The Cygnet and the Firebird

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “The firebird remembers.”

  He looked at her, his eyes dark, bruised, but he did not answer. Nyx pushed a tray toward him. “Eat something. If Rad Ilex wants the key and his dragon, he’ll return here, But I want no blood shed in this tower. My mother forbade it.”

  He made no response to that, either. Nyx broke into an elaborate crust, found duckling flavored with orange and rosemary. She ate hungrily a few minutes, then asked, “Did your father find his father among the dragons?”

  “No. He went with Rad to south Saphier. Rad was able to show him something—I don’t know what. Enough to give my father some hope, whether it was truth or lie. In the Luxour, some villagers collect big, iridescent lumps of stone they say are dragon’s hearts, and sell them. Those who buy them call them one thing, those who don’t, another. Rad said he knew a way to draw the dragons into time, but that he had to find something. A key.”

  Nyx made a sound. “Not a book.”

  “He said key.”

  “How could he have known to find it in Ro Holding?” she breathed. “He knows too much, this Rad Ilex.”

  Brand stirred edgily. “And where is he, if he wants this key so badly?”

  “Being cautious, I suppose. Coming here, he must face you or the firebird. Perhaps—”

  “I have remembered,” he interrupted. “He will face me, not the bird.”

  “You have not remembered everything. We’ll know at midnight.”

  His knife hit the edge of his plate; he pushed away from the table and rose, his shoulders bowed as if the firebird clung to his back. “What kind of a mage are you that you can’t break a simple spell?”

  She picked a bone out of a bite, watching him. “I suppose, by the standards of Saphier, not very apt. But I am considered adequate in Ro Holding.”

  He came back to her, head bowed. “Forgive me. You took me in, tried to help. It’s not your fault you are pitted against the most devious mage in my father’s court.”

  She frowned, thinking again of Meguet. “Where is Saphier? Do you cross a sea to get to it? Mountains? Maybe, if you could get home, your father could help you.”

  “Saphier is the world,” he said absently. “I never looked beyond it.” Then his eyes widened, and she saw the sudden flare of hope in them. She pushed back her chair, rose.

  “What do you remember?”

  “These.” He turned his wrists up, spread his fingers, as if the tarnished metal wove through blood and bone into his fingertips. “They are all the paths to Saphier.”

  “Paths of time.” She drew her finger down a weave lightly. “I thought so. But are they always so tarnished?”

  “No,” he said, puzzled. “They should be silver, like the paths inside your tiny box. You need to know the path before you travel it; that’s why you couldn’t find your own way out.”

  “You led me out,” she said abruptly. “You are also a mage.”

  He shook his head. “I am a warrior. I don’t have mage’s gifts.”

  “But you wear these. You can use them.”

  “Yes.” He hesitated, still perplexed by them. “It is something my father taught me.”

  “Do you always wear them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why are you wearing them now? As if you know you might need them? Or you were working a time-spell, or travelling a path when you were transformed?” She saw his face change, as he veered dangerously close to memory. He said quickly,

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you remember,” she asked after a moment, “how to use these?”

  “Yes.” He rubbed at one, trying to polish it with his thumb. “They are so dark. As if some enormous power ran through them.” He looked at her; she saw Saphier in his eyes, future instead of past. “I can go home.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tonight. Now. Before I change.”

  “Yes,” she said, breathless at the thought. “But if you leave, and Rad Ilex does not return with Meguet, how will I ever know where to look for her? Can you wait a little longer for them?”

  He gave her a distant, masked glance: the firebird’s eyes. “I forgot he must come here.”

  “I will give him the key and his dragon for Meguet,” she said. “I will not give you to him, or him to you. If you fight him, it must be in Saphier, or my mother will never forgive me for that as well as for a few other things she won’t forgive me for by now. Please,” she added, at his weary, desolate expression. “Only a little longer.”

  “And then what? If he does not come?”

  “Then,” she said steadily, “you will teach me the path to Saphier and I will look for her myself.”

