Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “This house is yours,” his mother had told him years earlier, when he was too young to understand what she wasn’t telling him. “Your father gave it to me before he left us. Now I’m giving it to you, so that you’ll have something from him. So that you’ll always have a home here with me and the trees and the sea.”

  Even then he had felt the twist of bitterness that this place was all he knew of a father: no voice, no expressions, no touch, only these huge, silent rooms full of heavy, ornate furniture and paintings of the dead who had lived in them. There was no picture of his father. As Pierce grew, so did his questions. But his own mother seemed to know little more than he did about his father. He was gone, she only told him. He had left the house to her, and now it was Pierce’s to keep forever. At any request for even the simplest of answers, she flung up a mist of silence, or sorrow, or absentmindedness, and disappeared into it. Pierce had no idea if his father was alive or dead. Nothing, anywhere in the vast house, including his mother, indicated that he even had a name. Pierce asked the housekeepers and gardeners, many of whom had grown up in Desolation Point, what they knew; he flung questions at random through the rest of the town. Everyone, wearing the same slightly uneasy expression, gave him the same answer.

  “Ask your mother.”

  He veered his small, weathered Metro away from the rutted, overgrown drive to the house, parked instead on a paved overlook at the cliff’s edge. Crenellated stonework marked the edge of safety. Beyond it, waves heaved and hammered at gigantic slabs of stone that had been, at some lost point in time, determined to burrow beneath the edge of the earth. The cliff bore signs of that ancient struggle. Layered and veined with changing eons, it had been twisted upward by the power of the collision. Jagged, broken edges of land reared out of the water like the prows of a ghostly fleet of ships. Time had laid a thin layer of dirt and decaying things on the top of the cliff. The house, the trees, stood on that fragile ground while the battle, frozen but not forgotten, bided its time beneath.

  Pierce got out of the car and wandered to his favorite corner of the wall, where tides in their raging broke high above the land, where the cliff swallows nested, gulls rode the wind below him, sea lions and whales slid through the waves as easily as he moved through air. That afternoon sea was calm, idling between tides. Waves gathered around the rocks, broke indolently against them, creating brief, lovely waterfalls of foamy white that flowed over the dark, wet stone and drained back into the sea.

  His thoughts were anything but calm. Old questions surfaced urgently, obsessively, along with new. Who was his father? What was he like? What had he done? Had he ever left Cape Mistbegotten to follow the long road south to Severluna? Had he known such as those formidably trained, confident, trusted young knights?

  Had he been one?

  Was he alive or dead? If dead, how had he died?

  If not, where was he?

  There were no answers, Pierce realized finally, in this place where he had been born. Wind, sea, the ancient house, even his mother all told him nothing. Sitting on the wall, staring at the fog bank rolling across the horizon told him nothing either. He stood, backed a step or two away from the land’s edge, perplexed by an impulse growing in him, as mindless and undefined as the forces under his feet. It was not until he finally turned, got back into the car and started it, that he understood what he would do.

  He went as far, then, as the end of the drive. He turned the engine off again and was gazing at the closed door of the garage when his mother stepped into view through the driver’s side window. She bent to look at him as he jumped. Her eyes were wide, her red-gold hair loose and roiling in the wind. It dawned on him, as they both fumbled to open the door, that she had been waiting for him. She had known what he was thinking before he did.

  “Pierce?” she said, as he got out. Her husky voice, oddly tremulous, the pallor in the lovely face, the green rainbow of letters spelling Haricot arching over the embroidered bean vine on the apron she had neglected to take off, amazed him. He had never seen her afraid before. He was going to do this thing, he realized, astonished anew. He was actually going to leave home.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “Mom. Really.”

  “It was those knights,” she said bitterly. She was trembling, her hands tucked under her arms as though she were cold. “Their fault.”

  “They just got lost.” He put an arm over her shoulder, turned her toward the house. “Let’s go inside. Don’t worry. It’s just something I have to do.”

