“Oh.” He shook his head. “I think there’s no cure for what I’ve got.”
“Is there a name for it?”
“I think—” He hesitated, looking at it, this ravening monster in him that ate words like fire ate twigs. “I think its name is magic. It goes where it goes. I follow.” He added, pulling up a useful word that he’d all but forgotten: “Sorry.”
“Ah, well,” she said ruefully. “I wish I had been able to understand it better. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Do you know that yet?”
“No.” Already the warm cottage walls were wavering, blurring behind all the words he had learned within them. “Not yet. I’ll tell you when I know.”
The snow had stopped falling; the world around him, as he walked back up the hill, seemed mute as midnight. Even the river, narrowed to a slit of dark water between encroaching boundaries of ice, ran silently under the pallid sky. The school on the hill seemed shrunken, huddled against the cold. The narrow tower windows, the tiny, thick panes in the students’ chambers, were barred with frozen tears of ice. The tower’s battlements were a thick, upside-down crown of ice, from which jagged, fist-thick shards hung down like barbaric jewels. Nairn, busy patterning everything he saw with ancient letters, forgot, for a brief moment, the shape of the word for ice. He stopped, gazing up at the massive icicles hanging high on the battlements and saw the patterns of the twigs in the way the icicles felclass="underline" long and short, long and long and short, randomly, the way the world sometimes made things. Or was it only the tiniest fragment of a pattern so vast, so intricate, that it would take a different kind of vision to see the whole?
The sun came out then, unexpectedly, slipping a sudden, astonishing shaft of light between the sullen clouds. It struck the tower, ignited the crown of ice to golden fire, and Nairn’s breath caught in his throat. The word in his head kindled as well, light running along the ancient pattern like a finger across harp strings, as the sun was doing, making a music of its own on a winter’s morning. The word in Nairn’s head leaped up to meet the fire within the ice.
There was a sudden crack just as, below, the scholarly Drue, bundled like a sausage, opened the door and stepped out.
The icicle struck him with all the force of a spear thrown from the battlements. Nairn, the breath turned to ice in his mouth, watched him spin and crumple, heard the ice shatter against the threshold stone. The sunlight faded. A swath of blood, the only color in the world, melted the snow around Drue’s head. Nairn, frozen in that slow, amber moment of time, saw a flicker at the tower window above the door: Declan, disturbed in his music room, looking down, then across the yard at Nairn.
He vanished. A student, come to shut the open front door, stared out instead, and shouted. Others crowded behind him, pushed him out as Declan’s own voice, still calm but louder than usual, bade them make way.
Nairn began to shake. He had cried so rarely in his life that he barely recognized the word, but he felt something like melted ice slide and chill on his face. The students came out, made a ring around the fallen Drue; Declan knelt in the snow beside him. Nairn moved finally, unsteadily, feeling vast mountains of snow shift at every step.
“Poor Drue,” Shea said, her peremptory voice trembling. “Master Declan, is he dead?”
“Yes,” Declan said briefly. He looked up as Nairn finally crossed some vast chasm of time and reached the edge of the circle.
“Nairn,” Blayse said abruptly, noticing from which direction he had come. “Were you out here? You must have seen what happened.”
Nairn opened his mouth. No words came out. There seemed none he knew for what had happened. How could he say sunlight, ice, the mystery within the word for ice, the sudden beauty that echoed so powerfully, so disastrously in his heart?
They were all looking at him then, their faces turned away from Declan, who held Nairn’s eyes, waiting, it seemed, like the others, for his answer.
Declan lifted his hand, held one finger briefly to his lips: another ancient word. Then he dropped his hand and his eyes, and Nairn heard himself speak.
“The ice broke from the top of the tower, fell on him just as he came out.”
Their eyes loosed him, too, drifted back to the unfortunate Drue, silent for once, and gazing with interest, it seemed, at the splinter of bone whiter than the snow that protruded down from his eyebrow.
“His father will be rabid,” Osprey murmured, awed.
“His father will be grieved,” Declan said, shifting Drue’s arm from behind his back. “He’ll understand that it was an accident. Help me get him inside. Shea, go and get Salix.”
“For what?” she asked bewilderedly. “He’s dead as a doornail.” He glanced at her, a quick flash of metal under his red brows, and she backed a step reluctantly. “Oh, all right.”
“We want to be able to tell his family that we did everything we could for him.”
Nairn helped lift the body, heard, as they brought him indoors, soft, moist, swollen noises of shock and sorrow following in the wake.
“Nairn,” Declan said, as they let the body fall on Drue’s tousled, fur-covered pallet. “Go up to the battlements and take an ax to the hanging ice. Blayse, you guard the door so that we don’t lose another student.”
“Watch out for Shea coming back,” someone said anxiously. “And Salix.”
“Yes,” Nairn said tightly.
Declan looked at him again; his eyes withheld expression. “When you’re done, come and let me know.”
“Yes,” he said again, hearing the implicit message within the request. “I’ll tell you.”
He realized, as he swung the ax and sent ice flying into the air to thump harmlessly into the snow, that even then, between the loveliness of the singing light and the sudden monstrosity of Drue’s death, he still had no answer to Salix’s question.
As the long winter finally ebbed and wild lilies bloomed in the melting snow, Declan sent out his message to all the bards of Belden, high and low, near and far, inviting them to the school for a great competition, on Midsummer Day, for the position of Royal Bard at King Oroh’s court.
Chapter Eleven
Zoe sat with the old bard as he lay in his chambers. She watched him silently. His eyes were closed, but he was awake, she guessed from the hard lines converging just above the bridge of his nose. He was silent as well. The king’s physician had examined him; he had let fall a miserly word or two then, grudging even those. He had choked on an errant salmon bone, he was told. Master Cle’s flailing arm had accidentally caught him where it did the most good; he had some bruises from his fall, but nothing sprained or broken. He would be fit as the proverbial fiddle tomorrow, the physician promised, and left him something that would put him to sleep when he drank it.
He did not drink it.
His servants had undressed him and put him to bed, while Zoe returned to the hall to ask Phelan to sing in her place. He was surprised, but he didn’t care. He had a fine, sinewy voice; he could perform the ancient Grishold love ballad as easily as pull on a boot. She went to give her excuses to the musicians in the gallery and to ask them to do what they could to replace Quennel, so that Lord Grishold’s bard would not be pressed to entertain the entire long evening. Lord Grishold’s bard was already there, tuning his harp and watching the guests below take their places for supper in the great hall.
She studied his absorbed face a moment and realized she would not want him to examine too closely the expression on hers. She turned away quickly without speaking and went back to Quennel’s chambers. He didn’t look at her or speak, even after she sent his servants away. She waited. He drifted a little at first, she thought, until she felt the deep focus of his thoughts, worrying at some kernel of truth within a husk held in the beak of some dark bird that held him fixed in the reflection of its black, black eye.