  He was silent, studying her, as if she had flung some peculiar spell over herself. “You would walk into a strange land to search for her?”

  “She searched for me once in a strange place. She is part of Ro Holding, part of this house. It’s inconceivable that she is wandering around lost in some other country.”

  “You are eccentric.”

  “Even,” she said drily, “in Ro Holding.”

  “My father’s court is structured according to precise law. Within that law, nothing disorderly exists for long. Either it shapes itself to law or it is destroyed.”

  Her brows rose. “Does that include guests?”

  “It is my father’s working philosophy,” he answered simply. “Out of order comes art. The art of government, the mage’s art, the art of poetry, the art of war. We do not give ourselves the luxury of eccentricity.”

  “Perhaps freedom is a luxury,” she said. “But that aside, there must be someone you would wander through a stranger’s land to find.”

  She saw it again in his face: the sudden, desperate aching shadow of memory, the firebird’s cry. He whispered, “No one has come searching for me.”

  She blinked, shaken by a glimpse into something more complex than she could unweave, or even imagine. She touched him; he looked at her, mute again, unable to give her either dragon heart or stone.

  “We’ll go to Saphier now,” she said abruptly, and felt her own heartbeat. “It’s cruel to keep you.” And safer, she thought, remembering the spinning swords, than another battle in the tower. “Take me to your father’s house. If Meguet is not there, then teach me the paths so that I can return to look for her if I have to. Will you do that?”

  “My father can, easily. And he will, in gratitude. The Holder will not even know you have been gone. Thank you.” He took her hands, dropped his face against them. “You took me in when no one in the world recognized me as human. Whatever else the bird knows, it knew enough to come to you.”

  And not, she observed with a certain grimness, to Saphier.

  The word, spoken aloud in the tower, would find its way to the Gatekeeper, following its own peculiar path within the house’s time. Brand held out his hands, spread his fingers as if to channel the flow of light from the silver. The bands remained black. He closed his eyes, walking the path in his mind. After a while, he put the bands against his eyes. Nyx felt pity well up from some deep place within her, as if hidden water had broken through layers of earth and hoary stone and old leaves. She put her hand gently on his shoulder.

  He whispered. “I am half man, half bird, and I am lost, with no way home.”

  “There is always a way,” she said. “Always.”

  He looked at her, read the promise in her eyes. After a while he moved to his place at the window, and waited silently for oblivion and the firebird.

  - Eight -

  Meguet sat rapt beneath the risen moon.

  In its light silver feathers of steam or dragon-fire glittered and faded. The high, jagged towers of stone transformed themselves. Here a great wing unfolded against the stars almost as slowly as the stars behind it moved. There an eye shone, moon-white or darker than the night. A craggy head lifted, or had just lifted before she saw it. A moon shadow, massive and curved, lay across the ground, cast by nothing visible. Crystal flashed. Vague,
dark, iridescent colors swam against the stars and vanished.

  Beside her, the mage lay watching with her. Sometimes he watched her; she felt his eyes. “You see,” he murmured now and then. “Did you see that?” His voice, worn, fading, sounded tranquil; he was lost in some fever-dream of dragons that he had pulled her into. She saw through his eyes, she thought, most likely. But still she watched, as he dreamed dragons and set them free into the night.

  “We should go,” she said now and then, for he shivered, though warm wind or dragon-breath sighed over them. She had taken down her canopy to see the sky. Things that had come out of his cube—wine, salted fish, bread, dried apples and figs—littered her skirt.

  “Yes,” he said, but made no effort to move. “I wanted you to see this, if you could.”

  “I see,” she said softly. “But I don’t know what I see.”

  “Time shifting. Dragon-paths. Chrysom saw this. He made the key to unlock their paths into time.”

  “Can they see us?”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Far better than we see them. We glimpse them indirectly, and with the heart more than the eye.”

