Cygnet
Page 20
“With Rush Yarrow?”
“No. With an armed guard. I want that Wayfolk man. He’s the one who can answer questions.”
“When will you leave?”
“At dawn.”
“So,” he said, meeting her eyes. “Meguet.”
A swan wing, glistening, crossed her mind. She said, “Midnight.”
She rode across the yard the next morning with twenty of the household guard behind her, all in black, with a black, silken pennant flying overhead. The Gatekeeper, crossing in front of her to open the gate, looked up at her briefly. She saw night in his eyes, swamp leaves, secret, wind-stirred pools. His thoughts dragged at her; she closed her eyes, set her face resolutely toward the gate. Behind her eyes were moving, fire-edged shadows. A silver goblet spilled wine over white fur. She heard the gate open. She rode forward mechanically, her eyes on the road between the gateposts, where the Gatekeeper, moving, laid his shadow across her path.
Slowed as they were by spring-swollen ground, by water flooded with storm-pushed tides and snow melting in the upper lands, they reached Nyx’s house at mid-morning two days later. It looked more shrunken than mysterious in the spring light. Vines tugged at it here and there, threatening to encroach beneath a window sash, to pull off a corner beam. A motley gathering of old boats set the company on the dock. Meguet took two guards with her; they climbed the stairs cautiously.
Nyx came out to meet them on the porch. She looked dishevelled, dressed in threadbare velvet; her long dark hair fell untidily past her waist. Her face was pale, lean, smudged with tiredness and what looked like old ashes. She said, frowning:
“Meguet.” She cast a glance at the group on the dock, and her frown grew pinched. “If you’ve come for me, that’s far too many for courtesy, and far too few to do any good. I told you I would return home in spring.”
“If I had come for you,” Meguet said evenly, “I would have come alone. And unarmed. I have come for the Wayfolk man.”
“Why?”
“The Holder wishes to see him.”
“The Wayfolk man is gone.”
“Gone where?”
“He stepped through his circle of time. He might have gone anywhere.”
“He might have.” Nyx’s colorless eyes met hers, expressionless. “He might have gone upriver. He might have gone into a room in this rambling, changing, shifting house. He might have—”
Nyx’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know this house shifts itself?”
“I came back to spy on you.”
“Really.” She drew breath. “Really, Meguet. You do take chances. Did it ever occur to you that wandering around in a bog witch’s house might be dangerous?”
“Has it occurred to you yet that the Wayfolk man is dangerous? I came back that night when I saw you last, for only one reason: I looked at him and was warned.”
Nyx was silent. She pushed her hair back from her face absently, studying Meguet. “You never even spoke to him.”
“I know.”
“You saw him last in Berg Hold. He told me.”
“Yes. I came for him then. He disappeared into silver.”
“That was the Ring of Time. He stepped through it again two days ago. I cannot tell you where he went.”
“And why did he leave you so precipitously?”
“He is only Wayfolk,” Nyx said. “My work must have troubled him.”
“He stayed with you a long time before it troubled him.”
“Did my mother instruct you to question me?”
“She instructed me to find Corleu. I will find him.”
Nyx’s eyes flickered, a touch of color in them. “You even know his name.”
“Yes.”
“He is Wayfolk. Powerless.”
“He made a Ring of Time. He wakes power wherever he goes. And those powers are disturbing Ro House. I want him. Let me search the house.”
Nyx did not move. She said softly, “Meguet. You must not stand between the Wayfolk man and those powers.”
“Someone must,” Meguet said tautly. “Will you? Where do you stand? With the Wayfolk man, with those powers, or with Ro House?”
“I stand for myself,” Nyx said sharply and stood aside.
Meguet beckoned the guard up from the dock. She went first into the house. When she passed through the hallway, she heard Nyx’s cold voice behind her: “Stop.”
She held one arm across the door. Meguet waited, poised for anything from Nyx: charm, nightmare, a moment’s private conversation. Nyx spoke privately to the air. “These belong to the woman who entered. You will not harm them.”
She dropped her arm, turned away, letting the guards enter. Meguet’s skin prickled. “Who were you talking to?”
