Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He shook his head a little, settling a bewildering stir of thought.

  “Anything I can help with?” he asked.

  “Just tightening this and that, Prince Daimon. Making sure things don’t fall apart. Thank you.” She smiled again, left an imprint on his mind of calm, violet eyes, an expression absurdly free of complications. “That’s another thing I accidentally became good at.”

  In the middle of the night he woke himself up thinking: Chimera Bay.

  The words haunted him when he woke again at dawn. He didn’t recall where he had heard them, or why they might be in any way important. He threw on some clothes, fended off the usual meaningless questions and conversations, and rode back in time to the one place left that made any sense to him.

  This time, he found himself at Vivien’s door. As always, she opened it before he knocked. He entered wordlessly. She put her arms around him and took him nowhere and everywhere at once. Memories his own and not his own drifted like richly colored dying leaves through his head; he did not know, any longer, who he was except in her enchanting eyes.

  He asked his mother about his vanishing past. She had put on a hundred masks to watch him grow; she would remember.

  But she did not seem interested in it, either. “That was the wyvern king’s world. The place I couldn’t enter unless I was disguised. I juggled colored cloth balls at your fourth birthday party; I measured you for your first formal suit. I watched you in your first tournament from a concession stand. Glimpses of you were all my life, then.” She gave him a lovely, bittersweet smile that touched his heart. “Now I can stand here looking at your face.” She cupped it lightly with her hands. “And showing you mine. Why should I want to remember that past?”

  They were in the tiny village called Ravensley, sitting at a sturdy wooden table in the cottage that Vivien’s apartment sometimes mysteriously became. She was out in one world or the other. Ana had poured tea in the pot on the table; neither of them drank it. The village was a place of shallow dimensions, Daimon sensed, like its photograph. He had never seen another cottage door open or anyone walking on the street. In a place beyond eyesight, it held villagers, tourists, traffic of every kind. In this moment, this memory, it held only an open door, a table, a teapot, no voices but their own.

  Morrig entered then, glanced around for another chair, and there it was, along with another teacup. Daimon watched her guardedly, aware now of the power she hid behind her dithering ways.

  “Tea,” she remarked, gazing into the cup. “Why never brandy? What is Chimera Bay?”

  She looked questioningly at Daimon; he tried to grasp a slippery recollection, not easy in a place that seemed to be somebody else’s fraying memory. For some reason the queen’s lover, Leith Duresse, surfaced.

  “I woke last night,” he explained, “and the words were in my head.”

  “I know,” Morrig said. “I heard them, and I wondered.” She linked her fingers, clad in lacy, fingerless gloves, beneath her chin and regarded him out of mist-colored eyes older than Wyvernhold. “Try,” she suggested gently, and it came: supper on the day of the Assembly, Leith sitting beside his newfound son, Pierce Oliver, who was explaining something to the king, and to Sylvester Skelton.

  “A fish fry?” Daimon said. “Can that be right?”

  “Chimera Bay is a fish fry?”

  “The fish fry is in Chimera Bay.” She nodded encouragingly, looking baffled, while his thoughts blundered about in the mists of her gaze, trying to see. “Friday fish fry,” he amended, then glimpsed another piece. “A ritual. Lord Skelton called it a ritual. Yes. Pierce Oliver had taken something from a ritual in Chimera Bay, involving fish. A knife, I think it was.” He hesitated, hearing fragments he had been paying little attention to, until now. “Lord Skelton seemed to make a connection between the knife, the fish fry, and Severen’s sacred artifact.”

  He felt wind stir through the door of the cottage, smelling of asphalt and brine. Somewhere, in the past or future, brakes screeched, then an owl. Morrig’s attention had withdrawn so far from him or anyone, she might have been one of the cottage’s memories: the old woman sitting over her tea, motionless, shrouded in shadow.

  Then she raised her cup, took a sip of tea, and made a face.

  “Where is Chimera Bay?”

