The Cygnet and the Firebird (17 page)

“Mage.” His voice went flat on the single word; she sensed all his attention then, pulled back out of the night to focus on her.

“The one who lives among the rocks.”

“Does this mage have a name?”

“I didn’t ask. She is quite old and somewhat blind.”

He made a soft sound; his attention strayed again. “She may see better, then, on the Luxour, where nothing is quite as it seems.”

“She had lost, she said, all interest in magic long ago. How is that possible? To stop being a mage?”

“To stop being compelled,” he answered; his face was turned away from her again, to the dark, singing distances. He added after a moment, “I don’t know if that in itself is possible.”

“She seemed compelled by dragons.”

“On the Luxour everyone is compelled by dragons.”

She was silent: A dragon had compelled her into
the hot, unbearable eye of the sun. She said, “It was kind of you to help me.”

“You’re not the first I’ve found overwhelmed by the Luxour,” he said. “It happens. People come looking for wonders, for the dragon’s claw, the dragon’s fire. They never stop to think that they might find what they are looking for. They see crystal bones, a piece of petrified fire, fragments of some long forgotten age. They never see the living fire that breathes over them out of a passing moment. I find them and they wake and tell me they were struck by sun. Then they stumble to the nearest village and buy a dragon heart and go home, never knowing they have worn dragon’s fire, they have stood within the dragon’s eye.”

She was silent, compelled, by something in his voice, to search the winds and stars for their reflections. “I thought it was the sun myself,” she admitted.

“I thought you must be a mage when I saw you,” he said a little drily. “With enchanted shoes and no food. No one has less common sense than a mage on the Luxour. But I didn’t recognize you, and I know all the mages of Saphier.”

“I’m not a mage,” she said. “A mage I met put the spell into my shoes.”

“Yes.” His voice went soft, very thin; he might have been listening to the sound of a shadow shifting across sand. “I recognized his spell. Mages leave fingerprints that the skilled can read. How well do you know him?”

She was silent, thinking of Rad with a dragon across his doorway, telling her what to fear. “Not well,” she said finally.

“Is he in his village now?”

“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “He comes and goes.” He moved. The mage-light flashed suddenly in her eyes. She winced, catching dust again, her vision blurring.

“I know those river villages,” he said. “Everyone knows everyone and everything.”

“It’s true.” She wiped tears from her eyes, shielding her face from the light. “I’ve lost track of time, here. It seems so long ago, now, that I walked out of the village. I don’t even know where I am; how can I know where a mage might be? Mages—except you—don’t pay attention to you unless they need you.”

“And did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Need you?”

She looked at him, her eyes finally clear, wondering at this stranger pushing her gently, question by question, into lies, and why she felt compelled to hide the sleeping mage within her thoughts. In the wider cast of light she finally saw his face.

She remembered to breathe after a time. It was the firebird’s face, older, passionate, controlled. She recognized the black brows slashing over cobalt eyes, the hard, clean-lined warrior’s face, weathered by experience. His long hair was varying shades of black and smoke and ash, tied back with braided ribbons of
leather. The flash of silver at his wrists were the woven strands of time.

She swallowed drily. He said curiously. “You know me. I don’t know you.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said. She felt her body trying to grow small, push into the ground away from his eyes. “You wouldn’t,” she said again, desperately. “I’m just another face in those river villages you know.”

He held her eyes for a long time until it seemed she began to hear the secret voices of his dragons, and to see their wings moving in his eyes. Then his expression changed, lines deepening between his brows, beside his mouth. He said, “Rad Ilex sent you into the Luxour leaving the track of his sorcery in every step you take. Are you running away from him? You won’t elude him wearing those. He put some thought into your shoes, but into little else.” She did not answer. He touched the light again; it dimmed, throwing a welcome shadow over her eyes. “You are protecting him.” His voice was suddenly husky, edged with pain, his face so like Brand’s it startled her. “It doesn’t matter. I will find him.”

“Why?” she whispered. He set the pouch near her, along with skins of water and wine. He sat still again, as she had first seen him, but his hands were tightly closed, his face taut.

