Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He woke in the morning, face-down in a book. Nyx was stirring the fire.

  “You should never sleep between two spells,” she commented.

  He raised his head, blinked at the ancient writing in blue and gold and black inks. Chrysom, it said, at the bottom of each page, like a warning.

  “I was looking for the web.”

  “You won’t find it in there, that’s spells only.” She tossed fragrant wood on the fire and sat beside him on the floor, leafing through the pages of one of the books lying open. He watched her sleepily. She wore a long dress of stiff green cloth that rippled with light when she moved. Its top button was missing; he could see the ivory skin at the hollow of her throat, and the thumbnail of shadow below that. Her eyes were on him suddenly, chilly, colorless, like a winter sky, like a slap of cold water.

  “Corleu. I know the fire you must bring to the Fire Bear, but I haven’t found yet where the Dancer sleeps.”

  He sat up, groggy and stiff from the floorboards. “I’m not waking the Dancer. She sleeps in ice beneath the Fire Bear.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “She’s under the constellation.”

  “So is all of Berg Hold. And all of Ro Holding, nearly. Where will you step to, if you go through that ring to Berg Hold? What do Wayfolk say of the Dancer?”

  “If you think of her at the fair side of midnight, you’ll have good dreams; at the dark side, you’ll have foul dreams. If a woman’s braid is undone during sleep, Dancer can draw memory away. If you sleep with fresh lavender on your pillow for her, she’ll tell you who you will marry. If the lavender is withered, she’ll tell who will die. If she dances hooded in your dreams, your life will change. If you see her face in your dreams, you will die. The Cygnet trapped her in ice so she could not dance. Freed, she never stops. Fire Bear would free her, but it has no fire left in it, after pursuing the Cygnet. So it guards her.”

  “But where?”

  “At the top of the world…” He paused, then shook his head. “That’s all I know. At the top of the world. You never saw a likely place in your wanderings?”

  She mused, remembering. “In Berg Hold I visited the northern witches. I sat around their fires in the dead of winter in their tiny dark huts smelling of tanned hides and smoke and bitter herbs, and I learned how to foretell from the forked horns of snow deer, and how to braid strips of leather into safe paths through the snow, and how to understand the language of the white crows, who gossip of bad weather, travellers, deer herds, death. The witches made do with what they had against storm, hunger, fever. They used to dance to invoke dreams of foreseeing. To them, the Dancer came alive in those dreams; where she slept in the ice was of no importance, that was only a tale. I also studied with the mage Diu, who is the last living descendant of Chrysom. He is very old; he went to Berg Hold to live in peace, he said. But he taught me what I wanted to know, anyway, for Chrysom’s descendants have always spent time serving Ro Holding. He made nothing of the Dancer, for he slept little. He only knew what Chrysom had written. The Dancer was a folk tale. A constellation. Inconsequential.” She turned a page, leaving Corleu to wonder at her down-turned, secret face.

  “You were curious,” he ventured. “That’s why you went there. To Berg Hold, to live close to earth in the dead of winter. Just curious.”

  She lifted her head, gave him for the first time a true smile. “Yes.”

  “Were you always this way?”

  Her eyes were clear again, expressionless, but not, he thought, offended. “I like to use my mind,” she said.

  “Does—does the Holder—” The mist in her eyes seemed to chill into frost then, but he persisted. “Does she wonder—does she know—”

  “Does she know that I’m in the Delta torturing small animals?”

  “I wondered,” he confessed, and she shrugged slightly.

  “Oh, yes. She knows. After this, she may not want to see much of me again, but I think she will always know where I am.”

  “How could she not want to see you?” he protested. “You’re her daughter.”

  “She has Iris and Calyx. And she has Rush Yarr, who is not her son but might as well be. And she has Meguet. She can spare me.” Her voice was dry, dispassionate. Corleu, feeling as if he had blundered into some complex, bewildering and totally unfamiliar country, said:

  “You’re like a story to us. The Holder of Ro Holding and her children: three daughters who wouldn’t recognize their fathers from three fence posts, because that’s the Holder’s business and that’s the way it is in your world. Once I saw a procession crossing Withy Hold when I was harvesting. We all stopped to watch it: long lines of riders in black, with other riders in fine, airy colors between them, and the Cygnet on a pennant as long as a furrow, flying like a black flame over them all. That’s all I’ve seen of the Holder. Is she so cold or cruel or stupid that you ran away from her?”

