Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Color flared into Nyx’s face. Her eyes seemed enormous, luminous. The door latch rattled suddenly and she started. She pushed herself away from the door.

  “Nyx!” It was the Holder. “Open the door!”

  She pounded on it impatiently. Meguet, freed suddenly, turned her whole body, hid her face against the wood. She reached out, at the insistent pounding, pulled the door open with shaking hands. The Holder stood on the threshold, looking at the lank-haired, barefoot woman whose back was turned to her. “Nyx?” she said tentatively. “The Gatekeeper told me you had come.”

  Nyx turned slowly, met her mother’s eyes. They were both silent then, their faces reflecting the same faint surprise at the still unbroken bond between them. The Holder spoke first, her voice soft, shaken:

  “Nyx.” She looked at Meguet then, her eyes suddenly vulnerable, haunted. “You went upriver for the Wayfolk man. Not Nyx. Not now.”

  “The Wayfolk man is here,” Nyx said.

  “Here! Where?”

  “In Chrysom’s maze. He came to look for something.”

  The Holder’s face whitened. “What is he looking for in my house?”

  “I don’t know. He never told me. He is coerced. I promised him help. That’s why I came back with Meguet. We are going together into the maze—”

  “No,” the Holder said sharply. “Meguet will go. I don’t want you in danger.”

  Nyx paused, looked at her oddly, a touch of color in her eyes. Then she linked her hands tightly together; her brows pinched. She answered carefully, “Meguet will need help.”

  “Meguet may need help, but—”

  “Mother, I did not spend nine years wandering Ro Holding for no reason. Almost nothing can stand against me. Almost nothing. And I promised—”

  “I don’t care what you promised the Wayfolk man and I don’t care if you can harry Chrysom himself out of his tomb, I want you here with me. Or better yet, out of this house. Go back to the swamp.”

  Nyx’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you wanted me out of the swamp. Your fey third daughter eating toads under a full moon, causing gossip across four Holds—”

  “Then, take that as a reason to be sent back to the swamp,” the Holder said sharply. “Better there than here. This house is not safe.”

  “That is why I came back. To deal with the danger. When I have done that, I will be gone. If that is what you want.”

  The Holder closed her eyes. “Moro’s name. I have wanted you home for nine years. Now I want you home tomorrow. Not now.”

  “Why?” Nyx asked, and answered herself, coldly, evenly. “You don’t trust me. You don’t know me anymore. You don’t know anymore which daughter is yours: the one who lived so innocently among the witches, or the one who dwelled among bones in the swamp. Which one will go into the maze? Which will fight in this house?”

  The Holder was silent; Meguet saw the confusion of anguish and guilt in her eyes. So did Nyx; her head bowed slightly, away from her mother’s expression. She added softly, “There is only one way for you to find out. You must let me go into that maze.”

  The Holder’s face looked pale, brittle as the pearls she twisted between her fingers. “No,” she said. “For many reasons.” Nyx did not move, or change expression, but Meguet, watching her, felt something twist in her own heart.

  She said abruptly, “Nyx is right. I will need her with me.”

  The Holder turned to her, startled. “Meguet, no. You cannot take her. She has only a mage’s powers.”

  “And at this moment, I have none at all.” She paused. She had fought back tears, but her face was colorless, and her voice unsteady with anger and shock. The Holder said sharply:

  “What’s wrong?”

  Meguet’s shoulders straightened, lined to the stones at her back. Nyx gazed at her expressionlessly, asking nothing, forcing nothing. Meguet said evenly, “Everything is wrong. I keep blundering a step behind the Wayfolk man. I could not stop him in Berg Hold, I missed him in the swamp, and I may well miss him again unless I get into that maze. If it is only sorcery to be dealt with in the maze, I will have only a sword to fight it. I will be helpless without Nyx.”

  The Holder drew breath, her eyes flicking between them. The strand in her fingers broke suddenly; pearls ran like mice at her feet. She threw the last of them down.

