Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Then give the key to Rad and go home. He can find the dragons, bring them to the Luxour to fight Draken.”

  Nyx was silent a moment, her fingers tight on her arms. Her eyes slid away from Meguet’s, the expression in them unfathomable. “Does he imagine them to be so obliging? To rouse themselves to fight for or against Draken, at the whim of whichever human reaches them first? They are very dangerous.”

  “I don’t know.” Meguet rubbed her eyes wearily. “I don’t know what he thinks, except that this is what he wants. He takes power from the Luxour, he says. Maybe that would persuade them. At least he could hide the key from Draken. Or you could. Hide it on some path and go.” Nyx remained unmoved; Meguet’s voice rose. “Nyx, you are heir to Ro Holding!”

  “I might as well be heir to the moon if we can’t stop Draken here and now. I know what he wants. I’d go home only to sit in Ro House and wait for him and his army of mages and dragons to knock at the gate. I saw your kinsman with his corn-silk hair appear in Chrysom’s tower just as I left with Brand. He came to warn me.”

  “Then why did you leave? Nyx, what possessed you to come here?”

  “What possessed you to think you could cross the Luxour on foot to Draken Saphier’s court?”

  “I had to find the danger—I couldn’t see it sitting safely in Rad’s village.”

  Nyx shrugged slightly. “And I couldn’t see what the firebird saw, by sitting safely in Chrysom’s tower. Nor could I find you. A minor point to you, perhaps, but it seemed important to my mother. What was the warning you were given?”

  “I saw a dragon of night and stars across Rad’s doorway, in the morning light. At first I thought Rad was the danger—he knew too much—and Draken, when he found me in the desert, was persuasive. I didn’t know—I was confused—”

  “With reason.”

  Meguet paused, remembering the dragon, her hand straying to her shoulder. “I doubt that Corleu even knew the word for what he was compelled to warn you of. The Dragon hunts the Cygnet. That is the warning.”

  “I thought as much.” Nyx gazed at nothing, wandering a tangled path of magic or memory, while Meguet contemplated their dubious fates grimly. “Brand,” Nyx said softly. The color washed into her eyes at the name. “He might stop Draken.”

  “Why should he?”

  “It’s complicated,” Nyx said, and nothing more, seeming, for once, at loss for words. Meguet, looking at her, found the unspoken words in her eyes.

  “Nyx Ro,” she said incredulously, the blood startling through her. “He’s a warrior!”

  “So? You love a Gatekeeper.”

  “At least he is part of Ro Holding.” Meguet laid a hand on her forehead, where the headache was beginning, and added crossly, “Moro’s name. Brand himself barely knows who he is. Other than the son of a ruler who wants to scorch the four Holds of Ro Holding with dragon-fire. Is he Saphier’s heir?”

  “I forgot to ask.”

  “Oh, Nyx, really.”

  “Such things are unimportant in Ro Holding. You know that. I never knew my own father’s name.”

  “That’s because your mother fell in love discreetly and in private, and not, I would imagine, in the middle of a strange land with a man who spends most of his day in a tree.” She was holding her shoulder as she spoke, frowning at the nagging pain. “You love him for the color of his eyes.”

  “Most likely,” Nyx said temperately. She drew the ivory ball out of her pocket, opened it, and extracted something that looked like a brown, withered hand.

  “What is that?”

  “Olem root. From Berg Hold.” She applied it gently to Meguet’s shoulder. A numbness washed across the pain; the scent of cloves and earth and mint seemed to quiet even the flickering ache behind her eyes. “Country magic. It will cling there until the bleeding stops, and then it will drop away and wither again. A trifle gruesome, but it works.”

  “Yes,” Meguet sighed. “Thank you. So. Brand will stop his father from destroying Ro Holding for your sake?”

  “Not exactly for my sake,” Nyx said, but did not elaborate, nor did she allow expression into her eyes. She took the amber earring from the ivory, hung it from her ear. Gold fire shimmered across it, faded. “As you say, we hardly know each other. But,” she added on a breath, “he knows his father even less.”

  “What—”

  “We must find the firebird now. Quickly.”

  “Draken will be with him.”

  “Draken was alone, when I saw him last. I’m hoping the Luxour separated them.”

