Kingfisher (16 page)

“He called me,” the old man said. “I heard him clear as an owl's cry, and I came. Up every morning, down the hill at sunset by myself for decades until my knee gave out and Sara here came along to help me.” He looked at her fondly, added, “I had no idea you could shoot that thing.”

“Neither did I. We found it in the cave,” she explained. “I think some miner left it there a hundred years ago.” Her smile deepened with satisfaction. “Now we know it works.”

“Forgive the knights if you can,” Leith said grimly. “Nothing they did here was sanctioned by King Arden, who has deep respect for all the gods and goddesses of Wyvernhold. Those young men are arrogant louts on an idiotic quest; their behavior here was despicable and cowardly, and I'm sorry not to have come in time to make that clear to them.” He paused, gazing at Pierce, his expression still dark. “I am enormously grateful you did not shoot my impulsive son. My other impulsive son.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “me, too.”

“You have another?” the old man said, surprised. “He didn't come running to help?”

“He went off in a car full of young women to look for a garage. No telling when we'll see him again.”

“A garage.”

“Our car is stalled on the road below. It shut itself down for its own reasons; our driver can't get it started again, and none of our phones work either.”

The old man raised a shaggy brow, musing a bit. “Everything just went dead?”

“Everything.”

“For no reason.”

“None.”

“Well.” He scratched his head and smiled a little; above him tree boughs swayed and spoke in a wind from the sea. “That happens, sometimes, around the shrine. On the odd occasion—rare, mind you—that the forest senses it might need some help. Go down and try your car again,” he added, as Pierce and Leith stared wordlessly at him. “It may have cured itself by now.”

When they reached the bottom of the hill, the limo engine was gently idling, and the tow truck from which Val had emerged was on its way back down the mountain.

C
arrie sat with Zed in his narrow bed, sharing a bottle of wine and the events of their long days. It was past midnight. Zed had come home from the Pharaoh Theater; Carrie had stayed late with Ella, scrubbing the hoary kitchen floors. Around them, the small cabin was a shadowy mix of candlelight and camp lantern. Thrown together as a duck blind, remodeled into a rental with the world's tiniest kitchen, it still smelled of damp logs, and occasionally sprouted a mushroom. A potbellied stove, one broken leg on a brick, exuded the scent of damp ash. There was an actual braided rug on the splintery floor. Outside, the night itself was soundless, no weather and a sky so clear the lace of streams through the long grasses ran with moonlight instead of water. The slough made its own noises: hooting, rustling, grunting, and peeping. Distant car engines mingled with the constant
musings of the sea. Carrie's ears sorted through every noise, pricked for the sound of Merle's voice.

“What is he, anyway?” she wondered. “Magic?”

“Merle?”

“I always thought he was just demented. My mother always said so. But no matter how crazy you want to be, you can't turn yourself into a wolf without knowing something more than most. Where did he learn it?”

“There's magic around.”

“Not in Chimera Bay.”

“There's Merle,” Zed said. “There's the Friday Nite ritual. There's mystery in that old hotel.”

She poured herself more wine, took a hefty swallow. “There's Stillwater.”

Zed looked at her silently, quizzically; in that moment, she made up her mind about what she had been pondering since the afternoon she had walked into Stillwater's restaurant to talk to him and got a glimpse of something in his face too old to be still alive and human at the same time.
Eat,
he had said.

“And I did,” she said hollowly.

“What?”

She stirred, getting her thoughts in order, what to tell, what not to so that he wouldn't worry. “I told you that Stillwater wants me to work for him.”

“Yeah.”

“So when I went to talk to him about it—just to talk—he offered me samples of his cooking. Little, complicated layers of color and texture, so wonderful to look at, you don't want
to eat it, and at the same time, you imagine how much more wonderful all those colors could taste, all at once in your mouth. Like a sweet explosion of fireworks, like edible music. So I ate.” She reached for her glass, took a sip to reassure herself that she still had taste buds. “That beautiful little piece of art, food jewelry—it tasted like nothing. Mist. Not even sea mist. That has a bite of salt in it. Just cloud. Just. Nothing.” She drank again. “So of course I ate another. And another, since whatever was wrong must have been in me, not in those perfect Stillwater bites. He must have known. I kept eating, trying to taste, and he just kept smiling. He has the most wonderful—”

“You keep saying.”

“Anyway, I think I ate everything in sight. Or I would have, except that his wife came in with her arms full of groceries, and we got up to help her. She seemed nice. Friendly. Really beautiful, of course; you'd expect that, since she's married to a Greek myth—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“When I left them, I still wanted more. More little beautiful bites of nothing.”

“So are you going to work for him?”

