The Cygnet and the Firebird

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Following the firebird, my lord?” Magior asked. His eyes went back to her.

  “No doubt. For whatever his purposes. But Brand—was he well? What did he say? Does he remember anything? How could he speak at all?”

  “Before he encountered Nyx Ro, he said that he could not even remember his name, where he was born, or when. The spell permits him to speak only at moonrise, until midnight.”

  “Strange,” he breathed. “And this mage helped him remember?”

  “Enough so that she was able to bring him here. But he still does not remember the exact circumstances of the spell, and he still changes; he is a bird, my lord, except for those scant hours.” She shook her head. “It is an impossible piece of mage-work. We did our best with it. He was becoming extremely impatient, waiting for you. I’m sure that’s where they have gone: to search the Luxour for you.”

  “Yes.” The lines were deepening on his face again: He still wore the dust of the Luxour, he had an unruly mage in his pocket, it seemed, and now a firebird to find among the dragons. He looked at Meguet. “Your cousin, Nyx Ro—is it likely she would have been so impulsive?”

  “Oh, yes,” Meguet sighed. “But only to help Brand. She would never harm him. I watched her working with that spell in Chrysom’s tower. She may not be disciplined—she trained herself—but she is fascinated by what she can’t do, what she doesn’t know. If Brand told her anything at all about the Luxour, she would have felt compelled by more than the firebird to go there.”

  “I see,” he said, unsurprised, and Meguet realized what she herself had conjured in his mind: a kindred spirit.

  She added, “Nyx must have come also to look for me. I vanished with Rad Ilex; Brand would have told her to look for him in Saphier.”

  “My lord?” Magior said abruptly, startled, staring at Meguet. “Is this another mage from Ro Holding?”

  “She says she is not a mage,” Draken said, though his eyes held Meguet’s a moment before he answered, and there was the faintest thread of curiosity in his voice. “What we have here is the mage’s cousin, Meguet Vervaine. I found her wandering across the Luxour: She had been pulled into Saphier by Rad Ilex.”

  Magior’s brows rose. “How terrible,” she said blankly. “But, my lord, why?”

  “It’s complex,” Meguet answered, trying to keep a straight course, in this land of tangled paths and shifting landscapes, toward essentials. “What I need to do above all is to find Nyx and go home. She is heir to Ro Holding, and the Holder will not sleep until she returns.”

  “And we have kept her three days,” Magior said worriedly. “And now she is in the Luxour. My lord—”

  “I’ll find her,” Draken said. “Even in the Luxour, I can find my own son.” He paused, thinking with an effort; he closed his eyes briefly, concentrating on a spell, or measuring his own weariness. He had been awake at night, listening for Rad’s footfall, as well as Meguet.

  She said, “I will come.”

  “There’s no need.”

  “I need to come.”

  He shook his head. “You’ll slow me,” he said in-arguably. “You have no conception of the difficulties of the Luxour. Even mages can rarely find one another. The great stones seem to deflect power, or attract it, draw it in. The land changes spells as it changes its face.”

  “You found Rad Ilex,” she reminded him, and felt concentration crumbling all over the silent hall. He said, lifting a hand to catch the mage-light as it fell from the dragon’s claws,

  “I fought the Luxour for him and won. With your help.”

  “My lord—” Magior whispered.

  “Yes,” he said tautly. “I have brought Rad Ilex with me. And now I must go back and find Brand. Magior, see that Meguet Vervaine is treated with utmost courtesy.”

  “But what will you do with Rad Ilex?” she breathed. “What will contain him while you are gone?”

  “Where is he?” Meguet asked, expecting no answer, but the entire hall waited, without a sound, for his response.

  “I trapped him,” Draken said, “in a time-path I made. I tricked him into running down it, and then closed the path upon itself. It has no beginning and no end. I can hold him there, while I am away,” he added to Magior. “It will be draining, but not impossible.”

  “My lord, take the mages to help you—at least a few!”

