Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You did,” Meguet said a little bitterly. “Those that you and Corleu woke hid themselves here. I came here to search for them. They attacked, I had to run. Time opened. I ran here.” She stopped pacing finally, leaned against the wall, watching Nyx. “You should not know about this place. I could have left you behind easily. But you said you wanted to see the face of power. I don’t know its face. But there is its eye.”

  Nyx turned. She moved then, swiftly, to stand beside Meguet, staring at the great prism that, moonlike, was affixed to nothing but time. “What is it?”

  “The eye of the Cygnet.”

  Nyx was silent, testing it, Meguet knew, recognizing the intent, detached expression, as if she were trying to breathe it like air, swallow it with her mind. “It yields nothing,” she whispered. “Who made it?”

  “Astor Ro. Chrysom made the maze to protect it. She was the first of us.”

  “The first—”

  “Of the Guardians.”

  “What is it—exactly that you guard?”

  “The Cygnet.”

  Nyx stared at her. “You never even wanted power. You never cared. You couldn’t get through the maze when we were young. Is this what gave you power?”

  “Yes. It needs hands, eyes, a mind living in the world. Other minds, older Guardians, woke in me to give me advice.”

  “What advice are they giving now?”

  “They are silent. Listening.”

  “Listening?”

  “To you. For any sign of danger from you.”

  “Toward you?” Nyx asked with a certain wariness. “Or toward the Cygnet?”

  “Toward both.”

  “They did not help you before.”

  “The danger was only to me, not the Cygnet. Now, it would be to both, but”—she shrugged slightly, a small gesture she regretted—“now you could not touch me.”

  Nyx’s gaze flicked away, back to the eye. “Why you?” she asked. “Why were you chosen?”

  “We are all related, in some way, to Astor Ro. Beyond that, I don’t know why.”

  “And you never knew. As we grew up together, you never sensed this power.”

  “I never needed it. The Cygnet was never in danger.”

  Nyx was silent, searching her face. The fire-white prism drew any hint of color from her eyes. “The thing he seeks belongs to the Cygnet,” she said slowly. “Or is it a danger to the Cygnet? Does the Cygnet give holding power to the Holders of Ro Holding? The power of the Holders turns on a tale? A constellation? But where is the Cygnet? Four Hold Signs and their faces of power are gathered in this maze. But where is the Cygnet’s face? You, Meguet?”

  She shook her head, wondering, herself, what mask the Cygnet might choose. “No. I’m simply a Guardian.”

  “My mother?”

  “Perhaps. But these powers only wear their faces to give them a human aspect. Tear the mask away, and you would have other words for them. Take those words away and—what?”

  “The power itself,” Nyx said softly. She looked at the prism, her arms folded, her face intent in a way that made Meguet alert, uneasy. She was no longer overawed; her busy mind had begun to weave again. “The eye of the Cygnet… What is in there?” Meguet did not answer. Nyx threw her a curious glance. “May I look into it?”

  “Be careful.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “No. But that’s what the Wayfolk man is reaching toward, through time.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Here.”

  “Here?” Nyx said, startled.

  “In this chamber. In the same moment, but in a different circle of it. The wall is a Ring of Time. Not like you make them, from one place to another. But in one place, one moment, and deeper into the same moment. It is part of the knowledge within that eye.” She paused, wishing she had bitten the word in two and swallowed it before she flung it to Nyx like bait. She added carefully, “As I said, all the power it gives is transitory; it can be used only for one purpose.”

  “Perhaps. I think power is malleable; it can be used to suit purpose. How much knowledge must have collected there, in a thousand years… And you might never have such power again in your life. This place could close like an eye closing, never to be seen again while we live. How much of it do you know, Meguet?”

  “I have no idea,” Meguet said shortly. “But it will be enough to stop the Wayfolk man.”

  Nyx was silent. All her attention had withdrawn from the prism to focus, suddenly, on Meguet. She put her hand on Meguet’s arm, gently, as if to coax her to turn, to look at something. “Meguet”—she picked words slowly—“whatever Corleu is searching for, he has been compelled to find. He is not acting by choice.”

