Cygnet Read online

  “Cygnet trapped them all,” Venn said drowsily.

  “All.”

  “They’re angry up there, likely. Being trapped so long.”

  Hay rustled as Jagger rolled suddenly, peered over the stack. “They’re not the only things angry,” he muttered. “My granny sleeps like a stump, but your da had an eye to your empty bed, Venn, and so did Corleu’s. Your mam’s out there, too, Venn.”

  Venn groaned, trying to crawl deeper into the hay. Corleu took a final swallow, passed the crock to Jagger. “Summer,” he said, meaning the still, green-soaked air, the vast, glowing sky, the tales and touches that seemed to tremble constantly on lip and fingertip. Jagger grunted and toasted the moon.

  Withy Hold for sowing and harvest, Hunter Hold for winter, and back again…and again…and then one year the wind changed direction, or the stars shifted a hair’s-breadth, or some such, for two things happened, only one of which Corleu’s mother had foreseen. Venn’s younger sister, Tiel, crossed the camp one day carrying a bucket of water from the stream, and Corleu, chopping wood, glanced up to find that in the interim between her going to the stream and returning, the world had transformed itself under his nose. The wooden ax handle was of a finer grain; the ground her bare feet touched had never been walked on before. Even the air was different: too shallow to breathe, so that she seemed to sparkle as she moved through the morning. She glanced up at his staring. For a moment their eyes clung. Then she looked down quickly, the water trembling in her bucket, and for the first time in his life, he cursed his great-gran and the rider in the corn, for no one, he felt, of such dark, sweet, mysterious Wayfolk beauty, could love a head of hair like his.

  He had reached his full growth by then; with his father’s shoulders and his startling corn-silk hair and something of the stranger in the slanted cast of his face, he drew attention. But, giving and taking pleasure now and then with young women from farms or other companies, he had thoughts only for Tiel. He watched her, and realized that all the young men in their company were falling all over each other watching her. Then someone spoke a word that, for a little, drove even the thought of Tiel into the back of his mind.

  Delta.

  No one ever remembered who first spoke the word—maybe it had travelled with them from Hunter Hold—but there was talk of going south to the warm, misty Delta for the season instead of to Hunter Hold. Tul snorted; Sorrel foresaw and was baffled by her seeing. “Something falls,” she could only say, and, used to water, leaves, seeds, something always falling out of the sky, no one paid mind. Talk grew stronger through harvest, swept from morning fire to night fire, until autumn, when nights began to chill and old bones began to ache, and suddenly it was true, they were turning south for the winter, toward the country of the blood fox and the sea and the ancient house of the rulers of Ro Holding.

  Corleu was as amazed as everyone when his parents decided to leave the company. He was still whittling away at Tul’s arguments the evening before their paths forked between known and unknown.

  “Withy Hold in spring, Hunter Hold in autumn and back again,” Tul said, “that’s what’s done and what’s to be done. I never liked change. Swamps and bog lilies, that’s all you’ll find down there. Beetles big as your hand. Damp air like steam from a kettle, smelling of rot. That’s no place for us. We follow sun and stars. You should come with us, not chase after some butterfly future.”

  Corleu shook his head. “Past is here,” he said. They sat in the wagon Tul had helped him build. The back was open to dark and fire and tender songs yearning under wanderers’ fingers for times and places that never existed. On his tiny table, Sorrel had spread her petals; scents of lavender, white lilac, violet, wove into the smell of burning applewood. Corleu picked out a harebell leaf absently, twirled it between finger and thumb, his eyes, intent and implacable, on his father’s face. “You can’t leave past behind you like a holey boot. We’re all family and ghosts of family. You’ll be without shadow, in Hunter Hold.”

  “I’ll be without son, is what,” Tul retorted. “Your place is with us, to feed us and drive our wagon when we get feeble and toothless. You come with us.”

  “I’m going south.”

  “Your mother has only you. What will she do for the little folk if you marry elsewhere?”

  Corleu snorted. “Likely I’ll have to wait till I’m bald to marry. Who in any company would want to wake to this head of hair every morning? It’s got questionable past in it.”

  “Your granda married,” Sorrel reminded him. “And in this company.”

  “My gran was fey to begin with. I’m going south. I want to see Ro City.”

  “What for?” Tul asked in astonishment. “Walls, stones, straight lines, roofs—why city, of all?”

