Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Where have you been?” Daimon heard him wonder. Attention had drifted away from the question; it got lost in the sudden ring of fork against porcelain. Servers in their bright uniforms circled the table, proffering buns; others stood attentively behind the king, holding pitchers of water, bottles of wine, ready to replace the slightest sip. Daimon, absently pulling a bun into bits, helplessly pondered the magus’s question.

  Where, indeed?

  Finally, there seemed some end in sight to the endless occasion. The king rose, spoke again; a few words drifted into Daimon’s head: a supper, a tournament, the formal opening of the Assembly, the purpose of which Lord Skelton and Mystes Ruxley would explain. And then everyone was rising, including Daimon, who left only his empty chair to answer some question that had begun with his name. In a blink, he was one of hundreds of black uniforms; after a blur of time, he was finally out, away, on his bike and leaving the tediously familiar behind him as rapidly as he could.

  This time, Vivien met him in the past.

  He tailed a roaring truck as it turned down the street where she lived, and there she was, waiting. There they both were, he realized suddenly, standing in the miserly shadow of a sidewalk tree. He stopped his bike, staring, oblivious to the screech and bellowing horns and curses behind him. Vivien gestured; he moved again, finally brought the bike to a halt under a NO PARKING sign.

  The gray eyes, he saw, held the familiar, magical parings of gold in them that would catch fire under any passing light. She wore a flowing skirt, a tunic; her long, white-gold hair was pinned carelessly; blowing strands framed her lovely face. The expression in those eyes, fierce and watchful as she studied him, was not something, he guessed, she would have let his father see in the brief hours they had been together.

  He swallowed dryly, tried to speak, suddenly as confused as the small whirlwind in a nearby alley, gathering up scraps, torn paper, dust, then letting them all go without knowing why.

  “All these years,” he said finally, raggedly, “you’ve been dead.”

  She smiled a little, fierceness melting into unexpected tenderness. “I never went that far away from you. Lady Seabrook found me various masks to wear so that I could sometimes see you, watch you grow.”

  “Lady Seabrook,” he repeated, astonished. “My dotty great-aunt Morrig?”

  “Your dotty great-aunt made me a field squire so that I could watch you train. I sold ice cream in Calluna’s Cave when the queen first took you there to see it. I taught you how to drive.”

  “No. That was—”

  “Me. I’ve worn a hundred faces so that I could see your face.”

  He was staring again, stunned. The little whirlwind spun down the walk behind her, plucked at her hair. She raised a hand, pushed the whirl gently aside, and it went around them, then dwindled into nothing, dropping grit and a feather black as a raven’s eye. Vivien picked it up, tucked it into her own hair, and smiled at Daimon encouragingly. As though his mother’s hand had reached out to him as well, into his whirlwind heart, he felt the turmoil lose force, let go of some of its bewildering flurry of questions.

  He asked the simplest, the most entangled: “Why?”

  “I am Ana, your mother. And I am the descendant of the scattered realm of Ravenhold, which lived at peace within the human world for thousands of years until the wyvern king destroyed it. To him, the Ravenhold that he could see was simply one of many small kingdoms he wanted to put into his collection. This one was ruled by Berenicia, a woman, an aberration in the nature of things, so Arden thought, and all the easier to conquer. But he would have failed completely and for all time, except for the loss of our most precious possession.

  “The fact that the Wyvernbourne kings have never used it, nor even their most powerful magi, indicates to us that they have never known where it is either, or even that it exists. Until now.”

  “What is it?” he asked, even as he heard the echoes, the suggestions, of such power reverberating through the past days.

  “You saw it. Child of the Wyvern and the Raven, you were born to see. That great cauldron beneath the tree, stirred by the raven-magus, has such powers that no Wyvernbourne king can begin to imagine. It was stolen from Ravenhold the day Arden Wyvernbourne overran our realm. The one who stole it tore the fabric of our realm, like waking tears apart a dream. He was the first and last king we ever had, and we had banished him from Ravenhold long before that for misusing our great cauldron and causing such distress across the realm that even the ravens helped us chase him out. At least we all thought he had gone; he had hidden himself among us so well. But when he finally fled with the cauldron, he opened the path into time, into the human world, that permitted Arden Wyvernbourne into our land. Left powerless, we could not fight back. Our warriors died like humans; we could not resurrect them.