“My doorkeepers. They guard me, day and night. They never sleep. No one passes them without my permission.” She put her hands on Meguet’s shoulders, held her lightly. Her eyes seemed enormous, mist-cold. “Except you, my cousin Meguet. Except you. I have often wondered why.” She loosed her, as the guard, taking the stairs cautiously, began to file in. “Search.”
“The rooms in the house shift constantly,” Meguet said to the guard. “Don’t let it alarm you. If you get lost, you will be found.”
“By what?” someone wondered dourly.
“I will find you.” Nyx glanced at her sharply. She said no more, led the way through the single door opening out of the workroom. The hearth had been cold, she noticed, empty even of ashes. The air smelled only of a slight cellar damp. Nyx, she thought, is leaving. The guard separated, opened other doors, scattered themselves through rambling corridors, where the threads of time frayed and broke and knit again. Meguet wandered with them until she was alone, in a room empty but for a great loom, the thread in the shuttle a color not used before.
She opened the only door in that room, wanting one room, expecting one room, and found it: the room full of mirrors. She felt a sudden chill down the corridor, like a wind from a broken window, or the swift turn of a sorceress’s attention. She closed the door abruptly. All the mirrors were black.
“Meguet!” The door latch rattled, the door shook. “Meguet!”
She did not answer. Standing in the middle of the room, she watched the mirrors. All her thoughts were focused on one thing. The house heard her, showed it to her: the Cygnet in flight in all of its eyes.
They darkened again. Corleu, she thought, holding his face in her mind. You saw where he went from this house. You heard. Show me.
Others watched in her; she sensed their sudden waking interest, alert to her focused attention. They had watched him from the first, she realized then, before she even knew them. They had pulled her back into Nyx’s house, to hear his voice, listen for his name. The Wayfolk man was the danger to the Cygnet.
Fire flared in the heart of each dark mirror. A hand held the fire. The flame moved slowly, revealed a slab of marble, a lion’s paw, a gryphon’s eye. The flame shifted across the mirrors, across the dark between walls. Travelling, it illumined, briefly, a Wayfolk face.
“Meguet!” There was a shock of noise that should have broken the door. But Meguet, intent on the mirrors, held the door firm with nothing more, it seemed, than blind desire, and the old house strained to do her bidding. The blood had washed from her face; she could not move, she could scarcely breathe. The Wayfolk man had stepped through time into Chrysom’s maze.
The mirrors shook around her. The walls of the room shuddered, undulated. She whispered drily, “Not yet. Not yet,” and they held, as if the hands of all the ghosts of her ancestors stood with the ghosts of the house to buttress them.
Faces formed under the flickering light: brightly masked, half-human, half-animal. The flame moved from one carved, motionless face to the next. Meguet put her hands to her mouth, made a sound, another. He had found his way to the center of the maze.
“How?” she shouted furiously, and found no answer within herself, only a strange, watchful silence. “How?”
“Meguet!”
He stood in the dark, surrounded by statues, in the small, empty chamber that all passages but one led away from. He had found the one passage. But he could not breach time itself. He turned in the dark, she saw from the changing light, like one uncertain. “He cannot,” she whispered through dry lips. “He cannot go within time.” The door bucked, throwing her. “Nyx!” she cried, still watching, as she picked herself up. “Nyx!”
“Meguet!”
She clung to the door again, felt a thousand years of power within her shielding the door to watch Corleu. “Who is he? Nyx, who is the Wayfolk man?”
“He said he is kin!”
“Kin to what?”
“To you! Meguet, what are you?”
Meguet closed her eyes. The door exploded inward with a sound like all the sorrows of the house. It flung her against a mirror, and then into the mirror. For an instant she saw room after room in the overburdened house torn by the conflict of powers in it. Walls and corners drew together, flattening; walls shrank. Ghosts thinned like spun thread. Guards tumbled, crying out soundlessly, terrified. Then they merged into wood, into warped glass. Meguet screamed, “No!” She felt glass against her mouth, glass tears falling from her eyes. Then the glass itself spun and spun toward nothing. Dimly, she heard it shatter.
