Kingfisher (9 page)

“For that I had to ask Daimon to give me a ride through the rosebushes? What on earth is it?”

“Something to do with Severen in his early aspect as the dying and reviving god. It's quite old, Sylvester claims. And enormously powerful.”

Perdita sat down on the uncomfortable little couch that did not encourage lingering. She bent over to wind and tie the dyed green laces of her sandals around her legs. “But what is it?”

“Leith wasn't certain. Something like a cup. Maybe a bowl. Anyway, Sylvester is very excited.” Perdita tried to imagine the frail, scholarly Lord Sylvester Skelton inflamed by a piece of crockery. “Yes,” her mother agreed. “It's hard to picture. But he is impassioned enough to persuade the king to send his knights out to look for it.”

Perdita leaned back on the slippery couch and stared at her mother, astonished.

There was a tap at the door. “Come,” Genevra said, and
Mystes Holly Halliwell entered, followed by Perdita's great-aunt, the previous King Arden's sister, Lady Morrig Seabrook.

Lady Seabrook, an absentminded relic from an earlier era, had vague gray eyes and a face contained within a labyrinth of wrinkles. She had worn black since the death of her young husband seventy years earlier. She served, for a couple of decades, as Mistress of Acolytes in the sanctum. As she aged, her duties had lightened; now she accompanied Mystes Halliwell to rituals and ceremonies, and she checked to see that the acolytes were at their designated daily posts within the sanctum whenever she happened to remember.

Holly Halliwell, a plump, pretty woman, was colorfully dressed in a blue and green silk robe overlaid with a web of jade and turquoise beads. She wore a crown of willow branches. Metal, which belonged to Severen, was never permitted in Calluna's sanctum. She carried the staff of her office: myrtle wood topped with the goddess's haunting face carved in pale green jade, inset against a full moon of ivory.

The mystes looked, Perdita thought, as though she'd swallowed a wasp. She gave the queen a formal bow before she raised the staff in her hand and let it thump sharply on the floorboards. Genevra, whose many subtleties of expression Perdita knew well, eyed her guardedly, as though she might peer under the couch or fling open the wardrobe door in search of the queen's hidden lover.

But it wasn't that.

“Queen Genevra,” Holly said indignantly, “have you heard what Sylvester Skelton is up to?”

“I heard,” the queen said, choosing words carefully, “he
has asked the king to send the knights out looking for something of Severen's.”

“Ha!” Holly lifted the staff again, then caught herself. “I do beg your pardon, Your Majesty. It's just that I'm extremely upset. He has no right—I mean Sylvester, of all people, should know better. He's a scholar, for Calluna's sake! How can he have made such an idiotic mistake?”

The queen glanced down at her hands, looking perplexed. She wriggled off a ring of gold and sapphire she had left inadvertently on one finger, dropped it among her other jewels. “I'm sorry, Holly. I'm just not following—”

Morrig interrupted. Her voice, for one so aged, was unexpectedly clear and sweet. “Lord Skelton and I are also having a difference of opinion. He's not listening very well. Hard of hearing, I suspect, from viewing a thing one way for so long. Hardening of the earways.”

“What Sylvester wants the knights to find never belonged to Severen!” Holly insisted, overriding her. “It belongs to Calluna.”

“I still don't—”

“Oh, I know that story,” Morrig said with delight. “Calluna found the dying god when they were young—back when the world itself was young. I was, too, then, I remember. She revived him with water from her fountainhead.”

Holly eyed her askance, surprised, then found her voice again. “Yes. That's what the king will send his knights searching for: the cup or vessel of power that returned life to the dying god.” Her mouth tightened; she refrained from whacking the floor again. “All its power is Calluna's. I've
been arguing for days with Lord Ruxley, ever since he came to tell me about the mistranslation Sylvester had discovered in a very early text, and what Lord Ruxley, as Severen's Mystes, advised the king. But he won't hear a word I say.”

“Neither will Sylvester,” Morrig said. “He complains that I have no textual proof. Textual proof. As though written words alone contain the truth about anything.” She smiled at Perdita. “He lets me borrow his books, you know. He trusts me with them.”

“Stubborn old men,” Holly fumed. “Both of them. You know the god Severen. Everything his name inspires turns to wealth or war. If the king's knights find that vessel, no good will ever come out of it.”

Perdita, intrigued by the matter, said slowly, “Maybe it doesn't exist to be found. Maybe the artifact is just a detail of a very ancient story.”

