“So you’ll live to raise wise grandsons like yourself,” said Peter, nodding approval. He tapped the coin with his fingernail. “Was that one I saw asking after us?”

  “Aye, he was. Where you hailed from. Whither bound.”

  “And you told him, of course.”

  “Not I. But anyone with ears in Boroughbridge could have done so. You’ve not kept it any close secret.”

  “That’s true. Well, I’m obliged to you, landlord. The boy and I have a mind to ride horseback the rest of our way. Can you manage us two hacks to ‘The Duke’s Arms’ in Selby Street?”

  “I can that, and gladly,” said the landlord, quite at his ease once more. “A quarter apiece they’ll cost you.”

  Peter nodded, opened his purse once more, joined a second half-royal to the first and pushed them across the table top. “You’ll not be out of pocket by our stay, I think.”

  The landlord shrugged and pocketed the coins. “They weren’t an over-thirsty lot, but there were plenty of them.”

  That night the old tale-spinner’s dreams were troubled by shapes of vague ill-boding, but the shadows they cast soon lifted next morning as he urged his hired horse at a trot out of Boroughbridge along the ancient road to York. Frosty icing glittered as the early sunlight splintered off diamond sparks from the hedgerow twigs; frozen puddles crackled briskly beneath the clopping hooves; and breath of horse and rider snorted up in misty plumes along the eager nipping air.

  “Hey, Tom, lad!” Peter called back over his shoulder. “How’s it feel to be entering York in style? This is the life, eh? Beats legging any day!”

  Tom shook his own nag into an arthritic canter and eventually lumbered up alongside. “No one can hear us out here, can they, Peter?”

  “What about it?”

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

  “Well, go ahead, lad. Ask away.”

  “It’s about the White Bird.”

  A light seemed to go out in Peter’s eye. He sighed. “Well, go on, if you must,” he said. “Get it off your chest.”

  “Just before he died Morfedd told me that the Bird will come down and drive the fear out of men’s hearts. But he didn’t say how. Do you know, Peter?”

  “I thought I’d made it pretty clear what I think, Tom. Why don’t you just let it alone, lad?”

  “But you know the story, Peter.”

  “I know how it ends,” said the old man grimly.

  “The other bird, you mean?”

  “Aye, lad. The Black Bird. Me, I prefer my stories to have happy endings.”

  Tom rode for a while in silence considering this. “Maybe it was a happy ending,” he said at last.

  “Not the way I heard it, it wasn’t.”

  “Then maybe we should all hear it different,” said Tom. “Perhaps that’s what Morfedd meant. He said true happiness was simply not being afraid of anyone at all. He called it the last secret.”

  “Did he, indeed? Well, let me tell you I’m a great respecter of Lord Fear. That’s how I’ve lived so long. If you want to do the same you’d better start by speeding all thoughts of the White Bird clear out of your mind-or into your pipe if you must. I’ve more than a suspicion we’ll find plenty of ears in York ready pricked for heresy, and plenty of tongues ready to run tattle with it. It’s a dangerous time to be dreaming of the White Bird of Kinship, Tom. Have I made myself plain enough?”

  “Aye, that you have,” said Tom and laughed cheerfully.

  As they clattered over Hammerton Bridge a solitary horseman dressed in doublet and breeches of black leather, wearing a studded steel casque helmet, and with a lethal-looking metal crossbow slung across his shoulder, emerged from behind a clump of trees and came cantering after them. “Good morrow, strangers,” he hailed them civilly. “You ride to York?”

  “Aye, sir,” said Peter. “To York it is.”

  “For the Fairing, no doubt.”

  Peter nodded.

  “You buy or sell?”

  The old man doffed his cap. “A little of both, sir. Old Peter of Hereford, Tale-Spinner. At your service.”

  “Well met indeed, then!” cried the bowman. “How better to pass an hour than by sampling your goods, Old Peter. And the lad? Does he sing, or what?”

  “He pipes a burden to my tales, sir.”

  “A piper too, eh! Truly fortune beams upon me.” The stranger drew back his lips in a smile but his eyes remained as cold and still as slate pebbles on a river bed. “So, what have we on offer?”

