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

up the stone walls around this tower.”
    â€œBut Bone Plain—it’s likely no more than a poem. A legend. A communal dream that got handed down from imagination to imagination through the centuries. That’s what most of the papers about it say. There’s no proof it existed in any real place. Every standing stone in Belden has been linked to Bone Plain in one paper or another, and every argument to prove it circles back to poetry. More myth and dreams.”
    â€œIs it?” He sipped his cooling coffee. Zoe wondered, not for the first time, what was on his mind. “You said you’d picked it for an easy topic. It doesn’t sound easy at all.”
    â€œIt will be,” Phelan insisted. “I’ll write it with my eyes closed as soon as I figure out how to begin.”
    He took himself off to the library soon after. Bayley refilled his cup and carried it up into the tower. Zoe surveyed the mess in the kitchen, decided that it wasn’t going anywhere, and went to give singing lessons to half a dozen beginning students.
    They attracted an audience, the children with their pure, fluting voices, and Zoe tempering her own to roam in a high, sweet descant above theirs. A shadow crossed the open doorway of the small classroom, lingered. She flicked her eyes along it to its owner: the young, golden-haired Frazer, with his wolfish jaw-line and his light blue eyes burning with impatience, longing for mysteries, bewildered by his impulses and his own changing bones. Her voice had lured him, she realized; he was entranced, his eyes wide and cloudy, staring at her without recognition as though she had just sprung fully formed and unnamed from between the floorboards.
    He waited there until she finished the lesson and sent the students flowing out the door around him. Then he stirred, and finally spoke.
    â€œZoe.” Like Phelan, she was on that indeterminate border between student and master, given authority but as yet untitled. “I was wondering ... I wanted to ask you something.”
    â€œAbout magic?” she guessed, and he flushed, his face tightening.
    â€œI thought it was secret,” he protested.
    â€œIt’s so secret I don’t know anything about it either. What made you ask Phelan? I mean—I know why you would choose Phelan to ask, but what made you ask at all? Something you read?”
    He was looking at her incredulously by then; he wandered into the room toward her, pulled by some private, wayward path. “How can you ask me that? I hear it in you. Every word you sing says magic. Says power. How could the word itself exist if it means nothing?”
    She gazed back at him, startled, trying to imagine what he felt, what he meant.
    He came closer, his burning eyes haunted with a passion he could scarcely name. Somehow, in the way she could sense Phelan before she saw him, or her father, she felt Frazer’s blind hunger, his frustration, like something unruly, undefined, blundering its way into being.
    He passed it to her, like a gift or a curse, she couldn’t tell; she only knew that in that inexplicable, wordless moment, she recognized what it was he wanted.
    He spoke finally, huskily. “Tell me what it is.”
    â€œI don’t know.” Her own voice had vanished. “I have glimpsed it, here and there, within the notes of ancient ballads, between the lines: the shadow, the footprint, of something ancient, powerful. Memories, maybe. Resonances.”
    â€œYes,” he said urgently. “Yes. Where do I go to learn more?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Still, his eyes clung to hers, wanting, willing answers out of her. You see it, too, he told her without words. You want it, too.
    â€œWho will you ask?” she heard, and was uncertain which of them had spoken aloud.
    She stepped back finally, drawing breath deeply as though she had been submerged in some timeless, nameless realm and had, for a moment, forgotten that she