Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Sylvester himself sent the knights out questing for it. He is convinced it is real. But he isn’t certain, any longer, that it ever had anything to do with Severen.”

  Perdita saw the look in her mother’s eye of a woman on the verge of kindling lightning with her hair. “And this has exactly what to do with Daimon?”

  A dark flame wavering in the air near her made her whirl. A figure seemed to push its way into being, shaping and pulling itself free from the mist and vagueness clinging to it. Perdita, fascinated, expected Lord Skelton to emerge from the nebulousness. The thin, sharp angles suggested his spare figure, his pointed elbows. But the face coming clear was not his.

  “Lady Seabrook,” the queen exclaimed.

  “Morrig,” the king echoed, rising, and responding, in Perdita’s view, to the least significant aspect of her great-aunt’s appearance out of thin air. “In ordinary circumstances, I would come nowhere near this sanctum. I know your rules. But—”

  “Don’t worry,” Morrig said sweetly. The gray eyes still carried the suggestion of shadow, like aged silver. “That’s why I came: to tell you not to worry.”

  “About—” the queen said faintly.

  “About Daimon, of course. Everything will go as planned. We will keep him safe.”

  “We.”

  “The three of us.”

  “Three,” Perdita whispered. The word came alive in her head, busily making connection after connection through time, across poetry, familiar images turning unfamiliar faces toward her, linking themselves across the whole of Wyvernhold history and farther back, so far back that they became themselves, words so old they were new, and they meant only what they were: Moon. Raven. Death. Night. Life. Morrig’s eyes flicked at her, and Perdita saw in them every ancient word.

  “Three,” the king echoed, sounding mystified.

  “Daimon’s mother, his sweet friend Vivien Ravensley, and his great-auntie Morrig. I know you must be fretting. You have always been so kind to him.”

  The king’s face flamed; the wyvern glowered back at her. “He is my son,” Arden said explosively. “What have you done to him? Are you setting him against me?”

  “Of course we don’t want it to come to that. And I can’t—”

  “Daimon’s mother is alive?” The queen’s voice hit a note so high that her voice cracked.

  “Very much so, yes. And I can’t stay to explain. Just be patient.” Her head cocked suddenly, as at an undercurrent of sound. “I think I’ll take the stairs. The airways are congested.”

  She went out the door without bothering to open it. The queen, white as spun sugar, glared incredulously at the wood, asked without sound, “Who is she? And who,” she demanded, her voice swooping up several notches again, “is Vivien?”

  The king, his face still fiery, drew a breath as though to bellow himself. The air, taking on density in front of them again, checked his impulse. They watched breathlessly. This time the face sculpting itself out of airy streaks and disturbances wore two long mustaches and circular spectacles.

  “Your Majesty,” he said without a mouth, then achieved himself and settled his glasses. “I heard you call.”

  “Did you find Daimon?”

  “I did. He is on the coast road, heading north, as are any number of questing knights.”

  “How?” the queen demanded. “Did he call you and tell you that?”

  “I found him in water, Queen Genevra,” Sylvester said. “It’s really the simplest way, especially since he left his cell phone in the royal garage’s garbage bin. At a projection of thought or memory onto the reflection of water, the surface will mirror the—”

  “Where is he going? Will it mirror that?”

  “Not yet, my lord. But as I watch his path unfold, I can see where he is, where he stops, and eventually, I hope, why.” He was silent, his eyes moving from face to fraught face. His hands rose, gripped his mustaches. “Now what?”

  Later that day, as she sat in the soothing calm of the goddess’s antechamber, guarding its peace a bit belatedly, she felt, and trying to imagine the state of her half sibling’s mind, Perdita saw yet another vision emerge from the crosshatch of candlelight and shadow.

  This one was no longer young but beautiful despite her years, like the queen. Gazing at her, surprised, Perdita felt her heartbeat suddenly. This apparition she recognized. This apparition had given Daimon her pale hair, her light eyes, the shape of her face. Perdita found herself on her feet, wondering if she were seeing a ghost, or a vision, or what she actually thought she might be seeing.

