Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The woman watched him silently. She was younger than Corleu had guessed, a scant handful of years older than he. Her hair, bound hastily at her neck with a gold clip, was long and fine and so dark it reminded him of another such night he had buried his face in. He whirled, to escape into the Delta night again. But instead of the hallway between workroom and porch, he found only a musty room full of doves sleeping in the rafters.

  He turned back, bewildered, beginning to panic. The young woman gazed down at the sack by her feet, ignoring him. The string untangled itself, fell to the floor. Corleu, his heart pounding sluggishly, watched the sack crawl like something living. Birds fluttered out of the opening: yellow canaries, and tiny, iridescent hummingbirds beating eerie, frantic, silent circles around the room. They made no noise.

  “Their tongues are in here somewhere,” the woman said. “I also need their wings. You will see to that.”

  Corleu flung a side door open. The room beyond it had no windows, no other doors; it held a small black boat with a broken mast and the constellation forming another improbable house painted on its bow.

  He slammed the door again, leaned against it. His heart seemed to be circling above him with the desperate birds. The woman was watching him expressionlessly.

  “You can’t leave,” she said. “This house has a hundred doors into itself. If you do what I tell you, I’ll feed you and give you a bed. In the morning you can tell me what you were doing in the sky talking to the sun. Or if you are simply demented. If you don’t do as I bid, you can starve. Suit yourself. They’re only birds.”

  Corleu ran down the hallway again. A door rose before him; he threw it open and ran on, one arm raised to ward off whatever might come at him. He came to another door, opened it, ran down a longer hallway. Another door rose before him; he passed through it, found himself back in the workroom.

  He sagged against a table, spilling things, sobbing for breath, and found that all the birds had come to perch on his hair, his shoulders. He shook them into the air.

  “Tear them apart yourself,” he said furiously. “I’ll starve.”

  She rummaged in the sack. Somewhere in the shadows a clock ticked. The small birds fluttered down to rest in his hair again.

  She did not feed him for two days; he did not speak to her for three. By then she had her bones and spoor and had taken the bird wings herself. Slumped on her floor, growing numb to both hunger and horror, Corleu watched her build her spell step by step. She made a fire of dogwood and willow and hard black gall wood. Tiny gold suns snapped toward the ceiling, gold lintels, a sun-king’s golden face… The fire turned strange colors and shapes as it ate her gleanings from the swamp. The shadows in the room were tinted blue and purple; curtains and paintings shifted uneasily. When she had fed the fire the last bone from the marsh, it turned grey-white and shaped a skull without eyes. The skull said one word and collapsed. The woman left Corleu lying in the haunted dark and went to bed.

  The next evening, tired of walking around him, she relented and fed him. She guided him out of the workroom, deeper into the rambling house and gave him a bed. The next day, while she sat reading beside a normal fire, Corleu searched the house for the one door that would undo. Rooms opened into rooms in her house, none holding anything predictable. In one, all the chairs in the house had gathered except the one the woman was sitting in. Another room, with white walls and white curtains, held nothing but a stuffed white peacock. One room seemed blown out of glass. Frozen flowers tumbled around Corleu as he stood in it. Delicate green ivy grew up the walls, soft purple lilac hung overhead. He could smell lilac. Wondering, he closed the door, then opened it again. Old tapestries hung from the walls now; a glass vase the color of lilac held a faded branch of lilac. He walked on, down silent carpeted hallways, opened another door at random. This room, for some reason, was filled from top to bottom with goose feathers. He sneezed. Pinfeathers startled into the air, drifted down like snow. He found a staircase and mounted it. At the top of the stairs he found a door with a sign on it that said “Do Not Enter.”

  He opened a door into memory. The tinker sat in the waning light, cooking something small over his fire… Falling, falling through endless stars, he came up against another door. But which was this? In? Or out? He touched it, hands flat against the wood, as if he could feel a secret, trembling heartbeat within it. He was shaking at what might be within: the gold, armored king pacing the length of his chain, the smell of fish cooking…worse than either, what he had to find. But there was no undoing without doing. His hand slid to the latch; he opened the door.

  Inside, the woman sat in her chair, reading. Her feet were bare; she nibbled a strand of hair as she read. She looked at Corleu; her pale eyes were as expressionless as water.

  He spoke to her, for the first time in three days. “What are you?”

  She shrugged a little. “I have been called everything from sorceress to bog hag. I know a great many things but never enough. Never enough. I know the great swamp of night, and sometimes I do things for pay if it interests me.”

  “And if—and if they can’t pay?”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Are you bargaining with me?”

  He swallowed. “Sorry. It’s Wayfolk habit.”

  “But for what? You loathe what I do. What could you want from me?”

  “It’s—you know things. You have so many books. You must know other than burning owl bones. My grandfather knew a little. Country magic. But all I know is stories, and all they’ve done is get me into trouble.”