She sat up slowly, amid an odd debris: a few rotten boards, a pink shoe, a pair of spectacles, a broken cauldron. She was sitting on bare, muddy ground where the house had stood. As if they felt the weight of her gaze, the ancient stairs gave up their hold on the leafless shrubs, slid with a dry clatter, like a pile of old bones, onto the dock. The drowned ghost stood up in her boat, staring upward under her hand. She vanished quite suddenly. So, inexplicably, did her boat. Guards in torn, mud-streaked uniforms pulled themselves upright, looking sour. Nyx, surrounded by a pile of old books and some broken jars, stirred near Meguet. She turned on her side, wincing. A book slid down the hillside, hit the river and floated.
She followed it a moment with her eyes. “Chrysom’s,” she said wearily. “They are indestructible.” She sat up, brushed old leaves out of her hair, then surveyed the destruction she and Meguet had wrought between them. She turned her head finally to stare at her cousin. “What exactly are you?”
Meguet slid her hands over her face, as much to evade that sudden, intense scrutiny, as to try to contain the headache that was rioting behind her eyes. “Desperate.” Her voice shook badly. “Nyx, what is the Wayfolk man doing in Chrysom’s maze?”
“Looking for something.”
Meguet dropped her hands, feeling the thousand-year-old fear like some icy wind, blowing off a place the sun never touched. Nyx’s eyes, catching at hers, seemed the color of that wind. “Looking for what?” she asked sharply.
The force of Nyx’s attention lessened finally. “He never told me. He is under duress not to tell. Something of Chrysom’s, I would guess, of great, secret power he may have hidden in the maze. Except that…”
“Except?”
“Not even Chrysom had power like yours,” Nyx said simply. Meguet, staring back at her, felt the chill again: this time, oddly, not an ancient fear for the Cygnet, but one a small night-hunter might feel for its bones, at owl wings darkening the moon. She got up too abruptly, had to quell the brawling in her head.
“It was only your power,” she said recklessly, “seeped into that crazed old house. I could not cast a spell of my own to save my life.” She counted heads swiftly, saw with relief that no one had been rendered into glass and framed. She held out a hand to Nyx. “We’re getting no farther than nowhere, sitting in the mud.”
For a moment it seemed the hand grasping hers was of stone, and the weight she pulled at was the stone-tortoise’s ponderous, time-burdened shell. “There are two things of great power in Ro House that I never knew existed,” Nyx said softly. “One is hidden in that maze. The other is you. If you will not tell me, Meguet, I will find out what you know, how you know it. One way or another, I will find out.”
White, mute, she set her teeth, pulled against Nyx’s grasp. Nyx, rising suddenly, nearly sent them both tumbling down the hillside. “Please.” She freed herself from Nyx’s hold. Her fists were clenched; the river blurred. “Please,” she whispered. “Just come home. Help us.”
The Gatekeeper found them a day or two later, trailing the twilight into the gate, a bedraggled company that caused him to lose his habitual impassivity.
“Lady Nyx,” he said, helping her dismount from behind Meguet. “Welcome.” Nyx, barefoot as the house had left her, grunted sourly as her foot hit a stone.
“Hew,” she said. She gestured a stableboy toward the great sack of books another rider carried. Then she folded her arms over her worn, archaic, velvet gown and surveyed the towers. “At least the house is still standing.”
The Gatekeeper held Meguet’s stirrup. She dismounted wearily, her face stiff. She could not smile at him; she could not even speak, until he touched her gently, as to help balance her, and then she could look at him, let him calculate the impossible distance the hand’s-breadth between them was. His hand rose toward her cheek, cupped air, dropped.
“You had a rough journey,” he breathed. She nodded, looking away from him until she could answer steadily.
“It isn’t over yet. Did the Hunter Hold Council arrive?”
“Not a sign of them. They’ll be a few days crossing the swamp. Lady Nyx, do you want a mount to ride to the towers?”
