Kingfisher (15 page)

“Then who—” Dame Scotia exclaimed. The princess turned to meet her amazed eyes. “Who else knew we were going to follow him?”

“No one. No one but you, and I, and the queen.”

“Then who did we follow through that tangle of streets? Someone must have known—”

“No one,” Perdita whispered. And then she was silent, looking back at the face of her aged, charmingly scattered great-aunt as she watched the princess from the top of the sanctum stairs.

Morrig.

KINGFISHER

P
ierce floated out of Severluna with his father and his brother in a black limo the size of a small yacht. It bore them effortlessly northward, surrounding them in a cocoon of soft leather, perfect air, small luxuries of every kind to while away the hours. Beyond its tinted windows, Pierce watched the highway he had driven down in the Metro scant days before. It looked completely different now, as though he saw it through the eyes of someone he barely knew. This strange Pierce unreeled a past to his new family that seemed, compared to theirs, scant of detail, monotonous, inexplicable.

“It took courage,” Leith said, “to leave the only place you ever lived. Even more to brave the complexities of Severluna and the court, where you knew no one and neither of us knew you existed.”

“It's magical,” Val said, sprawled easily along most of a seat and picking out the almonds from a can of roasted nuts.
“If you hadn't done this thing or that, if you had been two fighting squares away from me instead of next to me, if you hadn't announced a style of fighting I'd never heard of—”

Pierce's face burned. “Deli Style fighting. I can't believe I invented that. Lucky for me it was you. Anyone else would have just smeared me into the grass and left me there to be dumped back into the kitchen.”

His brother's pale blue eyes flicked at him. “It was perfect. The way you used that knife—”

“You asked me to show you. You spoke to me.”

“You used it the way our mother did. You unburied memories.”

“You asked my name.”

“It was your mother in you,” Leith said. “Both of you. You recognized her magic in each other.” He reached out, took the can from Val. He shook his head, gazing at his sons as he chewed. “I can't believe the pair of you. I thought I had done only one good thing in my life. Now I find I have done two.” He passed the can to Pierce. “Did you talk to Heloise?”

Pierce nodded. Leith waited while he stirred the mix, located a cashew, and ate it. He said finally, “She isn't very happy with me. I think she didn't really expect me to find you. She thought Severluna would terrify me, and I'd run back home. And it did. But I didn't.” He paused, added wryly, “I didn't have time to run.”

“Does she know that you're with us? Heading north toward the coast highway? Does she expect to see you?”

Pierce shook the can, peered into it, looking for words. “I told her we were traveling north together. I couldn't explain the quest—I wasn't listening very well at the
Assembly. She didn't say much. She didn't ask if we would be going as far as Cape Mistbegotten.”

Leith shifted. “She wouldn't want to see me, but I'm sure she'd want to see you and Val. Maybe you could—”

“She's a sorceress,” Val reminded his father. “We're here with you. We're on a quest, not a vacation. If she wants to, I think she could find us. Though she hasn't exactly made the effort so far.” He took the can from Pierce, rattled it, his eyes wide as he gazed into it. “She left me with you and never looked back.”

“Maybe that's why she let me go,” Pierce said abruptly. “So that I would find you both. She couldn't come looking for you. She is too proud. And too—and too hurt. But now she knows that we are all together. Val is right, I think. She has her ways. If she wants to, she'll use them.”

The driver's voice came over the intercom from behind the closed glass partition between them. “Sirs, this is the last largish town before we start climbing. Do you want me to stop somewhere for lunch? Once we get into the mountains, no telling what we'll find.”

They stopped.

In the midafternoon, surrounded by mile after mile of huge trees marching up and down peaks and valleys holding only hints of civilization, a glimpse of a door, a sign, an abandoned fuel station, the steadfast vehicle ran aground. One by one screens flicked off, lights failed, the car slowed, drifted. The driver, his cursing becoming audible, got the partition between them half-opened before it, too, stopped moving. A pickup careened around them, honking wildly. They were in the fast lane of a steep, curving, four-lane
highway, rapidly losing power and fortunately on a downslope. The driver eased the limo across the road, avoiding the swift cars dodging to the left and right of them. It settled finally onto an unpaved pullout as a semi peeled around them, making a noise like an indignant whale.

