Cygnet Read online

  Ace Books by Patricia A. McKillip

  THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD

  THE SORCERESS AND THE CYGNET

  THE CYGNET AND THE FIREBIRD

  THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLFE

  WINTER ROSE

  SONG FOR THE BASILISK

  RIDDLE-MASTER: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY

  THE TOWER AT STONY WOOD

  OMBRIA IN SHADOW

  IN THE FORESTS OF SERRE

  ALPHABET OF THORN

  OD MAGIC

  HARROWING THE DRAGON

  SOLSTICE WOOD

  Collected Works

  CYGNET

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cygnet collected edition copyright © 2007 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  The Sorceress and the Cygnet copyright © 1991 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  The Cygnet and the Firebird copyright © 1993 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  Cover illustration by John Howe. Cover design by Judith Lagerman. Text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ACE is an imprint of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  The Sorceress and the Cygnet, Ace hardcover edition / May 1991

  The Sorceress and the Cygnet, Ace mass-market edition / January 1992

  The Cygnet and the Firebird, Ace hardcover edition / September 1993

  The Cygnet and the Firebird, Ace mass-market edition / September 1995

  Ace trade paperback edition / March 2007

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  [Sorceress and the cygnet]

  Cygnet / Patricia A. McKillip.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13 978-0-441-01483-5

  1. Magic—fiction. I. McKillip, Patricia A. Cygnet and the Firebird. II. Title.

  PS3563.C38S67 2007

  813'.54—dc22

  2006047653

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  The Sorceress and the Cygnet

  PART ONE - RIDER in the CORN

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  PART TWO - THE GUARDIAN

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  PART THREE - HEART of the CYGNET

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  The Cygnet and the Firebird

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  PART ONE

  RIDER

  IN THE

  CORN

  One

  HE was a child of the horned moon. That much Corleu’s great-gran told him after, pipe between her last few teeth, she washed the mud out of his old man’s hair and stood him between her knees to dry it.

  “You have your granda’s hair,” she said.

  “Tell him take it back.” A thin, wiry child, brown as dirt otherwise, he stood tensely, still trembling with the indignity of being crowned with mud, tied up with Venn’s granny’s holey stockings and left in the sun to dry.

  “I can’t. He’s dead now. His hair sprouts into dandelion seed. Moon seed.” She smelled of smoke like a wood fire, he thought, leaning into her, and lavender and something dank but not unpleasant, like a cow barn. She was talking again, telling story as she stroked his hair with the cloth. Her own hair, proper dark, not moon hair, had a few white seedlings here and there. There were seedlings above her upper lip, and a mole like a black moon, which fascinated him, so the story he had to take out and examine later—years later—to understand it fully.

  “He rode between the rows of corn on his great dark horse, and all I could think was: His hair is white like the corn silk in my hand. I thought how it might feel, under my hand. Hot from the hot sun, and damp from his sweat. I stood there in the corn, thinking those things for the first time. Everything grew farther away, closer he came. His eyes were green, he wore green. I never saw green the same way, after. Everything was singing: My mam, a row away, was singing ‘the little dark house falling, falling…’”

  “I know that,” Corleu said, finding a place in the story to stand, a stone rising up in a river while the quick blurred water spun past.

  “Everyone knows. Dark house falls to everyone. But that day it sounded like a love song. Even the corn was singing, under hot sun, leaves quiet like they never learned how to whisper secrets, but whirring and buzzing from their shadows like blood flowed in them. I held the ripe corn heavy in my skirt, and the one in my hand I pulled leaf and silk aside with my teeth and bit into, sweet and hard and full of sun… He rode up to me and stopped.”

  She stopped, too, suddenly; Corleu gazed up at her, feeling as if the river had stopped.

  “Go on. Tell story.”

  “Nothing much more,” she said. There was more: He saw it in her eyes. “Only how all the corn leaves pushed together to hide us, and made the sky turn green… And then he rode away. And I had your granda. With his hair.” She pulled Corleu straight, scrubbed at his hair with the cloth. “He could foresee in a bucket of still water, your granda. He could see with his feet, they said. He could find anything in woods, any herb, mushroom, flower.”

  “Who was he?” Corleu asked. “Who was rider in the corn?”

  She made a sound in her nose, in the back of her throat, like a laugh, but she wasn’t smiling. “So many asked me that so many times. But how was I to know? I never asked, he never spoke. ‘Corn,’ I told your granda. ‘Corn wa
s your father and sun your grandfather.’” She smiled then, her lined face rippling like pond water. She touched his chin. “And old horned moon his grandmother, who turned to see him just as he opened his eyes first time, to see her. So all her power spilled out of her horns into his eyes. Likely you looked at her, too, with that hair. But you haven’t learned to look in other ways. My son was reading petals by your age. He could see the simple things: weather, birth. He learned to fight young, too, like you. No place for the white raven among the dark.” She stroked his damp hair flat. “And all Wayfolk are dark-haired.”