  “Yes,” the woman said, reading her mind. “Daimon is my son.”

  “Has he— Does he know—”

  “Oh, yes. He and I have met.” Perdita saw another thing the woman had given Daimon: that friendly but closely guarded smile. “My name is Ana. Daimon and I have met many times through the years. So, a time or two, have you and I.”

  Perdita glanced around her, wanting her father, Lord Skelton, even the queen to prove she was not dreaming. “No. I don’t remember.”

  “You wouldn’t. I had to wear many faces, many disguises, to watch my son grow up. Morrig helped me on every occasion, with every changing face. It was the only way I could see him.”

  Perdita backed up a little, felt the stone on which she had been sitting reassuringly solid against her. “What is it you want? My father? My mother? Daimon isn’t here.”

  “You are, Princess Perdita. Morrig sent me to answer questions; she said she left you in a mist—”

  “Totally blank,” Perdita agreed with feeling. “Who are you?”

  “We are remnants of an ancient realm. We have all our hope in Daimon to help us recover our lost land. And we are all very grateful for the queen’s care for him, for your love—”

  “You—you sound as though you’re taking him away from us. You, and Aunt Morrig, and that Vivien—”

  “Vivien Ravensley. She is heir, by a very long bloodline, to both the human and the not-so-human thrones of Ravenhold. The realm had a king once, in its early days. He grew so terrible we had to drive him out. Since then, only daughters rule. When they marry, the child of both the wyvern and the raven will unite the wyvern’s power as well to Ravenhold, in the daughter who will be their heir.”

  Perdita felt her knees give way; she sat down abruptly on the hard granite. “Marry? Exactly how far away from us are you taking him? Does he know? Or is he too spellbound—”

  “He knows, of course. How far he goes is up to him.”

  “Is it? Are they in love? Or is it an enchantment of convenience?”

  Ana paused before she answered. “I think,” she said with surprising honesty, “that, beyond the enchantment, they are in love enough. Certainly attracted. And not, so far as I know, in love with anyone else. Vivien is extremely ambitious. And Daimon is—”

  “Like his father,” Perdita finished tightly. “Susceptible.”

  Ana was silent again, gazing at the princess. “We have made our decision. How simple or difficult the matter will be will depend on the king. If he chooses the wyvern over the raven, then Daimon will make his own choices. One of which may well be the Wyvernhold throne.”

  Perdita felt the blood leave her face. “You have that power over him?”

  “If that’s what Daimon wants, we will get it for him. My own preference for the return of our realm would be under far happier and easier circumstances. The king could simply offer it to the new queen and her consort as a wedding gift.”

  “Who are you?” Her voice shook. “You three?”

  “We are different faces of the raven. We have survived in many bodies, behind many faces, for time beyond measure.” She smiled again, a cold moon’s smile; Perdita glimpsed the raven’s eye within hers. “We hope for all the best. But we will spread our wings and bring on the night if we are challenged.” She paused again
, looking at once inward and into the distance. “I must go. I am attracting Lord Skelton’s attention.”

  “Wait,” Perdita pleaded, and the blurring lines stilled. “Does my father know all this?”

  “In his heart he knows. It is what he fears most.”

  She was gone, drained out of the air like the candle flame on a river stone, dwindling into the memory of fire.

  Perdita, her wyvern’s eyes narrowed, gold reflecting fire, left the goddess to her own devices and went to call the questing Scotia Malory.

  22

  At the waning end of the endless day on the road that had begun at dawn in the sorceress’s driveway, Pierce recognized the snapped sapling, the gashed tree trunk, and the mangled milepost he had damaged in passing during his previous existence. He realized that they were nearly at Chimera Bay.

