Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “How do you know it’s getting dark?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t see out of these windows.”

  “It was dusk when I came in,” Meguet said surprisedly. She picked a heavy black cloak off a chair and swung it over her shoulders. The Cygnet, black and silver within a ring of silver, flew around her and settled at her back. She stepped into candlelight; the fire turned her pale hair silk, and Corleu shifted. A memory nagged him, a tale. Her face looked pale now; the things half-hidden in the shadows wore at her, or the odd sharpness in Nyx’s questions. Nyx said more easily:

  “I forget sometimes whether it’s day or night when I work. Tell my mother I will see her in spring.”

  “I will.”

  “And tell the trappers to come back here in the morning; I will have work for them.”

  “I will tell them,” Meguet said evenly. She held Nyx’s eyes. “They say you are ensorcelled by this swamp. But, now and then, I think I actually see why you are here, why you burn albino toads. I may be wrong. I know so little of magic. But I do wonder, if any of us knew as much as you, where we would make the choice to stop learning.”

  A little color rose in Nyx’s face. She did not answer, but words gathered in the air between them. Before she turned to go, Meguet looked at Corleu. He saw the color of her eyes. And then he saw the corn rows standing in the summer light, the cool, secret, shadowy world they hid between their leaves. He blinked, but he could not separate her from the tale: corn-silk hair and eyes as deeply green as his great-gran’s green-drenched memory.

  He swallowed drily, motionless under her gaze, not knowing how long they stood there silently, not knowing, from her expressionless face, what she thought. She turned suddenly, and almost dragged at him to take a step and follow her. Nyx stayed silent, listening to the fading footsteps on the porch. She looked as grim as Corleu had ever seen her. He asked tentatively,

  “Who is she?”

  “She is a far-flung cousin, Meguet Vervaine. She lost her family early; my mother took her in, raised her with us. She has a penchant for weapons and for wandering. She goes where the Holder sends her, and she is the only person in all of Ro Holding permitted to enter armed into Ro House. She is a descendant of Astor Ro, Moro Ro’s wife, who in a thousand years produced some varied and eccentric descendants.”

  “Does she have power? Like yours?”

  She gave him a brooding, searching look. “She has never shown signs of it. Why?”

  “Just—how she looked at me, before she left. At me, into me, and out the nether side. As if—as if she might know me, but couldn’t remember… Something like you’re looking at me now, only it’s not me troubles you, it’s her.”

  “She was in my house.” Her fingers tightened on her arms; she stared at the dark empty hallway as if to see her cousin’s shadow there. “My doorkeepers could keep even Chrysom out, and Meguet walked through them twice as if she did not even realize they exist.”

  PART TWO

  THE

  GUARDIAN

  One

  MEGUET Vervaine sat silently in the trappers’ boat, to their three eyes wrapped in authority and glacially calm; in truth she was deeply troubled and sitting in a puddle. Expressions haunted her: Nyx’s, seeing her; the face of the young man, whom she had never seen in her life, and yet who nagged at her, called her back the farther the river took her away. He was no one, she thought; Wayfolk, or part, with that odd hair; wanderer, who had found his way to Nyx’s doorstep. Or, more likely, since Wayfolk were rare in the Delta, he had trailed Nyx across Ro Holding, promising this and that in exchange for…what? What could he have that she might want, enough to keep him with her? Mute, maybe; he had not spoken but with his eyes. If she kept him to bed, she would not have to listen to him in the morning. But he looked troubled, haggard, ensorcelled maybe, but by Nyx—who had run out of Chrysom’s tower and out of Ro House and out of her own life in pursuit of freedom? It seemed unlikely she would extend her dark sorcery to humans just because for one year out of nine she had chosen to live in a swamp.

  Meguet shifted; the trappers glanced uneasily at one another, unnerved by her as they were by the woman she had visited. The darkening water caught her eye; it went the wrong direction, she felt: away. The man’s face had pulled at her, his dark eyes clinging to hers, stunned by something she could not see. She touched her pale hair, thinking of his hair. Wayfolk did not live within walls or in swamps, nor did they know those expressions, or have that hair. Nor had Wayfolk ever disturbed her before, hung in her thoughts clear and hard-lined as the moon over Wolfe Sea, tugged at her, like the moon tugged the sea, so strongly she said sharply:

  “Stop.”

