The Cygnet and the Firebird

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Then the Holder’s voice snapped across the chamber. “Meguet!”

  She turned, startled. The sword slipped out of her hold, rang against the stones like a challenge, and she saw beside it the rose that had flung itself off the outer wall into the room to lie burning in her shadow. She dragged her eyes away from it to the dais.

  Nyx had vanished.

  Dream shifted into time, became memory; she felt the blood leap out of her face. She reached down, snatched up the rose and began to run.

  * * *

  On the dais, the sorceress had felt the sudden shift of time.

  Intrigued, she simply sat still, not a difficult thing to do for one who had spent nights in the black deserts of Hunter Hold watching the constellations turn and the orange bitterthorn blossom open its fullest to the full moon. She saw Meguet bring up the sword in her hands, turn. The fair-haired stranger stopped at the threshold. Nyx’s attention focused, precise and fine-honed, on her cousin, who was waving a blade of sheep grass against the wind. Their voices carried easily across the eerie silence.

  She watched, unblinking, while the stranger came so close to Meguet only the swans on the sword hilt protected her. Light sparking off a jewel in Nyx’s hair would have alerted the mage; when he forced her to move, he would not see her. But he backed away from Meguet, passed around her, left her defending a breached threshold in a dream. He had paused, for some reason, to pick a rose off the tower vines. He dropped it in Meguet’s shadow. He passed among the councilors with no more interest in them than if they had been hedgerows. At the stairs, beneath the Blood Fox prowling between green swamp and starry night on the Delta banner, he hesitated. The power within the tower was complex, layered as it was with Chrysom’s ancient wizardry, household ghosts, the impress upon the centuries of every mage or Cygnet’s guardian who had left a trace of power lingering in time. Beneath that lay the entombed mage and the vast and intricate power within the Cygnet’s heart. He would not recognize that power, but he would be aware, like a man stepping to the edge of a chasm at midnight, that something undefined was catching at his attention. To separate what sorcery the stranger had come to find from the emanations of power and memory within the ancient stones would require at least a walk up the spiral stairs. When the stranger had felt his way through the lingering magic beyond the first curve, Nyx rose. She formed an image of Chrysom’s library in her mind, book and stone and rose-patterned windows, and stepped into it.

  She waited.

  The sight of Nyx reading at one of the tables made the stranger pause a heartbeat, as if his glance into the council chamber had snared her in his memories. But she gazed down at the page—a list of cows who had calved four hundred and ninety years before—with rapt attention. In that magic-steeped chamber he would not notice her mind working. He had reached his goal; his attention flicked like a needle in a compass toward what he had come to steal.

  The stone mantel above the fireplace was littered with thousand-year-old oddments of Chrysom’s that had somehow survived accidents, misplacements, pilfering and spring cleaning. Nyx had no idea what they were, besides volatile and unpredictable. The stranger glanced briefly at them. He stood in the center of the room, sending out filaments of thought like a spider spinning a web, into tables, hearth, book shelves, ancient weapons, cracked, bubbled mirrors, tapestries on the wall. He ignored Nyx, who, surrounded by mysteries, was reading about cows. He moved finally, abruptly, across the room to kneel at the hearth. His hands closed around one of the massive cornerstones that was crusted with centuries of ash. He tried to shift it. Now that he had shown her where it was, Nyx asked before he found it,

  “What in Moro’s name are you looking for in there?”

  He was so startled that he nearly leaped back into his own time. Parts of him faded and reappeared; a wing on his robe unfolded in the air and folded itself back into thread. He did not so much turn as rearrange himself through shifting moments of time to face her. She recognized the white animal then, from some of Chrysom’s ancient drawings: She thought he had imagined it, from some tale so old there was scarcely a word for it in Ro Holding. The mage, his face a few shades paler than dust, studied her while he caught his breath.

  He said abruptly, “You were in the hall, down there. I remember you now. Your eyes.”

  She lifted a brow. “You saw me watching you?”

