The Cygnet and the Firebird (8 page)

It was of a piece, like the bird, like the bird’s enchantments: a weave of magic so fine she could not isolate a single thread. Baffled, she withdrew from it, fascinated by her ignorance.

She put it back on the mantel, picked up a round bottle of opaque, swamp-green glass, no bigger than her palm. Its neck was short, slender, and had no opening. But it was not empty. Something within it shifted against the glass sides; the bottle tilted sluggishly in her hand, then rolled upright. Her thoughts grew crystal, rounded, green, then eased inward, dropped away from the glass into the tiny pool of magic it enclosed.

She fell into a great pool of nothing. The world lost hold of her, sent her tumbling headlong into an endless mist. Startled, she nearly withdrew; then, curious, she continued falling, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, moving toward nothing until she realized she
could fall forever in that tiny bottle and never reach the bottom.

She withdrew slowly, finding stone walls beyond the mist, books, the bird’s unblinking eyes. It took some effort; she rested a moment, wary now, but still intrigued, before she explored farther. She chose something black: glass or stone carved into a little block of shadow. It was wrapped in a web of silver filaments that wound around one another and parted and crossed again in an endless, intricate pattern. Concentrating on a single filament, she found herself on a silver road.

She did not need to move; it moved beneath her, swift as wind. Darkness dropped away from the road on both sides, as if the small block enmeshed in the silver had no reality itself. The silver turned and coiled, looked back, crossed itself, moving so fast she felt she had left her thoughts at some forgotten crossroad. The road went everywhere and nowhere, it seemed. On impulse, she dropped off the rushing silver into the darkness within it.

She found herself in a cube of night, with the silver running in front of her, behind her, underfoot and overhead, like a net. She tried to withdraw, but she could not reach past the silver. It was too intricate, it moved too quickly; catching hold of it was like trying to hold water pouring down a cliff.

So I am caught
, she thought,
like a fish in Chrysom’s net. But what is the net made of?

The way out of the trap was to become the trap. . . .

She could not hold a single, wild thread; she might,
leaping out of the dark, out of herself, hold the entire moving, glowing web. Unthinking, forgetting even her own name, she expanded into the darkness, and then, at all points and loops and crossroads, into the rushing current of silver.

The flowing pattern froze. Suspended, her mind the intricate net of filament, she saw what the dark had hidden: cubes within cubes of patterned silver, each a completely different weave, growing smaller and smaller but never vanishing. If she could move between them from one cube to the next, if she could walk each pattern . . . But what were they?

And then she remembered the filaments, blackened with age and fire, on the wrists of the stranger. His hands opened wide, as if to loose some lost power within the patterns. He spoke . . .

She whispered, “Time.”

She was suspended within tantalizing spells for time. But what spell opened the paths to use? How could she get here, there, or anywhere on those fantastic silver roads that led nowhere outside the box? How, she wondered more practically, could she get herself outside the box?

I got in
, she reminded herself.
I can get out
.

But if she had flung herself down a deep, dry well, that would be easy to say and not so easy to do. She swallowed, for the second time in her life, the little, cold, pebble-hard fact that all her will and all the knowledge she possessed might not be enough to find her way back to the world.

I am looking into Chrysom’s eye
, she thought.
Into
his mind, which until now I thought I knew. This is one of the puzzles in the missing book, which is why I cannot solve it. Yet
.

Later, after she had contemplated the frozen, glowing paths without inspiration, she felt again the feathery touch of fear.

They will find me
, she thought,
in the library, silent, blind, motionless, holding the box in my hand. Will they have the sense to leave me with it? Rush wouldn’t. He would smash it, to set me free. I could be trapped in its broken shards forever . . . I should have taught Rush more sorcery. But I never had the patience. And he would never stop to think
.

She quieted her unruly thoughts, focused them again. Nothing to do, it seemed, but pick a path again, see if her thoughts might lead somewhere, if the path wouldn’t. She narrowed her vision, dropped onto the nearest pattern. Instantly she felt it move, dividing, looping, flowing everywhere and nowhere, as it had before, and she was powerless to control it.

Time
, she thought.
What is it? A word. To endow a word with power, you must understand it
.

