Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Why wouldn’t he? He’s our father. We were traveling together.”

  “I explained that to him,” the sorceress said a trifle querulously. “More than once. That everyone around him was incapacitated by the monster, that I saw the incident from a distance and went to help, that he was alone when I found him, and in such distress that of course I did all that was possible to get him out of there, and quickly. The roads were blocked, so I brought him here. I saw nothing of a limo, a driver, or two young, red-haired men wearing uniforms. They must have driven on to search for him when the road cleared.”

  “He doesn’t know we’re here?” Pierce said, appalled.

  “No. He has no idea where you’ve gone.” She brooded a moment. “I suspect that—in some tiny way—he doesn’t entirely believe me. I don’t know why.” She stood up restively, paced a moment across a rumpled, faded hearthrug. They watched her in complete bewilderment.

  “What is it you want from him?” Pierce pleaded. “Maybe we can help? Is it something he did to you? Are you that angry with him?”

  “Of course not. He has never met me before in his life. But I’ve known about him all of mine.” She paused, studying them, nibbling on a fingernail. “It may be that you’ll both—no, maybe just one of you, to be on the safe side—will have to appear at my door asking if I’ve seen him. He will be so grateful to me when he sees at least one of his sons. But we’ll need some convincing story of where the other one has gone.”

  “How about this?” Val said sharply. “That one of us was kidnapped by the incredibly stupid and selfish sorceress who turned herself into a basilisk and attacked our father.”

  The sorceress took her finger from between her teeth and pointed it at him. “You,” she said coldly, “can stay here. I’ll take your brother with me to see your father.”

  “I’m not going to lie to him for you,” Pierce said adamantly.

  “Fine. Decide for yourselves who stays and who goes free to see Sir Leith. But if I glimpse the faintest falseness in your eyes, in your face, hear it in your words when you speak to him, the brother you left behind will share stale bread and moldy cheese rinds with the rats.”

  Val gazed at her, his eyes narrowed and so intent on her that Pierce wondered uneasily what, by word or action, he might trigger in her. He only asked, with unexpected gentleness, “What is it? If you want our help, tell us what you need.”

  Her face crumpled suddenly; she dabbed at the corner of one eye with her forefinger. “I need him to understand how deeply I am in love with him. That he holds my heart in his. I need to move him as he moves me. Can you help me with that? He finds it so difficult to be grateful despite all I’ve done for him. Can you persuade him? I want to rule his heart, to make it tack and turn toward me, always toward me, until all the world understands the poetry that he feels for me. I want him to forget the queen. I want to be known, from this time on, as his legendary love. Can you help me?” She flicked a finger at her other eye, then gave them both a dark, tearless stare. “If you can’t, then stay out of my way. Now. Choose. Which of you remains here, which of you sees your father. Be ready to tell me when I return.”

  Val said quickly, after she vanished, “I am older than you, far more experienced with fighting whatever she might conjure up, and I’ve been with him my entire life. Please. Let me go.”

  “I can lie better than you,” Pierce said.

  “How do you know?”

  Pierce gazed at him helplessly. “Because there’s so much I don’t know about either of you. I could invent all kinds of things and believe them at the same time. And I’ve been around a sorceress all my life. Look at your face. Have you ever told a single lie?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “That must be the first. You can’t even lie convincingly about lying. Your eyes don’t know how.”

  Val said nothing, just looked at him with such burning, pleading urgency that Pierce yielded and stayed behind to await the cheese rinds and the rats that, he expected, would be inevitable.

  It did not take Val long to get into trouble. After some roaming and futile banging at walls, during which time stood around and watched, judging from the lack of even a hairbreadth of movement from light or shadow, Pierce found a plate on a cracked and blistered wooden chest. As promised, it held some furry cheese whittled to the rind, and a couple of rock-hard heels of bread. He looked at it glumly, wondering how his father and brother were faring. Also as promised, a rat popped up from behind the chest, eyed Pierce warily.

  “Help yourself,” Pierce told it, and turned away to find another wall, another weapon.

