By then the sun had crossed the plain to lower itself into the western forests, drawing long shadows of stone and tree and bard across the grass. Nairn, helpless in the crosscurrents around the vortex of power he and Welkin had opened between them, saw Declan’s face one last time: his gray eyes fixed on Nairn, his fierce, triumphant smile.
The sun went down.
The crowd around them seemed to melt into the twilight. They might have been alone, he and Welkin, with the simplest and oldest words: wind, earth, stone, tree. The sky, in that misty realm neither day nor night, ringed the plain as gray as slate. For the first time, Nairn felt tired. Not in his fingers, or his voice, or his churning brain, but of the competition itself, which never ended, but drew and drew at him, forced him to reach ever deeper into memory and experience, farther than he thought even he had traveled in his life. The power in the ancient songs fed his hands, his harp, possessed him; he felt as though he were the instrument, sounding every note out of blood and bone marrow. Still it never ended, and still he would stand there until his feet took root in the ground and birds built nests in his hair before he would yield to Welkin.
The first breath of evening breeze wafted over the plain. He nearly fell to his knees at the smell in it: tender salmon, onions, celery, peas, rosemary, lavender, pepper. The savory scents threatened to cloud his mind like errant fog, overwhelming even the forces that drove him until he yielded and followed his nose across the grass, where a great cauldron reflected the fires under it, turning copper to gold.
Welkin smelled it, too; he spoke through their flurry of notes. “Could stop a moment.”
“No.”
“A swallow of cold water? Or ale? A mouthful of that?”
“Help yourself,” Nairn said tersely.
“I’m parched as a pebble in a desert. You may not be the better bard, but you’re the younger. Have mercy on an old worn harper. Call it a truce? We’ll go back to playing after—”
“No. You may not be the better bard, but you’re the craftier. You make yourself comfortable inside a blizzard. I’m not stopping. I’ll stop, and you won’t, and you’ll claim victory.”
Welkin gave one of his shard-shifting laughs. He was silent for a bit, while one tune ended, and he pulled another out of his inexhaustible memory that Nairn clawed out of his own by a thumbnail and a thread. They settled into it.
Welkin spoke again, softly. “Ah, look.”
Someone—Muire?—had come down the hill to add an apronful of something to the stew. She emptied it into the cauldron, gave it a stir. Smoke billowed, blurring her. She seemed taller, as it frayed around her again: willowy and graceful, with long, frothy hair of the palest gold. Nairn’s eyes widened; he nearly missed a note. Odelet? Doing what she had always done at the schooclass="underline" chopping, stirring, cooking, feeding the hungry?
“I’d stop for such as that,” Welkin grunted, and showed Nairn the teasing smile in his twilight eye. An expected fury shot through Nairn that the old battered boot sole of a bard had riffled through his thoughts; he nicked a note so sharply, he nearly broke the string. He heard Welkin’s sudden, indrawn breath; a note under his thumb wavered weakly. Then he turned himself back into a solid slab of stone with hands. Nairn stared down at his own fingers, rage transformed to wonder. He had hurt the impervious Welkin with an errant harp note.
What else might he do?
He was so engrossed in possibilities that he barely noticed the figure standing in front of him sometime later, smiling, stirring a richly fragrant and steaming bowl.
“Nairn. Shall I give you a bite?”
It was darker now; the fire under the cauldron and the moon glowed brightly in the vast, tidal flow of night, but little else on the plain did. Her face was still blurred, shadowed with twilight; her sweet, clear voice sounded as distant as memory. A dream, a wish, his weary, hungry brain had conjured, he suspected. Or she was something Welkin had picked out of Nairn’s head and shaped with his harp string. Nothing that could possibly be real.
He answered her tersely, “No.”
She was gone so abruptly, in the blink of an eye, he knew she must have been an enchantment, until Welkin complained, “You might have been more polite about it. She would have offered me a bite, too, then, before you drove her off.”
“Who?”
“Who?” He snorted like a horse, then roused his harp and his voice into a long rollicking ballad. Nairn pulled his thoughts out of the mysterious realms of power and caught up with him within a beat or two. The moon ascended, flooding the plain with silver. It was strangely full, as though more time had passed during their private battle than he realized. The ballad seemed to last forever, Nairn picking verses out of his head so old he must have been born knowing them, for all he remembered where he had learned them.
“We could walk down together,” Welkin suggested, when they had finished that and Nairn had challenged him with a dance he had only ever heard played on the bladder-pipe. Welkin only chuckled and leaped into it. “Charm her a bit, and she’ll feed us both.”
“Right. You’ll wait until my mouth is full and I can’t sing a note and you’ll call victory while I’m trying to swallow.”
Welkin shrugged. “Who’s to notice? No one’s paying attention but him.”
That seemed true enough. Everyone had wandered off to listen to the last of the court bards, maybe, but for the tall old man standing with his back to the moon. He was cloaked from head to heel. Nairn saw a flutter of hair white as moonlight out of the hood he wore, but nothing of his face.
Then his vision shifted, became clearer in the deceptive light.
“That’s not a man,” he said. “Just one of the standing stones.”
“You’re in poor shape if you can’t tell stone from man. We’ve been playing for a night and a day and about to begin another night. How much longer can you keep up with me? I’ve a long, long road behind me that crisscrossed all over this land. You’ve gone a mile or so from your pigsty.”
“Farther than that,” Nairn retorted. “I’m still standing. And you’re the one who brought up the words. Food. Ale. You’re the one who needs them.” He nodded at the stone. “Maybe he’ll fetch them for you, if you ask.”
Nairn gave his gravelly laugh. “I could make him dance. I could make him sing.”
“He’s stone.”
“I could make him tell our fortunes, which of us is still on his feet and playing by the dawn. I’ll make you a wager: whichever of us makes him speak goes down and charms her back up here with her bowl of stew.”
“He’s stone. And you’ll cheat.”
“You’re just afraid of facing her.”
“What ‘her’? She’s just something you’ve conjured up with your harp strings. I’m not wasting my fingers or my breath trying to make a stone speak. I intend to be standing right here, come the dawn, and you’ll be wondering where the magic in your harp went.”
“Is that so.”
“Yes, old man,” he said between his teeth. “I’ll find the way to make it so.”
Welkin laughed.
The sky darkened; stars gathered thick as the crowd on the plain, more and more of them pushing out to listen. Nairn played and sang to them, for they were all he saw. Even the night fires across the plain had been neglected, except for the one still burning beneath the great cauldron. No one else seemed to be eating from it either. They were all gathered somewhere in the dark, he guessed, somewhere beyond time, silent and entranced, waiting to see which of them would come to the end of songs and put down his harp, and finally feel the exhaustion, the torn fingers, the throat so raw and swollen nothing but a toad-croak would ever come creeping out of it again.
Even then, as the wheel of stars turned above them, he heard Welkin’s playing strengthen, gather energy from the night, at once so unfalteringly wild and so precise that the question nobody could answer welled again through Nairn: