Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Brand’s brows pulled together hard. He was silent a moment, his eyes on her, as if he had heard, even beneath the turmoil and frustration of the firebird’s cry, the equivocation in her voice. He said finally, “The Luxour is full of voices. So the mages say. The desert speaks. The stones and the silence speak. So they say. I doubt if I would hear much. But that makes it difficult for the mages to call my father home. And finding him, if he does not wish to be found, would be impossible. So I am told. It’s hard for me to wait patiently. The most I can manage at moonrise is just to wait. It would be kind of you to wait with me, at least while I’m human. The mages have tried to work with me; they get no farther than you did. I don’t think anyone can help me but my father, and I have very, very little patience left for mage-work. So. Keep me company. Walk with me, in the gardens.”

  “I think,” Magior murmured, “we should keep working. Such enchantments might be unravelled quite unexpectedly.”

  “Perhaps the moonlight will unravel it,” Brand said, “since no mage in this house can.” His face was strained, taut; Nyx heard the noiseless cry emanating from him so strongly, she wondered that the dragons around them did not turn into spellbound jewels. His great-aunt heard it too, apparently; she bowed her head in acquiescence.

  “Perhaps you are right,” she said. “I will wait for you here.”

  He did not speak for a while; he took Nyx’s arm, his grip tight, as if he expected the moon to toy with her shape, too. They left the house, walked on wide paths of white stone that wandered among the rose-trees. Nyx, unused to such formal progression through a garden, found it bewildering, for a mage and a man about to fly away. She laid her free hand on his hand, reminding him that she was there, and said,

  “I think—”

  “Not here,” he breathed, and she was silent again until they passed through the courtyard of roses into a tiny walled garden full of lemon trees, soft paths of moss between fountains and moon-bright streams. He closed the gate behind them; his grip eased finally.

  “It is my father’s meditation garden.” he said softly. “No one else comes here.”

  “There is little hope of privacy in a house full of mages,” she pointed out.

  “Perhaps. But I’m used to being private with you. No one told me you were still here. I thought you would have gone to look for Meguet.”

  “All they knew of me is that I brought you here. They couldn’t have assumed you cared. Did you ask after me?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are we here, whispering?”

  “Because,” he said restively, “your face looks changed. Wary. It wasn’t only you studying me, in that tower. I had nothing else to watch but you. You do what you want, say what you think; you listen to reason, but not without arguing. Here, you pick your way from thought to thought as if you are afraid. No. Not afraid. But in danger. In my father’s house. Why?”

  “I’m alone in a strange land, surrounded by mages of indeterminate power, and more warriors than I’ve seen in all of Ro Holding. It seems expedient for me to be somewhat wary. If you have one enemy, you might have two, and one of them under this roof.”

  He stared at her, amazed. “Me?”

  “You said yourself you can’t remember why Rad Ilex turned you into a firebird. Conceivably to guard himself against something you saw, something you know.”

  “A conspiracy? In my father’s house?”

  She sighed noiselessly. “I can only guess. You tell me. You brought me here. And I can’t imagine even this place being completely private. Those goldfish are probably trained to eat whatever words fall like crumbs on the water.”

  “No one speaks in here,” he said absently. His brows were drawn again; he glanced at the moon, then down at a little fish like an orange flame rising to the surface of the water. “The guard changes at midnight. I listen for that.” His fists clenched. “I can’t remember,” he said tightly, “how it feels to stand in sunlight. To fall asleep in a bed. To know where I was at noon yesterday. If my father does not come soon, I’ll go to the Luxour myself and find him.”

  “Would the bird fly there?” Nyx asked curiously. He looked at her, his eyes shadowed, haunted.

  “It flew to you,” he said slowly. “And here it sits in this house with you, waiting, though I assume that if it could find you in Ro Holding, it could find my father in the Luxour.”

  “Why Ro Holding? If your father made the paths on your wrists, why would he have fashioned one to Ro Holding?”

  He shook his head, disinterested. “I don’t know. He didn’t create the patterns out of time and space. He only forged the paths, and I don’t think even he knows where they all go. I think the firebird found Ro Holding by chance, though your power drew it, once it came there. Why? Is it important?”

  “Perhaps,” she said evenly, thinking of the flashing blades of the ritual dance, the silver paths blazing on every wrist. Brand was silent, watching the occasional moonlit glint of color in the dark water.

  He said very softly, “You could take me to the Luxour. The bird would follow you.”

  “If your father doesn’t return soon?”

  “Now.”

  She looked at him, startled. “Why not Magior, or one of the other mages?”

  “The bird follows you.” He paused; his face loosened slightly. “I follow you. I’m here with you in my father’s garden, where no one else is permitted. I trust you.”

  “You might,” she said slowly, “but there’s little reason for anyone else to trust a mage who absconds with you into the desert. If you vanish twice, they will be heart-struck. They are doing their best for you.”

