Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Trying to make it eat tongs.”

  “I can—”

  “No. Don’t let Stillwater see you back here.” He hesitated; she glared at him fiercely. “Go and watch over Sage. She doesn’t have a single weapon.”

  She has you, Pierce thought, and stepped back out of the vault into a battlefield.

  So it seemed, with all the darkly uniformed knights pouring through the doors. Pierce heard Stillwater’s voice trying for reason, humor; the young men ignored him, milling among the indignant diners, picking up this and that, invading the tiny space behind the bar, rattling through bottles and glassware. Then one stepped through the vault curtains, and Stillwater’s voice cracked a martini glass with his shout.

  “No!”

  The knights stared at him, motionless. Then, like a wave, they broke, tumbled across the room, and flowed through the steel walls of the vault toward the kitchen.

  Pierce heard Carrie scream.

  He spun, dove into the flow.

  By the time he had shouldered his way back into the kitchen, he found Carrie standing on top of the table among Stillwater’s machines. She held the tongs like a weapon, vigorously smacking hands probing the strange machines that could turn their fingers into froth.

  “What are you looking for?” she demanded. “This is just a kitchen! I’m cooking here! If you’ll tell me what you’re looking for—” She paused to whack the head of a knight who had turned a machine upside down and was shaking it. “Be careful with that! You have no idea how dangerous it is.”

  He glanced up at her with sudden interest. “Seriously? It’s a weapon?”

  “You would not believe.”

  “Then it belongs by right to the god Severen.”

  She stared at him, her tongs suspended. She said slowly, “I never thought of it that way. You’re right. Take them. Take them all.”

  Across a noisy, chaotic distance, Pierce heard a hoarse, deep reverberation, as though the air had growled. Then Stillwater was in the kitchen, melting through the crush of knights, leaping lightly onto the table beside Carrie like some graceful, powerful creature made of air and muscle, for whom bones were optional.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded; his voice still held the snarling edge to it. His eyes were on Carrie, but it was a knight who answered.

  “We are here in Severen’s name. We are Knights of the Rising God, come to proclaim the god’s ascendancy above all others—”

  “This is a restaurant, not a church! We cook in here.”

  “You cook in a vessel that belongs to Severen.” Pierce recognized the knights’ obstinate, humorless, boneheaded leader, Sir Niles Camden. “A great cauldron made of pure gold, that feeds everyone who comes here whatever they crave, and it constantly replenishes itself, it is never empty. We want it. Such a vessel is dedicated, by its nature, by its never-ending power enclosed in gold, to the god Severen. Praise him. In the name of King Arden, we have come to return the sacred vessel to the god.”

  “You disgrace the name of King Arden.” Somehow Leith and Val had pushed their way into the tightly crowded kitchen. “You disrupt people’s lives and steal from them,” Leith continued sharply. “You are not true knights, and no true god would accept your worship. You’re nothing but marauding thieves.”

  “We are questing knights, Sir Leith,” Prince Ingram protested. “You can’t change facts by calling people names.”

  “You’re trashing a restaurant kitchen. How proud would your father be of that?”

  “Enough!” Stillwater roared. The sound filled the kitchen and seemed to vibrate through his face, shake it free to reveal the bole and burls beneath the mask. This time, Pierce was not the only one to see it. Carrie stared at him, her eyes huge. Stillwater reached out, gripping her with fingers that coiled like bindweed around and around her arm. “There is nothing in this kitchen but what you see. I don’t cook in gold. It is soft, malleable; it changes shape too easily under pressure. I make my own machines; they work their wonders by such power that you would never understand. A god who values gold possesses no more than human powers. I feed the hungry. You knights won’t find what you’re looking for under this roof. But if you stay, I will cook for you, with my machines, a meal that you will never forget. If you stay, my wife Sage will seat you and bring you whatever you want to drink. Carrie will help me cook for you. Stay. Sit at our tables. Enjoy what we bring you; that’s all you need to do here.”

