The Cygnet and the Firebird (11 page)

“It’s my home,” he said simply. He drifted a moment, asked, when she thought he had fallen asleep again, “Where is the key?”

“I have it.”

He held up a hand, his eyes still closed, and murmured, “Let me see it.”

She did not move. “Swear to take me back to Ro
Holding. What I’ve done for you, I can undo. This time I have a weapon.” His eyes opened; she held up the little shard of silver. “I will use it.”

She heard his breath stop. Then he drew air deeply, blinking. “Of course I will take you home.”

“How can I trust you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you can’t. But it’s hard for me to believe you would put that sorcery back where you found it. It would be a bloody and noisy piece of work. And you would still be forced to keep me alive. Unless you want to wait here alone, hoping that someone will rescue you. If you choose to do that, remember that the only thing you’ll want to eat are the rock lizards. The smaller black ones, not the yellow. You can boil them in the steam pools. They’re less tough that way, than if you roast them. There’s not much to burn, anyway. But if you do want a fire—” He stopped, shifting ground a little. Meguet, still clinging to the shard, her only argument, said tautly,

“What do I burn?”

“I’ll make you something, before you kill me.”

“I don’t want—”

“You will, with that. It is a dark magic that goes straight to the marrow.” He added, at her silence, “I’m trying to persuade you to trust me.”

She ran one hand over her face, felt the fine dust clinging to her everywhere, even beneath her eyelids. “How can I?” she demanded. “You attacked my cousin and stole from her. You cast a spell over the Holder’s house. You did such terrible things to Brand that he can’t speak of them, he can’t even remember
them. He can only cry the firebird’s rage. I don’t trust you. The only reason I did all this for you is so that you will stay alive to take me back to Ro Holding.”

He stirred again, wincing, his eyes straying to the bare, distant crags. He said tiredly, “I doubt that your cousin tossed the real key to me. She just wanted me out of the tower. So, you see, I may be forced to return to Ro Holding for the true key.”

“You dragged me into this crazed, dragon-haunted place because of a fake key?”

He lifted one hand, touched her arm, speechless a moment. “You’ve seen dragons?” he asked huskily.

“I saw a shadow. You cried out such strange things when I tried to move you. I thought you summoned it. It hovered above us, hiding the sun. It was invisible and yet it cast a shadow.”

“A shadow.”

“It looked like a shadow your white dragon might have cast. Only a hundred times bigger. I was afraid—I was afraid it might attack.”

“Oh, no. They never do.”

“Your white dragon did.”

“That’s sorcery. I made it from a petrified dragon’s heart. I’m not sure how real it is. But I’ve grown fond of it. I left it there, didn’t I,” he added, remembering. “In the tower, with the firebird.”

“It is, I think, a pile of white leaves.”

“Until moonrise. And then it will change and Brand will see it.”

“Who is he?”

“Brand Saphier. His father, Draken, rules Saphier.
This is the Luxour Desert in south Saphier. The edge of the world, some call it. I was born here.”

That explained his coloring, she thought. “And why,” she asked steadily, “did you turn Brand Saphier into a firebird?”

He moved abruptly, as if the tiny blade of talon in her hand had touched his back again. He answered, his eyes shadowed, heavy, “If I had made the firebird, the magic would be part of me. It could do no more harm to me than my reflection could. The spell that enchanted the firebird is deadly to me.”

She was silent, weighing his words against every inflection in his voice, every change of expression in his face. “Assuming it’s not yours,” she said tautly, “then who cast the spell?”

His brows drew together hard; his eyes shifted away from her, toward some memory. “It’s not a thing,” he whispered, “I want even the wind to know.”

“Then why did the firebird attack you?”

“I think it was made to kill me.”

Meguet stood up. Standing brought her into the stifling light, but movement helped her think. In this case, thinking proved futile. She dropped her face in her hands, saw the fierce light behind her eyes. “I don’t know how to believe you.” She lifted her head, blinking the mage’s face clear again. “I don’t know what’s truth and what’s lie, between you and the firebird.”

“You don’t have to trust me,” he said simply. “You’re entirely at my mercy. No one knows where
you are. Brand would guess his father’s court. If he remembers Saphier at all. You can threaten me with that sorcery, but if you hurt me you will only be forced to care for me so that I won’t die, so that I can take you home. . . .”

