Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She found him by his singing.

  Crooning, more like, she thought. If a wolf could. It was a gentle sort of whine, hitting notes of love, lullaby, and play, the sound a creature might make that had spent an entirely satisfying night, and looked forward to another just like it. She could not see the wolf though it sounded close, just behind a tree, or around the great fallen snag of a root-ball lying partly in the grasses, partly in mud the ebbing tide had uncovered. She followed the wolf song through the trees behind the house, the hemlock and cedar, the occasional apple tree orphaned by a long-forgotten farm, scattering the last of its blossoms among its roots. She saw the deer the wolf ignored, nibbling on a shrub. The song, a tangible thing now, like a beckoning finger, or the wolf’s shadow sliding out of eyesight every time she saw it, led her deeper into the forest, but never far from the tranquil shallows reflecting the flush of light in the wake of the rising sun.

  The wolf sang. The song flowed into her ears, into her head and heart, then, like sunrise, it illuminated her eyes. She heard herself humming with it, now, seeing what the wolf saw, what it sang to, what it sang about. The daily ebb of water, the blue heron in the tree, the sleeping owl, the patient, peaceful trees, season after season of leaves falling, petals falling, needles flying, cones budding, petals forming again, opening again. The rich, tangled wealth of smells from the water, the living treasure buried in the mud, clinging to the long grasses, waiting for the tide to turn, return.

  At last she saw the wolf, sitting on its haunches, waiting for her.

  She walked up to it. It had stopped singing, just sat there, silent, motionless, its eyes the color of the drifts of morning mist above the waters.

  Its eyes closed. When they opened again, her father stood there, gazing at her out of weary human eyes. He was mud-stained, disheveled; there was dried eelgrass in his hair. He didn’t speak; neither did she. She just put her arms around him tightly, clinging to him thoughtlessly as she had when she was a child and believed he could protect her from anything.

  Then she dropped her arms, stepped back to see his face. He lifted his hands, gripped her arms, staring into her eyes. She saw crow wings in his, the full moon, lightning flashing in the dark, turning every hidden thread of slough water into molten silver. The sudden light ignited, turned to amber and fire; she stood reflected in the wyvern’s eye.

  She drew a deep breath, seeing herself finally, answering the one question that she hadn’t even known to ask.

  Daughter of the wolf. Daughter of the magus.

  “Yes,” she said tightly. “I want this. I need this. Whatever you can give me.”

  “You need to see this world before you can recognize the other.”

  She nodded, not entirely understanding but trusting him to arm her.

  “I have been calling for help,” he added. “I think I have finally been heard. I had to find someone who would remember me. Not many left who remember back that far.”

  Her eyes stung suddenly because he was finally talking to her, telling her, and because she could finally hear him. She did not have to ask how far back. He had seen the living wyvern, that was how far. He stood with his old, gawping boots rooted so far into the deep they probably reached bottom, down where the new things had started to crawl out of the sea onto the first of the drying mud.

  She saw the glimmer of a smile: Not quite that far. He went back as far as that, at least: to the beginning of laughter.

  She said, “Tell me what to do.”

  “I’m going to give you something. Give it to Lilith when you take her Hal’s note this morning.”

  “All right.”

  He leaned forward; she felt his lips brush her cheek, before they paused over her ear.

  He left a word there.

  Then he said, “Sorry about the empty cupboards. I didn’t have time—”

  “That’s okay. Zed is going grocery shopping.”

  “Good. He’s a good man. I hope he stays around.”

  He lingered, filling his eyes with her, even while a pointed ear nudged through his hair, one hand wavered into claw and back. “Be careful,” he said, his voice sliding between human and howl, between now and then, so ancient and unwieldy it might have been a slab of granite trying out a human word.

  Her eyes burned again. “Okay.”

  Then she was watching the wolf slip shadowlike through the trees, giving away nothing of itself, not even a scent to startle the grazing deer.

  —

  Lilith barely gave her a chance to speak when Carrie brought Hal’s note to the tower suite and knocked on her door later that morning. She opened the door and whirled away, phone to her ear, papers taking flight off her desk as she passed.