  “What about Rad?” Meguet asked anxiously, as Nyx shaped the silver pattern into their future. “Should we leave him on his own?”

  “He would only distract the firebird. I want all of Brand’s attention.” She listened a moment, for what Meguet could only imagine: dragon’s breath, the silent voices of the mages, the footsteps of the dragon-lord. “Come.”

  Winds, desert, stars, spilled around them at the path’s end. Meguet saw the broken palaces rising up against the night. The transparent, elusive colors in a dragonfly’s wing illumined windows, flickered away. In the next moment, the palaces were only stones.

  “Should we hide?” she whispered to Nyx. “Are we invisible?”

  Nyx shook her head. The wind tossed her hair into dark, tangled paths; for an instant her eyes reflected moonlight. “I want the firebird to find me.”

  “What if the mages find you first?”

  “That’s a risk I’ll have to take. Meguet—” she breathed, as stars sparked in the ground around Meguet, shifted to form a familiar constellation. “Will you stop that?”

  The Cygnet rose above their heads, star-fire marking its wings, its cold bright eye, until the winds picked the stars apart and they fell like fading embers into the dark. “It’s the Luxour,” Meguet said a little wildly. “I can’t control it.”

  “I can’t either.”

  “What do you want me to do? Should I hide?”

  “Go wait among those stones. Maybe their power will disguise yours.”

  Meguet left her alone, barely more than a shadow in the desert, using a power at once simpler and far more complex than any mage’s power to call the firebird. Turning as she entered the nearest mass of stones, she saw tiny black swans form and fly out of her footprints in the dust. Appalled, she moved deeper into the stones.

  Moonlight pulled her own shadow from the dark; she looked up and saw again the haunting shift from jumbled stones to the sagging walls and broken towers of a great ruined palace. Her mind wandered down an imaginary time-path and found the palace again, in a moment so close to the Luxour’s time that the two worlds of desert and palaces, made unstable by enormous, random powers, were constantly overlapping. The moonlight in the high windows grew filmy with butterfly colors. The colors washed away; the cold light poured down stone. She heard Nyx’s voice.

  She walked soundlessly to the opening in the stones, looked out. The firebird had come to Nyx; as it spiralled around her, she coaxed it down. It came to rest finally in front of her. It gazed at her a moment, motionless, crying neither sorrow nor fire. And then it changed.

  He is free, Meguet thought with wonder, and then, as the stones around her shifted, he changed under her eye: She saw the broader, more powerful line of his shoulders, the white in his hair. She felt something flash out of her entire body; the winds took her fear and shaped it into the dragon’s shadow.

  Nyx vanished. Draken simply turned his head, looked at the stones where Meguet was hiding, and Nyx appeared again.

  “No,” she said sharply.

  “Then give me what I want.”

  “Where is Brand?”

  “Where I left him. Give me the key. Then I will set you and Meguet on the path to Ro Holding. You can go home.”

  “And wait for you.” Her voice shook with anger. Draken said very softly,

  “Yes.”

  Meguet felt her body flash again. This time her own rage shaped the shadow that flew, soundless and dar
k as night, with its coldly burning eye on Draken Saphier. She flew and did not fly; she felt the power gather in her again, as the black swan neared him. Blue light flickered along its wings. He must have heard the winds part for it; he spun suddenly, flung up his hand. The black dragon formed against the moon and stars, its red eyes flaming. It opened its mouth, swung its long neck down and caught the black swan as it flew into Draken Saphier.

  He cried out, as the blue flame rippled over him. Then the dragon broke the swan’s neck and tossed it away. Meguet, still caught in it, felt herself grow limp and thoughtless with its death, falling farther and farther away from a point of light that grew small, so small she could scarcely see it, though it seemed, as she fell. the only important thing left to do.

  Then the hard ground shaped under her again; someone gripped her, shook her. “Meguet!” She opened her eyes. The world was still black, but she recognized Rad’s voice. She lifted her head, saw Draken rising. She heard a strange noise beside her; Draken, hearing it also, vanished just before the mage-light struck.

