Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Let’s toss their boots into the slough,” Val said with enthusiasm. “After they tell us exactly what they hoped to find here.”

  There was a brief silence, during which the knights, without moving, seemed to shift closer together, and the partially hidden faces calculated the changed odds.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” another indistinguishable face said slowly. “We are searching for something holy, precious, powerful. We move in Severen’s name; his name moves our hearts. You, Sir Leith, might think yourself worthy of this quest. But Lord Skelton and Mystes Ruxley both spoke of the need to see with your heart, and how can you, blinded by the king’s unfaithful wife wherever you look, and by your two sons at your side whose mother you abandoned for the queen? How can you possibly understand what we seek?”

  Pierce, standing very still beside Val, could not hear him breathe. When he breathed again, Pierce knew, in that split second, the tiny, peaceful island would no longer be the same. Birds would die, maybe trees; stones would go flying; bikes would roar into flame. New ghosts would inhabit the place in Severen’s name; they would roam without peace among the ghosts who still worshipped the moon.

  Val drew breath. He turned his head to look at his father, and said mildly, “He’s got a point. What do you think? Are they holier than thou?”

  “Damned if I know,” Leith said. “I do know that I don’t want to litter the mudflats with their boots.”

  “If we slash their tires, we could find someone to haul the bikes off the island,” Val suggested. “That way, we wouldn’t offend the moon.”

  “Just try,” another of the company dared them. “There are twenty-three of us and three—”

  “Four,” Dame Scotia said dryly.

  “Actually, I wasn’t counting the kitchen knight, Dame Scotia. That’s five to one. At least.”

  “Ah,” Val said. “That would be seven to one. Three times seven—”

  “I knew that.”

  “Actually almost eight to one, Prince Ingram.”

  There was another brief silence. “How did you—”

  “Don’t,” someone hissed between teeth. “He’s just baiting you.”

  “Well, I can’t go home and tell my father we attacked Sir Leith—”

  “Why not? Would he care?”

  “I have the strangest feeling that yes, he would care. More than I have the feeling that there’s anything in this place we need to dig up. It’s only a bit of tangled wood that everyone has already forgotten.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “The point of this quest is to find something sacred and powerful,” the prince said doggedly. “Not go around killing people. Especially people you just had dinner with a few nights ago.”

  “Oh, for—”

  “He might be right about one thing,” someone else said reasonably. “I don’t see anything here worth fighting for.”

  “Prospectors came here. There might be gold that belongs by right to Severen, not the moon.”

  “This place has been well picked over for decades. A few fieldstones aren’t worth the argument. Anyway, the sun is about to set. I’d not like to ride across that bridge in the dark. Nothing but bed slats and toothpicks.”

  “Well,” their leader said disgustedly, “we can always come back. And we will, Sir Leith, Dame Scotia, if this is the direction the compass of Severen draws our hearts.” He turned his back on them, strode to the toppled pile of bikes. “Let’s untangle these and get out of this pathetic backwater.”

  “Can I reach for my cell without starting a war?” Val asked. “I need to tell our driver at the other end of the bridge to move out of your way.”

  Nobody bothered to answer him.

  They followed the company of knights to the trail’s end, stood watching them ride carelessly, noisily across the trembling bridge. It held, by some miracle, possibly Severen’s, Pierce thought. But he doubted that the god would be at all interested in the mud, the trees, the moon just cresting the distant forest where the channel, pared to its narrowest, caught the first of the pale, ancient glow.

  “What are you doing here?” Leith asked Dame Scotia when the knights had gotten safely across the bridge and back onto the road.

  “I was looking for a place to camp for the night,” she answered. “I saw the bridge and wondered where it led.”

  “It drew you.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “I suppose you could say.”

  “That happened to us,” Val said, “in the mountains. Knights of the Rising God attacked a shrine. The forest god there summoned us by making our limo go dead for no reason at all until we finished his business.”

  “And here?”

  “The knights passed us on the road, and we recognized them. We followed them to the bridge.”

  “They are troublesome,” she murmured, frowning. “Brave and silly fanatics in love with Severen’s power and wealth. I wasn’t crazed enough to ride across the bridge. I walked my bike and found the trail to the ancient site. It seemed the perfect spot to build a fire, watch the night fall. And then they all came roaring out here. I hid myself and my bike until they started unpacking shovels. I’m so glad you showed up. I wasn’t at all certain, once I got their attention, what to do with them.”

  “Neither was I,” Leith admitted. He dropped his hand on Val’s shoulder. “You had me worried there for that split second. But I should have trusted you. You rescued us. You have a gift for recognizing what matters. That what he said was true.”

  Val slewed a quick, perceptive glance at his father. But he only said wistfully, “I could worship the moon for a bit. Smell the tide, feel the wind, after all those hours in the limo. Do you want some company around your fire, Dame Scotia?”

  Her smile appeared again, like something unexpected and lovely breaking the surface of an unruffled pool.

  “Yes. Very much.”

