The Cygnet and the Firebird (27 page)

“Yes.”

Meguet felt her body flash again. This time her own rage shaped the shadow that flew, soundless and dark as night, with its coldly burning eye on Draken Saphier. She flew and did not fly; she felt the power gather in her again, as the black swan neared him. Blue light flickered along its wings. He must have heard the winds part for it; he spun suddenly, flung up his hand. The black dragon formed against the moon and stars, its red eyes flaming. It opened its mouth, swung its long neck down and caught the black swan as it flew into Draken Saphier.

He cried out, as the blue flame rippled over him. Then the dragon broke the swan’s neck and tossed it away. Meguet, still caught in it, felt herself grow limp and thoughtless with its death, falling farther and farther away from a point of light that grew small, so small she could scarcely see it, though it seemed, as she fell, the only important thing left to do.

Then the hard ground shaped under her again; someone gripped her, shook her. “Meguet!” She opened her eyes. The world was still black, but she recognized Rad’s voice. She lifted her head, saw Draken rising. She heard a strange noise beside her;
Draken, hearing it also, vanished just before the mage-light struck.

So had Nyx; the light snaked across the air where she had been, and picked one of the warrior-mages out of nothing. Her ritual blades and time-paths caught the light, flared brighter than the moon. Then she seemed to lose all light, become a piece of nothing darker than the night. She fell without a sound. Another mage appeared beside her; power snapped back at Rad. The stones shook around them; a shard flicked across Meguet’s cheek. She flinched, heard Rad breathe something.

“Stay here,” he said, and vanished. She stumbled to her feet, gripping stones to keep her balance, and looked out.

She saw a calm and empty desert. Then both Rad and Nyx seemed to waver in and out of the air, as if they were being pulled into eyesight and constantly pulling themselves back. As the silent struggle gradually and relentlessly worked them visible, the warrior-mages appeared around them, still as monoliths in the moonlight.

Draken saw her. He was an eye in her mind instantly, blood-red and unblinking, staring everywhere she fled, forcing her finally into a maze where she took every wrong turn she could make, and every wall that stopped her turned into the dragon’s eye and forced her on. Once she turned and stood in its glare, refusing to move. The eye turned to fire in her head; from some far place she heard her own voice. She ran.

Abruptly, she could see again. She was on her knees, clinging to stone, trembling as if she had been running for her life through the maze of palaces on the Luxour. Draken had turned away from her to watch the firebird come.

It flew fast, and it flew straight to Rad Ilex.

He could not seem to move; he could only watch it, his head uplifted. He tried to speak; he could not. The bird’s silver claws shone like ritual blades; they were open, curved, and dropping toward his heart. Nyx’s face was turned toward the bird; she too struggled to speak. Meguet, freed from Draken’s attention, walked the maze in her mind to what the dragon had sought: the eye of the Cygnet.

Nyx
, she said, from that secret place, and Nyx met her eyes.

Power swept through her, from the Cygnet to the Cygnet’s heir, Nyx shook free of the web of minds that held her, and cried to the firebird,

“Brand! Not Rad! It’s your father’s spell! Remember!”

The firebird faltered above Rad. It tore its voice out of Ro Holding and screamed, falling as if it had been shot. Brand, his face rigid with the firebird’s fury, rolled to his feet and leaped in a single unbroken movement, at his father. Draken, startled, nearly unleashed mage-fire; he pulled it back quickly as Brand’s body struck him. He staggered, regained his balance and gripped Brand. The back of his hand, coupled with the weight of time-paths, whipped
across Brand’s face. He fell like the firebird had out of the air, and lay still.

A few of the warrior-mages stirred; Meguet heard an indrawn breath. Draken met their eyes, said calmly, “It was necessary. He will understand.” He looked at Nyx. “The key.”

Her eyes flicked at Meguet, leaning drained and helpless against the stones. She bowed her head. Something small, burnished with amber fire dropped into her hand. Draken, his eyes on it, stepped toward her. She flung the amber at his feet.

It exploded with all the firebird’s beautiful enchantments. For a moment Draken vanished among them: a scattering of garnet roses, a diamond snowfall. But as he picked himself out of the spell he had made, the mages held Nyx, shaped her back into the waning moonlight as she tried to vanish. Draken, shaking gold leaves out of his hair, stepped across Brand’s body to her.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you will give me something to fight after all in your peaceful kingdom. You and your cousin who is not a mage.”