“And if the key is the real one?” she demanded, torn. “You’ll vanish with it, leave me stranded here among the dragons. Why should you take the trouble to return me, and face my cousin and the firebird again?”

“It can’t be the true key.” He turned his face restlessly away from her. “Your cousin is too shrewd.”

She knelt, chipped a piece of ice with the crystal, and put it to his lips. There was color in his face now, a feverish glitter in his eyes. “Why,” she asked abruptly, frowning down at him, “did you pick that rose for me?”

“Because,” he said softly, “you made me remember what words like honor and courage mean. Why did you pick up the rose instead of the sword?”

She sighed, defeated. “I wish I knew.” She turned, lifted the dripping icicle out of his boot. She held the boot upside-down; the key dropped out onto the ground.

He picked it up, studied it curiously. He traced the crescent moon of ivory with his forefinger, and then the letter that clung in gold to the dark of the moon. She watched his face.

“Which is it?”

He shook his head. “Every spell carries somewhere in it the mage’s signature. It may be the order in
which things are done. Or the favorite spellbook used. Or some familiar element. Chrysom liked riddles. Unexpected images. Your cousin had no time for that. This has no centuries clinging to it. No riddles except for its shape. Nothing of Chrysom’s; something of a mage I wouldn’t have recognized.”

“How do you know so much about Chrysom? Is Saphier in another time? Or are you a thousand years old?”

“I like to wander . . . sometimes I wander in and out of time. I learned things, watching Chrysom. I would go and build his fires, fetch things—”

“You spoke to him?”

“He never asked where I was from. But we spoke of time, how it turns and loops. . . . He knew I didn’t belong there. He spoke of a spellbook of time he had written. He had hidden it, but he gave me hints, from time to time, when I came. From time to time.” He smiled a little, holding the key one way, and then another. His smile faded; he saw the shadow behind the key. “So you see I must return to Ro Holding.”

“Why?” she asked wearily. “What more do you need to know of time? You and Nyx will only fight each other.”

“I must have the key. I need it. Your cousin only wants it out of curiosity. I need it for my life.”

“Tell her that,” she said, startled. “She’ll help you.”

“Mages don’t help one another.”

“In Ro Holding—”

“Not in Saphier. And I can’t tell her why. I can’t
even whisper it to air. Not in Saphier. And most certainly not in that tower in front of the firebird.”

“Why? What are you to the firebird?”

He kindled a tiny flame out of nothing, set the crescent moon on fire. “Once,” he said, “we were friends.” He let the flame devour moon and letter and shaft, like a candle, until the flame danced on a tear of gold on his palm. He blew it out, let the tear melt into the ground, and buried it. “Now,” he explained, “there is only that much of your cousin to be found in Saphier. What is her name?”

“Nyx Ro.”

His brows went up. “She is—”

“The Holder’s heir.”

“And you, Meguet Vervaine?”

“Her cousin.”

“And?” He smiled a little at her silence. “The woman who sees into time. You saw the dragon’s shadow. It takes a great, complex power to find the dragon.” His eyes wandered to the jagged, barren thrusts of rock, the varying hues of gold and dust, the plumes of steam. “That’s why I love these deserts. From the time I was young, I could catch glimpses of the dragons. A shadow. A wing folded into a rock. A roar that is not wind. Light that is not sun. If you saw an entire shadow, it is more than most see in a lifetime. I dream of seeing them emerge from stone and air and light. . . .”

“Are they ghosts?” she asked, entranced.

“No. I think they shift in and out of time. Which is why,” he added obscurely, “I need that key.”

“Can’t you open the book without it? If you know Chrysom’s ways?”

“I do know Chrysom’s ways,” he said, but no more. He slid his hand into his pocket, brought out the little cube of gold. “You used a dragon’s tooth to start that fire,” he commented. Her eyes widened, going to the crystal. “And claws for the canopy. They leave pieces of themselves around.”

“I heard one snoring, I think, in the ice cave.”

“I tried to see that one. No light will shine in that dark, not even fire. It lives in some black plane so cold its breath freezes even in this heat. It must look like its own shadow, to the human eye.” He set the cube down on the ground.

“What is that?”