  “No,” she was saying. “We haven’t caught sight of them yet. I’ve never heard of a sorceress on that part of the coast. I’ll keep some eyes on her down there. I’m glad to hear you trimmed a few feathers out of her wings. It was astonishing to see their faces on the news—” She came to the edge of the carpet and turned again, a tide in full flood, until she saw Carrie and stopped so abruptly the breeze in her wake seemed to flow past her and out the door.

  The blood ran completely out of her face. It crumpled, shadows and lines appearing, underscoring the terror in her eyes, the sudden, overwhelming grief over something invisible between them, roused from memory by whatever she saw in Carrie’s face. She dropped the phone from her ear to her shoulder, held it there like a lifeline.

  As abruptly, the tide of color washed back into her face; the terror vanished under an upwelling of rage.

  “No,” she said to Carrie, chopping words like vegetables. “Tell me. You are not. Working for Todd Stillwater.”

  The voice on the phone rose in volume and jumped an octave, repeating the same word over and over, like an angry songbird. Lilith didn’t seem to hear; Carrie held all her attention.

  Carrie said, “My father told me to give you something. A word. I don’t know what it means. Miranda.”

  For a moment, Lilith only stared at her as though she had no idea either. Her face seemed frozen, unable to shape a thought. Slowly, her eyes changed, grew large, flushed, glittering with what Carrie realized were unshed tears. She dropped the phone on the floor, beginning to tremble. Carrie, suddenly terrified, took a step toward her. But Lilith caught her balance and finally found her voice.

  “Miranda,” she said, and again, “Miranda.” The name seemed to comfort her. The frozen, stricken face eased a little, expression melting through it. She seemed to look through Carrie, past her into an immeasurable distance.

  Then her eyes quickened, saw Carrie again.

  “He said her name.”

  “Yes,” Carrie whispered.

  “I haven’t. Said her name. None of us has, not even Merle. Said her name. In all these years.”

  “Who—who is she?”

  “Was. She was our daughter. Hal’s and mine. She fell in love with Todd Stillwater, when he cooked for the Kingfisher Inn, so long ago. His cooking—it made the inn famous. It was wonderful. Spellbinding. His spell bound my daughter. His spell bound us all. Me. He fed us all so well that we were always hungry, always happy, always wanting more. People came from all over Wyvernhold to tie up at our dock, stay at the inn, eat Stillwater’s magic in that magnificent old dining room that has never been used since—” She stopped, absolutely still again, looking inward, lost to the world.

  “Since?”

  “Miranda.” Her eyes filled again; she turned her head, looked out over the water. Like Carrie’s voice, her own dwindled, burrowed. “Only Merle saw. Only Merle saw clearly. What we had all become. What Stillwater was. Is.

  “He destroyed this place. Merle and Hal fought him, finally drove him out. But the terrible battle left Hal crippled, Merle lost in his own mind half the time. Stillwater sucked the magic out of this place, left it shattered, and u
s still spellbound. We couldn’t—we couldn’t speak. That’s why he’s still here in Chimera Bay. We could not speak. He’s safe here.”

  “From what?”

  “From those who drove him out of his world into this one.” She raised her hand, brushed her eyes with her wrist. “They couldn’t stand him, either.”

  “You’re speaking now.”

  “You said her name. We could never—we could never say her name. After she died. She died wanting more, always wanting more of Stillwater. He left her here, went his way. He took her name away with him. I could never forgive myself.” She looked at Carrie again, her eyes dry now, the unnatural green of sky and sea mirroring dangerous weather. “I encouraged her. Even I was a little in love. I thought our love, our fortune, our beautiful, enchanted life would last forever.”

  “That’s why you always stay up here. Why you never come down.”

  “There was no point. I couldn’t forgive myself for not—for not seeing my own daughter in such horrible danger, not helping her— How could I expect Hal to forgive me?”

  “What’s changed? Now?”