“Yes. I have to. He's the only piece of the mystery around the Kingfisher Inn that will talk to me.”

Zed shifted closer to her, put his arm around her. “Be careful,” he pleaded.

She nodded, whittling another half inch off the scant distance left between them, then another, after she put her glass on the floor and let the hollow in the old mattress cant them together.

“I intend to,” she said somberly. “I don't know what he is, I don't know what my father's afraid of, I don't know what Ella hates, and I have no idea if I'm capable of figuring out all the whys of everything. I can't imagine why Stillwater cooks like that. Or why my father can turn into a wolf. I need to stop thinking like me and start thinking like them.”

“How?”

She looked at him silently, studying the sweet, caramel brown of his eyes, while she contemplated mysteries going back farther than she did, back under the magnificent chandelier in the days when every prism flamed with light. “Stillwater lies even with his cooking; my father refuses to tell the truth. Where? Where does that story begin?” She turned her head, held Zed's eyes. “I will fry fish for Ella,” she told him fiercely. “I will eat Stillwater's not-cooking, I will learn wolf and howl back at my father if that's the only way I can talk to him. I want to understand this story if that's the last thing I do. If nobody's talking, I'll find a new way of listening. If nobody's talking, then nobody can say no.”

She went to work for Todd Stillwater during her hours off at the Kingfisher: lunches on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and dinner on Wednesdays. She did not so much as whisper to a soup pot or tell a fork in Ella's kitchen that she was cooking for Stillwater. She kept the word “water” out of her head when she took Hal's daily note up to Lilith. She avoided even looking out the window at the bay. Chowder, she thought. Butter, cream, clams. Onion cheddar biscuits. Endless sizzling fries. The sudden flick of storm-green glances Lilith sent her way hinted that she suspected something. But for once in her life, Carrie was doing the not-talking,
as though her life depended on it. She babbled randomly instead, about Zed, about the aging pickup truck, about the old fruit trees and vines the early farmers had left behind still alive and blossoming again. When Lilith pressed her about Merle, she drew upon old memories: he had left her a seashell, laundry, a wild lily in a beer bottle; she had heard him singing deep in the woods at midnight.

Except when she glimpsed him brooding at her in the Kingfisher bar, she had no idea what he was doing, or thinking, or where, or in what shape, he slept. He knew what she had done. She knew he knew. Neither one of them was talking.

The first of the questing knights came at the beginning of a Friday Nite Fish Fry. Carrie walked out of the kitchen holding the huge cauldron full of steaming oyster stew with tiny crackers buttered and broiled to a crisp floating like gold coins on top of it. She heard their voices break the traditional silence, the worship of smells, before she saw them. She glanced across the room toward the sound, found a cluster of noisy, muscular, handsome men, all of them dressed in black. They were laughing, she realized incredulously; they were joking about the peculiar backwater ceremony going on in the dilapidated old inn.

Hal did not waste a glance at them. He simply stopped, leaning on his staff, gazing ahead. The line behind him, Father Kirk with the bloodstained gaff, Merle carrying the salmon on the gold platter, Carrie, all stopped. The diners gathered for supper stood silently in their places, waiting. Through the swinging doors that Curt Sloan and his son Gabe held open, Carrie heard not a whisper, a step, a clatter from inside the kitchen.

The laughter thinned, died away. Carrie recognized the uniforms then, the little heraldic shields embroidered on their jackets. One of the young men looked at Tye, behind the bar.

Tye said before the knight could speak, “Bar's closed.”

“Private party,” another man murmured, and asked Tye, “Could you tell us—”

“Try Stillwater's,” Tye said without compunction, and stood unblinking, hands flat on the bar, until the young men finally drifted toward the door and out.

Hal spoke then, smiling, welcoming the gathering to supper.

My father knows what all this means, Carrie thought coldly, as she carried the cauldron back into the kitchen to ladle out its contents. He won't tell me.

Maybe, she thought later, bringing the cleaned and polished cauldron back to the bar to be locked away, Stillwater knows. Maybe he'll tell me.

“It's nothing,” Stillwater said, when she asked him about the ritual a few days later. “A family thing. You know how families are. Always looking back, doing things the way they were always done, acquiring habits, ceremonies over the years. Actually, if I were making that choice, I wouldn't put that in there.”

Actually, Carrie didn't say, I have no idea how families are, and neither do you. “That” was a lemon, and “there” was one of Stillwater's many odd kitchen tools, machines of various sizes with no obvious ways of behaving.

“Sorry,” she said. “I thought it was the slicer.”

He opened a drawer, took out a paring knife. “This works.”

