The Cygnet and the Firebird

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You know,” she whispered to the bird, who had tucked its head under its wing. “You know where they have gone.”

  But all its memories were enchanted.

  She sat down finally in a chair beside the firebird, waiting for the mage to return. He would know the difference between a key made by Chrysom’s hand, and one by hers; he might have felt it, her mind instead of Chrysom’s as he fell back through time, if Meguet hadn’t been holding the key. He hadn’t been too hurt to work a spell; most likely he could heal a scratch or two. And his white dragon lay in a pile of pearl leaves; if it were more than thread, he might return for that. And where was the book he so desperately wanted? He must have it already, she reasoned, since he wasn’t contorting time to look for that, too. A book without a key was far more valuable than a key without a book. . . .

  Her eyes closed. The key floated behind her eyes: gold, with an ivory-and-gold haft, a C or a crescent moon holding an M in its arms. Mage Chrysom. Chrysom’s Magic . . . the key . . .

  She woke at the sound of the council bells. The sun was up; it flung the bird’s shadow over her and glittered in amber, garnet, as if its own fire might wake the things frozen in time, waiting for the moon. She felt the key in her pocket, heard the bird pecking water from a bowl. There was no sign of the mage or Meguet.

  She slumped in the chair, feeling the tear in the tidy fabric of household life where Meguet should have been. The mage must return for the key. If he did not bring Meguet with him, there would be a mages’ war in the dark tower, despite the Holder’s wishes. It was inconceivable that he would not bring Meguet. But why had he not returned? Was he afraid of the firebird? Would he return at moonrise, when the bird changed? Would Brand remember him? Would the Holder wait patiently through another moonrise?

  “She has no choice,” Nyx murmured. “All she has is me.”

  She pulled the key out of her pocket, baiting the air with it, in case the mage lurked in some moment where a flash of magic from Chrysom’s tower would snag his attention. She turned it over in her palm; the gold caught a fiery tear of light. The crescent moon arched over the upside-down Mage.

  Her lips parted. She felt a stirring deep in her, as if small birds had suddenly scattered through her into light.

  Chrysom’s Work.

  She whispered, “The key is the book.”

  - Six -

  Meguet watched the sun rise over a nameless land.

  She had been sitting for hours on bare ground, thoughtless and stunned, under a sky full of unfamiliar constellations. There was some protection in the night. Unless she looked up, her eye did not have to acknowledge that she had travelled beyond Ro Holding: the dark might have belonged anywhere. She sat quite still where she had fallen, waiting for Nyx to rescue her, while the night stirred constantly around her, winds roaring and subsiding, hissing sometimes, the warm, malodorous breath of something she refused to imagine. Now and then the mage murmured, moving restlessly, but he never woke. She did not try to rouse him. Nyx would find her, take the key, and they would vanish before she caught a glimpse of this strange place somewhere beyond the Cygnet’s wing.

  But the morning light seared the land’s image into her mind. It unfolded desert, vast, barren, gold as a hawk’s eye, with juttings of bare stone like fantastic towers and crazed palaces. It was noisy; the winds blew unexpected notes through those stones. It smelled of sulphur and something charred; it hissed and steamed, in the distance, from boiling underground waters.

  She drew against herself, feeling dangerously exposed, as if the stones had eyes. They might, in that weird place: the ground itself had mouths. Mages might be riding the air above her head. And there she sat, dressed for last night’s supper in a gown as red as fire that flowed like fire on every passing breeze. Her thin velvet slippers would have sailed away in the wind; her sword had vanished somewhere between here and there. And even shod and armed and fitted for a journey, she could not have chosen here instead of there: Ro Holding might lie beyond the distant, shimmering peaks or, as easily, within the winds.

  Light sparked everywhere in this hard, bright place, finding flecks of gold in the sandstone, turning silvery in the steam. It snagged under the mage’s shoulder, and from there, leaped painfully into Meguet’s eyes. She blinked, saw the gold key half-hidden under him. He had that, she told herself; he had no use for her. But would he bother to send her back? She could take the key, hide it from him, bargain with him . . . But he had seen the key across time itself; it seemed unlikely that his mage’s eye would miss it under a rock. Both eyes were still closed; not even the sun had wakened him. She reached for the key quickly, slid it into her pocket. He did not move. She shifted closer after a moment, touched him.

