Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You’re already too much in this tower,” Iris declared. “It can’t be healthy.”

  “Meguet lives here. So I will.”

  Iris eyed Meguet a moment, found answer to her own satisfaction. “Meguet is permitted to be eccentric by heritage.”

  “This entire family is eccentric,” Calyx said, delving back into her book. “We have no known fathers, Nyx is a sorceress, Rush is hopelessly in love with a sorceress, and Meguet wanders everywhere and lives among ghosts. Our mother never married. I take after her.”

  “Our mother never sat in a tower to avoid suitors.”

  “They bore me. I would rather read history.”

  Rush slipped the book out of her hands. “What is this?” he asked, leafing through it. “There seems to be a lot of vegetables in it.”

  “It’s Rydel’s book on the growing of herbs and roses. I thought I would.”

  “Would what?”

  “I found a tiny, overgrown walled garden behind the back tower; Rydel wrote that Astor Ro had one that was latticed with vines, so she did not have to see the sky. I think this was her garden. Rydel planted roses there; perhaps some are still alive.”

  “After three hundred years?”

  “The rose vines on this tower are a thousand years old.”

  “But Chrysom planted those. They must be magic.”

  “Why must they be?” Iris demanded. “I don’t see why everything in this tower must be somehow touched by Chrysom. He’s been dead for centuries.”

  “This entire tower is spellbound,” Calyx said composedly. “That’s why I like it. The roots of the rose vines are fed by Chrysom’s bones, buried in the maze.”

  “Oh, really, Calyx,” Iris said in disgust. Rush laughed; Meguet, glancing at him, realized how rarely he did that, these days.

  She poured herself wine, sat where she could watch snow and fire at the same time. Rush paced a little, restlessly, behind her. His feet stopped finally; she felt his hands on her shoulders.

  “You look beautiful in that green,” he said. She dragged her thoughts back from the swamp, watched him thoughtfully as he moved to lounge on skins at her feet. He met her gaze. “Am I right,” he asked, “that you love no one?”

  She did not answer for a long time. “You,” she said, “love everyone and no one. I love no one and everyone. Even you, Rush Yarr. As you sometimes love me. And sometimes Calyx. But always Nyx.”

  “So,” he said, “you are not indifferent to the young blood foxes you teach.”

  She smiled. “Of course not.”

  “Don’t you want to marry, leave Ro House for a home of your own?”

  “No,” she said. “Marry, perhaps. But leave this house? Never. It is my heritage, I think. So old, I am tangled in these old stones. I can’t separate myself.”

  “One day you might,” he said, his brows knit. “One day.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t explain it,” she said, indifferent to explanations. Calyx, listening, said gravely:

  “Meguet is born to love a swan.”

  “What?” Rush said, turning. Meguet looked at her, startled. Calyx gathered strands of imagination, began weaving them.

  “A swan. One of the wild swans that come down late from Berg Hold. A great black swan, who comes once every three years to the lake. Once every three years, in the hour just before midnight, he takes on human form, and one year—perhaps this year—Meguet will stray to the lake under moonlight and find him, in the thousand-year-old wood where the trees will shift and hide them from all view. The mage who ensorcelled him is dead, and no one in the world is powerful enough to free him. So he is in despair of ever regaining human form. Meguet, finding him, will be his only solace, his only happiness. But, unbeknownst to him, there is someone even now growing powerful enough to free him, someone no farther from them than the Delta swamp—”

  Iris, intrigued by the tale, interrupted harshly. “Oh, Calyx, she’d be more likely to burn his liver for him than turn him human.”

  “She would not!” Calyx said indignantly. “Iris, I can’t believe you believe every stupid drunken trapper’s tale you hear about Nyx.”

  “They’re true,” Rush said shortly. “Meguet knows. True, Meguet?”

  Meguet sighed noiselessly, disinclined for a tempest. “Nyx would recognize an ensorcelled swan if she saw one.”

  “Yes, but the question is: What will she do with it?”

  “Stuff it and roast it for supper, I suppose.”

  “Poor swan,” Calyx said temperately, opening her book again. “An unhappy end to an unhappy tale.”

