“Everyone’s been asking. All the queen’s ladies and most of yours are suddenly fascinated by the harp and have been paying visits to the minstrels’ gallery for lessons.”
“Oh.” Deflated, she gazed at her tidy reflection, then studied Anne’s exquisite, aloof face, the arch of her fine nostril. “Not you, I take it?”
“Too raw by far for me, Princess Beatrice. He’s spent his life in the wilds of Grishold, and he looks like a pony. A rather willful pony at that.” She held an elaborate, fussy, and quite hideous collar of gold roses twined around chunks of amethyst against Beatrice’s collarbone without, it seemed, actually seeing it. “Still. Something besides all that rustic homespun, a decent pair of boots, and a good haircut, he might just possibly ... especially with those shoulders ...” She caught the princess’s clear, speculative eye upon her and actually blushed, Beatrice saw to her amazement: a tint of old rose like something in an antique painting. “I beg your pardon, Princess; I was distracted. Well.” She snatched the necklace away quickly. “That won’t do at all.”
“No.”
“Worse than your medallion, the other day. Did you find out what it was?”
“In a way. Once it meant a great deal, and now it means nothing to anyone.”
“A bit like—” She hesitated, considering the subject.
“Yes. A bit like love. I think the sapphires.”
“I think you’re right. The color offsets the pale green of your dress and complements your eyes.”
“But what is it about him?” Beatrice wondered. “Is it something he does deliberately, or something he can’t help?”
“I don’t know yet,” Lady Anne said slowly, clasping the necklace and settling the tiers of gold and deep, sparkling blue around the princess’s shoulders. “But may I suggest, Princess Beatrice, that finding out might be far more trouble than he’s worth?”
Which, considering the troubling events of the evening, Beatrice thought later, proved her lady-in-waiting’s shrewd eye for it.
It began predictably enough. Guests in their finery gathered in the long antechamber before supper to greet Lord Grishold and his family. Bottles were uncorked; platters carrying morsels of edible art followed trays of gleaming crystal in their labyrinthine paths through the crush. Flutes and viols sent their voices genially from the distant minstrels’ gallery to weave among the conversations below, all of them getting progressively louder as more guests were announced and added their own voices to the throng. Beatrice, drifting and making agreeable noises here and there, found her gaze straying through the gathering, searching, she realized, for the young, energetic face that had riveted her attention that morning. She felt herself flushing at the memory and pulled her attention resolutely back to the face in front of her: her brother’s affianced, she discovered, describing, inch by inch, the lace, piping, pearls, and ruches on the sleeves of her wedding gown.
Beatrice smiled and nodded and drifted again as soon as politely possible. A dark head caught her eye. But it was the back of Jonah Cle’s head, not the bard’s. He was standing on the edge of the crowd, a glass in his hand. His son, who tended toward the opposite side of whatever room his father was in, stood unexpectedly next to him. Even more unpredictably, they seemed to be talking, at least until someone in the crowd caught Phelan’s attention, and he vanished into it.
Beatrice, remembering the hooded face appearing at odd places in her father’s collection, put on her brightest smile, pretended to be deaf, and made her way to the fraying edges of the party.
“Good evening, Master Cle.”
His crabbed expression remained unchanged, but she did cause him to blink.
“Princess. You clean up astonishingly well.”
“Yes, don’t I? I wanted to ask you about that disk. I went to consult Master Burley this morning, and he pointed out the hooded face on several different pieces from entirely different centuries. He said that beyond the fact that it meant a secret, no one knows what the secret was. Do you have any idea?”
He was still looking at her, but his heavy-lidded gaze had become fixed and very dark, as though his attention had shifted imperceptibly beyond her. As she glanced around, something equally dark loomed to her other side. She turned her head quickly, and there was Lord Grishold’s bard, all in black as usual, and smiling upon them.
“Princess Beatrice,” he said, bowing his head to her. His deep, warm voice seemed to resonate in her bones, set them thrumming like harp strings. “Master Cle. We have not met, but I had the privilege of seeing many of your finds this morning in the king’s collection. I understand you also studied at the bardic school on the hill?”
It seemed to take forever for Jonah to answer. “Once,” he said finally, so dryly that Beatrice expected the word to puff into dust in the air.
Then the bard turned to her once more. Tall as she was, his big bones made her feel oddly birdlike, more swallow than her usual stork, as though he could carry her on his fingers. She felt her skin warm beneath the sapphires as he spoke; again, she sensed the odd, jarring, intriguing juxtaposition of ancient mystery and youthful exuberance.
“Princess, my name is Kelda. It’s an old crofter’s name in Grishold. What my father hoped I would become, except that he kept finding me sitting on the sty and singing to the pigs after I fed them.”
“Charming,” Jonah breathed to one of the ancestors hanging around the room, and the bard’s smile turned rueful.
“We in Grishold are a plainspoken lot. I learned my ballads in some rough places, where folk still sing the most ancient songs of the realm. I thought that, considering what you were wearing this morning, Princess, you would know something about earth.”
“Yes,” she answered a trifle dazedly. “I do. In my other life, I dig things up for Master Cle.”
“Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t that an unusual occupation for a king’s daughter?”
“I suppose, judging from old ballads, you would think that we all sat around doing needlepoint and waiting for our true loves to ride up to our door. Doors.” She was gabbling, she felt, under his smiling eyes, and wished she had pulled a glass off the champagne tray disappearing beyond him.
“Of course I do,” he answered with disarming candor. “Tales are all I know of princesses, in Grishold. But why do you like old things?”
She flushed again, as though the question were somehow intimate, and he knew it. She answered more slowly, studying his face helplessly as she spoke, entranced by the ambiguities in it. “I like—I like recognizing—I mean finding—what’s lost. Or rather what’s forgotten. Piecing people’s lives together with the little mysteries they leave for us. I like seeing out of earlier eyes, looking at the world when it was younger, different. Even then, that long ago, it was building the earliest foundations of my world. It’s like searching for the beginning of a story. You keep going back and back, and the beginning keeps shifting, running ahead of you, always older than the puzzle piece you hold in your hand, always pointing beyond what you know.”
He nodded vigorously, his flowing hair catching rivulets of light. “That’s what I feel when I come across a new ballad,” he exclaimed. “I keep listening for the older form of it, the place where language changes, hints at something past, the place where the story points even farther back.”
“Yes,” she agreed quickly, and noticed Phelan, then, coming to a stop beside the bard and gazing at her, entirely oblivious to the tray of wine intruding in front of him. Jonah took a glass promptly, and she saw it then, the older story: the flick of perceptive amusement in the young bard’s face, the faint, narrowed, teasing glance, the odd familiarity with the man he had never met. She stood with her mouth left hanging gracelessly open, forgetting even to reach for wine herself. Then Phelan greeted her, and she closed her mouth again quickly.