“What are you doing?” Phelan cried at him, wrenched off-balance and feeling as though his own misguided father had pushed him the wrong way over the cliff edge. “You can’t even whistle! Strings break when you look at them.”
Jonah ignored him. The harper flung his glinting smile at them and found his voice again; Jonah’s fingers leaped after him. Phelan stared at him, sweating, trembling, torn from the embrace of his instrument, from the embrace of the whirling, deadly current of music, to stand empty-handed on the shore, music still clamoring in his head with no way out.
Then he heard Jonah’s music melding with Zoe’s like silver braided with gold, like sunlight with sky, small birds flying out of his harp, and butterflies out of hers, their voices winding together, sweet, sinewy, strong as bone and old as stone. Together, they transfixed him, spellbound in their spell, his mouth still hanging open, and all the unplayed music in him easing out of his heart with every breath.
He didn’t notice when the old harper stopped playing. Sometime before that, the mist of stones around them had begun to float away, like clouds breaking up after a maelstrom. Phelan, sitting on the ground by then, watched wordlessly as the harper slipped the harp from his shoulder, reached for its case. Phelan saw the markings on the harp then, secrets all over it, whittled into the wood.
He found his voice finally, whispered, “Who are you? Are you Kelda?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I’m Welkin. Sometimes ...” He shrugged. “I go where the music is.”
“What is—What is your true name?”
The paler eye narrowed at him, catching light. “Ask your father. He knows.”
Phelan gazed up at his father, who was still playing as though his fingers were trying to let loose a millennium’s worth of unspent notes. “What did you do to him? He couldn’t play a blade of grass before today. He couldn’t find the beat in a pair of spoons.”
“I didn’t do anything. You did.” He slid the harp into the case, fastened the old leather ties, and patted it fondly, whereupon it disappeared. Phelan stared at the nothingness where it had been; his eyes were pulled away to follow the harper’s gesturing arm. “He’s been trapped in this tower since he tried to kill me with his music. That time, he only brought down that old watchtower. This time, he found a better way to deal with me. He turned his heart inside out to rescue you from his fate. Not,” he added, as Phelan opened his mouth, “that you were anywhere near it. But he didn’t know. He pulled down the tower walls with his music for you.”
Phelan felt his skin constrict. “Who are you?” he asked again, his voice a wisp, a tendril of itself.
The harper smiled. “Just an old stone,” he said, and became so, a weathered boulder embedded in the crown of the hill, scaly with lichen and the faint patterns of what might once have been words, drowsing in the afternoon sun.
Phelan shifted to lean against it after a while, as he listened to his father and Zoe. After a longer while, he heard the stone prophesy:
“She’ll be the next bard of this land. She’ll sing the moon down and the sun up, and not a bard will be left standing against her magic.”
After a time even longer than that, Beatrice found him.
She came up the knoll, carrying her high-heeled sandals, looking windblown, uncertain, even, he saw with astonishment, as he rose, somewhat fearful. He went to meet her, saw the tears still drying on her face. He put his arms around her, felt again the strong, sweet embrace of the music in her.
“I couldn’t see you,” he said.
“You’re all I could see. I was so frightened. I’ve never been so frightened. Everyone else had faded away, and I knew from your father’s tale where you and Zoe had gotten to. Kelda tricked you—”
He started to shake his head, then stopped and smiled crookedly. “Well. I suppose he did.”
“I tried to follow your father into the tower. But I couldn’t find my way until now. What happened to them?”
“My father managed to topple the right tower this time.”
She turned her head, looked over his shoulder; he felt her indrawn breath against his ear. “That’s Jonah. All this time I thought it was Kelda, playing with Zoe. I couldn’t see anything very clearly until now. I’ve never heard your father play before.”
“Neither have I. He finally remembered how.”
Her hair brushed his mouth as she shifted again. “Where is Kelda?”
Phelan hesitated, found it easiest just to say it. “He turned back into Welkin and reminded my father how to play again. Then he turned himself back into that.”
He gestured to the boulder breaking out of the ground. He felt the princess’s tremor of astonishment. She loosed him slowly, dropping her sandals, all her attention on the stone now, he noticed wryly, with the labyrinth of weathered lines on it.
She knelt beside it, touching it, caressing it, her splayed fingertips finding and tracing the ancient scorings, smiling even as her mouth shook with wonder and tears fell onto the sunlit stone. “The oldest words,” she whispered. “The oldest magic ... Oh, Phelan, look at this.” He crouched down beside her, drew a salty kiss from her, wishing he lay under those gently searching fingers and wondering if, in whatever dream the old bard inhabited, he felt them. “It’s the spiraling circle.”
“The what?”
“There.” She took his hand, guided his fingers around a circle, then into smaller and smaller rings that wound down into its heart. She looked at him, laughing through her tears. “It’s the symbol on the door stone of the tomb we’re unburying. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. I wonder if that’s his name.”
“He’s a ghost?”
“Well, maybe the tomb isn’t a tomb. Or maybe it’s still waiting for him—he hasn’t gotten around to dying yet.”
Bemused, he thought of the word Jonah had shouted that made the bard’s sure fingers skip a note with astonishment. Hearing your own name after who knew how many millennia might have that effect, he thought. He took the princess’s fingers, raised them away from the battered face of the stone to his lips, moved that she could see so clearly the words engraved in stone and all the worlds within the words.
Behind them, the music had begun to slow, fray into an unfinished phrase, a scattering of notes. Jonah laughed suddenly, a free, wondering sound unlike anything Phelan had ever heard from him.
Then the amphitheater thundered, roared, wave after wave of sound rolling across it from every point to crash together, unwieldy echoes rippling back again to meet the constant noise. They stood on stage and scaffolding again, musicians turned to stone in the suddenly appearing world, the princess looking around bewilderedly for the vanished stone, the knoll, the secret world, the ancient word beneath her hand.
Zoe came back to life first, managing a smile across the distance at Quennel, on his feet like everyone else in the place, and clapping so hard she thought his hands might fall off.
Then she turned to Jonah, held him in a long, incredulous gaze before she spoke. “Nairn?”
He looked back at her silently; Phelan glimpsed the shadow of the endless road in his eyes.
“I was young and foolish then,” he answered finally, and she shivered.
“So are we all ...”
“Maybe,” he said more gently. “But you recognized Kelda before I did. Welkin. All the magic and the poetry, the ancient voices of this land come to life, with two feet to roam on, a harp, and a pair of hands to play it with. You heard that true voice.”
Her eyes clung to him. “You played that true voice today,” she whispered.
He smiled. “I hear it every time I listen to you. You were born with it. There are always ulterior motives in mine.” He reached out to Phelan, drew him close. “I thought I was rescuing my son. That wily harper fooled me again. I seem to have rescued myself instead.”