  She heard his breathing then, shallow and erratic, saw the chalky whiteness beneath the sweat and dust on his face. Pain clawed furrows between his brows. He stirred a little, as if he felt her gaze; he murmured something, wincing, and lay still again, while the dust drifted over him.

  Horror, fine and dry as the dust, prickled over Meguet: that he might die and leave her alone in a strange land which might as well have been on some distant star. She stood up, panicked, searching the plain for a blue thread of water, a dark thread of wood smoke, symmetrical shapes of houses or a village among the broken tumbled towers of stone. They might have been the only living things in the world, she and the mage, and he was only half-alive. What water there was bubbled and stank; shadows on bare ground provided the only shelter she could see. She knelt again, trying to calm herself. The mage might have broken a bone, falling. But, running her hands over him, she felt nothing out of place. He didn’t seem to notice her, not even when, with some effort, she rolled him on his side to study the marks the firebird had scored across his shoulders.

  The weals were long but shallow; they looked irritating but hardly deadly, unless the bird carried some unexpected venom in its talons. The thought panicked her again; she closed her eyes, felt the desert sand in her throat, the hot sun melting into her skin. She must find shelter, water to clean his wounds. The nearest shadow, flung by a jagged and oddly folded stone, she could reach in a dozen steps. But the distance between shadow and mage seemed insurmountable. She rolled him gently on his back again, and slid her hands under his arms. It was only when she tried to lift him that he came alive, jerking out of her hold, crying odd words, names out of dreams or nightmares.

  She let him lie and knelt beside him, wondering what he might have inadvertently summoned. She stroked his hair, murmuring. She had missed something; the bird had hurt him in some deep, subtle way. She contemplated the problem, her eyes wide, gritty, her thoughts stark as light, while she drew her fingers across his cheek, his hair, until he quieted again. Then, slowly, carefully, she coaxed his boots off.

  They were fine leather, scuffed and scratched, big enough to fit over her feet and her shoes. He lay still, in the safe, private place where he sheltered against his pain. He did not stir even when she checked his robe for pockets. She found one in a side seam, and rifled it. She drew out a worn, jagged triangle of crystal or glass larger than her palm, the broken leaves of some dried herb, a tiny cube of gold etched on all sides with a delicate pattern not even the heavy crystal battering it had scarred. She sniffed the leaves: something pungent, unfamiliar. She could start a fire with the crystal and the dried leaves, though there was nothing to feed it. The sun had already burned everything. As she returned his odd possessions, the mage murmured again, frowning at the light; already it had become fierce, heavy, burning brass. She had to move him, find water, or she would die there beside a stranger under a strange sky. She stood up, blocked the sun on his face with her own shadow, scanning the land for one place more likely than another.

  Above her, a shadow blocked the sun.

  She looked up. The sun had vanished; an odd mass of air had swallowed a piece of sky overhead. She could not see what hovered; it was nothing, of no substance, but it cast a shadow all around her. She forced her eyes do
wn finally, not wanting to look, but seeing it, black and clean-lined in the light: the shape of the little white-winged dragon of thread, but huge enough to swallow the sun.

  Winds flew across the plain; blowing between cracks and towers of stone, they sounded deep, wild notes. Other voices bellowed among them from beyond the edge of the world. Meguet heard her own voice making an unfamiliar sound. She dropped, huddled against the mage, hiding her face from all the hidden eyes around her.

  “Don’t die,” she pleaded numbly, scarcely hearing herself. “Don’t die. I can spin hope for us out of a stone’s shadow, but I cannot deal with dragons. Please wake. Please.”