  The Holder’s daughter shook her head, surprised. “My mother is none of those things. Maybe if she were, I could have lived in the same house with her.” She added abruptly, frowning, when Corleu opened his mouth, “Enough. I don’t like answering to her, why should I want to answer to some Wayfolk man who fell out of the sky?”

  “Likely,” he suggested, rising, “because of how I got there.”

  He wandered away to wash and change his clothes, torn by the thorns and stained by the fields he had known in some distant, lost life. When he returned, dressed in odd, rich, mismatched clothes, combing his wet hair with his fingers, he found her in the same place, beside her fire, so immersed in what she read that she seemed only an illusion of herself.

  But she raised her head after a moment. “I have work to do this morning. You won’t want to watch it. Take what books you want with you. I’ll find you when I’m done.”

  Chilled, he took himself and an armload of books far enough away, he thought, that not even the anguished bellow of a swamp tortoise could reach him. In a small room containing an old velvet couch, an empty chest, an empty picture frame and an empty bird cage, he searched for a web until he fell asleep himself and dreamed of Tiel within a fall of vines within the bird cage. He woke and saw the sorceress’s face above him.

  He started, confusing himself, cages, small wingless birds. Then he drew a breath, leaned back again. He lifted the book that sprawled opened across his chest and said, “I found the Dancer.”

  “Where?”

  “‘On the top of the world,’” he read.

  “‘On the top of the mountain,

  On the top of a cliff,

  On the top of a stone,

  Beneath the night,

  Beneath the moon,

  Beneath the snow,

  Beneath the ice:

  The Dancer sleeps.

  In her breath,

  The last breath of winter,

  The breath of prophecy.’”

  He closed the heavy book and sat up. “It’s someone’s—I don’t know—scraps of sayings, tales, bits of history, even recipes. Riddles. Accounts, where wild herbs were found. Such like that.”

  She took it from him. “Rydel. She was head gardener for Timor Ro. She knew some herb magic. Chrysom’s grandson wrote of her. He thought highly of her. He wrote that she held secret powers of a kind not even Chrysom knew of, or would have understood. So I read whatever I could find that she wrote, or was written of her. But all her other writings are of herb lore, and no one else attributed such great mysterious powers to her. I have read these lines about the Dancer. I didn’t remember them.”

  “Is there only one mountain in Berg Hold?”

  “There is one peak much higher than the rest. There are many tales about what lies under its mists: ice spirits, the ghosts of travellers, the palace of the north wind, a real fire bear. I should have remembered that the Dancer and the Fire Bear are always together, even in tales. It’s a grey barren peak in late summer, and by autumn you can no longer see it.”

  Corleu was silent, weighing the impulse to step out
of the Delta onto the frozen peak of the world, to free the Dancer and ask her a question that might end his search, and then, with Tiel safe, to close his eyes and hope that the heart of the Cygnet and the heart of Ro Holding had no more to do with one another than a random pattern of stars had to do with a smallfolk rhyme. Impulse turned to desire; desire was nearly overwhelming. He said, his voice shaking, hearing the rustle of leaves in a place where there was no wind, “And if she doesn’t know? You know where she will send me.”

  The green in his eyes resolved into the watery sheen of the sorceress’s skirt, rustling as she shifted. She said only, “And if she knows?”

  “And if she doesn’t?” He closed his eyes, counted recklessly, deliberately. “Gold King, Silver Ring, Fire Bear—it’s not only tales I’m stirring up. It’s Hold Signs.”

  She was silent. He looked up; her eyes caught his, absolutely colorless. She made no movement, no sound. Suddenly terrified under that chill gaze, he thought she must have seen straight through his thoughts to the place where he had hidden his secret, and that, child born under the Cygnet’s dark wing, she would kill him before he shook apart Ro Holding.

