The Cygnet and the Firebird

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “He made the firebird to kill me,” Rad said, and then was silent, as if words, like his hands, were fixed to the mages’ web of power and had become too heavy. He lifted his head suddenly; Nyx, following his gaze, saw a piece of morning sky detach itself and fall. Against the gold-brown desert its shape became visible: a sky-blue dragon, smaller than the first, with eyes like cloud. It dropped onto another pile of stones, and vanished again; with difficulty she saw it settle itself, now stone-brown and grey, flecked with black, a rock-dragon hidden among the rocks. “I envy him,” Rad whispered. “Seeing all their private worlds.” Only Brand stared at the ground, seeing nothing. “Brand,” Rad said, again with effort, and Brand turned his dark, empty stare at him. “He didn’t know you either, then. You were someone for him to use. He would have used anyone.”

  “Don’t defend him,” Brand said fiercely. “Not to me.”

  “I’m not. He barely glimpsed then what he is bringing to the Luxour now, and if you hadn’t been there, he would have turned himself into the firebird to stop me.”

  “I was there. And so were you. He had no mercy for either of us. It was cruel. And unforgivable.”

  “Yes. I’m only explaining why—”

  “Power. I know my father that well at least.” He made a sudden, furious attempt at the leather thongs binding his wrists. The mages watched impassively. Nyx, her throat aching suddenly, reached out to loosen them. Light charred the ground under her hand; the snap of air numbed her fingers. She started to rise, swallowing anger, to plead with the mages. Meguet’s eyes caught her, wide, warning, and held her still.

  “But why,” Nyx asked Rad, when Brand had calmed himself, “did Brand become human again, those few hours every night? Why would Draken have done that?”

  “I don’t think Draken did,” Rad said softly. They watched a crimson dragon, long and sinuous, flicker in and out of time, its scenting tongue bright and quick as lightning, burning and vanishing. The winds of the Luxour finally dragged it into shape; it took its place on another ruin. “Brand and I met in secret at moonrise. Draken transformed him into the firebird at midnight. I remember hearing the changing of the guard, how the familiar ritual noises frayed apart at the cry of the firebird. I think Brand broke his father’s spell every night trying to remember the significance of moonrise, of midnight. Not even Draken could cast a spell more powerful than love, or rage, or grief.”

  Brand shook suddenly with a terrible, noiseless grief. He bowed his head, hid his face behind his hair; Nyx saw the tears fall on the barren ground like rain. She eased closer to him, slipped her arms around him. He dropped his face against her. Her hold tightened; she felt her own tears slide into his hair. The mages cast no spell to stop her. She held him until his trembling eased, and her own eyes were hot, heavy. She sat back; he raised his head, shook the hair out of his face. He leaned forward, kissed her; she tasted his tears. He said softly,

  “And so the firebird found you.”

  “If the firebird had come to Ro Holding a month or two earlier, it would never have come to me.” Her voice shook. “In some ways, I was as ruthless as your father. The small birds in the back swamps of the Delta know. Meguet knows.”

  He rested his face a moment longer against her dusty hair. “My father does not intend to war against swamp birds,” he said wearily. “And whatever you did to Meguet, she still loves you and she is still alive.”

  Another dragon broke into the morning, this one building itself out of a line of stones half-buried in the ground. It was huge, as grey as smoke, with a flattened, predatory skull. Its eyes sparked light like diamonds; they looked as hard and cold. One of the mages whispered uneasily to another as it took to the air. Its shadow slid slowly over them; it circled and settled on a massive rise of stones as grey as itself. Something in the distance disturbed it, perhaps an image drifting out of the winds. Its jaws opened; a colorless light flashed out of it. One of the piles of stone exploded, left a ghostly image of ruins where it had stood. The shock of boulders hitting the ground rocked the mages on their feet.