  “No. I remember their color, when I passed the dais. Like a winter sky. You are a mage. It’s hard to tell, in this house.”

  “People who belong in this house recognize me easily.” She rested her chin on her palm, contemplating him. “You are a thief. You are not from Ro Holding, or I would know you by now; your remarkable power would have caught my interest.”

  “You have some remarkable powers yourself,” he said with feeling. “You nearly turned me inside-out, scaring me like that.”

  “I know a few things,” she said.

  “You don’t know what’s in this stone. You never knew anything at all was in there. I can name it. That makes it mine.”

  “Fine,” she said drily. “I will let you keep the name. You may take that and yourself out of this tower. How dare you bewitch this entire house and wander through it, pilfering things? What kind of barbaric country taught you that?”

  “Only one thing,” he pointed out. “One pilfering. That’s all I need. Something you have never needed. Let me take it and go. I’ll never return to Ro Holding again.”

  “You have more than theft to answer for. You disturbed my cousin Meguet. You threatened her and tried to coerce her.” He opened his mouth to answer, did not. Nyx continued grimly, running one of Calyx’s pens absently in and out of her hair, “You used sorcery against her.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was curious.”

  “You were cruel.”

  He drew breath, his eyes flicking away from her; she saw the blood gather under his tan. “I was never taught,” he said finally, “to make such fine distinctions. In my country, ignorance is dangerous; curiosity can be ruthless. But I would never have harmed your cousin. I only wanted to know—”

  “I know what you only wanted to know.” She paused, her own eyes falling briefly. She took the pen out of her hair and laid it down. She folded her hands in front of her mouth and looked at the stranger again. “But it’s none of your business. Now leave this house in peace.”

  He paused, his eyes narrowed faintly, light-filled, hidden. “You’re curious, too,” he said slowly. “You want this thing only because you don’t know what it is.” She nodded, unperturbed. For a moment their eyes held, calculating, and then, abruptly, he yielded, tossing up a hand. “I never expected to find this tower so well-guarded. And now I have run out of time. . . .”

  And he was gone, to her surprise, as easily and noiselessly as light fading on stones. Distant sounds wove into the air again: children shouting, cows lowing as they came in from the back pastures. The Holder, she remembered suddenly, would be discovering the empty chair beside her. But Meguet would reassure her. Nyx knelt at the hearth, touched the stone with her hands, and then with her mind. Neither moved it. She wrapped her thoughts around the stone, feeling its weight and texture, its size: a single block of charred marble in a hearth so old the stones were all sagging into one another. As she studied it, she felt something watching her. She lifted her head. A crow winging out of the mantel gazed at her out of its black marble eye.

  She reached up, touched the eye. Nothing moved. Above it, in relief, the Cygnet flew the length of the mantel through a black marble sky, its eye aligned with the crow’s eye. She had to stand on air to reach it. The Cygnet’s eye moved nothing. She stood thinking, her own eyes flicking across the scattered con-vocation of crows, until in all their black stone eyes the pattern formed.

  It was a constellation: All the eyes were stars, depicting the Cygnet flying across the night. A riddle, she thought, no one outside of Ro Holding would have guessed. She felt a rare impulse for caution, but dismissed it immediately,
too close to the mystery, too curious. One after another she touched the dark stars. The stone, its mortar sifting drily into the fire-bed, swung free.

  She barely had time to look into it, when something struck her—a wind, a thunderbolt—and flung her at the mantel and then into it among the crows. She cried out, startled; her mouth was stopped with stone. She concentrated, found the face of one of the crows and gathered herself like a thought in its stony mind and then into a point of light within its eye. Beneath her, she saw the mage looking into the hollow stone.

