Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He said uncertainly, “Maybe you should talk?”

  Leith spread his arms wordlessly, dropped them. “She doesn’t want to see me. You just said.” He turned abruptly, walked back to the limo, then paused before he opened the door. He spoke again, his back to them. “She told me as much the last time I saw her, before you were born. From what I understand of quests, we go where they lead.” Val opened his mouth, promptly closed it again. Leith added, as though he had taken the unspoken point, “It led us here. Yes. But was that the quest, or was that your mother interrupting it? Let’s get back on the road, see where it takes us next.”

  Not far, Pierce saw with disbelief. They might as well be walking, considering how difficult it had become to move just a few scant miles along the road. They had passed through an elegant little resort town with wide beaches and monolithic rocks crusted with sea life wandering in and out of the tide, when the town’s four lanes dwindled again into two, then into none. The limo came to a halt at the end of a long line of traffic curving along the water and disappearing around the next bend.

  “Sorry, sirs,” the driver announced upon consultation with his dash. “Both lanes are blocked up ahead for nearly a mile. They don’t know how long before the road is cleared.” He paused, listening again. “They’re—ah—they’re advising people to turn around, catch another road back in town that runs through the hills around the—ah, the—ah—problem.”

  He sounded oddly shaken. Leith asked, “What exactly is the problem?”

  “Seems to be a mythological beast in the middle of the road, sir.”

  Val ducked instantly over his cell phone, working rapidly. Leith closed his eyes briefly, opened them, and said grimly, “Which beast?”

  “Ah—they’re not sure, sir. The fire department managed to get some trucks through from the next town before traffic got too tangled. They tried to chase it away with hoses and sirens. The beast is sitting on top of one of the trucks. They’ve sent a photo to the Royal Herald in Severluna.”

  “I’ve got it,” Val said briefly, and held it up.

  Pierce broke their mystified silence. “It looks like a snake with a rooster’s head.”

  “Basilisk,” Val murmured, entranced by the vision, the enormous, upright coils balanced between the fire-truck ladders; the fiery cockscomb fanning the fowl’s head above its huge, open beak; the visible eye, round, golden, with a mad red flame in its center. “Isn’t there something weird about the basilisk’s eye? Oh, here it is, in the Royal Herald’s description. Its look can kill.” He paused; his brows went up. “So can its breath.”

  “I doubt that your mother is planning to kill anyone,” Leith protested. “Except maybe me.”

  “I’ve been eyeballing the situation, sir,” the driver said over the intercom. “I’m fairly certain I can get the limo turned around soon. There’s a wide bit in the road ahead, and we’re creeping closer to it as more cars ahead are turning for the detour.”

  “It’s probably just another illusion,” Pierce guessed. “It won’t hurt anyone, and it can’t get hurt.”

  “No,” Leith said abruptly. Val looked at him, his eyes narrowed.

  “No, which, sir?” the driver asked.

  “No, don’t turn. Stay in line.” He reached across Pierce, opened the door, and stepped out. “And you stay here,” he told his sons.

  “But—” Val began.

  “You told me to talk to her.”

  “But what if it’s not her? I mean, not her making?” Pierce argued. “I might be wrong about that.”

  “It hasn’t done anything more dangerous than commandeer a fire truck. Besides, what are the odds that two mythological beasts appear along the same road within half an hour of each other, and they’re not from the same source?”

  “What if it’s not sorcery?” Val asked simply, balancing halfway out the door behind Leith. “Do you know how to kill a basilisk?”

  “Look it up,” Leith said shortly. “Call me and let me know how if I get into trouble.”

  “I think you should—”

  “I think this is my fight and not yours.” He pushed against the limo door until Val yielded, shifted back, and Leith closed it. “My fault, my affair, and my basilisk. Find your own mythological beast.”

  They waited until he had glanced back once, several cars ahead of them, before they followed him.

