His color was better, she saw immediately. Not so his mood. He smiled when he saw her; his pleasure was genuine but brief, before the frown turned the smile upside down. He was still in bed, she saw with surprise, covered with silk and eyelet lace, with a cap on his willful hair.
“My throat is raw,” he said disgruntledly. “I can’t sing tonight.”
“You could play,” she urged him, inspired. “I’ll sing for you.”
The thought brought out his smile again. It faded more slowly as he looked at her silently, his reddened eyes unblinking, an expression in them she couldn’t fathom.
“I need you to do something for me,” he said finally, when she thought he might be drifting off to sleep again.
“Yes,” she said quickly. “Anything.”
“I have been thinking about this yesterday evening, and most of the night, and this morning. You understand that I’ve given it my most careful attention.”
“Yes.”
“So don’t argue with me. I am going to relinquish my position as Royal Bard of King Lucien’s court.” She opened her mouth; nothing came out but a rush of air. “I would wait until Lord Grishold leaves,” he added distastefully, “if I had any hope that his bard would actually leave with him.”
“You’re going to retire? Because of a mouthful of salmon?”
“So why wait?”
“But—” She started to sit on air, looked around hastily to pull a chair into place. She sat, leaned forward, her hands folded tightly among the bed linens, her eyes wide, studying his face as though the answer lurked within his bones. “But why? There’s no need. You are still vigorous, your voice as tuned and resonant as ever, your ear as fine, your fingers—”
“My ear, my voice, my fingers are all telling me that as well,” he said so dryly his voice rasped. “But I saw my fate in that mouthful of fish. This is what I must do. I will announce my impending retirement but continue to play as Royal Bard until the moment a new bard is chosen.”
“There will be a competition,” she whispered, feeling even her lips go cold. “Between bards from all over the realm for the highest position. They will come to Caerau to compete, and I will be here to see it.”
“You will compete in it,” he told her grimly, and she felt the full weight of his determination, anger, and despair. “And you will win.” She stared at him, breathless, mute. “You will win,” he said again, harshly. “You will find the roots and wellsprings of this land within you, and sing them until the moon herself weeps. Because if you don’t, that bard from Grishold, who is no bard but something ancient, dark, and dangerous, will sing in my place to the king, and I don’t know what will befall this land when he has finished his song.”
Chapter Twelve
It’s here, around the time of Declan’s competition, that the boundaries of history begin to blur into the fluid realm of poetry, much as a well-delineated borderline might falter into and become overwhelmed by the marsh it crosses. Where, the historian might ask bewilderedly, did the border go? Nothing but this soggy expanse of uncertain territory in front of us, where we were stringently following the clear and charted path of truth.
That Declan called the gathering of the bards is recorded in many places. Oroh’s court chronicles mention it: “At last Declan gave the king hope that he would have a bard once again at his side, for counsel and for diversion, for the king loved his music greatly and would hear none but the best.” We might pause here and give King Oroh a measure of sympathy, for no bard in his new court, however gifted, would know the cherished ballads and poetry of his native land; Declan and death had taken them away.
Evidence in other chronicles, in letters, in household records indicating the absence of a family member “who rode to Stirl Plain for the gathering of bards”: all give us proof beyond poetry of the event. And indeed the bards came from high and low, from near and far, from the wealthiest court, the meanest tavern, from the northern fishing villages, the crags of the west, the salt marshes of the south. From every part of Belden, bards, musicians, minstrels, anyone with an instrument or a voice to sing with, converged upon Stirl Plain.
Fortunately, Declan allowed the villagers the few brief months between winter and midsummer to prepare for them. Before the bards came the builders and the traders, the barges carrying lumber from the northern forests, wagons carrying a wealth of other things, followed by people hoping for work after the terrible winter. One can imagine buildings sprouting like mushrooms up and down the riverbanks, crowding along the road leading up the hill to the school. Inns, taverns, shops flew up as both the wealthy and the poor began to make their way across the plain.
It was, as we can guess, the beginnings of the great city that later became the official residence of the rulers of Belden.
At the same time, it must have seemed a magical place, in which all the music of the five kingdoms might be heard, and, along with the bards, came their audience to listen and marvel at the best that Belden had to offer.
But before that, the fading shadow of winter left a stranger in its wake, an elusive, ambiguous figure sighted only briefly, at a tangent, in the poetry of the time, and in history only between the lines.
The stranger came at the forefront of the flow of musicians on the plain, so soon after Declan had sent out word of the competition that it seemed only the trees and stones of Stirl Plain could have gotten the word any earlier. Sometime afterwards, Nairn realized that was exactly so; earlier, he was simply surprised at the efficiency of Declan’s methods. The bard spoke; the harper appeared almost before the moon had decided to change the expression on her face.
The students of the Circle of Days had grown oddly closer since Drue’s death. With all their spiky differences and sharp opinions, they were bound not only by an ancient, secret language, but by a vision of the breathtaking randomness of life: not even they, possessing the oldest name for death, could see it coming. Sometime during the ebb of the endless winter, they had begun to meet, in the evening once or twice a week, at the tavern Shea’s father the brewer had built on the other side of the river. They drank his ale, drew runes with burned twigs on his rackety tables and in the ashes sifting out of the grate, and challenged one another obliquely, in one language, to answer with the patterns of another.
Nairn, still struggling with the power and deadly potential of the ancient words, played their tavern games cautiously and ventured few opinions about what value Master Declan’s list of words might have when the students finally learned them all. They had no clue, Nairn learned with wonder. The thought that he had flung his heart into a burning icicle and sent it plunging down onto Drue’s oblivious head would never have crossed their minds.