  So had Nyx; the light snaked across the air where she had been, and picked one of the warrior-mages out of nothing. Her ritual blades and time-paths caught the light, flared brighter than the moon. Then she seemed to lose all light, become a piece of nothing darker than the night. She fell without a sound. Another mage appeared beside her; power snapped back at Rad. The stones shook around them; a shard flicked across Meguet’s cheek. She flinched, heard Rad breathe something.

  “Stay here,” he said, and vanished. She stumbled to her feet, gripping stones to keep her balance, and looked out.

  She saw a calm and empty desert. Then both Rad and Nyx seemed to waver in and out of the air, as if they were being pulled into eyesight and constantly pulling themselves back. As the silent struggle gradually and relentlessly worked them visible, the warrior-mages appeared around them, still as monoliths in the moonlight.

  Draken saw her. He was an eye in her mind instantly, blood-red and unblinking, staring everywhere she fled, forcing her finally into a maze where she took every wrong turn she could make, and every wall that stopped her turned into the dragon’s eye and forced her on. Once she turned and stood in its glare, refusing to move. The eye turned to fire in her head; from some far place she heard her own voice. She ran.

  Abruptly, she could see again. She was on her knees, clinging to stone, trembling as if she had been running for her life through the maze of palaces on the Luxour. Draken had turned away from her to watch the firebird come.

  It flew fast, and it flew straight to Rad Ilex.

  He could not seem to move; he could only watch it, his head uplifted. He tried to speak; he could not. The bird’s silver claws shone like ritual blades; they were open, curved, and dropping toward his heart. Nyx’s face was turned toward the bird; she too struggled to speak. Meguet, freed from Draken’s attention, walked the maze in her mind to what the dragon had sought: the eye of the Cygnet.

  Nyx, she said, from that secret place, and Nyx met her eyes.

  Power swept through her, from the Cygnet to the Cygnet’s heir. Nyx shook free of the web of minds that held her, and cried to the firebird,

  “Brand! Not Rad! It’s your father’s spell! Remember!”

  The firebird faltered above Rad. It tore its voice out of Ro Holding and screamed, falling as if it had been shot. Brand, his face rigid with the firebird’s fury, rolled to his feet and leaped in a single unbroken movement, at his father. Draken, startled, nearly unleashed mage-fire; he pulled it back quickly as Brand’s body struck him. He staggered, regained his balance and gripped Brand. The back of his hand, coupled with the weight of time-paths, whipped across Brand’s face. He fell like the firebird had out of the air, and lay still.

  A few of the warrior-mages stirred; Meguet heard an indrawn breath. Draken met their eyes, said calmly, “It was necessary. He will understand.” He looked at Nyx. “The key.”

  Her eyes flicked at Meguet, leaning drained and helpless against the stones. She bowed her head. Something small, burnished with amber fire dropped into her hand. Draken, his eyes on it, stepped toward her. She flung the amber at his feet.

  It exploded with all the firebird’s beautiful enchantments. For a moment Draken vanished among them: a scattering of garnet roses, a diamond snowfall. But as he picked himself out of the spell he had made, the mages held Nyx, shaped her back into the waning moonlight as she tried to vanish. Draken, shaking gold leaves out of his hair, stepped across Brand’s body to her.

  “Perhaps.” he said, “you will give me something to fight after all in your peaceful kingdom. You and your cousin who is not a mage.”

  He held her eyes and held out his hand. After a long time, during which she stood like the warrior-mages, a standing stone beneath the setting moon, she reached into her pocket for the key to all the dreaming worlds.

  Seventeen

  THE first of the dragons appeared at dawn. Nyx watched the line of light above the mountains turn fiery with sunrise, and listened to Brand breathe. He might have been the firebird still, his bruised face empty, his thoughts hidden from her. Twice she had heard him try to speak in the night, then stop. He sat beside her on bare ground. The mages had tied his hands behind his back, while his father roamed the time-paths. They did not, Nyx guessed, want to use power against Draken Saphier’s powerless son. Rad slumped against a rock near him. A web of power, spun from mage to mage across the circle, trapped him in its intricate strands; Nyx caught a glimpse of it in the dawn, fine-spun and dangerous, each tendril clinging to Rad, trembling a warning at his every breath. It vanished from eyesight, then; the mages hid it from the light of day. She felt no such elaborate constraints on her; they knew she would not leave Meguet or Brand. The mages had left Meguet free; they watched with cold curiosity the odd enchantments the Luxour pulled out of her. She was mage and not mage. Nyx they understood; they might not, Nyx feared, let Meguet return home. Meguet sat near Rad, leaning against the same rock. She watched the sunrise absently, frowning a little; Nyx wondered if Meguet saw, instead of the rising sun, the great shining prism hidden within time, which was the Cygnet’s power and its eye.