  The mage did not answer. Shadow peeled away from the ground, left her to the sun. The winds blew dust and great stone flutes, but the otherworldly voices had sunk to a distant murmur. Steam shot a feathery plume out of the ground. The earth shook a little, as if something enormous, invisible, had walked across it. The steam dwindled; earth settled itself. Meguet straightened cautiously, wondering what other sorcery to expect from that exuberant, deadly place.

  It seemed for the moment quiet. She rose, went in search of water.

  She found, not far from the boiling pools, great thin crescents of something as darkly iridescent as beetles’ wings. Upright, they were nearly as tall as she, but they were light enough to drag. She took four of them, made her way slowly, doggedly, through the heat back to the mage. She looked back once; the crescents trailing from under her arms grooved the earth behind her like some great claw. She closed her eyes against the sight, trudged on, awkwardly, her footsteps echoing hollowly in the mage’s boots.

  She dug shallow holes with the sharp end of one claw, balanced the claws on either side of the mage’s body like four bedposts. Then she tore her skirt loose from the bodice, and picked apart a side seam. She dragged the length of silk across the claws, forced it down the sharp ends so that it stretched like a rippling canopy above the mage. He stirred, his face easing. She tore the sleeves from her bodice and wiped the sweat from his face. She rose again, as oddly dressed as she had ever been in her life, in tattered red silk bodice, long white linen shift and oversized boots, to look for water.

  There was water everywhere, it seemed, but it boiled and stank and grew crusts of oddly colored crystals where it splashed. She wandered in a wasteland of heat and steam and bubbling mud-holes, her hair plastered down her back, her mouth so dry she would have drunk what steamed in the rifts and crevices of rock if it had not been too hot to touch. She sat wearily on a sandstone ledge, searching for green in a parched land, while her eyes teared at the smell, and behind her, she heard the sudden hiss of jetting water and steam. She leaned back, resting in the shadow, and felt a drift of cold on one cheek.

  She found a cave of ice.

  It was small, dark, and it steamed like the water holes. Its mouth was rimmed with icy teeth; the threshold was solid ice. Beyond the threshold lay shadow so black she guessed the earth had fallen away there into some deep chasm of time. From the chasm, icy air blew constantly. There were noises, too, shifts like stone against stone, a kind of subdued, rhythmic bellowing, as if a mountain were snoring. She broke off a piece of ice, sucked it. It tasted of earth rather than rotten eggs. She stepped out of one boot and used it to knock down a fat icicle. Limping, the ground burning through her slipper, she made her way back to the mage, carrying a boot full of ice.

  She bathed his face with ice, forced it between his lips. Then she turned him over, washed the dirt and dried blood and torn cloth out of his wounds. He scarcely stirred until she touched a corner of one ragged cut above his shoulder blade. Then he stiffened, crying sorcery and dreams carelessly into the wind. She looked more closely, saw something the color of silver trapped there.

  She drew it out: a broken piece of the firebird’s talon.

  She was trembling and nearly in tears when she finished; the mage, having wakened every snoring dragon in the world, finally subsided when she put ice against his back. On impulse, she felt in his pocket again, drew out the broken leaves. She lay one on the ground, caught the sun in the crystal, and focused it until the dry leaf smoldered. She held it under the mage’s nose.

  His eyes opened. He stared at her expressionlessly, then at the silken canopy, the dark curved spikes that held it up, the icicle melting in his boot. He tested his back, wincing a little. He gazed at her again, this time with amazement.

  “Did you do all this?”

  She sat back on her heels, answered wearily, “No, of course not. I summoned my attendants.”

  “You did this without sorcery?”

  She closed her eyes briefly, looked at him again. His face was pale as old ivory; he carried his voice from word to word with an effort. She asked, “What else was I to do? You dragged me into this wasteland dressed for supper. You refused to help me. I could have sat here and wept, I suppose. But you only would have died, and I need you to take me home. Why in Moro’s name did you pick the middle of a desert to fall into?”

  “It’s my home,” he said simply. He drifted a moment, asked, when she thought he had fallen asleep again, “Where is the key?”

  “I have it.”

  He held up a hand, his eyes still closed, and murmured, “Let me see it.”

