Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She scattered her past in riddles around the apartment. A photo of an ancient village hung on her wall; it seemed made entirely of stone, its cottages and streets and the lovely little bridge that arched over a meandering brook he could not find on any map. A hundred-year-old sketch of a hoary castle stood framed on the table beside her bed. It was ringed with water, one tower split and sagging, the drawbridge drawn up tight, like a mouth clamped over a secret. “Where I was born,” she explained of those things. “Only it’s not in that photo—that’s just the antique part of Ravensley.” When he asked about the name, she shrugged. “It’s old. Common in south Wyvernhold.” Again, he could not find it on a map. “Too small,” she told him, laughing. “The tiniest village in the world.”

  She had come from there to Severluna, sometime in the previous year. Even that was vague. But her vagueness would be accompanied by that bewitching smile. He felt oddly comfortable with the lack of detail; it mirrored his own sense of something missing. Half of him seemed anchored to his Wyvernbourne heritage, but the other half lacked a solid place to stand. That part of himself drifted aimlessly, feeling the lack, wondering what it was he could not see.

  He said, cutting into his steak, “I am glad my father finally told me about my mother. I wish he had told me what little he knew years ago. It would have put an end to my endless imaginings. And I wish there had been more to tell.”

  “A happier ending?” Vivien guessed. “She didn’t die? But nothing in the world stays private these days. Her death made things tidy.” He eyed her; she lifted a shoulder. “Nothing to tell, no one to know, nothing muddled or messy.”

  “Only between the queen and my father,” he said dryly.

  “But Queen Genevra has been—” She paused. “Well. If not perfect, at least perfectly discreet.”

  “Not entirely if such gossip travels even into tiny villages not on any map.”

  She reached out quickly, wrapped her long, pale fingers around his wrist. “I’m sorry, Daimon. I shouldn’t have said that. The village of Ravensley might have been asleep the last hundred years for all it knows of court gossip. I picked up a thread of that rumor about the queen’s lover here in Severluna. But everyone here is discreet as well. Everyone is kind about the queen. No one blames her. And the story has been around so long, it’s beyond gossip now, anyway. It’s more like folklore.”

  He studied her curiously, struck. “Folklore. Fairy tale. Is that the context in which you live?”

  She sat back; shadow from a grill hood hid her eyes. “It’s where I grew up,” she said lightly. “Time passed so slowly there. Centuries overlapped. Like the cobblestone road through the village that bikers always take too fast, bouncing across it when the paved road suddenly vanishes. Here in Severluna, I might as well be on the moon; everything is still so strange.”

  “Centuries overlap here, too.”

  “But things change constantly; now is always becoming new.” She laughed at herself, shifting out of the shadow. “I still leave country dust in my footprints when I walk. I learned to cook in a cauldron.” She picked up a charred bit of parsnip with her fingers, absently or to prove her point, Daimon was unsure. He watched her mindlessly, her slender, graceful hand, the movements of her mouth, wanting to seize that hand, pull her away from the table, scatter plates, forks, chairs behind them as they ran for the door. She laughed at herself again, and at his expression, wiping her fingers on her napkin.

  “Sorry,” she said again. “Bumpkin.”

  “Alien.”

  “Is that all you talked about at lunch?”

  “I don’t remember.” Then he did, dimly. “Oh. My father brought up some artifact that Sylvester Skelton unearthed in his studies. Something even older than your village, and with mysterious, unlikely powers. My father talked about sending the knights out looking for it, to take their minds off—whatever it was. Politics. Reclaiming their ancient kingdoms. He’s calling an assembly. I’ll have to behave like a knight for a few days. Can we go?” he asked restively at the thought and snared the attention of a passing server. “I might not be able to get away so easily, then.”

  Her eyes flared again, as nearby coals flamed; she looked like a wild thing, he thought, a deer, a fox. “Another fairy tale,” she breathed. “What is this marvelous thing?”

  “I don’t know. A cup, a vessel, your cauldron for all anyone knows. Are you finished?”

  She gave him her entrancing smile and stood up.

  “I’ve barely begun.”

