The Cygnet and the Firebird (2 page)

Someone had slowed time.

In the weird stillness, Meguet heard a footfall in the grass behind her. She whirled, her heart hammering, and brought the broadsword up in both hands. A man stood within the tower ring, staring up at the solitary black tower. The flaring arc of silver from the door as the broadsword cut through light startled him; Meguet felt his attention riveted suddenly on her. In the brilliant, late light, the stranger cast no shadow.

She drew a slow, noiseless breath, tightening her hold on the blade, trapped in a world out of time by his sorcery and by her peculiar heritage: the sleepless
compulsion to guard what lay hidden within the tower’s heart. The man’s face, blurred by the dazzling light or perhaps by shifting time, was difficult to see. He seemed a profusion of colors: scarlet, gold, white, dust, blue, silver, that sorted itself out as he moved, crossing the yard with a strong, energetic stride.

Tall as she was, Meguet was forced to look up at him. His hair and skin were the same color as the dust on the hem of his red robe and his scuffed yellow boots, as if the parched gold-brown earth of some vast desert blown constantly through sun-drenched air had seeped into him. A strange winged animal embroidered in white wound itself in and out of the folds of cloth at his chest. The robe was belted with a curious, intricate weave of silver; silver glinted also at his wrists beneath his sleeves. A pouch of dark blue leather was slung over his shoulder; another, of dusty yellow silk, hung beside that. He stopped in front of Meguet’s blade. She saw his face clearly then, as surprised by her as she was by him.

His eyes flicked over her shoulder at the motionless hall, then back to her. His broad, spare face was young yet under its weathering; his eyes, a light, glinting blue, were flecked with gold.

He said, amazed, “Who are you?”

Meguet, abandoned, with only a broadsword to protect the house against sorcery, found her voice finally. “You are in the house of the Holders of Ro Holding. If you have business with the Holder, present yourself to the Gatekeeper.”

He glanced behind him at the little turret above the
gate, where the Gatekeeper leaned idly against the stones, a motionless figure in household black watching something in the yard. “Him.” He turned back. “He looks busy.” He touched the blade at his chest with one finger, but did not turn it. He grunted softly, his eyes going back to Meguet. “This is real.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you expect to do with it? You can’t keep me out of this tower with a sword. How can you have the power to see me through shifted time and still wave that under my nose? What are you? Are you a mage?”

“You have no business in this tower, you have no business in this house, and you have no business questioning me.”

“I’m curious,” he said. “You eluded my sorcery, and I had only thought to come and go so secretly no one would ever know.”

“Why?” she asked sharply. “Why have you come here?”

“I want something from this tower.”

She felt herself grow so still that no light trembled on the blade. “You may not enter.”

“There are a thousand ways to enter a tower. Every block of solid stone is an open doorway. You can’t guard every threshold.”

All fear had left her voice; it was thin and absolute. “If I must, I can.”

He was silent, puzzled again, at the certainty in her words. “It can’t be the sword,” he said at last. “The magic is in you, not that. True?” He caught the blade
in one hand, so quickly that not the flick of an eyelash forewarned her. She wrenched at it; it might as well have been sunk in stone. “Not,” he mused, “the sword, then.” He loosed it as abruptly. She steadied herself, breathing audibly, while he studied her, his eyes quizzical, secret. “Perhaps,” he said finally, “it’s what you guard in this tower that gives you such power. Is that it?”

She raised the blade again, swallowing drily. “No one may enter the tower at this time without permission from the Holder. Those are my instructions. You may not enter.”

“But the Holder will never know,” he said softly. “What I want has been hidden for centuries. No one knows it is here, and no one will miss it when it is gone. I will never return to Ro Holding. Let me pass. If all you’re brandishing against me is a point of honor, you won’t be dishonored. No one will ever know.”

“I will,” Meguet said succinctly. “And so will you. Honor is a word you would not bother to toss at me, if it meant nothing to you. You may not enter.”