  “Compelled,” Meguet said flatly, “he may have been, but he has found his way step by step to this time, to this place, and he has always known exactly what he wanted. And I am born to defend it.”

  “He is Wayfolk, powerless. I had to teach him spells a cottage brat could work, to get him this far.”

  “He should never have taken the first step.” Nyx’s fingers tightened on her arm; she moved slightly, left them closing on air. She eased into shadows again, her face shadowed. “He threatens the Cygnet. That is what the powers within me will see.”

  “Meguet.” Nyx’s face, with the color washing into her eyes, seemed candle-pale. “He is an innocent—”

  “How would you recognize innocence anymore? You have no mercy for any who love you, why would you defend someone you yourself coerced, except to get what you want?”

  “I did not coerce him. He needed me so he could rescue some Wayfolk girl—”

  “And that moved you, I suppose.”

  “It did, oddly,” Nyx admitted. Her brows were pinched; expression had broken through the cool detachment in her eyes. “I know he looks for something of great, dangerous power. But he wants nothing from it. All he wants is to rescue his Wayfolk love. It is a kind of innocence. A kind I never knew. I thought I could take what he found, and then use the power in it to protect him, send him unharmed back to his life. Back into that innocence. It seemed—even to me, living that way in the swamp—something worth protecting.”

  Meguet closed her eyes. “Then why,” she breathed, “did you send him here? He could never have known about the maze without you. What kind of innocent dream does this look like to you? You knew I wanted him. What did you think I would do when I found him in this house? Why should I believe what you tell me, rather than what I see with all the power within me? He is here. He is searching not for the face of power, but for its heart. You have sent him here to die.”

  Nyx caught her breath, a small, unguarded sound, a half-formed word. She vanished abruptly. Meguet, startled, had time only to tense, and then she found herself adjusting her vision like a telescope, pulling Nyx out of the air, focusing clearer and clearer, until she could see even the changing expression in Nyx’s eyes.

  The great swan-etched broadsword wrenched itself out of her hands. It stroked the air with silver, a line drawn straight toward the shining prism. Fast as it moved, Meguet was faster, folding the moment in her mind, stepping across time to seize the sword with both hands, stop it an instant before its tip broke the facets of the prism. It resisted her, in midair, dragging against her on its determined path. Then the desire that had held a door against Nyx’s power filled her; the need to see, to protect, became stronger than the threat, and she pulled the blade down and whirled.

  “Nyx!” She caught her breath, furious and terrified. Nyx had disappeared again; Meguet’s eyes picked her out from behind an illusion of black stone wall. She looked unfamiliar in concentration, detached, unreachable.

  “You can move like thought,” Nyx said softly. “You can see through illusion, your strength is formidable. You can walk through stone, you can walk through time. What else can you do? What else did that eye teach you that not even I know how to test? You guard a living power. I want it.”

  “Nyx, be careful,” Meguet begged,
white, trembling. “Please stop—”

  “What mind is in that eye?”

  “You will go too far—too far even for me to protect you. Nyx, please—”

  The dark walls blinked, hid Nyx. Meguet turned, drawn as always toward the Cygnet’s eye, and found her there, reaching out to it with both hands.

  Finally the voices within her spoke. They checked her, stilled a thought that would have transfixed Nyx within that moment, left her always reaching, never grasping. Wait, the Guardians said. She waited; their voices stilled, left a silence in her like the silence in the face of the moon. Nyx’s hands touched the prism, held it.

  In the misty light between her hands, the Cygnet flew.

  Corleu saw it within the globe. It left him no time to think, no time to move; he stood at the globe, reaching for it, his hands settling on it before he had even gotten off the tomb. He never felt the hot glass. Here, it was, he knew: The thing that trapped him and would set him free, the Cygnet, flying through that mist between time, to the place where it had hidden its heart.

  A face formed out of the mist; mist lingered in the eyes. “Nyx,” he said, a small word startled out of him that seemed to echo in whispers behind him. She also looked surprised, at something he could not see.

  And then he saw.

  Five

  HE dropped his hands, spun in horror and nearly impaled himself on the blade burrowing against his throat. Down the length of it, he saw Meguet’s eyes.