  “We want our realm back. We want our power back. Our cauldron. Whatever shape it has taken, you have the eyes, the heart to recognize it. Find it for Ravenhold. Find it for us.”

  He felt his heart crumple a little, bruised, at her words. “That’s why you chose my father? That’s why you had me?”

  She took a step toward him, her stern, beautiful face changing again, becoming human. “It’s not the first time, during our long defeat, that we have tried this. But none of the children we brought into the world were less loved for that.”

  He was silent, imagining her hundred different faces as she had wandered in and out of his life. Then he looked at Vivien, watching him beside his mother.

  “And you?” he asked, the whirlwind in his heart beginning to stir again, catching at any straw of understanding. “What do you want me for?”

  “I am the direct, living descendant of Queen Berenicia, whom Arden Wyvernbourne killed,” she answered. “I hope you will be my consort when I am crowned Queen of Ravenhold.”

  10

  Some kind of pot,” Gareth told Princess Perdita. “Or a vessel. A lost thing belonging to Severen. That’s the rumor going around.”

  “The king will ask you to go out looking for a flowerpot?”

  “Surely not.”

  “A fishing boat?”

  He looked perplexed. “I can’t imagine.”

  “There is an astounding array of pots in life,” she reminded him. “Including crock-pots. And vessels from sailboats to gravy boats.”

  He caught her hand to make her stop, pressed it against his lips. “I won’t know until the Assembly opens, in three more days. And then, I promise I will tell you everything.”

  She had joined the audience in the amphitheater seats on the first day of the tournament, to watch Gareth win a kickboxing match, then blow more flying objects than anybody else into a fine mist with the Wyvern’s Eye, then hit the center of a round, painted target more often than anyone else with an antique crossbow. He had clambered up into the seats to find her after that, relaxing after his victories. She wondered, as he sat beside her, if he had ever lost a contest in his life.

  “Of course I have,” he said. “I’m sure of it.” He looked uncertain. “Everybody does.”

  She smiled, then asked him what Mystes Halliwell had sent her there to find out: how much he knew about what the knights had been assembled for.

  She repeated what little that was to her great-aunt Morrig, Mystes Halliwell, and the queen, who seemed to appear as three as often as Perdita saw them. Holly Halliwell knew best what she was upset about, but not even she could shed much light on the obscurity.

  “How,” Perdita asked, “can anyone recognize something that has no name?”

  “Go and ask Sylvester,” Mystes Halliwell told her. “See what you can find out from him. Be subtle.”

  “Sometimes he has licorice,” Morrig said, and three faces turned to her, all mystified. “Slip a handful in your pocket for me?”

  —

  The king’s magus was most likely to be found in the
ancient keep that had been part of the first Wyvernbourne king’s castle. It stood on a lovely swath of green overlooking the sea, walled by worn stones salvaged from the original ruins. The tower was massive, and so high it had attracted the attention of a pair of wyverns, among the last before they went extinct. They took up residence on the top of the keep, with an eye to nesting there. The first Arden’s magus was able to charm them away, then decided to live there himself. Magi, gifted as they were, had no need for stairs. But Perdita, who had been in and out of Sylvester Skelton’s library since she was small, was grateful when he thoughtfully installed an elevator.

  She was surprised to find a knight sitting on Sylvester’s floor with an open tome on her knees.

  Sylvester, who was at his desk, stroking his long mustaches with both hands as he read, glanced at Perdita vaguely, and then, after blinking her into place, with great interest. Knight and magus got to their feet.

  “Princess Perdita,” Lord Skelton said, “you might remember Dame Scotia Malory? She has traveled from the mountainous northeastern parts of Wyvernhold, where the last of the wyverns were seen five centuries ago in King Hodder’s time.”