  “No. I need you to stay here, help me at Haricot. You can’t leave. You need to know so much more than you do. So much that I haven’t taught you yet.”

  He pushed the heavy front door open. The great hall, a shadowy, drafty remnant of a bygone age, held as many cobwebs as there were oddments to hang them on. The full body armor of some long-dead knight stood on one side of the huge fireplace so rarely lit that the pile of logs and driftwood in it probably housed any number of creatures. The knight’s helm, a beaky thing with slits for vision, seemed to stare speculatively at Pierce.

  He asked impulsively, “Was my father a knight?”

  Heloise sank into one of the worn couches scattered around the room. She eyed the cold hearth expressionlessly; Pierce thought that, as ever, she would maneuver around an answer. Her face crumpled abruptly. She tossed a streak of fire at the dry wood with one hand, and with the other, brought the hem of the apron to her eyes. The pile flamed amid explosions of resin, cracklings, and keening that, to Pierce’s ears, might not have entirely been the voices of wood.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “Yes. And he still is.”

  Pierce’s breath stopped. Everything stopped; his thoughts, his blood, even the fierce, hungry ravages of the fire froze in a moment of absolute silence. He sat down abruptly on the couch beside his mother. He took a breath, another, staring at her, then heard the fire again, and his own breathing, as ragged as though he had been running.

  “He’s alive?” He felt the blood push into his face, the sting of what might have been brine behind his eyes; he seemed, weirdly enough, on the verge of crying for the man who had not died. “What—where?”

  Her full lips pinched; her own face had flushed brightly, furiously. If he had touched her cheek, she might have burned him. Her lips parted finally, gave him the word, a hard, dry nugget of sound.

  “Severluna.” He didn’t move, just let his eyes draw at her, asking, asking, until she finally spoke again. “He has been, since before he was your age, a knight in King Arden’s court. We met there—”

  “You—”

  She held up a hand; he waited. More words fell: flint; fossils; hard, cold diamonds. “We met and married there.” His throat closed; he swallowed what felt like fire. “I had a child. A son.”

  His mouth opened; no words came. He felt the wave break again behind his eyes, the ache of salt and blood.

  “The year your father took my small son to King Arden’s court to be trained and educated was the year I knew, beyond all doubt, that he had never loved me. He loved the queen. Only her. Always her. Before, during, and even now.

  “So I ran.” Her own eyes glittered. Pierce watched one tear fall, saw her catch it in her palm, her fingers close over it, so rare it was, so powerful. “I took you with me. I didn’t—I didn’t know that then. I came here, to the place we chose, during the first year of our marriage, to be alone together. I thought we were alone. I had not realized then that he had brought her with us; even then he carried her everywhere in his heart.” His lips parted to ask; she opened her empty hand to stop him. “No one lived here; it was his inheritance. He came looking for me. Once. To ask me back to Severluna. I told him no. Never again.

  “By then I knew about you. I didn’t tell him. I kept you here, after you were born, so far from king and court that you would know nothing of your father’s life. Down there, no one gives a thought to the distant, isolate
d margins of the world. I wanted to raise you so far from Severluna that anything you heard or read about it would seem as unreal as a fairy tale.”

  Pierce, motionless, staring at her, felt the world change shape under his feet. No longer bounded by the sea, by the little, ancient town, the dark, endless forest, the narrow road that circled the cape, it expanded to immeasurable lengths, grew complex, noisy, mysterious, shocking.

  He opened his mouth, realized with wonder, as no hand came up, that she was waiting now for him to ask.

  “Who is he?”

  Her eyes grew luminous under tears she would not let fall; in that moment, he thought she would answer. Then she stood up so fast she pulled the next breath he drew into her wake. “Enough!” she told him fiercely, pacing in front of the roaring fire, rumpling the hearthrug. Her hand, searching for something to worry—beads, the restaurant key on a chain—found the apron front. She glanced down at it with surprise, then untied it impatiently and tossed it on the floor. Pierce, watching her, had a sudden, wrenching glimpse of the young woman she had been in Severluna, married to an illusion and fleeing in pain and fury to this difficult place, where memories rooted themselves more implacably than anything she could coax out of the miserly soil.