  “Moro’s name,” Meguet whispered. Nyx watched her tensely, wondering if she were about to vanish to fight a dragon that made even the mages wary. Another appeared. This one Nyx recognized: A drifting wall of steam among the pools tore itself open to reveal an empty blackness, a hole in the shape of a dragon, with eyes like stars, and breath that froze the rocks it settled on. A few cracked; fragments rattled down. It curled and breathed; the hot morning light slid like white fire over the ice on the dark stones.

  “How many more?” Meguet asked rigidly.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “A dozen? Two?”

  “Maybe. Not that a dozen more or less matters much.”

  “Draken can’t control them all,” Rad said. His head jerked, as if a strand of the mages’ web had tightened around his throat. He swallowed, leaned back silently.

  “He is looking for his father,” Brand said. “His father will control them.”

  “I hope,” Nyx murmured. Meguet turned her head, looked at Nyx without fear, without hope, simply recognizing the frail bonds of time and memory between them. With a shock deep in her, as if something named Ro Holding had suddenly ceased to exist, Nyx realized that the Luxour might hold the only moments they had left. All for a firebird, she thought numbly. All for a key. For a challenge to a mage on a warm summer day. She stared blindly at her eyeless shadow, felt sorrow, heavy, motionless, endless, begin to replace her bones.

  More dragons became visible: one of air, translucent, its bones pale light, its wings faint shimmerings of heat; another, formed of twilight cloud, with scales of deep purple, blue-grey, violet. A white dragon, carved of ivory, it seemed, and as delicate, shaped itself out of steam and rode the wind to its distant perch. The stones were filling with dragons, watching the desert like birds of prey. A cobalt dragon flew out of the broken roof of one of the palaces, and then a black one with rust-red wings broke out of the palace’s shadow, its great, ax-shaped head lowering on its long neck to study them as it passed.

  And then Draken Saphier came out of a flash of silver.

  He studied the dragons surrounding them, their heads and great winged bodies etched in vivid, powerful lines against the sky. He said to the mages, “There are others. I haven’t found my father. He may be one hidden in a misty time-path with dangerous properties for the unwary. Have they been quiet?”

  “The dragons, my lord?” With a start, Nyx recognized Magior.

  “Our guests. What have I missed from Meguet?”

  “A comment or two, my lord.”

  “I can imagine.” He took a ritual blade from her, walked over to Brand. His shadow fell over his son; Brand lifted his face. Whatever his eyes held made Draken toss the blade on the ground. He squatted in front of Brand, held his shoulders. “Listen to me—” He dodged spit, said again, patiently, “Listen.” Brand gazed past him, motionless now. “I was aiming that spell at Rad Ilex. You flung yourself in the way, in some misguided attempt to protect him. You fled before I—”

  “You,” Brand said furiously, “destroyed my time-paths so that I could never return to Saphier! So that I could never speak the truth, never say that you had made the firebird out of me to kill Rad Ilex.”

  “That’s not true,” Draken said gravely.

  “What’s not true?”

  “That I never wanted you to return. I would have searched for you in every world we conquered.”

  Brand’s face flamed. He rolled so fast, his father barely had time to move; his sharp kick caught Draken Saphier in the chest, but only hard enough to stagger him. Brand, his hands tied, was off-balance as he rose. Draken spun around him, slid one arm between his wrists and jerked upward on the leather thongs. Brand gasped. Draken forced his rigid arms higher; the blood ran out of his face; his eyes closed.

  “Listen to me,” Draken said again, very patiently, and Nyx thought coldly: Either here or in Ro Holding. She flung power across the web and ducked
into her own shadow. Meguet, moving faster than the eye could follow, was a blur, picking up the blade Draken had dropped. Nyx’s power tangled in the web; it became visible for a second, a flaring crosshatch of light that dissipated just before it touched Draken. Meguet, nearly invisible, brought the ritual blade slashing down between Brand’s wrists. It cut through the leather, but Draken misted away at its touch. Meguet vanished as he reappeared; the Cygnet, blown across the winds like black flame, marked the place where she had been.

  Then a strange light sprang down out of nowhere, peeled layers of wind and power and time itself apart like paper to find her, force her, pale and shaking, back into eyesight, despite all the Cygnet’s power. Nyx, stunned, dragged her eyes away from Meguet finally, traced the light through the air above their heads, through the bright morning sunlight, up stone and the shadow flung by stone, to its source: the dragon’s mouth.