  “Anyway, Nyx may be wicked, but she is not disgusting,” Iris pronounced, contradicting herself, and Rush, as always, rose to the bait. Meguet moved from between their argument, to sit next to Calyx. Calyx knew odd things and Meguet had odd questions. Calyx smiled at her. The swan had met its destiny and she was already back among the roses.

  “You know that garden, Meguet. Don’t you? Where the tower rooms had no windows above the garden wall, so that she would not have to look out.”

  “Yes,” Meguet said. “I read about it once, and I searched for it. I wanted to look at the world out of Astor Ro’s eyes. She fascinated me: such fear and such courage. I could read Rydel’s books; she talked so much about plants instead of history.”

  “Which book was it?”

  “I don’t remember. Odd things, she wrote of, everything. I think Nyx took it. She rambled about her gardens and Timor Ro.”

  “Timor Ro said she had mysterious powers.”

  “Sorcery?”

  “Something like, but even more powerful. Chrysom, Timor Ro said, stood in her shadow.”

  Meguet raised a brow. “All she ever did was garden.”

  “Mysterious, secret powers, they were.”

  “Calyx, you’re inventing this.”

  “I’m not. He said she used them only for Ro Holding.”

  “Did he say what powers?”

  “No. He said such things were not to be known.”

  “He must have meant her peach brandy. Calyx…if someone spoke of waking the Dancer, what would that mean?”

  “The Dancer trapped in ice by the Cygnet,” Calyx said promptly. “Guarded by the Fire Bear.”

  “In the sky?”

  “On the top of the highest peak of Berg Hold.”

  “Berg Hold,” Meguet repeated, oddly startled. There was a place, not between lines of a tale, but in Ro Holding, that a Wayfolk man might find if he persisted. “How would—how would the Dancer be wakened?”

  “Only the Fire Bear can free her, and it has no more of its fire.”

  “Then how—”

  “But, she may be wakened on the last day of winter.”

  “Why the last—”

  “Then, if you bring her a question, she will wake just long enough to answer or predict, without moving from the ice. Which is safest for us all, since, freed, the Dancer dances chaos into the world.”

  “Why chaos?”

  “Because she is no longer trapped in dreams; she can turn all our waking lives into dreams, and nightmares.” She read a page or two, while Meguet, frowning, imagined the Dancer dancing free.

  “Why the last day of winter?” she asked. Calyx pondered, smoothing a single shining hair back into place.

  “Perhaps,” she suggested, “because the constellation of the Dancer sinks out of sight during spring, leaving only the Fire Bear visible, watching her over the edge of the world.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “I watch the stars,” Calyx said simply. “Sometimes it seems that all the constellations exist in a strange, ancient tale that we only catch glimpses of, in our short lives, while they move slowly as centuries through it.”

  “A piecemeal tale,” Meguet murmured, and thought of another piecemeal tale she had heard from within a mirror. “But what, I wonder, is the tale?”

  She and Rush went to the armory awhile, and then, sweating, tired, still armed, they fl
ung cloaks over their light shirts and went riding to cool themselves. The sky had emptied itself for a time of rain, snow, wind, and there was nothing left in the pale, silken clouds to fall. The air was still; only a thin, dark thread of crow flight seamed it now and then. They rode across field and meadow, an unbroken plane of white, passing birch a shade whiter than the snow. The thousand-year-old wood, a dark, glistening green powdered with snow, seemed the only color left in the world. They rode to the edge of it and paused, questioning one another silently. The tangled, massive, sweeping boughs had caught most of the snow before it touched ground. The snow itself had caught the frail winter light, leaving a dense, sweet-smelling shadowy world among the black trunks that rose toward a green-black mist higher than Chrysom’s tower. It looked, Meguet thought, like a giant’s garden.

  She turned her horse into it; Rush followed.

  “We just left the world behind,” he said, glancing back: Towers, gardens, pasture, sky had all vanished.

  “Speak quietly,” Meguet warned him. “The trees are more restless in winter. Cold wakes them.”

