The Cygnet and the Firebird (3 page)

He paused, his eyes narrowed faintly, light-filled, hidden. “You’re curious, too,” he said slowly. “You want this thing only because you don’t know what it is.” She nodded, unperturbed. For a moment their eyes held, calculating, and then, abruptly, he yielded, tossing up a hand. “I never expected to find this tower
so well-guarded. And now I have run out of time. . . .”

And he was gone, to her surprise, as easily and noiselessly as light fading on stones. Distant sounds wove into the air again: children shouting, cows lowing as they came in from the back pastures. The Holder, she remembered suddenly, would be discovering the empty chair beside her. But Meguet would reassure her. Nyx knelt at the hearth, touched the stone with her hands, and then with her mind. Neither moved it. She wrapped her thoughts around the stone, feeling its weight and texture, its size: a single block of charred marble in a hearth so old the stones were all sagging into one another. As she studied it, she felt something watching her. She lifted her head. A crow winging out of the mantel gazed at her out of its black marble eye.

She reached up, touched the eye. Nothing moved. Above it, in relief, the Cygnet flew the length of the mantel through a black marble sky, its eye aligned with the crow’s eye. She had to stand on air to reach it. The Cygnet’s eye moved nothing. She stood thinking, her own eyes flicking across the scattered con-vocation of crows, until in all their black stone eyes the pattern formed.

It was a constellation: All the eyes were stars, depicting the Cygnet flying across the night. A riddle, she thought, no one outside of Ro Holding would have guessed. She felt a rare impulse for caution, but dismissed it immediately, too close to the mystery, too curious. One after another she touched the dark
stars. The stone, its mortar sifting drily into the fire-bed, swung free.

She barely had time to look into it, when something struck her—a wind, a thunderbolt—and flung her at the mantel and then into it among the crows. She cried out, startled; her mouth was stopped with stone. She concentrated, found the face of one of the crows and gathered herself like a thought in its stony mind and then into a point of light within its eye. Beneath her, she saw the mage looking into the hollow stone.

Meguet, slamming the library door wide, knocked a shield off the wall. The mage, barely glancing up, flung a hand out impatiently, murmuring. The animal leaped from his breast, a sinuous blur of white that poured to the floor, bounded upward again, catching air with its wings, claws out, aimed at its prey. Meguet threw up her arm, wielding a rose against it. Something—the streak of red in the air, a sound she made—caught the mage’s attention. His head snapped around. For an instant the rose stunned him. Then he spoke sharply. The animal halted in mid-flight; white embroidery thread snarled in the air. Nyx dropped like a tear out of the crow’s eye, reappeared in front of Meguet. The air seemed to snarl in her wake as she dragged remnants of the mage’s spell from the air and threw them back at him. The mage began to fray in different directions at once, as if he were spun of fine threads of time, all unravelling. He cried something before he vanished. The cry skipped like a rock across water, snatched the gently falling thread. Cry and thread whirled away into nothing.

Meguet sagged against the open doorway, felt air and brought herself upright. “Moro’s name,” she whispered. “What did you do to him?”

Nyx, her eyes flooded with color, untangling herself from her sorcery, looked bewitched herself, something only half human. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never done that before.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I have no idea.” She drew a deep breath then; her eyes relinquished color, became familiar. She glanced toward the noise that had followed Meguet up the stairs. She touched her cousin, who, having fought some ancient and very peculiar sorcery not many weeks before, seemed oddly shaken by a tidy piece of work. “Stay here. Keep them out. If he comes back, this time not even that rose will stop him.”

She crossed the room quickly, knelt at the hearth. Meguet, watching the air for a warning of color, was jostled by the first of the guard who, weapons drawn, flung themselves precipitously toward the threat to the house. Several of the more agile councilors were among them. Meguet heard the Holder’s voice farther down the stairwell.

She turned briefly, stilled the guard with a gesture. They quieted, peering over Meguet’s shoulders at Nyx, who was gazing meditatively into a cracked, charred stone adrift from the hearth. The silence spread; subdued whisperings passed it back to the crowd at the top of the stairs, until it reached even the Holder. Meguet felt her coming in eddies of
movement as the guard pushed a path clear for her. She joined Meguet, who was guarding yet another threshold, eyed her daughter, and went no farther.