  The young knight, a foot taller than either of them, with a knot of long, honey-colored hair, bowed her head to the princess, and said ruefully, “The time also of my appalling ancestor, Tavis Malory, Princess. Lord Skelton kindly let me come to borrow some books about him.”

  “Tavis,” Perdita exclaimed with delight. “He wrote The Life and Death of Arden Wyvernbourne while he was in jail for— What was it? Stealing sheep? Hiding in a hayrick during a battle?”

  “I believe that time he was accused of assaulting Calluna’s acolytes, Princess. I’m trying to find out if he was malignant or maligned. If I could borrow this, Lord Skelton?”

  “Of course, Dame Scotia.”

  She wedged the huge book easily under her elbow and bowed her head again.

  “Then I’ll leave you—”

  “Wait,” Perdita said impulsively. “I don’t suppose you ever trained as an acolyte yourself in Calluna’s sanctum?”

  Dame Scotia smiled apologetically. “I never had the chance, living that far north. I came to court so seldom that I only became a knight by accident.”

  “That doesn’t sound easy,” Perdita commented.

  “Growing up so big and gawky, I felt most comfortable among people whose feet and elbows might be lethal to others. So I lived on the practice field at home, and here, whenever my father brought me to the king’s assemblies. I caught the king’s attention by knocking Bayley Reeve off his horse in the antique-tournament style of fighting.”

  Sylvester chuckled. “I remember that. The king knighted you, he said, before you had a chance to think about it.”

  “And I’ve never had a second thought.” She paused, her calm, violet eyes on Perdita. “Why did you ask, Princess Perdita? Is there something I can do for the sanctum?”

  “Perhaps,” Perdita answered lightly, aware of the magus’s swift attention. “I’ll let you know.”

  She came to another abrupt decision as Dame Scotia closed the study door behind her. The slight, bespectacled, spindle-shanked magus disguised startling powers behind his mild manner. Perdita had seen him untangle the technology of her stalled Greenwing by absently patting its hood while he expounded on the migratory habits of the bird singing on the tree branch above them. His predictions were eerily accurate; he could boil water by whispering to it; he could change the shape of his shadow to anything he wanted, which he had done many times to the delight of the royal toddlers. He could find any lost object he was asked about. Even those lost, apparently, in lines of poetry for thousands of years.

  “Be subtle,” Mystes Halliwell had warned. But at that moment, under the magus’s clear, interested gaze, she sensed that his dedication to scholarship would outweigh the preferences of Mystes Ruxley, and the king, and even the god Severen himself.

  She said baldly, “Mystes Halliwell sent me here to find out what you’re searching for, and if you have any idea where it is. I understand that revealing all this is the point of the Assembly of Knights. But since we are not knights, we are not invited. Mystes Halliwell is convinced that the lost vessel belongs to Calluna, not to Severen. Where should we—acolytes of the goddess—look for it? If, on the off chance, we do?”

  “Intriguing, yes,” the magus admitted, “that argument. Lady Seabrook brought it up to me as well. Oh, while I’m thinking about it, would you mind?” He pulled a bag out of a drawer and shook pieces of candy-coated licorice into an envelope. “She is the king’s aunt, his own father’s sister; she could ask for a tower full of sweets and get it. For some reason she prefers mine. If you would be so kind as to pretend you pilfered them?” Wordlessly, Perdita took the packet he made and slid it into a pocket. “Thank you, Princess. Now. As to your questions: What is it, where is it, and to whom does it belong?”

  There followed a bewildering weave of scholarly references, lines of poetry, each older than the last, a briar patch of arguments about a badly translated word, a foray into the book Tavis Malory had written five centuries before, then into other older works the writer had used as reference points. By the time Lord Skelton came to a barely comprehensible conclusion, open books were strewn all over the desk and the couch, and decades of disturbed dust motes floated in the shafts of light from the lowering sun.