He held her eyes and held out his hand. After a long time, during which she stood like the warrior-mages, a standing stone beneath the setting moon, she reached into her pocket for the key to all the dreaming worlds.

The first of the dragons appeared at dawn. Nyx watched the line of light above the mountains turn fiery with sunrise, and listened to Brand breathe. He might have been the firebird still, his bruised face empty, his thoughts hidden from her. Twice she had heard him try to speak in the night, then stop. He sat beside her on bare ground. The mages had tied his hands behind his back, while his father roamed the time-paths. They did not, Nyx guessed, want to use power against Draken Saphier’s powerless son. Rad slumped against a rock near him. A web of power, spun from mage to mage across the circle, trapped him in its intricate strands; Nyx caught a glimpse of it in the dawn, fine-spun and dangerous, each tendril clinging to Rad, trembling a warning at his every breath. It vanished from eyesight, then; the mages hid it from the light of day. She felt no such elaborate constraints on her; they knew she would not leave Meguet or Brand. The mages had left Meguet free; they watched with cold curiosity the odd enchantments the Luxour pulled out of her. She was mage
and not mage. Nyx they understood; they might not, Nyx feared, let Meguet return home. Meguet sat near Rad, leaning against the same rock. She watched the sunrise absently, frowning a little; Nyx wondered if Meguet saw, instead of the rising sun, the great shining prism hidden within time, which was the Cygnet’s power and its eye.

She heard Brand’s breath catch. An eye had opened in the distant mountains: a second sun, red-gold, flaming through the harsh, barren crags. A crag unfolded, extended itself upward in a broad sweep of gold. Another eye opened. The true sun rose above them. Shadows scattered away from the mountainside as the dragon’s face emerged. A second crag broke away, moved upward into the sky, to catch the wind. The dragon shrugged itself out of the mountain, soared upward, light sliding like molten gold across its bright scales. In that moment Nyx felt the slackening of the mages’ guard. It did not matter; as they watched the dragon burn across the morning, no one could have moved.

It came straight to them; its vast shadow, flung forward, reached them first. It seemed, as the earth darkened beneath its broad underbelly, to have swallowed the sun. Then it veered, loosed the sun from beneath its wing. It settled on top of the steep ruin of stones near them. It stretched its wings in the light; gold shook into their eyes. Then it faded into itself among the rocks, its brilliant, craggy profile to the light. One eye stared down at them, wide and ruthless as the sun.

Nyx felt a touch, and started. Brand had shifted
closer; his shoulder brushed hers. She looked at him; tie dragon had wakened something in him besides the firebird’s silent, endless cry.

“My father—” His voice caught. He began again, softly, but Nyx sensed the mages’ attention riveted on them. “He won’t stop this, until he finds his own father. The dragon-mage.”

“I know.”

“Such monsters will make a wasteland out of Ro Holding.” He closed his eyes, his face twisting. “Why must he take Ro Holding? There is a land for him at the end of every path.”

“He glimpsed the power in Meguet,” Rad Ilex said wearily. “It’s mysterious, beyond his control, beyond his experience. He will take apart Ro Holding to find the source.” Meguet’s eyes flicked to him. She turned her face away abruptly, her mouth tight. He reached out with some effort, as if he lifted stone instead of bone, and touched her. “I’m sorry. If I hadn’t dragged you here with me—”

“If I had just let you take the key,” Nyx said bitterly.

Meguet’s head bowed. “If I had not picked up the rose.”

“It’s my father’s fault,” Brand said with savage lucidity. “None of yours. Any of you.” He struggled impatiently with his bonds, and added dispassionately, “I would like to kill him.”

Nyx asked tentatively, “Do you remember—”

“Everything.” He stopped. He raised a shoulder, brushed it against his swollen cheek, where a few
fragmented time-paths had imprinted themselves in blood. He looked at Rad finally and said again, “Everything. You told me this would happen. That you needed to leave Saphier to look for Chrysom’s key, and you told me why. You had told my father, in all innocence, that it existed, and then you realized that all the innocence was yours. You knew he would kill you for the key. I didn’t believe you. Then he came in and I saw his eyes. Dragon’s eyes. You had already opened a path to Ro Holding. He—I—” He shook his head. “It becomes confused here. He tried to stop you—I tried to stop him—I don’t know how I thought I could.” He swallowed, added huskily, “He was no one I knew then. Not my father—No one. He had transformed himself. He was the dragon. And I became the firebird.”

