Beatrice waited a few minutes, until they had greeted the king. Jonah lingered there; Phelan, his face loosening as he sighted a friend, plunged one way into the currents; Sophy, waving, went another. Beatrice moved then, as the long line finally came to an end, and the king turned to speak to Jonah.
The king had evidently asked about the peculiarity adorning his daughter; they were both looking for Beatrice before she reached them.
“Princess,” Jonah Cle said a trifle tiredly, as she came up. He looked very pale and very well scrubbed. “You look lovely. I would scarcely have recognized you.”
“Thank you, I think, Master Cle. And so do you.”
“What have you found for me?”
“Curran found it,” she said, feeling for the chain clasp. “He asked me to give it to you.”
“I was hoping,” the king interposed, “you might consider it my birthday present.” He had his own fine collection of oddments, many given to him by Jonah. “It would be a gracious gesture and very much appreciated.”
“We have already left a very expensive present on your gift table.”
“But this is merely a trifle, I’m sure. You probably have dozens of them.”
Beatrice slid the stained copper disk off the chain, put it into Jonah’s hand. The runes were up; he studied them silently a moment, then turned it over to reveal the hooded face.
Beatrice saw his eyes widen. Then his fingers closed abruptly over the disk; he threw back his head and laughed, an open and genuine amusement that caused heads to turn, Phelan’s startled face among them.
He opened his hand again, offered the disk to the king. “Take it, with all my good wishes. Happy birthday, Your Majesty.”
“But what is it?” he demanded.
“What does it say?” Beatrice pleaded.
Jonah was silent again, weighing words along with the disk on his palm. Then he gave up, flipped the disk lightly in the air, caught it, and held it out again to the king. “You both enjoy a challenge. The weave is there, the thread is there. Find and follow.”
“But—” Beatrice and her father said at once. But the queen was suddenly among them, drawing the king’s attention to the Master of Ceremonies at her side.
“Your Majesty,” he said softly. “The guest bard from the school is about to sing. Then Prince Harold will make his toast to you, and you will speak after. Then the Royal Bard will sing his birthday composition to you, after which they will cut the cake.”
“We all must gather near the table,” the queen said.
“Yes, my dear.” The king took the disk, dropped it resignedly into his pocket, and held out his arm to her.
“Come along, Beatrice.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I need a drink,” she heard Jonah mutter, as she turned to follow in the royal wake, then, in the musician’s gallery, the guest from the school stroked her harp and loosed her voice like some rich, wild, haunting echo out of the singing bones of the plain in a ballad about the Peverell kings that was as old as Belden.
Chapter Four
History next records Nairn’s presence, unlikely as it seems, at the ceremony after the Battle of the Welde during which Anstan ceded the Kingdom of the Marches to the invader, King Oroh, who was busily amassing the five kingdoms that would become Belden. Oroh’s bard, Declan, was also present. The exact nature of his extraordinary gifts is nebulous, and most often a matter of poetry rather than record. Whatever they were, his place was always at the king’s side. An odd tale rippled down the centuries from that ceremony, in ballads, in poetry fragments, and as metaphor: Nairn returns to Declan the jewels he had taken from the older bard’s harp. In some tales, he throws them at Declan. How he acquired them is also a matter of folklore, especially of the Marches. Some say he stole them; others that he took them with magic; though that is never adequately explained, certainly not to the historian. After that, Nairn once again vanishes from even the footnotes of history.
He reappears, a few years later, at the bardic school that Declan started after King Oroh finished his campaigns. Pleading age and long years of service, Declan relinquished his duties as Oroh’s bard and returned to Stirl Plain, now under Oroh’s rule. There, on a small hill crowned with ancient standing stones and a watchtower overlooking the Stirl River, he retired to a life of contemplation. It did not last long, as bards and would-be bards from the five conquered kingdoms were drawn by his great knowledge and abilities to learn from him. There, on that hill, Nairn steps back into history.
Fickle as jewels on a harp.
The Battle of the Welde lasted three days. By the time it started, Nairn, who had beaten a marching rhythm for Anstan’s army through the western mountains of the Marches, and summoned the clans with his bladder-pipe, then drummed the army east and south to meet the invader, had calluses on his calluses. He had never traveled so quickly or played so hard in his life. The Welde, a broad, lovely river valley along the border between the Marches and Stirl Plain, had laid down a soft carpet of creamy yellow wildflowers. So Nairn saw it at the beginning of the battle, when he blew the long, coiled, battered cornu someone had handed him and told him to sound. By the end of the battle, there were a few flowers left untrampled and about as many of Anstan’s warriors. King Oroh sent his bard, Declan, across the field to meet the king’s emissary and demand that Anstan surrender his kingdom.
Anstan, furious and heartsick, answered with what he, not being particularly musical, considered a last, futile gesture of contempt. He sent his bedraggled drummer on foot across the ravaged, bloody field where nothing moved, nothing spoke except the flies and the flocks of crows, to meet with Oroh’s bard.
Declan rode a white horse. He was dressed in dark, rich leather and silk; he carried his harp on his shoulder. As always, he was unarmed. He reined in his mount at the center of the field between the two royal camps and waited for the young, grimy minstrel in his bloodstained robe and sandals with one sole tied to his foot with rope where the laces had rotted during the long march. He still carried the cornu over his shoulder, the last instrument he had played to call retreat.
Nairn stopped in front of the bard; they looked at one another silently.
“You asked,” Declan said finally, “what I am.”
The taut mouth in the stained white mask of a face moved finally, let loose a few words. “Yes. I asked.” He was silent again, his bleak, crow eyes moving over Declan, narrowing as memory broke through, a moment of wonder instead of bitterness. “You’re Oroh’s spy,” he said tersely. “And his bard. But what else? I didn’t sing those jewels out of your harp. You gave them to me.”