The Cygnet and the Firebird (6 page)

“The bird found you,” the man said. He was still gripping his chair, but he had made no other movement. Nyx waited; he added, some feeling breaking into his low voice, “I don’t know how long the bird flew to find you. But, entering this house, it cried its magic until you listened. You must do what you can. What you want. The bird will choose to stay or go. It’s no question of trust. Or of choice, for me. I have no choice.”

The Holder opened her mouth, closed it as the sorceress’s eyes flicked at her. Nyx said, answering her unspoken question, “I cannot know how the bird found me, or why, or if it was sent until I begin to work. I suspect that the spell was cast very long ago, and that the bird came here simply because it sensed a thousand years of magic in this tower. So I will assume that, for now, all I have to do is remove a spell.”

“And if the bird was sent?” the Holder asked. “Perhaps by the mage who appeared yesterday? You may put the entire house in danger.”

“Well,” Nyx said softly, “it won’t be the first time.”

“But—”

“You have heard that bird cry. Is there anything you would not do to stop it, if you could?” The Holder was silent; jewels sparked on her hands as they clasped, containing a mute argument. Nyx added, “I can stop it. I can help. If I bring down sorcery on this house, then we will find a way to deal with that. But now, the bird is here and the sorcerer is only a possibility. I must begin with the magic I see, not with the ghosts and shadows conjured up by fear.” She looked at the man again. He had not moved a muscle or an eyelash while she spoke; still she was not certain how much he understood besides hope. “So,” she said, toying with an earring, a circle of amber ringed with pearls, “we will wait for the bird to return. Tell me what you remember of your wanderings.”

“I remember sea. I remember the bird flying through a storm of burning arrows. I remember the face of a small boy just before he was caught in the bird’s fire. I remember waking in snow, in mud, sometimes in trees, sometimes falling out of the air and running from hunters.”

“And before you were spellbound?” The earring fell off; she caught it in her palm. She dropped her other hand toward the metal on his wrist, but did not touch it. “What are these?”

He gazed at them without a flicker of recognition. “Armor, of some kind, I think.”

“May I see?”

“They don’t come off.”

“Do you remember any place? A city? A house?”

He paused, made an effort. “I remember a doorway.”

“A doorway?”

He shrugged slightly. “Nothing more. A marble doorway, with a marble pot of flowers beside it.”

“What was inside the door?”

“A noonday shadow. That’s all I remember, except that I saw it, not the bird, because I remember the scent of the flowers and the soft air. It could be any door, anywhere. It means nothing.”

“What did you mean when you said to the Holder, ‘All the time I hold’?”

He was on his feet, then, with no warning. Meguet, pushing away from the table, saw the cry beginning in his face. Then she heard the midnight bells, and saw the fiery plumage streak his back. She checked her instinctive movement to Nyx’s side, having no desire to be caught in the enchanted fire. The bird finished the cry in midair. Fire swarmed at Nyx; Meguet heard Calyx cry out behind the silken, red-gold wall. Nyx opened her hand, held up her defense: an amber earring.

Fire kindled in the amber, a reflection of the onslaught of flame. It kindled in Nyx’s misty eyes, washed them with color. For a time her mind was an amber, fire-filled jewel guiding the magic, inviting more, expanding endlessly as it flooded into her, while, to watching eyes, the small jewel in her hand
focused and ate the fire. The gorgeous and magical imagery of the bird’s enchantments changed and changed again in her mind as it tried to change her: black roses, emerald leaves, snowflakes of silver latticed like the odd armor, birds with sapphire wings and eyes, golden lilies, bird-eggs of topaz and diamond. The threads of the spell were a tapestry of tiny detail worked by a skilled hand. Dimly, as she dragged the fire and rich images endlessly out of it, she heard the bird’s ceaseless cry.

Then there was only pale moonlight in her mind, a final rose the color of mist. She could see again; she dropped her hand, blinking. The bird, perched on the chair, was silent. The air darkened slowly, candlelight and shadow. The faces gazing at her looked haunted, exhausted by the cry. She lifted the amber, red-gold now and cracked like glass, and put it back in her ear; her hand trembled slightly.

“So the bird knows where it is,” she said.