  She looked at him. An odd, heavy, nameless feeling pushed through her; she scarcely knew what to call it. Hunger? Sorrow? Desire? “I wish,” she whispered. “I wish.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know . . . I wish I could watch you free them with that key.”

  “You can. Stay here until you have seen the dragons fly. Until I draw them out of stars and stone, until bone and blood cast shadows instead of dreams. Stay until you have seen the dragons’ fire.”

  She dragged her eyes from the stars, still heavy with the strange, impossible yearning. “I cannot. The white dragon waiting for you in Chrysom’s tower must be enough for me. I was not born to see dragons.”

  “They get into your blood. They call you in some secret language spoken by stones. They show you a shadow, they leave a bone behind. And so you spend your life searching for them . . . Stay until I free them.”

  “I don’t dare,” she whispered. “You were born under the dragon’s eye. I was born under the Cygnet. I have never in my life come so close to forgetting that.”

  “The Luxour will make you forget.”

  She was silent, remembering the desert by day, hot and golden as some vast wing stretched taut to catch the light, the massive framework of its bones visible just beneath the surface of the stones.

  “We must go,” she said, but did not move, still riding the dragon that was the Luxour through the stars. Finally she felt his hand, and saw her skirt attach itself to her again. Everything had vanished back into the little cube. Only the dragon claws, scattered in the sand, told where they had been.

  “We must go,” he said, and the stars blurred together to form their path.

  Night, where the path ended, was unexpectedly still. Here and there a light that was not a star burned, illumining a circular window or a door. Even the winds were silent. Pebbles shifting under Meguet’s feet as she turned sounded loud enough to wake the sleepers within the small stone houses. The handful of them, huddled together in the vast dark, seemed an unlikely place for a mage to dwell.

  The mage, rising, lost his balance; Meguet caught him. He dropped an arm over her shoulders, and was still a moment while the earth settled. She whispered, “Where are we?”

  “On the south edge of the Luxour.” He added obscurely, “Safe. Even mages have trouble crossing the Luxour. This is my house.”

  She helped him toward one of the simple wooden doors. It had no latch. He placed his hand flat against it and it opened. Sudden light spilled over them. Within, the little house was bare and tidy as the desert. The sandstone walls were unpainted; a single rough-woven rug lay on the stone floor. His table held none of the disorder of magic and mundane—books, apple cores, crystals, bones, assorted nameless things—that Meguet had come to expect of mages. Except for a layer of dust, it held nothing at all. Another door opened to a tiny chamber that held a wooden chest and a pile of skins and neatly folded blankets. Only the collection of colored desert rocks on the stone ledge above the hearth was unnecessary. Other things, a couple of copper pots, a clay water jar, oil lamps, sat neatly in their niches and, like the table, gathered dust.

  She said, helping him sit on one of the unpainted benches beside the table, “You don’t come here often.”

  “Not as often as I want.” He smiled at her as she moved through the lamplight. “There are some clothes in that chest. People will think I conjured you out of gold and fire and ivory, the way you are now.”

  She eyed him. He did not seem in much pain, but his eyes were bright with fever and he moved and spoke slowly, as if air were too heavy to shift aside, too heavy to breathe. Worried, she asked, “What will heal you? Are there desert plants I can find?”

  “No. I need to rest.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been attacked by an enchantment before. I’m sorry,” he added, at her expression. “You’ll have to wait. I’ll take care of myself if you don’t want to look at me.”

  She sat down on the opposite bench, dropped her face in her hands, felt the desert grit behind her eyes. “Nyx will be waiting for you to bring me back. In exchange for the true key. She’ll wonder when you don’t come.”

  “Most likely, she’ll assume I died.”

  “And left me stranded. Moro’s eyes. What does that key open?”

  “Stone. Sky.” She looked up at the longing in his voice. “It opens time itself to reveal the dragon’s face.”

  She felt again a touch of his desire to wake dreams, to step into them. But she said only, “There are no dragons in Ro Holding. Nyx only wants the key because she does not know what it is. When she finds out, perhaps she won’t want it anymore.”

