The Cygnet and the Firebird

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “And all in it?”

  “All.”

  “Take it,” Draken said harshly, and bowed his head.

  The air ignited with silver. Paths tangled with paths, melted, converged, tore, until it seemed to Nyx that they were all trapped in Chrysom’s impossible black box, where all the threads of time led into one another, and no path opened beyond the chaos. The image of melted, burning threads of silver imprinted itself on the air for moments after the time-paths had vanished from every wrist.

  “There are no more such paths anywhere in Saphier,” the dragon said. “Except one.” He held out his hand; the gold and ivory key lay in it. Again the hard lines of his face eased; he looked at Nyx. “The mage—what was his name? Chrysom. He was a gentle man. I dislike burning books.”

  Nyx’s face shook. She put her hands over her mouth; the burning tears slid down between her fingers. Meguet, tearless, stunned, turned to her as at a touch, seeing what she saw: Time, nearly ended on the Luxour, was shaping its path again toward home.

  “I will take the key,” the dragon said. He added an afterthought, “And you, my twisted son. For seven years. And I will take the dragons back. But who,” he wondered of the mages, “will watch these human dragons for me?” The mages, under his eye again, turned to stone. He lifted a finger, spun a thread of fire. It streaked through the air and caught Rad Ilex.

  Rad, white, silent, ringed by fire, stared into the dragon’s eyes. The winds died; time stilled on the Luxour. In an hour, or in the next breath, Rad moved again, turned to the mages of Saphier. The dragon-fire parted, looped around his wrist, burning gold and red and all hues between. He said nothing. He didn’t have to, Nyx thought. Only he and the dragon knew what power had passed between them, and no one seemed likely to test him.

  “In seven years,” the dragon said, “Rad Ilex will come to me for Draken Saphier. Do not force him, by any intention or act, to find me sooner than that.”

  In the motionless ring of mages, someone moved: Magior stepped forward. “And who, my lord,” she asked humbly, “will rule Saphier? It is best for Saphier if you choose.”

  “Who will role in your place for seven years?” the dragon asked Draken Saphier. “Answer.”

  Draken was silent. An errant wind scattered a handful of dust at his feet; briefly, his noon shadow shaped the firebird. He swallowed something bitter, painful, the lines on his face running deep, before he lifted his head, held Brand’s eyes.

  “Brand Saphier will rule,” he said. “Now and for the rest of his life. I know Saphier. I will not have it tear itself apart choosing between the dragon and the firebird.” He added, so softly that even the Luxour stilled itself to hear, “If in seven years you have any desire at all to find me, look for me here. The Luxour seems the only thing that I have ever loved.”

  Brand’s expression blurred, as if the magical winds had reshaped it briefly, and then shaped again the warrior’s mask. The dragon said to him.

  “Is human justice served between father and son? Are you content? Answer.”

  “No,” Brand said huskily. His own hands clenched; expression shook again into his face, and, unexpectedly, into Draken’s. “There is no justice for this. Nothing will ever quiet the firebird’s cry.”

  Draken nodded wearily. “I hear it now,” he said. He turned away from Brand, to his father.

  “Come,” the dragon said, and Draken vanished. A black dragon with eyes of cobalt and gold lifted itself into the winds above Brand. From the jumbled stones and palaces the dragons rose, soared into the air, shapes of fire and shadow, a progression across the bright sky as strange and gorgeous as the firebird’s enchantments. As the dragon-mage led them back into their secret worlds, the Luxour sent a shadow after them, a memory in the wind: the Cygnet, with its wings of night, its starry eye, following dragons across an unfamiliar sky.

  - Eighteen -

  Nyx saw the face of the firebird one last time as the dragons disappeared: The cry filled Brand’s eyes, then left them empty, searching the barren desert for something he had forgotten. She took a step toward him. His eyes found her then. He waited, drained, motionless, for her to come to him, the terrible emptiness in his eyes slowly filling again with memories, dragons, the magic of the Luxour. She put her arms around him, heard nothing for a long time but his breathing, his heartbeat. Finally she heard his voice.

  “Can you stay?”

  She shook her head against him, her own face colorless, expressionless. “I must go home.”