Settling into that one place to begin to understand Chrysom’s spell, she saw a man in the distance ahead of her.

His head was bent slightly; he did not turn or speak. He simply walked, his eyes on the flow and weave of silver as if, out of the endless twists and turns, he fashioned a solid path and followed it.

She found the path he left, a stillness in the wild flow, a single strand of silver frozen among the rushing
patterns. Amazed, she followed it, wondering if Chrysom had set a shadow of himself within the paths to guide the unwary mage. The road beyond the guide began to blur into darkness. Nyx quickened her pace; as if he felt her sudden fear, he slowed. Closing the distance between them, she recognized him.

She caught her breath, stunned at the sight of the long black hair, the warrior’s straight line of shoulder. Turning, he met her eyes, held them. She blinked, and the tower stones formed around them, the moon hanging in the black sky beyond a window. Gazing at her, still caught, perhaps, in some twist of past, for an instant he recognized himself.

“My name is Brand.”

With the name came memory. He flinched away from it as from fire; for an instant his human face became the firebird’s cry. Then his eyes emptied of expression: the dreamer waking, the dream forgotten. She whispered.

“You were with me in Chrysom’s box. You led me out.”

He only gazed at her blankly. “I don’t remember.”

“Brand.” She added, at his silence, “That is your name. You just told me.”

“I don’t remember.”

The door opened. Preoccupied, she did not loose his eyes, just held up a hand for silence. She received it, so completely she wondered if she had thrown a spell across the room. “You remember,” she said. “Your eyes remember. The bird remembers.”

“The bird—” He paused, bewildered. “The bird is sorcery.”

“It cries your sorrow.”

“It cries jewels as well as sorrow. Are those mine also?”

“Perhaps. If you are a mage.”

He was silent again, throwing a net into the still black waters of memory. The net came up empty. “Why would I be that?”

“Only another mage could have rescued me from Chrysom’s spell.” She heard something from the door then, not sound so much as a rearrangement of disturbed air. She asked, because it had to be asked, not because she had much hope of answer, “Do you know the mage who wears a white dragon on his breast?”

His head lifted slightly; he gazed beyond her, as if dragons were gathering soundlessly in the shadows just beyond the candlelight. For an instant he seemed to see what lay beyond the light: the country where he had been named. The memory faded; he shook his head. “I cannot see that dragon.”

“The mage?”

“What?”

“Do you know the mage?”

He started to speak, stopped. All color left his face then; his hands clenched. Nyx saw the firebird cry in his eyes, of grief and rage and danger.

Red shimmered in the corner of her eye. She turned her head, saw Meguet, dressed for supper, slide a blade noiselessly off the wall. Whether she wanted it to fight mages or dragons, Nyx wasn’t sure; either, it seemed suddenly, might blow in unexpectedly on the night wind. She turned back to Brand, touched the metal patterns on his wrists lightly. When he made no protest, she lifted his hands in hers.

“Is this the path of time you followed here?” He looked at them, mute. “All Chrysom’s paths are silver. How did these get so black?”

He shook his head, seeing nothing of mage or time or color in the blackened metal. “I don’t understand. The bird brought me here. Not these.”

“You are the bird,” she reminded him patiently, and as patiently he replied,

“The bird is sorcery.”

Meguet tugged at Nyx’s attention. She still stood silently at the door, but her face was pale and her eyes flicked at every breeze-strewn shadow. She met Nyx’s glance, asked softly, “Is the mage looking for him?”

“Probably.”

“Nyx—”

“It’s an interesting problem,” Nyx admitted. “It’s hard enough to hide the key, let alone the bird.”

“Where did you put the key?”

“In my pocket.” She added, at Meguet’s expression, “It refused to change its shape, and I couldn’t think what else to do with it.”

“So you took it to the council hall?”

“Well, I could hardly slide it under a carpet. If the mage returned, I wanted to be there.”

“I didn’t,” Meguet said succinctly. She made a move toward a chair, then drew back to the door, looking, Nyx thought, with the gold threading through her loose hair, and the ancient sword, almost as tarnished as the metal on Brand’s wrists, half-hidden in the silken folds of her skirt, unlikely enough to startle
even the mage again. Nyx said,

“You might as well sit. I doubt that either dragon or mage will use the door.”