  “That’s all you’ll ever do,” Carrie cried. “Don’t listen—”

  Stillwater, his open, genial face restored, tapped her lips lightly with a forefinger. “She worries about me working too hard. But I feel like cooking. Cooking for you. All day and through the night, as long as you want to stay.”

  In his grasp, Carrie, her lips tightly closed, turned her head frantically, trying to push out words. Pierce, swayed hither and yon by the murmuring, surging crowd, felt something sharp threaten to dig into his elbow. He straightened his arm slowly, jostling for space, and pulled the kitchen knife out of his sleeve. His fingers closed tightly around the familiar handle, something to hold on to when there seemed nothing else. Val had a weapon out, too, he saw: The Wyvern’s Eye was cupped in his hands, though, surrounded by the eerie magic of Stillwater’s machines, the eye remained oddly dark.

  The knights were looking at Niles Camden, who finally proffered judgment. “If you let one or two of us watch you cook—”

  “Certainly.”

  “To see that nothing handled is of metals dedicated to Severen.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that these machines truly cook, and are not weapons, and therefore dedicated to the god—”

  “Of course.”

  “Then maybe we can—”

  The knife slid out of Pierce’s hand as someone passed him. His fingers tightened on air. He glanced around, startled, but saw only the listening knights, and Sage, who had slipped in somehow, likely at the sound of her name. Her back to Pierce, she eased herself around, between, toward her husband on the table, whose hold on Carrie had taken on a less fantastic shape.

  “Ah,” Stillwater said, smiling at the ripple through the crowd. “And here Sage is to help you all find places at our tables. If you would follow her—”

  Out, he meant to say, when a seam of silver parted the air above Sage, caught light as it spun itself down. Somehow, Stillwater’s word got stuck. His mouth opened wider and wider around it; still he could not push it out. His fingers uncurled; Carrie stumbled away from him as he bent down over himself. Knights near the table backed abruptly into one another, away from Sage and the strangely afflicted Stillwater, who was losing masks like leaves dropping away from him, until only one was left.

  The word came out finally, a stunned shriek, and Pierce saw the kitchen knife again, nailing the chef among his machines to the table by one bloody foot.

  “Take the machines,” Sage cried, turning away from him to face the knights. “Take them all to Severluna and throw them into the river. They are weapons. They are as powerful and destructive as any you carry. Go away and take them with you and never, ever eat anything they might tempt you with, because you will never again want anything but air until you die.”

  The bones were sharp in her wan, wasted face; her long hair hung limply; her eyes were hollowed with a human hunger. Behind her, Stillwater was tugging at the knife in his foot; it refused to give him up. Pierce would not have recognized him. His hair was a cloud of tangled dark, his eyes an astonishing peacock blue flecked with gold, his lean, high-boned face wild in its beauty, a face that had been once worn very close to earth.

  A wolf howled from the street outside. Then it howled at the door, and again, within the walls. Stillwater stopped moving, gazed incredulously toward the sound. Carrie, who stood holding one of his machines, a soda siphon by the look of it, above his head in case he escaped, smiled sudden
ly at what bounded through the knights, knocking half of them off their feet.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  The wolf leaped up onto the table; machines wobbled and crashed. The wolf snarled, showing teeth inches from Stillwater’s face.

  “You can’t be here,” Stillwater panted raggedly. “You can’t get past my wards. You never could. You—”

  He stopped speaking. His face turned reluctantly, angle by angle, toward what his eyes did not want to see.

  Three women stood across the threshold of his escape.

  At first glance, Pierce guessed, they were family, stopping in for a bite: daughter, mother, grandmother. Their eyes held a similar expression of recognition, satisfaction, the successful completion of some task, maybe something as simple as finally finding the time to meet together. Then he felt his skin prickle. What they recognized was Stillwater, or whatever went by that name, now that he had shed every disguise. They knew his oldest face.