  “Some say there are no dragons in Saphier, either.”

  “There are no tales of dragons in Ro Holding. Why would she want a key to unbind dragons in Saphier?”

  “Because it exists?” he guessed. She was silent at that, knowing Nyx.

  “But if you told her what danger you are in—”

  “I can’t speak of it,” he said. He didn’t; she was left listening to the silence. It took on an eerie quality then, as if the sandstone walls were paper-thin and something crouched beyond them, listening to her listen. She stirred finally.

  “Tell me what to do for you.”

  “Mages,” he said, with a faint grimace as a memory clawed his back, “are easy to care for.” He glanced into the other room: Skins and blankets had sorted themselves into a bed on the floor. Another formed beside the hearth. A thought struck her; he looked at her, reading her expression, or her thoughts. “Water. There is a river behind the house. It’s slow and warm even at night. If you want to bathe in that, I’ll set something on the bank to guard you.”

  “I’ll guard myself,” she said, uneasy at what guardian he might conjure up. But he sent one anyway, she noticed later, as she stood in dark water that mirrored a silvery stream of stars. An upright bar of light, elusive as color in moonlight, stood near her clothes. Exactly what it might do, she never knew; nothing disturbed the night. She emerged finally, dried herself with a blanket, and dressed in long, thin, flowing garments the colors of the desert. She sat on the blanket, combing her hair with her fingers and letting it dry, thinking helplessly of Nyx and the Holder, and the Gatekeeper, who had opened the gate for her into a stranger’s country. She lay back on the blanket, wanting the river to speak with his voice, the night to curve itself in his shape against her. Hew, she said without sound, wanting to protect even his name from the vast, dangerous, magic-riddled land.

  After a while, she went in, found Rad Ilex asleep at the table. She touched him; he vanished so abruptly that horror flashed through her: He had not been real at all, only some sending of himself. Then he reappeared, looking dazed.

  “Meguet. I forgot you. You frightened me. I was dreaming of the firebird. Only it had a human f
ace.”

  “Whose face?” she asked, wondering what faceless mage he feared. But he said nothing more. She helped him rise; the bed, it seemed, was too far for his strength. He walked two steps and sagged into the pile beside the hearth, so deeply asleep he did not feel her undress him and wash his wounds with something besides the ice of dragon’s breath.

  At dawn she stood at the open door, watching the village wake. A patch of stone houses beside a river’s bend, it seemed little more than a scattering of pebbles between two planes of earth and sky. The south Luxour was flat as water, but she could see far in the distance the tiny, fantastic shapes of stonework among which dragons, or tales of dragons, dwelled. Along the river, in patches of green, sheep and goats grazed. People bringing buckets to the village fountain looked at her curiously. They did not speak, but their eyes said: The mage is back. Their faces looked brown and tranquil, like the desert stones. One old woman driving a cart stopped in front of Meguet, handed her a stone that had been rolling among some sacks in the cart.

  “For Rad,” she said. She had a broken tooth, and a face as wrinkled as a root. “For healing my donkey, last year.”

  “But what is it?”

  The woman’s sparse brows and the reins flicked up at the same time. “A dragon’s heart.” The reins came down, the cart lurched forward. “I’m going out again for stones. Tell him to stay home, this time. There’s nothing good beyond the Luxour.”

  “How do you know?” Meguet asked curiously. “How does news find its way here?”

  “People come and go. And they come back again, for they leave their hearts in the Luxour and they wander back all hollow looking for them. Sometimes,” she added with a half-smile, “I find them first. I keep them safe on my shelves until they’re claimed.” She ticked to the donkey; Meguet stared after her. The dragon’s heart, big as a cabbage, crystal under a thin, worn layer of stone, weighed heavily in her hands. She wondered if the ghosts of dragons came back through time, searching for the hearts that the strange old woman harvested in her cart. Most likely, she thought, taking another look, it was just a rock.