Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Except when she glimpsed him brooding at her in the Kingfisher bar, she had no idea what he was doing, or thinking, or where, or in what shape, he slept. He knew what she had done. She knew he knew. Neither one of them was talking.

  The first of the questing knights came at the beginning of a Friday Nite Fish Fry. Carrie walked out of the kitchen holding the huge cauldron full of steaming oyster stew with tiny crackers buttered and broiled to a crisp floating like gold coins on top of it. She heard their voices break the traditional silence, the worship of smells, before she saw them. She glanced across the room toward the sound, found a cluster of noisy, muscular, handsome men, all of them dressed in black. They were laughing, she realized incredulously; they were joking about the peculiar backwater ceremony going on in the dilapidated old inn.

  Hal did not waste a glance at them. He simply stopped, leaning on his staff, gazing ahead. The line behind him, Father Kirk with the bloodstained gaff, Merle carrying the salmon on the gold platter, Carrie, all stopped. The diners gathered for supper stood silently in their places, waiting. Through the swinging doors that Curt Sloan and his son Gabe held open, Carrie heard not a whisper, a step, a clatter from inside the kitchen.

  The laughter thinned, died away. Carrie recognized the uniforms then, the little heraldic shields embroidered on their jackets. One of the young men looked at Tye, behind the bar.

  Tye said before the knight could speak, “Bar’s closed.”

  “Private party,” another man murmured, and asked Tye, “Could you tell us—”

  “Try Stillwater’s,” Tye said without compunction, and stood unblinking, hands flat on the bar, until the young men finally drifted toward the door and out.

  Hal spoke then, smiling, welcoming the gathering to supper.

  My father knows what all this means, Carrie thought coldly, as she carried the cauldron back into the kitchen to ladle out its contents. He won’t tell me.

  Maybe, she thought later, bringing the cleaned and polished cauldron back to the bar to be locked away, Stillwater knows. Maybe he’ll tell me.

  “It’s nothing,” Stillwater said, when she asked him about the ritual a few days later. “A family thing. You know how families are. Always looking back, doing things the way they were always done, acquiring habits, ceremonies over the years. Actually, if I were making that choice, I wouldn’t put that in there.”

  Actually, Carrie didn’t say, I have no idea how families are, and neither do you. “That” was a lemon, and “there” was one of Stillwater’s many odd kitchen tools, machines of various sizes with no obvious ways of behaving.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I thought it was the slicer.”

  He opened a drawer, took out a paring knife. “This works.”

  He had an extremely eccentric kitchen; the small stove and a blender were among the few things she recognized. He did nearly everything in his collection of machines. He showed her how to fry an egg in one, to roast a parsnip in another, to fashion a seven-layer cupcake, complete with a lovely ribbon of frosting tied in a bow on top, in something that looked like a martini shaker.

  “Forget everything you know here,” he advised. “Experiment. Invent. Create. That’s why I built these.”

  She spent the first working hours doing just that: tossing food at random into his inventions just to see what would happen. She turned a red onion into ice cream, a potato into sea foam, bread into what looked like curly shoe leather; she made sequins and stars out of radishes, frothed an egg yolk, then deep-fried the froth into a golden lace. She found herself eating constantly, licking a finger or a spoon handle, desperate for a taste of anything besides air. Sage wandered in occasionally to nibble Carrie’s experiments, give critical comments about how something looked, make suggestions about what to pair. Now and then, she said simply, warmly, “Yes. That’s good. Todd was right about you.”

  “It’s nothing,” Carrie said helplessly.

  “No, no. It’s wonderful.”

  Maybe, she thought, lying beside Zed and listening to him breathe in rhythm with the sea, that’s what magic is. Believing that nothing is something.

  “You haven’t been cooking the way you used to,” Ella commented wistfully as they prepped for the next day’s lunch. “I miss your tidbits. Your little bites.”

