The Cygnet and the Firebird (21 page)

“I’m thinking,” she said absently, wondering if the whole of the Luxour were on the verge of turning itself into a dragon. In the next moment, it would become; but this moment, in terms of its own time, had begun before Ro Holding had a name, and might last until its name was forgotten. “No wonder Chrysom came here. . . . He must have loved this place.” She drew the ivory ball out of her pocket, opened Chrysom’s book. Many of its paths, she found, began and ended in the Luxour; it seemed riddled with secrets. “Yes,” she said finally, choosing one. “We just walk.”

The path brought them to the springs. The water churned and steamed in the dark; mud bubbled and snorted. Wind dragged steam over them, blew it away as quickly when they began to cough. Beneath the noise of water and the exuberant wind, Nyx was aware of something deep and constant, a heartbeat within the earth, so low she felt rather than heard it. She touched Brand.

“Do you feel that?”

“What?” he asked, wary again. “Am I changing?”

“No. It’s like a heartbeat.”

He listened. “No.” He roamed, peering into moonlit crevices, studying pale crystals that crusted the
edges of the pools. He came back to her. “Nyx,” he pleaded, and she heard the urgency in his voice. Time, for him, would not slow even in the Luxour.

“Yes,” she said, but the wind brought her a breath of winter out of nowhere, and, wondering, she followed the chill.

Brand heard the heartbeat then; it came out of a hole in the night, a place so cold it was rimed with ice. For a moment, he forgot the firebird. “Is it a dragon?” he whispered, as if in his excitement he might wake it.

“I don’t know.”

“What else could turn desert into ice?”

“I thought they breathed fire. . . . I wonder if Chrysom mentions it.” She opened the book again; pages riffled quickly, stopping to show her what was on her mind:
The Ice-Dragon. . . It exists
, Chrysom had written,
in a time accessible but not recommended. It is very cold, and the dragon, roused, is fearsome, a monster with night-black scales and white eyes. It will follow the time-path if you do not close it behind you.

“What does he say?” Brand asked.

“He saw the dragon.” The book misted away in her mind. “He made a time-path to it. I wonder if all his paths through the Luxour lead to dragons. . . .”

“If you free a dragon, that would get my father’s attention.”

“And what will I do with the dragon?”

“My father could deal with it. He always wanted to see a dragon.”

“Your father might well be annoyed if I set a
dragon loose into Saphier. Chrysom left them alone.”

“It’s not like you to be so cautious,” Brand commented.

“It’s not like you to be so impulsive.”

She saw him smile unexpectedly in the moonlight; the Luxour was working its odd magic on him. “My grandfather was a dragon,” he reminded her. “So they say. My father says the heart of power—”

“—is a dragon’s heart.”

“So perhaps we should look for my grandfather. See if he’s in the mage’s book. A dragon who could take the shape of a man. My grandmother didn’t find him fearsome. If you find that dragon, my father would be in your debt. He always wanted to know his father.”

She was silent, thinking of the smell of winter and the timeless dark of the ice-dragon’s cave. Could it do such things beyond its own world? she wondered. Breathe a perpetual winter over a land, imprison it in ice?
A monster
, Chrysom had written. What might the other dragons do if they were loosed? She drew an uneasy breath, beginning to understand what she had dropped into her pocket, and carried so carelessly into a land ruled by a dragon’s son who could forge the time-paths but not the patterns. To find dragons, he would need the patterns she had found. . . .

But it was Rad Ilex searching for the key, not Draken Saphier.

“Nyx?” Brand’s voice pleaded again, this time for dragons.

“All right,” she said slowly. “I’ll see if Chrysom
wrote of a dragon he didn’t find fearsome.”

She found several, after perusing the book for so long that Brand had vanished by the time she finished. She looked around, startled, for the firebird, and found Brand finally, standing inside the ice-cave, shivering, listening to the heart of power.

The path she chose ended in one of the massive tumbles of stone. The winds smelled hot and dry there, as if they were about to burst into flame. She felt no heartbeat, but an odd shifting underfoot as if the earth were falling away like sand in an hourglass. The stones trembled a little. Nyx looked up, gripping Brand, in case she had to open a door into thin air and leave before a boulder flattened them. The bulky jumble resolved, as her eye travelled upward, into high, airy walls, half-broken turrets, moonlit windows.

