The Bards of Bone Plain (31 page)

He shrugged. “That's common, fieldstone used for chimneys, mantels.”

“It's not fieldstone. It's yellow. Like the standing stones.”

He dropped his brush. Behind her, Ida scrambled off her knees from where she was worrying at something on the floor of the dig. Curran, picking at a bump in the wall, straightened. They all came to look at it. What she had thought was bricks and mortar looked like a solid ledge indented with lines carved into the front of it.

Campion whistled. Curran brushed at the hair over his eyes, left a smudge.

“Looks like that disk I shoveled up,” he grunted, peering. “Those lines. More runes. Princess, what on earth have you found?”

“I think,” she breathed, “the Circle of Days.”

Campion cocked a brow. “The what?”

“It's an ancient runic system.” She started brushing again, violently enough that the others backed up behind her. “It was on the disk, too. Campion—”

He had his own brush working again by then, raising dust storms.

“I'll help,” Curran said abruptly, and Ida nodded vigorously, her hat sliding over her eyes. Hadrian picked up his tools, shouldered in among them.

“Master Cle will definitely love this.”

“I'm already in love with it,” Campion murmured. “Looks like the oldest thing we've ever found.”

“It looks like the oldest thing in the world,” Ida sighed rapturously, and splashed a dusty sneeze across it.

They worked carefully but energetically, impelled by the mystery revealing itself under their brushes and picks. Hours passed. One by one, they climbed up the ladder to eat their sandwiches and came back quickly, before they had quite finished chewing. They managed, with more haste than method, to bare the long face of the ledge, with the pattern of lines running from one end to the other, and had begun to brush away the packed earth beneath it. They slowed, as the familiar daily shafts of light and shadow in the hole shifted until they stood in shade, and the line of light began above the ledge.

The floor was beginning to dampen. Beatrice sighed, stepping back reluctantly.

“It doesn't look like any kind of a fireplace,” she commented, studying it. Curran moved back to join her.

“Looks more like a door, to me. That's the lintel stone we've been dusting off.”

“Is that possible?” Hadrian wondered, unkinking his thin shoulders.

“Reminds me of things I see in the countryside. One flat stone balanced on two ...”

“Can't be a door,” Campion said. “No wood there.”

“Well, there might not be, after all this time; might have rotted away.”

“A door to what?” Ida wondered.

“I'm feeling stone where a door would be,” Campion argued.

“Nobody makes a door out of stone,” Ida scoffed. “What kind of a door would that be?”

They were all silent then, gazing at one another. They bent abruptly, gathering tools, hats, paraphernalia, before the floor got any wetter.

“How early can we get back tomorrow?” Ida asked. Hadrian consulted his tide table; they scheduled a time to meet where the princess picked them up near the bridge. She dropped them there before she drove the crowded road upriver to the castle, puzzling over their find and scarcely hearing the music rising from one corner of the street and running into the next, played by musicians in every kind of antique costume.

She left the car in the chauffeur's hands and made her usual path through the back gardens toward the door nearest her chambers. The harping she heard then seemed so much a familiar part of the city those days that she only noticed it when she realized that she had stepped into a garden full of women in flowing silks and flowery hats. With an inner jolt of dismay, she remembered she had promised to be there among them two hours earlier.

Of all the faces turning to stare at the dust-plastered apparition wandering into the queen's garden party for Lady Petris, she saw her mother's first, rigid as an ice sculpture and as chilly. Her aunt Petris seemed equally frozen; only her eyelids moved, blinking rapidly above brows about to take flight. Beyond them, Kelda harped a love ballad, watching the princess gravely. Everybody else had gotten very quiet for a crowd of women carrying plates full of exquisite morsels and glasses of champagne. Only Sophy Cle, reaching for a salmon croquette at the table, missed being transfixed. She turned around, caught an eyeful of the walking disaster that was Beatrice, and smiled with pleasure, stepping immediately toward her.

But the queen got to her daughter first.

“I am so sorry,” Beatrice said softly.

“Go and change, please.”