  “Then how will I see you again?”

  “There is a way,” she said, but for once she doubted herself. “There is always a way.” She shifted to see his face; it was set, but more in determination than despair. He even smiled a little, crookedly.

  “I have never made things easy for you.”

  “I never liked things easy.” She held him again, tightly, aware this time of all the silent, watching mages. “Will you be safe?” she asked him.

  “The dragon rules Saphier,” he said softly. “For seven years. Even the most powerful of the warrior-mages will be wary of that. I trust Magior. And Rad. They will help me. Saphier’s future has always been its past. I don’t know how to change that. Perhaps only the threat of dragons can change Saphier’s ways. The threat of something more dangerous than itself.” He dropped his face against her lank, dusty hair, kissed it. “Some day,” he whispered, “we will find that cave full of waterfalls and dragon-mist again.”

  “I’ll find a way,” she promised. Her throat ached. “Chrysom did it. I can do it.”

  “I can’t. This time you will have to come to me.”

  She looked at him, saw his face, his father’s face, even something of the dragon’s hard, powerful face. “If Saphier’s heart is the Luxour, and the Luxour is the dragon’s heart, perhaps it is more your grandfather’s heart. He found something of Ro Holding to value. Something of Ro Holding’s peace.”

  “So have I,” Brand whispered. He bent his head, found her lips, coaxed peace from them until the winds of the Luxour, hot and fuming and enchanted, swirling around them, seemed to her the winds of home. He raised his head finally; she felt him draw in air as if he would swallow all the magic in the winds.

  She loosed him reluctantly. “Come to me,” he said, and she nodded. He cast an eye over his mages then. Some were watching him, astonished; others dreamed across the distances, searching for a glint of dragon-wing. Most had clustered in small groups, to unravel the events that had so abruptly changed the path of Saphier’s future. Nyx looked for Meguet. She stood beside Rad Ilex as he spoke with Magior; Nyx saw him lift one hand, draw it lightly down Meguet’s hair. She stiffened slightly, then met Nyx’s eyes. She looked too tired to stand; her face pleaded silently: Home.

  “We must go,” Nyx said to Rad Ilex as she joined them. Magior, her face seamed with fine, troubled lines, said to Nyx,

  “Draken Saphier cast a spell, it seems, over his entire house, as well as his son. We were all ensorcelled by his vision. The dragon was wise to destroy the time-paths. It is still a very powerful vision.”

  “There are other visions,” Nyx said wearily. “Perhaps the dragons of the Luxour will dream up something for the mages of Saphier to do besides war.”

  “Yes,” Magior agreed, but doubtfully. “It will take some time to change. Saphier has always been”—she gestured toward a sudden feathery sweep of distant steam—“volatile.”

  “Saphier,” Rad said grimly, “has a choice between inventing peace or ceasing to exist. A more merciful choice than you would have allowed Ro Holding.”

  “Yes.” Magior cleared her throat. “I know. Force is its own justification. It exists primarily because it is capable of existing. Now that we are made powerless, I can find no justification for what we had contemplated. I thought I was too old to change. Too old to see Saphier in the light of anything but its own history. We will need help. Your ideas, Rad, and Brand’s. Even Draken’s. Perhaps, in seven years, he will be alive to advise us.�
�

  “You would trust him?” Rad asked sharply.

  “I would trust his father,” Magior said simply. “If he permits Draken to live, he will have changed the heart of Saphier itself.” She paused, her eyes on Nyx. “Perhaps, with Brand, it is already changing.”

  “So will Ro Holding,” Meguet murmured, “if you manage to find each other again.”

  “Across mountains and seas and endless wastes,” Nyx said, seeing them spread across the distance between Ro Holding and Saphier, each mountain, each ocean, pushing them farther apart. “And worlds,” she added speculatively. “And time.” She put a hand to her eyes against the vision, felt Meguet’s hand on her shoulder.

  “There is always—”

  “A way,” Nyx finished. She looked at Rad, wondering how anyone so haggard and spent that he could scarcely cast his own shadow, could possibly be standing upright. “Is there a way home?” she asked him. “Will the dragon permit you to use Chrysom’s time-path back to Ro Holding?”