  Meguet, slamming the library door wide, knocked a shield off the wall. The mage, barely glancing up, flung a hand out impatiently, murmuring. The animal leaped from his breast, a sinuous blur of white that poured to the floor, bounded upward again, catching air with its wings, claws out, aimed at its prey. Meguet threw up her arm, wielding a rose against it. Something—the streak of red in the air, a sound she made—caught the mage’s attention. His head snapped around. For an instant the rose stunned him. Then he spoke sharply. The animal halted in mid-flight; white embroidery thread snarled in the air. Nyx dropped like a tear out of the crow’s eye, reappeared in front of Meguet. The air seemed to snarl in her wake as she dragged remnants of the mage’s spell from the air and threw them back at him. The mage began to fray in different directions at once, as if he were spun of fine threads of time, all unravelling. He cried something before he vanished. The cry skipped like a rock across water, snatched the gently falling thread. Cry and thread whirled away into nothing.

  Meguet sagged against the open doorway, felt air and brought herself upright. “Moro’s name,” she whispered. “What did you do to him?”

  Nyx, her eyes flooded with color, untangling herself from her sorcery, looked bewitched herself, something only half human. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never done that before.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I have no idea.” She drew a deep breath then; her eyes relinquished color, became familiar. She glanced toward the noise that had followed Meguet up the stairs. She touched her cousin, who, having fought some ancient and very peculiar sorcery not many weeks before, seemed oddly shaken by a tidy piece of work. “Stay here. Keep them out. If he comes back, this time not even that rose will stop him.”

  She crossed the room quickly, knelt at the hearth. Meguet, watching the air for a warning of color, was jostled by the first of the guard who, weapons drawn, flung themselves precipitously toward the threat to the house. Several of the more agile councilors were among them. Meguet heard the Holder’s voice farther down the stairwell.

  She turned briefly, stilled the guard with a gesture. They quieted, peering over Meguet’s shoulders at Nyx, who was gazing meditatively into a cracked, charred stone adrift from the hearth. The silence spread; subdued whisperings passed it back to the crowd at the top of the stairs, until it reached even the Holder. Meguet felt her coming in eddies of movement as the guard pushed a path clear for her. She joined Meguet, who was guarding yet another threshold, eyed her daughter, and went no farther.

  “What is it?” she asked. She had evidently flung a trail of pins down the stairs; most of her hair had fallen loose. She was frowning deeply; her black eyes were expressionless, wintry, but she kept her voice low. “Was she harmed?”

  “No. There was a strange mage, a thief, trying to steal something—she may still be in danger.”

  “Moro’s eyes, she knows enough sorcery to make Chrysom sit up in his tomb—why didn’t she just let him have what he wanted?”

  “Because she doesn’t know what it is.”

  “I thought she knew everything by now.”

  “She’s trying to be careful.”

  The Holder stared at her. “Really. And how did this thief get past the Gatekeeper?”

  “He slowed time.”

  The Holder’s response caused even Nyx, feeling through the stone for mage-traps, to raise her eyes. The Holder, still furious, lowered her voice mid-sentence, “—in the middle of the Holding Council, wandering among us at will, it’s unthinkable, intolerable. You couldn’t stop him?”

  Meguet sighed noiselessly. “I tried. All he wanted was something of Chrysom’s, nothing more serious. I had no power against sorcery. Nothing but a sword.”

  The Holder was silent, gazing at her quizzically. Her eyes dropped to the rose in Meguet’s hand. Meguet, staring at it, felt the color blaze into her face. She lifted her other hand, pushed it against her eyes, and saw the rose again, lying beside the sword in her shadow.

  She let it fall, as if a thorn had pricked her. “I was bewitched.”

  “Apparently,” the Holder said curiously. “But, I wonder, by what?”

  A murmuring rippled through the crowd at Meguet’s back; she looked up to see what the mage wanted so badly out of the stone that he had stopped the world.

  Nyx held it in her hand: a golden key.

  - Two -

  Nyx was crouched under a table in the mage’s library a day later, picking at a crack in the stone floor with her fingernail, when the firebird flew over the gate. Engrossed, she did not immediately hear the effect of its arrival. The Hold Councils and most of the household were at supper; strings and flutes from the third tower played a distant, ancient music in the peaceful twilight that wove among the reeds and drums from the cider house. Nyx, dressed for supper, had forgotten it. Cobwebs snagged in her dark hair; absently, she had rearranged the elaborate, jewelled structure until pins and strands of tiny pearls dangled around her face. Her black velvet dress was filigreed with dust; she had walked out of her shoes some time ago. Her eyes, usually the color of bog mist, were washed with lavender. Her face had taken on a feral cast; she seemed to be scenting even threads of smoke ingrained in the ancient stone.