  They stared at one another: he seeing green, hearing the green rustling corn leaves and knowing what they whispered of in their dry, ancient voices. Nothing, he heard, nothing, nothing, nothing, because that is what he glimpsed between him and the blade poised so surely in her hands that the light on it did not even tremble. She saw him dead. He had crept into the heart of time and held the Cygnet’s secret between his hands, revealing it to the wild, dangerous powers he had brought with him. She saw, held him transfixed with what was in her eyes. But her hands did not move to complete the image.

  Kill, she heard within her, and felt the ancient, killing anger sweep through her. Light shook down the sword. He saw Tiel’s face, smelled the lavender in her hair, and then sorrow thrust a sharp, heavy blade into his throat. He opened his mouth, breath grating through him, and realized that he was still alive.

  He was powerless against her, she sensed. Powerless to lift a finger to help himself: He did not even carry a knife. Still stunned by what he had seen, he could not even speak, beg, bargain for his life. Only his eyes spoke: of a terrible despair. Powerless as a swamp bird in Nyx’s house, and yet he had made his way to a place not even Nyx herself had found. He had known where to look. He had recognized what he had seen…

  She heard her own voice finally, among the clamoring winds of centuries. The voices cried at her; she beat them back with her own: I am your eyes and feet, I am your killing hand. I live in this world, I look into the eyes of those you tell me to kill. I have the right to be heard. How could he have reached this place without a Guardian’s powers? He has looked into the Cygnet’s eye. He is born to guard.

  She could barely speak, among the wild voices. Neither had moved, except him to take a breath. Together they had formed a private moment within a slow, slow drawing out of time around them. Nyx still held the prism, walls were still changing, Chrysom’s effigy shadowed the air, faces were still coming visible around her. “Wayfolk.” Her voice shook. “What are you?”

  “I—” He stuck, mute, forgetting how to talk as his eyes ran again over her face, her hair. “I never knew,” he said helplessly.

  “What did you see in the eye?”

  “The heart of the Cygnet.”

  “What you have searched for.”

  “Yes,” he whispered. Light flashed from her blade again; it bit at him and he jerked, feeling the sweat run down his face.

  “I should kill you.”

  “Likely.”

  “Why do I recognize you?”

  So he told story, his life hanging on his great-gran’s tale. Her green eyes narrowed at him through the tale; her face was hard and pale as marble. But it reached her. He felt the blade shift slightly against him. Something flicked into her eyes, memory, expression, something that was not death.

  “My great-grandfather,” she said tautly. “He was a restless man, with odd, stray power. He lived in Withy Hold until heritage drew him here. He would have taken a Wayfolk girl in a cornfield.”

  “How she remembered,” he said, “was she saw and took as well. It was what she came back to all her life. The place where time stops. Where green never fades. Where story begins. When I saw you in that house, I saw what she told: corn-leaf eyes and corn-silk hair. But that wasn’t all. It wasn’t even close to all, what I saw in you.”

  “No.” The voices within her were all silent now, waiting, it seemed, for judgment from her of this dangerous, bastard power. She lifted the blade finally, held it an inch or two away from him, still tense, still watchful. “You found what you need here. What will you—”

  “How can you ask?” he cried, seeing it again: the black swan flying into the mist of Nyx’s eyes. “I couldn’t lift a finger against her. When I told the tinker yes, it was stories I was thinking of: the heart kept inside a nut inside a tree, or locked in a box on one side of the world with the key in the other. I didn’t know it would be in someone living! And she—she wanted this thing I looked for. She said she wanted its power.”

  Meguet was silent. She lowered the blade, let the tip fall to the floor, her eyes wide, troubled. “Nyx,” she said softly.

  “You’d think a bird would have chosen better.”

  “She wasn’t always so…” Her eyes searched around them: Nyx’s hands had fallen, the effigy had seeped back into its own time. The forces gathered against the Cygnet had pulled themselves clear into the moment. She said quickly, “Hide. Go back through time.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t. You know I can’t. Cygnet is in danger.”

