Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The driver’s voice came over the intercom from behind the closed glass partition between them. “Sirs, this is the last largish town before we start climbing. Do you want me to stop somewhere for lunch? Once we get into the mountains, no telling what we’ll find.”

  They stopped.

  In the midafternoon, surrounded by mile after mile of huge trees marching up and down peaks and valleys holding only hints of civilization, a glimpse of a door, a sign, an abandoned fuel station, the steadfast vehicle ran aground. One by one screens flicked off, lights failed, the car slowed, drifted. The driver, his cursing becoming audible, got the partition between them half-opened before it, too, stopped moving. A pickup careened around them, honking wildly. They were in the fast lane of a steep, curving, four-lane highway, rapidly losing power and fortunately on a downslope. The driver eased the limo across the road, avoiding the swift cars dodging to the left and right of them. It settled finally onto an unpaved pullout as a semi peeled around them, making a noise like an indignant whale.

  The driver spoke to the dashboard. No one answered. He pushed this, flicked that. Val leaned through the partition, making suggestions, while Pierce tried a door, and Leith pulled out his cell.

  The door opened, to Pierce’s relief, but the phone screen remained black.

  The driver pulled off his crested uniform cap, threw it on the floor, then picked it up, put it back on, and turned.

  “Sorry, sirs. I don’t have a clue what to make of this.”

  Val looked at his own phone. “It’s a dead zone,” he said curiously. “Nothing tech works.”

  “Everyone else is still moving,” Leith said tersely. He got out, roamed around the car with his phone.

  “Sorcery, then.”

  “Might as well be,” the driver said, exasperated. “This vehicle was thoroughly tested before the wyvern on its hood got a look out the garage door.”

  He tried his own phone, then got out and waved at passing traffic until a Greenwing small enough to fit in the pullout behind the limo stopped. The driver bent down to talk to the young women in it. Val joined him promptly. Pierce got out, stood looking around, half expecting to see Heloise sitting on a branch above them.

  Gigantic pillars of trees stood tranquilly on the steep mountain, maybe napping in the warm, golden light, maybe commenting in slow tree-thoughts on the grand vehicle that had hobbled to a halt in their shadows. In the distance between two high peaks, he glimpsed the sea.

  A car door slammed; he glanced around to see Val settling in the midst of the young women in the little car. The car pulled back onto the road, sped away. Leith watched it, startled.

  “They said they’d take him to the nearest garage,” the driver explained. “Their phones work fine,” he added bitterly, as Leith walked to the edge of the road, stood frowning at the Greenwing disappearing around a bend.

  “I don’t like this.”

  “They seemed very nice,” the driver assured him. “Students on their way back to the local college. I offered to go, but—”

  “I know. An otherwise appealing young knight except for his brains. Or lack of them. He was the one who reminded me that we are on a quest. Sylvester Skelton said we must assume nothing.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the driver said uneasily. “I thought—”

  “Well,” Leith said, leaning against the limo beside the tiny bronze wyvern rearing on the hood. “You may be right. We’ll wait.”

  The driver got back inside, tried rousing the engine again. Leith, his arms folded, brooded at the highway. Pierce went looking for a bush.

  He walked farther than he intended, lulled by the soft breeze, the smells of needles, pitch, sun-burnished bark, the shadows and gentle whisperings of the immense trees. For the first time since he had left home, he feared nothing, anticipated nothing, just rambled without thinking through the quiet afternoon. A squirrel chided him; a bird sang briefly, then fluttered away, a streak of yellow against the green. He rounded a tree trunk that might have taken a couple dozen arms to span its girth. At the other side of it, he saw the sea again, the brilliant light across it that, in a tale, might have been the blazing wake of a vessel made of gold.

  From somewhere in the trees above him there came a sudden, high-pitched scream.

  His head snapped around; he took a step uphill and heard a gunshot. He froze. Someone shouted from below: Leith, he thought, but had no time to answer before he began a scrabbling run among the stones and swollen tree roots. The girl cried out again; this time it sounded like a curse. Another shout came, this one from uphill as well. Pierce crashed through a thicket; the ground leveled on the other side of it, trees opening up in a crescent around a strange stone ruin.

