Meguet dismounted tiredly just inside the gate; the Gatekeeper held her horse while the stable girls ran across the yard. She lingered to talk to him. He was tall, muscular, with short, muddy sun-streaked hair, and eyes as silvery green as the scythe-shaped leaves on the swamp trees. He was a reticent man, with a clever, unerring eye, discreet despite the household gossip that found its way to him like water found holes in a sieve. He had opened the gate to Meguet for the ten years she had worn the Cygnet on Holder’s business. Though he was swamp-born, as far as she knew, he always guessed where she had been when she returned.
“Has the house been quiet?” she asked him. A corner of his thin mouth slanted upward.
“In a manner of speaking.” He wore the Cygnet at both wrists and over his heart, though on him they were apt to fly haphazardly, rucked up over his forearms, or half-hidden under a sheepskin vest. “I opened the gate a dozen times to the sons and daughters of the Delta lords. Most are still here.”
“To see Rush?” Meguet guessed. “Or Calyx?”
“Both.” He added, “And to see you.”
She didn’t ask who or why, having little interest in their neighbors. “Anyone else?” She liked to hear him talk. The rough, river-hatchling’s voice ran just beneath ten years of household polish; it surfaced now and then, unexpectedly.
“Merchants,” he said. “In and out again. A tinker, in but not out.”
“A tinker?”
“He has kin, he said.”
“Ah.”
“The Holder sent word to the gate that she will see you whenever you arrive.”
Meguet glanced at the third tower. Lights swarmed around it; the great hall looked aflame. “She’ll be at supper.” The Gatekeeper, eyeing something in her hair, seemed to weigh respect against inclination. He said:
“You had raw weather for a ride upriver.”
Meguet looked at him. “I suppose you can tell from the mud on my stirrup which bog I stood in to mount.”
“No.” He reached out, picked a feather from her hair. “I’ve seen you wear mud from all over Ro Holding. But the small birds this color orange live only in one place.”
Gazing at it, she thought of the small silent white birds caged in Nyx’s workroom. She took it grimly, let it flutter free. He watched it fall.
“You saw the Lady Nyx,” he commented. There was neither question nor curiosity in his voice, but she was irritated, at him for seeing a feather fall and thinking of Nyx, mostly at Nyx, for causing the tales that linked her to such small birds. She asked sharply,
“Is there anything else I’ve done that you need to tell me?”
He eyed her, his expression, in the torchlight, hard to read. “You sat for some time on the gutting board of a trapper’s boat,” he said. She stared back at him, impassive. Then she heard something beyond the tower-ring, across the back meadows and pastures: a weave of light and dark beating the air toward the small lake that lay hidden behind the thousand-year-old wood. She knew that sound, had heard that coming every year of her life.
“And you,” she said, “forgot an entire company.”
The spare, crooked smile flickering over his face again, into his eyes, made her smile. “Who?” he demanded. “Who entered or left missed my eye?”
“The wild swans of winter.”
Two
MEGUET stood in the black tower, watching for swans. Her high chambers overlooked the tower ring, household grounds, sea and the city beyond. It was too dark to see anything; there was not a single star in the sky, not even a splash of moonlight on the lake to show her where it lay. But still she stood there, silent, tranquil, feeling them drop toward the water, a great gathering of black and white swans from the far north, who waited, it seemed, for the fiercest winds to ride across Ro Holding. She had never told anyone but the Gatekeeper that she could feel the swans come and go. In that house, with its long, powerful and eccentric history, it seemed an unimportant matter.
She turned away from the window. Her attendants moved quietly through the rooms, clearing away her supper, the bath water, gathering her muddy clothes. No one else lived in the tower; it was used once every three years for the Holding Council. It held Chrysom’s haunted library, just above her, and beneath the tower, the maze where, legend said, his bones were buried. They were guarded, legend said also, by terrifying and awesome beings, whom Meguet and Rush and Nyx had once wasted days trying to find. Such tales clustered around the tower like the thousand-year-old rose vines, making it the most peaceful place in the house. The Holder and her children escaped to Chrysom’s library for quiet and conference; cottagers’ children crept like mice in and out of the exasperating and tantalizing maze. Other than that, no one used it but Meguet and her hardheaded attendants, who feared neither ghosts nor the long spiral climb to the top.
There was a tap at the door; word came that the Holder would see Meguet in Chrysom’s library. Meguet pulled on a long black wool dress that hid the greater part of her oldest boots, and set a braid, Wayfolk-style, to one side of her loose hair. Watching her fingers move in the mirror, she thought of mirrors; Corleu’s face looked back at her, innocent and dangerous and bewilderingly compelling.
She rose, went up the final spiral of stairs. There was wine in Chrysom’s library, and the makings of a fire and a view of the night from every direction through the ring of glass windows that circled the stones. The room still held obscure oddments of Chrysom’s sorcery; Nyx had taken some. It also held Rush Yarr, who had built the fire and was standing at a window with a cup in his hand, looking for stars apparently, but thrown back by the utter dark onto his own reflection in the glass.