  Ana shook her head. “Somewhere north?”

  “I have no idea,” Vivien said. Daimon started, and she smiled, sitting among them unexpectedly, holding her own flowered cup. “Daimon, my love, do you?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “What might be there,” she persisted, “to make it at all important? To us, that is? A shrine? A well?”

  “A place,” Ana said more clearly, “that might hold our past? Anything of Calluna’s?”

  “I don’t know,” he said helplessly, and added, “I could ask Lord Skelton.”

  “You could,” Morrig said, “just go there and see what you see. Be a questing knight. Take a look. You know yourself well enough by now to recognize what might be important to us.” He looked mutely at Vivien, appalled at the idea, wondering how she could expect him to leave her and go off searching for a fish fry in the nether regions of Wyvernhold.

  “Come with me?” he pleaded. She reached across the table for his hand, gripped it tightly.

  “I can’t travel with you,” she said gently. “Not openly. None of us can. It would attract attention, especially from the king and his magus, who have their eyes on you already. Lord Skelton might begin to think too much and discover us. We must have that cauldron back first.” She raised his fingers to her cheek, her brows crooked. “But don’t worry. We will never be far from you. No farther than it takes for you to find me now. Do this for me?”

  Reluctantly, later, he nerved himself to enter the vast, dusty, overwhelmingly packed rooms of the Royal Library to look for maps. The older the better, he decided, since no modern map would have anything to do with Ravenhold. He needed one map to pinpoint Chimera Bay, which he was not entirely sure how to spell, and another, the oldest he could find, to look for words, place names, that, like fossil footprints, might indicate the values of a forgotten realm.

  He got vague directions from a librarian and wandered through collisions of architectural styles, as rooms expanded through the centuries to admit new collections. A map framed on a far wall beckoned; he followed its summons and found himself in a room so cluttered with moldering tomes that it made him sneeze.

  Near him, an elbow slid off the page of a tome and hit the table hard. A head, haloed with sunlight from stained glass, turned toward him as the elbow’s owner rubbed it. They gazed at one another with surprise.

  Then the knight hastily pushed back her heavy, ornate chair, and Daimon said as quickly, “Dame Scotia. I didn’t mean to startle you. Don’t tell me you read as well?”

  She subsided, showing him the enormous, gaudily illustrated work. “I’m researching my ancestor, Tavis Malory, to find out if he was truly as dreadful as his contemporaries said. I do intend to go questing. I keep intending to go. But I can’t seem to find my way past all the books, these and Lord Skelton’s.”

  “Tavis—” Past surfaced unexpectedly; a title came to mind. “The Life and Death—of course.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Hasn’t everybody? That’s what made me want to run around in armor swinging a broadsword at people. I remember now.” He glanced at her curiously, wondering what it was about her that seemed to clear his head, convince him, for just a moment, that he belonged back in the mundane world. “Where will you quest, when you do?”

  “I haven’t decided yet, Prince Daimon. It seems such a complex notion: finding a vessel belonging to a god, lost for who knows how long except in tales. I’m at a loss trying to find a beginning point. If you don’t mind my asking, how did you make the decision?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Oh
.”

  “Like you, I’m still here. But I have decided to look at a map. A very old map. Like this one.”

  He crossed the room to study the map on the wall that had lured him in. It was large, studded with wyverns’ nests, a realm with borders puffed and vague as clouds, mountains like inverted V’s, forests of what looked like brown chimneys billowing green smoke, abounding with animals extinct, and imaginary, and occasionally, like the spouting whales frolicking off the coast, still existent. Wyvernhold, in huge gold-leaf letters, spanned the landmass. “Later than I thought,” he commented, studying it closely, and came nose to nose with a peculiar creature. It appeared so suddenly that it took his breath away. “And there it is. So that’s what a chimera looks like . . .”