  Water flowed out from under the ruin, a quick little rill that vanished back underground beneath a brake of ferns. The ruin, three broken walls and an archway, had been built around what looked like a cave in a steep, sudden rise of earth, slabs of stone, more trees.

  The voices sounded very close, a tangle of men, the girl crying at them fiercely, rhythmically. Pierce saw the mountain bikes lined along both sides of the dark opening.

  All of them carried the familial devices of the Wyvernhold knights.

  The girl’s voice rose sharply. Pierce looked around wildly for a weapon, saw a lovely glass pitcher lightly chained around its neck to a tree branch above the froth of water. During the moment it took him to reach it, break it against a stone and turn, armed with a shard of jagged glass attached to the pitcher’s handle, some of the confused knot of voices began to break into words.

  “Put that down! I’ll shoot, I swear—”

  “All weapons belong to Severen—you can’t shoot us. Just put it down—”

  “You put that down!”

  “This is holy ground. We are Knights of the Rising God on a quest in King Arden’s name, and this gold mine is dedicated to Severen—”

  “This old shaft is as empty as your heads, you assholes; it went dead a hundred years ago!”

  “If you’ll just listen—”

  “Put that down, too! This is Tanne’s holy ground, not Severen’s, and I swear—”

  There was an odd snick of metal that Pierce associated with weapons in very old movies. He plunged into the ruins, wielding his broken glass in the air, and found an elderly man with white hair down his back swaying on his knees and trying to pull himself upright. His eyes widened at the sight of Pierce and his weapon. He threw himself sideways to grasp at some kind of long-handled implement. Pierce moved quickly through the ruins and into the open earth beyond them, the mouth of an old shaft crisscrossed with miners’ lights, young men’s faces flaring and disappearing as they roamed, and rummaged, and the girl cursed them in the constantly shifting shadows.

  One turned headlamp illumined her face finally: a young, freckled oval, narrowed gray eyes beneath flaming red brows, lips pared thin as thread with fury.

  Then she vanished as light drenched Pierce’s face, then flashed across the broken pitcher.

  Pierce heard her gasp. A thundering boom sent dirt scattering down from the ceiling. There was a tortured groan from very old timber. All of the headlamps pointed up.

  The world went black.

  When Pierce’s eyes flickered open, he saw the spare, freckled face again. He felt water misting over him instead of the dry dust of centuries. He made a sound, and Leith shifted into view, crouched beside him, Pierce realized, under sky and trees, not earth and rotting boards. The empty chain that had held the pitcher swung aimlessly above his head.

  “I’ll give you a drink, but you’ll have to take it from my hands,” the girl said dourly. “You broke my pitcher.”

  That, Pierce thought, would explain her disgruntled expression. He tried to speak, then nodded. Leith held up his head; the girl cupped her hands in the bright rill, and he opened his mouth.

  He drank
the pure, cold water falling from her fingertips three times before he could finally speak.

  “Sorry,” he croaked. “I needed a weapon.” He paused a moment, remembering. “Did you shoot everyone?”

  “No. But they didn’t wait around for the ceiling to make up its mind.” The frown on her face was easing; she added, “I thought you were one of them when I saw the broken pitcher. They were taking things—small, sacred things we keep in there—looking at them with their unholy lights, then just tossing them on the ground. Searching for gold, I think, though they kept yammering about something sacred belonging to Severen.”

  “Can you sit up?” Leith asked, and helped him. The world whirled, then slowed and steadied. He felt at the back of his aching head, wondering if one of the mineshaft timbers had swung down and smacked him. Sitting, he saw the old man finally, with his white hair and his beard down to his belt. There was not much room for expression on his hairy face, but his eyes were rueful.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you were one of them, too. You’re all dressed alike but for the emblems. Sir Leith here explained who you are.”

  “What hit me?” Pierce asked bewilderedly.

  “My garden shovel.”

  “Oh.” He sighed, his eyes going to Leith. “So much for knightly prowess. Armed with a pitcher and felled with a garden tool.”

