The Cygnet and the Firebird (30 page)

She lifted her head, blinking. “I was dragged.” She could see vague lines and shadows on his face in the torchlight; she could not see an expression. “Into a desert. Like no place I have ever been, not even in dreams. Dressed for supper in a hot, barren, nameless wasteland where there were dragons or maybe not, with a dying mage on my hands.”

He made a sound, touched her again, gently. “Let’s go up,” he said, “where I can see your face.”

They sat in the turret, a dragon’s eye of a moon watching them from over the swamps while she told him where the rose had led her. She could see him clearly then, in the taper-light, the shadows beneath his eyes, the ghosts of worry and care still haunting his face as he listened, one hand linked in hers, so
still she scarcely heard him breathe. When she had wakened herself again in the chair in Chrysom’s tower, he moved finally. His lips parted; he didn’t speak. One hand reached toward a taper, dropped. She said very softly,

“You opened the gate between Ro Holding and Saphier.”

He met her eyes; still he didn’t speak. Then she heard his breath, long and slow like tide.

“I am Gatekeeper,” he said finally. “In the light of day or in the dark, in the end it’s me, standing here, making a choice to open or not.”

“Nyx said she was warned, just as she left with the firebird, that there would be danger to the Cygnet. You let her go.”

He picked the taper out of its sconce then, lit his pipe. “I promised her I would.”

“Even when—”

“She gave me a name. The place where you were lost, where she would go to find you if she found a way. I never saw the dragon’s shadow behind the firebird, only the strange mage, and the firebird, who cried questions without answers here in Ro Holding. And only you, vanishing like that, dragged to anywhere by a mage who got past my eye.”

“Did he? Or did you let him in too?”

He shifted, putting the pipe down, and turned to her, grasping both her hands in his. “He found his own way in. As he had, you said yourself, many times before. Chrysom made this house, and its gate, and maybe left a door open somewhere, for the mage he
liked. If I had stopped Nyx from going, then what? We would have had at least one dragon at our gate, and maybe we can move the house across Ro Holding, but not Ro Holding itself to a safe place. The Cygnet flies alone among the dangers of the night. It doesn’t live quietly in some safe place. And neither, as you of all of us know best, does Nyx.”

She opened her mouth, found herself wordless. The house, she decided, in that tangled moment, had its mysteries, and she was one of them and so was he. Mysteries, by their nature, behaved in mysterious ways. She settled back, calmer now. “Sometimes,” she said, “I know you as well as yesterday. And sometimes not at all.”

He watched her, his own face calmer, still holding her hands. He leaned toward her; she met him halfway. The moon disappeared between their faces, reappeared now and then, in various phases, until a step disturbed them, and as they drew apart, the full moon grew again between them.

Nyx stood at the top of the steps, looking tired but composed. “My mother sent me to find you,” she said to Meguet. She held out a hand as Meguet straightened. “She doesn’t need you yet. She only wanted to make sure you hadn’t vanished again.” Meguet eyed her narrowly. Nyx had dressed for supper in familiar fashion, but supper was long past, and small jewels flashed askew in her hair, and a button dangled by a thread.

“What have you been doing?”

“Trying to find Saphier.” She tucked a strand of
hair behind her ear. “What else?”

“How?”

“In books. And other places.”

“What other places?”

“Odd places.” Her eyes went to the Gatekeeper. “Hew—”

“What other places? That box of Chrysom’s?”

Nyx drew breath, loosed it. She folded her arms, leaned against the stones. “Don’t worry. I’m being careful. I’ve figured out how to come and go; I don’t get lost inside the box and I don’t go far down any of the paths. None of them,” she added wearily, “are at all familiar. Hew—”

He was shaking his head, his brows crooked. “I’m so sorry.” he said gently. “You found your own path there before; I can’t do that for you. All I do is open and close.”

“Well.” She pondered, her eyes on the stars, while the Gatekeeper shifted past Meguet in the tiny turret, came out to stand beside Nyx. He lit his pipe again. “Assuming it’s on the same world, in Ro Holding’s present, and not its past or future—which I can’t entirely rule out—it must be somewhere. Not even Calyx can find it, and she’s been searching records as old as the house.”