“Supplies. For when I travel.” He murmured something. One side of the cube opened; he shook a water skin out of it. “Size,” he said, as Meguet’s eye tried to fit the full skin back into the tiny cube, “is illusion. I didn’t want to frighten you before, with my sorcery.” He shifted to hand her the skin, then sagged back wearily, settling himself into the ground as if he drew some deep, healing comfort from it. “I have a house in a village on the edge of the desert. I can take us both that far. I need to rest before I return to Ro Holding. You saved my life, but there wasn’t much of it left. If I hadn’t taken you with me, I would be lying here dreaming while the sun and the sand and the carrion snakes worked their magic on me.”

She brought the skin down incredulously, splashing
herself. “You deliberately brought me with you? To help you?”

“I hoped you would. I was desperate. But I didn’t expect—” He shifted again, his eyes on the dark spikes holding up her billowing skirt above his head. “I didn’t expect you to find ice in the desert. I didn’t expect you to see the dragon’s shadow.”

She looked at him, frowning again, but feeling the strange desert working its magic of light and illusion into her bones. She said abruptly, “Do you have a name?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “I thought you’d never ask. My name in Draken Saphier’s court is something he gave me, and that only mages use. In this place I love, where I was born, my name is Rad Ilex.”

In the black tower, Nyx waited for the mage and the moon.

The Gatekeeper came before either one of them, at evening when the household had gathered for supper and the yard was calm. Nyx, deep in contemplation of Chrysom’s key, which opened nothing in itself that she could find, scarcely heard him knock. She lifted her eyes to find him in front of her, an occurrence so rare that for a moment she wondered if the tower were the gate and the Gatekeeper watched them both. Then she remembered why he had come.

“Hew.” She pulled her bare feet off the nearest chair. “Sit down.”

He shook his head. “I came to ask you.”

“About Meguet.” She was silent a moment, studying him, her eyes luminous with sleeplessness. Gatekeepers of Ro House were rooted like stone and vine to the house. When they grew old, they wandered away looking for an heir to some peculiar power which Nyx had never explored. The Gatekeeper, his own face set and shadowed with weariness, did not
look accessible to exploration. But a part of him had gotten tangled in the fire’s enchantments, the night before; she was aware he had been there, though in what form she was not quite certain. Instead of waiting, like the mage’s dragon, for moonlight to free him, he was on his feet in front of her, looking perplexed. If, as she suspected, he saw everything that came and went in and out of Ro House, including ghosts and portents and the Cygnet itself, he would have known Meguet had gone. But not where.

“I thought,” he said, “the bird might have told you something by now about where it came from.”

“It’s a good guess that’s where the mage took Meguet,” Nyx said. “But where is still a mystery. He left something here; he may still return.”

“With Meguet?”

“If not,” she said grimly, “I’ll search for her.”

He sat down then, his head bowed, his eyes on the floor where it had opened like a mist to Meguet’s falling. Would it, Nyx wondered suddenly, open also to the Gatekeeper who opened and closed every door? But he did not seem inclined to dive headlong into solid stone. He asked, “Where would you look? Or would you just fling yourself blind into time beyond Ro Holding? Did the bird or mage give you a word to guide you?”

“Not yet. Why? Do you know of places beyond Ro Holding?”

“Me? No. I know the gate and the house and the back swamps of the Delta. The winds don’t blow me names of other places. And even so, what name
would mean more than another? Unless you could tell me.”

“And what would it be worth then? Would you leave the gate for Meguet?”

He lifted his head, met her eyes, his own colored like the silvery bog-mosses and about as transparent. “You would leave the house for her.”

“My mother told me to find Meguet. I have no intention of finding out what life is like with my mother and without Meguet.” He said nothing, still waiting for an answer; she added, “I’ll find her. If the mage brings her back, I’ll do what I must. If I have to search for her, I do have the means and I’ll discover how and where any way I can. It’s only a question of time.”

“I have more than enough of that, during the night at the gate.”

She was silent again. Something vital hovered beyond her memory: He had been in the tower, seen the mage and Meguet, but in what shape? Had she seen his face? Or only something she recognized as Gatekeeper that had entered a mage-locked room, and had been transformed by the bird’s fire just long enough to have known what became of Meguet? She eased back in her chair. Meguet would remember. She said softly, “What time you have is counted by the movement of the Cygnet’s stars. I’ll find Meguet. If you leave the gate, my mother will only have me searching for you as well.”