Morrig's misty gaze held her a moment, speculating, Perdita sensed, about some completely different matter—new shoes or a bottle of aged brandy—for which her great-niece might come in handy.

Holly's busy mind had already shifted toward possibilities. “Well,” she said, some of the annoyance melting from her face, “we have to assume it exists, as long as Lord Skelton and Mystes Ruxley are going to shake up the realm looking for it. There are at least a half dozen of Calluna's former acolytes among the knights. We'll convince one of them—or bribe her if nothing else works—to find the vessel and give it to us. And then we'll hide it here in Calluna's sanctum, where not even Severen himself would bother looking for it.”

Morrig opened her mouth; so did Perdita and the queen.

A bell rang, soft, sweet, from within the sanctum.

They closed their mouths, for the language of the sanctum was water, not words, and even Mystes Halliwell would not speak again until the ritual began.

Perdita checked the bone buttons on her tunic. The queen set a circlet of ivory and bone on her head. Perdita stepped to the door, opened it, and followed the mystes, the queen, and Morrig toward the slowly opening doors of the sanctum, where a young acolyte, surrounded by attendants and other acolytes, waited in the warm, steaming, gently swirling waters, to give birth.

W
hile knights from all over Wyvernhold gathered in Severluna, Daimon found himself spending pearly dawn hours, blue, windy afternoons, flame-streaked dusks on the Severluna streets. As though his heart had turned to thread and Vivien held the end of it, he would lose interest, leave whatever he was in the middle of doing or saying, and find the quickest way through the twists and turns of byways and alleys to the inelegant, backwater neighborhood where she waited. Somehow she knew; she was always there, opening her door before he knocked. He didn't ask. Her stray powers, like her smile, seemed at once very old and all her own.

The city changed in his eyes when she tugged at him. It lost its past, its history; it existed only as the place he traveled through to reach her.

Even the streets transformed themselves when he was with her. The cracked sidewalks, stunted trees along them
guarded by broken iron railings, the hot, blustering whirlwinds of litter, food-cart smells and old leaves, the groan and belch of trucks, the constantly clamoring traffic interwoven with stray snatches of music, sirens, ringtones, shifted focus in his perception. He glimpsed wonder in the dusty whirlwind, a fierce and ancient energy within the raucous voices of the road; he overheard, within the passing drift of song from an open car window, an otherworldly language.

“What is it you do to me?” he asked Vivien, incoherently, he thought, but she seemed unsurprised.

“Nothing,” she answered. “You're remembering.”

“Remembering what?” She didn't answer. He took her arm, held her fast in the jostling foot traffic streaming along the bumpy sidewalk, the worn shopfronts. In the scrap of shadow from a sapling whose wind-whipped leaves flecked her eyes with gold, then shadow, then again gold, he asked, “Remembering what?”

She gazed at him. He heard the distant voices within the wind, the song beneath the squeal of tires, the quickening water that flowed, in truth or memory, down hidden paths beneath his feet to find the sea. The leaves that played with light above her copper hair seemed suddenly ageless, lovely in their flick and glitter, both new and older than all he knew.

His fingers opened, slid down her arm; she caught his hand. They walked again down some path that he had never taken but that he was beginning to remember.

The next afternoon, she took him so far he lost his way.

“There's a special place we want you to see,” she told him as they walked. Sun dazzled on the hot streets, angled achingly bright off chrome and spinning hubcaps. It melted
stucco, wood, stone, blurring lines and corners until buildings shimmered like light-struck water. Had she said
we
? he wondered. What happened to
I
? And how could he see anything at all in this light-drenched world? A building in front of him, small shops topped by weary apartments, melted completely under the sun; he glimpsed the green meadow where it had stood, the long grass freckled with wildflowers. The building returned raggedly, missing corners, windows. He shook his head to clear it.

“Who is ‘we'?”

“Oh, people I know. I hope you like it. Look!” she exclaimed with delight, and he turned his head into a splash of gold. He blinked, saw the water flowing from beneath the meadow, pooling in the grass, carving its bed as it grew stronger, more defined, feeling its way into the world. “Calluna,” he heard Vivien say, then the city came back, rising rigidly around him; the rill of water faded into hot streets smelling of asphalt and exhaust. He stopped, then realized he had stopped. He was taking quick, sharp breaths, trying to catch the scent of the spring again, the wet earth. He felt water on his face, sweat, or maybe tears from the searing glance of the sun.

“Where are we?” His voice shook. “Where were we?”

