Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  What was left of Tormalyne House after it ventured out of hiding into Luna’s city was an assortment of distant relatives, whose wealth lay in the vigor and determination of their children. They gave Caladrius what they could, in gratitude; he could see in their eyes that Justin’s tale of the Basilisk’s blindness and death had lost nothing in the telling. They saw the raven in him and told him so: he was, they said, very like his father. With unexpected grace, Luna sent him a small casket of ebony and gold in which to lay his own dead to rest. He waited until the final trumpet had sounded over the last of the dead. And then, with Hollis, he returned to Tormalyne Palace.

  They filled the casket with ash and bone in silence, and then they argued.

  “No more funerals,” Caladrius said tersely.

  “There are people still living who knew them,” Hollis protested. “They’ve been lying up here unburied for nearly forty years. You’ve brought back honor to the House, and that’s the way they should be remembered, with proper dignity and ceremony. You can’t bury them in the garden.”

  “Why not? They died decades ago. The House did its grieving then.” He gazed into the open casket, saw the child in the hearth buried in ash, watching the Basilisk kill. He closed the lid gently.

  “Because,” Hollis said behind him, “you are not just burying your memories.”

  Caladrius turned. He smiled suddenly, put his hand on Hollis’s shoulder. “Then you bury them. You may be better at this than I am.”

  “Better at what?”

  “Ruling Tormalyne House.”

  Hollis slid out of his hold. “No,” he said, with something of Caladrius’s own unflinching gaze. “You are the heir of Tormalyne House; you can’t go back to living on that rock. If you want the House to survive, you must stay. You fought for this.”

  “An empty palace and a casket of ash.”

  “Freedom.”

  Caladrius was silent. Rain blew on a gust of wind across the window ledge; in the gardens trees soughed like tide. Ash brushed across the floor where the nameless child had lain. He could still see a curve of Luna’s footsteps in the ash.

  He said slowly, meeting Hollis’s eyes again, “Then I will need all your help. You saw what I have become.”

  Hollis said it after a moment, reluctantly. “Bard.”

  “I thought I knew once what the word meant.”

  “So did I.”

  “All I know is where to go to understand it.”

  Hollis closed his eyes, struggled with words. “Now?” he demanded incredulously.

  “Soon. I’ll see you settled first. I won’t be gone long.”

  “How do you know? You know what they say about the hinterlands.”

  “I’ll come back,” Caladrius insisted. “But I need you here, in my place, for a while. The Griffin’s son, to handle matters of the House. What House we have, and what little we have to handle it with.” He picked up the ebony casket, gave it to Hollis. “This first. I saw them die. I’ll never bury what I saw, but I would try. You do what’s best for the House.”

  “This first,” Hollis said, and handed him his father’s ring.

  Nine magisters in black, with black ribbons trailing from their horns, lifted them in a fanfare for the dead that Veris Legere found among the manuscripts Caladrius had been sorting. What seemed to be the entire House attended the ceremony to place the bones and ashes of Raven Tormalyne, his wife, an unnamed child, and a dog into the vault that held the rulers of Tormalyne House. Luna sent Veris Legere to attend also. Caladrius spoke to him afterward.

  “I never thanked you,” he said. “You let me leave the Hall of Mirrors, that day.”

  “What I saw,” Veris said slowly, “was between you and Arioso Pellior.”

  “You took a risk.”

  Expression, brief and intense, touched the dispassionate face. “So did you. Master Caladrius.”

  A few days later he was summoned to Pellior Palace.

  He waited for Luna in a quiet council chamber, in which he noticed hanging on a wall a tapestry with a hole in it where an animal’s eye should have been. While he was investigating it the block of marble behind it began to turn silently. He moved away, startled. Luna came out from behind it, carrying a rose.

  “It’s a secret chamber,” she explained, sealing it again. “Where my father taught me things.”

  “To kill with a rose,” he said, his eyes on it. She smiled.

  “This one heals,” she said enigmatically, and went to give it to an old woman he had seen waiting outside the door.