“He made the firebird to kill me,” Rad said, and then was silent, as if words, like his hands, were fixed to the mages’ web of power and had become too heavy. He lifted his head suddenly; Nyx, following his gaze, saw a piece of morning sky detach itself and fall. Against the gold-brown desert its shape became visible: a sky-blue dragon, smaller than the first, with eyes like cloud. It dropped onto another pile of stones, and vanished again; with difficulty she saw it settle itself, now stone-brown and grey, flecked with black, a rock-dragon hidden among the rocks. “I envy him,” Rad whispered. “Seeing all their private worlds.” Only Brand stared at the ground, seeing nothing. “Brand,” Rad said, again with effort, and Brand turned his dark, empty stare at him. “He didn’t
know you either, then. You were someone for him to use. He would have used anyone.”

“Don’t defend him,” Brand said fiercely. “Not to me.”

“I’m not. He barely glimpsed then what he is bringing to the Luxour now, and if you hadn’t been there, he would have turned himself into the firebird to stop me.”

“I was there. And so were you. He had no mercy for either of us. It was cruel. And unforgivable.”

“Yes. I’m only explaining why—”

“Power. I know my father that well at least.” He made a sudden, furious attempt at the leather thongs binding his wrists. The mages watched impassively. Nyx, her throat aching suddenly, reached out to loosen them. Light charred the ground under her hand; the snap of air numbed her fingers. She started to rise, swallowing anger, to plead with the mages. Meguet’s eyes caught her, wide, warning, and held her still.

“But why,” Nyx asked Rad, when Brand had calmed himself, “did Brand become human again, those few hours every night? Why would Draken have done that?”

“I don’t think Draken did,” Rad said softly. They watched a crimson dragon, long and sinuous, flicker in and out of time, its scenting tongue bright and quick as lightning, burning and vanishing. The winds of the Luxour finally dragged it into shape; it took its place on another ruin. “Brand and I met in secret at moonrise. Draken transformed him into the firebird at
midnight. I remember hearing the changing of the guard, how the familiar ritual noises frayed apart at the cry of the firebird. I think Brand broke his father’s spell every night trying to remember the significance of moonrise, of midnight. Not even Draken could cast a spell more powerful than love, or rage, or grief.”

Brand shook suddenly with a terrible, noiseless grief. He bowed his head, hid his face behind his hair; Nyx saw the tears fall on the barren ground like rain. She eased closer to him, slipped her arms around him. He dropped his face against her. Her hold tightened; she felt her own tears slide into his hair. The mages cast no spell to stop her. She held him until his trembling eased, and her own eyes were hot, heavy. She sat back; he raised his head, shook the hair out of his face. He leaned forward, kissed her; she tasted his tears. He said softly,

“And so the firebird found you.”

“If the firebird had come to Ro Holding a month or two earlier, it would never have come to me.” Her voice shook. “In some ways, I was as ruthless as your father. The small birds in the back swamps of the Delta know. Meguet knows.”

He rested his face a moment longer against her dusty hair. “My father does not intend to war against swamp birds,” he said wearily. “And whatever you did to Meguet, she still loves you and she is still alive.”

Another dragon broke into the morning, this one building itself out of a line of stones half-buried in the ground. It was huge, as grey as smoke, with a
flattened, predatory skull. Its eyes sparked light like diamonds; they looked as hard and cold. One of the mages whispered uneasily to another as it took to the air. Its shadow slid slowly over them; it circled and settled on a massive rise of stones as grey as itself. Something in the distance disturbed it, perhaps an image drifting out of the winds. Its jaws opened; a colorless light flashed out of it. One of the piles of stone exploded, left a ghostly image of ruins where it had stood. The shock of boulders hitting the ground rocked the mages on their feet.

“Moro’s name,” Meguet whispered. Nyx watched her tensely, wondering if she were about to vanish to fight a dragon that made even the mages wary. Another appeared. This one Nyx recognized: A drifting wall of steam among the pools tore itself open to reveal an empty blackness, a hole in the shape of a dragon, with eyes like stars, and breath that froze the rocks it settled on. A few cracked; fragments rattled down. It curled and breathed; the hot morning light slid like white fire over the ice on the dark stones.