Where Light Meets Shadow (5 page)

Kieran put hands to strings once
more. Alban recognized the simple mortal tune running over and under the
ornamentation, giving it a certain liveliness unusual to elven music, but the
presentation, the ornamentation, made it as complicated and as devastatingly
emotional a song as
The Gold on the Water
.

“That’s brilliant! How long did
it take you to do that?”

“That? Oh, I did that just now
for demonstration. Though it might be worth remembering and doing something
more with.”

The Scathlan’s casual response
stunned him. The thought that what he had just heard might disappear forever
like the light of a particular summer’s day pained him. “Absolutely, you must
remember it!”

“You like it that well?”

“I do. I can’t fathom how you can
just call up music like that. It is quite beyond my imagination.”

“As your gift for healing is to
me.”

“My father is the one who set
your ankle.”

“Yet you eased the pain at cost
to yourself.”

“Just a temporary wearying. No
cost at all in light of the pain it saved you.”

“Yet—and you must appreciate how
hard it is for me to say this to a Leas—I am grateful for it. And in your
debt.”

“My people do not think kindness
necessitates payment.”

“And my people do not believe in
leaving a debt unpaid.”

“Play for me then. A trade of
skills.
After
you have finished eating.”

The dream came again that night
to Kieran, the one he thought he’d escaped when he left his homelands.

Trapped in a small, dark prison,
unable to move and too cold to feel, an endless wail pierced his soul and
echoed in his skull until he thought he would never hear anything else again.

He woke abruptly, bolting upright
in the bed, sweating despite the coolness of the night. The fire Alban had
built up for him in the hearth had burned down to coals, and the bedposts cast
shadows like spears, darker shadows against the dimly lit walls. His pulse
pounded loud in his ears.

He had not had the dream so
vividly since he’d left home. The cessation might have been because of his
distance from his dreaming queen, but he hoped that the peace had come because
he was seeking some way to help his people. Maybe somehow, on some level, the
queen knew of his efforts. Maybe they comforted her.

Ever since the queen fell into
her long sleep, her dreams had shadowed her people’s sleep. Most Scathlan felt
only minor effects—the occasional morning where they woke up vaguely melancholy
from a dream they could not quite remember. For the more sensitive, the ones
with some bardic talent, the dreams came dark, vivid, and often. The dreams
drove some mad. Kieran’s teacher had leaped to his death from a high cliff.

The dreams left Kieran sane,
thank the Grace, but aching with sorrow for his poor, broken queen.

He was still awake when the sun
rose that morning, awake and longing for home.

He missed his homeland—“dark” the
Leas named it because the Scathlan lived primarily underground. But it was a
place of light, torches reflecting off the crystalline flow of cavern walls
and, wherever the walls were plain rock, bright murals showed the halcyon days
of his people. In the very oldest of those caverns, murals from long before the
division of their people showed dark-haired and pale-haired elves hunting and
feasting and even dancing together.

Some of the Scathlan, the queen’s
chief councilor among them, wanted the older murals destroyed out of respect
for their betrayed queen. As a bard and a keeper of history, Kieran sided with
those who wanted the murals preserved for their age and their beauty, despite
the reminder of the Leas who populated his nightmares. His voice carried little
weight, but Brona’s did.  At his impassioned pleading, she spoke up to
save the murals, and the people rallied around their poor, brave princess to
save the murals that she said reminded her of happier times.

He reached for his harp and
cradled it in his arms, caressing the strings until his fingers found a tune
that recalled all the beauty of dancing torchlight and the glittering walls
that harkened to days of laughter and dancing, a tune that segued, as it often
did, into one he wrote in honor of his queen. Not the cold living statue she
was now, but the mother Brona remembered.

Brona went daily to see her
mother, and sometimes she begged him to go with her, saying she could not bear
it alone. And so he would wait awkwardly in the shadows while Brona stood
before the silent, unseeing queen in the echoing, empty throne room.

Sometimes she would talk about
her day as though the queen listened intently and would offer commentary at any
moment. Brona always kept the narration light and happy. Sometimes she would
reminisce about how her mother sang her to sleep when she was sick, about the
times she had brought her mother bouquets of dandelions and her mother had
gushed over them and put them in the finest enameled vase she’d possessed.

Painful as the memory of Brona’s
false cheer was, he would give all to be back there now. To be healthy, to be
home.

