Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “We choose the weapons that best serve the goddess,” Daimon said mildly. “I was in my father’s service last week, putting his weapons to use. This week I’m in the queen’s. She asked me to work in the shrine, learn the rituals of the goddess.”

  “But she is not your—” Lady Clarice began, addicted as she was to arguing points of protocol. Then her mouth snapped shut; she flushed an interesting shade of plum. Behind her, the ticket-taker caught her lips between her teeth and stared raptly at the floor.

  “Technically, no,” Daimon agreed. “The queen is not my mother, so I was not dedicated at birth to the goddess. But I see no reason to displease either of two such powerful women. Do you?”

  A faint squeak came out of the ticket-taker, a similar sound out of Lady Clarice. “I do beg your pardon—” she managed faintly.

  Daimon shrugged a shoulder and began lining more cups along the bar. “What for? Nobody cares. Even if I weren’t a bastard son of my father, I’d have to outlive four siblings and their offspring before I could possibly be king of anything. And when you consider—”

  The ticket-taker straightened abruptly on her stool. “Oh, stop. Forgive him, Lady Clarice; his true mother took one look at him when he was born and dropped him on his head.”

  Lady Clarice, stunned and swaying to stare at the ticket-taker, recognized the youngest offspring of Queen Genevra and King Arden. She swallowed audibly. Princess Perdita gave her a friendly smile, then shifted her gaze to frown at her half brother.

  “Shame, Daimon. Apologize to Lady Clarice for teasing her.”

  “I am sorry for teasing you, Lady Clarice,” Daimon said amiably, turning a spigot to refill the sacred water pitcher. In the silence before the water began to flow, the distant voices of children deep within the cave echoed incomprehensibly off the stones.

  “I’ll just—” Lady Clarice said weakly, taking a step or two backward. “I’d better see to—”

  She turned, plunged into the cave. Perdita looked reproachfully at her retreating shadow.

  “She didn’t give me her ticket.”

  Daimon and his half sibling had been born in vastly different circumstances, but so closely in time they might have been twins. The fair-haired, gray-eyed, muscular Daimon had entered the world in a busy public hospital on the outskirts of Severluna. Willowy Perdita, with the king’s black hair and golden eyes, had been born minutes earlier in a pool of warm water within the palace, surrounded by midwives and attendants of the goddess Calluna. By some royal sleight of hand, Daimon, howling in his crib in the hospital nursery, had been spirited away within an hour to grow up with Perdita.

  Daimon had never known his mother. The queen had given him only the most meager bone of truth at an early age: that his mother had died after giving birth to him. What Queen Genevra actually thought about the matter, she never said. Gossip said a great many conflicting things for a few years, as the court watched Daimon grow. Then it lost interest. When he found the reckless courage to ask the king, his father said briskly, “You are my son. The rest is my business.” Daimon guessed from the place where his mother had chosen for him to be born that she was used to taking care of herself. She was nobody, or anybody at all, until she had caught the king’s eye. That the king had not left him nameless and orphaned but had reached out to find him, told Daimon something. But he was never sure what.

  Daimon finished filling cups, put the mop back in a cupboard, and emptied the dregs in the vessel down the drain in the floor where it was filtered, cleaned, and piped back into the river downstream. He was aware of Perdita’s voice—something about an upcoming fete, someone she hoped would be there—as a light, pleasing counterpoint to his thoughts. When her voice suddenly invaded his distraction, he was startled.

  “Daimon! Where are you? I’ve been talking at you—you might as well be on the moon for all you’re listening. What are you thinking about?”

  He shook his preoccupations away, smiled at her. “Sorry. You were saying?”

  “No. Really. What were you thinking? I’ve never seen that expression on your face. Are you in love?”

  He knew the one on hers well enough. He felt that glittering, potent gaze from the place where, in a different myth, his third eye might have been, down to the soles of his feet. Witch, he thought. Sorceress. He shifted, dropping his own eyes, and took a cloth to a nonexistent spill on the bar.