“What is it?” she asked. She had evidently flung a trail of pins down the stairs; most of her hair had fallen loose. She was frowning deeply; her black eyes were expressionless, wintry, but she kept her voice low. “Was she harmed?”

“No. There was a strange mage, a thief, trying to steal something—she may still be in danger.”

“Moro’s eyes, she knows enough sorcery to make Chrysom sit up in his tomb—why didn’t she just let him have what he wanted?”

“Because she doesn’t know what it is.”

“I thought she knew everything by now.”

“She’s trying to be careful.”

The Holder stared at her. “Really. And how did this thief get past the Gatekeeper?”

“He slowed time.”

The Holder’s response caused even Nyx, feeling through the stone for mage-traps, to raise her eyes. The Holder, still furious, lowered her voice mid-sentence, “—in the middle of the Holding Council, wandering among us at will, it’s unthinkable, intolerable. You couldn’t stop him?”

Meguet sighed noiselessly. “I tried. All he wanted was something of Chrysom’s, nothing more serious. I had no power against sorcery. Nothing but a sword.”

The Holder was silent, gazing at her quizzically. Her eyes dropped to the rose in Meguet’s hand. Meguet,
staring at it, felt the color blaze into her face. She lifted her other hand, pushed it against her eyes, and saw the rose again, lying beside the sword in her shadow.

She let it fall, as if a thorn had pricked her. “I was bewitched.”

“Apparently,” the Holder said curiously. “But, I wonder, by what?”

A murmuring rippled through the crowd at Meguet’s back; she looked up to see what the mage wanted so badly out of the stone that he had stopped the world.

Nyx held it in her hand: a golden key.

Nyx was crouched under a table in the mage’s library a day later, picking at a crack in the stone floor with her fingernail, when the firebird flew over the gate. Engrossed, she did not immediately hear the effect of its arrival. The Hold Councils and most of the household were at supper; strings and flutes from the third tower played a distant, ancient music in the peaceful twilight that wove among the reeds and drums from the cider house. Nyx, dressed for supper, had forgotten it. Cobwebs snagged in her dark hair; absently, she had rearranged the elaborate, jewelled structure until pins and strands of tiny pearls dangled around her face. Her black velvet dress was filigreed with dust; she had walked out of her shoes some time ago. Her eyes, usually the color of bog mist, were washed with lavender. Her face had taken on a feral cast; she seemed to be scenting even threads of smoke ingrained in the ancient stone.

The disorderly clamor of people and animals finally intruded into her concentration. She straightened
abruptly against the table top. Someone pounded on the door, then opened it.

“Nyx!”

It was Calyx, who, looking high and low in the shadows, finally looked low enough. Nyx, rubbing her head crossly, said, “I thought I locked that door. What in Moro’s name is that racket in the yard?”

“It’s a bird,” Calyx said dazedly. “What are you doing under the table? And what have you—” Her voice caught; color washed over her delicate face. She found her voice again, raised it with unusual force. “Nyx Ro, what have you done with all the ancient household records I was studying?”

“Over there,” Nyx said, waving at a cairn of books as she crawled out. “A bird. What bird?”

“They’re all jumbled up! I had them all in order, a thousand years of household history—And look what you’ve done to this room!”

A pile of chairs balanced on a tiny wine table; shields and furs and tapestries hung in midair above their heads; bookshelves climbed up the stairs to the roof. Spell books, histories, accounts, diaries, rose like monoliths from the floor. Nyx, her arms folded, stood as still among them, eyes narrowed at her sister.

“Calyx,” she said softly. “What bird?”

“Look at this mess! And look at your face! There are black smudges all over it.”

“That would be from the chimney. Calyx—”

“You put your face up the chimney?”

“Evidently.”

“Why,” Calyx asked more precisely, “did you put
your face up the chimney?”

“Because I’m looking for something,” Nyx said impatiently. “Why else would I crawl up a chimney?”

“I have no idea. I thought, after studying sorcery for nine years, you’d pull an imp out of the air to do it for you. Maybe I can help you. What is it we’re looking for?”

“Most likely a book.”