  She did not move. “Swear to take me back to Ro Holding. What I’ve done for you, I can undo. This time I have a weapon.” His eyes opened; she held up the little shard of silver. “I will use it.”

  She heard his breath stop. Then he drew air deeply, blinking. “Of course I will take you home.”

  “How can I trust you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you can’t. But it’s hard for me to believe you would put that sorcery back where you found it. It would be a bloody and noisy piece of work. And you would still be forced to keep me alive. Unless you want to wait here alone, hoping that someone will rescue you. If you choose to do that, remember that the only thing you’ll want to eat are the rock lizards. The smaller black ones, not the yellow. You can boil them in the steam pools. They’re less tough that way, than if you roast them. There’s not much to burn, anyway. But if you do want a fire—” He stopped, shifting ground a little. Meguet, still clinging to the shard, her only argument, said tautly,

  “What do I burn?”

  “I’ll make you something, before you kill me.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “You will, with that. It is a dark magic that goes straight to the marrow.” He added, at her silence, “I’m trying to persuade you to trust me.”

  She ran one hand over her face, felt the fine dust clinging to her everywhere, even beneath her eyelids. “How can I?” she demanded. “You attacked my cousin and stole from her. You cast a spell over the Holder’s house. You did such terrible things to Brand that he can’t speak of them, he can’t even remember them. He can only cry the firebird’s rage. I don’t trust you. The only reason I did all this for you is so that you will stay alive to take me back to Ro Holding.”

  He stirred again, wincing, his eyes straying to the bare, distant crags. He said tiredly, “I doubt that your cousin tossed the real key to me. She just wanted me out of the tower. So, you see, I may be forced to return to Ro Holding for the true key.”

  “You dragged me into this crazed, dragon-haunted place because of a fake key?”

  He lifted one hand, touched her arm, speechless a moment. “You’ve seen dragons?” he asked huskily.

  “I saw a shadow. You cried out such strange things when I tried to move you. I thought you summoned it. It hovered above us, hiding the sun. It was invisible and yet it cast a shadow.”

  “A shadow.”

  “It looked like a shadow your white dragon might have cast. Only a hundred times bigger. I was afraid—I was afraid it might attack.”

  “Oh, no. They never do.”

  “Your white dragon did.”

  “That’s sorcery. I made it from a petrified dragon’s heart. I’m not sure how real it is. But I’ve grown fond of it. I left it
there, didn’t I,” he added, remembering. “In the tower, with the firebird.”

  “It is, I think, a pile of white leaves.”

  “Until moonrise. And then it will change and Brand will see it.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Brand Saphier. His father, Draken, rules Saphier. This is the Luxour Desert in south Saphier. The edge of the world, some call it. I was born here.”

  That explained his coloring, she thought. “And why,” she asked steadily, “did you turn Brand Saphier into a firebird?”

  He moved abruptly, as if the tiny blade of talon in her hand had touched his back again. He answered, his eyes shadowed, heavy, “If I had made the firebird, the magic would be part of me. It could do no more harm to me than my reflection could. The spell that enchanted the firebird is deadly to me.”

  She was silent, weighing his words against every inflection in his voice, every change of expression in his face. “Assuming it’s not yours,” she said tautly, “then who cast the spell?”

  His brows drew together hard; his eyes shifted away from her, toward some memory. “It’s not a thing,” he whispered, “I want even the wind to know.”

  “Then why did the firebird attack you?”

  “I think it was made to kill me.”

  Meguet stood up. Standing brought her into the stifling light, but movement helped her think. In this case, thinking proved futile. She dropped her face in her hands, saw the fierce light behind her eyes. “I don’t know how to believe you.” She lifted her head, blinking the mage’s face clear again. “I don’t know what’s truth and what’s lie, between you and the firebird.”

  “You don’t have to trust me,” he said simply. “You’re entirely at my mercy. No one knows where you are. Brand would guess his father’s court. If he remembers Saphier at all. You can threaten me with that sorcery, but if you hurt me you will only be forced to care for me so that I won’t die, so that I can take you home. . . .”