Kingfisher (22 page)

Perdita felt the blood leave her face. “You have that power over him?”

“If that's what Daimon wants, we will get it for him. My own preference for the return of our realm would be under far happier and easier circumstances. The king could simply offer it to the new queen and her consort as a wedding gift.”

“Who are you?” Her voice shook. “You three?”

“We are different faces of the raven. We have survived in many bodies, behind many faces, for time beyond measure.” She smiled again, a cold moon's smile; Perdita glimpsed the raven's eye within hers. “We hope for all the best. But we will spread our wings and bring on the night if we are challenged.” She paused again, looking at once inward and into the distance. “I must go. I am attracting Lord Skelton's attention.”

“Wait,” Perdita pleaded, and the blurring lines stilled. “Does my father know all this?”

“In his heart he knows. It is what he fears most.”

She was gone, drained out of the air like the candle flame on a river stone, dwindling into the memory of fire.

Perdita, her wyvern's eyes narrowed, gold reflecting fire, left the goddess to her own devices and went to call the questing Scotia Malory.

A
t the waning end of the endless day on the road that had begun at dawn in the sorceress's driveway, Pierce recognized the snapped sapling, the gashed tree trunk, and the mangled milepost he had damaged in passing during his previous existence. He realized that they were nearly at Chimera Bay.

He opened his mouth to say so, groggy with travel and full of wonder that here he was again, in such unpredictable circumstances, and for far different reasons. He was with family; his life had purpose, destiny, if only, at the moment, to return what he had stolen from the kindly owners of the Kingfisher Inn. It had, he thought dazedly, fulfilled its own unlikely purpose. Val, listening to music and lightly snoozing across from him, opened one eye blearily, as though he had sensed the languid tremor of mental activity. Leith,
texting someone as his sons sprawled in weary stupor around him, glanced at them, thumbed a brief end to his message.

Pierce said, “We're here.”

A dark tide roared up behind the limo on the quiet stretch of highway, washed around it in a fragmented whirl of faces, emblems painted on helmets, black leather gloves trailing colorful windswept leather ties raised in greeting, or maybe just signaling, bulky baggage tied to every possible space on the noisy bikes, all of which bore familiar crests. They forced the limo to slow, then abruptly turned in one long dark stream around it and onto a side road whose modest sign proclaimed it: Proffit Slough Lane.

“Follow them,” Leith told the driver abruptly as the fellowship swarmed around a curve and out of sight. The limo veered like a bus, rattling the last shreds of lethargy from Pierce's brain. Val pulled his lax limbs together; straightening, he twisted to get the driver's view of the winding road ahead.

“What's a slough?” he wondered. “Slow? Slog? Did you recognize them?” he asked his father.

“Several of the crests. Niles Camden's among them. Their leader. They seemed to know exactly where they wanted to go.”

Pierce pulled a memory, a pointed sliver, out of the past days. “Knights of the Rising God?”

“And up to no good,” Leith answered grimly, “in Severen's name.”

Val pulled out his cell. “Let's just find out what's got their attention . . .”

He regaled them for a while with an intermittent lecture involving tides, grasses, worms, mud, microscopic crabs, and salmon finding their way back home. “The great nursery of the sea,” he intoned, then was silent, causing his brother and his father to pull their eyes off the road ahead to look at him.

“What is it?” Leith asked.

“There is an island in the middle of the sluff. The slog.”

“Slough,” Pierce said.

“Slew. According to this article, which of course is suspect since Severen only knows who wrote it, it was once, to ancient indigenous peoples, a holy place. They believed, because of the positions of the moonrise around it, that the island was the birthplace of the moon. It had attributes, this island. It had powers of healing. Women came there to give birth. Small things left as gifts have been found by archaeologists and picnickers. Painted clay beads, bone flutes, shell belts. Fieldstones carved with pictures of objects used in daily life, or birds and animals, were transported to the island and laid down in shapes corresponding to the phases of the moon.” He glanced up at Leith's sudden shift. “Yes. That's probably where the knights are going. They seem fond of disturbing holy places. The site was most recently used, a century or two ago, by prospectors who built an alehouse on the island to carouse without complaints from the gentlefolk of Chimera Bay. There were rumors of a brothel as well. When the prospectors moved on, and the structures fell down, the island reverted to its former wild state.”