  Peter rubbed his chin and chuckled. “On such a morning as this what could suit better than a frisky love story?”

  “Nay, nay, old man! I fear you might set me on so hard my saddle would come sore. I’ll have none of your rutty nonsense. In truth my tastes are of a different order. Inclined more toward the fable you might say.” The smile was gone as though wiped from his face with a cloth. “I’ll have The White Bird of Kinship, Tale-Spinner, and none other.”

  Peter frowned. “Faith, sir, I’m famed to know a tale for every week I’ve lived, but that’s a new one on me. No doubt I have it by some other name. That happens sometimes. If you could, perhaps, prompt me….”

  “We’ll let the lad do that for us, old rogue. Come, sprat! Put your master on the right road!”

  Tom smelt old Peter’s fear, rank as stale sweat, and felt a quick stab of pity for the old man. He looked across at the bowman and smiled and shook his head. “I do have an old hill tune of that calling, sir. But it has no words to it that I know. If you wish I can finger it for you.” And without waiting for a reply he looped his reins over his pommel, dipped into his knapsack and took out his pipe.

  The bowman watched, sardonic and unblinking, as the boy first set the mouthpiece to his lips then turned his head so that he was facing the newcomer directly across the forequarters of Peter’s horse. Their glances met, locked, and, at the very instant of eye-contact, the boy began to play.

  Whiteness exploded in the man’s mind. For an appalling instant he felt the very fabric of the world rending apart. Before his eyes the sun was spinning like a crazy golden top; glittering shafts of light leapt up like sparkling spears from hedgerow and hilltop; and all about his head the air was suddenly awash with the slow, majestic beating of huge, invisible wings. He felt an almost inexpressible urge to send a wild hosanna of joy fountaining upwards in welcome while, at the same time, his heart was melting within him. He had become a tiny infant rocked in a warm cradle of wonder and borne aloft by those vast unseen pinions, up and up to join the blossoming radiance of the sun. And then, as suddenly as it had come, it was over; he was back within himself again, conscious only of a sense of desperate loss-of an enormous insatiable yearning.

  The bowman sat astride his horse like one half-stunned, the reins drooping from his nerveless fingers, while the old man turned to the boy and whispered: “What in the name of mercy have you done to him? He looks like a sleep-walker.”

  Tom ran his strange forked tongue across his upper lip. “I thought of him like I think of the dogs,” he murmured, “not as a man at all. Perhaps he wanted to believe me. Do you know who he is?”

  “Aye. He’s a Falcon. Each Minster has a brood of them. They have a swift and deadly swoop. I glimpsed one of them at the telling last night.” He turned back with a broad guileless smile to the bowman. “Well, sir,” he cried cheerfully, “now you’ve sampled the lad’s skill, how about a taste of mine? Myself I’m in the mood for a good spicy wenching tale, if you’re agreeable?”

  The man nodded abstractedly and the old storyteller launched himself without further ado into a tale of lechery whose bones had been creaking long before Rome was young and yet which, for all its antiquity, lacked neither spirit nor flavor.

  By the time the last score had been settled, the last knot tied, the three riders were within a strong bowshot of the city walls. Peter reined up his horse and doffed his hat with a fine flourish. “Your servant, sir,” he said. “And may your nights be as lively as my tale.”

  The man reached absently toward the purse that hung at his belt but the old man stopped him with a lordly gesture. “Your personal recommendation is all we crave, sir,” he said. “We come to work the Fair.”

  “So you shall have it,” said the bowman. “I give you the word of Gyre.” He stood up in his stirrups and looked back along the road they had ridden as though he were searching for something he could no longer see. Finally he shook his head, turned back, and glancing at Tom, said: “I am sorry I didn’t get to hear your piping, lad. Some other time, eh?”

  Tom nodded and smiled and patted the neck of his horse.

  In brief salute the bowman touched his left shoulder with his clenched right fist. “Well met, then,” he said. He shook his reins, kicked his heels into his horse’s flanks and cantered off toward the west gate of the city.

  As they watched him go, Peter muttered uneasily: “Was that his idea of a joke, d’you think?”

  “No,” said Tom. “He meant it.”

  “But he can’t have forgotten.”