  They gathered up twigs and fallen branches for a fire and sat around it among the stones and memories of the island. The night enclosed them quickly; the moon, a luminous eye, watched their fire with them, turning the complicated channels, the coils and threads of water, a silver that the god Severen had never thought to claim. Dame Scotia shared her wine with them, passing a camp cup around, as well as nuts and olives, smoked fish and chocolate. Pierce, leaning against one of the little standing stones, watched the stars form and hang among the tree branches like strange, fairy tale fruit. His thoughts reeled backward through the past amazing days, the scant weeks since he had left Cape Mistbegotten. A face appeared among the stars, long rippling hair, eyes the gray-green of her name.

  “Tavis Malory,” he heard Scotia say from the shadows. “Yes. The depraved knight who could not stay out of trouble and was in jail when he wrote the history of the first Wyvernhold king. Part of the land my father holds along the northern marches was once his. At least it was until Tavis had to sell it to pay compensation for one of his despicable crimes. His grandsons managed to buy back the land. They tried to restore his reputation, too, saying that his enemies betrayed and maligned him. But it was a tough sell. Everyone liked the other version of his life better. He did write a fine book, though.” She leaned forward to prod the fire, and Pierce saw her profile, strong and graceful, the shining braid down her back now, loosed from its coils.

  “We don’t often see you at court,” Leith commented.

  “I’m with my father most of the year, helping him care for the land, especially when he’s in Severluna himself, supporting parliamentary issues affecting the north. Water usage, fish habitats, that sort of thing. This time, when the king called the Assembly, my father had to send me alone. He sprained his back swinging a broadsword with too much enthusiasm for his age, and he can’t travel easily yet.”

  “So you’re questing,” Val said. “Like the rest of us. Do you know where you’re going?”
/>   “Not entirely.”

  Val nodded, reaching out to stir the flames. “Following your heart.”

  In the sudden flare of firelight, Pierce saw her eyes widen with surprise, then swiftly fall. She turned, reaching into the shadows for more wood. Pierce’s thoughts drifted again, this time back to the Kingfisher Inn, with its odd ceremony that seemed, at the time, as old as the stone at his back. What strange urge had that been, to steal the ritual knife, take it all the way to Severluna to end up coring a nonexistent apple on a field full of trained knights? Had the fish fry suffered because of him? he wondered. The wolf man, Merle, had known Pierce had it. Take it to Severluna, he had said in that hovel of a bar on the waterfront. See what you can do with it.

  He had gone; he had seen. He had found his brother with it, then his father. Now he was ready to give it back. Was that the end of it?

  His brother and his father were stirring, rising. He stood up as well, feeling as pleasantly drunk with moonlight as with wine. Dame Scotia rifled through one of her packs and produced a flashlight, which they promised to leave for her at the other end of the bridge.

  “What if the knights come back here?” Pierce asked uneasily.

  “They won’t cross that bridge in the dark. And I’ll be gone at dawn.”

  They left her beside the fire under a watchful moon. Pierce glanced back at her before he turned onto the trail. She had risen also, and was standing at the edge of the cliff, looking out at the dark that defined itself best, to the human eye, by what it was not.

  Light flared from a different night in the corner of Pierce’s eye. He turned his head and froze at the reflection of fire in a pair of unexpected eyes. Something big, he sensed, just beyond the light. Something wild, powerful, undefined.

  He opened his mouth to warn, then saw those eyes again, their human shape and expression, in his head, in memory. He breathed again, relieved by the thought of a closer, more dangerous guardian for the solitary knight than the wandering moon.

  “Pierce,” his father called from the dark ahead.

  He nodded a greeting to the wolf and turned again to the path.

  23

  Carrie, veering around knights at any hour and on every corner of Chimera Bay, was hardly surprised, on one of her Stillwater lunch days, to see a darkly clad figure walk into the restaurant door ahead of her. It was too early for lunch, but Todd Stillwater rarely bothered with CLOSED signs. People would know, he told Carrie, and mostly that worked, though he didn’t explain how. Carrie, causing the knight to turn as she followed him in, saw the expression on his face of someone amazed that he had actually found his way through a door.

  Then she recognized the face.

  That red hair, those vivid, blue-green eyes—there was a name attached to the face in some cluttered drawer or file holder in her head. He was frowning at her, recognizing her as well, but in the wrong context. She should, she remembered, have been carrying sheets instead of fresh basil and oregano from the Farmer’s Market.

  “Carrie?” she offered helpfully, and he nodded quickly.

  “Yes. The Kingfisher Inn. I’m Pierce Oliver.”

  He looked older, she thought, than just a week or three. He had seen things, learned things, done something, at least, to be wearing that uniform.

  “Did you get yourself knighted?” she asked with astonishment.

  “No.” The thought made him smile ruefully. “The only weapon I’m good with is the knife I stole. I plan to give it back,” he added quickly.

  “That’s what my dad said. That it would bring you back.”

  “Really? Merle said that?”

  “He did.”

  “How did—”

  “He just knows things. If you want lunch, it’ll be an hour or so before we start serving.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t come for lunch. I came to see if—” He paused; a little color streaked his face. “Is Sage here?”

  “No,” she said, amazed again, wondering how they had ever met. “She shops on Tuesdays.”

