Where Light Meets Shadow (4 page)

Practicing with the crutches had
made Kieran’s ankle throb. Alban told him that the movement had done it and suggested
that he rest and elevate the injury once more. The Leas prince helped him get
situated on the bed and left.

Kieran stared out the window, but
all he could see from the angle of the bed was blue sky and clouds and, once,
the deceptively lazy circling of a hawk. With nothing else to do and with the
painkillers dulling his mind, he slept.

A soft knock on the door woke
him. Kieran expected Alban or Toryn. Instead, a Leas woman entered, willowy,
with the fair, ethereal beauty of her people. Her dress was the light green of
new willow fronds in spring. She carried a cloth-wrapped bundle in her arms,
and she stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Toryn
warned me, but still... You are very like him. Your father, I mean.”

This Leas had known his father?

Kieran sat up in the bed and
regretted it immediately as the motion dragged on his ankle. “Everyone tells me
I’m smaller. Slighter.”
Lesser.

She smiled. “It is true you are
not so tall, nor so broad of shoulder. But you have his face. His eyes.” The
Leas shook her head as if dispelling an old memory, her smile fond and a bit
sad. “Forgive me. I have not introduced myself. I am Eilinora, Alban’s mother.”

Alban’s mother. The woman for
whom the Leas king had jilted Kieran’s queen, starting the war responsible for
the deaths of countless Scathlan. Including Kieran’s father.

She had the nerve to stand before
him, speaking of his dead father with familiarity. Kieran felt cold despite the
thick quilt and the warmth of the hearth fire. The churning in his stomach had
nothing to do with his pain or the residue of the drug Alban had given him.

She came closer and sat in the
chair beside the bed. “I met your father when
he
was a travelling bard.
Kors would have been about the same age you are now. I was quite a bit younger,
younger than Alban. It all seems so long ago now.”

She was not as he had imagined
her. He’d pictured her as beautiful, yes, but always a cold, haughty beauty.

“He came to my father’s hall,
dark-haired and exotic, with a voice that could move stone to tears and music
that could shape worlds. I demanded to study with him. He and my father
indulged me. Winter was coming, and Kors was grateful enough to have a warm
hall for the season. My father saw him for the gentleman he was and knew he
would not take advantage of my girlish infatuation.

“And he did not, seeing it for
what it was and knowing I was far too young for such things. He turned my
affections aside with kindness and tact. I will always cherish that about him,
as much as I cherish the music he taught me.”

She had studied music with his
father, a precious gift that had been torn from Kieran before he was old enough
for his first real harp.

“He’s dead, you know,” Kieran
said harshly. “Your people killed him.”

“I know that he died in the war,”
she said, responding to his goad not with anger and affront but with gentle
sorrow. “So many good people did, Leas and Scathlan both. Perhaps if your
father had been less honorable, we would have been married—it is not unheard of
to marry so young, though it is uncommon and unwise. I might never have fallen
in love with Toryn, and the war might never have happened. But I cannot regret
my love, nor the son it got me.”

“Selfish thoughts, for one who is
a queen of her people.”

She only smiled at his
discourtesy. “Perhaps. Some nights I lie awake, thinking that same thought. And
still I cannot regret it. You are young yet, Kieran Korsson. Have you ever been
in love?”

He shook his head. In lust, yes.
A passing fondness here and there. Brona was his confidant and occasional
partner in crime, and he loved her like the sister he’d never had. But he
couldn’t imagine being “in love” with her, even if she weren’t his queen’s
daughter.

“Someday you will be. Come talk
to me then about my choices.”

Kieran looked away. For all the
ballads he could sing about love that forsook all the world for the sake of the
beloved, he wanted no part of a sentiment that led to oathbreaking and
kinslaying and the betrayal of one’s people.

“I didn’t come here to debate
ancient rights and wrongs,” she said. “Your father made this for me, but I play
very little now and, even when I was in practice, I never had the talent to do
it justice.”

