The Cygnet and the Firebird (7 page)

She carried the key with her to the great hall in the third tower, where the councilors ate savory delicacies with their fingers, drank wine, and continued their endless debates while families and guests slowly gathered from woods and gardens, city shops and neighbors’ houses, for supper. She had promised the Holder that for one evening at least, she would not shut herself up behind another locked door with yet another bird. But birds and rumors shadowed her, it seemed. As she bit into melted cheese wrapped in butter pastry, young Darl Kell of Hunter Hold, who had eyes like some of the frogs she had used in her fires, asked with a bluntness he meant to be charming,

“Is it one of yours?”

She raised a brow mutely, her tongue busy dodging hot cheese.

“The great bird in the tower. A bit of your leftover magic from the swamp?”

She coughed on a pastry crumb. “No,” she said when she could speak. “If nothing else, I’m tidy. If I transform something, it stays transformed, and I don’t leave it a voice to complain with.”

Darl Kell flushed to his broad ears. “You’re not like your sisters,” he said, and stalked off to gaze at Calyx. Nyx brushed crumbs off her silk and wished she could be as tidy in life as she was in art. Someone pushed wine into her hand and said, his voice too close to her ear,

“He could stand some room for improvement, if
you’re in the mood to transform.”

She looked up, into the smiling eyes of Urbin Dacey, whose father led the Withy Hold Council. He was tall and black-haired and amber-eyed. She had noticed those eyes several times during the council, and had wondered what perversity they watched for. She took a sip of wine, and answered equably,

“I don’t transform by whim. And I don’t practice such sorcery on humans.”

“Pity. His ears could stand some.” He turned deftly, lifted a plate of stuffed mushrooms as she opened her mouth. “What sorcery do you allow yourself to practice on humans?”

“As little as poss—”

“You have been practicing some on me.”

“What?”

“I’ve felt it in the council chamber. You meet my eyes with your pale moon eyes. You draw at me. Calyx is very beautiful, but she is day, and you are night, secret, beautiful, mysterious, perhaps dangerous. Are you dangerous at night?”

Nyx gazed at him, a mushroom halted midway to her mouth. “What in Moro’s name are you talking about?”

His smile never faltered. “I believe I make myself clear. I am falling a little in love with you.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” She bit into the mushroom, added, chewing, “Love is the last thing on your mind.”

He was silent, looking down at her so long that she wondered if she had left mushroom in some unsightly
place. “It’s a game,” he said lightly. “You should learn to play it. It gives the world grace.”

He slid the glass from her hand, took a sip of wine, and slipped it back between her fingers. She said softly, “And how well you play it. You must practice often.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“Unfortunately, I lack grace.” She set the glass on the table and stood quietly, not moving or speaking, simply looking at him until his smile finally faltered and he turned away.

She picked up the glass again, took a hefty swallow. Someone else stepped to her side and marvelled, “You made Urbin Dacey blush.”

She lowered the glass with some relief. “Rush.”

He brushed a crumb off her sleeve. “It takes a complex sorcery to discomfit Urbin. He won’t give up easily, though. I’ve seen him watching you. He plays a game he hates to lose.”

“I have no time for games,” she said, feeling the weight of the key in her pocket. Rush looked at her silently a moment; she glimpsed a familiar curiosity in his eyes and wondered what realm she had neglected to explore. He asked the question in his eyes.

“Does sorcery preclude love?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s not in Chrysom’s books.”

“Is that all you—” he began, then saw he was being teased. He smiled a little, still curious, while she helped herself to a plate of tiny biscuits rolled in poppy seeds and spices. She said, because he wanted to know,

“I take after my mother, who roamed Ro Holding when she was young and found three fathers for three daughters. Sorcery does not preclude curiosity, and I have satisfied my curiosity at times. But—”

“With whom?”

Like her mother, she ignored the question. “But you have to stand still for love. I could never stand still.”

“Like Urbin,” he said, then flushed a little. But she mulled that over calmly.

“Maybe. But at least I’m honest.”

“Yes,” he said, not looking at her, but she saw the memories in his eyes. “Urbin has a thousand ways of saying one thing. You don’t hide behind language, which is why he can’t find, among his thousand ways, the one way to make you listen. Neither could I,” he added, but lightly, and she smiled, seeing no bitterness in his eyes.

