“Always,” he breathed. “Always my father ... It’s impossible. But it would explain ... I need to know what happened at that first bardic competition. And I need to know where Kelda came from.”
“Grishold,” she said, but again without any degree of certainty. “He speaks the language of the Circle of Days ... Is that common knowledge in Grishold?”
Phelan turned his head abruptly, his eyes, heavy and feverish, clinging to her. “You recognized it last night.”
“So did your father.” Her voice sounded faint, distant; she felt the imperative intensity of his gaze, searching, waiting. “Master Burley said no one had ever been able to translate it beyond— beyond—what the words say into the secrets they conceal. Phelan, what exactly are you thinking?”
“That I need to finish my research on Nairn as soon as possible. Look.” He loosed her eyes finally, nodded toward the trees, where a circle of students sat around the dark-haired harper, in the shadows of the ancient oak.
“Kelda,” the princess breathed.
Phelan looked at her again, his face colorless, harrowed with light, his mouth clamped tight. She saw what he was not saying: Zoe in the transfixed circle around Kelda, listening to him play.
Chapter Sixteen
On the third day of the bardic competition, the tower blew apart, and Nairn disappeared again from history.
Both events are transformed into accounts rendered or received in the steward’s records. Dower Ren himself makes an appearance as an account rendered for the wounds he suffered when the roof and the battlement stones crashed down into his chambers; he gives his shattered inkpot more mention than he does himself. Two students were killed by the broken tower; one vanished. The names of the two sent home in their coffins appear in their own families’ household records, and in chronicles of the period. They had both heard Declan play during King Oroh’s visits to his nobles and had left their comfortable homes to meet their fates in the school on the hill.
The third student, Nairn, seems to have been missed by no one, at least for a couple of centuries, except for some sharp-eyed bards and minstrels, who had glimpsed something more on the plain than is anywhere recorded outside of poetry.
The foremost question the historian must ask, in attempting to understand the events of the third day within the rigorous boundaries of the field is: What did those on the plain actually see?
The household records of Dower Ren deal only with the after-math of the day, and they are terse to the extreme. Before then, when the two bards, Welkin and Nairn, were the only ones left to compete for the highest honor in the realm, we must explore other sources. Like the steward, Declan himself was mute about that last, intense struggle between musicians. His comments come later, in a letter to King Oroh:
“... we send you the best the land has left to offer, with my hope that, in the following year or two, I might again find one of such gifts to which you are accustomed in your bard, and so proceed with the training.” That’s all. He makes no reference either to his student, in whom he had placed such hope, or in the harper out of nowhere who challenged him. What happened to Welkin, at the end of the day? Why did one or the other not claim victory? Who knows?
Declan, of all, might have, but he will not say.
When we look through the records of the court chroniclers, busily taking notes on the plain, we find odd, conflicting comments about the end of the competition. Lord Grishold’s chronicler, Viruh Staid, confesses to a peculiar lapse of attention. He flirts with a bard’s wife; he wanders down to the river to relieve himself among the trees—whatever he found to do, it seems astonishing and highly suspicious that he chooses to do it in the middle of the final songs of the competition.
His disclaimer makes more sense in light of King Oroh’s own chronicler’s mind-boggling description: “It seemed to me that the wind itself grew very old as the harpers played. The moon grew full, though it was scarce past half when it rose. My heart overspilled itself like a seething cauldron with wonder. The very stones within them turned and turned and the stones sang ... Such was my dream ... Then the dream blew into fragments. I woke, and the competition was at an end.”
Others, writing letters or descriptions later in the calm of their own chambers, were equally nebulous about how the great event ended. They barely comment about the broken tower, as though that was the least of their memories. One remembers following the scent of an enormous cauldron, and how he craved the “heady broth” so much that he forgot to listen to the music, but no one offered him any. Another complains that an ill-chosen mushroom must have clouded his memory, for what he does remember of the final song could never have happened. And so on.
At the end of the day, we have the results set down very succinctly by the king’s chronicler:
“I watched the bard of the Duke of Waverlea given the title, by Declan himself, of Royal Bard of Belden.”
They had never stopped playing. At sunrise, only Osprey and a couple of court bards were left in the tavern. Osprey’s head lay on the table in a ring of beer mugs. The court bards caught at melodies they knew with harp and pipe and small drum; otherwise, they listened silently, their faces stunned with weariness and wonder, to songs from all over the five kingdoms that had never been permitted to pass the thick stone walls surrounding court music.
The brewer, who had gone to bed hours before, woke up and gave them all breakfast. Welkin and Nairn, drunk on music, chewed intermittently on bread and bacon as they tested one another, Nairn pulling music out of his back teeth, songs from his Pig-Singer days that he must have learned by listening to the grass grow, or to a blackbird’s passing whistle, for all he was taught back then. Welkin had the same teachers, it seemed; all his music sounded eldritch, haunted. Finally, they left their benches, accompanied by a ringing wake of gold tossed on the tables by the court bards, and moved up the hill.
They barely noticed the gathering of musicians for the final day, so engrossed they were in their own competition. The two court bards left to play, then came back again, followed by others. Through the noon and afternoon, it became clear that the true contest pitted the young, charming student from the Marches with the scruffy, odd-eyed wanderer out of nowhere discernible. Their struggle was congenial and absolute. They matched song for song, took them back through their various changes, so far back sometimes that word and wind seemed to veer close enough to overlap, borne on the rilling notes of a brook or a bird cry.
They were moving very close to the language of the Circle of Days. Nairn felt it like a tidal pull, a whirling exuberance that tugged, lured, tempted into its roil of beauty and danger. His craft sheered closer and closer to its wildness. Welkin heard it; the smile in his eyes grew deep, honed. The listeners, more and more of them drifting from the circle around the final competitors to this private battle, heard it as well. They stood, wordless and motionless as the stones on the hill, while court bard vied with court bard in some other world, until even they yielded to the irresistible and astonishing engagement that overwhelmed even their great gifts.