Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Mother, I may have no choice. From what Brand has said, Saphier is not the most hospitable place in the world. It sounds fierce, violent, power-ridden. The mage may be the least of Meguet’s problems.”

  The Holder’s tight grip of herself loosened suddenly; she pulled a net of gold thread and emeralds from her hair, flung it to the floor. She stared at Nyx, hair tumbling around her shoulders, her eyes night-dark, lined with pain. She said harshly, “I forbid you to leave this house. You said the mage will return. Wait for him. I will not lose both you and Meguet to some barbaric land beyond Ro Holding. Meguet is resourceful; she may be able to find her way back—”

  “No.” She gazed at her mother, her throat tight. Her face had lost color. “I won’t let you sacrifice Meguet for me.”

  “You sacrificed her for a key.”

  “I—” She swallowed, unable to speak, then steadied her voice. “I make mistakes. Yes.”

  The Holder closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “I was careless.” Nyx spoke carefully, her eyes wide, colorless as cloud. “But I’m not entirely without resources myself. Meguet fought for me. I owe her. I think I can find a way into Saphier.”

  “But why?” The Holder’s voice rose again, dangerously. “Why must you go there if you expect the mage to come here?”

  “I think he can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Return. I think he was injured by the firebird.”

  “Moro’s eyes,” the Holder breathed. “Badly?”

  “It’s not a question of degree—”

  “Do you think he’s dead?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You saw him before he disappeared. What had the bird done to him?”

  “It was enough,” Nyx said slowly, “that the bird had done anything at all to him. If he had made the firebird, with all his formidable power he should have been able to control it. He never tried to harm it; it was trying to kill him. It drew blood; it lost a talon. That may have been enough to kill the mage.”

  “A bird claw? I don’t understand.”

  “The spell itself. The sorcery that transformed the firebird. It might have been deadly to the mage.”

  The Holder stared at her. “I thought it was his spell.”

  “So did I, until I saw him wounded. I think Meguet may be somewhere in Saphier with an injured mage on her hands.”

  The Holder was silent. She turned abruptly, found the nearest chair and sat. “Then whose spell is it? Are we to expect yet another mage who won’t bother to use the gate?”

  “I don’t—” Nyx’s voice shook suddenly with worry. “I don’t know what to expect next.” She leaned against the massive fireplace, gazing down at her mother, and finding some comfort from the solid stones. “I’ve never asked your permission to leave the house before.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve rarely even told you where I was going. I’m your heir, yes, but I’m also all you’ve got for a mage, and I must be free to work. Though I realize I’ve hardly given you much, these past months, to have faith in.” The Holder shifted, gestured wordlessly, her ringed hands flashing, falling. “All you’ve seen me do here is turn the Hold Signs back into embroidery and silence a bird, which rumor already told you I could do.”

  “Nyx—”

  “All I seem to do with the firebird in the tower is to fail. It does seem a simple thing to do: change a bird back into a man, something any mage could do.”

  “It must,” the Holder said, “be a very subtle sorcery.”

  “Oh, it is. Very subtle. And so stubborn, it seems to me at times that Brand himself cast the spell, masked himself behind the firebird, and refuses to relinquish it.”

  The Holder made a noise, staring at her daughter. “He enchanted himself?”

  “I don’t think so. But I am beginning to think he has some very powerful reasons to avoid becoming himself again. And I think the truth of the matter lies in Saphier. He cannot return on his own; the time-paths on his wrists have been damaged. I must take him.”

  “I don’t like this,” the Holder said. “A ruler’s son, ensorcelled and exiled—it sounds dangerous. It’s not your business to solve Saphier’s problems.”

  “No. But Brand has given me no reason to believe his father won’t want him back. If I were missing in a strange land, you would be grateful if someone brought me home.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Also, there is Meguet. I can’t leave her there.”

  “No. But—”

  “But, why me? Because you have no one else who can do these things.”

  “You are my heir.”

  “I am your mage. This is what mages do.”