  Val slipped an assortment of chains, sticks, and metal balls into various hidden pockets, along with the small, deadly Wyvern’s Eye. Pierce, blankly considering his own arsenal, pulled the kitchen knife out of his pack. Val showed him one of the sheaths sewn into his jacket lining. The driver stuck his fist out the window as they passed, and raised his thumb.

  “Good luck, sirs. Be careful.”

  They did not have to walk far before they saw the beast.

  Its body, uncoiled, would have been longer than two or three fire trucks. Its head, with its blazing frill of cockscomb and the great wheels of its eyes, was raised, alert, over the front end of the truck, peering out of one eye, then the other, at the people milling around it with weapons, news cameras, cell phones. Leith, walking toward it on the opposite side of the road, was half-hidden by the idling vehicles. The fire truck the beast had landed on was angled across the road, stopping traffic in both directions. Its former occupants had abandoned it hastily, judging from the wide-open doors. A man spoke into a bullhorn, trying to persuade people back into their cars. They ignored him; so did the beast.

  “I wonder if it knows—” Val started, then answered himself. “Of course it knows we’re here if it’s our mother’s making. That’s why it appeared.”

  “It’s another message for us,” Pierce said tightly. “She knows we didn’t listen to the dragon. Maybe I should call her.”

  “A basilisk with a phone?”

  “She’s probably at home in Desolation Point, watching us in water, or in the mist, or in a pot of chicken soup or something. I had no idea she could make anything like this. I had no idea—” He paused, added heavily, “I’m glad I didn’t know. It wouldn’t have been so easy to think of leaving her.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know either,” Val suggested. “Maybe she was never this angry before.” He sounded unusually somber. Pierce glanced at him, and he added, “I haven’t seen her since I was a child. I’ve been with my father most of my life. She doesn’t have a reason to think that I care about her. That I even remember her. You, at least, she knows she loves.”

  “She’s mad at me, too.”

  “Only by default. You’re with us.”

  Pierce started to reply, didn’t. He had no idea any longer what their mother might do or not do. He watched Leith, who was hidden from the basilisk’s eye by a long moving van. He reached the end of it, and the strange, upright coils of the snake’s body rippled suddenly. Its head turned almost completely sideways, staring down at the man walking toward it, visible now beside a small convertible with its top down. The driver, in the shadow of the beast’s oddly tilted head, dropped his cell and tried to crawl under the dash.

  “That is the weirdest combination of creatures imaginable,” Val said, wonderstruck anew. “A variation of the feathered serpent, maybe? I wonder if it crows.”

  “I think,” Pierce said uneasily, “we’re about to find out.”

  The huge beak was opening wide above Leith. Weapons appeared in open windows: Wyvern’s Eyes, hunting rifles, bows. Leith shouted something; so did the man with the bullhorn. Leith moved to the middle of the empty lane, walked down it in full view of the basilisk. Behind him, cars stopped in the middle of their turns, transfixed by the knight on foot challenging the monster on top of the fire engine. One of the trucks let out an ear-piercing wail, an effort to distract it, Pierce guessed. Val moved impulsively from behind the line of vehicles to walk behind his father. The snake’s coils shuddered again all down the long body. The rooste
r beak answered the fire truck with a fierce, shrill cross between a rooster crow and a snake’s hiss that must have shaken windows all along the highway. Then it caught sight of Pierce emerging behind his brother.

  The basilisk’s beak opened again. It made no sound this time. It enveloped Leith in a cloud of breath that was black, completely opaque, and stank of such acrid bitterness that a flock of starlings flying overhead rained down suddenly among the fire trucks.

  The whiff Pierce caught made him gag, forced tears into his eyes. He heard children screaming and crying, people coughing and cursing all around him. He moved blindly, bumped into Val, who was bent over and throwing up his lunch. Pierce wiped his burning eyes with his sleeve, blinked vision desperately back into them, taking in dry, shallow breaths through his mouth.

  When he could finally see again, the basilisk had vanished, leaving its cloud of appalling breath for the sea winds to shred. The body of his father, his blurred eyes told him, lay motionless on the road.