  “Who?” he pleaded again, his voice grating; she only shook her head.

  “Find your own answers,” she said harshly. “I’ve been trying since I came here to forget all this.” Then she halted, midwhirl in her pacing, to stare at him. “No. Don’t. Don’t leave me, Pierce. There’s nothing you need in Severluna. Your father does not even know you exist, and even if you find him or your brother, what can they do for you? You’re not trained to the ways of the court. I have no family there to take you in. You’ll be alone in a city full of strangers—what will you do with yourself?”

  He gazed at her, wondering that she could show him such things—a father, a brother, a world not governed by wind and tide and how many crabs came up in the net, but by wealth, power, knowledge, and the sources of the strange magic she knew—and expect him not to want what she herself had wanted.

  He stirred, beginning to think. “What I do here,” he answered slowly. “I work for you. I’ll find another restaurant.”

  “But how will you find your way? You can barely read a map.”

  He shrugged. “People do. Find their ways. Even people as ignorant as I am of anything beyond Cape Mistbegotten. I’ll put one mile behind me, then another, until I get where I’m going.”

  “And what,” she asked helplessly, “will I do without you? Without the sound of your voice in this rambling old house? Without the sweet face I’ve known all of your life? Here everyone knows your name. You have a place here, everything you need. How will you know even how to look for a bed in Severluna?”

  “Mom.” He leaned forward, caught one of the long, graceful hands working anxiously around the other. He tugged at her gently until she dropped beside him again on the couch. “What I don’t know by now, it’s time I learned. Stop worrying. The road runs both ways. If I get into trouble over my head, I can find my way back. Anyway. When in my life have you not known where I am?”

  She was silent at that; she sat tensely looking into the fire, fingers kneading the sofa cushions. “Yes,” she said finally. Her grip loosened slowly; she met his eyes again, her own no longer angry, grieving, but calmer and beginning to calculate. “Yes. Come and work with me for one more evening. Please,” she begged, as he stirred in protest. “I’ll be understaffed without you. And I need you under this roof one last time, while I get used to the idea that you are leaving me. At Haricot tonight, I can teach you a little sorcery, some arcane methods that will be useful to know in a strange kitchen. All right?”

  He nodded absently, hearing only every other word of kitchens, sorcery, cooking, as he conjured up the knights again in memory. They might remember him, he thought: the young man who had seen the legendary shadows of their ancestors.

  “In the morning, if you still want to leave, we can make proper plans. Yes?”

  “Yes,” he said absently, and realized then that he was already gone, on his way, the roof over his head, his bed, now only his first temporary stop, and her advice among the possessions he might take or leave behind when he continued his journey.

  2

  Merle was chanting again. Carrie heard his voice coming out of the old rowboat hauled to dry dock under a hemlock. Keys in hand, she paused beside the pickup door, listening. She couldn’t make out a word of it. The old crow perched on the wind-bowed crown of the hemlock burst into sudden, raucous song. Carrie wondered if Merle and bird understood each other. It seemed as likely as anything else about her impossible father.

  She tossed the keys onto the driver’s seat, walked into the long grasses under the shadow of the forest. She and Merle lived at the southern edge of Proffit Slough, high and back far enough so that the daily ebb and flow of tidewater pushing into sweet water didn’t find its way into their house even in the most violent weather. Several other houses, old, patched, painted long ago in muted colors, stood peacefully among the silent pines. They were relics of a past when farmers had drained the land and built the only road that ran between the fields and up to the highway. Farmers and crops and cows were long gone; the land had been repossessed by streams and tidal channels, the labyrinthine sea nursery regulated by tides and seasons and the ancient rhythms of the moon. Only farmhouses remained, inhabited by the artistic, the eccentric, the reclusive.