“Now,” she said, “we listen to one another.” She touched his arm and turned, to find Arlen Hunter in her path, who had come to tell her what he believed about her, and what he didn’t, feeling it was important for her to know. She extracted herself abruptly from his muddle of awe and prurience, deciding that no effort to please her mother was worth becoming civilized for this. She slipped away to wait for moonrise.

Across the hall, Meguet, disarmed, dressed in red silk and gold, found siege laid against her own patience. Tur Hunter, blue-eyed, golden-haired, heir to Hunter Hold, had lost, he said, his heart to her green eyes. He was smiling, but relentless, burning hot and
cold, and willing to fight a slight to his pride. She said carefully, “My own heart is bound to this house; my eyes are not free to stray.”

“Not from the gate?” he said, his smile thinning, and she felt the blood rise in her face. “Your whims are your business, but you should have some respect for your own heritage. What in Moro’s name can you do with a Gatekeeper?”

“Love him,” she said simply, with no tact whatsoever. Tur Hunter snorted, flushing.

“What will you do? Marry him and live among the cottagers?”

She shrugged slightly. “I hadn’t thought. If past is status, some among the cottagers can trace their families back a thousand years, when Moro Ro’s status in Ro Holding was that he had a bigger cottage than anyone else and a bloodier sword.”

“And what does your Gatekeeper have?” he retorted. “Born among tortoises and river rats, he still has the swamp in his voice. You’ll tire of that soon enough.”

“Then,” she said, keeping her voice steady with an effort, “it is not worth your breath to interfere, since I will cast him aside eventually over the cadence of lilies and slow dark water and small birds in his voice.”

Tur was silent a breath, then changed weapons. “Now,” he said solicitously, and took her hand in his, “I have put you in the position of having to defend him. I have made you angry. That was hardly my intention. If the Holder hasn’t interfered in your
infatuation with the murkier side of the Delta, it must be because she is wiser than I am, and knows it is like the elusive, colorful swamp lights, of little substance and will burn itself out. Tell me what I can do to persuade you to forgive me.”

She almost suggested something. But the Holder was beside her suddenly, as if summoned by the swamp lights smoldering in the air between them.

“Tur,” she said, fixing a dark eye upon him, “stop trying to lure my niece to Hunter Hold; I need her here. She is one of the foundation stones of this house, like my Gatekeeper, and I won’t free her for all the gold in Hunter Hold. Go and get me wine and take it outside and drink it.” She took Meguet’s arm, forcing Tur to loose her hand, and led her to the hearth. It was cold, unoccupied, and offered a moment of privacy within the crowded hall.

Meguet said softly, “I can fight my own battles. Though I didn’t think I would have to.”

The Holder, who loved fires, eyed the empty grate wistfully. She said, “Neither did I, but then I never admitted to anything I had to defend. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you. When you are not guarding the Holding Council, I want you with Nyx.”

Meguet, startled, said, “There’s not much I can do for her.”

“I know that and I don’t care. I don’t want her alone with that stranger, and you’re the only one in the house she would put up with.” She kicked the grate moodily, and turned, gazing at the placid, murmuring hall as if mages were concealed in the hangings
or underfoot beneath the carpets. “I want you with her in those night hours when the bird becomes human.”

Meguet was silent, seeing again the rich and stunning shapes the bird’s cry had taken in the yard. “I wonder where he came from . . . I wonder if anyone is alive to miss him or search for him.”

“I’m wondering who cast that spell and when Nyx’s meddling will bring yet another mage to my door.”

“If that mage is still alive.”

“There are too many mages.” Her fingers lifted to her hair, searching for pins to pull, but they were too well hidden. She folded her arms instead, frowning at her shadow in the torchlight. “Nyx assumes the mage is dead. I assume otherwise, for the sake of my house. That is why I want you with her. She trusts you, and you have more common sense than she does.”

“Only for an ordinary world.”

“That’s the one I want to keep her alive in,” the Holder said grimly. “She has so much power, and she has hardly scrubbed the mud off her feet from that morass she trapped herself in.”

“The power was given to her freely.”