  “Then go,” she said huskily to Nyx. She did not look at her daughter. “If you do not return, you will break my heart.”

  They were nearly at the foot of the tower stairs before Nyx spoke. “You could have told her. I thought you would. It would have been just. And,” she added dispassionately, “she has already judged me.”

  “I fight my own battles,” Meguet said shortly. “And I may well need you. I have no idea what is down there in the dark by now.”

  “I do not mean to harass you.” She touched Meguet’s arm lightly and for a breath, once again, Meguet froze, so precariously balanced between steps that if Nyx had shifted a finger she would have tumbled headlong to the floor. She felt the dark anger beat like insect wings in the back of her throat, in her wrists. “I only want to understand you, and the great secret power that uses you. I want to see its face.”

  In the heart of the tower, Corleu saw the small chamber he sat in waver around him. The fires went out, hiding the still faces of both stone and the living. Time closed over him like water. A globe lit the room now, silver-green, hanging from the center of the ceiling above a marble effigy and tomb.

  The stone statues began to move.

  Four

  THE tomb guardians, colorful and fierce, prowling silently around the tomb on their half-human legs, the black stone effigy itself, of a tall old man frowning faintly, it looked, at the doings in the tower, impressed Corleu fully but briefly. His eyes kept returning to the globe.

  Just a light, his brain told him. But his hands wanted to hold it; he wanted to see into it. Nothing in it but a green-white mage-flame, his eyes told him, but his attention fluttered around it like some frantic moth. There, he wanted to say, there. But it wasn’t there.

  “Nothing there but fire,” the tinker said. Corleu dragged his eyes from it finally, turning. He opened his mouth to answer, then could not, stunned finally in that chamber full of wonders.

  The Gold King stood in his gold spiked armor, masked in gold, crowned with the seven gold stars of his house. The edges of his scabbard rippled like flame. The chain he dragged went just so far across the marble floor, then simply stopped in the middle of a link, as if it continued elsewhere, in another chamber, perhaps, or somewhere among the stars.

  Behind him the Warlock, dressed in the black of his night-shadow, juggled the stars that limned the shadow, and the one red star that was his heart.

  “We’re close,” he said. His red-furred, feral face looked intent, watchful, the blood fox scenting the hunters, perhaps, or the prey. It was an ancient expression, Corleu thought suddenly, seeing the first blood fox in the Delta waiting, wide-eyed, still, for what it smelled flying low over the swamps on the wind.

  His heart pounded. There was too much power. Tinker, he had told Nyx; old blind beggar woman. The Blind Lady wore peacock feathers from throat to foot. Her long black hair tumbled away from a delicate oval face. Her eyes were closed, a faint frown between her brows. Her ringed hand wove threads of palest silver; like the Gold King’s chain, they stopped short in the air, continued elsewhere. Her face was so calm she seemed elsewhere as well, but she spoke. “A little farther, Wayfolk man. Take us farther.”

  He stared at her, not knowing how he had gotten even that far. “You must promise,” he said desperately. “You haven’t promised what I asked.”

  The Dancer chuckled. One side of her hair was black as night, the other white as snow. She wore a Fire Bear pelt; her fingers were its curved ice-white claws. She looked old as night one moment, then, at a shift of light or expression, as young as morning. “We gained ground without a promise.”

  “Then I won’t move. I’ll go no farther.�
�� He sat down at the foot of the effigy, his arms folded. “I’ll stay here with the dead until you promise.” His face was blanched; his old man’s hair, he thought, would have turned white anyway at this point. The Gold King turned his imperious mask of gold at Corleu, and he had to drag at air, just at the movement.

  “Tell us who might be waiting for us,” the Gold King said. “Tell us who might have taken an interest in whatever you searched for, who might have turned a thought toward taking this thing I want. How can we promise without a name?”

  “I won’t name until you promise.” He had reached out, clung to something solid on the tomb, in the face of the Gold King’s wrath. The guardians swung their horned, beaked, goat-eyed heads at him as they roamed around the tomb. But no fire came out of their mouths, no roars of warning. “And she doesn’t know what or where. She can’t be there waiting.”