“Nyx,” the Holder breathed, and nothing more. Beside her, Calyx lifted her face from her hands; tears slid between her fingers. Rush, stunned by the sorcery, moved behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. The guards’ faces looked pinched, as if they had been standing in a freezing wind. Iris had gone. Nyx’s eyes moved to Meguet. Her face was composed, watchful, as always, but so white it might have been carved of snow.

“That must have wakened the house,” Meguet commented. Her voice shook suddenly; she put her hand to her mouth, hearing an echo of the fury and
the sorrow. “Can you find a jewel hard enough to hold its cry?”

“Maybe,” Nyx said softly. Her eyes were wide, luminous; they seemed to look through Meguet. “Maybe one.” Meguet, recognizing that expression, felt herself grow very still; she seemed to pick out of Nyx’s mind the jewel that hung there. “You do it so easily, Meguet, when you need to, but I have never tried. Yet I saw it all within the Cygnet’s eye. . . .”

“What?” Calyx and the Holder asked together.

“All the fractured moments within the whole, like light fractured within the prism . . . a moment shifting into all its layers. If I could throw the bird’s cries into another layer of time, we would not hear them and it would still have its voice. I have taken its fire. That cry is its heart and the only word it knows. I will not take its heart.” She paused, her eyes clinging to Meguet in lieu of the great dark prism beneath the tower that was the Cygnet’s eye. “I looked into the Cygnet’s eye, and saw its power. But did it only show me things I could never know? Or did I take that power?” Meguet, transfixed, birdlike, could not look away. The room was soundless. “You wander through the walls of time at need; so did I, that one time, flying faster than thought. But can I wander at will? I am the Cygnet’s heir: Did it give me only what I needed, or what I wanted? I wanted everything I saw. . . . For that one moment, I flew within time, but did I fly? Or did the Cygnet?” The black tower walls wrapped around her like the small, circular chamber at the heart of Chrysom’s maze. Concentrating, her
gaze still on Meguet, she saw the black prism, the faceted eye of power, hanging in the still darkness within a triple ring of time. “You could cry into that silence,” she told the bird. “I did.”

The bird cried. She heard it standing once again beneath the great prism, which was no longer dark, but fire-white, sculpted with planes of light. The cry filled the chamber, buried deep where only the Cygnet would hear it. It cried, and cried again; the stone walls echoed with its tale, as if it had found the safe and secret place to tell it. Nyx, gazing into the prism, listening for one familiar word, saw Meguet’s face reflected in every plane. Then she saw Meguet, in the shadows on the other side of the prism, caught in the tangle of cries, as if Nyx, using her face to open memory, had pulled her into the fractured time.

She blinked; the prism faded, and she saw Meguet’s face again, a stillness in it like the stillness of stone. The mage’s tower circled them again, with its triple ring of stone and night and time. Color flooded suddenly into Meguet’s face; she stared, incredulously, at Nyx. The bird cried, but its cries were soundless now, its story hidden.

The Holder and Calyx were both on their feet.

“Where did you go?” Calyx demanded, astonished. “You both vanished.”

“I sent the bird cry into the heart of the maze,” Nyx said. She ran her hands through her hair wearily, scattering jewels, her eyes on Meguet. “I seem to have pulled us both along with it.”

“That’s not possible,” the Holder said. She appealed
to Meguet. “Is it?”

“No.” She drew breath, shivering slightly. “There was no need for me there.”

“I needed you,” Nyx said. “You took me there in memory. Who knows which of us guided whom? The bird is crying to the Cygnet instead of to us, which means we can all sleep soundly.” She dropped her hand on Meguet’s shoulder, and smiled a little, tightly. “Maybe that’s all we did: walk back into memory, and leave, appropriately, a bird cry there.”

Meguet, still standing tensely, shook her head. “You shifted time,” she said simply, “not memory.” She paused, listening to her words, or to other words echoing under the moonlight. The Holder said softly, her dark, troubled eyes on the sorceress’s face,

“‘All the time I hold.”’