  But she moved finally. Her fingers closed tightly on her arms; her face, always pale, seemed ghostly in that pale room. “How complex and fascinating,” she breathed. “This is a power like no other power I have ever encountered. If in the end I must fight it, then I must understand it. And I can only do that if I see it unmasked, open, not skulking behind poetry and folk myths. If you don’t finish this, the Gold King will find someone else who will, someone who may not fall into my hands as tidily as you did.”

  “You’d risk Ro Holding out of curiosity,” he challenged her, miserable and desperate. Her brows went up. Behind her, in the frame that had been empty, he saw the night sky in miniature, the constellations of the Holds—the Gold King, the Silver Ring, the Fire Bear, the Blood Fox—circling the Cygnet in its flight. Circling among them were the lesser stars: the Peacock leading the Blind Lady, the Mage shadowing the Blood Fox, the Dark House, the Dancer guarded by the Fire Bear.

  “Of course I’m curious,” Nyx Ro said. “What else would I be?”

  “Likely if you’re that powerful you don’t have to be afraid.”

  “Not until you tell me what it is you want me to fear.”

  He looked away from her steady eyes, back to the night sky. The frame was empty again. “If I knew exactly,” he sighed, “I could say. They’re just tales, how could there be danger? Just stars our eyes picked out and made into patterns so the night would be less lonely with faces looking back at us. But because of stars and smallfolk rhyme, I’ve lost everything I ever knew.”

  “It’s only a step through time from here to there, from Delta to Berg Hold, Corleu. From not knowing to knowing. And only at the cost of fire. Will you wake the Dancer?”

  Fire rippled inside the picture frame: a Fire Bear’s soundless roar, a tinker’s fire. He saw the tinker’s face in the fire, his yellow eyes, his narrow, sidelong smile. He stared back at it, trapped and shaken with sudden fury at his helplessness. He said abruptly, “No.”

  “No? Corleu, it might take a lifetime to find the web, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “What I’m thinking is that likely I’ll have to give the tinker what he asked for, but there’s no reason to give him the world and stars besides. I don’t have to bring the Dancer to life for him. All I must do is ask a question.”

  “So—”

  “So.” He met her cool, misty, slightly bemused eyes. “I’ll wait for the last day of winter. She’ll answer me truly and then she’ll dream like always, and none of us will have to see her waking face.”

  Nyx was silent, studying him. Her head bent slightly; she turned, closed a couple of tomes and picked them up. She said only, “The work I do here might well drive you to Berg Hold long before the end of winter.”

  “I’ll chance it.” He heaved books into his arms. “If you’ll let me stay.”

  “Only yesterday you would have given the world and stars to get out of here.”

  “That was yesterday.” He waited for her to open the door, for she would find the workroom behind it, while he would find only another memory. “I can search for the web. If I find what that is, I won’t need to ask the Dancer anything.”

  “You won’t last here till winter’s end,” she predicted, and opened the door.

  “I’ll last,” he said.

  There was a woman leaning against a cauldron in the workroom.

  Nyx stopped so abruptly in front of Corleu, he nearly dropped books on her; it was a moment before she spoke. The woman waited, her face composed. She wore black silk and leather; the Cygnet, limned and ringed in silver, flew in the hollow of her left shoulder. She was slender, broad-shouldered, tall enough to wear the long blade at her belt. Swans swirled up the metal sheath and over the hilt of the sword; one tried to soar out of the pommel. Her braided hair was pale ivory. Her face, broad-boned, sun-colored, reminded Corleu at first glance of the easily smiling daughters of the wealthy lords of Withy Hold. In the next moment she reminded him of no one he had ever met in his life, and he guessed where she must have come from.

  “Meguet,” Nyx breathed.

  “The Holder sent me.” She did not look at Corleu; her still, intent gaze was for Nyx. Nyx moved finally, to a table, and set her books down. She folded her arms. Corleu, following, saw her face as she turned. It looked bloodless in the candlelight; she was frowning deeply.

