The Bards of Bone Plain (6 page)

“But this is merely a trifle, I'm sure. You probably have dozens of them.”

Beatrice slid the stained copper disk off the chain, put it into Jonah's hand. The runes were up; he studied them silently a moment, then turned it over to reveal the hooded face.

Beatrice saw his eyes widen. Then his fingers closed abruptly over the disk; he threw back his head and laughed, an open and genuine amusement that caused heads to turn, Phelan's startled face among them.

He opened his hand again, offered the disk to the king. “Take it, with all my good wishes. Happy birthday, Your Majesty.”

“But what is it?” he demanded.

“What does it say?” Beatrice pleaded.

Jonah was silent again, weighing words along with the disk on his palm. Then he gave up, flipped the disk lightly in the air, caught it, and held it out again to the king. “You both enjoy a challenge. The weave is there, the thread is there. Find and follow.”

“But—” Beatrice and her father said at once. But the queen was suddenly among them, drawing the king's attention to the Master of Ceremonies at her side.

“Your Majesty,” he said softly. “The guest bard from the school is about to sing. Then Prince Harold will make his toast to you, and you will speak after. Then the Royal Bard will sing his birthday composition to you, after which they will cut the cake.”

“We all must gather near the table,” the queen said.

“Yes, my dear.” The king took the disk, dropped it resignedly into his pocket, and held out his arm to her.

“Come along, Beatrice.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I need a drink,” she heard Jonah mutter, as she turned to follow in the royal wake, then, in the musician's gallery, the guest from the school stroked her harp and loosed her voice like some rich, wild, haunting echo out of the singing bones of the plain in a ballad about the Peverell kings that was as old as Belden.

The Battle of the Welde lasted three days. By the time it started, Nairn, who had beaten a marching rhythm for Anstan's army through the western mountains of the Marches, and summoned the clans with his bladder-pipe, then drummed the army east and south to meet the invader, had calluses on his calluses. He had never traveled so quickly or played so hard in his life. The Welde, a broad, lovely river valley along the border between the Marches and Stirl Plain, had laid down a soft carpet of creamy yellow wildflowers. So Nairn saw it at the beginning of the battle, when he blew the long, coiled, battered cornu someone had handed him and told him to sound. By the end of the battle, there were a few flowers left untrampled and about as many of Anstan's warriors. King Oroh sent his bard, Declan, across the field to meet the king's emissary and demand that Anstan surrender his kingdom.

Anstan, furious and heartsick, answered with what he, not being particularly musical, considered a last, futile gesture of contempt. He sent his bedraggled drummer on foot across the ravaged, bloody field where nothing moved, nothing spoke except the flies and the flocks of crows, to meet with Oroh's bard.

Declan rode a white horse. He was dressed in dark, rich leather and silk; he carried his harp on his shoulder. As always, he was unarmed. He reined in his mount at the center of the field between the two royal camps and waited for the young, grimy minstrel in his bloodstained robe and sandals with one sole tied to his foot with rope where the laces had rotted during the long march. He still carried the cornu over his shoulder, the last instrument he had played to call retreat.

Nairn stopped in front of the bard; they looked at one another silently.

“You asked,” Declan said finally, “what I am.”

The taut mouth in the stained white mask of a face moved finally, let loose a few words. “Yes. I asked.” He was silent again, his bleak, crow eyes moving over Declan, narrowing as memory broke through, a moment of wonder instead of bitterness. “You're Oroh's spy,” he said tersely. “And his bard. But what else? I didn't sing those jewels out of your harp. You gave them to me.”

The strange eyes glinted at him suddenly, catching light like metal. “You took them,” Declan said, and raised his eyes to ask of the sky, “Is this entire land ignorant of its own magic?”

“What?”

Declan tossed a hand skyward, relinquishing a comment. “I'll answer that when you've learned to understand the question.”

“You'll forgive me if this is the last I ever want to see of your face.”

“You may not be given the choice.” Nairn, staring at him, drew breath to protest; the bard didn't yield him that choice, either. “Since you brought the matter up, we should deal with it. King Oroh will accept Anstan's sword and crown and his pledge of fealty at dawn tomorrow.”

“Dawn,” Nairn interrupted recklessly. “What makes you think King Anstan will still be around?”

“Because I will be watching,” Declan answered softly, and Nairn, staring again, felt the short hairs prickle at his neck. “In return for Anstan's pledge, he may keep one holding in the Marches for his family. As to other matters, the size of his retinue, tributes to King Oroh, such things will be left to the king's counselors. For tomorrow, the king will be content with the sight of an unarmed, uncrowned man with one knee in the dirt in front of him. That is the price of peace.”

“I can't tell King Anstan that,” Nairn said flatly. “He'd kill me.”

“He should honor you.”

“For what? Blaring a retreat out of this poor dented wheel of a horn?”

“He should honor you,” Declan repeated, “for all that you should have been able to do for him.”

“What—”

Again, the bard's hand rose, inviting Nairn's attention to the disaster around them.

“Who do you think you fought?” There was an odd note of exasperation in the fine, calm voice. “This entire field is ringed with King Oroh's army. Most of them just stood and watched you flail at one another in the mist.”