  The Warlock paced, juggling, with one hand, small worlds of fire.

  “Then why are you afraid for her? This ignorant, innocent sorceress who has no interest in why we wake? If she’s nowhere, how could we harm her? I know mages, witches, sorcerers. Their minds are always turning, always busy, nosing out this, that. She pointed your way here. You’d have spent years searching on your own for this maze. But she would not come with you if only to see for herself what you might find? She was not curious? She had better things to do? And why,” he added, tossing a star and catching it, “would we harm her for helping us?” Corleu, gripping stone, stared at him, dry-mouthed. “No answer from the Wayfolk? Then I’ll answer. Because she intends us harm.”

  He threw a glass ball in his hand hard across the chamber, straight at the globe. Corleu, on his feet before he realized it, saw the ball pass through the globe as if it were air, and rebound against the wall. The Warlock caught it. Corleu molded stone in his hand, still searching the globe, for a crack, injury, a wavering of its light. He moved finally, took a step toward it, touched it with one hand.

  He flinched away from hot glass; it was only mage-light, burning for centuries, likely old as the maze. He turned, found an audience out of nightmare watching him.

  “What do you see,” the Dancer asked softly, “in there, Wayfolk? It’s only a round globe of light.”

  “Nothing.” He sat down again, cooling his hand against the cold marble: It was the effigy’s left foot, he realized, he had hold of like a spar off a swamped ship. He moved his hand quickly before the effigy stirred in annoyance.

  “I looked into a round globe of light once,” the Blind Lady said in her low, grave voice. “I saw what I saw and never saw again. Be careful, Wayfolk, what you look too closely into.”

  “It’s too late for care.” His eyes wandered back to the globe, then dragged away from it, to meet the Gold King’s expressionless, armored face.

  “There,” the Gold King said softly. “In there, Corleu?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe in its shadow?”

  He did not answer; his face turned resolutely from it. But it burned in his thoughts. “You must promise,” he said doggedly, “or none of us will ever know. She could never harm the likes of you. She could never take from you.”

  “Could she not?” They consulted one another silently; so did the fey-eyed tomb guardians.

  “Never harm,” the Warlock said thinly, tossing balls again. “Never take.”

  “But would she try?” the Dancer asked, revealing her ancient furrowed face. “There’s the question. If we promise, and she tries to harm, then what, Wayfolk man? Will you come to our rescue?”

  “She can’t harm you,” he said again, wearily. “No one could. You’re old as story. You never die. Nothing’s got more power than a dream. Or time. Or sun. You’ll take what you want and walk through her like glass through that globe. She’d maybe throw a spell or two, but what’s that to do with you? You’ll go on forever. Promise.”

  “Name her.”

  “Promise. Her, and her house, and all who know her name.”

  “Name her.”

  “Nyx.”

  Rush’s voice, pleading, breathless, caught them across the black tower. Meguet, pushing the Cygnet banner away from the door, saw Nyx’s eyes widen, expression cross her face, before she finally turned.

  “Rush.” It sounded like a sigh. He was armed, but for his heart, which had no defense against Nyx anywhere, it seemed.

  “I heard you had come home to fight for this house.”

  “Rush, we cannot wait—”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Meguet closed her eyes. An impatience like some deadly acrid desert wind shook her. The Wayfolk man had breached time. She saw his face, turned upward, gazing, pale, entranced, puzzled, at the silver-green globe over Chrysom’s effigy. “Nyx,” she whispered. “We have no time left—”

  Rush swept a torch out of its sconce, crossed the floor toward them. “You’ll need help. I have some power, Nyx—”

  “No.”

  “I won’t let you go there alone.”

  “Rush,” Nyx said, her voice cold as the gate hinges in midwinter, “you have been saying that for nine years. And for nine years I have gone my way and I have gone alone. You don’t have the power to follow us. I will not be distracted trying to guard you.”