  “How should I know? I’ve never been there before.”

  “Who is she?”

  “You were saying about a fete? Hoping who might come?”

  He still felt that intense, ruthless regard, heard her draw breath. Then the children came spilling out of the cave, running upstairs in anticipation of ice cream, despite the unreasonable demands to Walk! Walk! Some unfortunate visitor coming down against the tide stopped and pressed himself against the wall until the frothing school of bodies vanished into the upper realms. He descended finally, interrupting Perdita’s single-minded pursuit of her half brother’s private concerns.

  “Gareth!”

  She sprang off the stool and flung her arms around the visitor. Daimon’s mouth crooked. He couldn’t, himself, appreciate the subtle fascinations of Gareth May that turned the willful Perdita into a boneless butterfly. But he was grateful for the interruption. The young knight gave him a little, formal nod over Perdita’s shoulder; Daimon saluted him genially with the bar cloth. In the little, quiet interim between visitors, while the lovers murmured, Daimon could hear the voice of the goddess, whispering as the waters quickened against the stones in the distant underground.

  He stepped from behind the water bar and slipped into the cave.

  Underwater lights limned the large, round pool of the headwaters that in earlier centuries had been caught in a basin of brick and colored tiles, ringed by stone steps where sufferers could lower themselves into the soothing embrace of the goddess. Pillars, plaques, broken statues haunted the shadows, wandering downstream as far as they dared. Seeking the upper world and light, the Calluna would ultimately find the swift, broad waters of the Severen as well. The river god would sweep the slower, shallower waters of the goddess into his bed, dissipating hers as god and goddess became one. Now the goddess’s waters were trapped in enormous underground pipes beneath the city streets. They never saw the light before they joined the Severen in its chilly, muscular flow to the sea.

  Daimon stood at the edge of the pool, where Calluna’s first visitors had painted their gifts to her on the raw stones: animals, birds, flowers. The earliest image of the goddess’s face floated among them, inspired by the moon, archaeologists thought, reflected through a hole in the upper ground onto the dark water below. She had enormous, staring eyes; a wreath of hair or light rippled around her face. She watched. Daimon, meeting her dark, urgent gaze, found as much pain as power in it. She understood the sufferers who sought her. She understood her fate.

  Moved by the glimpse of ancient glory and sorrow, Daimon bent, dipped his fingers into the pool, watched the ripples form and slowly spread.

  Perdita called his name, needing him back; he heard the clamor of other voices in the antechamber. As he turned, a pair of bewitching eyes opened across time, space, memory, and smiled, blurring the face of the goddess in his thoughts.

  In the dark privacy of the cave, he smiled back. But, he remembered, he had a lunch to get through first with his father, whose unexpected summons earlier that day took precedence.

  When his shift behind the goddess’s water bar ended, he ascended to the upper realms, unlocked his electric bike from the parking rack, and made his way through the busy, labyrinthine streets of Severluna to the calmer, tree-lined avenues that ended at the vast grounds and high towers of the palace of the Wyvernhold kings on the cliff above the sea.

  “The queen asked me to talk to you,” King Arden said.

  They sat in the king’s private chambers, eating a seafood stew, a
salad of strawberries, hazelnuts, and a dozen kinds of baby greens, and chewy, sour rolls flavored with rosemary. The servers had withdrawn; they were completely alone, which Daimon found disquieting. As the youngest of Arden’s five children, and illegitimate to boot, he enjoyed a certain amount of lax attention, an absence of scrutiny from his father as long as he did what the king asked when he remembered that Daimon was around.

  “About what?” Daimon asked bewilderedly, and caught the flash of the wyvern’s attention. But the king hesitated. He trawled for a bite, then lost interest in it, and let go of his spoon. He sat back, gazing at Daimon, an odd, quizzical expression on his face. He was a handsome, energetic man who commanded respect, explained succinctly when he had to, and held his secrets as close as any gambler; Daimon was unused to seeing him uncertain about anything.

  “She said it’s time. High time, her exact words. That I talk to you about your mother.”