“He injured my son.” His hands opened, closed again; he stared into the mage-light. “Brand,” he whispered. “My only child. He is lost somewhere in time, crying fire like a dragon, unable to speak anything
but strange, jewelled spells. Rad forced him out of Saphier, and destroyed his only path back.”

“Why?” The word hurt, coming out, as if it were a strange, hard jewel.

“I don’t know. They had been friends. Rad Ilex had discovered something, I think, something of enormous power, dangerous to Saphier. Brand tried to warn me, Rad silenced him. I have been searching for them both. I have sent my mages searching for them. But Rad Ilex is elusive and my son is—anywhere. You have been with Rad in his village. Is he there, still? You do not know. He comes and goes. So he came and went in my son’s life and twisted him out of shape, and tore time itself apart to fling him beyond Saphier. Beyond even my sight.” He paused; she saw him swallow. “I taught Rad to do those things.”

She started to speak, couldn’t. She heard Rad’s voice:
The Dragon of Saphier will test you and test you until you can’t call your own bones private
 . . . The dragon of night and stars had been on Rad’s own threshold, had filled his own doorway. It was Rad who searched for the key, Rad whom the firebird attacked, Rad who had tested her himself . . . Rad who lay helpless against Draken Saphier, alone and dreaming, recovering from Brand’s fury.

Or was he? Had he lied to her, gone in secret to Ro Holding to trade her warnings for a key? Was he on the desert now, coming to find her, or had he sent her on an impossible journey to Draken Saphier’s court, simply to lose her and her suspicions to the Luxour?

“I can’t help you.” Her voice trembled badly, torn as she was between truth and lie, recognizing neither. She felt something like wind glide over her feet, and Draken Saphier rose, holding her shoes.

“You can help me,” he said simply. “You can stay here until Rad follows the path of his sorcery to you. Not even the whims of the Luxour can hide your steps from him. When he finds you, I will find him.” She stared at him, stunned. “Keep the food and water,” he said. “I’ll take the light.” He added, “Don’t try to walk in the dark. Things that are afraid of light, that bury themselves against the heat by day, dig out at night to feed. They are small, vicious, and can feel the vibrations of a falling pebble. As long as you stay still, you’ll be safe. And I’ll be here, watching.”

The light went out. He was silent. He had, she realized, faded into the desert: a dark streak of wind, a thinking stone. She lay still, scarcely daring to breathe, trying to remember why, in another time, in another country, she had not picked up a sword instead of a rose.

Nyx sat in a white room, contemplating three black leaves floating in a bowl of water. The bowl was white; the table it stood on was white. Thin white curtains caught light before it spilled a hint of color across the white floor. Nyx wore a fine, flowing, complex assortment of garments, all of white silk. In the entire room, only her eyes had color, the lavender in them so deep it seemed, when she caught her reflection, a comment on her surroundings.

She was alone in the small chamber, whatever alone meant in a house full of mages. She had been treated with impeccable courtesy from the moment she appeared: a sorceress from a strange land walking a path of time into a ruler’s house, with a firebird she claimed was his missing son. This she explained to more mages than she had ever counted even among the dead in the history of Ro Holding. There was not a shadow of disbelief in their expressions, as the firebird cried noiselessly, constantly overhead. Of course this was Draken Saphier’s son, this wild bird trying impotently to turn them all into jewelled trees. Unfortunately,
Draken Saphier was not there to thank her himself. Neither were Rad Ilex and Meguet, her eye told her, among this grave and attentive gathering. She must wait, of course, for Draken Saphier’s return. She had, she explained, urgent business elsewhere. No, they persuaded her, she must wait. Draken Saphier would want to question her more fully about his son’s enchantment, perhaps seek her advice. This, she had to admit, seemed reasonable, considering the state in which his son had returned. Draken Saphier’s arrival, they told her, was imminent.

It remained imminent. She had been given pristine quarters, three leaves in a bowl to contemplate, attendants of exquisite tact and skill who were all, she realized, mages of varying degree. Draken Saphier had not yet returned, but would soon. Soon became three days, and in three days she had been shown extraordinary things in the vast, white, light-filled palace. But she had seen nothing of the firebird.