Calyx stared at her. “Did you,” she asked ominously, “look on the bookshelves?”

“Oh, really, Calyx.” She wiped at ash with her sleeve, her breath snagging on a sudden laugh. “You do keep dwelling on nonessentials. After studying sorcery for nine years, I have learned how to clean up a room.” She picked her way through the chairs to the windows. From that high place, she could see the parapet wall linking the seven white towers, most of the cottages clustered beyond the wall, and the vast yard with its barns and forges and craft houses that dealt with the upkeep of the household and the lands that rambled endlessly within the outer wall. One thing caught her eye instantly at that busy hour.

“The Gatekeeper is not at the gate.”

And then she saw the flash of fire that scratched the air with gold and turned a rearing cart horse into a tree with diamond leaves.

*    *    *

Meguet had been sitting with the Gatekeeper in his turret when the bird flew over the gate. Dressed in corn-leaf silk the color of her eyes, strands of tiny
jewels braided into her rippling hair, she had abandoned guests and musicians in the supper hall, pulled on her oldest boots and wandered into the summer twilight to talk to the Gatekeeper. She had seen nothing of him the day before; at the Holder’s request she had stood watch in Chrysom’s library most of the evening, while Nyx puzzled over the key she had found. Some of the gossip had evidently found its way to the gate; as she entered the turret, the Gatekeeper handed her a rose.

She eyed him; his lean, sun-browned face, with its silvery-green swamp-leaf eyes, was expressionless. She said, “It was red, not white.”

“I hoped you’d like this better.” Then she saw the beginnings of his tight, slanted smile, and she sighed and slid onto the stone bench next to him.

“I was hoping no one had noticed. Does gossip blow on the wind across this yard? Or do you hear through stone?”

“People like tales.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “For nine days you’ve stood at that tower door with a sword in your hands. When you suddenly toss it aside for a rose, it causes comment. What was he like, this mage who gave you the rose?”

“You should know,” she said grimly. “You let him in.”

He stirred; his eyes flickered away from her, across the wall, where the lazy tide sighed and broke. “He did get past me. Odd things have, in this house. Tell me what happened. No one saw him but you and Nyx, and the tales being spun around this mysterious mage
make me afraid to open the gate.”

She smiled at the thought. “You’d open the gate to winter itself. Or time, or the end of it.” She brought the white rose to her face, breathed in its scent. He opened her other hand, dropped his lips on her palm where thorns had left an imprint.

“You fought a battle with the red rose.”

“I nearly lost it,” she said, and heard his breath.

“Tell me,” he said, and listened with the hard, expressionless cast that his face took on when something disturbed him. He applied a taper to his ebony pipe before the end of it, blowing smoke seaward, his eyes hidden. She told much of the tale to the rose, turning it in her fingers, finding memories in its whorl of petals.

“Is he expected back?” he asked. “Or did she kill him?”

“She doesn’t know. She told the Holder that if he is alive he might return, since he seemed that desperate.”

“For a key? To what?”

“Nyx thinks a book. Some secret magic book of Chrysom’s.”

“I thought she had all his books.”

“So did she.”

He turned his head, tossed smoke downwind. “What kinds of things would a mage keep hidden?”

“That,” she sighed, “is why Nyx refuses to let the stranger have what he wants, which is the advice that, at some length, the Holder gave her. If she knew, she might let him take it and stop threatening the house.
But she is spellbound by this book that she can’t even find.”

“So is the stranger, it sounds, stopping time and threatening to burn the house down for it.”

“What was that like? Did you feel time stop?”

He shook his head. “Your corn-silk hair caught my eye; I turned to look at you. I was hoping you would turn. Then I blinked, and there was your face. Then you vanished into the tower, and what caught my eye was the blade of silver light on the stones just inside the door. A moment later one of the tower guards ran for help. And I guessed what the light must be. I nearly left the gate. But I didn’t want to risk trouble letting itself out while I was gone, though it had wandered in without my help. So I waited. And the tales started flying like birds out of the tower, each one more colorful than the last.” He touched the rose in her hand. “They all said you were safe.” He paused, his eyes going seaward again, where white birds flashed over the water and dived. “I caught the gist of it: a mage, a key—”