Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Meguet was silent. She closed her eyes, feeling the light on her icy face. She could still speak; the horror, a blow falling across a long distance, had not reached her yet. “They said,” she whispered, swallowing the burning in her throat, “you were beautiful.”

  “So I was. So I was.”

  “How—how did we—” But she knew before she asked. She heard the Gatekeeper’s dream-heavy voice: The gate moved. She heard her answer. She opened her eyes, beginning to tremble. The pool of light was empty. A peacock feather watched her from the shadow, then vanished.

  She pushed her face against the stones and wept.

  Six

  IN the shadows, someone touched her. She whirled, breathing hard, back against the stones. She stared at the Gatekeeper through swollen eyes.

  “You left the gate,” she said, stunned. “In broad daylight.”

  “Moro’s eyes,” he said, staring back at her. “You’re weeping in broad daylight.” He reached out, pulled her away from the stones, held her tightly. In the yard behind him, stablehands were staring; faces clustered at the thick glass windows of the cider house. “I watched you cross the yard from Chrysom’s tower in the sunlight. You disappeared under this arch and you didn’t come out.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Who?”

  She pushed against him, hands on his shoulders, to look at him. “Who.” She watched the color drain out of his face. He set his hands flat against the wall on either side of her, leaned against them, not looking at her. “It was my fault,” she added wearily. “I would not let you watch.”

  His head lifted; his back straightened, as if her words were something edged, dangerous, that had touched him unexpectedly. “Then, it was?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes filled again; light blurred into dark around his face. She heard him catch his breath.

  “Meguet…” Then he swung his heavy cloak around her, gathered her into it. “Come with me.”

  She walked with him through the cottages, scarcely seeing the people that gazed, shaken, at the pair of them. He pushed a door open; she sank onto a bench, dropped her face into her hands, trying to think rather than to weep. She heard Hew stirring, hearth-sounds, the snap of fire across kindling.

  She dropped her hands finally, said numbly, “I must tell the Holder.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “There’s no need—”

  “I let trouble in,” he said grimly. “Through my gate, they came. The tinker in his dark house, the Blind Lady—”

  “You know her.” She stared at him. “You know her.”

  “I know them both. I have over enough time to think up there, see pictures in my pipe-smoke and put them together. That tinker rolling across the threshold of this house in his black house with the Gold King scowling on the back door, telling his tales, then vanishing—”

  “You told me. You tried to warn me.”

  “And the Blind Lady. ‘My lady walks on the moon’s road, shod, she is, in peacock feathers, all eyes, she is all eyes, but for her moonstruck eyes.’” He gave a short laugh, not smiling. “A love song, that is.”

  She was wordless, taking in finally the fragile, faded books that stood on oak shelves against the whitewashed walls, the dark, carved furniture with a flower winding down a chair-arm, a leg ending with a cat’s face, both flower and face worn smooth by centuries. Hew poured her wine; she took a swallow; he watched her, the hard lines running along his mouth. He said again, “We’ll go together to the Holder.”

  “Yes.” She set her cup down, her eyes going to the fire. “Soon.”

  “Meguet.”

  “Soon.” She raised her eyes from the fire to his face. “First I have to find them.”

  “Where?” he demanded. “They move in and out of shadows, they’re hardly real—”

  “They’re in this house. They came in through the gate. They’re real enough to have come from somewhere, be somewhere. They know me. I’ve seen them both; they’ve said my name. The household guard might raise the dust looking for them and never notice them.”

  “They’re dangerous.”

  “I only want to find them. I only want to—” Her voice shook suddenly; she folded her hands tightly, steadying herself. “When I tell the Holder that the Blind Lady is in this house, I want to give her something more than just that. Perhaps, if I go quietly, in secret, I might learn what they want here. Why they have come into Ro House. We have to know, Hew. We must know.”

  He closed his eyes, breathed something. She stood up restively. “Do you have a sword?”

  “For what?” he asked. “Skewering the guests?”

