The Bard of Bryn Doon

“The end,” I whispered. I hovered over my stool, fearing that my slightest movement might push him back into full wakefulness. I needn’t have worried.

“No, it is not,” he insisted in full voice.

“It isn’t what?”

Pyrà opened his right eye a slit. “The end. It isn’t the end.”

“What do you mean? There is no other.” I knew this telling as well as I knew my name. When I was Pyrà’s age, Ben and The SunQuest had been my favorite as well. And despite the uncountable generations that had passed since the great king’s death, despite the impassable distance between his part of the realm and ours, the story was as alive in my heart as it had been the night I first heard it and as unchanged as when he penned it, at least according to my grandfather. Some stories alter over time or according to the teller’s whims. This one was not one of them.

“Say that last bit again.”

“The end.”

He giggled. “No, silly. Before that.”

“With that, King Ben shut his eyes and fell into the deepest of contented sleeps?”

“Before that.”

“Now we are all bards?”

“Yeah.”

“Now we are all bards,” I repeated, “and I am at peace—”

“Don’t say it.”

“What?

The end, he mouthed. He sat quietly, deep in thought. “If we are all bards in Q’ntana…”

“Yes?”

He lay motionless for so long I thought he must have at last fallen asleep. Jeryn still stared at me, so I pinched out the candle flame, hoping the darkness would coax her as well toward the dreamwalkers.

A few moments later, Pyrà’s whispered voice cut through the black stillness.

“If we are all bards in Q’ntana,” he repeated, so softly that for a minim I thought I too had drifted off and was dreaming, “then I must be a bard. Is that not so?”

I reached down and stroked his face. “It is, little one.”

“You are certain?”

I nodded, then realized he could not see me. “If the story says it, then it must be so. Stories do not lie.”

“Then as the bard that I am,” he declared, “I say it is not the end. ‘There’s more to every story. Tell me how it continues.’ Isn’t that what Eulisha tells Toshar in The MoonQuest?”

How did he know that? In that story as well, he was always asleep before I reached that point in the telling.

“That is a different tale,” I replied, doing my best to keep my voice level. “At any rate, I know no more than what I have told you. That is all I have ever known of the Ben story. As far as I am aware, that is all that anyone knows. If there is a continuing, I can’t tell it to you. I don’t know it.”

A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, so near to our hut that it shone through the blanket and illuminated Pyrà’s face. He appeared to be deep in thought. Another flash, then another, this last one accompanied by the low rumbling that always presaged the storm’s worsening. He jerked up with the next clap of thunder and his eyes shot open. Even in the dark they shone with excitement. “I do,” he whispered. “I do.”