  He heard the chair scrape stone again. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  She came to stand beside him, silent for a moment, until she gave a sudden chuckle. “There.” She tapped the glass over the northeastern, mountainous portion of Wyvernhold. “The Triple-Horned Mountain Sheep. My family crest. Not lovely, but fearless and quite strong. They would even attack wyverns who were after their young.”

  “Everyone fought the wyvern, once, it seems.”

  “Where is the chimera?”

  He pointed to the fire-breathing lion with the body of a goat, and a writhing serpent for a tail, hovering over a bay in the northern coast of Wyvernhold. “Chimera Bay. That’s where I would look. If I were questing.”

  “Why there?” she murmured, studying the strange beast. “Is a chimera particularly dedicated to Severen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The goat part looks female.”

  “So it does,” he said, recognizing the very full udder. “I need an older map. A map older than Wyvernhold, to know.”

  “To know what, Prince Daimon?”

  “If the bay had other names. Older names. What early beings might still be living, forgotten, in the chimera’s shadow.” He glanced at her; she still studied the map, fascinated, it seemed, by the variety of beasts.

  “So you are?” she asked. “Questing? That’s why you need the map?”

  “Yes.” He turned away restively, full of sudden impatience, to go so that he could come back. “As soon as I can. Tomorrow. At dawn.”

  She looked at him, gave him her quick, generous smile. “I hope you find your chimera, Prince Daimon. Wish me luck with mine.”

  19

  I told you so,” Val said.

  “You did not,” Pierce said. “You didn’t say a word.”

  “I told you with everything but words. You read my mind.”

  “I heard your ‘no,’” Pierce conceded reluctantly. “But you didn’t say why.”

  “How could I? She was the basilisk.”

  They were sitting in what looked like an old library in the basilisk’s house. At least it was full of bookcases. A dusty volume lay here and there on the shelves, which mostly held an impressive collection of cobwebs. The books seemed discarded leftovers: A Beginner’s Guide to Butterflies, Do It Yourself Plumbing, A History of Irrigation Methods in South Wyvernhold.

  There was also their supper, which they had chanced upon by roaming around the countless rooms in the house above the sea. How long they had been there, Pierce had no idea. After adroitly separating them from Leith, sending him off under the care of her attendants, the sorceress had stripped them of everything but their underwear and left them a pile of old shirts and assorted bottoms to pick from. Somehow, they could not move while she did this. They could not speak, not even when she pulled Val’s Wyvern’s Eye out of his jacket and examined it curiously.

  “What is this?” she asked, waving it at them; they could not blink, let alone duck. “Oh, well.” She tossed it on the small pile of arms that included the kitchen knife. “You won’t need it.”

  Pierce wondered how he had ever imagined her beautiful. Her lips were too rosy, her teeth too white, her curly hair too golden, her eyes an unpleasant shade of cornflower blue. Her smile deepened slightly, offering him an absurdly placed dimple.

  “It’s called glamour,” she told him. “Works like a charm. Now. Here are the rules. You can go wherever you like. I’ll feed you when you’re hungry. After Sir Leith recovers from his unfortunate affliction—which he will do, I promise—I’m sure we will all become the best of friends. Any questions?” They stared at her. “Good. Then I will see you—when I see you.” She laughed lightly and disappeared, along with their weapons and uniforms, without bothering with the door.

  Still wordless, too worried and disgusted to speak, they pulled on some faded, fraying clothes and went looking for Leith.

  The house, which had seemed from the road a large, light-filled coastal mansion, full of windows and decks to watch the sea, bore no resemblance to itself inside. It rambled interminably like an underground cave. Its hallways were shadowy, its ceilings low, its rooms moldy and overflowing with shabby furniture, or else, like the library, looking as though they had been hastily abandoned. There were no windows anywhere. There were no visible doors leading outside. There was no sign of Leith.

  “Why did she do that to him?” Val demanded explosively, when, weary and strewn with cobwebs, they stumbled into the library and found their supper. “She turned into a basilisk, knocked him out with her breath, brought him here to cure him—for what? It makes no sense.”