“Meguet,” he said, recognizing her long, quick stride before he turned. He was a sinewy man with a lean, restless face. He had hair the color of a blood-fox pelt and the blood fox’s amber eyes without the wash of red in them. His family, who once fought Moro Ro under the sign of the Blood Fox, had perished at sea in one of their own merchant ships. He had been sent to Ro House at an early age, a year after Meguet had come. There, he fell in love with the Holder’s third daughter. The old stones still echoed with their quarrels years before, for she had not told him she was leaving, nor, returned for a visit, would she permit him to travel with her. So, ghostlike, he haunted the room where she had spent most of her time, waiting for her final homecoming, trapped, Meguet thought, unable to love a woman never there, unable to stop loving her.
He poured Meguet wine before asking the question she knew was foremost in his mind.
“Did you find Nyx?”
“Of course I found Nyx,” she answered. “The Holder told me to find her.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well, is it true she is eating small animals alive and gossiping with the dead?”
“She was doing those very things when I walked into her house.” Meguet sipped wine, and leaned her head back to look at Rush, who was pacing the length of the massive hearth. Ravens and gulls perched half out of the stone beneath the mantelpiece; the Cygnet, carved in black marble, flew above the fire. In that room, with its thousand-year-old collection of books and paraphernalia, Nyx had taken up residence as a child, reading constantly, spells seeping into her pale, luminous eyes, while Rush rifled through old jars and boxes, set minor fires and conjured up terrifying images in cloudy mirrors, which Nyx would summarily disperse. Meguet added with more sympathy, “She said she intends to come to the Holding Council.”
“How kind of her.”
“She’s learning things, Rush.”
“Learning what?” He was facing her suddenly, backed by fire and flying birds; something of Chrysom’s had somehow gotten into his hand. “A mean, petty magic—pirates pay her to foresee storms, merchants pay her to foresee one another’s misfortunes. She pays river-scum to bring her half-dead animals. She is Lauro Ro’s daughter. Or at least she was. I don’t know what she’s making herself into now.”
“A mage,” Meguet said simply.
> “I want to talk to her. Where is she?”
Meguet cradled her wine cup in both hands, contemplated the shiver of light across it. Something in her grew alert, as always when Rush was fretting over Nyx. She said calmly, “Nyx is in a house upriver. Any trapper could tell you where. If you really thought she would listen to you now, you would not be standing here talking to me. She is doing what she thinks she must.”
“How can she think—”
“Be patient, Rush.”
“She’s in the Delta backwater, tearing the wings off birds and burning the bones of the dead.” His hand clenched tightly around the thing he held. Meguet, very still, watched needles of firelight dart across it. “None of us knows her anymore. None of us. We saw her last nearly three years ago. For all of five days. And not for two years before that. She is tearing at the Holder’s heart. And mine. And you say be patient.”
Meguet closed her eyes briefly, against the headache that was threatening. “You could simply forget her,” she suggested, not for the first time.
“She could be brought home.”
“No.”
“She belongs here. She could learn her sorcery here like she did when she was young.”
“You weren’t this bitter when she stayed for two years in Berg Hold. Or for a year in Withy Hold. Or in Hunter Hold among the witches.”
“She was learning things of value then, not—”
“How do you know? How do you know what she was learning? Do you think knowledge always lies in safe, clean places where nothing or anyone is disturbed? That you can always learn by daylight and always sleep without dreams afterward?”
“How can you defend her?” It was as much plea as demand; he stood so tensely, waiting for answer, that he might have been something Chrysom carved on the hearth along with the crows. She picked her words with care; if he wanted a quarrel, she thought, he could go find Nyx.
“She has great power, I think, though it’s hardly evident from what she does in the swamp. If she makes mistakes now, she may make great mistakes. But she—”
“Then she may harm herself, along with the swamp life. She should be brought home.”
“Nonsense, Rush, you can’t just walk into her house and—”
“Why not?” Rush demanded. “You did. So can I. So I will.”
“No. You won’t,” she said flatly. “Because you know her too well. You know that she will only love you freely if you let her come back freely. That’s why you are still here, shouting at me instead of her.”
Rush was silent, his jaw clamped. He whirled abruptly, having no other argument but confusion, and flung the thing in his hand into the fire.
They both jumped, he in surprise at what he had done, and Meguet because he had actually done it. She finished the movement on her feet. The fire made an odd, keening wail. She threw herself at Rush, who seemed too surprised to move, and knocked him away from the fire. Black smoke poured out of the hearth, obscuring the flames. Something snapped, and there was a stench that sent them both running to the windows.
They flung a few open before, weeping and choking, they headed up the stairs to the roof. The stones flashed green a moment; the smell followed them up, disgorged itself into the wind.
Meguet leaned on the parapet, wiping her streaming eyes. “I wish,” she said tartly when she could speak again, “you would stop doing that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“One of these days you’ll throw the wrong thing and blow Chrysom’s tower back to the quarries in Hunter Hold.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He leaned against the stones beside her, dragging at the north wind. “It—it tears at me that you can see her, talk to her, and I can’t.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. “I know. But she barely even talked to me. I startled her, I think, coming out of this world into hers… You’ll see her in spring. It’s not that long to winter’s end. Perhaps by then she’ll be out of the swamp, learning something less…dubious.”
