Read Online The Bards of Bone Plain by Patricia A. McKillip - Free Book Online Page B

Nairn without surprise.
    â€œYou took your time,” he commented.
    Nairn, still transfixed, stared at him, as the students, a motley crowd of men and women of varying ages and circumstances, jostled past them. He felt his skin constrict suddenly, as he guessed that those owl’s eyes must have watched every step he had taken across the plain, and maybe even down his secret, crooked path before that.
    â€œThe third time,” he whispered, hearing the charm behind him begin to ladle stew for the others. “How did you know I would find you?”
    â€œWhere else,” Declan asked, his voice mingling patience and exasperation, “in this utterly oblivious land, could you go?”
    It was a while before Nairn understood that question, a little longer than that before he realized how right the bard was, and far too late when he understood at last how wrong.

Chapter Five
    The guest bard, Zoe Wren, was cooking breakfast for her father in the ancient cavern of the tower kitchen when Phelan knocked and walked in. She broke off midline of the ribald song she had encountered at the Merry Rampion sometime in the wee hours after the king’s birthday and reached for a couple more eggs without bothering to look. She knew the sound of his knuckle and the sound of his knock in exactly the middle of which slat in the door ever since they were both five, and the knock was a lot lower down on the door. They had known each other that long. Wood wailed against stone as he pulled out a chair. The scarred deal table creaked as his knee hit a leg; the glass teapot and butter dish lids trembled; one elbow thumped as she broke an egg. It splashed, as the other thumped, into the bowl of liquid, floating suns.
    He spoke then. “Someday,” he warned. “Someday you’ll think it’s me, and it won’t be—”
    â€œNonsense. I feel you come in like an old familiar song, only without the sound.” She turned finally, laughing at herself. “You know what I mean.”
    â€œNo. I don’t.” He was smiling, maybe at the sight of her bare feet, the sleeves of her school robe shoved back to her elbows over yesterday’s silks, a strand of her rumpled dark hair trying to join the eggs in the bowl. “Late night?”
    She nodded, gazing at him a moment longer, sensing things awry, hidden behind his smile. She turned back to the old iron stove, dropped a lump of butter into the pan heating on it. Her own elegant face, lean and brown, hid little and flashed color, from her shrewd green eyes and her holly-berry mouth. Phelan’s pale coloring had first caught her curious gaze when she had come out of the refectory kitchen upstairs where her mother was cooking, and saw the small boy with his duck-fluff hair and his wide eyes as opaque as mist, sitting silently, expressionlessly beside his father.
    â€œI stayed with Chase,” she said over her shoulder. “Some bards out of the north came down to hear what kind of music the students play. They taught us some wonderfully rowdy songs. I just got back. How is your father?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œYou have that expression on your face.”
    She heard him lean back hard in his chair until it creaked. He answered dispassionately enough. “I found him in the wasteland across Dockers Bridge at dawn yesterday. That gave him a few hours to get cleaned up for the king’s party. He was sitting in the mud by the river, singing to the standing stones. He wonders how I find him, but even he is predictable. I just look around his most recent dig site.” He paused, added restively, “I don’t know what he’s looking for. I wish I did. Once I thought he was wandering around Caerau digging graves, trying to find his own death. But he keeps finding treasures instead ...”
    Zoe upended a chopping board full of onions, chives, sausages, into the frothing butter. She stirred them, said slowly, “Death is easy