  Carrie looked at her, surprised. She seemed to be inventing all the time, coming up with this and that, plate jewelry, edible ornaments. But that was for Todd Stillwater, she remembered; she had neglected them in this kitchen, where every tool and recipe was predictable.

  “I forgot,” she said lamely. “I’ve been distracted, I guess.”

  “Something worrying you?”

  Carrie shook her head, speechless. Working two jobs, skulking to Stillwater’s three times a week, trying to find her father, deceiving Ella, hiding her thoughts from the scarily perceptive Lilith, had put her beyond worry. Maybe that was why she was hungry all the time, at least at Stillwater’s. Here, she barely remembered to eat.

  “Not more than usual.” She whacked at celery for the soup of the day, the old workhorse chicken-veg. She never chopped vegetables in Stillwater’s kitchen, she realized. If he served soup at all, it would be in the form of a custard, maybe, or a cone of little frozen pearls. She made an effort, shoved his kitchen out of her mind. “I’ll come up with something today,” she promised, and later, she combined several things lying around in such a fashion that there were visible signs, on many plates, of bites that had been spat back out.

  “You’ve got some serious weirdness going on here,” Jayne declared, eating Carrie’s creation. “I like anchovies. I just never knew I liked them with sweet pickles before.” She swallowed and added, “There are knights at one of my tables. Three of them, from Severluna. I had to explain what a shrimp basket is. What’s with these knights coming through Chimera Bay? Are they all lost?”

  “Maybe someone’s making a movie,” Bek suggested, hefting a tray of plates to his shoulder.

  “You’re probably right,” Jayne said, absently munching more anchovy bites. “Real knights can’t all be that gorgeous.”

  They were that gorgeous in Carrie’s dream that night: they all had Stillwater’s face. The knights had gathered in the Kingfisher Inn to watch the solemn ritual Fish Fry. Women from an era of crimped hair, red lipstick, heart-shaped bodices, full skirts made of satin and chiffon accompanied the knights. The high-hatted chef led the ritual, holding a great platter of beautiful little bites. He carried it around the room, offering it to the richly dressed, smiling women, to the knights who all looked alike, to Hal and Merle, who wore their tuxedos, to Ella, even to Lilith, who had come down from her tower to join the merry gathering.

  Everyone ate. The platter never emptied; more and more bites appeared and disappeared. Colors in the dream began to flicker, vanish, return. The rich hues of women’s gowns paled, melted into grays and whites and blacks of old photos. People kept talking, laughing, even as one by one lights in the chandelier went dark. Airy skirts began to tear, part into shreds; high-heeled sandals vanished, left the women barefoot. Their glittering diamonds winked out like the prisms above them. The knights’ beautiful faces became hollow, haggard, even as they kept eating. The walls of the prosperous inn grew thin; moonlight came through them, and the sound of the gulls. Here and there a rafter fell. Still the party, the celebration, continued, as if nothing were wrong, nothing at all, everyone talking, laughing, eating from the chef’s inexhaustible platter, even though shadows crept over the walls, and Lilith had vanished, and so had Hal, leaving a crippled old man in his place, leaning painfully on a staff, and beside him, Merle turned into a wolf.

  The wolf opened its jaws, howled.

  Carrie sat up in bed, knowing even before she opened her eyes that the wolf was at the door. She stumbled through the farmhouse, flung the door open, and saw the lovely, silvery lines of streams growing dark, lifeless, as the
stars blanked out, one by one, and the darkness swirling over them reached out toward the moon.

  She opened her mouth, heard herself howl with the wolf as the moon began to disappear.

  She woke and heard the wolf at the door.

  This time she rolled out of Zed’s bed and tripped over the brick under the broken stove leg, so she knew that she was finally awake. She heard Zed moving behind her, muttering drowsily until he tripped over the same brick and cursed.

  Carrie threw open the door and saw moonlight drenching everything in a misty glow, burning the tidal strands running through the grasses, the dark and bright mystery of living water flowing out of the hidden source within the trees, the silent, glowing hills.