  “You should have— You should never have—” Leith began, then gave up, shaking his head.

  “It was very brave of you to try,” the girl said staunchly. “My grandfather tried to stop them. They just threw his crutch over the wall and let him fall. He has a bad knee.”

  “Where— What is this place?”

  “It’s Tanne’s shrine.”

  “Tanne.”

  She gestured at the crescent of enormous, hoary trees around the ruins, so tall their lofty tips seemed to lean together as their great boughs stretched toward the sky. A rosy wave swept up her face, making her red hair, glowing in the sunlight, even more fiery. “This is his forest. My grandfather has been the shrine guardian here all of his life since he was twelve. This old shrine was built thousands of years before anybody discovered the gold behind it. The miners ran that guardian out and let the shrine fall down while they took out all the gold. Now travelers come to see the ruins and fill their bottles with water fresh out of the earth. But nobody remembers the forest god. People born here pass the tales along. When my grandfather can’t climb up here any longer, then one of our family will take his place.”

  “You?”

  She shrugged, almost smiling at the thought. “Maybe. Tanne chooses. Sometimes with a dream. Sometimes, if the wind is just right, the one who is chosen hears him call.”

  “He called me,” the old man said. “I heard him clear as an owl’s cry, and I came. Up every morning, down the hill at sunset by myself for decades until my knee gave out and Sara here came along to help me.” He looked at her fondly, added, “I had no idea you could shoot that thing.”

  “Neither did I. We found it in the cave,” she explained. “I think some miner left it there a hundred years ago.” Her smile deepened with satisfaction. “Now we know it works.”

  “Forgive the knights if you can,” Leith said grimly. “Nothing they did here was sanctioned by King Arden, who has deep respect for all the gods and goddesses of Wyvernhold. Those young men are arrogant louts on an idiotic quest; their behavior here was despicable and cowardly, and I’m sorry not to have come in time to make that clear to them.” He paused, gazing at Pierce, his expression still dark. “I am enormously grateful you did not shoot my impulsive son. My other impulsive son.”

  “Oh,” she sighed, “me, too.”

  “You have another?” the old man said, surprised. “He didn’t come running to help?”

  “He went off in a car full of young women to look for a garage. No telling when we’ll see him again.”

  “A garage.”

  “Our car is stalled on the road below. It shut itself down for its own reasons; our driver can’t get it started again, and none of our phones work either.”

  The old man raised a shaggy brow, musing a bit. “Everything just went dead?”

  “Everything.”

  “For no reason.”

  “None.”

  “Well.” He scratched his head and smiled a little; above him tree boughs swayed and spoke in a wind from the sea. “That happens, sometimes, around the shrine. On the odd occasion—rare, mind you—that the forest senses it might need some help. Go down and try your car again,” he added, as Pierce and Leith stared wordlessly at him. “It may have cured itself by now.”

  When they reached the bottom of the hill, the limo engine was gently idling, and the tow truck from which Val had emerged was on its way back down the mountain.

  16

  Carrie sat with Zed in his narrow bed, sharing a bottle of wine and the events of their long days. It was past midnight. Zed had come home from the Pharaoh Theater; Carrie had stayed late with Ella, scrubbing the hoary kitchen floors. Around them, the small cabin was a shadowy mix of candlelight and camp lantern. Thrown together as a duck blind, remodeled into a rental with the world’s tiniest kitchen, it still smelled of damp logs, and occasionally sprouted a mushroom. A potbellied stove, one broken leg on a brick, exuded the scent of damp ash. There was an actual braided rug on the splintery floor. Outside, the night itself was soundless, no weather and a sky so clear the lace of streams through the long grasses ran with moonlight instead of water. The slough made its own noises: hooting, rustling, grunting, and peeping. Distant car engines mingled with the constant musings of the sea. Carrie’s ears sorted through every noise, pricked for the sound of Merle’s voice.

  “What is he, anyway?” she wondered. “Magic?”

  “Merle?”

  “I always thought he was just demented. My mother always said so. But no matter how crazy you want to be, you can’t turn yourself into a wolf without knowing something more than most. Where did he learn it?”