  She studied him curiously, as if he were a rare kind of tree frog that maybe she could use in her fire. She had a fine lady’s sunless skin and slender fingers, though hers had chipped nails and blisters from the fire. Swathed in some black shapeless dress, all her thoughts hidden away in her lovely, cold face, she gave him again an illusion of someone who prowled or flew by day, and only walked, wept, spoke, in the darkest hour of night. She said finally, “You fell out of the sky. You talked to the sun. You ran all the way out of the world, it sounds like.”

  “Yes.” His hands clenched, opened again. “I went into the wrong door.”

  “In this house?”

  “Likely here, too. But even before they found me in the swamp. It was another house that said ‘Do Not Enter,’ plain as if it had shouted at me.”

  “Do you always open doors that say that?”

  “I’m getting in the habit of it. So I went in, and now I must find something.”

  “What? Where?”

  “I don’t know where. It could be anywhere. So if a door like this one bothers to talk at all, even to warn, that’s a door I need to open, to see if what it warns of can help me at all. Even you.”

  Her brows went up. She said drily, “Even the likes of me.”

  “I didn’t mean—” He held his breath a moment, under that colorless, speculative gaze. “I’m used to a harmless magic. You know some terrible things. But you do know, and I’m short of knowing anything besides my name. I’ll sweep for you, I’ll clear your hearth, I’ll do anything but kill for you, except for what you need to live. I’ll cut wood, I know herbs and flowers, I can even mend your stairs. If you’ll only help me, even only tell me where to begin—”

  She shook her head, her fine hair sliding laxly over one shoulder. “I like my stairs that way,” she said shortly. “They discourage company. I don’t understand you. Begin what?”

  “To look for what I have to find.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “It’s—just a small thing.” His hands had clenched again: his eyes flicked past her as if shadows of his memories moved on the wall behind her. “A small thing. He said to ask the Blind Lady.”

  “What blind lady?”

  “The Blind Lady of Withy Hold. He said to give her a gift.”

  She shifted, impatient, bewildered. “What gift? What small thing? What ‘he’ said you must find it?”

  “The sun.”

  She made an unlad
ylike noise. “You,” she said, “may be too demented to be useful.”

  “No—”

  “Demented people talk to suns.”

  “And to old burned bones that answer back.” His retort left her wordless; he pleaded quickly, “You brought me in here. Likely you thought you could stand a few lunatic ravings.”

  “Or likely not—”

  “I have no place to go, no one else to ask. Please. If you could only listen. Only that. Please.” Her face promised him no indulgence. But she didn’t stop him. “We travelled south this year from Withy Hold, instead of going to Hunter Hold, like always. We were bound for Delta, but somewhere we took a wrong turn.”

  “We.”

  “My Wayfolk company. Except my true kin—they went on to Hunter Hold.”

  “Get on with it,” she said with some asperity. “I don’t want details about all your barefoot siblings.”

  “I—my parents went to Hunter Hold instead, because my mother saw something in her petals, something falling out of the sky, and all our paths twisting and turning and going nowhere—”

  “Like your tale,” she muttered.

  “It was a beautiful place we came to,” he said, skipping over the endless roads. “Nothing like the true Delta. Nothing. It was like the days in spring when you find everything has flowered and nothing has begun to die, so it seems that’s the way the world must go on: always just breaking into blossom, and the air full of soft, sweet smells, and colors to wring your heart, after all the white and grey of winter. That’s what this place was. Day after day after day. Nothing ever died. But once we left Withy Hold, we never saw sky, nor star, nor sun…just those colorless mists.” His face was blanched beneath its color; he was sweating lightly, as if the warm, sultry air clung to him again. “We kept driving, driving, never counting days, never seeing sunlight except when it turned red at sundown, and then one day I saw it—how we must have driven past autumn into the dead of winter, and still we never reached city or sea, and still nothing in that land died… I tried to tell them, but they were content there, they saw no harm… Then I found a way out and I took it. Alone. They’re still all there. I can free them, he said. If I find the thing he wants.”

  “How did you escape?” she asked, groping for a thread in the tangled skein. “The color of your hair?”

  “Something like,” he whispered, so deep in the memory he scarcely saw her. “There’s a song.”

  “I might have guessed.”

  “One of those you’re born knowing, you never remember learning. The little dark house that falls out of the sky.”

  She nodded, impatient again and mystified. “I know it.”

  “You must not enter it.”

  “It’s the house you’ll never leave.”

  “Everyone knows it. But no one pays mind to it. I never did either, until it fell.” Her fingernail, ticking at the chair arm, missed a beat. “There was no other door I could see. No other way out of the dream world. Only that black house, with the roof of gold and the lintel of gold. So”—he drew breath raggedly—“I went into it.”

  She was motionless, in a way he associated with animals fading into their surroundings at a scent, at something barely glimpsed. “You did.” Her voice was devoid of expression. “And what did you find, in that little dark house that falls from the sky?”

  “The Gold King.”

  He had closed his eyes at the memory. He could not hear her breathing, and he wondered suddenly if, exasperated, she had taken her book and walked through a wall. But she was still there, gazing at him without blinking, spellbound, it seemed to him, sculpted out of air and painted.