  The moon’s ancient, beautiful face, her spangled fingers of light, the streams milky with her reflection, the glittering air all but transparent over the distant, luminous source stunned Carrie. As she stood on the threshold of the night, she heard the song of the wolf within the eerie light transform itself in her ears.

  It was not the language of fear, she realized, but the language of love.

  And then she saw her father, in the meadow under the soft touch of moonlight, changing into shape after shape in an intricate dance of power, or the constant folding and refolding of life in all its variations. Man became wolf became deer became hare became bear became cougar became porcupine became salmon leaping out of the water, became white heron became owl, soundless in the transfixed eye of the moon. Then owl became man, hair and long beard of moonlight, tall, hale, and older than time. Then man became Merle, her father, the shape she knew.

  She swallowed fire; she was shaking; she tasted tears catching in her smile. Zed put an arm around her, held her tightly.

  The man became raven, followed the path of the moon into night.

  17

  On the narrow coast road beyond the ancient forest, a mountain face covered with trees on one side, and a long craggy drop to the sea on the other, the limo rounded a curve and drove straight into a blinding wall of fog.

  It was so thick, the world vanished. Pierce could not see so much as a weed in a ditch beside the road. He could not, he realized, see the road. Even the little wyvern ornamenting the long hood of the limo wavered in and out of the sluggishly drifting fog. The driver slowed to a sudden caterpillar crawl, causing Val to pull out his earbuds, and Leith to blink the abrupt nothingness out of his eyes and channel the intercom.

  “This is not good.”

  Pierce stared incredulously at the nothing and waited for the strike from behind, the beginning of the pileup along the steep, two-lane highway.

  “Shall I try to back up, sir?”

  “Mist,” Val observed with seemingly pointless interest, as though it were a hitherto mythical sea creature.

  “No,” Leith said tersely. “Don’t back up.”

  “I think you should get out, sirs. I’ll keep inching along. I think now, sirs, would be a good time for you to get out.”

  “So do I,” Val said, and promptly opened a door. It scraped against something invisible, but left room for him to slither out. Leith motioned for Pierce to follow; Pierce hesitated.

  “You’re coming, too,” he said.

  “Yes. In a moment. Go,” he added, and Pierce moved finally, reluctantly, out of the car and into the cloud. It was annoyingly damp and chilly, oddly silent as well, he noticed, then realized why.

  “I can’t hear the waves,” he said to the fraying figure of his brother, whose red hair was the most visible thing left of him.

  “No,” Val agreed. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

  “It’s fog,” Pierce protested. “It’s blinding, it’s dangerous, it is not fascinating. And where’s our father? Did he get out of the limo? Where is the limo?”

  “Mist,” Val said again, a point of argument so pointless that Pierce ignored it.

  He turned restively, trying to spot Leith, trying to see the car, listening for the inevitable collision of traffic, tires screaming, metal accordion-pleating against the rear end of the limo. He heard nothing, not even the cry of a gull. He took a few steps, one hand out to feel the trees he could not see: a steep slope full of them, tall, thick pillars of red whose green boughs stretched out endlessly, greedily, to gather up the cloying, obscuring wet.

  They were all apparently receding from him as he moved. The ground that should have been running sharply uphill was simply lying there, no matter which way he turned, flat and vaguely rocky underfoot. He heard something finally: his own heartbeat, uncomfortably loud, as if the fog had pushed powerful, invisible hands against his ears.

  “Val?” he said, suddenly without much hope of an answer. He had wandered out of the world he recognized, leaving even Val and their father behind, along with his sight, his hearing, and, once again, any kind of a weapon.

  He heard an inhuman snort, an answer to his call, as though he had awakened something within the fog. He froze, hoping it would go back to sleep. A stone skittered across the ground. Something enormous yawned, sucking in mist; it swirled, ebbed toward the indrawn breath for a long time, it seemed, before fog blew back out again, accompanied by an odd smell of charred, damp wood.