She unwrapped the bundle in her
arms. A harp, sister to the one that lay in pieces within the ruined case. The touches
of gilt on the carved ornamentation were gold, not silver, and showed less of
the wear of long use, but he’d know it for his father’s work even if he hadn’t
been told its origins. His fingers flexed, longing to hold it.

She held it out to him, and his
hands reached out to take it of their own accord. He held it close to him,
caressing the wood, and then his hands found its strings and called forth a
melody.

It had been tuned recently but
inexpertly. He broke off playing and wondered where his tuning key had gotten
to. His eyes scanned the room. There, on the little bedside table. They must
have emptied his pockets before doing whatever they did with the ruined
breeches. He stretched for it, but it was just out of reach. He began to
strategize the best way to slide over while disturbing his ankle as little as
possible, but the Leas queen stepped up and handed it to him.

“I’ll leave the two of you alone
then,” she said.

He looked up. Surely he hadn’t
understood her. “You’re loaning her to me?”

She smiled; he could see her son
in that smile. “I’m giving her to you.”

The sudden rush of emotion caught
him unaware, tightening his throat. He ducked his face against the instrument
to hide the threatening tears.

Kieran should refuse. He should
not accept any gift from the Leas not demanded by the laws of hospitality on
their side and the reality of need on his.

His father’s harp.

“Thank you,” he whispered,
holding tight to the harp as though it might yet be taken from him.

The harp was fractionally smaller
than the one that had been his father’s. It felt strange in his arms, though he
suspected that once he got used to it this harp would be a better fit. He’d
made a harp as part of his apprenticeship, but had given it away, preferring
his father’s harp for all that he had to struggle to match his father’s reach.

He plucked out a simple tune.
This instrument was more responsive than his old one, taking less effort to
call forth the music. He tried another piece, a more complicated one that took
the harp through its full range of notes. Its voice was sweet but less powerful
than the one that had broken beneath him. That was a warrior-bard’s harp, a
harp worthy of his father, a harp that required a strong voice to match it.
Sometimes he had felt little up to the task, though he had received no
complaints from the audience, so he matched it well enough.

This harp, though, made for a
smaller musician with a voice more sweet than strong, this was the harp he
should have made himself, in the fullness of time and mastery.

It didn’t make up for the loss of
his father’s harp, the harp that had been his companion and his teacher and his
joy. But perhaps, in time, he could learn to love this one. A different love,
perhaps a lesser love, but love just the same.

#

Alban trudged up the stairs with
a dinner tray for the Scathlan. He could have had a servant deliver the meal,
but the Scathlan was his responsibility until he healed and could be gone from
their lands. Limiting Kieran’s contact with other Leas meant less chance of
friction between Kieran and his people, who were not thrilled to have a
cold-hearted, murdering Scathlan among them.

Though Kieran hardly fit the
image. More accuracy in Father’s comparison of the man to a lost pup, though
the Scathlan resented the implication. And when Kieran forgot his hatred and
his stiff Scathlan attitude, he had a warm smile and a ready laugh.

The music reached Alban before he
made the last turning of the stair. He knew of his mother’s gift to Kieran, and
if the man was a bard his skill should be no surprise, but what he heard was
magic. The notes fell liquid as a quicksilver mountain rill, sweet and
unbearably sad all at once. Alban’s chest filled with the ache of it.

Drawn by the harp, he finished
climbing up the staircase and paused, leaning against the door, unable to break
the spell by opening the door.

When the music stilled, he softly
turned the knob and slipped through the door. If the bard had heard him enter,
he made no sign of it, his eyes closed, cheek resting against the harp, face
transcendent and beautiful in the lamplight.

Some scuff or stir of unintended
sound must have alerted the Scathlan, or maybe it was just the subconscious
awareness of an intruder in the room. Kieran opened his eyes and looked at
Alban, and perhaps the spirit of the music was still on him because he didn’t
glare as an enemy nor give the wary, closed look of a prisoner. For one moment,
the ancient soul of music regarded Alban through Kieran’s eyes and, when it
departed, what replaced it was the bright, easy charm of the traveling
musician.