He was silent again, so still he might have put himself under his own mysterious spell. His eyes had narrowed; light or memory flashed through them. “What made you time or honor’s guardian?” he breathed. “You have seen a few of its back roads, its crooked lanes and alleyways. Haven’t you. But you are not a mage. Or are you?” She did not answer. He stepped closer; she did not move. He stepped so close that the blade snagged the golden eye of the winged beast
across his chest. He said, “If you do not let me enter, I will turn every rose on this tower into flame.”

“Then you will burn what you have come for.”

He moved closer. The blade turned a little in her hands as if the animal had shifted under it, and she felt the sweat break out on her face.

“I will seal every door and window in this tower, and turn it into a tomb for those you guard.”

“It is already a tomb.” Her voice shook. He stepped so close the blade slid ghostlike into him. Her shoulders burned at the sudden weight, but she held the blade steady under his expressionless gaze.

“If you do not let me enter, I will kill you.”

“Then,” she said, as sweat and light burned into her eyes, and the clawed, airy animal whipped beneath the blade like a desperate thing, “one of us will die.”

He stepped back then, as easily as if the great sword were made of smoke. The animal turned a smoldering eye at her and subsided into the cloth. The blade trembled in her hands; still she did not lower it. The mage’s face changed; the expression on it startled her.

“You deserve better than a doorway,” he said abruptly. “What kind of upside-down house is this where no power but honor is pitted against the likes of me? You can’t stop me. You can barely hold that sword. It is shaking in your hands. It is so heavy it weighs like stone, it drags you down. It is heavier than old age, heavier than grief. It falls like the setting sun, slowly, slowly. Watch it fall. Watch the tiny
flame of light on its tip shift, move down the blade toward your hands. Watch it. The light trembles among the silver swan wings. What is your name?”

“Meguet Vervaine.”

“Is it night or day?”

“I do not know.”

“Are you awake or dreaming?”

“I do not know.”

“Are you a mage?”

“No.”

“Have you a mage’s powers?”

“No.”

“How do you have the power to see and move through shifted time?”

“I have no power.”

“Then who gives you power?”

“No one.”

“You have power. You are standing here talking to me when no one else in this house can move.”

“I have no power.”

“What gives you power?”

“Nothing.”

“You are guarding something from me as steadfastly as you guard this door. I will enter this tower. Do you have the power to stop me?”

“You may not enter.”

“Do you have the power to stop me?”

Meguet was silent. Wind brushed her face, a cool breeze smelling of twilight. For a moment she stared senselessly at what she saw: the inner yard, the towers, the outer yard through the arches, where cottagers’
children flung a ball back and forth, and the Gatekeeper on the ground, his back to her, opened the gate to a couple of riders. Then she looked down at her hands. They were locked so fiercely, so protectively around the hilt of Moro Ro’s sword that her fingers ached, loosening. The smell of roses teased her memory.
I fell asleep
, she thought surprisedly.
I had a dream
. . . .

Then the Holder’s voice snapped across the chamber. “Meguet!”

She turned, startled. The sword slipped out of her hold, rang against the stones like a challenge, and she saw beside it the rose that had flung itself off the outer wall into the room to lie burning in her shadow. She dragged her eyes away from it to the dais.

Nyx had vanished.

Dream shifted into time, became memory; she felt the blood leap out of her face. She reached down, snatched up the rose and began to run.

*    *    *

On the dais, the sorceress had felt the sudden shift of time.

Intrigued, she simply sat still, not a difficult thing to do for one who had spent nights in the black deserts of Hunter Hold watching the constellations turn and the orange bitterthorn blossom open its fullest to the full moon. She saw Meguet bring up the sword in her hands, turn. The fair-haired stranger stopped at the threshold. Nyx’s attention focused, precise and fine-honed, on her cousin, who was waving a blade of sheep grass against the wind. Their voices carried
easily across the eerie silence.