Meguet watched the dawn unfurl like a wing of fire across the Delta. She had wakened early, anticipating a summons, and had seen the Gatekeeper, anticipating dawn, extinguish the torches beside the gate. Beyond the wall, the waves picked up light, rolled it into scrolls and unrolled it again, like a spell in some forgotten language across the sand. She dressed quickly, without waking her attendants, pulling swans down her wrists and across her shoulders, for despite the mysteries and magic, there was yet another prosaic day of council ahead of them, if they could dodge the sorcery falling headlong out of the air. She braided her hair as she went down. Crossing the yard, she caught a breath of the moist, dank sweetness of the inner swamps, lily and mud and still, secret waters. The Gatekeeper’s face turned toward it; she wondered if he had smelled it, too, if he were breathing in memories. And then he saw her.

His breakfast followed close behind her. He shared it with her, the tray balanced between them in the tiny turret. He buttered hot bread for her, offered pale,
spiced wine from his cup, peeled quail’s eggs. She nibbled, weary and absent-minded, listening, in some deep part of her, for the Holder’s voice.

He said, “I saw light all night from the mage’s tower.”

Her eyes, following the white thread of a gull’s flight, flicked to his face. “Then you were awake all night.”

“I thought it best,” he said wryly, “the way things have been getting past me.” He cut wafer-thin strips of melon and passed her one. “I don’t know what to expect next.”

She saw then the familiar shadows under his eyes, that came when he saw too little or too much in the small lonely hours of the night. She set the tray aside abruptly, shifted to sit beside him.

“Nobody knows,” she said, and told him what the firebird had said, what Nyx had done. When she finished, her head in the hollow of his shoulder to dodge the flood of morning light, he commented,

“She has a way with birds.”

Meguet lifted her head, eyed him narrowly. He let her see the faintest line of a smile beside his mouth. “You had better be smiling,” she said dourly.

He smoothed her hair. “It’s not so long ago that she had us all dancing at shadows because of birds. Now here’s another over the gate so fast it left the Gatekeeper of Ro House standing with his mouth open in a wake of pinfeathers. I might as well row myself back to the swamp.”

“Take me with you,” she sighed. “I’m house-bound
with this council. I want to pick lilies in a bog and have you braid them in my hair.”

“They must be getting edgy, the Hold Councils.”

“They’re curious. I’m edgy. The Holder looks as if she swallowed a thunderbolt. Her house was spellbound by a mage with no good intentions who may or may not return, and her heir is up in Chrysom’s tower with a bird who may be trouble or may not, but most likely has trouble on its tail. In the middle of this, she has to sit through speeches about sheep.”

“What kind of trouble does she look for from the firebird?”

“The mage who cast the spell.”

He made a soft sound, stirring. “Another one? How many mages are we looking at?”

“Maybe this one will knock on the gate.”

“They don’t seem in the habit of knocking. Why would a mage twist a man out of his shape for all but a few moonlit hours? Only to make him remember that he’s human?”

“That’s all he does remember.”

“Not what he did to get himself turned into a bird?”

Meguet was silent, thinking of the cries that came and went across the man’s face like lightning across a barren landscape. She said, “The bird remembers.”

“But not the man.” His eyes strayed seaward. “So. I must watch for a dangerous and cold-blooded mage.”

“If he’s still alive. And if—” She paused again, her brows crooked uncertainly, her eyes on another
bird: the Cygnet, flying across the mantle of the bell ringer entering the north tower to summon the councilors together.

“And if what? What do you see, Meguet?”

She blinked, her thoughts clearing. “I see that I must leave you.”

“If what?” he asked insistently, holding her with nothing more than the tone of his voice, his eyes. She gazed back at him, perplexed, hearing again the terrible, desperate cry of the firebird.

“If,” she said, “the bird is innocent.”

*    *    *

Nyx, present to the outward eye during the council that day, was so preoccupied that Calyx touched her once or twice, wondering obviously if she were still breathing. All her attention was focused in the high tower room, where the mage might return. He would want the key. He would guess that she had hidden it in a different place. She had spent some time before dawn trying to turn it invisible, or change its shape into one of Calyx’s hoary household records, or a rose among the hundreds on the tower vines. It resisted all enchantment. She gave up finally and put it in her pocket, a solution which would have horrified the Holder. Nyx did not approve of it herself, but she had run out of ideas by morning. The mage might disrupt the council, demanding the key, but the worst he would most likely do would be to give everyone something to talk about besides border tolls. The bird, she suspected with no particular evidence, might fare differently. So she had separated them, the key and
the bird, in hope that the strange, ruthless mage, seeking one mystery, would ignore the other.