She kept an eye out for him, as mages led her through the palace. It seemed an irregular assortment of cubes piled at varying heights, the whole house formed around a great square which was separated into formal gardens, and, at the center, a broad square of red and white stone. From the highest windows in the house she could see the pattern in the stones: the emblem of Saphier, an intricate, stylized weave of lines coiling, locking, parting, meeting. She wondered, if she walked that path, where it would end. It held, she realized after a time, the only curved lines in the palace. The palace had no round towers, no
turrets, no spirals or circles, only a series of arched windows now and then, open to air and light, overlooking the gardens. The chambers and halls, corridors, stairways, all carried continuous straight lines from angle to angle as the palace turned at the corners of the square. Nothing was jumbled, labyrinthine, untidy with past. Past had been relegated to memory, or it was framed in orderly fashion within the present. For a house full of mages of varying powers the space and pale walls and light would be calming, and the strict lines the eye perceived might order the mind. So much Nyx conjectured, though, within those lines, she was shown fascinating deviations.

“This wall is very old,” a very old mage named Magior Ilel, who was Brand’s great-aunt, told her. She was quite tall and thin, with hands that seemed all bone, translucent with age, and eyes as dark and still as the new moon. The wall, a great slab of pale wood at one end of a white room, was so completely and intricately carved with tiny figures that it seemed to move. It was a battle, Nyx realized, taking a closer look, depicted with ruthless and startling detail: Not even the cart horses seemed exempt from slaughter. Only birds, picking out an eye or a bloody heart, eluded arrow, spear, fire, club, stone. The carving of the devastation was elegant, skilled. She studied it, curiously; such fury seemed remote in the peaceful house.

“Where are the mages?” she asked, turning to Magior. She surprised a fleeting expression on the ancient, composed face.

“A mage witnessed it,” she answered. “He carved it, as an example of power he thought beyond the control even of sorcery. There were few mages then, and magic seemed a force as raw and random as lightning.”

“Then he didn’t connect sorcery with savagery,” Nyx commented. She turned away from the silent, frozen carnage, to a more tranquil tapestry hanging on a side wall. At first glance it seemed a tree full of birds and flowers, bright, varied blooms growing along the same bough, with small, vivid birds fluttering among the leaves. As she gazed at it, odd dark shapes intruded: broken pieces of shadow, faces, perhaps, half-revealed behind the leaves, or even within a flower, as if some other work were embroidering itself through this one. She looked closer, intrigued, trying to piece the darkness together, but it remained elusive.

“It makes me want to frighten the birds out of the tapestry, part the leaves,” she said, “to see what the tree is hiding.” She looked at Magior. “What is it? What do you see?”

“I am too old,” Magior said in her slow, dry voice, “to see anything. Flower and shadow, dark and light, in the end they are what they are. There is no resolution. You are unconvinced. What do you see?”

“A mystery,” Nyx answered simply. “What I would like to see, unless you have some objection, is the firebird.” Magior looked at her silently; she added, “It flew to me for help. I’ve grown—accustomed to it. To Brand. I’ve left work unfinished,
which worries me, and will worry me until I see it completed. Or has he remembered everything? Is the spell broken?”

Lines moved across the aged face, undecipherable expressions. “The firebird is resting. It has several—roosts, I suppose we must call them. We thought it best to surround him with familiar faces, so that he could more easily remember his past. The past he remembers with you is intricately bound with the spell.”

“I see.”

“Please do not be offended.”

“No.”

“If he looks at you, he will only remember himself as the firebird, needing help.”

“And is he remembering himself?”

“It is,” Magior said after a pause, “an exasperating piece of sorcery.” Her face worked again. “When we follow his memories back, there is a point at which all we find, inevitably, is the bird’s face. The bird’s silent cry.”

“You go into his mind?” Nyx asked, startled.

“You didn’t?”

“Only to find the bird’s mind. And that was like entering some hard, polished jewel, where every part is like every other part. And yet Brand kept insisting that all he lost of time and memory could be found in that enchanted bird.”

Magior nodded. “So he still insists,” she murmured. “All we can do is wait for Draken Saphier.” She paused again, her eyes on Nyx’s face. “We wondered,”
she said at last, “what you did with the bird’s fire and its voice.”