  “I don’t like it.” The Holder rose abruptly to pace again, down a woven path of flowers and ivy to its edge and then back again. “You are too much like me,” she said abruptly. “Strong-willed and prone to wander. What if I lose you to Saphier? Where will I go to look for you? You can’t even tell me where this land is, assuming it exists now, at this moment and not some other, which occurs to me to wonder about since it doesn’t exist on any map.”

  “The problem,” Nyx said carefully, wondering herself, “may not exist either. It’s not something to worry about until we must.”

  “That,” the Holder said explosively, “is the kind of muddy thinking that has led you into trouble before.”

  “Perhaps. But I’ve always found my way home. Somehow,” She put her hand on her mother’s arm. “Please,” she said softly. “I didn’t run away nine years for nothing. I am a sorceress. Let me do some sorcery.”

  The Holder came with her to the tower. The midnight bells had not yet rung; Brand, whirling mid-pace as the door opened, was still human. Nyx cast a glance around the room; he answered her unspoken question.

  “No one came. No one that I could see.”

  “All right,” she said tautly. “We’ll go there.” She turned, looked at the Holder a moment, wordlessly. She said with wonder, “I’ve never said goodbye to you before.”

  “Don’t say it now,” the Holder said fiercely. She touched an errant strand of Nyx’s hair, then dropped her hand, stepped back. “Just go. Return Brand to his father, find Meguet, and come home. Nothing more complicated than that. Promise me.”

  “I’ll come back as soon as I can.” She drew the ivory ball out of her pocket, gazed into it. She could see the key floating in the dark; she touched it with her mind. Pages turned, time-paths wandered through them, through her thoughts, into the room itself. She was vaguely aware that Brand had knelt at the Holder’s feet. He said something, rose again through a misty net of silver. Something else happened as he stepped to Nyx’s side and the room itself wavered, dreamlike, beyond the widening silver filigree: There were unexpected sounds, sudden movements. A door opened; faces appeared, then faded into a soft darkness that grew so deep it swallowed even the bright stars of candlelight. Nyx, paths rushing everywhere around her, struggled a moment to remember the faces. Not Meguet, though one had her hair. Not the mage. She was aware of Brand with her, a presence and a name, though he had moved behind her. Saphier, she said, and all the glowing paths around them froze and vanished. All but one… She stepped onto it; it began to move. As she shifted the path to form the pattern that led to Saphier, elusive sounds, faces, drew urgently at her attention, demanding to be named. She pushed them away, concentrating, intent on accurately shaping the whorls and crooks of time and distance so that the path would end in Saphier and not in the middle of some sea. It was not until she had formed the final turn and something vast began to shape itself beyond the dark, that she relinquished her attention to memory, and the sounds, the faces, came suddenly clear.

  A knock… The Holder turned, and the bells began to ring. The door opened… The Gatekeeper, his face hard, white, as it was when he swallowed fear whole and tried to hide it in some private place… The face beside him was so unexpected that for a moment she fe
lt only amazement: dark-skinned, pale-haired, eyes as dark as the first night of the world. It was Meguet’s kin, her unlikely shadow, as powerful and as powerless, standing under a roof that was not stars or light. And then she saw the warning in his eyes.

  She felt the blood startle out of her face. The darkness ebbed, revealing a quiet, shadowy hall, a house at night, some time after, she guessed, the midnight bells had rung.

  The firebird flew ahead of her toward a moving circle of light.

  Ten

  MEGUET picked her way across a dragon’s spine. It pushed itself in a sharp, uneven ridge of red stone out of dry, weathered earth; it was not high, but too long to walk around and almost too steep to climb. Nothing grew on it. On the other side of it lay more of what she had already crossed: the Luxour with no perceptible horizon, shimmering with heat or with air disturbed by the flicker of dragon wings.

  She had left Rad’s village at dawn, sitting beside a young, straw-haired man on his cart. He was going to cut salt blocks, he had told her when she stopped him. There was a place he knew in the desert, a white pool of salt. She needed to get to Draken Saphier’s court, she said. He looked surprised, but offered her a ride as far as the first wall of stone.