  He opened his mouth to say so, groggy with travel and full of wonder that here he was again, in such unpredictable circumstances, and for far different reasons. He was with family; his life had purpose, destiny, if only, at the moment, to return what he had stolen from the kindly owners of the Kingfisher Inn. It had, he thought dazedly, fulfilled its own unlikely purpose. Val, listening to music and lightly snoozing across from him, opened one eye blearily, as though he had sensed the languid tremor of mental activity. Leith, texting someone as his sons sprawled in weary stupor around him, glanced at them, thumbed a brief end to his message.

  Pierce said, “We’re here.”

  A dark tide roared up behind the limo on the quiet stretch of highway, washed around it in a fragmented whirl of faces, emblems painted on helmets, black leather gloves trailing colorful windswept leather ties raised in greeting, or maybe just signaling, bulky baggage tied to every possible space on the noisy bikes, all of which bore familiar crests. They forced the limo to slow, then abruptly turned in one long dark stream around it and onto a side road whose modest sign proclaimed it: Proffit Slough Lane.

  “Follow them,” Leith told the driver abruptly as the fellowship swarmed around a curve and out of sight. The limo veered like a bus, rattling the last shreds of lethargy from Pierce’s brain. Val pulled his lax limbs together; straightening, he twisted to get the driver’s view of the winding road ahead.

  “What’s a slough?” he wondered. “Slow? Slog? Did you recognize them?” he asked his father.

  “Several of the crests. Niles Camden’s among them. Their leader. They seemed to know exactly where they wanted to go.”

  Pierce pulled a memory, a pointed sliver, out of the past days. “Knights of the Rising God?”

  “And up to no good,” Leith answered grimly, “in Severen’s name.”

  Val pulled out his cell. “Let’s just find out what’s got their attention . . .”

  He regaled them for a while with an intermittent lecture involving tides, grasses, worms, mud, microscopic crabs, and salmon finding their way back home. “The great nursery of the sea,” he intoned, then was silent, causing his brother and his father to pull their eyes off the road ahead to look at him.

  “What is it?” Leith asked.

  “There is an island in the middle of the sluff. The slog.”

  “Slough,” Pierce said.

  “Slew. According to this article, which of course is suspect since Severen only knows who wrote it, it was once, to ancient indigenous peoples, a holy place. They believed, because of the positions of the moonrise around it, that the island was the birthplace of the moon. It had attributes, this island. It had powers of healing. Women came there to give birth. Small things left as gifts have been found by archaeologists and picnickers. Painted clay beads, bone flutes, shell belts. Fieldstones carved with pictures of objects used in daily life, or birds and animals, were transported to the island and laid down in shapes corresponding to the phases of the moon.” He glanced up at Leith’s sudden shift. “Yes. That’s probably where the knights are going. They seem fond of disturbing holy places. The site was most recently used, a century or two ago, by prospectors who built an alehouse on the island to carouse without complaints from the gentlefolk of Chimera Bay. There were rumors of a brothel as well. When the prospectors moved on, and the structures fell down, the island reverted to its former wild state.”

  “Is it accessible?” Leith asked.

  Val studied his screen. “It is . . . yes. By means of a footbridge, too narrow for cars.”

  “But not for bikes.”

  “If they want to risk it. I wouldn’t. It looks pretty rickety to me.”

  “They are risking it,” Pierce said, looking over the driver’s shoulder at a distant span above silent waters surrounded by the gentle rise and fall of thick, sprawling forests.

  The driver echoed him. “There they are, sirs. And losing no time about it. Sorry to be so slow around these curves. The limo doesn’t like to bend.”

  A dark smudge moved across the span, which seemed cobbled erratically to begin with, and gently dilapidated, swinging a slat here and there. One dropped off, shaken loose by the powerful vibrations of well-kept machines. It seemed to Pierce to fall a long way before it hit the water, causing a raptor to change its mind and veer sharply out of its dive.

  As he watched, a piece of high ground detached itself from solid ground and shifted, as the road slewed, to reveal the water around all sides of it. The bridge disappeared into the tangle of green near the top of the island.