He set the harp aside. He was
tired from his night of poor sleep. And he was in pain and very sick of staring
at the same four walls.

Alban soon arrived, and his
cheerful healer’s civility grated his nerves like a farrier’s rasp.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”
Alban continued when his initial greeting was unenthusiastically returned.

Kieran turned his head to stare
out the window, where a few fluffy clouds drifted in a bright blue sky. “I
suppose.”

The room was high up in the tower
of the Leas castle. According to Alban, their rooms were the only ones on this
floor. Alban’s because he chose it for the view and Kieran’s because he was
Alban’s special project. His latest stray. Not that Alban was discourteous
enough to phrase it that way.

Alban sat on the chair by the
bed. “Will you play the harp for me?”

“If you wish it.” He made the
civil response into a bitter snarl.

Kieran was being childish, and he
knew it, but the knowledge only made his mood fouler.

“Would you rather do something
else today? We could play a game of—”

“I would rather be on my horse,
on my way to the next village, to learn songs and tales I’ve never heard and
play music they’ve never dreamed of. Barring that, I want to be left alone.”

“You act as though your
confinement here is some nefarious Leas plot. As though it wasn’t your own
blind stupidity that ended you up with a broken ankle.”

So Alban still had a temper.
Good. But Alban’s comment was accurate and in line with how Kieran had been
berating himself before Alban arrived to take the brunt of his anger.

“Yes. I know.” Kieran ground out.
“I am stuck here, more useless than usual, and it’s all my fault. Thank you for
reminding me.”

Alban sighed. “You mentioned new
songs and new tales. We do have a library, you know.”

“How nice for you.”

“I think it’s time you learned to
manage steps with your crutches anyway.”

“Because I have so many places to
go and people to see.”

“The library is just down one
flight of stairs. Well, and then along a rather long hall. Come on, get up. I
think the change will do you good.”

About halfway down the stairs,
and cursing every step, Kieran realized that he and Alban were not so different
after all. He was learning to use his crutches—well, to use them better—with a
bribe of books.

He chuckled softly to himself.

Alban looked at him curiously. “I
see your bad mood has broken, at least.”

“Sorry,” Kieran said. “I know
I’ve been beastly to deal with this morning.”

“I am usually not in the best
temper, either, if I am confined to my bed with injury,” Alban said. “I’d
rather be hawking or hunting if the weather is good, or by the fire in the
library if the weather is poor. How is your ankle? This is the most you’ve been
up and about since you came here. I know moving about can make the pain worse.”

“It hurts,” Kieran admitted. “But
I think you were right. I needed to be outside of the same four walls. I feel
better now.”

The Leas library was impressive.
Books and scrolls from floor to ceiling along three walls, broken only by a
cavernous fireplace on one wall and a tall window on another that looked out
over a forested valley. The fireplace, Kieran noted, had a generous space of
stone around it to keep a stray spark from the precious volumes. Free-standing
shelves with yet more books divided the room into separate private reading
areas. It smelled wonderfully of old books.

“Look up,” Alban whispered.

The ceiling was painted to look
like a summer sky as seen through a forest canopy. Something in the style
reminded him of the faded murals in the old section of the Scathlan caverns.

Alban got him settled in a chair
and dragged a second chair over for Kieran to put his foot on. Which he did
with gratitude, as his ankle had begun to throb. Alban brought over a selection
of books, Leas myths and legends, plus a collection some scholar had made of
mortal tales.

He set one book with a tired
leather cover on top of the stack, its embossing so worn as to be illegible.
“See if you can make any sense of that. It predates the divide of our kindreds.
The author talks of the convergence of healing magic and bardic magic. My
father and I have pored over it again and again, but it refers to other books
that, so far as anyone knows, no longer exist.”

Kieran looked at the stack, then
back up to Alban.

“The others are to amuse you when
you get too frustrated. Who knows, you might find some material to use.”

With that, Alban selected a book
for himself and, though the weather was perfect for hawking or hunting, settled
down to read far enough away not to be hovering over Kieran’s shoulder but near
enough to be available should Kieran need him.

It had become more and more
difficult to hate, or even dislike, this particular Leas, and Kieran wearied of
trying.