  8

  Above ground on the final afternoon of their weeklong shift at Calluna’s cave, Princess Perdita watched Daimon melt into the traffic on his electric bike. As though he felt her narrow-eyed gaze between his shoulder blades, he vanished quickly around the nearest corner. Meeting someone, she guessed, but no one he would talk about. She wondered why.

  “Is something wrong?” Gareth asked.

  She was standing in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, gripping him by his forearm with both hands, frowning intently at nothing. Total strangers were grinning at the couple, pulling out phones. Gareth wore that look he got when confronted with the powerful, exasperating bond between the half sibs. Perdita looked at him quickly and smiled, and his face eased.

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe not.” Wind blew her long black hair across her face; she pushed it away, laughing. “I’m starving, and my hair smells like Calluna’s cave. No respectable place will let me in. There’s the car.”

  He grimaced as he folded his tall body, packed as it was with knightly virtues and muscles, into her tiny Greenwing. “Be easier to carry this under my arm,” he grumbled.

  “I know, I know, but father says it’s good for the earth and sets an example. More likely he had Lord Skelton put a spell on the engine that makes it impossible to speed. What’s the greasiest, smokiest, darkest pub you know?”

  He thought a moment, then guided her there.

  They sat in a corner of the antique pub, surrounded by oak and smoke-stained stone, along with a mix of tourists and students from an equally archaic local college. Everything on the menu was fried, including modern versions of rustic dishes with weird names. They ate Straw Dogs and Fishwife’s Cobble, along with Wyvern Eggs, which turned out to be balls of deep-fried bread stuffed with golden, peppery cheese. Perdita watched people come and go, some fashionably dressed in black and metal, others who might have just gotten out of bed and tossed on some laundry in one of the aged flats down the streets. Gareth meandered absently through a tale about getting lost during his recent trip north and finding an invisible cape with an unusual name.

  Perdita felt the name come alive in her head, possibly a portent, or a detail in some obscure scheme of things. “Mistbegotten?” She tucked it away for later scrutiny as Gareth nodded.

  “We met a young man with a net full of crabs and a sorceress for a mother.”

  “Really. What’s her name?”

  “Heloise Oliver. She runs a restaurant there; she served us the most amazing crab chowder. Beautiful woman. Red-gold hair and eyes that glitter like bluebottle wings.” He bit into a Wyvern Egg, rendered himself speechless with hot cheese. Perdita eyed him speculatively. “Her son takes after her,” Gareth continued, when he could. “He seems to have something of her gifts, as well. I can’t imagine what the pair of them are doing up there in that forgotten little corner of—”

  Somebody skidded across the floor and landed in Perdita’s lap.

  Before she could move, Gareth mesmerized her, seeming to be sitting in his chair and standing in front of her in the same second, holding a strange, spiky fistful of metal she guessed was a weapon under the nose of the man on top of her.

  He said, “Get. Up.”

  The entire pub had frozen, along with the stranger, who smelled of piss, sweat, and the spilled beer that was soaking into Perdita’s skirt. She nudged him; he remembered how to move, gathering
himself slowly, clumsily, while the peculiar weapon with its mysterious red light like a mad little eye glared an inch from his face. His long hair was a tangled mass of gold and silver; he tied his torn pants with rope, and there were no laces in his mismatched shoes. He lurched a little as he rose, causing the red light to roil suddenly amid a steam-kettle hiss of breath from the onlookers.

  Perdita stood up, then, and edged around the man to see his aging, befuddled face. He had gone cross-eyed, staring at Gareth’s weapon.

  “Are you hungry?” she guessed. “Can we treat you to lunch?”

  His thin lips opened and closed a couple of times before he finally spoke. “That would be kind, miss. Ah. Will I be alive to eat it?”

  She glanced at Gareth. The weapon was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Gareth stood with a quizzical look on his face, wondering, it seemed, why everyone was riveted in place and dead quiet in the middle of their drinks.

  The bartender came to life, bringing a cloth to mop up the beer. The unfortunate who had sat on the princess cleared his throat.