  “Of course. On Tuesdays.” He sighed. “If I walked in here on a Wednesday or a Saturday, that would be the day she’s out shopping.”

  She stared at him, recognizing that dazed look in his eyes. When on earth had he had time to fall in love with Todd Stillwater’s wife? Then he was seeing Carrie again; he glanced puzzledly at the world around her.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Are you working for Stillwater now?”

  She swallowed, stepped closer to him. “Listen,” she said softly. “Please. Don’t tell anyone I’m working here. Please. Nobody at the Kingfisher Inn knows. Nobody. I don’t want them to know. Except my father. I mean, he already knows. But he’s not talking about it. Maybe he’ll talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Just—please. Promise me? If you promise, I’ll tell Sage you came here. But I won’t tell Todd Stillwater.”

  He flushed again. But his eyes, on her face, were wide, curious. “I’ll try to remember,” he promised. “Might be easier if I knew why it’s such a secret.”

  “It’s too complicated to explain, and I can’t, right now. You should go. I need to work. That way I’ll have something to think about, and Todd won’t pick you out of my head.”

  He frowned at that, still studying her. “Are you all right? I’ve never even met him, and he has that effect. Of making people not all right.”

  “I’m fine. I need to be fine. We’ll talk later. Over a beer at the Kingfisher bar. All right?”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  In the quiet vault, she took the odd pot out of the corner where she always found it, no matter where else she had left it. Stillwater moved it out of his way, maybe. It had other quirks that she was beginning to expect. No matter how thoroughly she washed it, no matter how it brightened and glowed under her scrubbing, it would be, when next she saw it, in the same dull, cobwebby, grimy state as she had first found it. Stillwater, again, she guessed, though it was hard to imagine him not cleaning a pot, when she never saw as much as a speck on his gleaming machines. Another weirdness was the way it changed size according to what she put into it. It seemed to know what she wanted to cook: It grew huge at the proximity of live crabs from the docks; it dwindled down to the size of a soup bowl when she melted butter.

  It could read her mind.

  The first time she used it, she had no idea what to expect. None of Stillwater’s machines ever did anything predictable. Would it, she wondered, transform a homely potato into a perfect nest of twigs, deep-fry them golden, and lay tiny eggs of potato ice cream in them? It did. Would it stack paper-thin slices of raw beef, black licorice, sweet cherries, white onion, and bittersweet chocolate into colorful layered bites, and add a rosette of red onion on top of it? It would indeed. Might it shred the boiled crabmeat, swirl cracked peppercorns, roasted garlic, and the tender green shoots of onions in such a magical fashion that the concoction could be inserted into hollow straws of deep-fried butter and breadcrumbs, to be sucked through them before the straws themselves were eaten? It might, it would, and it did. Carrie, so enchanted by the results, picked one without a thought out of the pot and bit into it.

  Tastes filled her mouth: crab, onion, garlic, pepper, salt and spices from the breadcrumbs. She stood in shock, her mouth full, not daring to chew, just letting the wonderful wave of flavors flow and break across her tongue until, reflexively, she swallowed. The flavors did not vanish; they lingered, reminding her what charms and delights a simple, single bite of anything at all could hold.

  She reached into the pot for another, then another.

  Then she heard Todd’s voice, Sage answering, Todd’s voice again, coming closer as he walked into the vault. He wore his sweet Stillwater face since the restaurant would soon be open. At other times, he did not know, or perhaps he didn’t care, what face
Carrie saw. She turned to present him with her experimental crab bite, and found the pot had disappeared, along with everything she had made.

  She stared at where it had been, then at the corner where it usually sat: it was nowhere to behold.

  She still had a bite, she realized, in her hand. He looked surprised by the bare table, the silent machines.

  “You haven’t started cooking yet? It’s nearly time to open. Business is doing well with all the knights coming in. They inspire me,” he said, with a faint, thin smile.

  “I was experimenting,” she told him, glancing around again for the hidden pot. “I came up with this.”

  She gave him the crab straw; he ate it the way she had envisioned: sucking the crab out like a mouthful of milk shake, then eating the savory little straw.

  He nodded. “Good,” he said. “Very good. As always,” which was what he always said, without a flicker of expression, as though he had just tossed back a vitamin pill. “Make more,” he suggested. “And make it fast.”

  She gazed at his back as he went out to the dining room. He had tasted nothing, she realized suddenly. He had never tasted anything. He had no idea what she could feed his customers if only she could find what she had made it in.

  “Come back, pot,” she whispered, glancing under the table. “Where are you, pot?”

  And there it was on the table again. She studied it a moment, wondering at this extraordinary vessel, able to change its size, wear protective coloring, see what she saw, imagine what she imagined, making it, then hiding itself at will from the cook whose machines transformed everything into illusion.

  She made more, she made it fast, and she made it all in that peculiar pot.

  Stillwater came in again to cook with her, later. She expected the pot to vanish again. But it stayed visible, all the while he worked with his machines and barely noticed what Carrie did. He looked straight at it a time or two, Carrie thought, but he did not comment. So why, she wondered, did it bother to hide?

  She answered her own question finally, making tiny, braided loaves of bread out of white root vegetables and baked egg whites.