  “Merle said her name. He sent you up here, looking like you do, feeding on emptiness, wasting away without even noticing, even your hair thin and hungry for what’s real, what’s true. But somehow you learned to see like Merle sees. You are his daughter, and what he sees in you is hope.”

  —

  When she left the Kingfisher Grill after lunch and went to Stillwater’s to prep for dinner, she was not entirely surprised by the cracked and rain-darkened oak in the old bank door. She walked inside, saw the splintered, warped floorboards, the tattered tablecloths, the long-dead flowers in the vases. Sage Stillwater sat at the bar, taking notes. She turned her head, smiled at Carrie. Her hair was limp, her face wan, hollowed, fretted with tiny, worried lines, and so pale it might have been the color of her bones seeping too near the surface of her face. Her eyes seemed huge, hungry for something she no longer remembered. Stillwater, his back to Carrie, read labels of nearly empty bottles, some of them so dusty the writing was hardly visible. Sage jotted down what he needed: limes, olives, brandy, new glasses to replace the cracked. He glanced toward Carrie and smiled absently as she greeted him. He looked, she thought, like a sort of shriveled, pallid mushroom, his skin damp, grayish white, not enough hair on his head to bother leaving it there. One eyebrow had vanished completely. His eyes had sunk so deeply into his furrowed face that he looked like something furtive peering out of a fallen tree trunk.

  After seeing Merle shaping everything under the moon, she wasn’t afraid of the magic, just suddenly, profoundly curious about this ancient, nameless power who, in trapping those Carrie loved within all their memories, seemed to have trapped himself as well.

  She passed them, headed into the kitchen, and saw something she hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe her attention had just skittered over it before, since it was nothing much to look at, just a dented old pot gathering cobwebs on the floor in a corner. As she wondered idly what it was doing there, a lovely bronze light glided over it, barely visible beneath the dust and old grease clinging to it.

  Something of Stillwater’s, she guessed. Maybe one of his early, experimental machines. Being Stillwater’s, it would most likely still contain a surprise or two.

  She lifted it out of the shadows to see what it could do.

  21

  Perdita and the queen received the news of Daimon’s quest from the king himself, who summoned them out of a ritual midseason salute to the goddess by appearing at the top of the sanctum stairs and startling the guardian on duty to the point of incoherence.

  “Your Majesty,” she whispered to the queen within the sanctum, as Mystes Halliwell led the acolytes in their chant. “His Majesty—he’s—just outside. Inside the antechamber. He wants you and Princess Perdita.”

  Perdita, watching the queen grow pale, thought instantly: Daimon. She turned, followed the queen easing through the crowd around the central pool with its feathery wisp of a fountain murmuring a musical counterpoint to the chant. For no reason, Perdita glanced back as they left the sanctum. She saw her aunt Morrig’s face turned to watch them, her gray eyes looking oddly dark and birdlike.

  Observing the sanctum’s rules, the king waited courteously on the top of the antechamber stairs. The rare uncertainty on his face made Perdita swallow dryly. The queen quickened her pace.

  “Please,” he said softly, as they reached him. “Can we talk?”

  The queen’s mouth tightened. As she had done many times through the years for her lover, she opened the chamber door for her husband.

  “Arden, what is it?” She closed the door behind him, leaned against it. The king glanced around the small, cluttered room strewn with clothes, shoes, jewels, the open wardrobe door whose mirror reflected his presence. He picked up a sweater Perdita had tossed on the little couch, then stood holding it, hesitating. “Sit down,” Genevra said, and he did.

  Perdita took the sweater from him and sat on the arm of the couch, gripping the soft wool tightly. “It’s Daimon,” she said with that strange certainty, and the king nodded.

  “What is it?” the queen said again, sharply. “What happened? Where is he?”

  “He has gone questing, like half my other knights.” He paused, his eyes on his wife, narrowed slightly as against a dark and imminent tempest. “You asked me to tell him about his mother. I did. And now I think I should tell you.”

  The queen stared at him. “She’s dead. That’s all I have ever wanted to know.”