“It’s not her heart that worries me now, it’s her magpie curiosity that picks at anything glittering of magic. She’s facing a twisted sorcery unfamiliar even to her. She may have terrorized the population of birds in the swamp, but she never made anything human cry so desperately. And all she can see of the sorcery is something she can’t do herself—she’s blind
to danger, Even the young man seems dangerous to me.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think he’s just an innocent under a spell. He looks powerful and unpredictable.”

“Like Nyx, not long ago.”

The Holder’s brooding attached itself to her. “Meguet Vervaine, are you counseling compassion over common sense?”

“Never,” Meguet said flatly, “where Nyx is concerned. But given the murkier sorcery she has dabbled in, she may have more success with a bird with a questionable past than a mage with a tidier history would.”

The Holder made an undignified sound. “Let’s hope his past is tidier than hers. Wherever his past is. Or was.”

“Perhaps he is from Ro Holding and he simply can’t remember. He does remember the Cygnet flying on warships.”

“He’d have to be a very old bird.”

“Or a young man trapped outside of his time.”

The Holder touched her eyes. “That is something Nyx would find irresistible. But how much does she know about time? Is that common knowledge among mages?”

“She pulled me within time to stand beneath the Cygnet’s eye. For all I know she may have all the Cygnet’s power.”

The Holder drew breath. “Moro’s bones. It’s unprecedented.” Her eyes moved over the hall, searching.
“Where is she? I asked her to stay through supper.”

“I saw her talking to Rush. And then to Arlen Hunter.”

“I don’t see her.”

“She must be here,” Meguet said, failing to find her. “She doesn’t forget things.”

“She forgets unimportant things,” the Holder said darkly. “Supper, her shoes, sleep, time. Maybe that mage returned without our knowing, ensorcelled us all again between a bite and a swallow. Maybe,” she added, with some hope, “he has found the book himself and vanished back into his own secret country.”

“It can’t be all that secret,” Meguet pointed out, “if he has heard of Chrysom.”

The Holder closed her eyes. “Don’t raise side issues,” she said tersely. “Find Nyx before the moon rises and I lose her again to that demented bird.”

*    *    *

The bird’s eye reflected a sorceress within its golden iris. It perched on a window ledge; its shadow, cast long and black by the torch beside the window, cut across the sorceress’s path to take shape against the hearth: a faceless dark beneath the stone Cygnet. Nyx was aware of the bird’s scrutiny and its shadow. She moved imperturbably through both, continuing her search for the missing book and waiting for moonrise. She had explored everything but the oddments on the mantel. There, she reasoned, it must be; the mage’s voice buzzing inside the cobalt box, the barely perceptible
shift of weighty thought within the emerald bottle.

The bird opened its beak. No cry came out of it, no fire, but the sorceress turned to face it.

“Be patient,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten you.”

She folded her arms, leaned against the mantel, frowning slightly, studying the bird. The red on its folded wingtips made an elaborate chessboard pattern against the white. Its longer plumes trailed down the stone, delicate puffs of white that stirred at a breath. Its sharp talons caught light like metal; the mask of fiery feathers around its eyes gave it a fierce and secretive expression. Nyx, slowly dissolving within an amber eye, saw only herself in its thoughts. Whatever language it spoke—bird or human—was hidden.

“You are well guarded,” she commented, returned to herself on the hearth. The bird did not shift a feather, as motionless as if it had become one of its own enchantments. The fire still hung in Nyx’s ear. She toyed with it absently. The bird opened its beak soundlessly, in recognition.

Red the color of the bird’s mask snagged her eye. She turned her head, studied a tiny red clay jar on the mantel. It was shaped like a hazelnut with a flat bottom and a cap of gold. The clay was seamed with minute cracks, as if whatever it held had seeped out centuries before. Nyx picked it up, weighed it in her hand. Chrysom, who had, centuries after his death, gotten suddenly more complex, might have left an empty bottle on his mantel, or a mage’s trap. A day
or two ago she had known how he thought. Now, she was not so sure.

“Well,” she said, and met the bird’s intent golden stare. “Better sorry than safe.”

She gazed down at the jar, letting her thoughts flow like air or water into the spider web of cracks. The rough, dry edges permitted her only so far, no farther, into their tiny crevices. What stopped her, she couldn’t tell; it had no substance. The gold cap, molded into the clay by the slow shift of particles of metal, seemed solid; touching it, her thoughts turned into gold.