  Corleu shifted slightly, his eyes falling away from his father. “It’s old,” he said to the harebell leaf. “It’s got past running straight back to the beginning of Ro Holding. It casts a long shadow.”

  “You’re Wayfolk. What has a city’s past of any kind to do with you?”

  “I don’t know.” He dropped the leaf, ran his hand through his hair. “Stories, maybe. Old stories. Old words. Books, maybe, like Granda’s.”

  “You have books here.”

  “I’ve read.”

  “Well, what more reading do you need? What more can books give you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again, hoving against the chair he straddled until it creaked. “It’s a fair question,” he admitted.

  “There’s no work we’re used to, in cities.”

  “I know.”

  “Then what are you using your head for, besides to hang your ears on? You can’t eat story, or wear it, or bed it. Best come with us.”

  “I’m going south.”

  “It’s your hair,” Tul said recklessly, but Corleu only nodded.

  “Likely, for once. The rider in the corn gave me an unnatural taste for words. But you have them all twisted. It’s not me leaving you, it’s you leaving me, for something done and done until it’s a wonder we don’t meet ourselves coming back on the road to Hunter Hold. You might like change; you never tried it.”

  “I never needed it,” Tul said. “None of you knows what lies south in the Delta, and here’s even your mother seeing against it. Change is for weather and geese and worn-out trousers. You stay with us.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Won’t. Stubborn as an old root ball, you always were. Your place is with us, not by sea or swamp or whatever unfurrowed place this company muddles across. You come with us.”

  Corleu started to answer, then did not. His eyes were hidden; the lamplight overhead drew stray shadows beneath the bones of his face, giving it a smudge-eyed, secretive cast. Sorrel gave him an opaque glance. She sifted petals through her fingers; a pattern of colors formed on the wood. “It’s you being stubborn,” she said to Tul. “And blind as a harrow after a hare. He’s in love.”

  Corleu stirred suddenly, as if he had left a splinter or two in the chair he straddled. He could feel Tul’s stare like a flush of fire over his face; he refused to look up. Tul found his voice finally:

  “What’s that to do with the time of day or the price of a turnip? You’ve been in love before.”

  “No.”

  “The world is full of pretty faces.”

  “No.”

  “So you’ll stay,” Tul said a trifle sharply, “and go south with the geese, to mope after some girl who will show you the back of her head while she smiles at true Wayfolk—”

  “I am true Wayfolk,” Corleu snapped, goaded into staring back at Tul. “I walked Wayfolk paths my whole life.”

  “You’re looking to cross thresholds in Ro City. Wayfolk shy at doorposts. My da had to drink his way through doors.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s not the doors or straight roads or high walls or lintels I want—it’s the past that built the city.”

  “How do you expect any Wayfolk woman to understand that?”

  His hands c
losed on the chair back. “I don’t know,” he said tightly, holding the chair as if Tul were about to toss it and him into deep water. “I just want. Both.”

  “You’re besotted.”

  “Likely. Likely that’s a word for it. Wayfolk word would be ‘moonbrained’.”

  Sorrel breathed softly across the petals; they drifted across the wood, changing pattern, colors hidden, colors revealed. She studied them a moment, brows pursed; then she gave notice to the tension in the air.

  “Tul.” Her deep voice, half imperious, half pleading, eased them both. “It’s our last night.”

  Tul muttered softly, yielding; Corleu slumped against the chair back. Three haunting notes from a reed flute caught his ear; then he named the song and could let it go.

  “My lady walks on the moon’s road,

  Shod, she is, in peacock feathers,

  All eyes, she is, all eyes…”

  “Besotted,” he sighed. “If that’s to have your head so full of one face you don’t even remember whose feet you’re walking on.”

  “Have you said so to her?” Sorrel asked practically.

  “I’m biding my time.”

  “Till when?” Tul inquired. “Till her hair is the color of yours?”

  Corleu glared at him, then dropped his face into the crook of his arm. “Till I can drag my voice back out of my boots when I try to talk to her.”

  “Ask now. Tonight. If she says no, you can come—”

  “Tul,” Sorrel murmured, and then to Corleu, “You’ve only spoken to her all her life.” Both men looked at her in surprise. She patted Corleu’s shoulder. “Nothing’s secret around here. Except to your father.”

  “She’s different now,” Corleu said, gazing at the swirl of petals. “Like she went somewhere without us and came back. She makes me forget words.” He cast a warning glance at Tul, waiting for abuse. But his father only blinked down at the petals as if he finally saw the pattern in them.

