Free The Bards of Bone Plain by Patricia A. McKillip

enough to find. Isn’t it? If you truly want it. So he must want something else.”
    â€œHe has everything else,” Phelan said, then paused. His mouth crooked. “Except music. But if he put me in this school to make up for his own abysmal failure here, it makes no sense to let me turn my back to all I’ve learned and walk away—”
    â€œNo,” Zoe said pointedly, rapping the spoon on the pan for emphasis. “No more than it makes sense for you to want to.”
    He ignored that. “He’s rich in so much else. Everything he touches turns to gold. The King of Belden calls him friend despite his eccentricities. Even my mother still loves him.”
    She glanced back at him. “Even you do.”
    He flung up a hand. “But why?”
    Zoe thought, but had nothing to add to the familiar litany of conjectures about Jonah that they had strung together through the years. She added salt to the mix, stirred it, sent the smells swirling through the kitchen.
    â€œHow was your class this morning?” she asked to get them off the labyrinthine subject. “Everyone awake?”
    â€œExcept me. I’ve started them memorizing the ninety verses of the ‘Catalog of Virtues.’ It’s enough to drive everyone to slavering mayhem in the streets of Caerau. Except for Frazer. He’s inhaling it all in through his pores. He thinks there’s magic between the lines.”
    Her eyes widened at the word; she stared hard into the pan, turning things mindlessly with her fork until the onion fumes bit at her eyes. She blinked. “Magic.”
    â€œI don’t know what he’s talking about. Except what you did yesterday at the king’s party. That song—I swear it nearly melted the expression on my father’s face. That was magic.”
    She smiled. “Thank you.”
    â€œWhere did you find it? It sounded as though you dug it out of a barrow.”
    She nodded, peppering the eggs vigorously. “It’s very old. Quennel taught it to me.”
    â€œThe Royal Bard? That Quennel?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHe wouldn’t part with a song if you held fire to his feet.”
    â€œHe likes me,” she answered cheerfully. “He says I’m what the plain would sound like if it sang, wind, bird, bone, and stone. Don’t ask me. That’s what he said. What exactly did Frazer say to you?”
    â€œExactly, I don’t remember. Something about secrets. The secrets of the bardic arts. When he would be taught them.”
    â€œStrange,” she breathed. “Maybe you should do your research paper on that.”
    â€œOn what? A connection between magic and poetry?”
    â€œWhen Oroh fought his only battle in the Marches, according to the ‘The Lament for the Marches,’ his bard Declan raised a fog with his poetry that blinded King Anstan’s army so badly they could not recognize one another’s faces. Anstan’s army fought itself; Oroh’s mostly stood and watched.” Phelan was silent behind her. “The magic was in the words. The words were the magic.”
    â€œThat’s one reference,” he said dryly. “I just want to get out of here, not spend half my life tracking down obscure incidents of bardic magic. Let Frazer write that paper.”
    â€œMaybe I’ll write it,” she said recklessly. She beat the eggs until they frothed, then added them to the pan, musing over the question. “I wonder what caused Frazer to ask.”
    â€œI think something he read.”
    â€œWell, what?”
    â€œI have no idea.” His voice shrugged the subject away. “Some old ballad, probably. He’ll figure it out, whatever it is he wants to know. He’s bright enough.”
    She drew breath to speak, then stared down into the pan again, without moving, wondering what in her head had leaped at the word without understanding the question at all, and what in Phelan, with