  “I think he has,” said Tom. “He remembers something, but he’s not sure whether we had anything to do with it. Didn’t you see him looking back along the road? Perhaps he thinks I offered to play for him and he refused.”

  “And he won’t remember?”

  “I don’t think so. Not unless I want him to.”

  “I once knew a man in Italy who could entrance people,” said Peter. “But he did it with words.”

  Tom nodded. “Morfedd could do that too.”

  “He did it to you, did he?”

  “Often.”

  “And how do you do it?”

  “I tell them too-only without words.”

  “Tell them what?”

  Tom looked into the old man’s eyes and smiled faintly. “I told him about the White Bird,” he said. “He wanted to believe me, so it was easy.”

  Peter stared at him. “Do you know how you do it?”

  “I know when someone wants me to.”

  “But how, lad? What is it you do?”

  Tom sighed faintly. “I join myself to them. I build a bridge and walk to them over it. I take their thoughts and give them back my own.” He glanced at Peter and then away again. “One day I’ll do it for everyone, not just one or two.”

  “And Morfedd taught you that, did he?”.

  “He taught me how to find the right keys. A different one for each person. But I believe there’s a master-key, Peter. One to unlock the whole world. I call that key the White Bird.”

  Peter shook his head slowly. “Well, I’m scarcely wiser than I was before, but I’m mighty glad you did it. I had an ill vision of the two of us lying spitted at the roadside like a couple of sparrows. That little toy he carries at his back can put a bolt clean through an oak door at thirty paces.”

  Tom laughed. “I liked the story anyway.”

  The old man treated him to an enormous wink. “Come on, lad!” he cried. “We’re still alive so let’s make the most of it! My throats as dry as a brick oven.” Slapping his horse’s haunch with the reins he led the way into the city.

  York was the first city that Tom had ever laid eyes on. As soon as he had recovered from his initial astonishment he found it put him irresistibly in mind of an ancient oak that grew on a hillside near his home in Bowness. Known locally as “the Wizard’s Oak” this once lordly tree had been completely shattered by lightning and given up for dead. Then, a year later, it had begun to generate a few leafy shoots and, within ten years, had become a respectable living tree again. Now as he wandered about the bustling streets and squares and nosed into the dark alleys, Tom’s sharp eyes picked out the dead skeleton branches of ancient York still standing amidst the new, and he found himself wondering about the race of men, long since dead and forgotten, who had erected these incredible buildings. He even conceived the odd notion that the builders must themselves have been shaped differently from ordinary men and women, not rounded but squared off and pared to sharp edges, as if their gods had first drawn them out on a plan with rule and line and then poured them into molds, row upon row, all alike like bricks in a brick works.

  Yet even underneath those stark bones he perceived faint traces of a structure yet more ancient still: great blocks of gray granite cemented into the foundations of the city’s walls and, here and there, twisting flights of stone steps worn thin as wafers by the feet of generations all hurrying on to death long long ago. Once, wandering near the Minster he had seemed to sense their hungry ghosts clustering all about him, imploring him with their shadowy charnel mouths and their sightless eyes to tell them that they had not lived in vain. He had fled up on to the city walls and, gazing out across the Sea of Goole, had tried to imagine what it must have been like to live in the days before the Drowning. He strove to visualize the skies above the city filled with Morfedd’s “metal birds” and the great sea road to Doncaster thronged with glittering carts drawn by invisible horses. But in truth it was like believing that the world travelled round the sun-something you accepted because you were told it was so-and a good deal less real than many of Old Peter’s tales. Even the importunate ghosts of the dead were more alive in his imagination as they came flocking grayly in upon him, unaccountable as the waves on the distant winter sea.

  Staring into the setting sun, lost in time, he heard, deep within himself, yet another fragment of the melody he was always listening for. At once the smothering weight lifted from his heart. He turned, and skipping lightly down the steps, headed back to the inn.

  Late on Christmas Eve a message was brought up to Clerk Seymour at the Chapter House that a man was below asking to speak with him on a matter of urgency.

  The Clerk, a gray, cobwebby man with a deeply lined face and bad teeth, frowned tetchily. “At this hour?” he protested. “What does he want?”

  “He didn’t say, except that it was for your own ear.”