  “No. We’ll only confuse one another. I need to find Brand and Nyx Ro quickly.” He handed Magior the mage-light; she stood gazing at him, an old woman with a star between her hands. “Keep the house orderly, and do not trouble Meguet Vervaine with details. Show her the gardens. Let her rest. Ask her no questions beyond what is customary to reveal the status of a stranger in the house. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “I will answer everything else when I return.”

  He vanished; so did the dragon above their heads. Meguet, sagging suddenly on her feet, was grateful for Magior’s firm hold, as well as her silence, as she led Meguet through a thicket of curious gazes. Exhausted as she was, she saw the silver enclosing every wrist; everyone, it seemed, was imprisoned in the delicate weaves of time, on its never-ending paths. She made nothing more of it then, barely aware of washing, eating, in a chamber so full of light it seemed made entirely of gold. The light hardened into the golden face of the Luxour just before she fell asleep.

  She woke hours later at dusk, to a vision of silver. She almost cried out, but she had no strength even for that. The tangle of silver floated, glowing, in midair, its lines blurred in the soft shadows. Rad Ilex, standing in the midst of endless layers of paths, put his finger to his lips. Half his face was masked in blood, the other half gilded with the dust of the Luxour.

  He whispered, “Meguet.” His voice seemed to come from unexpected, ghostly places. She swallowed, felt the blood beating through her. “Where is he? Where did he go?”

  “To find Brand,” she answered finally. “And Nyx. They went looking for him.”

  “Nyx.”

  “She came here.”

  “To Saphier?” He moved slowly, as if caught in hard, rushing currents. He changed, she saw with horrified fascination, in unpredictable ways: He grew smaller, he lost perspective, a limb would disappear around an invisible corner, reappear. “Where is he?” he repeated.

  “In the desert.”

  He said, “Ah,” very slowly; the sound died on an ebbing wave. “The desert distracted him.”

  “What?”

  “He has lost hold of me a little. So I came looking for you. I need help.”

  “I won’t argue that,” she whispered, still amazed. “But why me? I’m no mage. And the last I saw of you, you tried to kill me.”

  “I was trying to save you. If you hadn’t run, Draken would have attacked us both—”

  “You lied to me. You said there was nothing more dangerous than lizards in the night.”

  “I didn’t lie.”

  “Draken killed something. With teeth. Beside my bare foot.”

  She heard him sigh. “Meguet. Would you rather be in here with me? I would have said anything to make you run. Besides, I didn’t lie. Draken lied. He made that thing, then killed it. I know how his mind works. Can you get your own mind off small details for the moment?”

  She put her hands to her eyes, still saw him floating in the dark behind her eyelids. “I was awake for two nights, terrified of those small details. Of such details are great lies formed. What do you want from me? Draken will bring Nyx back with him, and she and I will leave. If there is a threat to Ro Holding, we will face it there.”

  “Of course there’s a threat. You’ve been in this house. Armed mages wear the paths of time on their wrists, and one of those paths, as the firebird has shown, leads to Ro Holding.”

  Her hands slid down slowly to her mouth. The blood drained out of her face; the room darkened a little, a shadow forming against the dusk: the dragon, hunting. “But why?” she whispered.

  “Saphier breeds warriors. War i
s our history, our heritage. You saw Brand fight me. The movements of his attack are as old as Saphier. Draken is a double-edged sword: the warrior-mage. His eye turned to Ro Holding when he found Chrysom’s writings here. I showed—” He stopped abruptly; she heard his voice shake. “I showed him the path to Ro Holding.”

  “You what?”

  “Inadvertently. He discovered from Brand that I used to visit Chrysom. That I was searching for that key. That the key held in it paths of time beyond Draken’s knowledge. He wants conquest, even through time, and he wants the dragons’ power to make himself invincible.”

  “He wouldn’t need much,” she said numbly, “in Ro Holding.”

  “He wants that key. Does Nyx have it here in Saphier?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “If she does, and Draken realizes that, she is in terrible danger.”

  “That key.” She felt again the sudden, blind anger at the confusion, tangled as the winds on the Luxour blowing from every direction, into which he inevitably led her. “Always that key. Draken never mentioned it. You want it. You told me that I would be in terrible danger from Draken. That he would sense my odd powers and take my bones apart to analyze them. All he did in the desert was take away my shoes. All he’s done to me here is give me a bed to sleep on instead of a stone.”