  The disorderly clamor of people and animals finally intruded into her concentration. She straightened abruptly against the table top. Someone pounded on the door, then opened it.

  “Nyx!”

  It was Calyx, who, looking high and low in the shadows, finally looked low enough. Nyx, rubbing her head crossly, said, “I thought I locked that door. What in Moro’s name is that racket in the yard?”

  “It’s a bird,” Calyx said dazedly. “What are you doing under the table? And what have you—” Her voice caught; color washed over her delicate face. She found her voice again, raised it with unusual force. “Nyx Ro, what have you done with all the ancient household records I was studying?”

  “Over there,” Nyx said, waving at a cairn of books as she crawled out. “A bird. What bird?”

  “They’re all jumbled up! I had them all in order, a thousand years of household history—And look what you’ve done to this room!”

  A pile of chairs balanced on a tiny wine table; shields and furs and tapestries hung in midair above their heads; bookshelves climbed up the stairs to the roof. Spell books, histories, accounts, diaries, rose like monoliths from the floor. Nyx, her arms folded, stood as still among them, eyes narrowed at her sister.

  “Calyx,” she said softly. “What bird?”

  “Look at this mess! And look at your face! There are black smudges all over it.”

  “That would be from the chimney. Calyx—”

  “You put your face up the chimney?”

  “Evidently.”

  “Why,” Calyx asked more precisely, “did you put your face up the chimney?”

  “Because I’m looking for something,” Nyx said impatiently. “Why else would I crawl up a chimney?”

  “I have no idea. I thought, after studying sorcery for nine years, you’d pull an imp out of the air to do it for you. Maybe I can help you. What is it we’re looking for?”

  “Most likely a book.”

  Calyx stared at her. “Did you,” she asked ominously, “look on the bookshelves?”

  “Oh, really, Calyx.” She wiped at ash with her sleeve, her breath snagging on a sudden laugh. “You do keep dwelling on nonessentials. After studying sorcery for nine years, I have learned how to
clean up a room.” She picked her way through the chairs to the windows. From that high place, she could see the parapet wall linking the seven white towers, most of the cottages clustered beyond the wall, and the vast yard with its barns and forges and craft houses that dealt with the upkeep of the household and the lands that rambled endlessly within the outer wall. One thing caught her eye instantly at that busy hour.

  “The Gatekeeper is not at the gate.”

  And then she saw the flash of fire that scratched the air with gold and turned a rearing cart horse into a tree with diamond leaves.

  * * *

  Meguet had been sitting with the Gatekeeper in his turret when the bird flew over the gate. Dressed in corn-leaf silk the color of her eyes, strands of tiny jewels braided into her rippling hair, she had abandoned guests and musicians in the supper hall, pulled on her oldest boots and wandered into the summer twilight to talk to the Gatekeeper. She had seen nothing of him the day before; at the Holder’s request she had stood watch in Chrysom’s library most of the evening, while Nyx puzzled over the key she had found. Some of the gossip had evidently found its way to the gate; as she entered the turret, the Gatekeeper handed her a rose.

  She eyed him; his lean, sun-browned face, with its silvery-green swamp-leaf eyes, was expressionless. She said, “It was red, not white.”

  “I hoped you’d like this better.” Then she saw the beginnings of his tight, slanted smile, and she sighed and slid onto the stone bench next to him.

  “I was hoping no one had noticed. Does gossip blow on the wind across this yard? Or do you hear through stone?”

  “People like tales.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “For nine days you’ve stood at that tower door with a sword in your hands. When you suddenly toss it aside for a rose, it causes comment. What was he like, this mage who gave you the rose?”