  “Do you have a Guardian’s full power?”

  “I’ll find out, likely. If not,” he added bleakly, “maybe I’ll stand a better chance at finding Tiel as a ghost. But who is it the Cygnet is in most danger from? Gold King’s heart or Nyx’s?”

  He was unprepared for time roiling back over them like a fierce, moon-tossed tide. Nyx’s hands finished falling away from the prism. She turned, her face still wearing a private, startled expression at what she had seen within it. Then the Warlock stepped out of the shadows.

  Her hands were moving before she even changed expression. A huge red ball formed around him; he snarled soundlessly, testing it with his hands. The Gold King drew a sword that was a blinding stroke of light, and dragged his chain toward the Cygnet’s eye. Meguet, stunned by his flat, metallic sun-face, the lines wrought into it of fury and cruelty, recognized the tinker only by the gold he wore, and the tricks he played with light. She moved into his path, her back to the prism, holding the broadsword between them with both hands. She heard him laugh. The Warlock exploded out of his glass prison, throwing splinters of fire everywhere. The Blind Lady, gathering them out of the air, began to weave a net of flame.

  The Gold King’s sword wheeled, moving so fast it left its reflection across an arc of air. It caught one of the Cygnet wings along the grip of Meguet’s sword and wrenched it from her hands. It flew across the room toward the Dancer. As she looked at it, the swans on the hilt and pommel, etched along the blade, startled away from it, flocked together as they flew, tiny birds turning desperately along the curved walls.

  Meguet pulled the Gold King’s relentless path along a fine, slow, narrow line of time; he walked his halting pace toward the prism, but the distance he crossed was minute. The Blind Lady lifted a hand toward them, reshaped the Gold King’s path, and he pulled himself close to Meguet. He was molten, she saw; blisters of gold appeared and disappeared along his armor. Nyx swung toward them. Her face seemed as detached as ever, concentrating, as she juggled spells, but h
er eyes were wide, and there was a desperate edginess to her movements. She flung out a hand, frowning. The Gold King’s chain lifted ponderously, began to wrap itself around him.

  He only laughed again, the dark, jangled, echoing laughter that Meguet had heard before. He was so close to her, she could feel the heat within him. She would not back; Corleu, behind her, gripped her finally, pulled her a step or two closer to the Cygnet’s eye. The Warlock sent the small birds scattering out of the air, dead at Nyx’s feet.

  She stared down at them, a moment that cost her. The Blind Lady flung her web. It fell over Nyx, a weave of fire and light that tangled around her. She cried out suddenly. Meguet, her heart pounding at the sound, left the Cygnet’s eye to Corleu and moved to her, so quickly that the Gold King, swinging his chain at her, tripped only empty air.

  “Wayfolk,” the Gold King said, facing him. He put out a burning hand; Corleu flinched back from it. His shadow, flung forward by the light within the prism, fell over the Gold King. For an instant he was tinker again, with shaggy night-black hair and smiling golden eyes. “You found what I wanted. Why fight me? I’ll return what’s yours.”

  “I didn’t promise you someone living!”

  The tinker shrugged. “Who will miss her? She’s swamp-mired. Her heart is full of little bones. Who would want her ruling Ro Holding?”

  “The Cygnet—”

  “A bird, like the ones she pulled apart?”

  “It’s more than bird,” he said desperately, but the tinker smiled his mocking smile and shifted out of Corleu’s shadow. Armed again, masked in light, he swung his hand at Corleu, his upturned face glowing pale in the light from the prism. The spiked armor hit Corleu like stone. Thrown out of the Gold King’s path, he hit the wall and clung, blinking, trying to stay on his feet while the wall moved against him. The floor bucked suddenly; he fell to his knees.

  Wayfolk, he heard suddenly, deep in him: the frail, whispering winds of voices. Watch his shadow.

  It lay under his hands, the Gold King’s shadow, stretching away from him. Its hands reached toward the prism’s reflection, a complex dance of light thrown along the wall. The shadow of a swan flew into the fractured light. Shadow-hands closed around it. The bird eluded, flew again into the light. Again the hands grasped. The bird flew.