  She heard Brand’s breath catch. An eye had opened in the distant mountains: a second sun, red-gold, flaming through the harsh, barren crags. A crag unfolded, extended itself upward in a broad sweep of gold. Another eye opened. The true sun rose above them. Shadows scattered away from the mountainside as the dragon’s face emerged. A second crag broke away, moved upward into the sky, to catch the wind. The dragon shrugged itself out of the mountain, soared upward, light sliding like molten gold across its bright scales. In that moment Nyx felt the slackening of the mages’ guard. It did not matter; as they watched the dragon burn across the morning, no one could have moved.

  It came straight to them; its vast shadow, flung forward, reached them first. It seemed, as the earth darkened beneath its broad underbelly, to have swallowed the sun. Then it veered, loosed the sun from beneath its wing. It settled on top of the steep ruin of stones near them. It stretched its wings in the light; gold shook into their eyes. Then it faded into itself among the rocks, its brilliant, craggy profile to the light. One eye stared down at them, wide and ruthless as the sun.

  Nyx felt a touch, and started. Brand had shifted closer; his shoulder brushed hers. She looked at him; the dragon had wakened something in him besides the firebird’s silent, endless cry.

  “My father—” His voice caught. He began again, softly, but Nyx sensed the mages’ attention riveted on them. “He won’t stop this, until he finds his own father. The dragon-mage.”

  “I know.”

  “Such monsters will make a wasteland out of Ro Holding.” He closed his eyes, his face twisting. “Why must he take Ro Holding? There is a land for him at the end of every path.”

  “He glimpsed the power in Meguet,” Rad Ilex said wearily. “It’s mysterious, beyond his control, beyond his experience. He will take apart Ro Holding to find the source.”
Meguet’s eyes flicked to him. She turned her face away abruptly, her mouth tight. He reached out with some effort, as if he lifted stone instead of bone, and touched her. “I’m sorry. If I hadn’t dragged you here with me—”

  “If I had just let you take the key,” Nyx said bitterly.

  Meguet’s head bowed. “If I had not picked up the rose.”

  “It’s my father’s fault,” Brand said with savage lucidity. “None of yours. Any of you.” He struggled impatiently with his bonds, and added dispassionately, “I would like to kill him.”

  Nyx asked tentatively, “Do you remember—”

  “Everything.” He stopped. He raised a shoulder, brushed it against his swollen cheek, where a few fragmented time-paths had imprinted themselves in blood. He looked at Rad finally and said again, “Everything. You told me this would happen. That you needed to leave Saphier to look for Chrysom’s key, and you told me why. You had told my father, in all innocence, that it existed, and then you realized that all the innocence was yours. You knew he would kill you for the key. I didn’t believe you. Then he came in and I saw his eyes. Dragon’s eyes. You had already opened a path to Ro Holding. He—I—” He shook his head. “It becomes confused here. He tried to stop you—I tried to stop him—I don’t know how I thought I could.” He swallowed, added huskily, “He was no one I knew then. Not my father—No one. He had transformed himself. He was the dragon. And I became the firebird.”

  “He made the firebird to kill me,” Rad said, and then was silent, as if words, like his hands, were fixed to the mages’ web of power and had become too heavy. He lifted his head suddenly; Nyx, following his gaze, saw a piece of morning sky detach itself and fall. Against the gold-brown desert its shape became visible; a sky-blue dragon, smaller than the first, with eyes like cloud. It dropped onto another pile of stones, and vanished again; with difficulty she saw it settle itself, now stone-brown and grey, flecked with black, a rock-dragon hidden among the rocks. “I envy him,” Rad whispered. “Seeing all their private worlds.” Only Brand stared at the ground, seeing nothing. “Brand,” Rad said, again with effort, and Brand turned his dark, empty stare at him. “He didn’t know you either, then. You were someone for him to use. He would have used anyone.”