“Dubious.” She felt him laugh noiselessly at the word. “There’s nothing dubious about what she’s doing. It’s disgusting.”
“Then how can you love her so? Can’t you love someone else instead?”
“I’ve tried.”
“And?”
“No one else in the world is a lank-haired, cold-eyed, sharp-tongued woman with enough sorcery in her to stand this house on its head.”
“Is there anything at all you like about her?”
“No. Just the smallest finger in each hand, the color that comes into her eyes under a full moon, the way her mouth shapes certain words. My name, for instance. The way she laughs, which she did once, three years ago. A soft, summery chuckle like blackbirds among the rose trees. The way she wears the color green. The way she looks sometimes, like a wild thing listening for another wild thing. The way she reads, as if words are air to be breathed. The way she kissed me when we were barely more than children, out of curiosity, behind the closed doors of the hay barn on the warmest day of the year, and the way she looked at me afterwards, as startled as if she had just invented a world. The way the shadows of the doves flying up into the rafters crossed and recrossed her face…” His hand was between Meguet’s shoulders by then, his fingers working at the knot from the day’s riding. She tilted her head back, loosening muscles, and saw, beyond the curl of the great black pennant whipping above their heads, the full moon revealed with a swan flying across it. She caught her breath; in the next moment the swan had dipped down into darkness and the moon had disappeared.
“I suppose there is no hope for you, Rush Yarr.”
“None.” He paused, added with a shade of reproach in his voice, “I would have ridden with you to see Nyx, but you didn’t tell me you were going.”
“The Holder tells me when to come and go. She didn’t mention you.”
“Must you be so blindly obedient?”
“Always.”
“Because she gave you a home?”
“Because I choose to.”
“She gave me a home, too, and family. I am obedient and respectful, too, but rarely at the same time.”
“You are of Delta blood. You have an archaic desire to rebel against the Holder.”
“And you, descended from Astor Ro, desire to obey the Holder, speak meekly at all times with downcast eyes, and never look out of high windows.”
“Astor Ro may have been afraid of anything not surrounded by high walls, but she fought at Moro Ro’s side during the Hold Wars and she was not afraid to tell him when to change his underwear.”
“How do you know that?”
“I read it in some old chronicle.”
“You never read.”
“I tried, when you and Nyx and Calyx all studied together. I never understood how you could. It made me feel strange.”
He gazed at her curiously, his hand still. “How?”
“As if I had read everything before, and yet I never had. As if I remembered things I never knew…” She shivered suddenly and he dropped his hand. “Let’s go back. The Holder is coming up. I want to see if there’s a library left.”
“What do you think that was?”
“What was?”
“What I threw?”
“I have no idea. Dead, it smelled like. A thousand years dead.”
A silken green pall hung over the library. They opened more windows, let the north wind scour the air, blow the green shade out to sea. Rush, having enchanted away his anger, left Meguet alone to wait for the Holder.
She came finally, near midnight; Meguet heard her footsteps walk into a dream, and she half-woke, trying to rise at the same time. Lauro Ro’s hand at her shoulder kept her still. The Holder crossed to the fire, and picked up a poker to stir the lagging flames. Of all her daughters, Nyx most resembled her, in her dark hair and her movements. The Holder’s hair, wild, night-black, flecked with white, was coiled, braided, pinned into submission every morning; by midnight the Holder’s impatient fingers had fr
eed most of it. She was tall, big-boned, still slender; her eyes were dark as the Cygnet’s wings and her voice could—and did once or twice—carry from the top of Chrysom’s tower clear to the Gatekeeper in his turret beside the gate. She wore blue velvet that night, and rings on every finger, which sent jewelled lights spinning around the walls as she fanned the air under her nose with one hand. Rush Yarr considered her a throwback, in her darkness and strength and fearlessness, to Moro Ro himself.
“Has Rush been breaking things again?” she asked, opening a few more windows, and the damp sea winds danced into the room, waking Meguet further.
“He was upset about Nyx.”
“He is always upset about Nyx. I am upset about Nyx.” She gave the fire a final poke and turned, poured wine. “How is Nyx?” She handed Meguet a cup and sat down finally, near the hearth, with the poker and wood close at hand, for, like Nyx, she loved fires. “Will she come home?”
“She remembered her promise. She will come for the Council.”
“But not before.”
“No.”
The Holder’s mouth tightened. She pulled a pin of gold and pearl out of her hair, shook the falling strand free. Her feet worked out of her velvet slippers at the same time; she sat with her unshod feet on the stones like a cottager while Meguet stretched a worn boot to the fire and added, “I think she only does these things to see that she is able to do them. That’s what matters to her. She’s not destined for a life of petty witchery in the swamps. But this may not be the only strange path she takes.”
“She’s been away most of nine years,” the Holder said incredulously. “How much more of sorcery is there to learn?”
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