The driver spoke to the dashboard. No one answered. He pushed this, flicked that. Val leaned through the partition, making suggestions, while Pierce tried a door, and Leith pulled out his cell.

The door opened, to Pierce's relief, but the phone screen remained black.

The driver pulled off his crested uniform cap, threw it on the floor, then picked it up, put it back on, and turned.

“Sorry, sirs. I don't have a clue what to make of this.”

Val looked at his own phone. “It's a dead zone,” he said curiously. “Nothing tech works.”

“Everyone else is still moving,” Leith said tersely. He got out, roamed around the car with his phone.

“Sorcery, then.”

“Might as well be,” the driver said, exasperated. “This vehicle was thoroughly tested before the wyvern on its hood got a look out the garage door.”

He tried his own phone, then got out and waved at passing traffic until a Greenwing small enough to fit in the pullout behind the limo stopped. The driver bent down to talk to the young women in it. Val joined him promptly. Pierce got out, stood looking around, half expecting to see Heloise sitting on a branch above them.

Gigantic pillars of trees stood tranquilly on the steep mountain, maybe napping in the warm, golden light, maybe
commenting in slow tree-thoughts on the grand vehicle that had hobbled to a halt in their shadows. In the distance between two high peaks, he glimpsed the sea.

A car door slammed; he glanced around to see Val settling in the midst of the young women in the little car. The car pulled back onto the road, sped away. Leith watched it, startled.

“They said they'd take him to the nearest garage,” the driver explained. “Their phones work fine,” he added bitterly, as Leith walked to the edge of the road, stood frowning at the Greenwing disappearing around a bend.

“I don't like this.”

“They seemed very nice,” the driver assured him. “Students on their way back to the local college. I offered to go, but—”

“I know. An otherwise appealing young knight except for his brains. Or lack of them. He was the one who reminded me that we are on a quest. Sylvester Skelton said we must assume nothing.”

“I'm sorry, sir,” the driver said uneasily. “I thought—”

“Well,” Leith said, leaning against the limo beside the tiny bronze wyvern rearing on the hood. “You may be right. We'll wait.”

The driver got back inside, tried rousing the engine again. Leith, his arms folded, brooded at the highway. Pierce went looking for a bush.

He walked farther than he intended, lulled by the soft breeze, the smells of needles, pitch, sun-burnished bark, the shadows and gentle whisperings of the immense trees. For the first time since he had left home, he feared nothing,
anticipated nothing, just rambled without thinking through the quiet afternoon. A squirrel chided him; a bird sang briefly, then fluttered away, a streak of yellow against the green. He rounded a tree trunk that might have taken a couple dozen arms to span its girth. At the other side of it, he saw the sea again, the brilliant light across it that, in a tale, might have been the blazing wake of a vessel made of gold.

From somewhere in the trees above him there came a sudden, high-pitched scream.

His head snapped around; he took a step uphill and heard a gunshot. He froze. Someone shouted from below: Leith, he thought, but had no time to answer before he began a scrabbling run among the stones and swollen tree roots. The girl cried out again; this time it sounded like a curse. Another shout came, this one from uphill as well. Pierce crashed through a thicket; the ground leveled on the other side of it, trees opening up in a crescent around a strange stone ruin.

Water flowed out from under the ruin, a quick little rill that vanished back underground beneath a brake of ferns. The ruin, three broken walls and an archway, had been built around what looked like a cave in a steep, sudden rise of earth, slabs of stone, more trees.

The voices sounded very close, a tangle of men, the girl crying at them fiercely, rhythmically. Pierce saw the mountain bikes lined along both sides of the dark opening.

All of them carried the familial devices of the Wyvernhold knights.

The girl's voice rose sharply. Pierce looked around wildly for a weapon, saw a lovely glass pitcher lightly chained around its neck to a tree branch above the froth of water.
During the moment it took him to reach it, break it against a stone and turn, armed with a shard of jagged glass attached to the pitcher's handle, some of the confused knot of voices began to break into words.

“Put that down! I'll shoot, I swear—”

“All weapons belong to Severen—you can't shoot us. Just put it down—”

“You put that down!”