  An odd cast of light behind them caused their shadows to meet in front of them, form one long, straight line of dark that rolled through the old vault, into the kitchen to the table. Knights, oddly silent, swallowing their words, shifted away from that dark, pushing against one another to avoid its stark edges.

  “There you are,” the oldest said. Her eyes were smudged silver, her hair white as moonlight.

  “And about time,” the younger said. Her face looked backward and forward, lingering in the mellow season of beauty between young and old. “You’ve lived so quietly up here, you must have thought we had forgotten you entirely. But we have never for a moment forgotten. The wolf recognized you. He called us until we finally heard him.”

  The youngest of them, slight and ethereally slender, gazed at him curiously out of his own rich, fay eyes. “You stole our cauldron, that feeds anyone, everyone, and is never empty. Yet you made these machines. You make hate with them, and you feed it to humans. You hated your own world; you hate this one as much. What a strange existence. You never used what you had stolen. What did you do with it?”

  Behind the creature that was Stillwater, Carrie lowered the machine she held over him. She set it very quietly on the table and backed away from the impending storm. Leith, his eyes never leaving the three, held out his hand to her, helped her down. The wolf, turning restively on the table, shoved against the trapped cook once or twice, knocking his body out of its precarious huddle over the knife, its compromise with pain. His mouth opened again; the anguished word that came out was incomprehensible. Then the wolf flowed carelessly down onto the tangle of shadows and turned human.

  He turned his back to Stillwater, asked the three tersely, “You? Or me?”

  “He might prefer you,” the oldest said, her silvery eyes as cold as the metallic machines around the cook. “You are powerful, Merle, and you might find a way to give him oblivion. We can take him back to the place he fled so long ago, the place where he was born. He has something that belongs to us; he will not die before he tells us where it is.”

  Another word came out of the cook, a wild bird cry, echoing itself again and again. He pulled frantically at the knife, his hands growing slick; the kitchen blade seemed rooted in the table, oblivious to any power but its own. He spoke again to the women, words entwined with the sounds of birds and insects, frogs and snakes, creatures that ran on four legs and named themselves with other than language.

  “Promises,” the youngest said, the one who had his eyes. “Promises. I am only part fay, the tiniest breath left from those days when human and fay crossed paths, and yet I feel I know you. What have you done to yourself?”

  “Time to go,” the third said, her pale eyes pitiless. “Time to go home.”

  “I don’t know!” he shouted, finding one final way to say what he needed. “I don’t know where it is! It vanished from my sight years ago. Maybe decades, maybe centuries—I don’t remember! It was useless to me—I stopped seeing it, and it was gone.”

  They had no faces suddenly; they had no substance; three shadows stood together, hollows of air and space. On the floor, the path of their true shadows deepened, took on dimension. The thing that had been Stillwater was losing its shape, blurring into a slurry not unlike one of his strange culinary inventions. So were the walls and ceiling of the kitchen; the machines, the table, everything that was not human dissolved. Colors ran, whirled, shed light, as though, Pierce thought, the world itself had gotten snagged in one of the machines and was turning into something only almost familiar. Then, for the briefest, most exquisite moment, he saw the world that engulfed the fay: such a wealth, a treasure of beauty, of scents and sounds, air as fine as silk, heavy gold light falling extravagantly everywhere, free for the taking, loveliness wherever he looked, as though he had never fully opened his eyes before, and now he could see what he had missed, what had always been there, all along, if only he had looked.

  Then all he saw was that long stretch of shadow, opening like a door. The cry of loss that came out of it as it closed sounded completely human.

  25

  Daimon, stopped at a light on the highway running along the water in Chimera Bay, saw a sign ahead of him, swaying from the scaffolding covering much of a dilapidated old hotel. ALL YOU CAN EAT, it said, FRIDAY NITE FISH FRY.

  The light changed; he started forward. He angled across the next lane and pulled into the parking lot, sat idling, gazing at the extremely unlikely sign, and the even more improbable Kingfisher Bar and Grill, whose customers all seemed to own one version or another of the same dented, rackety pickup.