  “A knife?”

  “Bread knife.” His eyes opened, withholding expression. “Where will you look? There are people moving constantly up in the towers, down in the cellars, across fields, through cottages, everywhere but Chrysom’s tomb. There’s no place for secrets in this house.”

  “Chrysom’s tomb.” She stopped moving to gaze at him. “The maze beneath the tower.”

  “That’s no secret, either. Every cottage brat old enough to lose front teeth knows how to get into that maze.”

  “And how far do they get?”

  “Never far.”

  “How far did you get?” she challenged him, and saw the flicker of memory in his face.

  “Not past the place where all the rotting strings unwound,” he said. “Seemed no one got past there. Unless you.”

  “No.” She touched the window glass lightly with her fingers, her breath misting the blade-sharp edge of shadow the tower wall laid across the light. “Nyx and Rush and I spent days trying to get past the first few turns. We would turn a corner and wind up walking into a closet, or a pantry. Or a cupboard under a stair. Always through some door we could never find again. As if whatever Chrysom built that maze to guard is too precious, or too terrible, for humans.”

  “Did he build it to guard against a tinker and a beggar woman?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe. Maybe they got no farther than the first few turns. But even that’s a place to hide. The black tower, where so few come.” She turned toward the door. “I’ll get—No. If I take a sword out of the armory, they’ll wonder… I’ll get one off the council chamber wall.”

  “For what?” he asked her tersely. “Tinker doesn’t burn, what makes you think he bleeds?”

  “It makes me feel safer.”

  “Then I’ll carry the bread knife. It’ll be as much protection.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes widening.

  “I’m coming.”

  “You can’t leave the gate.”

  “Am I at the gate?”

  “But, Hew! Who will open and close? What will people think, seeing the turret empty in daylight? They’ll think you died. What will the Holder say?”

  “What will she say to you, going into that dark and lonely place alone?”

  “It’s my business,” she said obstinately.

  “What is? Defending the house? There’s a guard for that. What makes it your business to track danger and power into such a place? Are you a sorcerer yourself?”

  “No,” she snapped. “What business is it of yours to abandon the gate for this?”

  “None of mine. None of yours. So.” He swung the door open. “My lady Meguet, let us get on with it.”

  Only one door in or out of the maze never vanished: one set in the stone wall behind the dais in the ancient council chamber where Moro Ro had claimed, in the Sign of the Cygnet, all Ro Holding. As usual, the chamber, which took up the entire ground floor of the black tower, was empty. The banners of Hunter Hold and Withy Hold had been hung; the silver and gold thread winked in the morning light. The vast banner of Ro Holding hung behind the dais, hiding the door, so fragile and old that black swan melted into blue-black night, and only the tarnished threads depicting the stars of the Cygnet in flight seemed to hold the darkness together.

  Hew took a torch from the stairway; Meguet chose a sword from the wall of ceremonial swords
forged for each Holder, and then held the Cygnet away from the wall until, bending, Hew had carried the fire safely through the small door. She let it fall behind her and entered. Fire ran down the steps ahead of them, nibbled at an ancient dark. She smelled earth, stones, but no wood fires, no lingering odors of cooking. She heard nothing.

  Hew, moving down the steps ahead of her, stopped at the foot of the stairs. She whispered,

  “What is it?”

  “I was only remembering what all the younglings hope to find but are terrified of finding: the fearsome beings, the guardians of Chrysom’s tomb. Do you think there’s truth to that?”

  “Why not? The stars are falling out of the sky and turning into tinkers. If we ever find the center of the maze, I suppose we’ll know.”

  “Maybe it’s a Ring of Time, the center. Chrysom walked out of Ro Holding into past or future.”

  She was silent, hovering at his shoulder, watching gryphons, dragons, hawks, lions, shrug themselves out of the marble walls of the maze. Under torch fire, they raged silently, bidding the trespasser beware. “Why?” she wondered, forgetting to whisper. “All this for his own tomb? What is he still guarding after a thousand years? Are a mage’s bones so precious? Do they turn to gold?”