“Don't worry.” She kissed away the tear under his eye. “It's not far now.”

They turned at a street corner, and the city vanished.

A cobbled street ran silently between a huddle of cottages built of stone and thatch. At the end of the street, a small bridge arched gracefully across a reedy, lily-filled brook. Beyond the bridge, a castle rose, its towers tall and slender,
its walls pale as the open lilies massed around it as the brook turned to embrace the castle. It was a beautiful, colorful affair, its turrets and corner towers painted blue and green, rose vines climbing its inner walls, long pennants streaming everywhere. A pair of wild swans flew down, settled into the moat, glided serenely among the lilies. Like a fairy tale castle, he thought. And then the words took on power and life, and he closed his eyes, feeling as though he had stepped off the edge of the world and had no idea how far he would fall.

“We're in your photograph,” he heard himself say.

“Well, not exactly,” Vivien answered, and he remembered the ruins of that lovely castle, its towers broken, its bridge drawn up tight, closed. “That is now,” she explained, or thought she did. “This is then.”

He dragged his eyes open, found some comfort, even in free fall, at the sight of her smile.

“Where are we?”

“In Ravensley. Inside its memories. In Ravenhold.”

“Ravenhold.”

“One of the earliest realms in this land. Far older than Wyvernhold.” She regarded him steadily, willing him to see out of her eyes, know what she was not saying.

“And not on any map,” he breathed.

“How do you map a memory? A dream? We have never had much use for maps. It was the Wyvernbourne who drew lines around things, who declared boundaries. Air has no borders, nor does light. Nor should water though it does.”

“How did you—how did you bring me here?”

“I didn't. You found your way. Those memories are your heritage.”

He felt himself grow cold, seeing too much, seeing himself. “I am Wyvernbourne.”

“You are the raven's child.”

“I am—”

“You are both.” She took his hand, even though his bones had turned to ice. “Come with me. I want to show you one more memory.”

He heard traffic again, groaning and thundering as they moved. Thunder thinned to wind, roiling noisily, busily around them. She drew him down the road, over the bridge, into the meadowlands around the castle. In the midst of the green, a single tree branched high and full against the sky. Half-hidden in green, ravens or the shadows of ravens watched them among the leaves.

Vivien stopped just beyond the tree's shadow, as though it formed some kind of windblown, constantly shifting boundary. On the ground within the shadow, an enormous, lovely vessel shed light from within itself, as well as from its bronze-and-gold surface, every inch of it etched with patterns. The cauldron bubbled and steamed, though it rested on grass, not fire; its fires were invisible. A woman stirred it. She spoke to it; she sang; small birds flitted around her head, commenting cheerfully in liquid splashes of sound.

The woman raised her head, saw the pair at the boundary between light and shadow. She was barefoot under her long skirt; her sleeveless vest revealed the muscles in her arms, strong from wielding the great paddle. Her face was plain, friendly; her eyes, like Vivien's, were extraordinary. She said something and laughed. She gave the great pot one more swirl, then raised the wood out of the mix. She held it out
to them, sliding it beyond the boundary just a little, just enough, so that the bowl at the end of the long handle was filled with dark and light, sun and shadow, day and night.

Her face changed, grew beautiful. Her hair turned from tree-bark brown to palest gold; the fantastic colors in her eyes misted into smoky, opaque gray. She looked at Daimon out of those eyes, and he saw himself in her.

He felt his heart fly into birds, all trying to burst out of him at once. He heard his own voice, an incoherent warble. Then he stood on the noisy street corner again, cold with shock, while, at his side, Vivien took his hand, blew on his chilled fingers.

He stayed with her that night, not trusting himself to find his way back to anything he knew.

Finally, the world caught up with him, in the form of his oldest half sibling, Roarke, who waylaid him the next morning when he returned to the palace to change his clothes.

“Where have you been?” he asked, then surveyed Daimon's clothes. “You're attending the formal lunch to welcome the knights in less than an hour; you should be in uniform. Where have you been?” he repeated, more slowly, his eyes, like the queen's, as green as a mermaid's scales, taking in more than what they saw.

“Around,” Daimon answered briefly; his brother looked skeptical.

“Not around here, you haven't. Whoever it is, she'll have to wait, or there will be an empty chair with your name on it around the dais table at lunch and hundreds of knights all asking the same question—”

“All right,” Daimon said, backing as he spoke. “All right.”

“Not to mention our father.”

“I'll get changed.”