  “That’s almost all I know of her,” Arden said heavily. “We were together one very short night. Nine months later, she was dead.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m not so sure of anything, even that.”

  The queen pulled herself from the door, sank into a chair. The blood rose swiftly, brightly, into her face. “You think she might be still alive? Does Daimon know her?”

  “He’s been behaving very strangely. He comes and goes without a word; he is distant, preoccupied, and—most of the time—simply not there.”

  “Not there where?”

  “Behind his eyes. It’s as though he sees us as strangers. He can’t seem to remember who he is, why he’s here in this family. He has spent entire days, and even nights, away. He won’t say where. Sylvester thinks he’s enchanted.”

  “So it sounds,” the queen said, her frown easing a little. “So he’s in love? Is that what you’re worried about? That she’s in some way inappropriate? So is he, for that matter. We all are, at one time or another—”

  “Spellbound,” the king interrupted, and she was silent again, her eyes wide on his face. “As I might have been,” he added slowly, “so long ago.”

  The queen gripped the hardwood arms of her chair. Perdita had never seen her eyes so cold. “Arden. What is the point of all this? He is in love the way you were in love?”

  “No. It’s not my word. It’s Sylvester’s,” the king said, with odd emphasis, and Perdita’s lips parted.

  “Yes,” she exclaimed. “Of course that’s it. That’s why Morrig— But who? Who is doing the enchanting?”

  Her parents stared at her now.

  “Morrig?” the queen echoed faintly.

  “What do you know about this, Perdita?” the king asked with bewilderment.

  “He as much as told me he had glimpsed his other heritage—his other half.”

  The queen’s voice ratcheted up a notch. “So who was his mother?” she demanded of Arden. “And what,” she asked Perdita, “does Lady Seabrook have to do with any of this?”

  “I think,” Perdita said, keeping her voice low in case Morrig was hovering around the keyhole, “that Great-aunt Morrig is anything but dotty. I believe she—or someone who does her bidding—led Scotia Malory and me on a wild-goose chase over most of Severluna when we tried to follow Daimon t
o see where he goes.”

  The king held up his hand, patted the air between them. “Please. Let me say what I came to say. Sylvester put the pieces together, taught me the words for it. There was a realm once named Ravenhold. It existed along with many other small kingdoms before Arden Wyvernbourne conquered it. At least the human realm of Ravenhold disappeared within Wyvernbourne. The hidden realm, the invisible realm, whose boundaries once stretched across the whole of Wyvernbourne and beyond, never entirely disappeared. Neither did its powerful, magical people, who, Sylvester guesses, still live among us. He also guesses that, after all this time, they want their realm back.

  “And that realm is Daimon’s other heritage. Where his mother came from. Where she still might be, for all I know. He is half-Wyvernbourne. His other—”

  “You didn’t know?” the queen interrupted incredulously. “You did not know her well enough to know that?”

  “I was enchanted,” the king said simply. “All that the word means. All.”

  “And Daimon—”

  “Spellbound as well, by the powers we have all forgotten, until they transform our hearts. My ancestor overran their realm, called himself their king. My son, half-wyvern, has been enchanted by the raven. I can’t guess what will come of it.”

  “Why should anything come of a broken realm? How powerful can it be?”

  “Lord Skelton has found evidence, in old myths and poetry,” the king answered steadily, “that they were powerful enough to make a great cauldron that brought their dead warriors back to life.”

  “A cauldron,” Perdita said blankly. Then her eyes widened, riveted on her father. “A bowl. A pot. A vessel of enormous power—”

  “Yes.” The wyvern’s eyes, holding hers, seemed dimmed, diminished by the idea of it. “And I have sent the knights of Wyvernhold out looking for it. Including my youngest son, who is under the raven’s spell.”

  The queen rose abruptly, pacing the small room in six long strides. “It’s a tale,” she said harshly. “A scrap of myth.” She whirled, paced back. “Anyway, if it’s real, and your knights find it, they will bring it to you. Not that such a thing could possibly exist. Could it?” She came to a halt in front of Arden. “What does Sylvester think?”