  “He’s like that. He’ll bide his time. And then he’ll attack. Meguet,” he said urgently, at her silence. “You must help me. You can help me escape this. There’s not a mage in this house who would dare raise a finger against Draken Saphier. But you would never attract his attention. You must help me, set me free to help Nyx.”

  “Help her!” Her voice nearly rose above a whisper. “All you and Nyx do is fight. I won’t free you to go and steal that key and leave her wandering alone in a desert—”

  “She knows the path to Ro Holding. She got herself here.”

  “I don’t know how she got here. You tell me this, you tell me that—and then you tell me that I know what you have told me!”

  “You know the firebird.” He was breathing quickly, the time-paths blurring around him. “Its face is the true face of Saphier, and its cry the only truth. Meguet.” His face darkened; he seemed to flatten, an upright shadow. “Think. Help me. I’ll come back when I can. If I can.” The paths vanished, swallowed in Saphier’s night. Only his voice lingered, urgent, imperative, to become her own voice as his faded. “Choose.”

  - Thirteen -

  Nyx stood with the firebird in the Luxour.

  The firebird had perched above Nyx’s shoulder on a ledge of rock. It watched a splash of milky silver spilling into the sky above the distant mountains. Its beak opened; a sapphire dropped. It cried jewels now and then instead of fire: a single blood-red garnet, an emerald. It left, to Nyx’s bemused eye, a gleaming trail across the desert, as if it marked a path for Draken Saphier to follow.

  She sensed power everywhere, as if the entire desert were under a spell, and its winds and piles of stone and vast stretches of nothing might change, at moonrise, into something completely different. It seemed always on the verge of changing. Stones shifted beyond eyesight; shadows tumbled across the ground, wind-blown, attached to nothing. Not even the ground felt solid; it seemed pocketed with echoing chambers, where things stirred, breathed, dreamed. Odd smells streaked the winds: sulphur, damp earth, even water, or some ancient memory of water. In the light of the rising moon the great piles of stone here and there took shape: They were dragon-bones and palaces; they reared, spread their wings; doors opened, windows filled with light.

  The firebird cried a blue topaz. The moon slid free of the dark, jagged line of mountains. Nyx, watching, saw the bird seized, pulled almost into something else at the moment of transformation. Its eye narrowed, became slitted; its feathers froze into hard, smooth scales. And then Brand slid down off the rocks to her side, unsurprised, by now, at where he found himself under any risen moon.

  “Did you feel that?” Nyx asked, amazed at the random, mindless power that had stopped for a moment to toy with a spell no one else could even grasp.

  “Feel what?” Brand asked. He scanned the dark, looking for mage-fires, for his father to step out from behind a rock.

  “Something emerged between the firebird and you. Only for a moment.”

  He looked startled, torn between hope and alarm. “What?”

  “Almost like a—” She paused, trying to remember what it was almost like: the tapering head, the hard, tight skin. The word caught. “Dragon.”

  He was silent, staring at her. Then he turned, impatient, frustrated. “Where is my father? I hoped the firebird would find him, fly to him the way it flew to you.”

  “I doubt if even the firebird—whatever powers it has that you don’t—could isolate one mage in this windstorm of power.”

  He shook his head a little, still searching. “I just see desert,” he murmured. “Rocks. The wind feels like wind. It smells like dragons’ breath. That must be the hot springs.” He looked at her. “Now what? Do we just walk?”

  “I’m thinking,” she said absently, wondering if the whole of the Luxour were on the verge of turning itself into a dragon. In the next moment, it would become; but this moment, in terms of its own time, had begun before Ro Holding had a name, and might last until its name was forgotten. “No wonder Chrysom came here. . . . He must have loved this place.” She drew the ivory ball out of her pocket, opened Chrysom’s book. Many of its paths, she found, began and ended in the Luxour; it seemed riddled with secrets. “Yes,” she said finally, choosing one. “We just walk.”

