The Bards of Bone Plain – Patricia A. McKillip

Phelan Cle is back looking for his father. Jonah wanders- looking for lost treasures. He’s even got the Princess Beatrice (youngest daughter of the king) working on the crew that helps him dig things up around the capital city of Cearlu. Phelan’s never known what Jonah’s been searching for.

Phelan himself is in his last year at the bard’s school. Despite not being able to play, it’s been Jonah’s wish for Phelan to study there, and he’s just a final paper away from his mastery. Not really knowing what to write about, he chooses Bone Plain – the mythical site of the bard’s challenge, which only two bards have faced, and one lost.

The bard that lost was Nairn – a self taught pig farmer who lived at the time when King Oroh (ancestor of the current king) conquered the lands that would become the kingdom of Belden. Oroh brought his bard Declan with him, and Declan had powers that Nairn could not understand. When Declan eventually founds a bard’s school, Nairn goes there, to try and understand.

This is typical McKillip, where the sum of the stories are much more than the parts, and the bare outline can’t possibly give justice to the many layers of what’s actually going on. I usually hate trying to write these up, because they’re almost impossible to adequately describe without more or less rehashing the entire book.