  “I’ve never heard such.” He took a step, then stopped, handed the torch to Meguet. “You lead.”

  “Why? Neither of us is likely to wind up anywhere but in a pantry somewhere, interrupting a cook’s apprentice and a scullery boy kissing.”

  “You’re the one bearing arms,” he said wryly, and, edgy as she was, she almost laughed. She moved; he followed her. Walls broke between passageways; she slipped at random between them. Passageways split, forked away into the silence, forced her to choose between one shadow and another. She chose thoughtlessly, according to the glint of light in a gryphon’s eye, the gesture of a lion’s paw. At any moment, she expected, the walls would subtly shift, dissolve and simply vanish into the dark. A door in front of them would open to some tower or another; they would emerge under a stairway, trailing cobwebs and blinking at the light. The small door, closing, would melt into wood or stone around it. But the walls held longer than she would have believed. Hew walked quietly beside her, watching the dark beyond the edge of light around them, sometimes watching her. He said once, softly:

  “They’d never have gone this deep, surely?”

  “I don’t know.” She added after a moment, “I’ve never come this far myself.”

  “I doubt anyone has.”

  “Why?”

  “No threads left, no candle nubs, no smoke marks on the walls or on the floor…”

  “It must run underground even past the tower ring. We’ve been walking forever, it seems.”

  “Into or out of forever.”

  She looked at him, surprised. “Do you mean like the thousand-year-old wood? Part real, part dream?”

  “No. Well, maybe, or partly a different time. Or a slower time. In our own time, the House time, the maze never goes beyond the tower ring. But in a different time, it is vast and the center can be reached.”

  “And the House?” she asked, startled and intrigued by the intricate turn of his thoughts.

  “Ro House does not exist now.”

  “Or the gate?”

  He smiled a little. “Perhaps the gate. But open or closed? And who watches?”

  A tongue of gold fire dropped out of a lion’s mouth and fell, burning, at Meguet’s feet.

  She whirled, the torch outstretched, spinning a circle around her. She saw no one. A coiled snake of fire dropped out of a hawk’s talon; a gold eye rolled from a gryphon’s face, spilled fire on the floor. She drew her sword, circled again, her eyes wide, both torch and blade probing the empty dark. More fire fell, ringing them both with gold, she saw in horror. “Hew!” she cried, losing him as he circled at her back. He swung his heavy cloak around her suddenly, and gripped her, swept her off her feet. She struggled instinctively, desperately, hating to be bound, needing freedom to move, to fight. The torch slipped dangerously close to his face. He flinched back, gasping. But he kept his grim hold; he lifted her, tossed her away from him over the burning ring of gold. She lost her balance, tangled and weighted in sheepskin; she stumbled to her hands and knees. Turning, she saw only a tower of gold.

  She whispered, “Hew.” Within the fire something shaped: a woman clothed in stars and night, stars clinging to her black hair, her beautiful face moon-pale, her blind eyes closed. She lifted her hands, pulled a glowing thread taut between them until, under the lick of fire, it began to fray.

  Meguet screamed his name. A small dark wagon with a roof of light and a lintel of light rolled through the flames. Its door opened. She saw the Gatekeeper of Ro House rise amid the flames. He walked away from her for a long time, it seemed, or into a different time, while the door in the black house opened slowly, revealing a starlit dark.

  Meguet rolled to her feet, flung herself, eyes closed, through the fire. She careened into Hew, knocking him off his relentless path. Groping for balance, he caught at her, dragged her down under him as he fell. She pushed at him desperately, winded; sagging against her, his hand on her shoulder, his arm across her hair, he gave her no help. She edged out from under him finally. When she dragged his arm off her hair, it fell back laxly against the floor. He did not move.

  Pulling herself to her knees beside him, reaching out to him in bewilderment, she saw the blood on the knife in his hand.