  “So there you have it,” the magus finished. “I would never call Mystes Halliwell wrong about her conclusions. I can only say that what fragments I have seen for that argument tend to be either fairly modern, or, if very old, imprecise and speculative, with only the weakest of scholarly underpinnings.” He paused, reached again for the licorice. “As far as where it is, that’s a completely different thicket of argument, and every bit as dense.” He proffered the bag, then took a piece himself. Chewing, they looked at one another, startled, suddenly, at the angle of light through the tower windows.

  Perdita glanced quickly at her watch. “I’m due at the sanctum in five minutes. Luckily, it’s just the guardian’s watch, keeping the peace and discouraging men and other such strangers from entering. Thank you, Lord Skelton. I’m not sure exactly what you said, but I’m fascinated by it anyway.”

  “Thank you, Princess,” Sylvester said, looking pleased. “It’s high time I put my ideas in order; I’ll have to explain all this at the Assembly. Mystes Ruxley can deal with the practicalities of sending the knights across the realm searching for an ancient mystery. He’s best at mundane details, despite his calling. But then, Severen himself was never a subtle god. Just rich.”

  Crossing the yard from the keep to the sanctum tower, Perdita was surprised to see her half brother wheeling his electric bike along the sward.

  “Daimon?” she called, and he started, then glanced back at her and reluctantly waited. “What are you doing? You look as though you’re sneaking out of here.”

  “I am,” he said. “Or I was.”

  “You look strange,” she said, frowning at him. “All awry, somehow. I’ve hardly seen you for days. Not that I would anyway since you’re busy doing knightly things. Like creeping through the sanctum gardens to the back roads beyond the practice field. Are you all right?”

  He started to speak, shook his head a little, and started again. “Yes. I think so. And, yes, I am trying to slip away.”

  “Affairs of the heart?”

  “Oh, yes. Very much so.”

  “Is she married?” He stared at her. “Well, you don’t seem entirely happy. Whatever it is—”

  “She’s not married,” he said shortly. “You’re prying.”

  “Of course I’m prying. I’m your sister.”

  “Half. Half sister.”

  Something in the emphasis tossed her a clue; her eyes widened. “You know something,” she breathed. “You found out something. About the other half. Daimon—”

&nbs
p; He shifted edgily, began to walk his bike again, quickly. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing—” He seemed to feel her eyes boring into his head as she kept up with him; he stopped, said without looking at her, “I’m thinking something through. Just let it go. It’s mine to figure out.”

  “Are you—”

  “No,” he said, with an odd, sharp urgency. “No more.”

  She took a step away, swallowing; he moved again, doggedly, his eyes on the route he would use to escape to or from whatever troubled him.

  “Let me know,” she said, too softly for him to hear except with his heart, “if you want to talk.”

  She hurried up the sanctum-tower steps to the royal chamber; she had pulled the long guardian’s robe over her head and was putting on her sandals, when the door opened abruptly. Both the queen and Mystes Halliwell stood in the doorway, the mystes emitting incandescence like a burning stove. The queen’s face wore a familiar, guarded expression. Perdita assumed that the fuel that stoked the mystes’ ire was either Leith or Lord Skelton.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Perdita said; she saw the book in Holly’s hand, then, and guessed Lord Skelton.

  “Princess Perdita,” Holly said stiffly, formally, as she tended to when she was beyond furious. “Please come with us.”

  Perdita did so, hopping on one foot as she finished tying her sandal.

  The mystes led them into the sanctum, past its birthing and healing pools, its meditation streams, its fountains for worship and for drinking. The place was empty, soundless but for the faint rill of the goddess’s waters flowing in from the antechamber. Holly did not stop there but headed for a closed door made of unadorned black wood in the back of the sanctum. A wooden sconce beside the door held an unlit candle. Lit, it requested privacy for those within. Holly barely waited for Perdita to light the candle before she flung open the door. The room was not empty. It was, however, occupied by the one woman who would not have fled from the look on Mystes Halliwell’s face.