She watched, unblinking, while the stranger came so close to Meguet only the swans on the sword hilt protected her. Light sparking off a jewel in Nyx’s hair would have alerted the mage; when he forced her to move, he would not see her. But he backed away from Meguet, passed around her, left her defending a breached threshold in a dream. He had paused, for some reason, to pick a rose off the tower vines. He dropped it in Meguet’s shadow. He passed among the councilors with no more interest in them than if they had been hedgerows. At the stairs, beneath the Blood Fox prowling between green swamp and starry night on the Delta banner, he hesitated. The power within the tower was complex, layered as it was with Chrysom’s ancient wizardry, household ghosts, the impress upon the centuries of every mage or Cygnet’s guardian who had left a trace of power lingering in time. Beneath that lay the entombed mage and the vast and intricate power within the Cygnet’s heart. He would not recognize that power, but he would be aware, like a man stepping to the edge of a chasm at midnight, that something undefined was catching at his attention. To separate what sorcery the stranger had come to find from the emanations of power and memory within the ancient stones would require at least a walk up the spiral stairs. When the stranger had felt his way through the lingering magic beyond the first curve, Nyx rose. She formed an image of Chrysom’s library in her mind, book and stone and rose-patterned windows, and stepped into it.

She waited.

The sight of Nyx reading at one of the tables made the stranger pause a heartbeat, as if his glance into the council chamber had snared her in his memories. But she gazed down at the page—a list of cows who had calved four hundred and ninety years before—with rapt attention. In that magic-steeped chamber he would not notice her mind working. He had reached his goal; his attention flicked like a needle in a compass toward what he had come to steal.

The stone mantel above the fireplace was littered with thousand-year-old oddments of Chrysom’s that had somehow survived accidents, misplacements, pilfering and spring cleaning. Nyx had no idea what they were, besides volatile and unpredictable. The stranger glanced briefly at them. He stood in the center of the room, sending out filaments of thought like a spider spinning a web, into tables, hearth, book shelves, ancient weapons, cracked, bubbled mirrors, tapestries on the wall. He ignored Nyx, who, surrounded by mysteries, was reading about cows. He moved finally, abruptly, across the room to kneel at the hearth. His hands closed around one of the massive cornerstones that was crusted with centuries of ash. He tried to shift it. Now that he had shown her where it was, Nyx asked before he found it,

“What in Moro’s name are you looking for in there?”

He was so startled that he nearly leaped back into his own time. Parts of him faded and reappeared; a wing on his robe unfolded in the air and folded itself
back into thread. He did not so much turn as rearrange himself through shifting moments of time to face her. She recognized the white animal then, from some of Chrysom’s ancient drawings: She thought he had imagined it, from some tale so old there was scarcely a word for it in Ro Holding. The mage, his face a few shades paler than dust, studied her while he caught his breath.

He said abruptly, “You were in the hall, down there. I remember you now. Your eyes.”

She lifted a brow. “You saw me watching you?”

“No. I remember their color, when I passed the dais. Like a winter sky. You are a mage. It’s hard to tell, in this house.”

“People who belong in this house recognize me easily.” She rested her chin on her palm, contemplating him. “You are a thief. You are not from Ro Holding, or I would know you by now; your remarkable power would have caught my interest.”

“You have some remarkable powers yourself,” he said with feeling. “You nearly turned me inside-out, scaring me like that.”

“I know a few things,” she said.

“You don’t know what’s in this stone. You never knew anything at all was in there. I can name it. That makes it mine.”

“Fine,” she said drily. “I will let you keep the name. You may take that and yourself out of this tower. How dare you bewitch this entire house and wander through it, pilfering things? What kind of barbaric country taught you that?”

“Only one thing,” he pointed out. “One pilfering. That’s all I need. Something you have never needed. Let me take it and go. I’ll never return to Ro Holding again.”

“You have more than theft to answer for. You disturbed my cousin Meguet. You threatened her and tried to coerce her.” He opened his mouth to answer, did not. Nyx continued grimly, running one of Calyx’s pens absently in and out of her hair, “You used sorcery against her.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was curious.”

“You were cruel.”

He drew breath, his eyes flicking away from her; she saw the blood gather under his tan. “I was never taught,” he said finally, “to make such fine distinctions. In my country, ignorance is dangerous; curiosity can be ruthless. But I would never have harmed your cousin. I only wanted to know—”

“I know what you only wanted to know.” She paused, her own eyes falling briefly. She took the pen out of her hair and laid it down. She folded her hands in front of her mouth and looked at the stranger again. “But it’s none of your business. Now leave this house in peace.”