  The trappers eyed one another, wondering, obviously, how to stop the river. The one-eyed man asked gruffly, “Shall we turn to shore, Lady?”

  “Turn back.”

  “Will cost,” the younger man said timidly, and the older shoved at him.

  “Will cost nothing,” he said hastily, “to the Cygnet. But, Lady, how far back? Not to the house again?”

  She nodded. “To the house.”

  The younger slumped over the oars. “It’s not for the likes of you,” he protested, “that witch’s house. She’s demented.”

  Meguet smiled thinly. “She is my cousin.” They were silent then, rowing quickly, lest she reveal an arcane kindred power and find some unpleasant, peculiar use for parts of them.

  They left her at the dock, gazing up at the opaque, dragonfly lights in the windows. What Nyx would say if she found Meguet spying on her was something Meguet chose not to contemplate. She heard a sigh behind her and turned, startled; the beautiful river-ghost in her water-stained tumble of lace sat in the prow of her boat and gazed mournfully mid-river. Meguet turned back and a blood fox’s eyes flared in the mooring light on the bank. She grew still, not touching her sword, for the blood fox, like the swan, was of an ancient lineage, and had known the Delta before humans. To Delta folk of old family it was not so much bad luck as bad manners to harm their neighbor. When the red-washed eyes vanished, she went up the stairs.

  She passed the odd shadows clinging batlike to the walls of the entryway; they were alive, she sensed, but did not consider her worth peeling themselves off the walls to challenge her. No one was in the workroom. She crossed it, under the empty stares of owl and goat and muskrat. She heard voices near, and froze. A few murmured words, silence. She heard no steps. They were together, Nyx and the stranger, nearby. She saw a door in the far wall and opened it a crack. The room beyond was empty. She slipped noiselessly into it. If Nyx found her, she could protest that she was only wandering through the house searching for her to talk further, to reason, to argue. It sounded innocent enough: They had been friends once. The walls of the room were blood red; a stuffed white owl watched her from its perch, looking alarmed, ready to ask its question. The room offered her eight closed doors to choose from. She opened one at random, bewildered, and felt, eerily, as she passed into a dense silence, that somehow she had gone too far: Nyx was not only in some other room, but in some other time. The room she entered was a twilight place, everything in it—candlesticks and chairs and heavy curtains—mauve; it offered her only one door. She pulled it open, expecting the owl room again, but found another room with a great canopied bed and one shoe set neatly next to it.

  The door closed behind her; already, she guessed, the twilight room was changing. She stood blinking, bewildered, feeling more lost than she had ever been anywhere in the wilds of Ro Holding. The old house would ramble forever in its memories, like some fey old woman rummaging through her past. She would wander with it until she was forced to call Nyx’s name for rescue. She closed her eyes, touched them with cold fingers, concentrated. After a moment, the Cygnet moved across her mind, the black swan flying against a circle of white. Instinct, and experience with that odd, secret habit, made her follow its direction. Eyes still closed she opened the door she had just come through and stepped into the room b
eyond.

  Opening her eyes, she saw a hundred black swans flying around her. The vision lasted only a moment, and then the mirrors the swans had flown through were blank as sky. They changed again as she stood motionless, were suddenly busy with impressions. She saw herself in a small round mirror framed in silver, hung high on a wall. The big mirror beneath it reflected a room lull of opened chests and wardrobes, rich clothes tumbling out of all of them. An ornate, square mirror propped against that revealed a room blown entirely, it seemed, out of glass. On every wall, in every corner, high and low, mirrors of every size framed the house’s memories, some changing now and then, as if there were not enough mirrors, while at another moment it seemed that, as she stood there, mirrors were coming into existence around her, as if the house were baring its heart to one who could see.