  “The Gold King is a Hold Sign.” She picked words carefully, as she might have picked a path across a marsh.

  “Yes.”

  “The yellow star its lintel, the yellow star its roof, the four stars of red and pale marking its walls, the blue star marking its doorlatch… The Hold Sign of Hunter Hold.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is a banner, a constellation, an ancient war sign. A song. How could you walk into it?”

  “Who am I to know that?” he asked her. “The likes of me? How did the Cygnet get into the sky? How did the Gold King’s house get into a song? Maybe it was us put them there. Or maybe they’re the ones whispered to us that they were there. Or something was there, hiding behind Cygnet, behind sun’s face. Something dark and powerful and terrible, that we hung faces on to make them less terrible. The house fell. I went into it. How is what I could break my mind over till I die. What matters is that, standing here in front of you, I’m still in that house. What I need is how to get out of it.”

  Her face was so pale it reminded him of the waxen dream-lilies. Her eyes were wide on his face; he saw color in them finally, the palest trace of lavender. “That house,” she whispered. “Here. In the Delta.”

  “In a dream.”

  “Why you? Why would the Gold King fall out of the sky into your life?”

  He swallowed, his throat burning. “I asked him. He said no one else in Ro Holding would have been muckerhead enough to enter his house.”

  She drew breath, moving finally. Shadows moved and melted on the walls around them; he wondered, eerily, if they were her suddenly busy thoughts.

  “The Gold King wants you to find something for him. In return for your people. What? Some treasure?”

  “A small thing, he said. Being trapped, he can’t look for it.”

  “A small thing.”

  “Something only he still values, after all this time, he said.”

  “The Gold King did.” She slammed her heavy book suddenly, so hard he started. She caught his eyes in her unsettling way. “A small thing. Corleu Ross, you may be a muckerhead, but what kind of idiot do you think I am? The Gold King would not tumble out of the sky in his ancient house to send you on a goose chase for some bauble of sentimental value. I would guess that what he wants you to find is powerful enough to rattle Ro Holding like a weathercock in a storm. Tell me what it is or I will not help you.”

  “I cannot,” he whispered. “I cannot. I will never see them again, he said. Never in the true world.”

  “But you do know what it is.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  She held him still under her scrutiny, as if she were trying to see the mystery inside his head. But not even she could do that, or wanted to; the intensity of her gaze lessened; he could move again. She nibbled a thumbnail; shadows shifted like smoke behind her. “This thing,” she said. “Would you want it for yourself if you could find a way to keep it?”

  His face twisted, as if he smelled smoke again from the tinker’s spattering fire. He shook his head.

  “Then, if I take it from the Gold King after he frees your people, you wouldn’t fight me for it? Think. You might change your mind once it’s in your hand.”

  “No,” he said, brusque with horror. “It’s a terrible thing. Likely even you won’t want it.”

  She smiled a little, thinly. “Likely I will, if it’s anything of power. In return for you finding this thing for me, I will help you with all my power. Which,” she added, “is considerable, and not confined to this moldering backwater. I have taken it from all over Ro Holding.”

  “Are you Wayfolk?” he asked bewilderedly, for lords’ daughters seldom rambled the length and breadth of Ro Holding, or took to living like a cuckoo in an untidy, haunted nest in a swamp.

  She shook her head absently, already conjecturing. Her answer took his breath away. “Of course not. I am Nyx Ro.”

  Five

  HE could not stop staring at her. Even though the door had moved and there was a hallway where he remembered stairs, and all the portraits hanging along the mauve walls were upside down, his eyes kept returning to her face, for never in his life had he thought he might be close enough to touch one of the three daughters of the Holder of Ro Holding. She ignored his staring, as well as all the white, closed doors they passed, until she came to one that had, maybe, one more
grain of dust on it than the others, or it cast a slanted shadow. She opened it and they stepped back into her workroom.

  “You never get lost?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You made this house, then?”

  She shook her head. “I found it.” She went to the fire; its embers glowed like a multi-eyed beast in the shadows. “It’s quite old and full of memories, dreams, thoughts, reflections of time. But it’s addled with age. It can’t remember what’s real and what’s memory, or where it puts things; that’s why they constantly shift.” She reached for wood, then changed her mind before she touched it. “Make up the fire, Corleu. Use pear and coralwood, that will clear the air.”

  He was getting used to the stenches that came out of her fires, but this last had been formidable. “It smells like the dead were dancing in here,” he muttered, raking the embers. “Why do you live like this?”

  “Like what?” She was at a worktable, sorting through a pile of books that smelled of smoke and leather and ancient ink, and that flickered sometimes in the candlelight like star-fire and jewelled salamander tongues.

  “Like this,” he said recklessly. “Barefoot in a rickety house, summoning hobgoblins out of your fire, when you could be—”

  “Shod in velvet, wearing pearls in my hair in the Holder’s house by the sea?” She lifted her eyes; again he saw the faint wash of color in them, and then her narrow-eyed, sardonic smile. “I came here to learn what the swamp had to teach me. To look out of the stone-tortoise’s ancient eyes and see what it has seen.”