  “I go due north,” he said, “to the dragon’s backbone. Then I go west along that to the end, and there’s the salt pond. You’ll want to keep going north.” He eyed her askance as she climbed onto the cart seat; an answer presented itself. “You’ll be a mage, too, then. We were all wondering. Only mages cross the Luxour on foot.”

  “How do others get across?” she asked. He urged his donkeys forward.

  “They ride. Mostly they go around to the east, then follow the river. Others come in caravans, on carts, well-supplied. Those who hunger after dragons. Most buy a heart and go home again.” He ticked at the donkeys; his voice was good-humored, unhurried. “Some stay along the river, spend their lives looking for crystal bones. A handful stay on the Luxour itself.”

  “In the desert?” she said, startled.

  “A half-dozen, maybe, I’ve seen; there must be others. They find their places in the rocks, their underground streams. They see their private dreams of dragons to live near—a shape of stone, a hot spring, an odd configuration of shadows at sunset—and there they stay. They find me or they find the salt, eventually. That’s how I know them.”

  She looked at him, at the crook of his mouth, his eyes that expected no surprises. “You don’t believe in the dragons.”

  He shook his head, surprised again. “But I love the desert. It’s enough for me, just the way it is, without suppositions. Most born around here never leave. Or like Rad, they come back. He never stays long, though. He believes in dragons, Rad. He’s seen them since we were small, running barefoot into the desert after lizards. ‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘look.’ But I’d never see. So I wasn’t surprised when he left for Draken Saphier’s court. All mages go there. Is that where you were born?”

  “No.”

  He waited, then flicked the reins idly. “I thought maybe so, because you came with him and you’re going back there. But they say the mages come from all over Saphier, to Draken Saphier’s court.”

  She opened her mouth to ask a question, closed it again. Mages, she thought, and wondered if they were all as powerful as Nyx. She felt a familiar, terrible impatience, wanting to be there instead of here with a desert to find her way across, at least until urgency loosed her powers, pleated time and desert to take her where she was needed. Whether or not Rad Ilex would search for her after he took the key from Nyx, she had no idea. She could do nothing for Ro Holding, staying in that village at the edge of nowhere. Nyx, she had reasoned starkly, would not sit still in Chrysom’s tower wondering where Meguet was. if she could find her way to Saphier. And if she came, she would not bother with a desert; she would go straight to Draken Saphier…

  “There,” the young man beside her said. “The dragon’s backbone.”

  The sun had risen above the distant blue mountains, begun its arc across the sky. It peeled shadow away from the dragon bone, left a low, jagged ridge cutting across the landscape, beginning and ending nowhere. He pointed.

  “Salt’s there, at that end.” He looked at her a moment, silently; perhaps, Meguet thought, he did not believe in mages either, and saw only a woman, unprotected and ignorant, about to wander into a place abandoned by everything but light. He said only, “Rad’s doings taught me never to question mages; not even their answers make much sense. If you need me again for something, I’ll be at the west end for two days.”

  At the top of the ridge, she could still see his cart, lumbering and patient as a beetle, crawling along the bone. She rested a moment. Ahead lay the odd, crazed towers and palaces and dragons’ wings of stone. Wind roused suddenly, pushed at her hard; she smelled sulphur, and a darker, sweeter scent, as if in some deep, moldering cave something huge had shifted, disturbing earth. She started down the slope.

  Sometime later, she walked along shallow furrows, straight lines raked long ago across the ground as if by some giant claw. The scars had weathered, but never closed. She glanced up uneasily, wondering at the size of such a thing. A fierce, golden eye left an imprint of fire in hers. She looked down, blinking, and continued doggedly, wondering if she would become like the desert dwellers, seeing dragons everywhere. Her shadow fluttered like black fire in the wind: the loose, flowing garments she had taken from Rad. He had worked some magic into her velvet shoes, during one of his waking moments, so she could walk, he said, if she got restless while he mended himself. Wearing them, she would feel neither heat nor cold nor water nor stone; she would walk on air. Dust did not cling to them either, she noticed, though dust clung to her sweating face and wove itself into her hair. She carried a water skin and a pouch with some bread and fruit and goat cheese. She would find lizards when she ran out of food. She would find the water that the desert dwellers drank. She would cross the desert somehow; even the Luxour came to an end eventually.