“I forgot. We found something—something very old, I think, and wonderful—”

“Bea,” Charlotte interrupted. “You look as though you've been buried alive. Marcus, stop patting the dust clouds from Bea's boots; they're unspeakable.”

“We found—” the princess tried again, desperately. “Well, we hardly know what it is, but Father will be so intrigued, and Master Cle—”

The queen closed glacial blue eyes, opened them again. “Please.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“We'll talk when you are presentable.”

She sounded dubious. The princess made her escape, found her lady-in-waiting patiently waiting, and was delivered in short order out of her clothes and into a bath, where the patina of centuries rained gently from her hair to float upon the water.

Neatly coiffed and disguised from collarbone to shin in flowers, she went back to the garden party, hoping that her mother would mistake this aspect of her for the good and dutiful Beatrice and forget she ever saw the other one. Suddenly ravenous, she lingered at the table, filling a plate with the odd bits still remaining of smoked trout, marinated vegetables in aspic, little pastries shaped like the suits of playing cards and filled with a bright concoction of sweet red peppers and hearts of palm. She could hear her mother's voice as she ate, reassuringly at a distance. Her brother's betrothed drifted up to talk to Beatrice about wedding-candle colors, so Beatrice could let her own thoughts flow underground again to puzzle at the mystery, while suitable noises came now and then out of her mouth.

“Beatrice,” Charlotte interrupted, descending out of nowhere, it seemed, onto the tool-strewn floor of the dig with a jam-faced child in her arms. “Our mother and I have come up with the most perfect solution. Idea, I mean. You must come and spend the summer in the country with me and Great Marcus and Small Marcus and Tiny Thomasina.” Beatrice, appalled, inhaled a crumb; while she coughed, Charlotte tumbled on, a glint in her eye alarmingly like their mother's. “Just think a moment about it. Small Marcus adores you, and it would get you out of a city swarming with ragtag musicians from every corner of Belden—”

“But—”

“But what about Damon's wedding, you mean? We'll all come back for that, of course. And I do so want you to meet one of our neighbors, so charming, connected to a distant branch of Peverell cousins, with a stableful of horses and running what he calls his hobby farm.”

“I can't just—”

“Of course you can. We'd love to have you, wouldn't we, Marcus? Marcus. Where did that child run off to? Oh, Marcus, leave the bee alone!”

Marcus, poking at a rose on a bush nearby, opened his mouth suddenly, so hugely that he seemed about to devour the flower. Then came the wail, like a steam tram trying to break for a drunken sailor. Charlotte darted off to rescue him. Beatrice, watching, mute and horrified, absently crammed an entire diamond pastry into her mouth.

“Princess Beatrice.”

She turned, chewing hastily and trying to smile at the same time. It was Sophy, she found to her relief, who chattered amiably about the lilies blooming in the fish pool, until Beatrice could swallow her bite.

“Of course, I really came over to ask you what you unearthed—besides yourself, I mean. You looked positively extraordinary, earlier, like a walking artifact. Your mantelpiece at last?”

Beatrice nodded, grateful for the chance to talk about it. “Yes,” she said, and lowered her voice so that her mother wouldn't hear. “Only it's covered with runes, and we're thinking it's not part of a fireplace at all.”

“Oh, how marvelous. Does Jonah know?”

“We haven't seen him yet. Please, tell him when you do. We're all so excited, and dying to know what it is.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother on the move, looking purposeful, still chatting as she pulled Lady Petris and an entourage in her wake, a bouquet of hats, it looked like, on colorful, slowly swaying stalks. On the other side of her, Charlotte had pacified Marcus with another jam tart and was leading him to Beatrice's side.

“It sounds quite mystifying and exciting,” Sophy said, seemingly oblivious to the gathering forces. “Along with something else I learned today. I wasn't sure he would actually do it, he's seemed so distracted lately with his paper—which is finally coming into being and so brilliant, I think—but he is, and I couldn't be more pleased.”

