Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You haven’t found it,” the tinker commented, carving a sliver of cheese with his knife.

  “I’m near enough. I found the place.”

  “We found it before you.”

  He was silent, swallowing bitterness with his bread. “So,” he said to the tinker, “you knew this place all along. You only needed me to wake your friends. If you know so much, you don’t need me now. You can find the Cygnet’s heart by yourself.”

  Hissing, the Warlock was behind him again, one hand over his mouth, the other tightening over his throat. The tinker put a finger to his lips.

  “Things listen, in here.”

  Corleu heard only the blood drumming in his ears. The Warlock loosed him finally; he sagged forward, blinking, until the darkening fire burned bright again.

  “I made your heart,” he said hoarsely. “You said you would be grateful.”

  “I smell a trap,” the Warlock growled. “I smell sorcery.”

  “What sorcery could stand up to you when I find this thing for you?”

  “What sorcery?” the tinker said genially. “You can answer that one.” Corleu picked up bread silently. “You won’t answer.” He cocked a brow at the Dancer. “What sorcerers have been dreaming of this thing we want?”

  She discarded her mask, let her face flow into various faces. Nyx’s face came and went quickly; Corleu froze mid-bite, then chewed again, expressionless. “None dreaming,” the Dancer said, “not of this.”

  “Of him?”

  “Only one,” she said smiling, “still dreaming. Like me, before you woke me.” She wore Tiel’s face. Corleu caught his breath on a bread crumb.

  “Easy,” the tinker said, pounding on his back, handing him the water.

  “I told—I told no one.”

  “Not even Great-gran? Not even whispered to her grave? Not even to a green stalk of corn?”

  “No one.”

  “Then who taught you?” the Warlock demanded. “Whose sorcery brought us awake?”

  “You wanted that,” Corleu said tersely. “You wanted freedom. I couldn’t do it without learning somewhere, from someone. You said find it. I chose how.”

  “Silver Ring of Time is a powerful magic.”

  “So are you. I couldn’t free things of power without power.”

  “What did you pay this teacher?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you promise?”

  “What does it matter?” he said. “It’s my promise, my payment. Nothing to do with you.”

  They were silent, looking at one another, even the Blind Lady, casting about with her fallen eyes.

  “He paid for sorcery,” the tinker said, “with nothing we need worry about.” He cocked a brow around the chamber, then regarded Corleu, hand rasping at the dark stubble on his cheeks.

  “What would Wayfolk pay with?” the Dancer asked. “All they own is time.”

  “A man searching for treasure could promise that in payment,” the Warlock said, prowling the edge of the light. His eyes flared at Corleu. “Did you?” Corleu stared back at him. He turned to the tinker.

  “You didn’t pay me for this,” he said. The Warlock snarled beyond the fire, then barked the Blood Fox’s attack, and he felt the cold sweat break on his face. But he kept his eyes steady on the tinker, who smiled a faint, thin smile.

  “Wayfolk. Always one for a bargain.” He waved a remonstrating hand at the Warlock. “You should be a little grateful.”

  “I’ll be grateful,” the Warlock said with a snap of teeth, “when he finds this.”

  “You owe me,” Corleu said baldly, “not just tinker, you all do.” He reached for the knife, his hand trembling in the shadows. “You told me ask for myself.”

  The Warlock, snarling, leaped over the fire. Corleu jumped to his feet, the knife in his hand. A blood fox’s weight crashed against him, bore him back against one of the statues. Its orange lizard’s face smiled over his shoulder, its cloven hand pushed into his backbone. The knife burned like a coal in his hand; he dropped it, crying out, and heard it shatter like glass on the stones. A blood fox’s eyes looked into his, feral, furious.

  “You alone in this. Not with some faceless mage behind you. Who is it?”

  The tinker chuckled. “Don’t eat him. We need him yet. Who, Corleu?”

  “You may not need to know.” He stopped, catching his breath; the Blood Fox eyes still glared into his, all he could see. “Ever. How could—how could anyone threaten you, once you have it?”

