Felix left. He said he was hungry and tired, and said that the ring was none of his affair. Janus fished it out of his pouch and tentatively placed it on Yew’s desk.
Strangely, while the ring had been a source of comfort for him until now, he was already starting to associate it with the pain of having his hand burned. Part of him almost wanted Yew to take it away permanently. Maybe the whole thing with his memories would just work itself out. Come to think of it, he hadn’t had a blackout in weeks.
Yew picked up the ring and was examining it with the same expression he had when telling Felix he couldn’t leave even if he wanted. He lifted up his cap so his cap to get a better look at the stamp, revealing his gray eyes with dark bags beneath. Bizarrely, he then stuck out his tongue and licked the ring.
“Basso,” Yew muttered with a grimace.
“Is that whose ring it is?” Janus asked excitedly. He had not expected to get something as concrete as a name, and hearing one made forget the idea of just letting go of the ring and its associated mysteries.
Yew put the ring back on the desk and leaned against the wall with his chair, letting out an exaggerated sigh.
“This is more than I can deal with today,” said Yew. “Still, tell me how you got it.”
Janus told the story, from the field of mud to the monastery, when Yew stopped him.
“That is quite a tale, but I have the important parts now. So you have no idea what happened that year? And you came here because you thought we might know. I hate to break this to you…but we don’t. Or I don’t, and I know nearly everything.”
Janus’s heart sank. He didn’t know? The school for singers was a dead end? But that was impossible. No, no, there was definitely more there, this tricky, fox-faced man just wanted to keep his secrets. He just had to keep asking questions.
“Who is Basso?” said Janus, standing up and grabbing the edge of the desk. “You said ‘Basso’, I heard you!”
“Calm down, calm down,” Yew responded. “You’re not going to walk away from this with nothing. But this next part stays between us. Felix doesn’t get to know about it. Or Chretien, or Martin, or anyone else you meet here. This is a big one, kid. You came all this way, so you’ll get it…but keep in mind, you’re not a Bard. You’re not one of us. But maybe we can still be friends.”
Janus’s eyes were wide. “Yes, okay! I won't talk about it. I can keep secrets! Maybe I’m keeping some now!”
And so Janus learned the story of a man whose life was already inextricably linked to his own.
-----
Later that evening, Janus returned to to the room with with the bunk beds from earlier, which Yew called the Low Dormitory. Felix was sitting on his bed tuning his lute with an annoyed expression illuminated by candles And a hearth at the end of the room he hadn’t noticed.
“I’ll never use this thing as a weapon again, I swear…” Felix murmured as Janus reached the ladder.
Janus wasn't sure if Felix expected him to respond to this, and seeing he was a little tired, he ignored it and pulled up the blanket.
“Hey, did you get a good look at that book Yew showed us? The one with the pictures of men in it?” Felix asked from below.
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“I did. But I only got a few lines.”
“Did you get anything about the other kinds of ‘Crafters’? Like ‘Magi’?”
“It said, ‘Magi are affiliated with fire, and flame’s numen. By…’ That’s as far as I got.”
“Hmm…so if Bards are Air, Magi are Fire. That’s something. There was a fourth one too, wasn’t there?”
“Drycrafters. I know about them already. There are lots of them in Eirinn. They, um... well, it's kind of hard to explain.”
“Just tell me what you can.”
“So, Drycraft is like, picking herbs, sort of? Or that’s part of it. The other part is turning into animals. Or maybe it was stone? It’s been a long time since I heard about stuff from home.”
Felix was silent for a moment.
“I want to say that's hard to believe,” he said at length. “But we just fought an animal possessed by a man, so maybe? Though you did most of the fighting.”
“Oh! Yew told me some other stuff about Bards. I reckon I can tell you that part if you want. The rest is a secret though, the stuff about the ring. He made me swear on the Amores and I can't go back on that.”
Yew allowed Janus to swear on his personal copy in lieu of the Bible, which to Janus was just another book. If he was going to swear on one he might as well use his favorite. Really, making an oath seemed kind of pointless seeing as Yew could spy on anything he said from miles away, but he was in no position to object.
“I don’t know what Amores are,” said Felix. “But yeah, tell me.”
“Okay so: you can’t enchant yourself. That’s the big one.”
“The Dame…I mean, Madina, she did, on her hair. I saw it.”
“Yeah, I said the same thing, but Yew said hair is different because, it's not, you know, part of the body. Like, you can cut it and it doesn't hurt, or something. So it doesn't count.”
Janus heard Felix put away his lute in the trunk beside their bed. “So many inconsistent rules,” he muttered. “ I wouldn't be surprised if he just made half of them up.”
“So, the other big one” Janus continued, “is you can’t enchant the Air itself.”
“What? The Air?” Felix responded as he got into his bunk, making the whole bed creak. “He said Air is the Bard’s specialty, but we can’t do anything with it? That makes no sense.”
“Yew said it’s because Air is, ah…it’s what carries your message. It can’t carry a message to itself…and people can't really send messages to themselves, which gets you the first rule.”
“What a lot of nonsense,” Felix said with a yawn. “I bet every other word that guy says is a lie.”
“I don’t think he has any reason to lie about this”
Janus waited for a rejoinder, but he heard nothing but Felix’s rhythmic breathing.
I should sleep too, Janus thought, even though he wasn’t sleepy in the least. The dormitory was quiet and empty except for themselves and one other sleeper on the opposite end. It was almost night, but it wasn’t surprising that most Bards kept late hours.
“Quite a day,” said the Voice inside him.
“So you’re talking again,” Janus answered in his thoughts. “Yeah, I guess it was.”
“No answers, though. Not really”
Janus had learned that the ring belonged to a Bard and Song-Catcher named Basso who had gone missing in the great forest east of the Rhine a few years ago. But Basso had no connection to the Northmen or West Francia in general, and he was not the sort of person who would go around teaching a child to read.
“That’s true. But it was still a good day. I found out where the blackouts are coming from, but this time it didn’t happen. And even if the school for singers had nothing to do with me, it does now. Oh, and I met Felix today and we became friends.”
“…”
“Aren’t you going to say something like, ‘You barely know him’ or ‘You’re not really friends, he was just using you from the start’. You seem to enjoy making turns of phrase like, like before.”
Janus thought of when he had called the young man named Chretien a weakling, a thought he had never had when it passed his lips in Yew’s office
“I don’t object to calling that boy a friend, if you consider him one,” the Voice answered, ignoring the pointed comment. “He was at least honest about his cowardice. And it's better for your peace of mind to consider him one.”
“You know me so well, Master Voice. Probably because you are really just me, in the end.”
“Am I? Didn’t you just say, it’s not possible for a man to send a message to himself? And yet what are you doing now?”
“I don’t know. but—“
But before he could finish another thought, Janus fell asleep.