“About what, Sophy?” the queen asked curiously, she and her bevy reaching them at the same moment that Beatrice felt Marcus sit on her feet to eat his tart.

“Phelan,” Sophy said happily.

“What?” Charlotte demanded. “Is he engaged, too?”

“No, I don't think so. At least, I haven't heard. He is going to enter the bardic competition, compete for Quennel's place. I'm so thoroughly proud of him. Of course, you must stop your digging, Princess, long enough to listen to him play. I'm sure Jonah will understand even though he'll be so impatient for you to continue work on such an important find.” She turned her candid gaze to the queen. “Of course, the king will be impatient as well, when he hears, Lady Harriet, don't you think? Our children are accomplishing such amazing things.”

The queen looked slightly dazed for a moment. Charlotte said blankly, “Well. Beatrice can't, of course, do any of that. She's coming to spend summer in the country with us.”

Sophy found nothing to say to that, only smiled pleasantly, rather bemusedly, into the sudden silence. Beatrice, eyeing the table helplessly, felt something already in her mouth, growing and clamoring for exit, like an irritated wasp.

She let it out finally. “No.” She swallowed under Charlotte's stare, and said it again. “No. Thank you, Charlotte. I will be extremely busy this summer here in the city. And I would so very much appreciate it if you would stop Marcus from trying to stuff his tart into my shoe.”

“Marcus!” Charlotte cried, glancing down without interest. “Stop that. But, Beatrice. We're already expecting you.”

Beatrice slid off her heel, bent, and shook the crumbs out of it. Before she straightened, she realized what had put the edge in her voice, and that it had little to do with a hoary stone covered with incomprehensible words.

Her mother wanted her to go.

Phelan's mother wanted her to stay.

“We'll discuss this later,” the queen said calmly, and with that the fascinated faces around them had to be satisfied.

The queen signaled an end to the harping soon after; Kelda packed up his instrument and slipped away. The guests began taking their leave of her and Lady Petris. Beatrice drifted with them unobtrusively back into the house, then angled down a quieter hallway toward her father's collection, where she could consult with Master Burley about the new find and hide from her mother for a while until the queen got distracted by more interesting matters than her dusty daughter.

A black back vanishing into a wall in an empty guest chamber caught her eye. A door in the wainscoting clicked shut and became invisible. She stopped, blinking. She knew that secret door: she had discovered it when she was a child exploring the ancient castle. It had been there for centuries and last used, according to chronicles shown to her by Master Burley, by King Severin to visit his mistress late at night when his queen, in her bed-cap, put down her book and her sherry glass and began to snore.

It wasn't the ghost of Severin Peverell blurring into the walls. He didn't have that black, glossy, engagingly disheveled hair, nor could he have played a note on the harp hanging from the broad, black-clad shoulder.

It was Kelda, sneaking around in her father's house. Kelda, who knew the language of the Circle of Days and had loosed its power at Phelan. Beatrice stepped out of her heels, picked them up, and stuffed them under the pillows on the bed as she passed it. She pressed the wainscoting until a panel gave under her hand, and the narrow door opened. Ahead, in the dark, she could see the light Kelda had kindled and carried on his palm as easily as a stolen jewel.

She followed him.

He had led her, she guessed from the cessation of random, distant noises on the other side of the walls, and the change under her stockinged feet from floorboards to flagstones and then to dirt, beyond the castle and underneath the main courtyard, when she lost him. The glow in his palm vanished, left her stranded in the dark, abruptly motionless, and breathing as quietly as possible. She strained her ears, listening for a shift of earth, a soft footfall too close to her. Her skin prickled, anticipating the harper's touch out of the blackness.

Nothing happened. Kelda had just gone his way without her. Perhaps he had sensed someone following. Maybe he had simply turned down a side path, an old sewage channel connected to a different part of the castle. They all merged into a main passage that went to the river, she knew. She could find her way back, if she didn't go wandering off perpetually down side paths. Her mouth crooked at a thought: what the queen would say if she caught her shoeless daughter coming back through the wrong door in the castle with filthy stockings and cobwebs in her hair.