  Around her no one moved. No one spoke. Even the mages were staring upward. Rad Ilex might have unbound himself from their loose and fraying concentration and slipped away, but his eyes too were on the dragon slowly rising on the stone pile above them, unfurling its wings to fly.

  It had risen with the sun, Nyx remembered: the golden dragon with the red-gold eyes. It had perched up there all morning without a claw or a wing-bone moving, its great eyes smoldering down at them, unblinking, until it had opened its jaws and caught Meguet with a flick of light as easily as a swamp toad catching a butterfly.

  It dropped off the stones; the sky darkened as it flung its shadow over them all. It came down fast, for all its bulk; still no one moved, not even Draken, for it held them all with its fiery eyes. It could have landed on them, or scorched them all to ash, stray shreds of power for the winds to play with; no one could guess what it might do, and no one lifted a finger to stop it.

  It vanished. So did the light holding Meguet. Nyx still searched the sky for it, her eyes bewildered by its absence, until movement among the motionless mages drew her attention back to earth.

  A strange mage walked among them toward Draken. His hair was gold, his eyes were amber flecked with red. He wore a robe of dragon scales that drifted and glowed like the strange desert winds. His face was clean-lined, hard and powerful, like the desert itself, a thing so ancient it had been scoured by wind and sun and time of everything except its essence.

  He stopped in front of Draken, studied him expressionlessly. Draken’s face lost color in the light; Nyx saw him try to speak, falter. The dragon spoke first, his voice low, sinewy, harsh with unexpected inflections. “You are mine.”

  Draken’s eyes burned, the dragon’s gold in them reflecting light. “I am Ragah’s son.”

  “She gave me no name,” the dragon said indifferently. “She asked me to name her and I did. A word that means ‘night-fall.’ For her hair, and her powers that waxed by moonlight. She sent a message to the dreaming winds that she wanted a dragon-born child. I heard her dream in my dreams. She haunted the desert, she sent her wish on every wind, and I dreamed and dreamed until she roused me, drew me out of my world into this place. And I remembered the human-born, the human shape. And now you are here, Ragah’s son, rousing dragons with your dreams.”

  “I was looking for you.” Nyx heard the wonder in Draken’s voice. “I didn’t know I had already found you.”

  The dragon sighed, a long, slow, lizard’s hiss. “You have found me.” His burning, light-filled eyes moved to Brand, standing in Draken’s shadow, and to Meguet, who still held Magior’s ritual blade. He turned then; his slow, unblinking gaze swept around all the mages’ faces. His hand opened. Nyx saw the mage-web become visible, shining, all its strands linked to Rad. The dragon’s hand closed. The strands snapped in his grip, vanished. Rad gripped the rock, pulled himself to his feet, trembling with exhaustion, or with wonder. “You have dreamed,” the dragon said to Draken, “of dragon-wars and found me.”

  “Teach me,” Draken breathed. “Teach me. The heart of power is the dragon’s heart. You have all the power of the Luxour in you, all the power of the dragon-worlds, all the power of time. You haunt my dreams, your shadow spans my life. I have looked for you since I was born.”

  “You woke me.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you brought me here.”

  “Yes.”

  “For this.” His face tightened; deep, bitter lines formed. “For this.” He looked at Nyx. His eyes were endless; they had seen forever, and they left her breathless, as if, meeting them, she had begun a slow fall off the world. They went to Brand again, who gave him only an expressionless, unyielding warrior’s stare. The dragon sighed again. “What will you give me to teach you?”

  “Anything.”

  “Your son?”

  “Anything.” The word flicked across Brand’s face; he closed his eyes. “Everything.”

  “Seven years.”

  “Seven. Twelve. A lifetime.”

  “Seven I will take from you. In return, I will teach you what you need to know before I will permit you to call yourself my son.”

  “Yes,” Draken breathed.