  He heard another bike turn in behind him. In that same moment, the world began to ripple around him. His inarticulate protest was echoed by a sudden shift of gears behind him. The stranger’s bike roared; the town vanished into mist and trees, and he heard another voice raised in a cry of complete astonishment.

  He turned, found Dame Scotia Malory, pale and breathless, searching the air for whatever was left of Chimera Bay.

  “What— Where— What just happened?”

  “Dame Scotia,” he said, astounded. “What are you doing here?”

  “Following you.”

  “Here?”

  “Here is where you went. So I—” Her voice wobbled; so did her bike. She got off it, kicked its stand in place, and turned a slow circle, blinking rapidly at the tall, silent trees, pennants of mist hanging from their boughs. “Princess Perdita asked me to follow you. So I—” Her voice trickled to a whisper. “So I did.

  “Here?” he repeated sharply, and she shrugged helplessly.

  “It’s where you went.”

  Daimon parked his own bike, frowning, watching her turn another bewildered circle, searching for anything familiar. Memories appeared in his mind like stepping-stones; he tracked her backward to the royal library, to the palace garage.

  “Why on earth,” he asked with some annoyance, “would Perdita ask you to follow me all the way up the north coast?”

  “Well.” Her face, still colorless, seemed to shield itself then behind a warrior’s mask, calm, watchful, focused on that fraught question. “It seems she met your mother. Who explained what she, and Lady Seabrook, and your friend Vivien Ravensley have in mind for you. At the least, a wedding. At most, war between Wyvernhold and Ravenhold. Between you and your father. The end of the rule of the Wyvernbourne kings.”

  Daimon, staring at her, felt the fog that had taken up residence in his head fray a little, breeze-blown, hinting at the precipice on which he stood. “That sounds,” he said, his eyes narrowed against the mist, “that sounds like some old story.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “How did it end?”

  “Badly. Very, very badly.”

  He was silent again, his eyes on her face now, using its calm to look as clearly as he could into the swirling, unsettled mists of the past weeks. He had met a young woman with astonishing eyes. She had taken him into anot
her world, showed him marvels, the most marvelous of which was how she had made him see so clearly the drab, pointless, unfeeling world he had been born in, devoid of vision, trivial to the extreme, and completely unworthy of his curiosity and his love. In return, she had asked him only the simplest of favors: to find a cauldron, to help her regain her lost realm, to become her consort when she was crowned queen.

  He closed his eyes and glimpsed the edge of the precipice at his feet, the long, long fall into the unknown.

  Where had he been? he wondered, seeking Dame Scotia’s face again to steady himself as he balanced precariously between worlds.

  He remembered then the knight in black he had battled with a broadsword, whose impervious, implacable strength within the armor, behind the expressionless helm, had seemed to him the shape and invincible face of his own confusion, his conflicted impulses. The lovely, smiling, unexpected face that appeared beneath the helm as he lay vanquished on the ground had transformed the dark.

  “How did you do that?” he demanded, incredulous again. “Is there some Ravensley in your past? Is that how you could follow me even here?”

  “Ravensley? Not that I know,” she answered, looking baffled. “The family crests tend toward beasts that get along very well with this world. Is that where we are? In that fay realm?”

  He glanced at the silent trees, the bay streaked with long sluices of mudflat as the tide slowly, gently, pulled back into the sea. “I’m not sure. In someone’s past, I think.”

  “Is that why you stopped here? Because you sensed something? It drew you here?”

  “I stopped because I heard a rumor that within a shabby diner advertising all you can eat there might be the vessel of ancient and enormous power I was requested to find and return to Ravenhold.”

  “Ravenhold. Not Wyvernhold.”

  “I have the raven’s eyes. So I’m told. And the raven’s heart. I would recognize what belongs to the raven.” He wandered restively a few steps to where the Kingfisher Inn should have cast its shadow, should have hidden the water from view. “Apparently, the inn vanished when it saw me coming.”