  He dumped the dead plant out of a cast-iron pot, and was trying to put a dent in a windowless wall inset with an incongruous window seat, when the rat leaped up onto the seat and stood staring at him.

  “Sorry,” Pierce sighed. “You’ll have to wait for the next meal after whatever that one was.” He whacked at the wall with force, determined to fight his way back into the world by whatever worked. The rat did not move. Pierce glanced at it again. Something in its dark, fixed gaze, its complete lack of instinct or common rat sense, made Pierce’s skin prickle.

  He lowered the pot, whispered, “Mom?”

  The wall around the window seat blew into fragments. The rat, squealing, leaped one way, Pierce another. When the shards of lath and plaster finished falling, and the dust settled, he felt light and heard the distant roar of the sea.

  A series of muffled explosions thundered methodically around him, followed by some furious shouting just before the floor collapsed under his feet. He thudded down an inch or two, and walls around him collapsed, dissolved, like the long spiral of chambers within a shell fraying apart, opening up to reveal its outer structure. He stood in the lovely mansion he had seen from the road, with its airy rooms overlooking the highway and the sea, its windows stained the mist and pearl of what he finally realized was dawn.

  Across the road, down a long, empty beach, a crow chased a seagull. Their cries were audible even above the waves. Pierce, watching the crow gain air and peck at the gull’s feathers, shivered suddenly, amazed at the power that his mother possessed to have torn apart the sorceress’s spell like a squall hitting a haystack. He watched for a time, wondering if she would turn and fly back to him. Both birds vanished behind a jut of headland. He waited, as the sun revealed its waking eye between two layers of cloud, then closed it again and carried on unseen. Pierce opened a sliding deck door, stepped outside, taking deep breaths of the briny, chilly air. He heard voices, and went to look over the side of the deck.

  Val and Leith stood below. Val was pulling on his jacket and sliding weapons into its hidden pockets. Leith, holding Pierce’s clothes and boots and the kitchen knife, was scanning the lower windows and shouting his name.

  Pierce called back, then found his way down swiftly and joined them. Leith, looking pale and harried, reached out, hugged him tightly with one arm, then handed him his pants.

  “Hurry,” he begged, “before she comes back. I’d rather face the kraken at the bottom of the sea than that again.”

  Val was looking askew at Pierce, astonished. “How on earth did you break that spell?”

  “I didn’t. Our mother found us.”

  Leith stared at him. “That was Heloise?”

  Pierce nodded, pulling on his shirt. “The sorceress made a mistake and let a living animal into her spell. I told you,” he added to Val, “that you couldn’t lie.”

  “You were right.”

  “What animal?” Leith asked.

  “A rat. My mother has a habit of watching out for me. She uses just about anything with eyes.” He paused, added with wonder, “I can’t believe she came all the way down from Cape Mistbegotten for this.”

  “She was the dragon,” Val reminded him.

  “No. That was only her making. She probably borrowed some other local creature
for that illusion.”

  “But she wasn’t the basilisk.”

  “No. I was wrong about that.”

  “We were all wrong,” Leith murmured. He gave Pierce his jacket and the knife. “Where is she? Where did they both go?”

  “Last I saw, they went flying down the beach. And I think you’re right,” Pierce added uneasily. “We should get out of here before the sorceress comes back.”

  Val produced his cell. “I’ll call our driver.”

  Leith, still looking unsettled, incredulous, said, “I can’t believe . . . I had no idea she could— Did you have any idea she was that— Do you think she knew that Val and I were in trouble? Or did she only do this for you?”

  Pierce sighed. “Honestly? I don’t know. You should ask her that. You should find her. You should talk.”

  Leith, his gaze shifting toward the sea, said nothing; after a moment, he gave a short nod.

  They had walked halfway down the long drive from the sorceress’s house when they saw the limo pull up at the end of it.