“Is it accessible?” Leith asked.

Val studied his screen. “It is . . . yes. By means of a footbridge, too narrow for cars.”

“But not for bikes.”

“If they want to risk it. I wouldn't. It looks pretty rickety to me.”

“They are risking it,” Pierce said, looking over the driver's shoulder at a distant span above silent waters surrounded by the gentle rise and fall of thick, sprawling forests.

The driver echoed him. “There they are, sirs. And losing no time about it. Sorry to be so slow around these curves. The limo doesn't like to bend.”

A dark smudge moved across the span, which seemed cobbled erratically to begin with, and gently dilapidated, swinging a slat here and there. One dropped off, shaken loose by the powerful vibrations of well-kept machines. It seemed to Pierce to fall a long way before it hit the water, causing a raptor to change its mind and veer sharply out of its dive.

As he watched, a piece of high ground detached itself from solid ground and shifted, as the road slewed, to reveal the water around all sides of it. The bridge disappeared into the tangle of green near the top of the island.

The first of the knights vanished into it.

“What do they think they'll find there?” Val wondered. “Gold the prospectors missed? The brothel?”

“What do you think, sirs?” the driver asked. “There are a couple dozen of them and, from the look of it, not much trouble they can get into.”

As he spoke, a streak of blood-red lightning shot up from the trees, made a smoking blur of the uppermost branches. The driver braked hard, nearly tossing his passengers onto the floor.

“Sorry, sirs,” he panted. “What was that?”

“Wyvern's Eye,” Leith said tersely. “Step on it.”

The driver pulled up finally at the end of the narrow bridge. As he tumbled out, Pierce heard faint cries across the water that might or might not have been gulls.

“Are you armed?” Leith asked him. He had to think.

“Yes.” He touched his shoulder, where the knife lay in its hidden sheath. “Since this morning.” He added, as another bolt of fuming red lit up the crown of the island, “For what it's worth.”

Val, standing still, his eyes narrowed at the island, said, “There's a woman's voice among the birds.”

“Not again,” Leith breathed, and began to run.

By the time they reached the island and stumbled, panting, into the trees, the shouting had stopped. Even the birds had quieted. There was a faint, calm rill of water, which, as they moved toward it, transformed itself in surprising fashion to Pierce's ears. The water spoke a human language. The water was not water. The rill, low, sweet, calm, was human.

They followed the trail the bikes had left along a hiking path that was littered with torn branches and tire-scarred ground. The tangle around them opened to a wide clearing. Surrounded by brush and trees, it edged the top of the island, overlooking the waters of the slough as they were pushed inland by the tide toward the distant conjunction of water and earth, silver flowing and disappearing into the endless rise of green.

The woman, her back to them, was addressing the entire company of knights. They stood among the sunken patterns of fieldstone, small, dark standing stones, the drifts of shell
and little piles of sea-polished stones left by more recent visitors. Their faces, half-hidden by visors and sunglasses, seemed both baffled and incredulous. The woman in black with the Wyvern's Eye in her hand aimed it not at them but at the line of bikes that had fallen one over the next as though they had been ruthlessly shoved.

“It's a long walk back to Severluna,” she said.

Then she was facing Leith, Val, and Pierce, her pale violet eyes unblinking, her face composed, ready for whatever came. In her other hand, the weapon's red fuming eye still stared at the bikes.

There were stray movements among the knights, but Leith had his weapon out, aiming at the young men rather than their transportation. The woman smiled suddenly, and Pierce recognized the very tall, broad-boned, amber-haired knight who had rescued him, in the Hall of Wyverns, from the wrath of the king's seneschal.

“Sir Leith. Where on earth did you come from?”

Leith nodded, his taut face loosening almost enough to smile back. “Dame Scotia. I'm very happy to see you here.”

“Sir Leith,” one of the young men called across the clearing. “Can you get her to stop pointing that at our bikes? She has us at a disadvantage. We are Knights of the Rising God. We don't fight women.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” Pierce exclaimed indignantly. “Last I saw of you, you were harassing a girl at the mountain shrine.”

“I'm sure that wasn't us.”

“I'm counting,” Val said, “what? Twenty-three of you? And you need my father to rescue you? I have an idea. Why don't you just do whatever Dame Scotia wants you to do?”

“We haven't done anything yet! We just came to look around, and she started shooting.”