Meguet did so, but reluctantly, still holding the sword. “Dragon,” she said, “being the little winged animal made of thread.”

“According to Chrysom, who must have roamed farther than I ever realized, dragons are made of flesh and blood and fire, and most are not small.”

“How big,” Meguet asked after a moment, “is not small?”

“Huge. So Chrysom said.”

Meguet shifted uneasily, hearing dragon wings in the rustling wind. “Well,” she sighed, “at least they can’t come through the windows. Did Chrysom happen to say where there might be dragons?”

Nyx shook her head. “Like the firebird, he considered them fable. Or he wrote as if he did. Now, after coming out of that black box, I’m not sure what he knew, where he travelled, or when. He—”

“What black box?” Meguet’s eyes fell to what Nyx still held in her hand, and widened. “That? You were in there?”

“My mind was.”

“Moro’s name. Why?”

“It seemed a good idea at the time. Not,” she admitted, “one of my better ones. I wanted to see if any of those odd things were the missing book. This is full of paths, twisting, turning, looping strands of silver. I think they lead to different times, moments within moments, perhaps the sorcery the mage used
to slow time. But I don’t know how to use them, and I think the knowledge is in the missing book, as well as in the firebird’s memory.”

“That was the spell he rescued you from?”

“Brand. Coming out, he remembered his name. But nothing more, not even that he had walked a path of time with me in that box, and led me out.”

Meguet closed her eyes, dropped a cold hand over them. “I don’t know why your mother bothered to send me up here.”

“I don’t know, either. Why did she?”

“I’m supposed to guard you. At best a futile notion, at worst laughable.”

Nyx turned, set the box carefully back on the mantel. “My mother worries too much.”

“How can you say that? The mage is not only looking for the key you are carrying around in your pocket, but for the firebird, both of which are in the place he will obviously return to, unless you spun him into thread so thoroughly he is still trying to untangle himself.” There was a tap at the door; she nearly jumped, then rose with more dignity. “That will be Brand’s supper. The Holder requested your presence in the hall.”

“I can’t go now,” Nyx said absently. “I’m thinking.” She sat down, slipped her shoes off and propped her feet up. Arms folded, she frowned at midair. A wide-eyed page set the supper tray on a table, seemed inclined to linger to watch the firebird eat, and encountered Nyx’s eye. Meguet, left between the pensive sorceress and the ravenous man, sat tensely,
watching for a thread of white dragon-wing, a dust-gold face in the shadows, and wondering what raw deed the firebird’s jewelled enchantments hid. She murmured,

“There are too many mages.”

Nyx’s eyes rose, fixed on Brand. She nodded, still frowning. “He could have ensorcelled himself.”

“And the other mage is following to free him?”

“It’s possible. There is a way to find out.”

“How?” Then she leaned forward, gripping the sword hilt. “No.”

Nyx shrugged. “I don’t see how we are to get closer to the truth this way. The man retreats constantly into the firebird. If we let the mage find him, Brand might remember himself along with the mage.”

“Not here. Not in this tower, in the middle of the Holding Council. They may be bitter enemies. The entire house would be in danger. I think you should hide the firebird—”

“Where?” Nyx asked. “In the maze beneath the tower?”

“Of course not.”

“Then where?”

“In the thousand-year-old wood. Not even the mage would find him among the shifting trees.”

“I could find him easily there. What I can do, I must assume the mage can do.”

“Then somewhere in the city, or in the swamp—”

Nyx’s mouth crooked. “I can’t disappear into the
swamp with a bird. My mother would spit lightning. I would prefer to face the mage.”

“I’ll leave,” Brand said abruptly. They both looked at him, startled, as if they had forgotten he could speak. Disturbed, he pushed away his food. He came to stand before Nyx. “I didn’t know the bird would endanger you.”

Nyx checked her immediate response, said patiently, “You might walk out of here, but the bird would return. It’s you who must learn to cry jewels. To cry sorrow. Or the bird will never set you free.”