  “And their best is no better than what you did for me in that tower.” His voice sounded dangerously thin. “If I have to spend one more day covered with feathers and eating mice, and wake to myself again without seeing my father, I will walk out of this house and keep walking south, and no one will know where I am. You yourself want to go to the Luxour, Rad Ilex will be hiding there. It’s the only place in Saphier where he can hide from my father. And it’s the place to look for Meguet.”

  “Let me go,” she pleaded. “By myself. That way you’ll be here, if your father is on his way back now. If not, I can look for him, and for Meguet.”

  “No.” His hands closed suddenly on her arms; she felt the tension in his grip. “No. I will not wait here. I’ll walk out now. I know my father’s private passage from this garden out of the house. You can stay here and explain to Magior where I’ve gone.”

  “Brand—”

  “Now. Before midnight. I’m not a mage. If I tell Magior, and she thinks I’m unwise, she’ll keep me here. She’ll find ways. I can’t stop her. I am unwise, but if I don’t see my father soon, if this spell stays on me much longer, I will find a new voice for the firebird, and it will cry day and night without ceasing and no one in this house, not even you, will stop it.”

  “All right.” She touched him gently, swallowing drily. “All right. I’ll take you there. Now. And I won’t walk. I think I have a path to the Luxour.”

  “Where?” he asked, amazed.

  “In my pocket.” She drew out the ivory ball. “Chrysom’s book.”

  Twelve

  MEGUET waited a night and a day and a night for Rad Ilex. After staring down the moon and then the stars, listening for night-hunters, she finally fell asleep as the sky lightened, showing her broken airy palaces that would turn to stone at sunrise. She woke to light pounding down at her, ground shimmering with heat. She caught up the skins and pouch, and burned her feet running to shelter among the nearest stones. There she sat, shifting as the shadow shifted, her thoughts as formless and furious as the maddening heat. When night fell, she found a slab of rock to crawl onto, away, she hoped, from whatever small ferocious things might consider her supper. The first tiny lizard that slipped out of a crevice and ran over her nearly sent her tumbling to the ground. After that, she shared the stone with them, shaking them away with little more attention th
an she would give a fly. The inactivity was as maddening as the heat. If Rad Ilex did not bother coming for her, she assumed Draken Saphier would let the desert have her, a ghost to haunt the dream-castles. Dying alone in the middle of a desert in a strange land seemed preposterous. But if Draken Saphier told the truth, and she had helped the wrong mage, he had little reason to care what happened to her.

  He might not even bother telling her if he caught Rad; he might just leave her anyway. That thought kept her awake the second night, listening for voices, for mage-work. In the darkest hour before dawn, when even the winds drifted gently, spent, she heard a pebble on the ground below her shift.

  She tensed, thinking of the small, toothed animals. A lizard skittered across her hand. She flung it away, gasping. The lizard said as it fell,

  “Meguet.”

  She peered over the edge of stone, saw nothing. She had to wait for it to work its way up the rock again, and then, in deep shadow, it changed. Rad whispered,

  “I know Draken is here. I want you to run from me. Now.”

  She was silent, trying to pick out his face in the dark; it might as well have been the peeked and weathered stone speaking. “Are you trying to kill me?”

  “What?”

  “You want me eaten by the night-hunters.”

  “What night-hunters?”

  “The ones who can feel your running steps.”

  “What are you talking about?” His voice, cobweb thin, took on slightly more substance. “There’s nothing but lizards in this part of the desert. And you’ve been sleeping with them.”

  She was silent, her mouth tight, controlling a flash of temper as black as the sky. She said between her teeth, “Draken Saphier says they exist. You say they don’t. He told me not to move among them. You tell me to run.”

  “Then believe him.” There was no anger in his voice, almost no sound but a taut urgency trembling between them. “Yes, there are terrible night-hunters. Yes, I want to kill you. So run from me, Meguet, quickly, because they will show you more mercy than I will. Run. Now. Run.”

  She hesitated a moment, still trying to see his face. Then she slid off the ledge and ran across the cool, hard ground, blind until a light exploded behind her like the fallen star suddenly showering its pale fire across the sleeping desert. She tripped on a stone, came down hard, and heard, above her panting, Rad Ilex’s sudden, twisted cry. She caught her own cry behind her hand, feeling tears sting her eyes. There was another flash. She pushed her face against her arms, felt the ground shake a little, as if, deep beneath it, the dragons stirred, disturbed.

  The night was still again. She heard a step. And then Draken Saphier’s voice: “You’re safe, now. I have him.”

  She rose, trembling; she sensed only one shadowy presence in the dark. “Where? Did you kill him?”

  “No. I need him alive to take the spell from my son.”

  She brushed hair and dirt out of her face, tried to speak with dignity, though her voice shook. “Will you give me back my shoes now? I’ll walk home.”

  He was silent. A thin, white light snapped through the air, hit the ground near her foot. She glimpsed something small, many-legged, trying to bite the blade of light impaling it. She froze, speechless, and then felt the black anger again, as if she were truly blind, and teased and teased by voices, light touches, questions without answers, without end: Who am I, Meguet? Who am I now? And now?