  20

  There were knights everywhere, suddenly, in Chimera Bay. Carrie, shopping for Stillwater’s, saw them strolling down streets, eating lunch in the brew-pub, getting their bikes and cars looked at in the local garages, roaming through antique stores and the flea market, even appearing at weekend garage sales. They were hunting, Carrie learned from Jayne and Bek, who paid attention to lunchtime gossip. The knights were in pursuit of something inexplicable, indescribable, that might resemble a mixing bowl, or a wine goblet, or a flowerpot made of gold. They would know it when they saw it.

  They didn’t stay long, overnight at the most, though it was hard to tell when they all dressed alike. Chimera Bay, a serviceable wayside along the highway between greater, more complex cities, presented a friendly and ingenuous face to strangers passing through. No one would stay long to look for wonders there. A few found Stillwater’s restaurant, though, busy as she was in the kitchen, Carrie rarely knew until after who had eaten her cooking.

  Some workdays were longer than others: when she cooked for lunch at Stillwater’s, then dinner at the Kingfisher. She scarcely saw Zed on those days, much less her father, who, after his amazing shape-changing dance in the moonlight, had vanished again. She thought, after that vision, nothing else could surprise her. But, on one of the long days, which started early when she bought groceries for Stillwater’s before lunch, she walked in hauling bags and found Sage Stillwater on a stool at the bar eating a sandwich.

  Carrie nearly dropped the groceries.

  “Is that tuna?” she asked incredulously, catching a whiff of it.

  Sage nodded, making a little face. “Out of a can, even. Todd’s funny that way. He gives me such ordinary food now and then. I have no idea why. Maybe he just gets tired and runs out of ideas. And he is so hurt if I don’t eat it.” She lifted the thick, graceless slabs of bread with the grayish ooze of tuna salad between them, gazed at the concoction reluctantly, and forced herself to take another bite. “Pickles,” she said, grimacing again after she swallowed. “Mayonnaise from a jar. Celery. Onions.”

  “Sounds like something on the Kingfisher menu,” Carrie said with disbelief.

  “Capers.”

  “Well, maybe not.” She noted the salad beside the sandwich plate: tomatoes that looked exactly like themselves, undisguised red onion and pepper, a mass of greens for all the world to see. “Does he eat that, too?”

  “No,” Sage said, laughing. “Never. He wouldn’t be caught dead eating anything less than beautiful.” She had another face-off with the unlovely sandwich. “It hasn’t killed me yet, and it makes him happy.” She sighed, and bit into it again.

  Carrie, mystified, took the groceries into the kitchen and began to prep for lunch.

  When Stillwater came in later, she was turning truffle oil into a mist to give a delicate, subtle flavor to thin diamonds of raw beef for the bottom layer of a lunch bite. He tasted one, grunted something approving, and passed on before she remembered the tuna sandwich. She went on to the Kingfisher Grill with the scent of truffles in her hair. By the time she helped Ella replenish the dessert tray and started cooking suppers, the homey smells of banana cream pie and frying fish overpowered any lingering mementos from Stillwater’s kitchen.

  But Ella kept giving her little fretful glances whenever she was between whirlwinds of this or that.

  “You’re getting too thin,” she commented as she finished making up half a dozen salads and put them on a tray for Marjorie.

  “Am I?” Carrie said, surprised.

  “Have you been eating?”

  “Of course. All the time.”

  Ella gave her one of those narrow-eyed looks of pure perception, the last thing Carrie wanted to inspire. “Are you working another job?”

  “No,” Carrie said, shoveling halibut over to sizzle on its other side. She felt cold, hollow with the lie; she peppered the fish, not meeting Ella’s eyes. “I have been looking,” she temporized. “Just for a part-time, something mindless and easy, to make a little more money. But I don’t want to change my hours here. I’m fine with here.” She paused to test the silence, the weight of Ella’s regard. “I’m worried about my father. We seem to be at odds, these days. We can’t agree on things, and most of the time I never know where he is. When I do see him, he doesn’t talk to me.”

