“Why,” she asked plaintively, gazing at the door. “Maybe it’s a sort of pantry. Or some kind of sweat lodge, an early spa—”
“Could be, I suppose,” Hadrian said dubiously, bending his thin frame backward and forward to unkink his spine.
“Doors,” Curran pointed out, “are meant to be used. Unless they’re meant to open once, then close something inside. Has to be a tomb. Likely we’ll never know, the way that stone is wedged in there now—looks so old it’s slumped and melted into itself.”
“A king’s tomb, maybe,” Beatrice murmured. “All that writing, that special mark on the door ...”
“Well.” Campion reached for his tool belt, slung it over his shoulder. “Jonah will know. Odd he hasn’t come to look at it yet.”
“He’s been at the competition,” Beatrice said, adding as they looked at her questioningly, “Phelan is playing.” She felt the warmth in her face as she said his name; luckily, she was so grimy nobody noticed.
“Does Jonah even know about this?” Curran asked.
“Oh, yes. I told him.”
Campion grunted. “Phelan must be good, to keep Jonah’s mind off his digs.”
“He roams at night,” Curran said wryly. “Along with the standing stones. Likely he’s already seen it.”
They clambered out then, leaving the mystery to the moon. They washed their faces in water and leftover tea from the thermoses, and pounded the dust off their clothes. Beatrice gave them a ride across the bridge, dropped them to catch their various trams, and turned reluctantly toward the awaiting squall. The last she had seen of the queen had been at the garden party. Beatrice had sent her a message from Jonah Cle’s house that evening, a rather incoherent one, she recalled, but who could be entirely rational after emerging in tattered stockings and a party dress out of a sewer in the company of a thousand-year-old legend?
The answer from the castle had been ominous silence.
She had time, at least, to wash and change before the summons came. Unexpectedly, it was from her father.
She found the king pacing among his antiquities, tossing comments over his shoulder to Master Burley.
“Beatrice. Your mother told me to talk to you,” he said brusquely. “Do you have any idea why?”
She smiled, enormously relieved. “Nothing to be concerned about,” she answered.
“Good. She said that you ran away after a party two days ago and were seen this morning in the company of Sophy Cle.” He picked up an ancient bone rattle, shook it absently, the whirling bones clicking wildly, to Master Burley’s consternation. “Anything you need to talk about?”
“I don’t think so, really. I think—somehow I might have fallen in love with Phelan Cle.”
His brows rose. “Phelan.” He gave the rattle a final spin, put it back down. “H’m.”
“Yes.”
“Well.” His hand hovered over a fine, very early piece of pottery. Master Burley closed his eyes. Beatrice watched her father’s expression change slowly, as he mused. He dropped his hand abruptly, leaving the pottery intact. “Well,” he said again, looking hopeful. “That could work. Couldn’t it? It gets tedious, trying to discuss antiquities with your brothers and Marcus. Anything else upsetting your mother?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“Good. Then we can move on to what you’ve unearthed in that dig of Jonah’s. Your mother said it was all you could talk about at her party. What on earth did you find?”
“Father, it’s the most amazing thing,” she told him eagerly. “A great creamy yellow stone tomb-looking sort of thing completely covered with runes. Except for the door. At least we think it’s a door. There’s only one symbol on that.”
“What symbol?” both the king and the curator demanded together.
“A circle that coils inward to a dot. Or maybe the other way around.”
“A coil,” her father murmured, and glanced at Master Burley. “Anything come to mind?”
“Nothing immediately, my lord. Perhaps the princess could draw it.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll find some dictionaries.”
He disappeared, came back with pencil, paper, and an armload of books. Beatrice drew the spiral within the circle, and they all pored among the books, draping themselves in various positions over the collection cases: Beatrice with both elbows on the glass covering a case of early spear and ax heads, studying a translation from the runic; the king leaning against a cupboard full of pottery pieces and flipping through a dictionary of early symbols.
“Anything?” the king murmured. Master Burley, poised like a bookend on the other side of the pottery cupboard, shut one book, opened another impatiently.
“You would think that such a simple, memorable symbol would be more easily found.”
“Not like ‘bread,’ ” Beatrice commented absently, twirling the pencil through her hair. “Perhaps it’s someone’s name?”
“Lucien!” the queen said despairingly, and the cases rattled alarmingly as they all straightened. She eyed her daughter frostily, then tossed her hands. “I give up, I really do. Have you even tried, Lucien? Have you spoken to your daughter at all?”
“Of course I have. She says everything is fine. Oh, and that it may well be a tomb.” The queen stared at him. He smiled at her. “Shall I take your brother there tomorrow, show him what Beatrice has found? He fell asleep during the bardic competition today. Perhaps he prefers tombs.”
“Bards,” Beatrice echoed abruptly. “Kelda will know.”
“What?”
She gazed at her father without seeing him, seeing instead the dark, mystifying face of the bard, his teasing smile hinting of ambiguities. “What the symbol is. He knows them all, the old runes.”
“Good. We’ll invite him to supper tonight and ask him. That is, unless Jonah is joining us,” he added. “There seems some odd tension between them. Do you understand it, Beatrice?”
“Ah—”
“Of course not, how could you? Some sort of misunderstanding, very likely.” He glanced around at a strangled sound from the queen. “What is it, Harriet? Are we late for something?”
Neither Jonah nor Kelda appeared in the hall that evening. Quennel played alone, slow, old ballads and ancient court dances. There was an odd, distant look on his face, as though, beneath his own music, he could hear the music all over the plain as bards contended in private bouts in taverns, on hillocks under the moon, among the standing stones. His brows were drawn; his expression, on one of his final nights as Royal Bard, seemed more harsh than nostalgic. Beatrice guessed whose music he listened for, drifting across the long summer evening, and was both relieved and disturbed that the young bard with his raptor’s glance, his perceptive smile, was nowhere in sight.
It was a smaller family gathering than usual around the tables. Charlotte and her family had left for the country, the queen told Beatrice, who was sitting in her sister’s customary place beside their mother. Damon and Daphne were at yet another engagement supper; even Harold was out somewhere. The king was left to make desultory conversation with Lord Grishold. The queen’s voice, carefully modulated, had lost some of its implacable resolve. Beatrice wondered if she was already regretting the loss of Quennel, who had played at every important occasion in the castle since her marriage. Even Lord Grishold, the most unmusical of men, seemed to respond to the change in the Royal Bard.
“I understand I might have to find another bard myself,” Beatrice overheard him say to her father. “I’ve heard the odds are on Kelda to win. People tell me his voice is magical. I can’t hear it myself; music all sounds alike to me, like bees—can’t tell one note from another. But Petris and our daughters will miss him.”