  Stunned, she could only stare, her eyes snagged by every peculiar revelation; not even growing up with Nyx’s astonishing gifts inured her to this. She was able to move finally, a slight, unguarded sound coming out of her, when she saw Nyx herself, in an oval, wood-framed mirror on the floor. She knelt down in front of it. Nyx and the young man were in a kitchen; ovens and spits and blackened hearths lined the stone wall behind them. They sat at a vast wooden table surrounded by books, nuts, torn loaves of bread, smoked fish, apples, cheese, onions, pitchers of water and wine. Nyx, holding a half-eaten apple between her teeth, was flipping rapidly through a huge book. The young man was reading, his lips moving noiselessly, a frown, intent and anxious, between his brows. Wayfolk he certainly was, with his brown skin and black eyes; that he could read at all was curious. That he wanted to read buried deep in a maze of walls in the middle of the sunless Delta was astonishing. He was, Meguet decided, in dire need of a spell. Or someone he knew was. She leaned toward the mirror, studying him, feeling something cold, dispassionate, ruthless in the scrutiny.

  The man lifted his head; for a moment he seemed to gaze back at Meguet, puzzled, uneasy, as if the mirror were water between them and he caught a strange shadow in its depths. Nyx removed the apple from her mouth and chewed a bite.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Did you find something?”

  “Just a dead spider between pages.” He rubbed absently at the pale stubble on his chin. Nyx still watched him, not, it seemed, with a lover’s attention, but with a rather detached interest, as if he might, if coaxed right, predict, but then again he might not. “Nothing anywhere about a web. Not even in a rhyme for curing warts or jumping stooks.”

  “Jumping stooks?”

  “In a wheat field. It’s a smallfolk game.”

  “Oh.”

  He closed the books wearily, rubbed his eyes. “We’d get beaten for it when they caught us, but that was part of the game almost.”

  Nyx, uninterested in stooks, pushed her book aside, pulled another from the pile. “I thought you Wayfolk had a rhyme for everything.”

  “So did I.” He poured water, drank it. There was dust all over his hands; Nyx had a streak on her face. They had, judging from the crumbs on the table, been at this mystery for some time. “It’s a secret,” the Wayfolk man suggested. “This web. So secret it’s nowhere in these books. So it wouldn’t likely be in a rhyme smallfolk gabble at each other.”

  “Nothing in this world is that secret.”

  The man’s eyes flickered to her lowered head. He raised his hands to his face again, linking his fingers across his eyes. Meguet stopped breathing. She leaned forward, touched the cold face in the mirror, as if to draw his hands away, see what he was seeing.

  Something is, she thought. You know something that secret.

  His hands dropped. Nyx leaned back, contemplating him as Meguet was herself, so close to the mirror that her breath misted the cracked painted walls of the kitchen. Finally, Nyx spoke the young man’s name.

  “You can still change your mind, Corleu. You can wake the Dancer now, if you’re fretting.”

  Meguet, repeating his name silently, felt something stir deep inside her, like the Dancer herself might have stirred, in her cocoon of ice, at the sound of her name.

  “No.” His hands closed; he said again, not looking up, “No.”

  “You’re not fretting.”

  He raised his head at the bait; Meguet heard his breath. Then he came close to smiling, a taut smile that barely grew past his eyes. “No. I don’t care anymore. The swamp is full of women trapped in mists, waiting for me. They can all wait till winter’s end.”

  “Tell me,” Nyx said curiously, “what she is like. Tiel.”

  He looked at her. “You wouldn’t even see her face, likely, if you passed her,” he said simply. “You’d see her dark skin and her dark hair and that would be all; your eye would say: She is Wayfolk. She—I could hardly see her face, when I—before I lost her. What it is like truly. She was like the world, like sky, like leaves, like night. Her face was my face. When that dark house fell and I ran into it, I never left her. I’m still there in that mist, like that ghost on the dock, like the Warlock’s shadow in the stars. I’m outside my heart, looking for the way back in.” He added bitterly, after a pause, “It was easy enough to leave. I only had to go through a door.”

  Nyx was still, in a way that Meguet remembered: so still the watery sheen on the fabric of her gown seemed painted; no light trembled on the gold clip in her hair. Then her hand moved, fell across the open pages, close to Corleu’s hand. If she had straightened a forefinger, she could have touched him.

  “You had no choice.”

  “I should have stayed with her. I could have.”

  “Then there would have been no mist trapping your company, no falling house, no spellbound love, no timely meeting with a bog witch—just a straight road through the Delta to the sea, because if you were a man who could not recognize that house, or had been warned by it, it would never have fallen into your life. Though,” she added, “that can’t be a flea’s worth of comfort.”