  Rush stared at her. “It is true, then. I never believed it.”

  “That they shift?” She looked at him, amused. “Why would you believe everything else that Chrysom said, and not this?”

  “I don’t know. Moving trees? Maybe if they roamed under my window I would consider it.”

  “You’ll consider it if they start,” she said softly, and he eyed her again, askance.

  “You’ve been caught in that?”

  “Only twice.”

  “Twice!”

  “Sh.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s like being lost in a forest the size of Berg Hold… The trees shift, and all their memories move with them, century upon century of dreams, until you don’t know anymore what’s tree and what’s only a dream of tree.”

  “It’s only a small wood.”

  “I know. But Chrysom took them from the northern forests so long ago there must have been a sea of trees bigger than Wolfe Sea. It’s that they remember, I think, and that’s the memory you get lost in.”

  Rush shivered lightly. “Cold,” he commented. He reached out to touch one swollen black trunk. Knots and boles like small animals ran up it, peered, frozen, at the riders. “Cold,” he said again, as if he had felt the heart of the tree, and Meguet had a sudden image of tree roots, chilled in the unexpected weather, stirring just beneath the earth. She picked up her pace a little. The swan lake lay just on the other side of the wood. Like the trees, the swans were born to a land of fierce winter; the snow, it seemed, had followed them south.

  “Rush,” she said impulsively, keeping her voice low, and hoping he would, “I must ride back upriver as soon as the weather clears. To talk to Nyx. The Holder told me to take someone. Will you come?”

  He was watching her as he listened, his face as cold and set as the wrinkled faces of the trees. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you need company? You never have in your life. Why, to see Nyx? What is she doing?”

  She drew breath, her mouth tight. “Rush. Don’t shout here.”

  “I’m not going to.”

  “You are. Just say yes or no. Shout among the swans.”

  “I’m not—”

  “You are. Please. Say yes. Say no. Then don’t say anything more.”

  “Why—” She stared him into silence, saw his eyes widen in comprehension. He unclamped his jaw, said, “Yes,” and watched the trees in an uneasy fascination.

  They were nearly through the wood, with a tree or two between them, when Rush vanished. He was there one moment, and then, obscured by two trees aligned by eyesight, if not by distance, he was simply gone. Meguet circled the trees several times, called him softly. He was nowhere, it seemed, or she was. She reined, feeling the blood run quick and cold through her. Trees filled her sight wherever she looked. She moved forward, she thought, toward the lake. Trees shifted in front of her, faded as she circled them, or did not when she rode up to them. She cursed softly, helplessly, feeling the chill damp air clinging to her. “Not now,” she pleaded, numbly. “Not now.” But trees and the dream of trees rose in her path, huge, tranquil, ancient and endless as the forests of a world a thousand years younger. She called his name desperately, careless now of their peace, and heard a rustle like wind around her. She smelled wood smoke.

  She turned toward it with relief, without thinking. Trees opened in front of her to dense shadow. Within shadow was a denser shadow: a small black wagon like a house, its slanted roof painted yellow, Hold Signs on back and side. And in front of it, roasting a swamp lizard: a tinker.

  He lifted his black shaggy head, smiled. Gold gleamed in his ear, around his neck, and, she imagined, from his eyes.

  “You’ll pardon me, Lady,” he said. “I’m a solitary man. Crowds like that in the yard when I entered frighten me.”

  Meguet stared at him. There seemed a patch of sunlight beside his fire, or some odd reflection from the flames. “Why did you come into this house?” she asked, for he was no tinker, nothing she had ever encountered.

  “To patch pots.”

  “We have no need of another tinker.”

  “You never know,” the tinker said. He turned his spit thoughtfully. The lizard’s eye, open and emerald green, regarded her.

  “You must come with me,” she said, dragging her eyes from the lizard. “In the name of Lauro Ro.”

  “Why?” the tinker asked, wide-eyed. “I have done nothing more than pass through her gate.”

  “She has a pot to patch.”

  “She has, in this great house, a tinker for every broken pot.”