  The path brought them to the springs. The water churned and steamed in the dark; mud bubbled and snorted. Wind dragged steam over them, blew it away as quickly when they began to cough. Beneath the noise of water and the exuberant wind, Nyx was aware of something deep and constant, a heartbeat within the earth, so low she felt rather than heard it. She touched Brand.

  “Do you feel that?”

  “What?” he asked, wary again. “Am I changing?”

  “No. It’s like a heartbeat.”

  He listened. “No.” He roamed, peering into moonlit crevices, studying pale crystals that crusted the edges of the pools. He came back to her. “Nyx,” he pleaded, and she heard the urgency in his voice. Time, for him, would not slow even in the Luxour.

  “Yes,” she said, but the wind brought her a breath of winter out of nowhere, and, wondering, she followed the chill.

  Brand heard the heartbeat then; it came out of a hole in the night, a place so cold it was rimed with ice. For a moment, he forgot the firebird. “Is it a dragon?” he whispered, as if in his excitement he might wake it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What else could turn desert into ice?”

  “I thought they breathed fire. . . . I wonder if Chrysom mentions it.” She opened the book again; pages riffled quickly, stopping to show her what was on her mind: The Ice-Dragon. . . It exists, Chrysom had written, in a time accessible but not recommended. It is very cold, and the dragon, roused, is fearsome, a monster with night-black scales and white eyes. It will follow the time-path if you do not close it behind you.

  “What does he say?” Brand asked.

  “He saw the dragon.” The book misted away in her mind. “He made a time-path to it. I wonder if all his paths through the Luxour lead to dragons. . . .”

  “If you free a dragon, that would get my father’s attention.”

  “And what will I do with the dragon?”

  “My father could deal with it. He always wanted to see a dragon.”

  “Your father might well be annoyed if I set a dragon loose into Saphier. Chrysom left them alone.”

  “It’s not like you to be so cautious,” Brand commented.

  “It’s not like you to be so impulsive.”

  She saw him smile unexpectedly in the moonlight; the Luxour was working its odd magic on him. “My grandfather was a dragon,” he reminded her. “So they say. My father says the heart of powe
r—”

  “—is a dragon’s heart.”

  “So perhaps we should look for my grandfather. See if he’s in the mage’s book. A dragon who could take the shape of a man. My grandmother didn’t find him fearsome. If you find that dragon, my father would be in your debt. He always wanted to know his father.”

  She was silent, thinking of the smell of winter and the timeless dark of the ice-dragon’s cave. Could it do such things beyond its own world? she wondered. Breathe a perpetual winter over a land, imprison it in ice? A monster, Chrysom had written. What might the other dragons do if they were loosed? She drew an uneasy breath, beginning to understand what she had dropped into her pocket, and carried so carelessly into a land ruled by a dragon’s son who could forge the time-paths but not the patterns. To find dragons, he would need the patterns she had found. . . .

  But it was Rad Ilex searching for the key, not Draken Saphier.

  “Nyx?” Brand’s voice pleaded again, this time for dragons.

  “All right,” she said slowly. “I’ll see if Chrysom wrote of a dragon he didn’t find fearsome.”

  She found several, after perusing the book for so long that Brand had vanished by the time she finished. She looked around, startled, for the firebird, and found Brand finally, standing inside the ice-cave, shivering, listening to the heart of power.

  The path she chose ended in one of the massive tumbles of stone. The winds smelled hot and dry there, as if they were about to burst into flame. She felt no heartbeat, but an odd shifting underfoot as if the earth were falling away like sand in an hourglass. The stones trembled a little. Nyx looked up, gripping Brand, in case she had to open a door into thin air and leave before a boulder flattened them. The bulky jumble resolved, as her eye travelled upward, into high, airy walls, half-broken turrets, moonlit windows.

  “It’s a palace,” she breathed.

  “It’s just stones,” Brand said. His voice was tense again; the moon was continuing its inexorable climb toward midnight. “What does Chrysom say about this dragon?”

  “It is red as flame and breathes flame. However, when it understood him to be harmless, it ceased its baleful attack and permitted him to come close. Its eye, Chrysom said, seemed a portal through which he might walk.”