“It’s a palace,” she breathed.

“It’s just stones,” Brand said. His voice was tense again; the moon was continuing its inexorable climb toward midnight. “What does Chrysom say about this dragon?”

“It is red as flame and breathes flame. However, when it understood him to be harmless, it ceased its baleful attack and permitted him to come close. Its eye, Chrysom said, seemed a portal through which he might walk.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s enormous.”

“What else? Did it speak?”

“It lies within a ring of fire.”

“Did it speak?”

“The point is: You can’t survive attack by fire.”

“Chrysom did.”

“Chrysom was a mage.”

“Did it speak?” he asked again, patiently, and she sighed.

“It made, Chrysom said, overtures of Interest in a language he found fascinating but obscure.”

“Meaning what?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It could be my grandfather,” Brand said hopefully. “If it saw one human, it would have known what my grandmother was, when it saw her centuries later.”

“How did she find it?” Nyx asked, puzzled. “Or did it find her? Did it walk its own path of time into Saphier out of some peculiar longing for a human heir to its powers?”

“No one knows,” Brand said. “She was a warrior-mage, like my father, very powerful, though she did not train mages. She must have come looking for dragons; the dragon may have let her find it. But I wonder why.”

“Perhaps, like Chrysom, it was very powerful and very curious. Perhaps it liked to travel. It had seen humans before, and it approached your grandmother in that shape so not to frighten her.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t sound like this dragon. This one likes sleeping in the hearth fire; it doesn’t travel.”

“More dragons than my grandmother’s must have travelled,” Brand pointed out. “Legends of dragons
have come out of the Luxour for centuries. You saw my father’s dragon-room. Some of the things are very old.”

“How many dragons would it take to produce a legend?”

He hesitated. “None,” he admitted. “Some say the only dragon ever seen was by a mage having a bad dream on the Luxour. But they’re here,” he said softly, fiercely. “Even I can feel them. Chrysom saw them.”

“Yes.”

“Then find another. One I can see with you. It may recognize my grandmother in me. She had long black hair and blue eyes.” His hand closed lightly on her arm. “Please. I’m in no shape to worry about risks.”

She opened the book again.

The next path ended under the earth. They stood in a starless black, surrounded by thunder. Nyx, casting a mage-light so Brand could see, found water everywhere, dark rivers and cataracts tearing at the reflection of her light. The mage-light hollowed a vast cavern around them; its walls and ceiling receded into shadows. Brand, his face teared with water from a misty, roaring waterfall, asked incredulously,

“Are we still in the desert?”

“Chrysom says so.” She looked around, her hair shining with jewels of water. “How strange . . . It’s as if the dragons create their own small worlds within the Luxour.”

Drawn to the plunging water, he missed a step in
the shadows; she heard him splash. “What does he say about this one?”

She consulted the book again. “This dragon is white as bone, with eyes like blue water. It recognized the human form. It is a shape-changer, an imitator, capable of taking any form—” Brand opened his mouth; she held up her hand. “It is quite old and transforms slowly, with much effort now. It breathes a kind of incandescence that shrouds it as it sleeps. The mist itself is a form of power. It seems to be a subtle labyrinth, a time-trap in which the unwary might easily become lost, if the dragon does not wish to be disturbed. Apparently Chrysom chanced on it at the right time.”

“Does it speak?”

“It has, Chrysom says, the power of communication.”

“Then let’s communicate with it,” Brand said tersely. Nyx looked past the book in her hand, at his set, tense face. “It may know my grandfather, at least.”

“Well,” she said after a moment, “I suppose it’s pointless to be cautious now.”

“It also takes up time.”

“At least, if we’re both trapped, I won’t have to explain to your father what happened to you.”

“Chrysom wasn’t cautious,” he reminded her. “And he lived to write the book.”

“True,” she said, but did nothing.

“Are you afraid of dragons?” he asked. “I didn’t think you were afraid of anything.”