  “Sorry, miss. I’m a little unsteady at this particular juncture in time. Sorry, young sir. My fault absolutely. I believe the entire incident was occasioned by an olive.”

  “An olive.”

  “Under my heel. I slid on it.”

  “Go and sit down, Henry,” the bartender sighed. “And thank your lucky stars. And thank you, Princess Perdita,” she added with a charming smile at Perdita, then at Gareth as he passed her a paper bill with Severen’s face on it. The god, his hair colored gold, his face masked in silver, looked not unlike the wild-haired, silver-stubbled man staring raptly at Perdita. “If you’ll come with me, Princess, I’ll unlock the private facilities, and you can wash off the beer.”

  Perdita drove Gareth to the palace. He had a meeting; she had a ritual to attend. She turned out of the city traffic through the hoary, lichen-stained arch at the south end of the palace grounds. The broad, graveled drive ran through parklands and gardens toward a view of the vast expanse of wind-whipped blue that was Severluna Bay. It began to curve at the white-stone walls of the palace rising as high as the cliff it stood upon. At the deepest point of the drive’s horseshoe turn, the wide steps of the palace flowed down from the doors to meet it.

  It was, on ordinary days, the most efficient way to get home. But the princess had barely cleared the archway before she found herself at the end of a long, slow line of official vehicles, private cars, motorbikes, electric bikes, blue-and-gold city cabs, and the sleek, dark, fast sedans favored by knights on duty. She felt, in the Greenwing, like a sprat that had wandered into a school of sharks.

  She asked Gareth incredulously, “What is this? Is this your meeting?”

  “It might well be. The king called for an assembly of the knights of Wyvernhold, which means everybody still capable of hobbling into his presence.”

  She glanced into the rearview mirror to back out, but a car had already pulled in line behind her. She recognized the device on the pennant flying on the hood. “Lord Kraken,” she marveled. “He’s got to be at least a couple of centuries old. What is my father up to? Are we going to war with somebody? You’ll tell me, won’t you?”

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t know how to keep secrets from you.”

  She caught sight of Daimon, then, ahead of them in the line. Wherever he had come from, he hadn’t yet had time to change into the formal black leathers and quilted jacket with the golden wyvern opening its wings across his shoulders, and depicted on the crest over his heart. He balanced on his bike with one boot on the ground, listening to the giant Sir Bayley Reeve, who stood athwart his own motorcycle five times the size of Daimon’s.

  “Gareth,” Perdita said, coming to an abrupt decision, “can you drive this?”

  He looked pained, as though she had asked him to pedal a tricycle to the Assembly. “Must I?”

  “I’m going to be so late . . .” She leaned over to kiss him before she opened the door. “Just leave it anywhere near the garages, with the keys in it. Thank you, Sweet.”

  She jogged down the drive and slid onto the bike behind Daimon, interrupting Bayley Reeve’s move-by-move rendition of a wrestling match he’d won.

  “Sorry,” Perdita told him. “I’m desperate. Daimon, can you cut through the garden to the back courtyard?”

  She felt his silent grunt of amusement. “You reek of beer,” he commented.

  “Please?”

  “Well. Possibly the guards will recognize us and we won’t get shot. But I will be viewed askance for days from every conceivable direction.”

  “Just hurry, and maybe no one will notice.”

  He was already veering out of line. As they sped on the verge along the drive to the nearest paved path through the immense garden, Perdita took a firmer hold on him and aimed for his ear.

  “Do I know her? This woman you’re in love with?”

  The bike careened abruptly, nearly sending them into a fishpond. Daimon righted them, curved around the water, then made his own path between the hedgerow and the herbaceous border, to the consternation of the gardeners deadheading the roses between them.

  “Sorry!” Perdita called to them. “Daimon—”

  “I’m not in love.” The bike sped from grass to gravel as it met the drive again, this time edging between taxis that had already deposited their passengers at the king’s front door, and were moving more quickly. Half a dozen palace guards spilled down the marble steps after the racing bike. Perdita turned quickly to call to them.

  “Sorry! I’m late! So you are seeing someone.”