“This is holy ground. We are Knights of the Rising God on a quest in King Arden's name, and this gold mine is dedicated to Severen—”

“This old shaft is as empty as your heads, you assholes; it went dead a hundred years ago!”

“If you'll just listen—”

“Put that down, too! This is Tanne's holy ground, not Severen's, and I swear—”

There was an odd snick of metal that Pierce associated with weapons in very old movies. He plunged into the ruins, wielding his broken glass in the air, and found an elderly man with white hair down his back swaying on his knees and trying to pull himself upright. His eyes widened at the sight of Pierce and his weapon. He threw himself sideways to grasp at some kind of long-handled implement. Pierce moved quickly through the ruins and into the open earth beyond them, the mouth of an old shaft crisscrossed with miners' lights, young men's faces flaring and disappearing as they roamed, and rummaged, and the girl cursed them in the constantly shifting shadows.

One turned headlamp illumined her face finally: a young, freckled oval, narrowed gray eyes beneath flaming red brows, lips pared thin as thread with fury.

Then she vanished as light drenched Pierce's face, then flashed across the broken pitcher.

Pierce heard her gasp. A thundering boom sent dirt scattering down from the ceiling. There was a tortured groan from very old timber. All of the headlamps pointed up.

The world went black.

When Pierce's eyes flickered open, he saw the spare, freckled face again. He felt water misting over him instead of the dry dust of centuries. He made a sound, and Leith shifted into view, crouched beside him, Pierce realized, under sky and trees, not earth and rotting boards. The empty chain that had held the pitcher swung aimlessly above his head.

“I'll give you a drink, but you'll have to take it from my hands,” the girl said dourly. “You broke my pitcher.”

That, Pierce thought, would explain her disgruntled expression. He tried to speak, then nodded. Leith held up his head; the girl cupped her hands in the bright rill, and he opened his mouth.

He drank the pure, cold water falling from her fingertips three times before he could finally speak.

“Sorry,” he croaked. “I needed a weapon.” He paused a moment, remembering. “Did you shoot everyone?”

“No. But they didn't wait around for the ceiling to make up its mind.” The frown on her face was easing; she added, “I thought you were one of them when I saw the broken pitcher. They were taking things—small, sacred things we keep in there—looking at them with their unholy lights, then just tossing them on the ground. Searching for gold, I think, though they kept yammering about something sacred belonging to Severen.”

“Can you sit up?” Leith asked, and helped him. The world whirled, then slowed and steadied. He felt at the back of his aching head, wondering if one of the mineshaft timbers had swung down and smacked him. Sitting, he saw the old man finally, with his white hair and his beard down to his belt. There was not much room for expression on his hairy face, but his eyes were rueful.

“Sorry,” he said. “I thought you were one of them, too. You're all dressed alike but for the emblems. Sir Leith here explained who you are.”

“What hit me?” Pierce asked bewilderedly.

“My garden shovel.”

“Oh.” He sighed, his eyes going to Leith. “So much for knightly prowess. Armed with a pitcher and felled with a garden tool.”

“You should have— You should never have—” Leith began, then gave up, shaking his head.

“It was very brave of you to try,” the girl said staunchly. “My grandfather tried to stop them. They just threw his crutch over the wall and let him fall. He has a bad knee.”

“Where— What is this place?”

“It's Tanne's shrine.”

“Tanne.”

She gestured at the crescent of enormous, hoary trees around the ruins, so tall their lofty tips seemed to lean together as their great boughs stretched toward the sky. A rosy wave swept up her face, making her red hair, glowing in the sunlight, even more fiery. “This is his forest. My grandfather has been the shrine guardian here all of his life since he was twelve. This old shrine was built thousands of years
before anybody discovered the gold behind it. The miners ran that guardian out and let the shrine fall down while they took out all the gold. Now travelers come to see the ruins and fill their bottles with water fresh out of the earth. But nobody remembers the forest god. People born here pass the tales along. When my grandfather can't climb up here any longer, then one of our family will take his place.”

“You?”

She shrugged, almost smiling at the thought. “Maybe. Tanne chooses. Sometimes with a dream. Sometimes, if the wind is just right, the one who is chosen hears him call.”