  He drew breath, remembering the terror of that night she had found him, the mystery of it. She returned to him, her eyes cool, smiling faintly, though her voice was grave. She wore black, for her own dead. She seemed composed as ever; but he glimpsed the constant watchfulness that she had kept hidden behind her wayward smile.

  “Master Cal—” She stopped.

  “I hardly recognize my own name,” he commented.

  “Who named you Caladrius?”

  “My great-uncle did, when he found me alive. He had some desperate hope that the child he gave it to might learn what to do with it.”

  “Indeed, he was right,” she murmured. “I sent for you for three reasons. The first is to tell you that I have asked Veris Legere to return the music taken from Tormalyne Palace to the palace or the music school, according to your wishes.”

  “Thank you,” he said, touched. “I am grateful. The school could give it better shelter than Tormalyne Palace. As you know, it may be some time—perhaps even a generation or two—before the palace will be a suitable place for much of anything.”

  “That is the second reason I sent for you. To discuss reparations for the damages done to Tormalyne House by my father.” She held up her hand as he began to answer. “I know,” she said gently, “you will tell me that no price can be put on such suffering. But I hope you will at least accept a few chairs to sit on in Tormalyne Palace. Windows to keep out the rain. Someone to clean the soot off the walls.”

  He felt the raven in his bones again, his hands turning into something other. “And the third reason?” he asked steadily.

  “The third reason,” she said, and stopped again. She linked her fingers. He saw an unfamiliar expression in her eyes, the first hint of uncertainty. “My lord Tormalyne, you and I have some very unusual powers. I hope that we will be able to live peacefully in Berylon. The third reason I sent for you is to assure you of my good intentions. And to ask you how far your unusual powers extend. My father could not have turned into a raven.”

  He answered her unspoken question first. He went to her, drew one hand free from the other, and raised it to his lips. “I owe you my life,” he said simply. “And my son’s life. I trust you. But I can’t answer you. Not yet. I must leave Berylon first. And I leave Hollis under your eyes.”

  Her brows rose. “Where are you going?”

  “North.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. No one ever knows.”

  She was silent, studying him, not smiling now, letting him glimpse again some sweet, green shade in her eyes, where leaves trembled with light but did not let it fall. “I hope, my lord Tormalyne, that you will let me know when you are leaving.”

  “I will.” It seemed to him that his name had come to him at last, from some untroubled place, perhaps from within the leaves. “My lady.”

  In the Tormalyne School, Giulia was collecting manuscript sheets that had been scattered through halls and chambers during the invasion of the Basilisk’s guard. Around her, students and magisters picked up books, mopped mud and spilled water off the floors, repaired battered doors, patched and restrung instruments. She put a pile of music, in hopeless disarray, with other piles of music in front of students who were trying to sort it; they glanced up and groaned. Justin, trailing a broom, appeared behind her as she turned. He snatched a kiss. The students groaned again.

  “Magister Dulcet, I can’t find the viol part to this piece a
nywhere.”

  “Magister Dulcet, the bust of Auber Tormalyne fell over and broke its nose off.”

  “Magister Dulcet…”

  “Giulia,” Justin said. “Come to the Griffin’s Egg tonight. Play with us.”

  She thought about it, exchanging one chaos for another, and smiled suddenly. “Yes.” Her smile faded. “But where,” she wondered, “has my picochet gone?”

  She searched, hoping that it had not met its fate in the streets. She gathered music as she looked in practice rooms, under tables. She found it finally in Hexel’s study, where it had slid beneath his harpsichord. He had not seen it, she guessed; he had not tossed it out the door.

  She found Hexel there also, unexpectedly sitting at his desk with a pen in his hand, another woven through his hair. He barely noticed her until she spoke.

  “Hexel,” she said, amazed. “How can you be inspired in all this confusion? What are you doing?”

  He looked up at her and smiled. “Changing the ending,” he said, and went back to work.

  About the Author

  Patricia McKillip is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the author of many fantasy novels, including The Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, Stepping from the Shadows, and The Cygnet and the Firebird. Her most recent novels are The Book of Atrix Wolfe and Winter Rose. She lives in Roxbury, New York.