The Bards of Bone Plain by Patricia A. McKillip

head out the door into the night and heard his harping. He followed it to where Declan sat in his favorite place, leaning against one of the great standing stones on the crown of the hill and playing to the moon. It must have been his harping that Nairn had heard as he climbed up the tower; it stopped as Nairn halted beside him, glancing puzzledly down the hill for the outlines of the unfamiliar tower in the dark.
    Then he felt Declan’s eyes on him, and he said brusquely, “You lied to me again.”
    For a moment, the bard was silent, motionless. Then he set his harp beside him in the grass and answered evenly, “Then you spoke of what I asked you to keep secret. How else would you know?”
    â€œIt’s such a small thing—Why would you lie about something that unimportant?”
    â€œWhom did you tell?”
    â€œDower Ren. I went to him to ask him how to spell one word—”
    â€œWhy didn’t you come to me?”
    Nairn felt himself redden, said shortly, “It was private.”
    â€œYou barely know the steward.”
    â€œI knew he would tell me the truth, how to spell the word I wanted, not give me some other word like ‘bell’ or ‘butter’ instead of ‘O—’ ” He stopped, clamped his mouth down on the word, but too late.
    A sound came out of the bard’s nostrils, a snort, a laugh, or just a passing spore, expelled. “Odelet?”
    Nairn’s fists clenched. “I knew you’d laugh. You keep your secrets and laugh at everything. You came as far north as you could go in this land just to spy on fishers and shepherds and lie to them—”
    â€œI’m not laughing,” Declan interrupted sharply. “I would not laugh at the only thing that keeps you here. Do you always tell the truth?”
    â€œYes. No. When it’s important. That’s not the point—” He stopped, thinking back at his piecemeal life, all that it had taken to bring himself here to sit on a hill with the greatest bard in five kingdoms.
    â€œMusic doesn’t lie,” the bard said after a moment. “If you play a false note, it sounds. But words can shift their meanings so easily, weigh so lightly one moment, fly like a star, or drop like a stone in the next. How many times have you spoken the word ‘love’ and meant anything but that?” Nairn, staring rigidly down at him, blinked. “And now that you finally think you know what the word means, you find it impossible to say. Who would believe you?”
    â€œThat’s not—” he protested. “That’s not exactly—She—Anyway, I didn’t come to talk about that. How do you know? I’ve never said anything to anyone—”
    â€œYour face speaks every time you look at her. Your feet speak when you trip over them in her presence. Your fingers speak when they tremble on a pipe note. You talk about her all the time, in ways that I would wager my harp strings that you, with your gifts and your comely face, have never had to speak before.”
    Nairn was silent, gazing back at the eavesdropping moon. He drew breath finally, loosed it. “True enough. Am I that pitiful a creature around her?”
    â€œYou’re not the only one.”
    â€œI hadn’t—I hadn’t noticed.”
    â€œYou haven’t been paying attention to anyone else. According to her brother, she left a very wealthy noble waiting for an answer to come here.”
    â€œOh,” he said, deflated.
    â€œYou might talk to her now and then.”
    â€œMaybe. She makes all the words vanish out of my head. And so do you,” he added restively. “This is not at all what I came out here to talk about.”
    â€œAt least you are talking to me,” Declan breathed. “What did you come to talk about?”
    â€œWhy are you teaching me to write ‘water’ with scratches that are as ancient as the standing stones and