“You cook as well? Fortunate man. Tomorrow, then? The Circle of Days?” He waited, neither complacent nor challenging now, but as though, she felt, something important to him depended on her answer. She gave a short nod. “Good,” he said softly. “I have some time in the late afternoon before Quennel plays at the king’s supper, and I must go and be polite. I’ll find a more suitable place to meet and let everyone else know.”
He turned in time to greet a multitude of students just out of class, eager to share with him their excitement about Quennel’s announcement. Zoe went her way, feeling buffeted within by inarticulate questions, and went to the tower kitchen to chop up a chicken while she tried to ignore them.
The bard walked in and out of her thoughts many times that day and the next, to her annoyance. He exuded ambiguities, she decided: that was his fascination. His mouth spoke; his eyes said something other; his smile belied everything. He was a crofter’s son from Grishold; he had never been anywhere else. So he said, while he made his way easily through Caerau without a map. He dabbled, he said, in magic; he played with the language of the Circle of Days like a child with an arsenal of twigs. His music said otherwise; it seemed to echo through time out of a past as old as the stones on the hill. He lied with every note he played. Or, in his music, he finally told the truth.
What that truth was, Zoe glimpsed only fitfully: crazed, scattered notions that flitted like bats in the twilight around the edges of coherent thought, scarcely visible, gone when she tried to make sense of them. Lost in thought, she only noticed Phelan as something as familiar as furniture, when he appeared at the table reading some ancient book of her father’s, or when she found him coming down the tower steps with his arms full of them. He was as preoccupied, as distracted as she; when she came out of her brooding enough to wonder and ask him, he only murmured something vague and got out of her way. He was possessed by his paper, she guessed, and about time. What was it about? Bone Plain? Apparently he had found something at last to say about it, that maybe had been said only a dozen times, not a hundred.
The place that Kelda chose for the next meeting of the Circle of Days took her breath away.
It was under the king’s own roof, or at least under his courtyard.
“One of the queen’s ladies showed it to me,” he said disingenuously. “It’s a very old passageway, connecting several inner chambers of the castle to the riverbank. No doubt it had many uses through the centuries, for trysts and spying, for escape under siege. Likely it was an ancient sewage channel; it’s locked tight now against the curious and the malignant. I doubt that even Jonah Cle will find us there.”
“It seems—it seems so clandestine. As though we are plotting under the king’s very nose.”
“Yes, doesn’t it?” He gave her his kelpie’s smile, all innocence and complicity. “At least it will be private. Lord Grishold requested no more inexplicable incidents involving door hinges and inn-keepers’ bills. What could possibly happen in a place everybody has forgotten?”
What indeed? Zoe wondered, as the reckless, cheerful group of students gathered like conspirators at an iron grate sealing a vaulted stone channel that began under the shadow of the broad Royal Bridge near the castle. She would have sworn the grate was locked the moment Kelda opened it as easily as a nursery door. They filed inside quickly, followed the dry, musty sluice. When they left the lowering sun behind, Kelda produced fire from somewhere—out of his sleeve or a pocket—causing ripples of awe that echoed off the stones to drift against the murmuring tide behind them. Zoe, startled, felt eager fingers lock around her wrist, heard Frazer’s indrawn breath.
“Did you see that? He kindles fire out of air—out of shadow—”
“I saw it.”
“I was right! I knew there was magic in the words, and he knows it. Zoe, he can teach it to us!”
“Yes,” she answered, chilled under the empty, secret path that led to the heart of the king’s house. Frazer’s fierce hold loosened, but his fingers brushed her now and then, cold with excitement, she guessed, and reassuring himself with her presence. She had no such reassurance: every step she took over the uneven ground led her closer to the enigmatic heart of the kelpie. She walked that pathway alone, she knew; there was no mistrust, only eagerness and wonder in the hushed voices around her.
For a man who had never been to Caerau before, the bard led them with astonishing certainty, ignoring or choosing passageways that shunted this way and that under the castle grounds, until he reached, to his own satisfaction, a place that looked like any other in the long vault, and stopped there.
He said nothing to the students gathered around him, just set his fire on the ground and motioned for them to sit around it. He pulled the case from his shoulder, took out the strange harp he had carried to the inn. It seemed very old, unadorned by metal or jewels, only by what looked to Zoe’s perplexed eye like the random knife-whittlings of a very bored harper.
Kelda spoke then, holding the harp over the fire so they could see more clearly. “I was shown this harp by an old villager whose fingers had stiffened too badly for him to play it any longer. He liked my harping, and thought I’d find it interesting. He couldn’t read the words on it, nor could his own father. He thought his great-grandmother might have learned them, so the family lore went. There was another bit of lore handed down as welclass="underline" that the harp traveled its own path, went where it would, gave itself to whom it chose.” He smiled. “I felt that it chose me, and so I took it. I learned to play it. I have learned to play it very well ...” He touched a string lightly; the fire responded, a flame leaping upward, bright, coiling in currents that must have been stirred by the string. “You might have heard it the other night. If not, no matter. You will hear it tonight, I promise. And in a short time, all of Caerau will hear it.”
“The Circle of Days,” Frazer broke in abruptly, his eyes riveted to the harp. “Those are the words you’re teaching us, carved all over the wood.”
“The harp speaks that language,” Kelda said simply, “if you know how to ask it.”
Zoe felt a tremor deep within her, as though the harp had already sounded, and her heart’s blood had answered in terror, in wonder, in desire. She closed her eyes briefly, tried to remember why, exactly, she had followed this harper underground, to such a secret place so far from anything she knew, so close to the oblivious royal court above their heads that if Kelda played a note wrong, the king himself might tumble into their circle along with the stones overhead.
She opened her eyes to meet Kelda’s dark gaze, at once masked and illuminated with fire.
He said, “Listen.”
He struck a note so pure and sweet that her heart melted with astonishment. She closed her eyes again, breathing in the notes that followed, taking them deep into bone and marrow, into the place where tears began.
Chapter Eighteen
So where are we now in the story of Nairn? He dies in history during the destruction of the school tower. But where his life goes blank in history, it springs to life again in poetry, generally in the kinds of ballads that are sung long before they are transcribed to paper. From bawdy street jingles to elegant court ballads, he appears again and again, without introductory comment, as though his name and his story have become so familiar across the centuries that he needs no explanation. He is “The Failed Bard,” “The Wanderer,” “The Lost,” the beggar-minstrel whose harp is perpetually out of tune, who is more laughed at than shunned, or “The Cursed,” the tragic figure of cautionary tales: the bard gifted enough to attempt the Three Trials of Bone Plain and foolish enough to fail them all.