  “Oh, very well. Send him up.”

  A minute later there were steps on the wooden stairs, a deferential knock at the door and Old Peter appeared on the threshold with his hat in his hand. “Clerk Seymour?”

  “Aye, sir. And who are you?”

  Old Peter closed the door carefully behind him and came forward with hand outstretched. “Old Peter of Hereford,” he said. “Tale-Spinner by calling. You and I are related by wedlock through my niece Margot.”

  “Ah, yes. To be sure. You are bringing her boy to me. Well met, cousin.” They shook hands formally and the Clerk gestured the old man to a seat. “I have heard many speak highly of your skill, Tale-Spinner,” he said. “But am I not right in thinking you are over a week in York already?”

  The old man made a self-deprecating gesture. “Truly I would have called sooner,” he said, “but I guessed these weeks would be a busy time for all at the Chapter. Is it not so?”

  The Clerk smiled faintly. “Aye, well, we are none of us idle at the Mass. That goes for you too, I daresay. You will take a cup of wine with me?”

  “That I will and gladly, cousin.”

  The Clerk fetched cups and a stone bottle from a cupboard. “And how goes the Fairing for you?” he inquired amiably.

  “Faith I’ve never known one like it,” said Peter. “I vow I could fill Cross Square four times over and I had the voice to carry. They flock in like starlings.”

  The Clerk poured out the wine carefully, re-corked the bottle, handed a cup to Peter and lifted his own in silent toast. Having taken a sip he resumed, his chair. “You are not working alone, I gather.”

  “Ah, the lad you mean?” Peter nodded indulgently. “Well, he pleaded with me to let him take a part and I hadn’t the heart to deny him. He has a mighty engaging way with him has Tom. But of course you’ll know that.”

  “Not I,” said the Clerk. “I’ve never set eyes on the boy. In truth, until Margot’s letter I’d thought he was another girl. What is it he does with you?”

  Peter licked a trace of wine from his lips. “I let him pipe a burden to my tales. A snatch or two here and there. It helps things along and it keeps him happy.”

  “He does it well?”

  “I’ve had to coach him, of course. But he learns quickly. He has a good ear for a tune.”

  “Then it’s clear that I must make time to come and hear you.” The Clerk took another sip at his wine. “You see the Fairing out?”

  “Aye. I had thought to leg to Doncaster for the New Year but while things go so well…”

  Clerk Seymour nodded, wondering when the old man was going to get round to saying whatever it was that he had come to say. Surely it was not just to pass the time of day? “To Doncaster,” he murmured. “Aye, well…”

  Old Peter set down his cup and plucked his lower lip thoughtfully. “Tell me, cousin Seymour,” he said casually. “The Chapter School. Am I right in thinking they take lads of all ages?”

  “Well, within reason, yes, that is so.”

  “Fourteen years would not be thought too old?”

  “By no means. But surely I understood Margot to say…”

  “Yes, yes,” said Peter quickly. “Young Tom won’t span fourteen for a five-month yet. What I am anxious to know, cousin, is whether his place could be held open for him till then?”

  “I’m not sure that I…”

  “This would be in the nature of a personal favor to me, you understand, and naturally I should be prepared to recompense the Chapter for any inconvenience it might cause.” The old man hesitated a mere half second, glanced sharply sideways and added, “Fifty royal?”

  The Clerk did his best to conceal his astonishment and did not succeed. After all, the sum mentioned was as much as he earned in a six-month! He stared at Peter. “Forgive me, Tale-Spinner,” he said. “But do I understand you right? You wish to postpone the boy’s entry till he reaches his fourteenth year?”

  Peter nodded.

  The Clerk waved a hand. “Why this, I’m sure, could easily be arranged. But why?”

  Old Peter sank back in his chair and let out his breath in a long sigh. “Cousin Seymour,” he said, “you see before you an old man, friendless, alone in the world, with the final curtain about to come down upon his last act. For this month past I have found in Tom’s constant companionship a source of solace and comfort I had not dreamed could be mine. My sole wish is to make one last farewell tour through the Seven Kingdoms and then back home to Cumberland and the long rest. Without Tom I could not face it. With him along it will be my crowning triumph. There now, that is the answer to your question.”