  “She has not yet had you to mend a pot for her.” The patch of sunlight appeared to be moving with the tinker. It was his shadow, she realized suddenly, a subversion of light that left her breathless. She kept her body very still, kept her face calm, though it felt cold and white as snow. “You must come with me. The trees are shifting, it is not safe here.”

  “You are armed,” he said surprisedly, and the jewel in the pommel of the sword she wore winked as at a touch of light in that dark place.

  “It is my right to bear arms in this house.”

  “Against a poor tinker?”

  “You troubled the Gatekeeper, who has an eye for trouble. You are skulking like a thief in these woods without a broken pot in sight. Since you did not give your true name to the Gate-keeper, you must give it to the Holder, for you are in her house.”

  He did not answer her. His yellow-gold eyes seemed to reflect fire as he gazed at her. A corner of his mouth had crept upward in a smile. “And you?” he said finally, softly. “You looked straight at me, through those shifting trees; your eyes picked me out of the shadows. Who are you?”

  “Meguet!” Rush called, from some place far away, within trees, behind trees, encircled by trees.

  “Meguet,” the tinker repeated thoughtfully. He turned the spit again; the lizard’s eyes were faded now, filmy with smoke. “Meguet,” he said again. “Pretty. But who? Who dwells behind your eyes?” He fingered the lizard, picked an eye out of its head, tossed it into the air. Falling, turning, turning in the air, it flashed now emerald, now coin-gold.

  Sudden, dark, overwhelming anger drove Meguet forward, past revulsion and fear, to the fire and the charred, one-eyed lizard, and the tinker who dared his ugly sorcery within the Holder’s house. She drew the sword at her side, thrust it down through the flames until the tip rested against the tinker’s heart.

  It was Moro Ro’s great sword and it shook slightly in one hand, but the tinker seemed impressed. He looked up at her, still turning the lizard’s eye between his fingers. “Meguet,” he said curiously, his eyes full of yellow light, and suddenly her mind was full of light, as if the sun had struck her.

  “Meguet!” Rush shouted behind her. The fire flared silver, swallowed the lizard, Moro’s sword. Half-blind, she swung her horse, confused, trying to see Ru
sh. She saw the tinker’s wagon; its back door with the gold sun on it slammed shut. Then the air cracked oddly around her, as if a tree had snapped in two. The dark walls of the tinker’s house crawled with flame.

  She cried out. Rush tugged at her reins; she jerked free, turning back to stare at the tiny house, with its four black walls and its yellow roof and yellow lintel, until the silver flames engulfed it and Rush wrenched at her reins again.

  “Meguet! The trees!”

  They were rustling, sighing, drawing back from the fire. “Meguet,” Rush pleaded. “He’s burning in his house.” He looked shaken, white; as usual, Meguet realized, his sorcery must have gone awry. The flames were dying already, without reaching toward the tree boughs; that much he had done right. She let him lead her finally. She glanced back one more time, incredulously, to seek a hint of what she had glimpsed in the fire-chewed bones of the wagon. The lizard in the fire moved its head to look at her. Both eyes were in its head and they were yellow-gold.

  Four

  YOU burned a tinker in the thousand-year-old wood?” the Holder said incredulously. Half the household had stood in windows and doorways, on the parapet wall between the back towers, watching the silver smoke rising out of the trees. Household guard, riding out to investigate, had found Meguet and Rush emerging from the trees, grim, silent, exhausted from the twisting paths of the disturbed and dreaming trees. The Holder, the guard told them, would see them immediately.

  “He was not a tinker,” Meguet said abruptly, breaking a silence that had lasted from the wood to Chrysom’s library, where the Holder and Calyx had been watching the oddly glittering smoke. “And he is not dead.”

  Rush stared at her. “He’s dead. Whatever he is. I burned his house with him in it—”

  “Why?” the Holder asked sharply. “What had he done? In Moro’s name, why did you set fire to a tinker?”

  He closed his eyes. “I did not intend to. I was trying to circle his house with fire. Not burn it down.”

  “Then why—”

  “I missed.”

  “Oh, Rush,” Calyx breathed, hands over her mouth. “You never could do that right.”