  A sound came out of her, echoed off the corners of the maze in a harsh, terrible tangle. Laughter wove into her cry. Lifting her head, she finally saw the Gold King.

  He stood within the fire. He wore armor hammered of gold; his hair and eyes and the seven-starred crown on his head were gold. Only his laughing mouth was dark, a hollow that might open into another world, another time, and she knew he laughed at her because she did not know, seeing him, if she knelt beside death or dream. In sudden fury, she pulled the knife from Hew’s hand, flung it with deadly accuracy into the Gold King’s open mouth.

  A darkness burst out of the tinker-king, flooded the walls, buried flame and torch fire until she could see only the barest, silvery outline of stone animals in the wall. She got to her feet and ran.

  The stones began to come alive under the strange glow. A hawk cried; a gryphon shifted a wing; a dragon pointed her path with an upraised claw. She ran without hesitating, not even considering choice, and as she wound deeper into the maze she realized, chilled, that she recognized the path she took.

  I have walked this before, she thought, prickling with terror, knowing it was not true. But, as memory guided her, she made choices: right at the gryphon’s snarl, left at the lion’s roar, between walls at the graceful shift of a unicorn’s horn. Who sees out of my eyes? Who walked this before me? Whose memories have I inherited? And then, rounding a corner beneath a dragon’s outspread wing, she knew that she had shifted into a different time.

  That was why the stones moved, she realized; in her own life they might have spent a century lowering an eyelid. She swallowed drily, trembling, sensing movement around her from those that dwelled in the dark of this time. Walking into a small, circular chamber, she caught glimpses of colored horn, of fur, of rich cloth, of sword blades so massive she could not have lifted them. Here were the huge and terrible creatures of legend white-toothed, masked, prowling at the edge of an eerie, silver-green glow that came from a globe hanging over a black effigy and tomb. Chrysom’s tomb, she thought in horror, but its guardians recognized something in her and let her pass among them. As she stepped beyond time, she stepped beyond wonder, beyond terror, beyond any thought of her own. She gazed at the effigy; then the globe above it dragged at her eyes. Staring into it, she saw back along her own history: a past full of names of those born to see, to watch, hers among them, though at that moment she could not remember which was hers.

  The tomb faded into its own moment; the globe changed shape.

  A huge, faceted crystal, suspended
from nothing upon nothing, glowed like a moon at the center of the maze. Its facets blazed with a white light that slowly faded, until, blinking away splinters of light, she could see the black swan flying in every plane. The swans faded; faces began to appear within the globe, of men and women she should not have recognized but did: Rydel the gardener; the mage Ais; Tries, physician to Jain Ro; the Lady Seine, historian and poet; Paro Ro’s horse trainer Jhen; Eleria Ro’s cousin Shadox; all of them descendants of Astor Ro, all secret guardians of the Cygnet. She saw her own face last, broad-boned, green-eyed, and then realized, from the pearls braided into the long hair, and the darker, straighter brows, that she looked at Astor Ro.

  Motionless, submerged in her heritage, she felt no surprise. The face within the crystal spoke:

  “Who are you?”

  She answered, her voice expressionless, a dreamer’s voice. “I am Meguet Vervaine.”

  “Why were you born?”

  The answer, like her movement to the heart of the maze, came without hesitation. “I was born to serve the Cygnet.”

  “To what are you sworn?”

  “To guard the Cygnet. With my life. For all of my days. Beyond my days and my life.”

  “You will walk in the Cygnet’s eye. You will guard. You will defend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Our memories are yours, our eyes are yours. Your heart is ours and your body and the strength of your hand.”

  “Yes.”

  “Our gifts are yours. Our experience is yours. We will guide you, watch with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will obey us.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why have you come here?”

  “The Cygnet is in danger.”

  “What must you do?”

  She felt an ancient rage within her, honed thin and sharp as the mage-forged blades she sometimes practiced with. She said, “I will seek the danger to the Cygnet. I will hunt it down. I will destroy it. For this we were born.”