  Daimon, stunned, felt the blood flush into his face.

  “Now? Why?”

  “I have no idea. Genevra is an acolyte of the goddess. She pulls things out of the air sometimes. Ties up a loose thread before anyone else sees it. She herself never wanted to know anything more about your mother. And I never meant to not tell you. The time just never seemed—easy. But she said you have a right to know, and now is better than not.” He was still again, frowning at the past. “I wish,” he breathed finally, “that I understood it better myself.” He raised his salad fork, aimed it toward Daimon’s plate. “Eat. While I find the place to begin.”

  Daimon took a few tasteless bites, listening to his father’s silence. “I always thought,” he said slowly, trying to help, “that she must have been independent, maybe poor, considering where I was born, but someone who didn’t expect—who wanted to take care of herself.” He looked at the king, so lost in the past, it seemed he had all but forgotten his son. “She must have had a name. You could start there.”

  The king stirred, rearranged a few leaves in his salad. “Her name was Ana. That’s all I knew of it. I met her at a party. I don’t remember whose. I was much younger, then; life and details blur. Her face never did. It is as clear in my memory as yesterday.” He paused, seeing her again, Daimon guessed, the face that had never changed with time because she had so little left of it. “She had come to Severluna at the invitation of your great-aunt Morrig. They were related in some far-flung way; they shared ancestors in a family whose name is in annals older than Wyvernhold. Are you in love?”

  Daimon coughed on a hazelnut. “I don’t think so,” he said vaguely, and was held in the wyvern’s intent, powerful gaze.

  “You know that what you feel is not love? Or you don’t know, yet, what love is?”

  Daimon felt the burn again in his face and guessed that perhaps his life was not so comfortably ignored as he had thought. “I don’t know enough,” he said finally, “even to answer the question.”

  His father nodded. “That’s a good place to begin learning. I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know until I met your mother. And you are right: She was very independent. She wouldn’t let me give her anything. Morrig helped her find work; she took an apartment in the hinterlands of the city, which is why you were born out there.” He broke a piece off a bread roll, crumbled it absently. “All we had was that one night together, after the party. Not even a night, just the few early-morning hours. She wouldn’t see me again. I had no idea where she went after she left Morrig’s house; my aunt wouldn’t tell me. But they kept in touch with one another. It was Morrig who told me when and where you were born. And that your mother had died.” He paused; his mouth tightened, more rueful than bitter. “It was Genevra who taught me a few more things about love, then. How far it can bend, and in how many ways, without shattering. I knew your mother so briefly. But to this day, I have never forgotten her. And I have never understood exactly what had hold of my heart that night.” He picked up his fork again, missing Daimon’s sudden, wide-eyed stare as the king’s words echoed in his own heart. “You look like her. That’s all I can tell you. I’m sorry. I don’t know how much you’ve wondered about the matter, but if you need more, you might ask your great-aunt Morrig. These days, she seems to remember the distant past much better than she remembers last week. Another thing,” his father said, moving on with a touch of relief, “I might as well bring up while you’re here. There is a matter that Sylvester Skelton brought to Lord Ruxley’s attention; he brought it to mine.”

  Daimon, struggling with his father’s startling revelations, responded to the simplest of them. “They can’t stand each other. Why would Sylvester take anything to Lord Ruxley before he brought it to you?”

  “It is a matter for the Mystes Ruxley, not the lord. Some ancient artifact of the god Severen’s—a cup, a pot—came to light in a manuscript Lord Skelton has been translating.” The king paused a moment, studying his bread plate as if the crumbs on it might shift into language and illuminate a mystery. “I don’t entirely understand the significance. Which isn’t surprising, considering the maze of Sylvester’s mind. The part I do understand is that he says the object is ancient, valuable, and powerful beyond belief.”

  Daimon pursed his lips to whistle, refrained. “What on earth is it?”