  Her shadow shrank; the eye overhead blazed at her. She felt even her bones shrink under its cruel gaze, as if the weight of light pouring down over her pushed her closer to the earth. She reached one of the strange ruins, steep upthrusts of stone that had weathered and sheared pieces of itself away. From a distance it had doors, broken towers, and fallen walls, empty windows framing sky. Close, it was simply a pile of rock, within which she found shade, a resting place. She ate and drank sparingly, then leaned against a slab of warm stone and closed her eyes.

  She woke with a start at a sound, and found a woman watching her.

  “Are you mage?” the woman asked. “Or dragon?” Her eyes were blue desert sky, split with streaks of silver lightning; she peered at Meguet, blinking. Her long hair was white, her hands slender and delicate. She wore a black robe and magic shoes; there was no dust on them. “I hear you breathing. I cannot see so clearly now; everything breathes now, everything has wings. Which are you?”

  “Neither,” Meguet said. She straightened slowly, stiff. The woman, perched on stone like a butterfly sunning, smiled, her smooth brown face breaking suddenly into a spider web of wrinkles.

  “A riddle!”

  “No. Only a woman crossing a desert.”

  “You are not a mage.”

  “No.”

  “Then,” the woman said, “you have a chance of getting out.”

  Meguet was silent, puzzled. She found her water skin, drank a mouthful, and held it out. “Are you thirsty?”

  “No. But thank you. I have learned to smell clean water, after so many years here. I never go thirsty.”

  “Years.” Meguet swallowed, staring at the ancient, beautiful, half-blind face. “How many years?”

  “I can’t remember. I only remember how old I was when I got lost here; after I decided to stay I started counting dragons instead of years.” She smiled again. “In dragon years, I might be five. Or a thousand. Or I may not even be born. They are that elusive…”

  “Are you
a mage?”

  “I was. Maybe I still am. I never think about it.”

  “I thought that’s all mages thought about.”

  “Being mages?” She nodded, her hair drifting in the wind, a long cobweb cloak. “You’ve been around them, to know that.”

  “A couple of them. But how did you get lost? All you have to do is follow the sun or cross it, to find your directions.”

  “Mages,” the woman said, “tend to get distracted in the Luxour. There’s such a tangled magic here. It lures you this way, that. It tantalizes, it whispers.” She put her hand on a jagged tower of rock. “It lies. It says: Once I was this, search me, find who built me. So you search, and once you begin to see one fine, lost palace, you begin to see entire kingdoms lost; you wander from ruin to ruin. trying to find a memory.”

  “A memory of what?”

  “Of those who might have lived here among the dragons. Or, dragon-born, built them.” She patted the stone fondly. “Oh, they’re like the dragons, these old stones. They never say yes or no, but always maybe. Maybe I’m stone. Maybe more than stone.”

  “Then why did you never turn your back on them and leave?”

  “Because by then you yourself live within the ruined palaces; you have inherited the forgotten kingdoms.” She stood up on the rock, let her hair flow on the wild currents. She held out her hand. There was a blood-red jewel on her forefinger: a dragon’s eye. “Come with me. I’ll show you where I live, among the lizards and the sand beetles and the blue-eyed snakes. There’s a well of water beneath the rocks, so deep I never touch the bottom when I bathe in it. A dragon sleeps at the bottom of the well. Some-times at noon when sunlight pours between the rocks, I glimpse it, coiled, golden as the light. Come. I’ll show you.”

  “I cannot,” Meguet said gently. “I must cross the Luxour. I dare not be distracted by it.”

  “So I felt. when I was much younger. That a hundred reasons compelled me across the desert. But after a time, I realized there was no reason for me not to stay. No reason at all. What compels you?”