  The Dancer pirouetted along the statues, turning herself gracefully from embrace to embrace until she brought herself against Corleu. She put her hand on his hair, murmured against his mouth, “But how will we know who to protect, if we are threatened?” Her face became green suddenly, with fierce blue oval eyes and a sharp raven’s beak. He jerked his head back, banged it against the stones. She laughed.

  “Pass the knife,” the tinker asked politely, “if you’re done with it.”

  The Warlock loosed Corleu slowly. He bent, growling, picked up shards of glass and flung them to the tinker. They reshaped in the air; the tinker picked the knife out of it, cut more cheese.

  The Dancer turned across Corleu, continued her dance. Corleu slid down to the feet of the statue, closed his eyes.

  “Now,” he heard the tinker say, “let’s begin again. You want something more for your pains. For the worry and trouble. That seems fair. We told you you might want more. But here is the point we stick at, Corleu. There’s the small matter of the thing itself.” He cocked an eye up at the painted Cygnet flying across the small round ceiling, then down at the floor. “Even Wayfolk know not to barter with air. You find this small thing. Then ask.”

  Corleu looked at him, wondering if any Wayfolk in all history had ever strayed down such a mysterious path to end sitting in the dark beneath the Holder’s house, surrounded by tales come alive and speaking. He said slowly, “You knew this place before I did. Why do you need me now? You gave me pieces of the puzzle. Is that all the pieces you have? If it’s not here, I don’t know where to look. I don’t have your magic. You could find it easily as me, now.”

  “It’s here,” the Blind Lady murmured, and snapped another thread absently. The tinker’s yellow eyes smiled their faint, glinting smile.

  “Another fine point. But so easily answered, you answer.”

  “You can’t find it without me.” He shook his head, bewildered, as the tinker’s smile broadened. “I’m Wayfolk,” he protested. “That means back roads, herb magic, no corners. Ignorance, field dirt, living and dying in a wagon. I’m nothing. If you want me for more than my feet and hands, there’s little to find. Why me? Why me to find it?” They were silent. The tinker gazed into the fire; the Dancer beside a statue imitated its distant stare. The Blind Lady picked at thread; the Warlock picked a red glass ball out of a gryphon’s mouth, set it flaming in a niche in the wall. Corleu’s hands closed tightly. “You do need me,” he breathed. “So I have more than air to barter with.” The Warlock’s face flashed toward him, snarling, but noiselessly, and he did not move. The tinker picked his teeth thoughtfully with the knife.

  “It’s an unusual position to bargain from. You alone can find this thing. But you don’t know how to get at it.”

  “Hear him,” the Dancer murmured. “It costs nothing. And it may amuse.” She strayed to Corleu, traced his ear with her thumb. “What more does the Wayfolk man want? A house? A palace?”

  “I don’t like walls.”

  “Wealth?”

  “Wayfolk can’t count. They use coins for buttons.”

  “A sorcerer’s power?”

  “I’ve had a bellyful of sorcery.”

  “Knowledge?”

  “I’m getting that, just breathing.”

  “Then what, Corleu?” the tinker asked. His smile was gone; his voice had thinned. He tossed the knife in the air, caught it. For a moment, wheeling in the firelight, it turned gold. Corleu’s hands clenched; he looked at them blindly
, testing the demand silently, against the straight doorposts and towers, the safety of the ancient house above his head.

  “I want,” he said, “a promise. That no harm will come to the one who helped me, or to her house, or to any who know her name.”

  There was dead silence from the gathering he had wakened; they gazed at him, remote and eerie as the statues around him.

  Behind him, the statue he leaned against seemed to shift.

  Meguet and Nyx entered Chrysom’s tower. Nyx had paused to heal her foot, standing in the middle of the yard, with one hand on Meguet’s arm. No one greeted her; no one stared; no one, Meguet found bemusedly, noticed either of them. Then she saw the yard as from another angle, a world without them, and she said, feeling an odd mingling of uneasiness and freedom:

  “Have you made us invisible?”

  “For a moment,” Nyx answered absently. “Just until we reach Chrysom’s tower. I have things to do; I don’t want to be distracted.”

  “You will see the Holder first.”

  “No.”