  “Sylvester seems to think it important enough to call an assembly of the knights of Wyvernhold. He and Mystes Ruxley will explain it.” He paused, chewing over the matter with a bite. Daimon recognized the more familiar expression in his eyes, now: the gleam of the wyvern, roused. “I have no idea what this object is, but I think what Sylvester has in mind is along the lines of an old-fashioned quest. It sounds to me like the perfect diversion.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “You must have heard the rumblings of discontent from knights born in more isolated parts of Wyvernhold—in the eastern mountains, along the north coast—about regaining the sovereignty that was lost when the first King Arden Wyvernbourne’s army pulled all the little, bickering kingdoms together under his rule and created Wyvernhold.”

  “Something of it. Surely nobody’s serious.”

  “The notion seems to spread more often in peaceful times, when there’s little else to complain about. That somehow the romance and glory of those realms would return along with their reclaimed boundaries and their names. It’s a foolish, dangerous idea. Something as common as water rights could tangle the courts for years, not to mention the temptation for each small kingdom to build up its own standing army, just in case. If the magus and the mystes can sell this idea of an artifact that powerful and valuable free for the finding and the taking, it will scatter the knights across Wyvernhold and give them all something else to think about besides reclaiming long-lost kingdoms. I have no intention of becoming Arden the Last, who let Wyvernhold scatter into thousand-year-old fragments.”

  Daimon, trying to imagine such a marvel, found a flaw in his father’s thinking. “What if it’s real?”

  He felt the weight of the wyvern’s regard again, golden and unblinking. “Then one of my children had better find it for me.”

  —

  Daimon joined Vivien Ravensley that evening for dinner in the Gold District. The district was one of the outermost in Severluna. Blessed a couple of centuries before by the god Severen with a stray nugget of gold, it had attracted swarms of prospectors. A sanctum had been built near the site of the finding. The gold ran out not long after the sanctum was completed; the disappointed prospectors moved on. Even the god himself moved on; at least the sanctum’s Mystica did. The sanctum, unsanctified, wore many faces through the years. Now it was The Proper Way, a restaurant and brew-pub named after the street on which it stood.

  They sat at one of the little outdoor tables overlooking the distant lights floating on the dusky blue Severen: night-fishers, barges, cruise and container ships following the river to the sea.

  Vivien had caught Daimon’s eye at a party one late night, an
endless affair that drifted from place to place by the hour, its cast changing across every threshold. He kept seeing her at odd moments: once leaning against a colorful paper-covered wall, her hair a sleek helmet of burnished copper around her face, another time between two marble statues, her own face as matte white as theirs, her eyes a rich peacock blue flecked with gold that turned fiery when someone struck a match to light a candle next to her. Looking for her, he didn’t find her; she seemed to become visible only when he thought she had gone. Then she would appear again across yet another threshold and give him something new to notice: her very long, thin fingers, her smile that made him think of otherworldly beings whose names were slowly vanishing from the language.

  Finally, she turned that smile to him and beckoned.

  They put in an order for steak and vegetables and watched their supper cook on one of the blazing grills on the restaurant deck. As they ate, Daimon told her about his lunch with the king.

  “It sounds like a fairy tale,” Vivien commented. “Your mother enchanted the king for a night and—”

  “Came up with me. Yes. It seems extremely tactful of her to vanish like that. Asking for nothing from my father, no money, no help—and then considerately dying. If it hadn’t been for my great-aunt Morrig, not even my father would have known I existed. I certainly would never have known. I could be out in the dark now, repaving highways or working on one of those container ships, instead of having a palace to return to after sitting here with you.”

  She looked at him over a forkful of blackened carrots. Passing car lights caught her eyes, kindling that strange golden fire in them. “You’re not. Returning. Are you?”

  He smiled, entranced by that fire. “How could I?”

  He was very familiar with her tiny, untidy apartment overlooking the sleepless streets and the broad, busy river. But he had no idea where she worked. She only laughed when he asked, and hinted of something involving dogs, or small children, or the elderly. “Very boring,” she told him. “I do it; I get paid; I don’t want to think about it.”