  “If, in seven years, you have not learned what you must learn, I will kill you.” Draken opened his mouth to answer, did not. “Answer,” the dragon said. Nyx, staring at him, felt the cold silken touch of dread and wonder glide over her.

  “Yes.”

  “So dragons treat their children. So I have learned from you, as I waited on that bright, high place, listening to your son. As I woke in my quiet dark to listen to the mage who, running for her life away from you, found herself faced with me. All these small, disturbing human voices. Because of you, I was wakened; because of you I listened, having nothing else to do. You taught me.”

  Draken was silent. He turned his head, looked at Nyx, as did Brand, Rad Ilex, and the entire circle of mages, everyone but Meguet, who had closed her eyes at the thought of the Cygnet’s heir running headlong into a dragon’s lair. “You? You found my father?”

  “I didn’t know,” she whispered.

  His attention moved to Brand, He seemed uncertain, suddenly, as if, not seeing the firebird, he did not recognize his son. “Brand?” he said. The hard, set face with Draken’s hair, his eyes, gave him nothing.

  “You wanted paths to find us,” the dragon said. “You woke us, brought us out to use us. To burn, to annihilate. There are those among us who crave such work. Like you, they do not discriminate. They may begin here.”

  Draken moved a little, as if a wind had pushed him lightly. “In Saphier.”

  “You have brought us into your land.” His slow, burning gaze swept the mages again. “They could not begin to fight us.”

  Draken whispered, “You would not destroy Saphier.” Something besides the memories of his dead and blackened past touched Brand’s face, altered the white, stiff lines of it. His eyes glittered faintly, with a shock of hope or horror, Nyx could not tell.

  “It is a place,” the dragon said indifferently, “to begin.”

  “No.” The wind pushed harder, moved Draken back a pace. The mages’ voices murmured around him, shaken, protesting.

  “You’ll find another country. Take Ro Holding instead. What does it matter where you rule, if you have conquered time?”

  “Why?”

  “Saphier is the dragon’s face. The Luxour is its heart. Saphier’s history is my past, my future. The Luxour is my heart.”

  “You have no heart,” the dragon said contemptuously. “This stone has more heart. I should kill you now, let them burn Saphier to ash and rubble. Shall I?” he asked Brand, who started under his sudden gaze. “Shall I? Answer.”

  Brand’s hands clenched. His mouth tightened; his silence wore at Nyx as she sat tensely, neither moving nor breathing, listening. It wore at Draken, who seemed to hear in it, or in himself, something of the firebird’s endless, anguished cry. “He is your son,” Brand said finally. His voice shook. “How do dragons treat their children?”

  Lines that were not bitter shifted unexpected
ly across the ancient face. “Who taught you to riddle with dragons? Your father? Does he know the answer to that riddle? Tell us the answer, Ragah’s son. Guess if you do not know. How do dragons treat their children? Answer.”

  Draken, his eyes on Brand’s rigid face, started to answer, stopped. He lifted one hand, hid his eyes from what he saw. “With lies,” he said. “With ruthless cruelty. They make their children love them, and then twist their love into hate, their trust into fury, their innocence into despair and grief. So dragons treat their children.”

  “No,” the dragon said softly. “You are wrong. So humans treat their children.”

  The mages’ voices fluttered like leaves in a treeless place. In the distance, the great, grey dragon rose on its rock pile, sent a flash of deadly light at whatever had annoyed it. The ground shook as the dragon-fire scarred the Luxour; stones whirled into the air. Draken watched them fall; they struck the earth like random heartbeats. He said, his voice sounding weary, almost as ancient as his father’s, “I have nothing to give you for Saphier but my life.”

  “A poor price.”

  “All I have. Spare Saphier. I beg you.”

  “It made you. You are its past, its future.”

  “It made Rad Ilex. Something good must dream its way out of the minds of dragons into the Luxour, into the air of Saphier to shape the likes of Rad Ilex, who of all my mages defied me. And Saphier made my son. In spite of me.”

  “There is a price,” the dragon said, “for Saphier.”