  “Why?”

  “Because long ago we wandered down out of the stars, that’s how restless the Wayfolk are. Looking for new ways and roads and paths. We still carry night in our hair.” She lifted his face between her fingers. “And eyes. Even though you stared at moon, you’re one of us, with night in your eyes. And that’s why women always put a braid in their hair, so the night and Wayfolk past won’t flow out of it at sunrise.”

  “Tiel doesn’t braid,” he said, thinking of her dark, straight, glossy hair.

  She chuckled, hauled to her feet, and said something else it would take years for him to understand. “She will, one day. She’ll braid, like all of us. But whose name will she braid into her hair?”

  For all those years to understanding, it seemed to him that all else he inherited from his granda—or great-gran, more likely—was a gift for getting into trouble. “Moonbrain,” he heard endlessly. “Corleu fell off moon. Limehair. Catch a cuckoo in Corleu’s hair.” Fists would fly, a small brawl erupt among the colorful wagons, always with the lank, corn-silk hair at the center of it, until someone’s mam waded in with soup ladle or a pan of dishwater. He could turn even a simple game hobble-nobble. It might begin peacefully enough: all the dark-eyed, barefoot, raw-kneed smallfolk in a circle, holding hands and moving around the moonbrat, who held his hands over his eyes, in a game as old as memory.

  “In a wooden ring,” the circle chanted,

  “Find a stone circle.

  In the stone ring

  Find a silver circle.

  In the silver ring

  Find a peacock’s eye.

  Lady come, lady come,

  Find my eyes, find my eyes.

  Circle, circle… Blind can see!”

  The circle jostled to a sudden halt; the blind dropped his hands. In front of him: Jagger, a stocky child with coarse straight hair and an eye for trouble. By rule of the game, Corleu must do whatever Jagger ordered, to get himself out of the circle. They stared at one another, mute, challenging, while the other children whispered and grinned.

  Jagger gave his command at last. He pointed a grubby finger toward Venn’s parents’ wagon and said, “Go stick your head in that bucket of milk. Milkhead.”

  When the older children finally peeled the pile apart, there Corleu was on the bottom, with his hair rubbed so full of dirt he looked almost one of them. His nose was running, his eye wild, his fists clenched; Sorrel, receiving him into the wagon, sighed worriedly, for her fey son hardly looked human.

  She cleaned him up and sat him down at the tiny painted table. She emptied a basket of dried flowers in front of him: wild rose, lavender, verbena, dandelion, hawthorn. “Pick the stalks out,” she instructed. “And the leaves. Only leave the petals.” She was a tall woman, with lovely almond eyes and a soothing, husky voice. She wore bright ribbons braided in her long black hair; that and the songs she sang had entranced Corleu since he was old enough to uncross his eyes. They had also entranced Tul Ross, a stolid, hard-working man who had fallen in love with her as she sang in the fields. Unafraid of her peculiar father and her own odd gifts, he had married her and had only said resignedly, when the past echoed in her newborn’s hair:

  “That’s out of the way. Likely you’ll have the dark ones now.”

  But she never did. She watched her son sniffing and picking at the petals, so gently they barely stirred under his hands. As he had watched her do, he blew over them, winnowed them with his breath, so that colors formed patterns on the wood. He sat silently again.

  “What do you see?” she asked at last, curiously. He looked up at her, his eyes huge, shadowed.

  “Face.”

  “Whose face?”

  “Table’s.”

  “What?”

  He showed her with his finger: two knotholes and a scowling crack. She shook her head, baffled, and gave him one of his granda’s books to read, for he had an odd, useless gift for that.

  As smallfolk became halflings, they ceased tormenting Corleu and began trailing after him, for he also had inherited his great-gran’s tongue. He told them the tale of the Rider in the Corn many different ways, always feeling his way closer to the truth of it, until one day they all stumbled into understanding, and the tale took off in wild variations. The Rider was a lord from Withy Hold. The Rider was an evil mage from Berg Hold. The Rider was a cowherd on a borrowed horse. There never was a Rider, only his great-gran’s fancy, and the warm, sweet, singing corn. One of Wayfolk boys had fathered the bastard and Corleu’s great-gran had looked at a white goat under the full moon, that’s why his hair. Since by then, great-gran was dead, they couldn’t go to her for the true story. He told them other tales, collected from Granda’s books, or from listening silently in the dark while the oldfolk talked around fires on mild winter days in the deserts of Hunter Hold, where they met with other Wayfolk companies for the season, or in the barns and stables and cider houses on the sweeping farms of Withy Hold. One summer, he learned to take more than tales from the cider house.

