It was going through difficult times, as well. Towns were prospering all over Belden. The solitary village of Caerau, so promising that one summer, seemed to be withering away as the harsh winters drove out all but the hardiest and most stubborn. The school’s reputation had spread far and wide, causing bardic schools to spring up everywhere to emulate it. It had become legendary, and as happens with legends, it was relegated mostly to the imagination. Worthy, gifted students, inspired by its existence, went to more comfortable schools that were closer to home; the poor and brilliant came to be taught and to teach at the school on the plain, drawn by tales of Declan and the first great competition. When the Wanderer returned and stood in the dark listening to the music coming out of it, nearly a century later, it didn’t seem much different from the school in his memories.
He sat down on the hillside among the ring of standing stones, where he could see a scant handful of lights along the river, and the immense flow of icy stars above the plain. He had no idea what to do. He couldn’t play the harp he carried; he could barely remember the glittering lengths of verse, long enough to unfold across the plain, which he had once carried so effortlessly in his head. He doubted that, if he revealed himself, anybody would remember him, or even much care. If anyone even believed him.
He worked some magic, then, which surprised him enormously, as he felt it overwhelm him. He made a wish, sitting there with an abandoned past and no future except forever. He gazed at the crown of stones on the hill and wished he were one of them, rooted and bound to the plain, an ordinary battered old boulder with no need to explain anything and none but the most primitive of memories. As he felt the unexpected, welcome change reworking his mind, his heart, his breath and bones, he must have left a path open for his own return, as he wondered, in the final instant, why he had not tried that before.
So, for a couple of centuries, Nairn became stone. Oddly enough, in his absence, he flourished. In ballad and poetry, his reputation grew like a hardy weed, scattering seed on the wind, blown into every corner of Belden. He lived many lives in spite of himself as he slept the still, slow-dreaming sleep of a hoary, lichen-covered boulder, only waking very slightly, somewhere deep inside himself, when students sat on him to practice their music.
It was a song that woke him completely, reached into stone and found the human heart of him. He opened an ear to listen to it, and then another. He opened his eyes finally to see the singer with that treasure of a voice as wild and pure as the wind on the plain. He found his feet out of long-forgotten habit and pulled himself out of the earth that the boulder had shifted around and settled into to make itself more comfortable. The singing stopped abruptly. He stood in a morning that smelled of spring, new grass, turned earth, a harp on his shoulder he’d forgotten he possessed, blinking stone out of his brain under the wide-eyed stare of a dark-haired young woman picking wild strawberries among the stones.
She was absolutely motionless for a breath, stunned with amazement. He cleared his throat. At the sound, all the bones in her tried to escape at once out of her body. Then she whirled and fled headfirst into a hawthorn hedge and out the other side, leaving an uproar of mating finches startling into the air behind her.
Nairn watched the birds settle. The hedge was new. He walked around it, testing his movements. The school grounds looked oddly civilized, broken into flower gardens and swaths of lawn. There was a road downhill, neatly lined with low stone walls that ran to a bridge across the river. The village had grown far down both sides of the river. New houses and barns had gone up since he’d closed his eyes. A bit of cobbled road divided the houses across the far side of the river. In the distance, a great massive thing was growing beside the water, the fieldstones mortared into walls, and spiraling upward into eerie unfinished towers that seemed to mirror the broken tower of the school.
All around Caerau, the flowing green had been divided, hedged, walled, in squares and fans and lozenges of black, tilled earth.
He wondered how long he had been stone.
Something intruded into his thoughts. He recognized it finally and went, out of habit, around to the back of the school, where he smelled food for the first time in a couple hundred years.
He had to open a gate in the wall that surrounded the substantial kitchen garden. The shadow of the broken tower loomed over him, and he reared back, staring up at it, as more memories wakened of the moment the stones had begun to fall. He wondered confusedly which tower he had brought down. The Turning Tower, he had thought. Maybe this one had gotten hit by the explosion of ghostly stones. Or was the Turning Tower truly the shadow of the ancient watchtower on the hill? It had never been rebuilt, which he found strange. Did anyone really remember the magic that had ripped through those stones? Or did it just stand like a question on the plain? A mystery out of the past: the place where something terrible or wonderful had once happened, but nobody remembered what.
He found the young woman again, inside the open kitchen door.
She gazed at him mutely, as she gave a stir to the stew bubbling in the cauldron over the fire. He felt his body come suddenly, painfully to life again, at the smells in the smoky air of leeks, mushrooms, lamb.
He heard her voice again, faint and shaking slightly. “You can go up those stairs. The students are eating now. Sit, and I’ll bring you a bowl.”
He nodded gratefully, remembered the words. “Thank you.”
“If you—if you want to play for them, they’ll listen. Most musicians pay that way, and the students are always glad to hear a stranger’s song.”
He turned to the familiar, worn stairs. “I have no new songs.” His own voice sounded harsh with disuse, a stone’s voice, weathered and hard. “Only the oldest in the world.”
She brought him a great bowl of stew, bread and cheese, the strawberries she had picked. He ate every crumb, grateful for her perception that an old boulder that had been around since before she was born might be hungrier than most. No one spoke to him, although most threw curious glances at him and his harp. But he did not offer to play for his meal, and the students went off, leaving their empty cups and bowls scattered across the tables.
He could do that much, at least, he thought, and went back down to the kitchen. It was empty. He found a tray to stack the dirty dishes on and brought them down. He was in the middle of washing them when he heard steps on the tower stairs.
A man followed the young woman down; he carried their own emptied bowls. Nairn glanced up and saw him hesitate briefly between the bottom step and the floor, brought up by whatever was in Nairn’s eyes. Even after so many years, he recognized that studious, attentive expression: that hadn’t changed, though his face was older, grayer, than the one Nairn remembered.
“A Ren?” he guessed, taking the bowls. “School steward? You’re still up in that tower, then.”
The man nodded cautiously. “Argot Renne. This is my daughter Lynnet. And you?”
Nairn turned back to his wash water. “No one. Just a stranger who needed a meal.”
“I told him,” the girl murmured in her voice like a rippling stream, “he could play for his meal.”
“That’s the last thing you need around here, another harper. I’ll finish this and leave.”
“Where?” the steward asked abruptly. “Where will you go?”
Nairn looked at him. Argot Renne was staring again, his gray eyes wide, stunned with conjecture, as though he recognized the tale that pulled itself out of the earth and stone to walk into the tower kitchen and do the dishes.
“I don’t know,” Nairn said at last, scrubbing the bowl in his hands. “I haven’t thought, yet.”