  “Please.” Her voice trembled badly. “Give me my shoes and let me go.”

  “Come.” He took her arm. “You want to go north; I’ll take you. You’re barely fit to walk, and I owe you something for helping me, though until you ran from Rad, I was not certain you believed me.” She opened her mouth, closed it, speechless again. “Come to my court.” His grip was not tight, but she suspected he would not let her go. “Wherever you are going, my palace must be closer to it than the Luxour.”

  She answered finally, wearily, using herself again as bait to lure truth, for her own hidden face only called forth other shifting faces. “It’s where I am going. The court of Draken Saphier.”

  His voice sharpened. “You were walking to my house across the desert?”

  “I’m a stranger in your land. My name is Meguet Vervaine. Rad Ilex pulled me out of the house of the Holders of Ro Holding, into the middle of the Luxour. He took me to his village from there. He was hurt; he hadn’t the strength to take me back to Ro Holding. I recognized you because your son is in Ro Holding, in the care of my cousin, Nyx Ro, who is a very capable mage.” He was absolutely motionless; she spoke to nothing, to the night. “Rad had told me certain things that made me wary of you. And you tell me things that make me wary of Rad. Whatever is between you is far too complicated for me to sort out. Perhaps Brand himself, when he is no longer imprisoned by the firebird, can make things clear.”

  “Ro Holding.”

  “Saphier is on none of our maps.”

  “I have heard of Ro Holding.”

  She was silent, aware of words scattered to a stranger’s winds, like birds flying out of her mouth that could never be caught. She felt ancient, uneasy stirrings. not from the Luxour, but within her, a faint flurry of voices through the ages: Meguet, what are you, are you doing, are you doing? I am blind, she told them fiercely, desperately. I am trying to see.

  The night shifted, as if it, too, had caught an echo of her past. She said quickly, “Then you will know where to go to get your son. If not how.”

  “Yes.” She saw, finally, in the slow ebb of dark, a line or two of his face. “The mage Chrysom was born in Ro Holding. It seemed he liked to travel. He left his name in the air of Saphier’s past.” She felt his hand again, lighter now; his voice was imperative, impatient of distances. “Come.”

  Stars blossomed from the dark, shot in streaks of silver past them and back again, winding, weaving, circling, until it seemed they stood in a web of silver that was at once rushing away from them and frozen still. Draken spoke; the paths blurred together, silver into dark, except for one. He led her onto it.

  They were met, in a great, orderly hall, by a turmoil. Meguet, blinking at noise made by dozens of people, brightly dressed at that hour of the morning, at the bronze lamps and mage-lights burning everywhere, realized she had walked barefoot into the house of Draken Saphier. Her hair was loose, tangled, her clothes sweat-stained and dusty, her hands scratched. Draken, seen for once in light, was frowning at the chaos. Something seemed to drag at him; there were taut, weary lines beside his mouth, between his brows. Rad, she guessed, weighed heavily, wherever he was.

  Draken said nothing. He picked up a mage-light from a ledge, held it aloft. Red, smoky, sinuous lines of light whirled out of it, took shape in the air above the crowd. A dragon floated above them, wings spread, neck arched, glaring down at the gathering. It hissed suddenly; the air chilled; lamps flickered. Draken tossed the mage-light; it hung in midair, illumining silent, upturned faces. The dragon reached for the star, held it between its claws, stared into it.

  “It is a question,” Draken said obscurely to the soundless crowd. “Contemplate it.” Then he added, “Magior.”

  A tall, graceful woman with a still, seamed face came to him. She bowed her head. “My lord.”

  “What is this unseemly behavior from my household, my mages?”

  “My lord—” She touched her eyes wearily. “Your son has disappeared.”

  “Magior—” His voice caught. Meguet wondered blankly if the silvery path had led them backward in time instead of forward. “What—”

  “I mean, my lord, again. He has been here for three days.”

  “Here!” He looked stunned, and then suddenly harried, his attention drawn to his restive prisoner. He asked incredulously when he was able to speak again, “Is the spell broken?”

  “No, my lord. He was brought here by a mage from some peculiar country where mages, apparently, are neither trained nor disciplined. We worked with the spell, and at her insistence finally permitted Brand to speak to her
. They were last seen entering your meditation garden. Before midnight, last night. Neither has been seen since. We have searched ruthlessly, my lord. They are gone.”

  “Where?” Draken whispered. Nyx, Meguet thought. The name turned her cold as stone, as if it were a spell. Nyx in Saphier.

  “I believe she intended no harm,” Magior was saying. “Brand insisted that no one could help him but you. She apparently has some knowledge of the time-paths within Saphier, which is perplexing because she had never even heard of Saphier before the firebird flew into Ro Holding—”

  “The Luxour,” Draken said, his face taut, dark with care. Then he stopped breathing, stopped thinking, it seemed. It was something Meguet had seen Nyx do: grow so still she might have been painted on the air. “And that,” he said very softly, evenly, as if he were recounting the ending of a tale, “is why Rad Ilex went to Ro Holding.”

  “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?”