  The first of the knights vanished into it.

  “What do they think they’ll find there?” Val wondered. “Gold the prospectors missed? The brothel?”

  “What do you think, sirs?” the driver asked. “There are a couple dozen of them and, from the look of it, not much trouble they can get into.”

  As he spoke, a streak of blood-red lightning shot up from the trees, made a smoking blur of the uppermost branches. The driver braked hard, nearly tossing his passengers onto the floor.

  “Sorry, sirs,” he panted. “What was that?”

  “Wyvern’s Eye,” Leith said tersely. “Step on it.”

  The driver pulled up finally at the end of the narrow bridge. As he tumbled out, Pierce heard faint cries across the water that might or might not have been gulls.

  “Are you armed?” Leith asked him. He had to think.

  “Yes.” He touched his shoulder, where the knife lay in its hidden sheath. “Since this morning.” He added, as another bolt of fuming red lit up the crown of the island, “For what it’s worth.”

  Val, standing still, his eyes narrowed at the island, said, “There’s a woman’s voice among the birds.”

  “Not again,” Leith breathed, and began to run.

  By the time they reached the island and stumbled, panting, into the trees, the shouting had stopped. Even the birds had quieted. There was a faint, calm rill of water, which, as they moved toward it, transformed itself in surprising fashion to Pierce’s ears. The water spoke a human language. The water was not water. The rill, low, sweet, calm, was human.

  They followed the trail the bikes had left along a hiking path that was littered with torn branches and tire-scarred ground. The tangle around them opened to a wide clearing. Surrounded by brush and trees, it edged the top of the island, overlooking the waters of the slough as they were pushed inland by the tide toward the distant conjunction of water and earth, silver flowing and disappearing into the endless rise of green.

  The woman, her back to them, was addressing the entire company of knights. They stood among the sunken patterns of fieldstone, small, dark standing stones, the drifts of shell and little piles of sea-polished stones left by more recent visitors. Their faces, half-hidden by visors and sunglasses, seemed both baffled and incredulous. The woman in black with the Wyvern’s Eye in her hand aimed it not at them but at the line of bikes that had fallen one over the next as though they had been ruthlessly shoved.

  “It’s a long walk back to Severluna,” she said
.

  Then she was facing Leith, Val, and Pierce, her pale violet eyes unblinking, her face composed, ready for whatever came. In her other hand, the weapon’s red fuming eye still stared at the bikes.

  There were stray movements among the knights, but Leith had his weapon out, aiming at the young men rather than their transportation. The woman smiled suddenly, and Pierce recognized the very tall, broad-boned, amber-haired knight who had rescued him, in the Hall of Wyverns, from the wrath of the king’s seneschal.

  “Sir Leith. Where on earth did you come from?”

  Leith nodded, his taut face loosening almost enough to smile back. “Dame Scotia. I’m very happy to see you here.”

  “Sir Leith,” one of the young men called across the clearing. “Can you get her to stop pointing that at our bikes? She has us at a disadvantage. We are Knights of the Rising God. We don’t fight women.”

  “Oh, yes, you do,” Pierce exclaimed indignantly. “Last I saw of you, you were harassing a girl at the mountain shrine.”

  “I’m sure that wasn’t us.”

  “I’m counting,” Val said, “what? Twenty-three of you? And you need my father to rescue you? I have an idea. Why don’t you just do whatever Dame Scotia wants you to do?”

  “We haven’t done anything yet! We just came to look around, and she started shooting.”

  “I’ve been on the road long enough to see what happens when you just stop to look around,” Dame Scotia said tartly. “Things get stolen and broken. Sacred shrines to gods other than Severen get totally trashed.”

  “We seek only what belongs to Severen—”

  “You seek to destroy any hint of power other than Severen’s. You’re a rude, wicked lot, and I should just make you walk back across that bridge without your bikes.”

  “How about we slash their tires?” Pierce suggested.