  “I didn’t say that.” He churned up gravel turning along the side of the west wing of the palace, then veered again, heading for an arch in a walled courtyard. Perdita, clinging tightly, wondered if he was trying to throw her off the bike.

  “Do I know her?”

  She felt him draw breath, let it go. “No.”

  “Why not?” He didn’t answer. “We’ve always told each other who our latest passions are. Why is this one such a secret?”

  At the arch, guards raised their weapons and shouted, then recognized the pair as they skidded through into the broad, quiet yard behind the palace. Daimon brought the bike to a halt at the stairway to the goddess’s sanctum.

  He said, as Perdita got off the bike, “Because I’m obsessed. Because I don’t know, in a clearer light, exactly what I’d see.”

  She stood still, gazing at him with sudden, rabid curiosity. The expression in his eyes, above an implacable smile, warned her away.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she said, and ran for the stairs.

  The stairway curled up the inner walls of a lovely white-marble tower inlaid with a winding filigree of blue and green marble. A briny wind off the bay whistled through the filigree. Perdita pushed open the upper door and stepped into another world, this one entirely Calluna’s.

  It was the antechamber to the sanctum, where water piped from Calluna’s cave filled richly decorated pools for giving birth, for meditation, for healing. The antechamber had no windows, only blue and green walls down which Calluna’s water slid endlessly, silently, reflecting fire from candles of every size and shape lined along the walls on river-smoothed stones brought up from the goddess’s cave. A carved replica of Calluna’s earliest face hung above the closed doors of the Inner Sanctum, watching her waters fall.

  As Perdita hurried across the wide antechamber toward the line of private rooms where the mystes and the acolytes kept their robes and effects of office, a door opened softly and closed. Perdita slowed, blinking. The man turned swiftly down the inner stairway nearby without noticing her. But in that brief glimpse she recognized him, as well as whose chamber he had slipped out of.

  Leith Duresse.

  She had grown up aware of him, not really knowing why for years, only understanding finally that it was her mother�
��s awareness of him she had sensed at a very early age. Other knights could come and go, their faces blurring into one another; she always saw Leith clearly: the tall man with the black hair and broad shoulders, eyes the turquoise of Calluna’s walls in the sanctum. Always shadows in them, Perdita saw, always something she could not grasp. Then one day she did. Maybe someone had said something. Maybe it was the way he had looked at the princess, from behind that tangle of passion, guilt, love, acknowledging his fault. Or maybe he had opened the door of her mother’s chamber in that place where only women came, just at the moment when she was old enough, knew enough, to understand what she saw.

  Her mother opened the door a moment later. Perdita saw her glance down the stairwell. Then she heard Perdita’s step and turned her head quickly to meet her daughter’s eyes.

  Perdita saw only recognition and a faint touch of relief. The queen stepped back, opening the door wider. “You’re so late. Hurry and dress.”

  “I know. I got tangled up in the line of knights.” The little chamber, richly appointed with chairs, couch, wardrobe, mirrors, cupboards, was already draped with the queen’s garments. Perdita began to throw clothes off as the queen closed the door and opened the wardrobe where Perdita’s acolyte’s skirt and tunic hung. Genevra, who rarely smiled, gave a sudden, helpless laugh.

  “You smell like a brewery.”

  Her mother was a mermaid, the child Perdita had decided. What else could she be with that long sea-foam hair, those green eyes, that skin as luminous as pearl? Decades of marriage, two walloping sons and two daughters, an adopted son from her husband’s lover, her own long, discreet affair, had added a line here, a shadow there, and deepened the intensity in her eyes. She knew that Perdita knew. Others in that women’s sanctum knew as well. But no one spoke of it. Passion had no part in Calluna’s world, which was an escape from the ruthless carelessness of the god Severen.

  “There was an accident in a pub,” Perdita said, pulling off her boots, “involving a homeless man, an olive, and Gareth’s beer. Mother, what is my father intending, with all those knights on his doorstep? Are we threatening someone? Is someone threatening us? Are the old kingdoms going to rise up and rebel?”