Free The Bards of Bone Plain by Patricia A. McKillip Page A

all his gifts, failed to resonate with any interest whatsoever.
    She heard her father’s steps on the tower stairs and reached for a spatula to turn the eggs. The smells had wafted to him, pulled him out of the ancient room he used for his office. The chambers of the school steward were as old as the school itself: the four tower rooms up the winding stairs, the hoary kitchen at the bottom, with its huge maw of a hearth that could roast an entire sheep in the days when one sheep could feed the entire student body. Zoe loved the tower. The smoke-stained walls, their stones dug out of field and river, still spoke, she thought, of a time so long ago that the school on the hill with its broken tower and the tiny village called Caerau were surrounded only by grass and fields and the great standing stones so old nobody remembered when or how they had come to the plain.
    Now the oldest school building housed the masters in elegant rooms pieced together out of the hive of tiny stone cells the early school had occupied. The masters’ cook was upstairs in the pristine modern kitchen, supervising their breakfasts. Zoe’s mother had been the cook there until she died. She taught her very small daughter this and that when she was very young, to keep her from running underfoot in the busy kitchen. Even then, tiny Zoe’s singing, vigorous and pure as she stirred the flour and butter and pan juices into gravy, riveted the masters’ attention.
    She pulled plates out of the cupboard, lined them on the table, and divided the eggs between them. The butter was on the table, the fruit in its bowl, the bread already cut on its board. She sat finally. Her father, a tall, spare, graying man with the tidy habits becoming to a steward, greeted Phelan without surprise and asked about his paper. Zoe watched their faces together: the son her father hadn’t gotten around to having, the intelligent, calm, unambiguous father Phelan wished he had. Her thoughts strayed. The Royal Bard had invited her to sing again, during the visit of Queen Harriet’s brother. He was Lord Grishold, Duke of what was once one of the five kingdoms, in the mountains of west Belden. His new bard would be traveling with him. Zoe had never met him. The previous bard in Lord Grishold’s court had forgotten his verses, or mistuned a string, or otherwise embarrassed himself, and had relinquished his position several months before, pleading age. He was upstairs now, eating breakfast in the masters’ refectory, preferring to live out his years in the genial city rather than among the gloomy crags of Grishold.
    She mentioned as much to Phelan as they lingered over cups of tea and coffee, trying to delay the day.
    â€œI’ve been asked to sing during the formal supper for the guests from Grishold. Are you coming?”
    He looked blank. “I can’t remember if we’ve been invited. I hope not.”
    Bayley Wren set his cup down, asked gently, “Is he missing again?”
    â€œVanished like the dew upon the sloe berry, after the birthday party. I don’t think he even went home to change his clothes. I’m not sure where I’d look for him so soon. It’s easier to find him when he’s running out of money.”
    The steward raised his cup an inch, his pale eyes lowered, then set it down again. “You might try looking in the school’s household records.”
    â€œFor my father?”
    â€œWell. I was thinking more of your paper.”
    â€œFor some legendary stones?” Phelan said, still bewildered. “What would they be doing among the price of beer or a mended hole in a master’s boot?”
    Bayley gave his slow, thin smile that bracketed his mouth with lines inscribed, Zoe thought, by decades of such painstaking entries. “You’d be surprised at the odd things you can find in those records. They go back centuries, all the way to the first summer, when the first students began to put