“I've been on the road long enough to see what happens when you just stop to look around,” Dame Scotia said tartly. “Things get stolen and broken. Sacred shrines to gods other than Severen get totally trashed.”

“We seek only what belongs to Severen—”

“You seek to destroy any hint of power other than Severen's. You're a rude, wicked lot, and I should just make you walk back across that bridge without your bikes.”

“How about we slash their tires?” Pierce suggested.

“Let's toss their boots into the slough,” Val said with enthusiasm. “After they tell us exactly what they hoped to find here.”

There was a brief silence, during which the knights, without moving, seemed to shift closer together, and the partially hidden faces calculated the changed odds.

“You wouldn't understand,” another indistinguishable face said slowly. “We are searching for something holy, precious, powerful. We move in Severen's name; his name moves our hearts. You, Sir Leith, might think yourself worthy of this quest. But Lord Skelton and Mystes Ruxley both spoke of the need to see with your heart, and how can you, blinded by the king's unfaithful wife wherever you look, and by your two sons at your side whose mother you abandoned for the queen? How can you possibly understand what we seek?”

Pierce, standing very still beside Val, could not hear him breathe. When he breathed again, Pierce knew, in that split second, the tiny, peaceful island would no longer be the same. Birds would die, maybe trees; stones would go flying; bikes
would roar into flame. New ghosts would inhabit the place in Severen's name; they would roam without peace among the ghosts who still worshipped the moon.

Val drew breath. He turned his head to look at his father, and said mildly, “He's got a point. What do you think? Are they holier than thou?”

“Damned if I know,” Leith said. “I do know that I don't want to litter the mudflats with their boots.”

“If we slash their tires, we could find someone to haul the bikes off the island,” Val suggested. “That way, we wouldn't offend the moon.”

“Just try,” another of the company dared them. “There are twenty-three of us and three—”

“Four,” Dame Scotia said dryly.

“Actually, I wasn't counting the kitchen knight, Dame Scotia. That's five to one. At least.”

“Ah,” Val said. “That would be seven to one. Three times seven—”

“I knew that.”

“Actually almost eight to one, Prince Ingram.”

There was another brief silence. “How did you—”

“Don't,” someone hissed between teeth. “He's just baiting you.”

“Well, I can't go home and tell my father we attacked Sir Leith—”

“Why not? Would he care?”

“I have the strangest feeling that yes, he would care. More than I have the feeling that there's anything in this place we need to dig up. It's only a bit of tangled wood that everyone has already forgotten.”

“That's not the point!”

“The point of this quest is to find something sacred and powerful,” the prince said doggedly. “Not go around killing people. Especially people you just had dinner with a few nights ago.”

“Oh, for—”

“He might be right about one thing,” someone else said reasonably. “I don't see anything here worth fighting for.”

“Prospectors came here. There might be gold that belongs by right to Severen, not the moon.”

“This place has been well picked over for decades. A few fieldstones aren't worth the argument. Anyway, the sun is about to set. I'd not like to ride across that bridge in the dark. Nothing but bed slats and toothpicks.”

“Well,” their leader said disgustedly, “we can always come back. And we will, Sir Leith, Dame Scotia, if this is the direction the compass of Severen draws our hearts.” He turned his back on them, strode to the toppled pile of bikes. “Let's untangle these and get out of this pathetic backwater.”

“Can I reach for my cell without starting a war?” Val asked. “I need to tell our driver at the other end of the bridge to move out of your way.”

Nobody bothered to answer him.

They followed the company of knights to the trail's end, stood watching them ride carelessly, noisily across the trembling bridge. It held, by some miracle, possibly Severen's, Pierce thought. But he doubted that the god would be at all interested in the mud, the trees, the moon just cresting the distant forest where the channel, pared to its narrowest, caught the first of the pale, ancient glow.

“What are you doing here?” Leith asked Dame Scotia when the knights had gotten safely across the bridge and back onto the road.

“I was looking for a place to camp for the night,” she answered. “I saw the bridge and wondered where it led.”

“It drew you.”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “I suppose you could say.”

“That happened to us,” Val said, “in the mountains. Knights of the Rising God attacked a shrine. The forest god there summoned us by making our limo go dead for no reason at all until we finished his business.”

“And here?”

“The knights passed us on the road, and we recognized them. We followed them to the bridge.”