He ran a hand over the cover of
the book on top of the stack, then laid it on the table and opened it. Part of
him rebelled at taking direction from one of the Leas, especially to do
something they might find useful. Yet the faint underlying challenge beckoned.
He needn’t share anything with them that he didn’t want to.

Within a few pages, excitement
rose in his chest, tingling warmth like those times Kieran knew he was right on
the verge of a composition that would be one of the best ever. For years he’d
suspected that the old tales of bards that healed people near death and made
the lame walk again were not just myths of long-ago, like tales of dragons and
giants. Though for that matter he’d seen old, old bones of some huge creature
embedded in the stone of a
cliffside
, and so he
wasn’t quite sure about dragons.

When he’d left on his quest to
make some difference to his ailing queen and despondent people, even the
kindest had laughed behind his back. The less kind had derided him to his face.
Even he had doubted; Kieran could scarcely live up to his father’s memory, let
alone match one of the healer-bards of legend. Perhaps if his brother had lived
long enough to be born, he might have been a bard to meet and even surpass
their father’s skill. Instead, he was the only one left to shoulder the legacy.

He had been so very angry when
his parents told him he was to have a sibling. In his childish
self-centeredness, he didn’t want to share his mother, didn’t see why they
needed another child when they had him. In later years, he’d imagined the
brother he never knew, a friend and confidant and, more recently, someone to
succeed where he failed.

But the author of this book
talked about the healing music of legend as though it were something that he
had seen, practiced. Something that he meant to teach the reader.

He could aid his people. He
could—was it possible?—wake his queen.

“Are you all right?” Alban’s
concerned voice broke his reverie.

Kieran’s hands were shaking. He
rested them on the desk to steady them. He didn’t dare let the Leas know what
he had found, what he intended to do with it.

“I’m fine.” Too obvious a lie,
even by understatement. “Just a little tired.”

Alban was at his side instantly.
“Can I do something for you? Do you want to go back to your room?”

Kieran shook his head. “No, I’ll
be fine.” He doubted he’d be allowed to take so valuable a book from the
library, and he couldn’t bear to be parted from it so soon. “To be honest, I’m
not sure I’m quite ready to brave the stairs again just yet.”

Which was true enough, and so he
would not feel guilty about the frown of concern on Alban’s serious face. He
smiled deliberately, trying to coax an answering smile from Alban, but the
other narrowed his eyes as though trying to determine whether to believe his
false cheer.

“Can I get you something?” Alban
said after a moment. “Some refreshment? I’m afraid I can’t offer you more
painkiller, not unless the pain is truly unbearable. It can be unhealthy to
take too much for too long. Though it’s perfectly safe as we’ve been giving it
to you.”

The rushed reassurance brought a
huff of amusement from him. “Yes, I’ve figured out that you’re not trying to
poison me. I may be a fool, but I’m not stupid. You’ve had too many
opportunities, if that was your intent.”

Alban’s smile seemed as forced as
his own, masking worry, not deceit. “I can bring you a light meal, if you wish.
Some tea, maybe?”

He had a lovely smile, even
when—especially when—he was smiling over his concern.

“Thank you.” Those words came
easier all the time. Only common politeness, after all, and he and the Leas
were stuck with each other for a while to come.

It felt like less of a burden
than he imagined to have Alban in his life. But at the moment, he wanted to be
left alone to read.

Alban disappeared after one last
backward glance at the door to see that he was truly well enough to be left
alone. Kieran dove back into the book with growing excitement, skimming over
theory to find the methods
, ,
,

And swore in frustration. It was
just as Alban had said. The book made reference to other works it assumed the
reader knew. Without those references, the book made no sense.

He went back to the beginning,
reading every word carefully, determined to puzzle it out. When food appeared
at his elbow, Kieran ate absently and without tasting what he put in his mouth.

Without meaning to, the damned
Leas had devised the perfect torment. To have the answer so close, and yet
hidden from him.

“I didn’t mean for it to worry
you so.” The voice buzzed on the edge of his awareness. “Kieran?” Louder now,
sharp with worry.

“Hmm?” He looked up. “No, I’m
fine.”

“I only hoped it would prove an
interesting diversion for you,” Alban said. “Truly, it is of no consequence.”

No consequence? It was
everything.
But Alban couldn’t know that, and he refused to enlighten him.

He managed a smile. “This is
nothing. You should see me when I can’t get the right bit of ornamentation on a
tune I’m composing.”