  Pierce staggered toward him, still hearing sobs, moans, convulsive noises all around him. Those nearest the basilisk were dazed, hunched over and stumbling into the trucks, or tripping over one another. No one had yet come to the aid of the fallen knight. Pierce reached Leith finally, dropped to his knees. He put a hand on Leith’s chest, felt his heartbeat, then the breath move through him. Val staggered next to him, sagged down. He couldn’t speak; he queried Pierce with a bloodshot stare.

  “He’s breathing,” Pierce told him. “I don’t see anything broken or bleeding. I think he just fainted.”

  “Felled by the basilisk’s breath,” Val muttered hoarsely. “He’ll never live that down.” He held Leith’s shoulder, shook him gently. “Father? Are you in there? It’s safe. The beast is gone. Come back. Sir Leith Duresse. We need you. Please come back.”

  Leith showed no signs of doing so. Val gave Pierce another haggard glance, then looked around helplessly at the still-afflicted fire crew.

  A shadow fell over Leith. Pierce raised his head and found the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life standing over them.

  She was speaking, he realized belatedly, still half-stunned, as flowers, pearls, jewels, fell from her full, rose-petal lips.

  “My house is just up that drive.” She motioned toward a palatial estate on the cliff above them. “We’ve been watching the excitement from our deck. My driver can help you carry him to my car. The drive is clear of traffic, and he can wait for the paramedics in my guest room. I think it would be much quicker than waiting for an ambulance trying to get through this. Will you let us help you?”

  Val was trying to tell him something, Pierce sensed. His wide-eyed, insistent gaze, his two-handed grip on their father, his alert, motionless warrior’s stance, all spoke, all said the last thing Pierce wanted to hear.

  Pierce said, “Yes.”

  18

  Daimon rode through the streets of Severluna, paying no attention to where he was going. Where didn’t matter anymore: every street would take him there.

  “Our world,” his great-aunt told him, “is always just a step away from anywhere. Don’t bother looking for it. You are already there in your heart.”

  That much was true: he felt the moon-tug of that realm, the tidal pull of it overwhelming the kingdom of the wyvern, until very little of that world seemed important any longer. He lost the need of it, except in necessary ways: the place he went for clothes and food; the place where he was occasionally expected to appear, talk to faces that he remembered vaguely, in a dreamlike fashion. As in dreams, they were losing predictability; he was losing hold of their past. He saw them as from a distance: the queen who had never been his mother, the king who looked at him through wyvern’s eyes and knew nothing of the raven, the princess who fretted over him but no longer knew him, anything about him at all.

  He had thought that the fay realm of Ravenhold was a dream; he learned that Wyvernhold was the unreal world. Its magic had fragmented; few possessed it. Every moment of its days was time-bound, counted, measured; the end of time was not forever, but death, and death waited everywhere, in every shadow.

  “Silly way to live,” Morrig said. “What’s the point of being so tidy you can’t see beyond the rules you’ve made for everything? Look at this world instead.” He could see it now, as she and Vivien and his mother had taught him: the lovely, timeless place hidden within the noisy, jangling, quarrelsome, troubled world where even the wyverns were nothing now except a word. “Once our true realm ran from one horizon to the other, from day to night; you could move from one end to the other with a wish. A step. What Sylvester Skelton calls his magic flamed in every blade of grass, every flowering tree. Now, time gets in the way. It scattered us; we withered in it, even those of us closest to being human. The world of the wyvern king trampled us without even knowing we exist. We need our cauldron to remake our world. Find it.”

  “Find it,” his mother pleaded.

  “Find it,” Vivien said, always with a kiss, “for us.”

  “Where are you these days?” his father asked, startling Daimon on his way out. No one really knew him anymore, so why would anyone pay attention to what he did? “You drift in and out like a ghost; your body is here, but your eyes never are. And then you vanish entirely, and I think you’ve followed the path of the questing knight. Then you’re back; you’ve gone nowhere at all, except that you’ve never left the place you think you come home from.” Daimon, his mind in the wyvern’s world at that moment, saw the wariness in his father’s eyes. “Who is she?”