  Meguet caught her breath. “Nyx, she has waited years!” Nyx’s grip on her tightened slightly; she stared down at the dark head, hair swept impatiently behind one ear, what she could see of the pale, lean face quiet, absorbed in work. Nyx answered finally:

  “She will be here when I have finished. If I don’t begin, neither she nor I may be here in the end.”

  “And if you don’t return from the maze? You will not go to her first, even to let her see your face? Nyx Ro, that is cruel.”

  Nyx straightened, tested her foot on the bare ground. “I haven’t your warmth,” she said, “which you extend so unexpectedly. Even to Gatekeepers, apparently. Even to me.” She added, at Meguet’s silence, the ghost of a smile touching her mouth, “Hew, I can understand. But you use so carelessly, at times, something that to me is simply another source of power.”

  “Love?” She felt the blood in her face, a confusion of anger and helplessness, as if she were without arms or armor in some vital battle. But the word touched Nyx; her eyes flickered, following a thought.

  “Not even Chrysom suggested that as a source of power,” she commented. “It’s an interesting thought. I only meant that you allow yourself to be distracted by so many small things. To focus power you must first focus your attention.”

  “I am,” Meguet said shortly. “It’s all in that maze. If you are finished.”

  “First I must go to Chrysom’s library.”

  “Moro’s eyes! We have no time! If you haven’t learned it by now, you don’t need it.”

  “But I do.” She looked at Meguet, her eyes distant, unreadable. “There is something vital in that library. I will need it in the maze. It may save our lives.”

  Meguet hesitated. Her attention drained inward, to the still, secret place where a great prism hung in darkness. She sensed disturbance in a layer of time around it, but, so far, it was itself undisturbed.

  “All right,” she said tensely. “But hurry.”

  In the library, she paced, picking bog leaf out of her hair and rebraiding it. Nyx searched through books, letting pages dance through her fingers, a mysterious task which spun Meguet’s calm to a fine, frayed thread.

  “Nyx,” she breathed. “We must go.” Nyx did not answer. She closed a book, opened another. Meguet closed her eyes, turned on her heel. Her hands fell to her sides, clenched. She forced them open. Nothing had happened, yet. Nothing, yet… “Nyx.”

  “Be patient,” Nyx murmured. “In matters of sorcery there’s nothing more dangerous than haste.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A puzzle piece.”

  Meguet drew breath, held it. She listened to the silence a few more minutes. Then she wheeled, went to the door, opened it. She got Nyx’s attention then.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Down. Catch up with me.”

  “Wait, Meguet. Please wait. We may lose each other in the maze.”

  “Will you at least let me send word to the Holder?”

  “The guards must have told her by now.” She waited, her eyes on Meguet, looking faintly troubled, until Meguet’s hold on the latch loosened. She resumed reading. Meguet stood gazing at the half-open door. She closed it finally, leaned against it, head and shoulder against the wood as if she might hear voices from far below carried upward through the ancient stones.

  “Rydel.” Nyx’s flat voice nearly made her start. She closed a book sharply. “Secret powers. Powers not to be known. To be used only for Ro Holding.” Meguet turned incredulously to face her. “Rydel,” Nyx reminded her, “was your ancestor. Chrysom himself, Timor Ro said, stood in her shadow.” She took a step toward Meguet, her eyes wide, speculative. “The enormous powers of the mage Chrysom were overshadowed by the powers of Timor Ro’s eccentric gardener. That’s how you could walk past my doorkeepers.”

  “Your doorkeepers,” Meguet whispered. Then she heard herself shout, an unfamiliar sound. “Nyx, what are you doing wasting time reading about gardening? This house is in danger!”

  “Gardening is not at issue, and the acquisition of knowledge is never a waste of time. You stood against me in my house. You. My cousin Meguet, who could never find your way through a book, let alone a spell. I want to know how. I want to know before we go into the maze. I want to take this thing Corleu is searching for, and I need power. Power like Rydel’s. Like yours.”

  Meguet stared at her, stunned. She whirled abruptly. “You stay and look for it, then. I’m going down.” She wrenched the door so hard it should have swung back to boom against the stones. Instead it pulled her off balance, brought her up hard against it.

  She leaned into the wood after a moment, her heart pounding. “Nyx.”

  “Open it.”