  “There’s magic around.”

  “Not in Chimera Bay.”

  “There’s Merle,” Zed said. “There’s the Friday Nite ritual. There’s mystery in that old hotel.”

  She poured herself more wine, took a hefty swallow. “There’s Stillwater.”

  Zed looked at her silently, quizzically; in that moment, she made up her mind about what she had been pondering since the afternoon she had walked into Stillwater’s restaurant to talk to him and got a glimpse of something in his face too old to be still alive and human at the same time. Eat, he had said.

  “And I did,” she said hollowly.

  “What?”

  She stirred, getting her thoughts in order, what to tell, what not to so that he wouldn’t worry. “I told you that Stillwater wants me to work for him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So when I went to talk to him about it—just to talk—he offered me samples of his cooking. Little, complicated layers of color and texture, so wonderful to look at, you don’t want to eat it, and at the same time, you imagine how much more wonderful all those colors could taste, all at once in your mouth. Like a sweet explosion of fireworks, like edible music. So I ate.” She reached for her glass, took a sip to reassure herself that she still had taste buds. “That beautiful little piece of art, food jewelry—it tasted like nothing. Mist. Not even sea mist. That has a bite of salt in it. Just cloud. Just. Nothing.” She drank again. “So of course I ate another. And another, since whatever was wrong must have been in me, not in those perfect Stillwater bites. He must have known. I kept eating, trying to taste, and he just kept smiling. He has the most wonderful—”

  “You keep saying.”

  “Anyway, I think I ate everything in sight. Or I would have, except that his wife came in with her arms full of groceries, and we got up to help her. She seemed nice. Friendly. Really beautiful, of co
urse; you’d expect that, since she’s married to a Greek myth—”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “When I left them, I still wanted more. More little beautiful bites of nothing.”

  “So are you going to work for him?”

  “Yes. I have to. He’s the only piece of the mystery around the Kingfisher Inn that will talk to me.”

  Zed shifted closer to her, put his arm around her. “Be careful,” he pleaded.

  She nodded, whittling another half inch off the scant distance left between them, then another, after she put her glass on the floor and let the hollow in the old mattress cant them together.

  “I intend to,” she said somberly. “I don’t know what he is, I don’t know what my father’s afraid of, I don’t know what Ella hates, and I have no idea if I’m capable of figuring out all the whys of everything. I can’t imagine why Stillwater cooks like that. Or why my father can turn into a wolf. I need to stop thinking like me and start thinking like them.”

  “How?”

  She looked at him silently, studying the sweet, caramel brown of his eyes, while she contemplated mysteries going back farther than she did, back under the magnificent chandelier in the days when every prism flamed with light. “Stillwater lies even with his cooking; my father refuses to tell the truth. Where? Where does that story begin?” She turned her head, held Zed’s eyes. “I will fry fish for Ella,” she told him fiercely. “I will eat Stillwater’s not-cooking, I will learn wolf and howl back at my father if that’s the only way I can talk to him. I want to understand this story if that’s the last thing I do. If nobody’s talking, I’ll find a new way of listening. If nobody’s talking, then nobody can say no.”

  She went to work for Todd Stillwater during her hours off at the Kingfisher: lunches on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and dinner on Wednesdays. She did not so much as whisper to a soup pot or tell a fork in Ella’s kitchen that she was cooking for Stillwater. She kept the word “water” out of her head when she took Hal’s daily note up to Lilith. She avoided even looking out the window at the bay. Chowder, she thought. Butter, cream, clams. Onion cheddar biscuits. Endless sizzling fries. The sudden flick of storm-green glances Lilith sent her way hinted that she suspected something. But for once in her life, Carrie was doing the not-talking, as though her life depended on it. She babbled randomly instead, about Zed, about the aging pickup truck, about the old fruit trees and vines the early farmers had left behind still alive and blossoming again. When Lilith pressed her about Merle, she drew upon old memories: he had left her a seashell, laundry, a wild lily in a beer bottle; she had heard him singing deep in the woods at midnight.