She shook her head. “I’d rather crawl, after that ride. I’m used to walking barefoot.” She took a step and stumbled, grasping at Meguet to keep her balance. Brows pinched in pain, she turned up a dirty foot. Blood welled across it.
She eased down, still clinging to Meguet, and picked up the glass she had stepped on. “What is this?” she asked, and Meguet tensed at the sharpness in her voice.
She took it from Nyx; red, it was, with curved, jagged edges. “It looks like part of a glass cup,” she said, puzzled. “A hollow ball of some kind. Why—”
“One of the juggler’s,” the Gatekeeper said shortly. “I missed it, lying there. I beg your pardon, my—”
“What juggler?” Nyx interrupted. Meguet stared at him.
“You let a stranger in the gate?”
“Not that I know,” he said, and she saw how his eyes had darkened with weariness, and the skin hugged the sharp bones of his face. “Unless he slid like a shadow under the gate. I took him for a cottager, juggling for the children. Smith, by the look of his shoulders.”
“You don’t know him,” she whispered, cold. “You don’t know his name.”
He hesitated. He put his hand to his eyes and said tiredly, “I never saw his face. Only his back and his juggling. Always those red glass balls. If he is a stranger, I don’t know how he got in.”
“You said it: a shadow under the gate.” Nyx took the glass from Meguet, dropped it. It shattered into fine sand, lay sparkling in the torchlight. “He is no stranger,” she said grimly. “He’s the Warlock with a heart of glass, and he has just laid blood across this threshold.”
Three
CORLEU sat in the center of the maze. The mage-fire he had made and carried through time into the maze burnt on bare stone in front of him. Other fires he had not made lit the strange statues circling him. Their eyes, slitted like goat or cat, painted unexpected colors, seemed to watch him.
The Dancer leaned among them, sometimes putting on one of their nightmare faces. The tinker sat next to Corleu, sharing bread and cheese, or providing it from somewhere, since he ate little but a bread crumb now and then. The Blind Lady sat mumbling names to herself, weaving from an underskirt of muddy linen. The juggler paced. Sometimes his shadow, pacing over Corleu, was the Blood Fox’s.
“It’s here,” the tinker said patiently. He broke more bread off a loaf, p
assed it to Corleu. “I can feel it.”
“Thread ends here,” the Blind Lady said. She cocked her head at some mysterious trembling in time, and found a dangling thread in her sleeve. She snapped it abruptly; Corleu jerked. “Time, for that one.”
“I can smell it,” the Warlock said, standing over Corleu. He dropped his hands on Corleu’s shoulders, and sniffed at the air above the fire. “Mage-fire,” he said.
“I made it.”
“I know. But who taught you?”
“My great-gran,” he said recklessly, and the Warlock grinned his fox’s grin.
“Great-gran taught you to make the Ring of Time,” the Dancer said. She turned a scarlet face to him among the shadows, with gold-rimmed eyes and delicate gold cat’s ears. She settled her long, lissome body along a statue. “I heard Great-gran’s dreams. I danced in them. White-haired man among the corn she dreamed, now and then, all her life. Her last dream was of green corn. I was kind to Great-gran. She never dreamed the Ring of Time.”
“She was Wayfolk,” the Blind Lady said, chuckling. “They see into time in little toad hops. A morsel of future here, there. Never great daylong strides of it.”
“Did Great-gran teach you to make my heart?” the Warlock marvelled. His fingers dug painfully into Corleu’s shoulders, then let go suddenly. He paced again. Corleu chewed stolidly, his mouth dry.
“Great-gran,” he said, swallowing with an effort, “had odd talents.”
“You take after her, then,” the tinker said, passing him a water skin. “Thirsty? What other talents did Great-gran have?”
“She could read. She gave my granda books. Odd books, with odd things in them.”
“Many odd things,” the Warlock agreed, turning noiselessly on bare feet. “A wizard’s blood in amber, for instance,” Corleu, tilting the water skin, lowered it without drinking. He met the Warlock’s eyes a moment; they were smoky amber red. He lifted the skin again, drank.
“You owe me,” he said shortly. “You all do. I promised to find what I would find, not loose you into the world.”