“You look—” Roarke hesitated, groping; the intense gaze under black, level brows reminded Daimon forcibly of their father. “Like you've been seeing visions. Like you've been in some other world.”

Wyvern's eyes, Daimon thought, but without wonder: Roarke was the king's heir. “Well, I'm here now,” he said with regret. “I suppose I should thank you.”

“Don't bother,” Roarke answered cheerfully. “Just be there.”

—

D
aimon slid into the empty chair between his other half siblings, Prince Ingram and Princess Isolde. As he sat, his father rose to give his welcoming address. Round tables, clustered thick as lily pads in the Great Hall, were ringed with men and women in black; only the beasts, real and mythical, embroidered above their hearts, and the great, long-necked, amber-eyed wyverns flying across their backs, were permitted color.

“Welcome, Knights of Wyvernhold,” King Arden began, and Daimon's attention promptly wandered to the far regions of Severluna, where a woman with marble skin and eyes colored like a peacock's tail was no longer expecting him.

He quelled an urge to push his chair back, throw his jacket with the wyverns clinging to it onto the empty plates, and lose himself in the city. “. . . Mystes Ruxley will now bless this Assembly in Severen's name.”

Across the table, the dour, ivory-haired mystes rose, his robe of office glittering with threads of gold and silver, the
symbols of the river god, along with the jewels the mystes wore in his belt, on the collar around his neck, and on both hands.

“In Severen's name,” he intoned sonorously, the last thing Daimon heard until a salad plate glided under his nose, and he realized that Isolde was talking to him.

“Where have you been, Daimon? No one's seen you for days.”

He had the entire table's attention, then, even the king's. Mystes Ruxley, on one side of the king, opened his mouth to expand the question. The slight, wiry magus Lord Skelton, who was straightening his spectacles to observe Daimon more clearly, somehow dropped them into his water glass.

“Clumsy,” he commented, and held his open hand over the water. The spectacles rose, neatly folded and drip-free, into his palm. He blinked at everyone watching him now instead of Daimon. “I beg your pardon.”

He slid the glasses back on his nose and looked again at Daimon. What he saw through the circular lenses seemed to surprise him; his pale blue eyes, enlarged by the lenses, widened to fill them with the peering, questioning gaze.

“Where have you been?” Daimon heard him wonder. Attention had drifted away from the question; it got lost in the sudden ring of fork against porcelain. Servers in their bright uniforms circled the table, proffering buns; others stood attentively behind the king, holding pitchers of water, bottles of wine, ready to replace the slightest sip. Daimon, absently pulling a bun into bits, helplessly pondered the magus's question.

Where, indeed?

Finally, there seemed some end in sight to the endless
occasion. The king rose, spoke again; a few words drifted into Daimon's head: a supper, a tournament, the formal opening of the Assembly, the purpose of which Lord Skelton and Mystes Ruxley would explain. And then everyone was rising, including Daimon, who left only his empty chair to answer some question that had begun with his name. In a blink, he was one of hundreds of black uniforms; after a blur of time, he was finally out, away, on his bike and leaving the tediously familiar behind him as rapidly as he could.

This time, Vivien met him in the past.

He tailed a roaring truck as it turned down the street where she lived, and there she was, waiting. There they both were, he realized suddenly, standing in the miserly shadow of a sidewalk tree. He stopped his bike, staring, oblivious to the screech and bellowing horns and curses behind him. Vivien gestured; he moved again, finally brought the bike to a halt under a
NO PARKING
sign.

The gray eyes, he saw, held the familiar, magical parings of gold in them that would catch fire under any passing light. She wore a flowing skirt, a tunic; her long, white-gold hair was pinned carelessly; blowing strands framed her lovely face. The expression in those eyes, fierce and watchful as she studied him, was not something, he guessed, she would have let his father see in the brief hours they had been together.

He swallowed dryly, tried to speak, suddenly as confused as the small whirlwind in a nearby alley, gathering up scraps, torn paper, dust, then letting them all go without knowing why.

“All these years,” he said finally, raggedly, “you've been dead.”

She smiled a little, fierceness melting into unexpected tenderness. “I never went that far away from you. Lady Seabrook found me various masks to wear so that I could sometimes see you, watch you grow.”

“Lady Seabrook,” he repeated, astonished. “My dotty great-aunt Morrig?”

“Your dotty great-aunt made me a field squire so that I could watch you train. I sold ice cream in Calluna's Cave when the queen first took you there to see it. I taught you how to drive.”