  He nodded, and held out his hand: What he had sought in Ro Holding lay in his palm. “One last time,” he said with an effort. “Then I must return the key to him. Or he will come back to Saphier looking for it, and he will not be pleased. You’ll have to help me open the paths. I can hardly open the book itself.”

  Nyx was silent, thinking of the key holding all the mysteries of the Luxour, all Chrysom’s innocent, secret journeys. So was Rad; their minds touched inadvertently, holding the same key. They pulled back; their eyes met. Nyx said ruefully,

  “Now I would be content for either one of us to keep it.”

  “Yes.” He reached out to Meguet, held her wrist as he had when she had been pulled so precipitously into Saphier’s history. “So,” he said without looking at her, “I must return you to your Gatekeeper.” She said nothing, did not move, until he finally raised his eyes. She said softly.

  “I will never forget the dragons. Or the Luxour.”

  “Or the rose?”

  She started to speak, then stopped. She smiled suddenly, and a little color came back into his drawn face. “Or the rose that got us into all this trouble.”

  “Now you know why I dropped it there.”

  “Now,” she said, “I know why I picked it up.”

  He held her eyes, using her, Nyx realized, as his calm focal point of concentration. She turned abruptly, for one last glimpse of Brand standing in the Luxour, stones towering behind him in a tumbled jagged disorder that seemed to be always on the verge of order. In the next moment, in the next . . . Surrounded by mages, all their thoughts and ideas pulling at his attention, he detached himself for a moment, stood alone, saw only her. The Luxour slowly misted from gold to cobalt-blue to black, until the only clear thing in the world was the silver path to Ro Holding forming beneath their feet.

  Chrysom’s tower, building around them out of the mist, seemed, for a moment, another rising of stone at the moment of change. It did change into a palace and remained changed, though Nyx noted, with an instant of surprise, without the firebird. Her throat tightened. Rad’s white dragon waited for him still; she freed it. It leaped gracefully to its place across Rad’s heart. Together she and Rad fashioned a path back to the Luxour while he still had strength to think. Meguet had not even that left; Nyx found her a moment or two later, sunk deep into a leather chair and fast asleep.

  She paced a step aimlessly, bewildered by the silence, some part of her still expecting to see the firebird. Her bones ached with exhaustion, but she could not bring herself to leave the tower. It seemed the only bridge between two worlds, and a broken one at that, but all she had. Memories crowded into her mind, far too many for the tower to hold; she had no other place to keep them. She touched her face, and still moving, found a tear on her fingers. Her hand shook, her whole body trembled. She looked at Meguet, who had escaped the world somehow; not even Nyx’s tears brought her back. She was trapped, it seemed, like the firebird, by memory: impossible to go back, yet equally impossible to open the tower door, leave the past behind her. She forced herself still finally, stood in a drift of sunlight, her arms tightly folded to stop her trembling. Still she could shape no path, not even into the next moment.

  The door opened abruptly. She caught a glimpse of her mother’s face, chalk-white and delicately lined, before the Holder gripped her, shook her a little, and finally pulled her into an embrace that took her breath away. She blinked, vaguely aware that her mother was holding her upright; her bones preferred to spill onto the floor.

  “What happened?” the Holder was demanding, her attention divided between Nyx’s frozen face, her torn, dusty clothes, and Meguet, dressed in the same peculiar fashion, with blood on her sleeve and her face as pale and still as ivory. “What happened?”

  “I fell in love,” Nyx said.

  * * *

  Meguet woke out of a dream of dragons. A black dragon had been trying to tell her something: not the red-eyed dragon of war, nor the dragon with the human eyes that had been Draken Saphier, but one with a gentle voice, and eyes as cold and pure as stars. Or had it been a dragon? she wondered, in the moment between sleeping and waking. Something dark as night that flew . . . She opened her eyes then and found the night.

  Memory returned slowly: She had fallen asleep in a chair in Chrysom’s tower, not, as her bones felt, on the stone floor of a cave in the Luxour. Nyx was safe, Ro Holding was safe, time had been breached and sealed again. She gathered herself wearily, piecemeal, and stood. Nyx had left a candle lit for her. In the dark yard beyond the south window, she saw another flame. She moved toward it thoughtlessly, as if to walk to it on air, before her mind woke and told her what it was.