“Do the Leas have no servants,
that they must press their prince into the role? Or am I so fearsome a beast
that no servant dare approach me? In which case, it is a wonder that they would
risk the heir.”

The words could have been angry
or taunting, but his tone was too light and playful to give offense.

The harp had done wonders.

Alban opened his mouth to say
something about a host’s duty to provide company, a healer’s duty to check on a
patient. “I wanted to see how you were doing,” was what came out.

“Most of me is fine, other than
being stiff from lying abed and bored with my own company. The ankle is still
broken. I expect it will be for a while yet.”

“Sadly so. I fear I am not the
legendary Nolan, who could heal with a touch.”

“And I am not Bevin, who could
still the winds with a song. So we are on even footing.”

“I would say you are closer than
I.”

Kieran cocked his head, silently
asking for clarification.

Alban sat beside the bed. “I
listened for a while outside the door. You were amazing.”

“My father, I am told, was
better.”

“Your father had many more years
to perfect his craft.”

“Though not enough,” Kieran said,
voice tight with emotion. “Not nearly enough.”

Oh, mercy of healing. They were
back to the war. Yes, they were enemies but, given that they couldn’t be rid of
one another until Kieran’s ankle healed, couldn’t they just set it aside for
the moment? He braced for another blast of the Scathlan’s icy anger, but Kieran
just shook his head sadly and looked out the darkened window.

“I brought dinner. You should
eat.” Alban uncovered the tray.

“There’s enough there for half a
village,” Kieran said.

“Enough for two, anyway. I
thought I would join you.”

“Breaking bread with the enemy?”

“The war is over.”

“Peace was never declared.”

Alban sighed. “Can we call a
private truce between ourselves, then? Just for as long as it takes for you to
heal?”

He expected another
argument—Kieran seemed as born to conflict as he was to music. But after a long
moment, the Scathlan nodded. “A truce, then. For now.”

“Thank you.”

They ate in silence as Alban
desperately tried to come up with some topic of conversation that would not
renew hostilities.

“That song I heard you playing.
Does it have a name?”

Kieran smiled. “The Gold on the
Water. I wrote it for a stream where I like to sit and think. At a certain time
of day, the sun turns the water all silver and gold.”

“I did not think your kind cared
for the sun.” The words were out before Alban thought, and he could have kicked
himself. So much for the princely diplomacy he was raised to!

The Scathlan’s face hardened.
“Just because we love the earth and are wise enough to shelter in her arms does
not make us twisted creatures that cannot abide the sun.”

“No, of course not,” Alban agreed
hastily.

Though the tales his cousins told
him to frighten him as a child had implied as much. Alban’s parents had set the
story straight when he was older. It was important that he knew the world and
its history as it truly was to be a good prince. Once, the Scathlan and the
Leas had lived together as one people.

He floundered for a way to bring
the conversation back to a more civil track. “So that song, then, is your own
composition? It’s quite beautiful.”

The Scathlan narrowed his eyes
but said nothing. Did he not think Alban sincere in his compliment? Surely he
must know how stunning his talent was?

“Is that the sort of thing you
played in the mortal taverns?”

Kieran gave a short laugh. “No,
not hardly. Well, sometimes. If I have a sense that someone in the room might
appreciate it. Then I’ll play it, even if most of the audience wonder when I’ll
finish and get back to the real entertainment. Mortals like their songs quick
and lively and cheerful, for the most part.” He set aside his food to pick up
his harp for a quick snatch of a song with a rhythm like a frolicking horse,
singing a light verse about the joys of haying.

Even in so simple and uninspired
a song, Kieran’s voice hurt Alban with its beauty.

Kieran stilled the strings and
flashed a brilliant smile. “Fortunately, I am a quick study, and the first few
places I stopped were kind enough not to throw me out on my ear until I found
the way of the mortals’ music.”

“But how is that helping you? On
your quest for new songs, I mean. Surely you will not be playing mortal songs
in your court.”