  And Merle, who, Carrie’s mother said for years before she left them, was just plain demented.

  The chanting from the boat was getting eerie, high and reedy, like some ritual litany that should have been accompanied by gourd rattles and drums. Carrie looked down into the boat. Merle stopped his chanting abruptly and stared at her with such astonishment and wonder that she felt like something he had been trying, with no real hope, to summon. Well, here I am, she told him silently. As suddenly, he recognized her. He smiled. He was lying on his back beneath the broken seat planks, his head cushioned on a monstrous dandelion blooming through a hole in the boat bottom.

  “Are you drunk?” Carrie asked.

  He considered the question. “Not this morning.”

  “Do you want some help up?”

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  “Coffee?”

  “There’s a thought,” he answered, but showed no other signs of interest.

  “Well, what exactly are you doing?”

  “Waiting.”

  “For what?” she demanded bewilderedly. “A bus?”

  “For an answer.”

  He’d been out all night, she guessed, as often happened on tranquil spring nights. He watched the reflection of the moon in the slough streams, or swapped tales with some transient beside a fire in the backwoods. Fish stories, hunting stories, war stories: Carrie had overheard some of those earnest, drunken conversations, when neither listened to the other, and whatever events they spoke of seemed to have happened in different countries, maybe even in different millennia.

  “I have to go to work, Dad. You sure you don’t want a hand up?”

  Merle murmured something inaudible. Then he said more clearly, “I’m working.”

  Carrie glanced at the sky, saw a flock of geese in a ragged V flying the wrong direction for spring. “You’d be more comfortable out of here.”

  “I can see better down here.”

  “How about that cup of coffee?”

  “You’d shudder, your blood would roar, your hair would stiffen tendril by tendril like quills upon the fretful porpentine if you could see, if you could see.”

  Carrie gave up. “Okay. I guess that would be no.”

  Her father’s eyes lost their vacant passion; he smiled at her again.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Don’t forget that Mom’s in town for the night. She wants to meet yo
u for lunch. Call her?”

  “I won’t forget,” he promised.

  “You have a good day, Dad.” She hesitated. “You won’t forget, but will you do it?”

  “Whatever you say, Sweet.”

  “I have got to get out of Chimera Bay,” she said fiercely to the saint dangling on the rearview mirror of the pickup. Her father had found the medallion on his rambles, hung it in the truck because it protected travelers. How her father, who shied like a vampire at the shadow of a church spire in his path, knew one saint from another, Carrie hadn’t a clue.

  She and the truck rattled across the old farmers’ road, then up the steep, rocky, rutted grade that joined a paved road at the top of the hill. In the mirror, before she turned, she could see the north end of the slough, the distant estuary waters broadening between the low, coastal hills to meet the tide. The paved road wound for a few miles along the crest of the hills before it dipped down to follow the sea, where it flowed around the headlands and into Chimera Bay.

  The Kingfisher Inn stood at the edge of the broad bay, looking out over the deep shipping channel and the calm waters beyond it that ebbed twice a day into shallows and mudflats. From the highest curve, Carrie could see all of the inn at once, the huge central building with the two round turrets at its back corners, and the wide, graceful, four-storied wings that once overlooked lawn, rose gardens, and the docks where guests who sailed in on their yachts would tie up for the night.

  It had all been a wonder: so the old photos, letters, and yellowed reviews, framed and hanging behind glass along the walls, told her. And what had happened to it all? Something had happened. She was uncertain what; everything had changed before she was born. For all the vagueness in everyone’s eyes when she asked, the good fortune might have vanished a century before. Not even her father could come up with a coherent explanation, and he had been there, she knew, beside the much younger Hal Fisher in a tuxedo under the blazing chandelier, his golden hair clipped, his mustache wild and thick, bracketing his confident smile, lord of all he surveyed, including Merle at his elbow, wearing a dress suit, of all things, and looking, in the old sepia photo, oddly watchful, as though from very far away he saw the something coming.