Nairn felt his heart close like a fist, the blood vanish out of his face. The bard turned his horse, but not before Nairn glimpsed his weary revulsion.

“King Oroh's tent,” he reminded Nairn without looking back. “At dawn.”

“You're a bard,” Nairn pleaded to the retreating figure. “Put some poetry in the message, or I'll be out among the dead at dawn, with the crows picking at my eyes.”

Declan glanced around at that, his expression composed again. “I've heard what you can do. Find your own poetry in that.”

Stumbling back across the darkening battlefield, ignoring the black clouds of crows scattering up around him as he passed, Nairn managed to fashion King Oroh's demand into words more akin to a preference. Anstan, slumped on a chair in his tent, surrounded by his generals, listened wordlessly to Nairn's message. He gave an inarticulate growl, seized his crown with both hands, and flung it out the tent door. Then he followed it, stopping at the threshold long enough to say,

“All of you. Here with me before sunrise.”

He went out to mourn under the moon. So did Nairn, in an opposite direction, carrying his harp, which he hadn't played in weeks. Whether the grieving king heard the sweet, melancholy harping, or he played only to the moonstruck faces of the dead, Nairn didn't bother to wonder. He only hoped that the tin-eared king wouldn't mistake him for Declan and send a knife after him in the dark.

But Anstan surprised him in the predawn hour, when Nairn made his way into the king's tent.

“Bring your harp,” Anstan said tersely. “You honored the dead of the Marches last night.” He flicked a glance over the unkempt bard and gestured to a servant. “Find him something decent to put on. And wash your face. You look half-dead yourself. There must be some reason,” Nairn heard him grumble to his generals, “that barbarian gives his bard such status. Not that I can see it. We can at least pretend we have what he has.”

Later, kneeling beside Anstan in the mist-soaked mud churned up by constant comings and goings outside the new king's tent, Nairn watched an earthworm undulate between two clods of dirt and felt that even it had more status than he. Anstan's crown and sword appeared in a corner of his vision, laid as low as they could get, on the mud at Oroh's feet. It was then that he opened his clenched fist, let the jewels fall out of it to smolder like embers in the muck.

“What's this?” Oroh demanded. He was a tall, brawny man with tangled red hair and a deep, rumbling voice. A line of toggles made of boar tusks kept his loose tunic closed over his shirt and the flaps of his boots fastened. His crown was a jagged circle of golden tusks. He picked his words with less certainty than Declan did; Nairn heard the same unfamiliar lilt to his phrases.

“Jewels from your bard's harp,” Nairn said, too dispirited for courtesy. What king would expect good manners from a worm? “I took them from him.”

There was a moment's utter silence on the field. Not even a crow commented.

Then Oroh hunkered down in front of the young bard, to his astonishment. “Look at me,” the king said. “Give me my title.”

Nairn raised his head. The king's eyes were the color of hazelnuts; they held Nairn's for a long time, studying him, until Nairn heard himself say, “Yes, my lord.”

Oroh turned his head finally, shifted that piercing, unblinking gaze to Declan. “How did he take them?”

“They came to him, my lord.”

“Indeed,” the king breathed, and straightened. “You are fortunate in your bard, sir.”

“Yes,” Anstan agreed blankly, and added with bitter precision, “my lord.”

“Perhaps too fortunate. He's a weapon, and I will add him to the salvage of battle. Rise.”

“He's only a marching bard,” Anstan protested bewilderedly as he got to his feet.

“Well, you won't need him now.” Oroh turned, gesturing them to follow him into the tent. “Where I am from, bards are valued highly, and you will receive compensation for this one. He may go back now for his other instruments and possessions.” He nodded to a pair of guards, then raised a brow at Declan, asking a silent question.

“They'll do, my lord,” Declan said briefly. “His ignorance is abysmal.”

“Ah? His misfortune is now our fortune.” He turned his curious gaze from Nairn to the guards. “Go with him.”

They took him back across the field. While they walked, Nairn watched warriors searching for the wounded startle sudden, whirling black clouds of crow into the air. Nairn's own thoughts whirled as darkly. He had failed, in Declan's eyes, at some portentous task that might have turned the tide of yesterday's battle. How, exactly, he could not imagine. Because Nairn had failed so miserably at that, Declan expected nothing more than failure from him. Singing the jewels out of the harp had been an aberration: an impulse of deep, impossible desire in which there was no hope, only longing. He felt very much like that again: filled with desire without a gnat's worth of hope to get himself as far from that sad, smeared disaster and as far from Declan's eerie eyes as he could get.

If he could crawl like a snake through the dead, if he could fly among the crows ...

Lacking any better ideas, he left the guards rummaging through Anstan's possessions and walked into the back partition of the tent, where he had left his things scattered among the useless paraphernalia of war. Neither the marching drum nor the battered cornu would fit into his pack, so he left them there reluctantly. He slit a seam along the floor of the tent with one of the generals' swords, slid himself, his harp and pack and a pair of somebody's boots out the back of the tent. He made his way quickly among the morning campfires of the remnants of Anstan's army. The glum warriors watched him leave, raised a cup or two for luck. Then Nairn imitated the earthworm, slithering on his belly among the unburied dead, and made his way with more haste than caution to the thick trees along the river.