“I seem to have grown cautious,” she admitted. “There was a time when, like Chrysom, I would have taken every path to every dragon, for no reason but to see them in all their power. Then, I supposed I had no one but myself to think of, and the acquisition of knowledge of any kind seemed more important than returning home in one piece.”

“I’m not in one piece,” Brand said starkly. But he was listening; his eyes were on her face. He stood with his arms folded, motionless, while the dark water poured endlessly behind him.

“This is not my land,” she said. “You belong to Saphier. I’ve brought you this far, and I am responsible for you on the Luxour. If I lose you to time, Saphier will mourn you and curse me, and if I lose us both—”

“Ro Holding will lose its heir.”

“I’m not accustomed,” she said apologetically, “to being this reasonable. But I have already lost Meguet somewhere in Saphier through my own willfulness, and I don’t dare lose you. I can’t go through my life scattering people into various bog-pools of time from which they might never return. I’m not afraid of much. But I am a little afraid of myself. And I am terrified of harming you.”

He stood silently, still motionless, his brows drawn, a peculiar expression in his eyes. Then he blinked, and the expression faded. “That’s odd,” he said.

“What is?”

“That’s all I thought I was to you: a puzzle to be solved. And so that’s all I thought you were: a mage
with a puzzle to solve. Now—” He hesitated.

“Now?”

“Now I wonder who you would be if I were not a man lost within a spell. Instead of dreading midnight, feeling time pass like this black water rushing away from me, I might ask you questions. For a change.”

She was silent, seeing him differently now, as if for a moment, in that place beyond the world, his face was no longer haunted by the firebird within. It belonged only to him, and she knew him and didn’t know him. She said tentatively, “What questions?”

“Anything. Why you’re always walking out of your shoes.”

“I find shoes distracting when I’m trying to think.”

“Or how you knew you were a mage when you were young, and there was no one in your house to tell you what you were.”

“I had Chrysom,” she said. She was motionless herself, caught in his odd stillness, the little ivory ball in one hand, the mage-light at her feet. Water misted over them both, luminous in the light: the dragon’s iridescent time-trap. She watched the light move in his eyes, the flick of cobalt beneath his dark, slanted brows.

“Chrysom is dead.”

“Chrysom brought us here.”

“Did you always follow his teachings?”

“No.”

“My father’s mages rarely question him. But the firebird follows you. As if you understand something more than power.” He moved; his face grew clearer,
chiselled out of light and shadow, the water flecked and gleaming along his cheekbones. “What do you think the firebird knows?”

“That it might be safe with me.”

He blinked. “Are you saying—”

“No. Just that it couldn’t fly home to safety. So it flew to me.” She paused, her lips parted, remembering. “An odd choice, considering.”

“Why?”

“Not so long ago, I was learning sorcery in a bog. I burned birds in my fires and read the future from their bones.”

“You did.”

“I thought—a mage should know everything, no matter what the knowledge entailed. So I tried to learn everything.”

“Did you?”

“I learned to leave the birds in the trees.”

He smiled a little, his face losing its lean, feral cast, becoming, to her entranced eye, again a stranger’s face: someone who, in his forgotten past, had learned to laugh, who had been loved. “Except the firebird.” He moved again, step by step closing the distance between them. Light shifted over him, caught in the folds of cloth across his chest, traced the straight line of his shoulders. “Except the firebird. Your eyes have so much color now. What causes them to change like that?”

“When I work a spell.” She paused, scarcely hearing herself, wanting to reach out, touch a star of water at the hollow of his throat. “When I’m angry. When
I find something—something of overwhelming interest.”

“And which is it now?”

“Probably not anger.”

He swallowed; the star moved. “Probably,” he said huskily, “you are casting a spell.”

She shook her head a little. “I’m not doing it.”

“You’re changing shape.”

“Am I?”

“You used to look like a mage.”

“What does a mage look like?”

“Like a closed book full of strange and marvellous things. Like the closed door to a room full of peculiar noises, lights that seep out under the door. Like a beautiful jar made of thick, colored glass that holds something glowing inside that you can’t quite see, no matter how you turn the jar.”

“And now?” she whispered. He came close; the light at their feet cast hollows of shadow across his eyes, drew the precise lines of his mouth clear.