“It’s just as well,” the Gatekeeper said, “from the sound of things, that the Dragon hasn’t flown itself into the household records before now.”

“I suppose.” Nyx yawned; her eyes looked colorless and luminous as the moon. Meguet, watching
her through the open turret arches, asked with some sympathy,

“What does your mother think of all this?”

“She seems unusually resigned. I suspect she hopes that I’ll never find Saphier and that I’ll forget about Brand. Perhaps. Anything is possible. But expecting me to forget Brand, and the Luxour, and the dragons of the Luxour, and the dragon-mage, and all that wild, unfocused power that shaped even the Cygnet out of our thoughts, is expecting too much. There is, I reminded her, a precedent. Chrysom also loved the Luxour.”

“So did I,” Meguet said softly. “For a few moments. When I saw it through Rad’s eyes.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” the Gatekeeper said. She met his eyes across the torch fire.

“No,” she said, smiling a little. “I felt it was wrong of me, wanting to see dragons. Things that lay beyond the Cygnet’s eye.”

“How do you know they do?” he asked curiously. “Or do you know at all?”

She was silent, gazing back at him. “I don’t,” she said, and got to her feet abruptly. “None of us would have recognized a dragon before now. And perhaps I never saw the Cygnet among the stars only because I didn’t expect it to fly anywhere in Saphier’s sky.”

She stepped outside the turret; Nyx was already searching the night sky. “The Dragon hunts the Cygnet,” Nyx murmured. “Behind the constellation? Or above it? The black war-dragon with blood-red eyes.”

“I saw it,” Meguet said wonderingly. “The constellation in Rad’s doorway. The dragon of night and stars. It never occurred to me it might be—”

“There,” the gatekeeper said, pointing over the sea, “just on the horizon. That red star. Two red stars. And look. One star its breast, one star the tip of its outflung wing, those stars its claws, and those, that faint cloud of stars, its breath of fire. And that star over there, perhaps its tail? Would that be it?”

“I see it,” Nyx breathed. Her fingers, chilled, closed on Meguet’s wrist. “There. South and west above the sea.”

“I see.” Meguet was staring at the Gatekeeper.

“Is that what you saw, Meguet?”

“Yes.”

“So Saphier lies somewhere beneath the dragon’s eye. I can sail there—”

“Please,” Meguet breathed.

“I’ll send explorers,” Nyx conceded. “Messengers. Even my mother would approve of that. As much as she approves of any of this. I’ll take Chrysom’s box to Rad Ilex; perhaps he can help me find a path between Ro Holding and Saphier. A private path . . .” Her voice trailed into silence; she contemplated the dragon’s eyes a moment before she asked slowly, “How would a man born in a swamp in the Delta in Ro Holding recognize a dragon?”

“I was wondering that myself,” Meguet said. And then she felt all thought fade away until she was barely air, barely night within the night. She was touched, it seemed, by the light, flickering, changing
winds of the Luxour. “Were you there?” she asked the Gatekeeper. His face was in shadow again; she could not see his eyes. “On the Luxour? All those dark swans flying out of my night-shadow, all those winds stealing magic out of me. One of those swans wasn’t wind. One was real.” He didn’t answer. “Tell me,” she pleaded, her voice still spellbound, her bones shaped of stars now, at her elbow and ankle, throat and amazed eye. “Tell me that you saw the dragons. That when I say dragon, that’s what you will see: the flight of dragons across the Luxour under the noon sun.”

He started to speak, stopped. Then he shifted into light, and she saw them in all their terrible grace and power flying through his eyes. He drew her against him tightly, perhaps to hide what he had seen by day, perhaps in memory of what he had fought by night. “Gatekeepers don’t leave the gate,” he said at last into her hair. “But what my heart does, flying out of me in terror or wonder or love, only you can tell me, because it will follow only you.”

She felt his heart fly into her; her mind filled with dreams and memories of the soft touches of wings, the rustlings and night-murmurings of flight. Her hand brushed his wrist; his fingers opened, linked with hers. She whispered, “Then follow.”

She led him down the turret steps. Behind them, Nyx stood in the moonlight, waiting as patiently as stone or time, for the slow dance of constellations to reveal a path by star and water into the Dragon’s dawn.

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