  She turned and took the stairs instead.

  She wondered, as she crossed the quiet yard, what time it was, what day it was. Midnight might have come and gone; there was no firebird to cry against it. There was still a Gatekeeper; she saw a taper flame, trembling in the sea air, rise to light his pipe. The flame vanished suddenly, as if he had dropped pipe and taper to stand, a dark figure against the torchlight at the top of the turret steps.

  She did not see him come down. He was just there, with her in the yard, holding her face between his hands.

  “Meguet,” he said, and she felt his swift, fierce embrace, as if he could not bear even a shadow of night between them. She held him as tightly, feeling for the bone beneath his face, the bone beneath her hands, feeling for his heartbeat against hers. “I thought I lost you,” he whispered.

  She shook her head. “I came back.” He said no more, turning his face, bone by bone, against hers to find her mouth. For a moment she wandered with him beyond time, beyond memory, beyond weariness and terror. A stray touch made her wince; she dropped back into time.

  “You’re hurt,” he said, his hands sliding lightly down her arms, loosing her.

  “Only a little.” Draken’s relentless eye tracked her suddenly as she ran down the secret paths in her mind; she hid her face against Hew’s shoulder, added numbly, “I should be dead. And you should be trying to bar the gate against a hundred mages, and dragons of air and night and stone that could tear this house apart with a breath and toss it into the swamp. And the dragon-lord of Saphier, Brand’s father, who caused all this trouble.”

  She felt him shudder. “There’s been nothing at the gate lately but what’s expected, familiar. All the odd enchantments went with you and Nyx. We had a warning. And then nothing, not even a lost swamp-bird. Blue sky and tranquil seas. And a Gatekeeper going blind trying to shape you out of thin air. You vanished out of the world with a mage who gave you a rose—”

  She lifted her head, blinking. “I was dragged.” She could see vague lines and shadows on his face in the torchlight; she could not see an expression. “Into a desert. Like no place I have ever been, not even in dreams. Dressed for supper in a hot, barren, nameless wasteland where there were dragons or maybe not, with a dying mage on my hands.”

  He made a sound, touched her again, gently. “Let�
�s go up,” he said, “where I can see your face.”

  They sat in the turret, a dragon’s eye of a moon watching them from over the swamps while she told him where the rose had led her. She could see him clearly then, in the taper-light, the shadows beneath his eyes, the ghosts of worry and care still haunting his face as he listened, one hand linked in hers, so still she scarcely heard him breathe. When she had wakened herself again in the chair in Chrysom’s tower, he moved finally. His lips parted; he didn’t speak. One hand reached toward a taper, dropped. She said very softly,

  “You opened the gate between Ro Holding and Saphier.”

  He met her eyes; still he didn’t speak. Then she heard his breath, long and slow like tide.

  “I am Gatekeeper,” he said finally. “In the light of day or in the dark, in the end it’s me, standing here, making a choice to open or not.”

  “Nyx said she was warned, just as she left with the firebird, that there would be danger to the Cygnet. You let her go.”

  He picked the taper out of its sconce then, lit his pipe. “I promised her I would.”

  “Even when—”

  “She gave me a name. The place where you were lost, where she would go to find you if she found a way. I never saw the dragon’s shadow behind the firebird, only the strange mage, and the firebird, who cried questions without answers here in Ro Holding. And only you, vanishing like that, dragged to anywhere by a mage who got past my eye.”

  “Did he? Or did you let him in too?”

  He shifted, putting the pipe down, and turned to her, grasping both her hands in his. “He found his own way in. As he had, you said yourself, many times before. Chrysom made this house, and its gate, and maybe left a door open somewhere, for the mage he liked. If I had stopped Nyx from going, then what? We would have had at least one dragon at our gate, and maybe we can move the house across Ro Holding, but not Ro Holding itself to a safe place. The Cygnet flies alone among the dangers of the night. It doesn’t live quietly in some safe place. And neither, as you of all of us know best, does Nyx.”