pacing a circle around his chamber in the spiraling tower. Then he added tersely, “It's one thing to take on the magic of another land that everyone there has forgotten. It's another to meet the one who has not forgotten. Be careful.”

Nairn wondered at that: the eccentric harper seemed harmless and reasonably civilized. He kept looking for Welkin, enormously curious about this man who had discomposed the imperturbable Declan, and who could hide himself in wood smoke and shadows, and leave no footprints in the snow. But not even the brewer, whose tavern swarmed with musicians by the beginning of summer, had seen him after that winter evening.

The noise had driven the harper away, Nairn decided. Or maybe his competition had. Bards were coming from courts all over the realm, playing music far more intricate than Welkin's on instruments adorned with a filigree of gold rather than a fretwork of scars from a knife. When the bell beside the main door sounded one morning as Nairn passed, he pulled the door open absently, expecting yet another musician, newly arrived on the plain and anticipating Declan's immediate interest and attention.

“I heard Declan wants to see me,” the musician said, and the sound of the deep, rumbling, rough-hewn voice left Nairn speechless. He reached out, grasped Welkin's brawny arm, and drew him across the threshold before he could vanish again.

“Yes,” he said, guiding the harper through the empty hall to a side entry to the tower that bypassed the kitchen where, from the sound of the clanging and splashes below, Muire was scouring pots in the cauldron. “He does. I've been looking for you for months. Did you leave the plain?”

“After a fashion,” Welkin agreed, and added, to make himself entirely clear, “I'm back now.”

“ ‘After a fashion,' ” Nairn breathed. “What fashion?” He didn't expect an answer. Welkin, climbing up the winding steps, only glanced out the slitted windows without offering him one.

“Strange place for a tower,” he commented. “What was it for, when it was built?”

“A signal tower, I suppose. A watchtower. I don't know. No one does. It's older than anyone's memory, around here. How did you know that Declan wants to see you?”

Welkin shrugged. “Word travels, in a crowd like this.”

Nairn gave up. “It took long enough,” he said dryly, wondering in what language that particular word had traveled. He rounded a curve, found the door open and Declan waiting for them: word had, in whatever fashion, preceded them up the stairs.