  “You won’t.” He had reached her. His eyes narrowed slightly, as if he were trying to fit a face of memory over the sharp-boned, expressionless, intent face in front of him. “I’ll take care of myself. I’ll guard Meguet—she has only her sword against those sorcerers.”

  “I need only Meguet,” Nyx said flatly. His temper flared a little, sending blood to his face.

  “I’ll come with what I have: The house is in danger. You can’t return after three years, give me a glimpse of your back and your shadow and then disappear into that convoluted puzzle out of a dead mage’s brain, and expect me to wait—”

  “I never expected you to wait!” Nyx’s cold, calm voice, raised in sudden, genuine despair, startled Meguet. “I never wanted you to wait! You kept thinking I would return to love you—if it was love I wanted, I would never have left! You can’t understand, you never could, that I could want knowledge more than you, experience and power more than you. You love a shadow that left this house nine years ago. I have nothing in me of that woman. I have travelled a strange country, and I have changed myself to live in that magic country. Love is not what I have learned in nine years, Rush. It’s what I left behind.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Rush said. He was shaken, white, but grim, clinging with a blood fox’s death grip to something that, to Meguet’s eye, had given up life years ago without a protest. Nyx’s mouth thinned; her eyes looked silvery in the torchlight. “For nine years, yours was the first face I saw waking, the last I saw sleeping, no matter who lay beside me. How could I be that mistaken? You must have given me something, each time you returned—the way you spoke my name, the way you turned your head to catch my voice—You can’t have turned so far from love—”

  “You did,” she said flatly. “It was you who turned away from love, these nine years, turned away from those who might have truly loved you, to wring love out of a memory, a ghost, air. You loved nothing, Rush. You loved no one. Not even me. At least in nine years I learned something.”

  She turned abruptly, pulled aside the banner. Rush stood blinking, his face patchy, as if she had thrown more than words at him. For a moment he almost heard her: Meguet saw the hesitation in his movement. Then, obdurately, he stepped forward. Nyx spun so fast she blurred; there was a sound like air ripping. A line smoldered across the stone in front of Rush.

  “You will wait,” she said, her voice shaking with anger, “and you will wait, and you will wait in this dark tower—”

  “Nyx,” Meguet breathed.

  “Until the woman you will love freely frees you from your waiting.”

  “Nyx, what have you done?” He stood very still, looking half perplexed, half frightened, as if he had come to that moment, to that place, by choice, and
then could not remember why. Nyx turned again.

  “Nothing more,” she said with grim weariness, “than what he has laid on himself for nine years. You said to hurry.” Meguet, with a final, stunned glance back at Rush, followed her down the steps. “We’ll have to elude Chrysom’s tricks,” Nyx added, “to reach the center. We might have used Corleu’s Ring of Time, but it frayed when the house and all its odd time-paths broke apart.” She paused at the bottom of the steps; a mage-fire in her palm illumined a lion’s face at the first wall, turned to gaze back at her. “However, there are other ways of passing through time—”

  Meguet, impelled by a thousand years of voices incoherent in their urgency, did not bother to speak. She gripped Nyx’s arm, pulled her forward through the wall into the center of the maze. For a moment, the strange statues appeared around them, then Meguet, all her attention focused on the prism, changed that moment. The statues disappeared; black walls rose around them, enclosing the black eye of the Cygnet. It slowly paled, turned its fire-white gaze on them.

  Meguet let go of Nyx then, her eyes flickering at the shadows. She drew Moro Ro’s sword, out of habit. Nyx, standing stone-still, her back to the prism, blinked at the sound.

  “He’s close, the Wayfolk man,” Meguet said, prowling, tense. “He changed time at the center. I don’t know how.” Nyx moved, turned her head slightly to follow Meguet’s movements. “Only a Guardian can do that.”

  “Meguet.” The word was almost inaudible, but in that chamber any word ran clear as crystal to the ear. “What is this place?”

  “The heart of the maze.”

  “How did you find it?” Still she had not moved; expression had not yet come back into her face. “Who showed you the way?”