  “Did he break her heart, too?” Pierce asked.

  Val blinked, made a visible effort to think.

  “He never mentioned anyone but our mother. And the queen. He had to tell me about that before gossip did.” He paced, an incongruous knight in a torn pink T-shirt and fire-engine-red pajama bottoms. Then he paused over one of the supper trays, complete with a wineglass full of water and a plastic rose in a bud vase. “Do you think this is safe to eat?”

  Pierce shrugged and speared a forkful of some kind of fish covered in green. His brows went up; he swallowed. “Olive sauce. Someone here can cook. I don’t know if it’s safe, but it’s good.”

  They ate, then continued the search. When they began to stumble over their feet, they came upon a room with two frightful iron beds, thin mattresses unrolled over bare springs, covered with rumpled, yellowing sheets and threadbare blankets. They fell into the lumpy, sagging embraces and slept.

  The house looked exactly the same when they woke.

  “There is no time,” Val breathed. “There is no day or night.”

  “There are no toothbrushes,” Pierce said glumly from the stained, rusty bathroom.

  “I think we’re inside a spell.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Our father isn’t in the house we’re in,” Val said more coherently.

  “Well, there’s one. I think it was last used by something with mold on its fangs.”

  “No matter how long we look, we won’t find him. We’re in some kind of magic bubble. A sort of alternate universe inside the real house. We could be in the same room our father is in, right at this moment, and never know it.”

  Pierce, splashing water over his face, leaned back and peered out the door at Val. “Then how do we get to where he is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  They continued searching, and found their breakfast in a drab little room with an unplugged dishwasher in it, a box of laundry detergent on the bottom of a set of shelves, and an empty birdcage.

  “Our mother,” Pierce said as they leaned over the dishwasher and ate scrambled eggs, peppered bacon, and cranberry muffins, “is a sorceress. One of us must have inherited something of her magic. We should be able to think our way around this.” He paused, looking expectantly at Val, who shook his head. “You recognized the basilisk when all I saw was what she wanted me to see. You recognized the Mistbegotten mist. You recognized me. You piece things together far better than I do.”

  “That’s
not sorcery. That’s perception. What you do with that knife—that’s magical.”

  “It’s in the knife, not in me.”

  “Is it?” Val waggled his fork at his brother. “What could you do with this, for instance?”

  “Eat,” Pierce said flatly. He did, then added, “I still think we may have some of her powers. We’ve just never had to use them before. If you wanted to make all of this—”

  “It’s illusion,” Val pointed out.

  “You mean it’s all in our heads? We’re imagining this house?”

  “No. The sorceress is. It’s in her head.”

  “Well—” Pierce grappled a moment. “Can we—can we change it with our minds? Put a door in it that leads out?”

  Val considered the question, then answered simply, “I’m a knight. I’m better at bashing things apart than imagining doors through them.”

  They tried that for a while, swinging at scarred plaster and torn wallpaper with whatever they could find: removable shelving, a rolling pin with a missing handle, a mop. The sorceress appeared as they were battering at the walls around a chimney, raising clouds of soot but doing no discernible damage to her spell.

  She sat down on a couch with a few springs sticking out of it, and said, “I need some help with your father.”

  They gazed at her, still holding makeshift battering tools, which she ignored.

  Val said, “Of course we’ll help. Just take us to him. What’s wrong with him?”

  She brushed his words away. “Not that kind of help. He’s fine. He just— Is he always so stubborn?”

  Val took a step toward her, still wielding the mop handle. He asked tightly, “About what?”

  She waved her hand again; the mop disappeared. “About— Well. His feelings? I’ve been doing everything for him. I put him in the loveliest room in my house. I removed the basilisk’s spell. He has only a bit of a headache. My attendants bathed him, dressed him in clean clothes; I cooked for him myself. I would have fed him with my own hands. He refuses to be grateful. All he does is ask for you.”