  “Ah.” Ella went back to bustling, spooning green beans, garlic mash on a plate for Carrie’s halibut, then filling bowls, two chowders and a split pea ham for one of Bek’s tables. “You want to leave him. Like your mother did. No wonder he’s balking.”

  Carrie laughed a little, inhaled a pepper flake, and turned away quickly to cough. “Can you blame us? He doesn’t exactly make things easy.”

  Bek backed into the door, arms lined with salad plates; he slid them into the sink, picked up the two chowders, and vanished again.

  “Busy tonight,” Ella commented. “Strangers all over town, I hear.” She grated some carrot curls on top of the split pea bowl, and handed it to Bek as he reappeared. Then she stopped moving again, standing in the middle of the floor, staring down at the ancient linoleum as though it were expressing something profound, or just revealing old memories.

  “Nobody, living or dead, makes things easy even when you love them. Especially then.”

  Jayne whirled through the double doors like a dancer, her purple hair swirling, her tray full of dirty dishes. “There’s a pair of black-haired, blue-eyed twin knights out there I think we need to keep. I’ll take one and you take the other, Carrie. They need a blue cheese dressing and a chowder.”

  Ella reached for dishes; Jayne popped some corn muffins and butter into a basket and danced out again.

  Carrie checked the bar when she finished work but found no Merle there. She went home and crept gratefully into bed. Sometime in the night, she woke up feeling odd, somehow amiss, then realized it was nothing, only hunger. Zed came in then from working the late shows at the theater, and she took in a long breath of the smell of hot buttered popcorn on his skin as he rolled in beside her. She went back to sleep and dreamed of Merle, or maybe she heard him in her dreams, singing his song of love or loss or dire warning to the night.

  “You’re working too hard,” Zed told her sleepily the next morning, as they drank coffee together in the farmhouse kitchen.

  “I’m not the one who has to get up at the crack of dawn and walk Harlan Jameson’s puppy.”

  “That’s only for a week, while he’s out of town. I think you should quit working for Stillwater. He hasn’t told you anything. All he’s done is make you feel guilty about working for him. Your tightest pair of jeans is starting to sag on you. You’re getting some killer cheekbones, but I don’t think all this is good for you.”

  “I’m fine,” Carrie said without really listening. “You should eat something. I could scramble some eggs.”
<
br />   “There are no eggs. I looked. There’s no bread for toast.”

  “Milk and cereal?”

  “There’s a wilted stalk of celery and a jar of mustard.”

  “Seriously?” Carrie put her cup down, went to stick her head in the fridge. “Well, where did— Who’s been eating—” She opened the freezer. “There’s ice cream. No. Frozen yogurt.” She stared at it, and felt something dark, constricting, ease around her thoughts, her heart. “He hates frozen yogurt. He says it’s unnatural.”

  “Who?”

  She looked at him, smiling. “My father. He’s been here laying waste to the kitchen.”

  Zed didn’t smile back. “And this took you how long to notice? How many sandwiches ago did he finish your bread? How many bowls of cereal?”

  “I don’t know. What does it matter? I miss him, Zed. I want so much to be able to talk to him again. I’m just happy he’s been here at all.”

  “It matters because you’ve stopped bothering to feed yourself.” He got up abruptly, pulled the yogurt out of the freezer, and handed her a spoon. “Yogurt. It’s good for you. People eat it for breakfast. Eat some human food for once instead of those airy nothings you eat at Stillwater’s. I’m not moving until—”

  “Oh, all right,” Carrie said. She prodded a spoonful out of the box, sucked on it until it melted. “Here. Your turn.”

  “Finish it.”

  “I will, I will, I promise. You’d better go before the puppy chews its way out of the house.”

  He lingered, his forehead creased, his eyes dark, watching her excavate another bite, until the thought of the ravaging, whimpering beast tugged him away. “I’m bringing groceries tonight.” It sounded like a threat. “Somebody around here needs to exercise some common sense.”

  She tossed the carton and the spoon into the freezer when she heard his engine start, and went outside to see if she could spot the errant wolf.