  He lay with Jagger and Venn and a crock of cider on hay they had, piled one hot midsummer night when they were all pushing into adulthood several directions at once, and all of them in the dark. Early in the morning, tales took a turn from fathers, girls and ghosts, to the stars above them, thick as sheep in a shearing pen. Living between earth and sky, little escaped their notice underfoot or overhead. Corleu, who was racing Jagger for height, but was yet all scrawny wire and muscle, took a swallow, slapped a mosquito on his cheek, and said,

  “There’s Peacock.”

  It was hardest to see: a spray of glittering eyes clustered near the almost perfect Ring. Venn grunted.

  “I see it.” He grunted again. “I see two Rings.”

  Jagger burped. “Where’s the Blind Lady?”

  “There is no Blind Lady,” Corleu said.

  “Blind Lady wears the Ring of Time,” Jagger argued. “She sees out of the Peacock’s tail.” Venn giggled, was ignored. “So where is she?”

  “In stories. In the sky you only see her Ring.”

  “How come she’s blind?” Venn asked. From farmhands, shepherds, they all knew bits and pieces of the silent shapes of fire and shadow that haunted the night. Corleu said dreamily, hugging the crock against his chest:

  “The Cygnet tricked her. If she looks straight at you, you die, because the end of time is in her eyes. So the Cygnet, when they were all fighting, tricked her into looking at her reflection in the full moon. So she went blind. Now she sees out of the Peacock’s eyes.”

  Venn juggled his arm. “You’ll split your tongue with book lies. Pass crock.”

  “I’m not! It’s not lies, it’s stories.”

  “It’s stories,” Jagger said. His voice was deeper, his jaw was shadowed, he held a weight of authority. “Pass the crock over.”

  “Stars don’t fight,” Venn muttered.

  “These did,” Corleu said. A dog barked somewhere, catching wind of them, then subsided. He shifted on the hay, an intimation of dawn creeping over him: Tul’s furious face; haying under a blazing sun with the headache oozing out of his pores. But for now, night seemed on the verge of forever. “They fought the Cygnet. The Gold King. The Dancer. The Warlock. The Lady.”

  “For what?”

  “For Ro Holding.”

  “Who won?” Venn asked fuzzily. Jagger nudged him with a beefy elbow; cider splashed out of the crock onto Corleu.


  “You mucker, watch my hair—”

  Venn snickered. “Been watching it, it’s still white as bird shit.”

  Jagger’s arm weighed across Corleu’s chest as he started to sit up. “Don’t brawl in the hay,” he warned. “Bad enough we’re drinking in it. Get on with story, I want to hear. Venn, you say another word I’ll take your teeth for my sling.”

  “It’s the cider in my tongue,” Venn said meekly.

  “It’s a talkative cider,” Corleu said darkly.

  “Go on. Who won the star fight?”

  “The Cygnet of course, you loon, it’s the Holding Sign of Ro Holding. The others are only Hold Signs.”

  “Gold King is,” Jagger said after a moment, calculating. “Sign of Hunter Hold. But not the others. Not the Dancer or the Warlock or the Lady. Hold Signs are the Blood Fox and the Fire Bear—”

  “And the Ring,” Venn said, catching up. “The Ring of Withy Hold.”

  “It’s the Lady’s Ring,” Corleu said.

  “What of Blood Fox, then?”

  “Cygnet broke the Warlock into pieces and trapped him in the Blood Star. His shadow fell to earth, into the Delta, into Blood Fox’s shadow. That’s why they say: Beware the Blood Fox with a human shadow.”

  They were silent a little; the thick, blazing stars had edged closer, it seemed, to listen to Corleu’s tales. The Cygnet, its broad wings spanning the sky at an angle, gazed with a frosty eye over its realm. Winking, the Warlock shifted, stars limning his shadow, which, oddly enough, was both in the sky and in the Delta, attached to a Blood Fox’s pads.

  Jagger said, “Fire Bear.”

  “Fire Bear chased Cygnet all over the sky, roaring fire at it, protecting Dancer. But the Cygnet stayed just ahead, until Fire Bear held no more fire, only that one last red star in its belly. Cygnet trapped the Dancer in ice on the top of the world. Fire Bear guards her. But there’s no more fire left in the Fire Bear to melt the ice. So the Dancer stays frozen.”

  Jagger yawned. “Pass crock. There’s Gold King, still.”

  “You’ve got the crock under your arm, crockbrain.”

  “Get on with Gold King. Then we throw Venn in the sheep dip.”

  “Gold King is trapped.” Corleu yawned, too, hugely, trying to suck stars into his breath and bones. “The Cygnet trapped the Gold King in the Dark House. There it is, above the farmhouse. The black house with the lintel of gold and roof of gold.”