  “I can’t!”

  “You could fight me in my house.”

  “I wasn’t fighting you! I was watching! I can’t—”

  “Open the door.”

  “I can’t use those powers at will!” She stopped, appalled at what she had relinquished: an ancient privacy, a secret between Holder and Guardian. But it had already been relinquished, by consent, in Nyx’s house. She stood quietly then, her face against the wood, calming herself out of long habit, as for a bout. She turned finally, trembling slightly, her face white, feeling unskilled and clumsy at battles of will instead of movement. She said softly, waiting for an inner uproar of voices that did not come, “The powers are ancient. I may use them for one purpose. Only one purpose. I can’t use them at my own need. They are kept always secret, and through some generations they are never used.”

  “Power is power,” Nyx said. She stood as calm as the stone Cygnet carved above her head, unfamiliar, suddenly, as if her own past in that room, in that house, could no longer lay claim to her. “It can be worked with, changed, manipulated, shaped in whatever ways you choose. I only need to know its source.”

  The black prism, the Cygnet’s eye, formed in Meguet’s mind. She said, trying to find Nyx in the dangerous stranger in front of her, “The source itself is ancient. I obtained power by being born, only that. It is my heritage. And but what for you and the Wayfolk man have wakened, I might have lived and died without using it.”

  “Use it now. You can. Open the door.”

  “I can’t. The power is not mine to summon.”

  “It could be. Only learn how. If the need is there, the power will come. You know that yourself. Desperation spawns power. Open the door.”

  The Cygnet’s eye was still dark, untroubled, in its secret rings of time… She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak further, for desperation would spawn nothing more magical than anger and anger was a beggar’s blade. Without moving, it seemed, Nyx stood in front of her. She laid her hands against the door, on either side of Meguet’s face. Her eyes, misty, unblinking, drew at Meguet.

  “There must have been a place where you first knew your powers. A moment in time when you first recognized them for what they are. Wh
en was the time? Where is the place?” Meguet turned her face away; Nyx lifted one hand from the door, turned it back gently to meet her gaze. “Tell me.”

  “I cannot,” she whispered.

  “Why? Who stops you? What?”

  Meguet closed her eyes, shaking with anger. In one of her lithe, skilled movements, she had ducked away from Nyx, put distance, mentally and physically between them in this peculiar battle, before Nyx realized she had moved.

  But she had not: She had only thought the movement. She was still backed against the door, pinned under Nyx’s gaze, with the anger in her turning into a nightmarish panic. She tried again to move. Her voice broke away from her in terror.

  “Nyx, I can’t—”

  “You can move. If you choose. Find the way.”

  “How can you do this to me, how can you—”

  “Don’t panic. Find the power. Use the source.”

  “It is not—I cannot—it is not mine to use!”

  “It is yours. Take it. Have the courage to take. To use.”

  “You don’t understand—You think you know so much, you understand nothing.”

  “What? What don’t I understand?”

  “How to know without using.”

  “Power is to be known, is to be used, is even to be shared. You must share this knowledge with me, Meguet. It might save my life. If that, at this particular moment, does not move you, then think of the safety of this house. I can help, but you must help me.”

  “Nyx—” She could not even blink; she felt as immobile as one of the strange statues in the maze. She could only speak, and her voice shook badly. “You have brought your swamp ways into this house. The power does not belong to me. If even the thought of using it so crossed my heart, I would lose it. Do you think I would risk my own heritage only because I can’t move a finger or open a door? Ask me what my heart is worth to me, or my life. Then make me an offer. Ask me.” Nyx, a hair-fine line between her brows, said nothing, waited. Meguet’s breath caught suddenly, painfully; she was going to cry, in sheer frustration, she realized furiously, and she could not even wipe away her own tears, or turn her face to hide them. “I never judged you before,” she whispered. “I never knew the things you know. It seemed that what you sought might be worth a long journey, a stay in the desert, a lonely life, even the life of an animal or two. But now I judge you. I know you as the small birds know you. You cut out their tongues so they cannot speak, you cut off their wings so they cannot fly. They look at you and know you. You make what you are. When you burn their hearts, it is your own heart burning in the fire.”