He had an extremely eccentric kitchen; the small stove and a blender were among the few things she recognized. He did nearly everything in his collection of machines. He showed her how to fry an egg in one, to roast a parsnip in another, to fashion a seven-layer cupcake, complete with a lovely ribbon of frosting tied in a bow on top, in something that looked like a martini shaker.

“Forget everything you know here,” he advised. “Experiment. Invent. Create. That's why I built these.”

She spent the first working hours doing just that: tossing food at random into his inventions just to see what would happen. She turned a red onion into ice cream, a potato into sea foam, bread into what looked like curly shoe leather; she made sequins and stars out of radishes, frothed an egg yolk, then deep-fried the froth into a golden lace. She found herself eating constantly, licking a finger or a spoon handle, desperate for a taste of anything besides air. Sage wandered in occasionally to nibble Carrie's experiments, give critical comments about how something looked, make suggestions about what to pair. Now and then, she said simply, warmly, “Yes. That's good. Todd was right about you.”

“It's nothing,” Carrie said helplessly.

“No, no. It's wonderful.”

Maybe, she thought, lying beside Zed and listening to him breathe in rhythm with the sea, that's what magic is. Believing that nothing is something.

“You haven't been cooking the way you used to,” Ella commented wistfully as they prepped for the next day's lunch. “I miss your tidbits. Your little bites.”

Carrie looked at her, surprised. She seemed to be
inventing all the time, coming up with this and that, plate jewelry, edible ornaments. But that was for Todd Stillwater, she remembered; she had neglected them in this kitchen, where every tool and recipe was predictable.

“I forgot,” she said lamely. “I've been distracted, I guess.”

“Something worrying you?”

Carrie shook her head, speechless. Working two jobs, skulking to Stillwater's three times a week, trying to find her father, deceiving Ella, hiding her thoughts from the scarily perceptive Lilith, had put her beyond worry. Maybe that was why she was hungry all the time, at least at Stillwater's. Here, she barely remembered to eat.

“Not more than usual.” She whacked at celery for the soup of the day, the old workhorse chicken-veg. She never chopped vegetables in Stillwater's kitchen, she realized. If he served soup at all, it would be in the form of a custard, maybe, or a cone of little frozen pearls. She made an effort, shoved his kitchen out of her mind. “I'll come up with something today,” she promised, and later, she combined several things lying around in such a fashion that there were visible signs, on many plates, of bites that had been spat back out.

“You've got some serious weirdness going on here,” Jayne declared, eating Carrie's creation. “I like anchovies. I just never knew I liked them with sweet pickles before.” She swallowed and added, “There are knights at one of my tables. Three of them, from Severluna. I had to explain what a shrimp basket is. What's with these knights coming through Chimera Bay? Are they all lost?”

“Maybe someone's making a movie,” Bek suggested, hefting a tray of plates to his shoulder.

“You're probably right,” Jayne said, absently munching more anchovy bites. “Real knights can't all be that gorgeous.”

They were that gorgeous in Carrie's dream that night: they all had Stillwater's face. The knights had gathered in the Kingfisher Inn to watch the solemn ritual Fish Fry. Women from an era of crimped hair, red lipstick, heart-shaped bodices, full skirts made of satin and chiffon accompanied the knights. The high-hatted chef led the ritual, holding a great platter of beautiful little bites. He carried it around the room, offering it to the richly dressed, smiling women, to the knights who all looked alike, to Hal and Merle, who wore their tuxedos, to Ella, even to Lilith, who had come down from her tower to join the merry gathering.

Everyone ate. The platter never emptied; more and more bites appeared and disappeared. Colors in the dream began to flicker, vanish, return. The rich hues of women's gowns paled, melted into grays and whites and blacks of old photos. People kept talking, laughing, even as one by one lights in the chandelier went dark. Airy skirts began to tear, part into shreds; high-heeled sandals vanished, left the women barefoot. Their glittering diamonds winked out like the prisms above them. The knights' beautiful faces became hollow, haggard, even as they kept eating. The walls of the prosperous inn grew thin; moonlight came through them, and the sound of the gulls. Here and there a rafter fell. Still the party, the celebration, continued, as if nothing were wrong, nothing at all, everyone talking, laughing, eating from the chef's inexhaustible platter, even though shadows crept over the walls, and Lilith had vanished, and so had Hal, leaving a
crippled old man in his place, leaning painfully on a staff, and beside him, Merle turned into a wolf.

The wolf opened its jaws, howled.

Carrie sat up in bed, knowing even before she opened her eyes that the wolf was at the door. She stumbled through the farmhouse, flung the door open, and saw the lovely, silvery lines of streams growing dark, lifeless, as the stars blanked out, one by one, and the darkness swirling over them reached out toward the moon.