  “Is the Holder well?”

  “The Holder, both your sisters and Rush Yarr are all well.” The woman’s voice, low and slightly husky, was quite calm under the stares of Nyx’s assortment of skulls.

  “I didn’t ask about Rush Yarr.”

  “So you didn’t.” She detached herself from the cauldron with the grace of one intimately acquainted with movement. Her curious glance fell here, there; she picked up a bird skull, examined its clean, delicate lines, its empty eyes, as if searching for the magic in it. Nyx opened her mouth to protest, closed it again. Meguet put the skull down. “So you didn’t,” she said again. “I’ll tell him that if you want. He’ll ask.”

  “After all this time?” Nyx asked sharply. “Nine years?”

  “He won’t listen to reason.” She touched a book or two, paced back to the cauldron, her movements light, quick, restive, like one troubled by walls, Corleu thought, or more likely only these, full of bones and smells. “He still loves you.”

  “What for?” Nyx said, astonished. The woman’s eyes flickered at her; in the pallid light, Corleu caught a hint of their color.

  “You must ask him to know. If it’s important at all.” She glanced into the cauldron. “You have a toad in your cauldron. A big, bloated moon of a toad.”

  “It’s an albino,” Nyx said crossly. “You’ve known Rush as long as I have. Tell him to stop. Tell him I said to.”

  “I will tell him. Does it jump?”

  “It jumps out of everything but that.”

  “It looks too fat to jump.”

  “It jumps.”

  “Its eyes are sapphire… He would have come with me, had he known.”

  “He should have come,” Nyx said dourly. “This house would have opened his eyes.”

  “Perhaps. What do you do with an albino toad?”

  “You feed it to an albino fire.”

  “Ah,” the woman said softly. She reached into the cauldron with one hand, did something that made the toad give a deep, lazy grunt. “It speaks.”

  “As it will in the fire,” Nyx said implacably. “If you are finished playing with my toad, perhaps you will tell me why my mother sent you.”

  “The Holder sent me to remind you that you will have been away from home for three years in spring.”

  “Three—” Looking surprised, she calculated, from dust motes apparently. “Two years in the desert, last spring here…so it will be three years.”

  “In spring. The Holder asks that you remember
your promise to return for the Holding Council.”

  Nyx was silent. She went to the fire, tossed a handful of wood chips from a bowl beside it onto the embers, and the harsh, charred smell in the air subsided. “Of course I’ll come home,” she said reluctantly. “I did promise. But I would think, under the circumstances, she would rather not see me in the company of all the Hold Councils.”

  “You think she should wait until you are doing something less disturbing and all the disgusting rumors of you have died down?”

  Nyx met her level gaze. “You could put it like that.”

  “I just did. You’re overlooking one thing. Your mother misses you.”

  Nyx’s fingers found a strand of hair to worry. “I can’t think why.”

  “She hoped you would come back with me.”

  “She must be getting tired of hearing comments about my life.”

  “That would be the only reason she wants to see you.”

  Nyx sighed. “If I go back now, we’ll only quarrel.”

  “You’ve been here nearly a year. Is there that much to learn in this soggy backwater?”

  “There are a few things left. Tell my mother I will come home in spring.”

  Meguet inclined her head without comment. Nyx studied her a moment, the look in her pale eyes unfathomable. She asked, “Is that the only reason you have come, Meguet? All this way through the swamp, up my rickety stairs? The Holder could have sent a message upriver; it would have reached me, my reputation what it is.”

  Meguet did not reply immediately; she seemed to hear a question beneath that question. “Your mother holds you in more regard than that. Even now. As for your stairs, I would think anyone as powerful as you could mend a stair.”

  “It discourages visitors.”

  “So it must. There are two morose trappers waiting for me in a boat at your dock, who almost refused to bring me here. They said you wouldn’t want company.”

  “They were right.”

  Meguet’s calm gaze did not falter. “Then I will leave you,” she said softly. “It’s getting dark and the trappers may not wait for me.”