  “No one,” Daimon told him, feeling the long, powerful flow and drag on his heart, the summons of the invisible on the verge of becoming visible if he took that step, that leap. “I’ll get over it,” he added, absently, words his father wanted to hear. “Just give me time.”

  As he learned how to see into that timeless place, he learned more of its past.

  It was a piecemeal process: he never knew what he would see, or when it might have happened; as in dreams, there was no past, only now.

  He parked his bike at a crossroad, took a step, and Severluna vanished. The broad meadow where the Calluna River found its way into light surrounded him. What he thought was the sun flashed on the horizon. But his shadow lay in front of him; a twin sun above him illumined the vast flow of green around him. The second star on the horizon was rich bronze-gold; it pulsed with a clamor of hammering that echoed across the plain. Great black flocks of ravens swirled up and out of the glow, as though somehow they had been forged within its fires. Everything—the genial sky, the flowering grass, the earth itself—seemed to emit a low, sweet hum he could feel reverberating through the ground, up into his veins and sinews. He stood rapt, a note the earth sang.

  At the corner of another street, he stepped into night, and saw the source of the second sun. It was the cauldron he had seen before, under the familiar tree. The woman he remembered stirred the shining liquid within it with her great wooden spoon; this time she sang that pure, constant hum. So bright the cauldron was that it blotted out the stars. The moon, awash with its light, was a faint, thin pair of bronze horns tilted above the tree.

  A procession made its way from night into light: four women carrying a long bronze shield with a dead man lying upon it. He had no eyes; there was a bloody hole where his heart should have been. Following him, a man carried a spear that wept blood; another held a knife, its blade curved like the moon in the tree.

  The woman stirring the pot raised the bowl of her spoon, poured the molten liquid over the blind face. Then she gestured.

  The women raised the shield, tilted it, and the body of the fallen warrior slid, disappeared into the cauldron.

  “That’s what you want me to find?” Daimon asked Vivien, who was suddenly on the sidewalk beside him, surrounded by endlessly moving bodies dodging around them.

  “Yes,” she said. “But after being in time all these�
��well, however long—we don’t know exactly what it will look like. You’ll recognize it as we would.” She smiled; her palm rested briefly on his heart. “Here.”

  “Did the warrior come back to life? Or did he get eaten?”

  Her mouth crooked; she answered patiently, “He was drinking beer and toasting the moon an hour later.”

  “Are you certain my heart is big enough for this?”

  “I’m certain that your heart will grow large enough to take that great power when it reveals itself to you. As it will. You are the raven’s son.”

  He rode in a daze, found himself back on the palace grounds. He got off his bike, walked it behind the sanctum tower to the royal garages, where he found a woman crouched on the floor beside her bike and wielding a wrench.

  She rose swiftly when she recognized him.

  “Prince Daimon.”

  She looked familiar: those long bones, the honey-colored hair, that height. Standing, they were eye to eye, and suddenly he remembered.

  “Dame Scotia. You were the black knight who forced me to yield to you.”

  She smiled; that, too, he remembered.

  “It is strange,” she commented, “not knowing who you’re fighting. In tales, it seems romantic: the nameless, invisible knights, the shining armor, the great swords. That’s why I took to it. In truth, it’s stifling and awkward, lumbering around wearing all that weight and trying to see out of a slit in your helm.”

  “You made yourself good at it.”

  She shrugged lightly. “I had several older cousins to practice on. You made yourself good at it, as well.”

  He was silent, trying to recall exactly why. His own past blurred into another; he could scarcely envision a time before he had known Vivien. Who had he been, he wondered with a strange, quick tremor of panic, before he was the raven’s child?

  He heard a clink, blinked, and saw Dame Scotia bending to pick up the wrench she had dropped. He saw her, he realized, as he saw no one else those days. Perhaps only because she was a stranger, and therefore not tediously predictable.