  Pierce stopped breathing. His skin grew colder than the fog. The fire-breathing cousin of the wyvern was, unlike the extinct wyvern, a myth. It had inspired a rich hoard of tales in early Wyvernhold history, especially those illuminating the prowess of legendary questing knights. It was a fantasy, a symbol, no more than that. At least it should have been.

  He heard the dragon’s voice.

  Pierce.

  He caught a breath, coughed on cold, ash-soured air. The deep voice seemed to resonate from the stones buried beneath the earth; Pierce felt it underfoot, heard it with his bones. The constantly shifting mist frayed just enough to give him a glimpse of an outline paler than the mist: an enormous, crested neck, a lizard’s maw trickling smoky mist out of nostrils the size of platters and ringed with a red, pulsing glow.

  Go no farther. You are not welcome in the north.

  “I’m— We’re just on our way to Chimera Bay,” Pierce stammered. “Only that far. At least for now.”

  No.

  He cudgeled his brain a moment, trying to remember any scrap of story that gave him a clue about how to talk to dragons. Mostly, he guessed, there was not a lot of talking, just fire and gore. He gave up, asked baldly, “Why not?”

  The mist flamed in front of him; he felt the warmth, smelled the harsh, dry dragon’s breath.

  You have chosen. Come no closer. This is my world.

  He blinked and recognized the cold encircling him, the soundless, invisible landscape, the baleful dragon: the heart of the matter. Val had seen it, felt it, immediately.

  Mistbegotten.

  “Mom?” he whispered, and the dragon roared.

  That cleared the air, though Pierce, dropped and clinging to earth under the weight of the vast, endless, reverberating thunder, didn’t notice until the sound growled and echoed away into the distance. He raised his head cautiously, opened his eyes, and heard the plaintive cry of gulls, the surge and break of the waves.

  “Pierce!” his father called, and he got up, brushing away the needles that clung to him, dropped from the finally visible trees.

  He stumbled downhill, saw the limo across the road, waiting in a viewing area overlooking the sea. Val and Leith stood with their backs to the water, trying to find Pierce among the thick, silent ranks of giants climbing up the mountainside.

  “I’m here,” he said, reaching the road, still feeling the smoldering glare of invisible dragon between his shoulder blades. Its thunder echoed in his heartbeat, his blood. The mist clung to his skin like the touch of the sorceress’s hand. He wondered if even his shadow had turned pale.

  As he crossed the road to the overlook, he saw Leith’s face grow tight, his brows knot. Val’s nor
mally unruffled expression mutated into an odd wariness.

  “Mist,” he said for the third time, and Pierce nodded wearily. Leith’s eyes flicked between them.

  “What?” he demanded. “What was up there? What happened to you? You look white as a ghost. You’re shivering.”

  “Ah—” Pierce said, and stuck. One angry parent seemed more than enough. But this was between the two of them, he remembered; the seeds of the dragon’s wrath had been sown before he was born. “She—ah—she doesn’t want to see us. Any of us. She thinks that’s why we’re travelling north. I must not have explained things very well when we talked.”

  Leith took a step closer, his hands tightening. “What did she do to you?”

  “She roared at me.”

  “She what?”

  “Well, it probably wasn’t her. It was her making. Her illusion. I couldn’t see it too well in that mist. But it was huge, and it smelled like burning embers, and it made a noise like a mountain blowing its top.”

  “Dragon.” Val’s face had gone pale, but it had lost its tension; his eyes, vivid with sudden comprehension, narrowed at his father. “She still loves you,” he said incredulously, and Leith’s face flamed as though the dragon’s fire had scorched it.

  “I doubt that her passion has anything to do with love at this point,” he said brusquely.

  Val gazed quizzically at him, looking unconvinced. Pierce, remembering his last evening with his mother, the fierce anger in her that had shaped flames, that had shaped tears, wondered at his brother, who could draw such conclusions out of a seemingly impenetrable mist.