  “Not even that,” he sighed, and dragged at another book on the heap.

  Meguet watched, unblinking, scarcely breathing. It sounded simple enough: the Wayfolk man in trouble, needing a spell; Nyx helping precisely because it wasn’t simple, and all her life Nyx had loved nothing better than a challenge. That was all. Yet she could not move; she held the mirror with both hands, her eyes on the haunted Wayfolk face, learning every line and hollow of it, for the words he spoke were illuminating, like lightning shedding glimpses of a traveller’s road, some dark, ancient landscape within her mind.

  The words almost came together, the landscape was almost revealed.

  The dark falling house…

  The Dancer…

  The Warlock…

  The web…

  For a moment, as she concentrated, every mirror in the room showed her face: pale, intent, motionless, her green eyes narrowed, alert as a hunting animal after a scent. Then the road went dark again, the words fell apart, meaningless. She dropped her face against the mirror, wondering at herself, drawn upriver into a room full of mirrors by a Wayfolk man with no power, just a problem that, compared with Nyx’s usual swamp sorcery, sounded remarkably innocent.

  Yet she stayed, her eyes rarely moving from him, and bored herself into a stupor while they read. They spoke little more, finally closed their books with weary thuds, and Meguet slipped away, through the workroom before Nyx returned to it. She borrowed the ghost’s boat and the dock lamp, and rowed herself downriver to the ramshackle inn where she had left her horse. The next morning, she sent the boat back upriver and rode out of the swamplands down to the sea.

  She followed a narrow trail along the river, which widened and eventually became a road, a tavern at the point where it widened. Another half mile, and she caught a glimpse of Wolfe Sea, a line of deep grey running into the cloudy sky. The low swamp mists changed into a stormy winter sky over the city. The road beneath her crossed other roads now, fronted houses, buildings, boat docks. The river was growing broad, fanning out to mingle with the tides; sea birds and swamp
birds wove overhead, with an eye to what the receding tide was leaving in the mud flats.

  The road skirted wide around them; houses, shops, guild halls, warehouses, sprouted cheek by jowl, eye to eye across the road. The road itself was cobbled here, and in the late afternoon, crowded. Presently, the buildings yielded to a high stone wall that rambled along the road; ancient trees leaned over the wall, their bare boughs chattering together in the wind, like a private conversation between many very old friends. In the distance Meguet saw the sea again.

  She heard it finally; the road wound around a curve in the wall and brought her to the gate of Ro House. It was late by then; the sea was very dark. A single red star broke through the clouds, hung low on the horizon: the Blood Star. The gate faced the sea; the waves turned sluggishly along the pale sand, broke with a frail, lacy line of silver that teased the eye and vanished. Beyond it, night fishers, their bows lamp-lit, flickered like fireflies on the vast restless dark.

  The Cygnet flew diagonally across the gate, lit by torches on either side. Meguet rode up to it and dismounted. The Gatekeeper, who had seen her coming from his high perch on the wall, was already opening it.

  “Lady Meguet,” he greeted her, and swung the gate wide. “Welcome.”

  The house that the mage Chrysom had built on the curving shore of Wolfe Sea was a great, shining wheel of seven towers circling the high black tower above which the Cygnet flew on a pennant furling and unfurling, by day and night. The towers were built of granite and marble cut in Hunter Hold, of pale wood from the Delta and dark polished wood from Berg Hold and delicate glass blown in Withy Hold. A miniature city rambled around the tower walls, of stables, smithies, barns, kennels, hen coops, forges, tanneries, workshops, cottages with gardens in front of their doors. Some of the household and cottagers could trace their families back a thousand years to Moro Ro’s time. Behind the towers the outer walls sprawled out of sight, for Chrysom had made room for fields, ponds, pastures, a small lake around which ancient oak mingled with the vast, dark firs he had taken as saplings from Berg Hold. Legend had it that he had built the house to move from Hold to Hold, eluding siege like a flea eludes a hound’s tooth. At the end of the Hold Wars, the warlords had come to the Delta to pledge fealty to Moro Ro, in his house by the sea, and there it had stood since.