  “I don’t want you to leave us,” he said gruffly. “That’s the all and that’s the end.”

  “Then come. Come with us.”

  “No. Not to Delta.”

  “Why? It’s only a Hold, not another world. By the sound of you, we’re travelling toward some place outside Ro Holding, not held by Lauro Ro, beyond even the Cygnet’s eye.”

  “How can the Cygnet see anything under that bog mist?” Tul retorted. Corleu, wordless, met Sorrel’s eyes and saw the end of their lives together. He stared wide-eyed at the table. She gave him no comfort; she had seen it coming since he was born.

  “Well,” she said softly, intent on the petals, her voice snagging here and there on a word. “You’ll always know where we are. Withy Hold, Hunter Hold and back. When you need us.” Then she was still, not even breathing, so still that both men drew toward her. Her hands went out, staying them, before they disturbed her pattern.

  “Strange,” she whispered. “Strange…”

  Corleu studied the breath-blown petals. Troubled, he only saw in every delicate, circling path, an ending.

  Two

  SO the Wayfolk came down from the heart of Ro Holding to the Delta. Corleu, plodding through days, one eye to the road past his mare’s rump, the other to the strange, dark, tangled horizon, never knew exactly when they left the clear, endless blue of Withy Hold sky behind and passed into the Delta mists. There the sun was invisible by day; at evening it hovered, huge and blood-red, above silvery, delicate forests. The rich, steamy, scented air clung to everything, even time, it seemed, until it moved like the slow, indolent water moved, deep and secret. The bog mists, the great red sun, the lovely green drugged the eye. The final, glowing moments of sunsets, trees like black fire against a backdrop of fire, burned into memory; Withy Hold paled, ghostlike, into past.

  Tul had guessed it: In the Delta, the Cygnet was invisible. In the Delta were low, sultry skies, smells of mud, still water, the sound of hidden water, the sound of a great river breaking up into roads and trails and ruts of water, black pools and backwashes, before it drained into Wolfe Sea. Huge, shy, graceful birds—yellow, rose, teal—cried at night in throaty, urgent voices. Flowers of burning colors floated on dark water, left their imprint on the eye like the sun. Like the old river road they followed, Wayfolk were drawn from wonder to wonder toward what lay beyond the mists. But the mists never parted and the road ran endlessly into them.

  Corleu, driving at the end of the line, eating the dust Jagger’s wagon kicked up, felt a thought move, slow and fishlike, in his swampy brain. A warm weight sat on his head, his eyelids; sat on his thoughts, too, like hot light on water. The thought surfaced finally, making him lift his head, blink. The scythe-like, silvery leaves danced above his head, not a touch of autumn on them. We have been travelling forever, he thought surprisedly. Then the drowsy, sweating, perfumed air filled his veins again. The slow wagon ahead of him, with Jagger’s gran peering out the back, and the dogs trotting behind it, grew smaller and smaller. He drifted in and out of a dream of blue sky. “Limehead,” he heard someone call in the dream. “Catch a cuckoo in Corleu’s hair.” A bird had spoken, or the river. “Moonbrain. Corleu fell off the moon.” He was on the haystack again, with Jagger and Venn, pointing to the Blood Fox prowling, huge, silent, dangerous, along the horizon, dragging the star-limned shadow of the Warlock behind it. “Delta fought Cygnet under the Hold Sign of the Blood Fox… Milkhead. Stick your head in a bucket of milk.”

  He raised his head, groggy, astonished at what he was hearing. A great blood fox flowed silently out of the shadows across the road under his horse’s nose. The horse reared, jolting Corleu awake; hooves pounded down on the blood fox’s shadow. Corleu, staring at the shadow’s human hands, nearly lost the reins when his horse bolted.

  He pulled at them, shouting; horse and wagon careened across spongy, shifting ground toward a broad, lily-choked swamp. Water loomed closer; the wagon reeled, nearly throwing him; he wondered if he should jump. Then both he and the horse saw something at the water’s edge. The mare veered sharply away from it. The wagon groaned on its axle; things tumbled and smacked the floor. He got the wagon turned, its back wheel laying track within an inch of water, and he harried the mare back across the trembling ground to the road. He set the brake and jumped down, shaking, his head jerking back at the swamp where he had had a confused image of the blood fox’s shadow, standing upright, black as the inside of nowhere, juggling stars in its hands.

  He saw no one, nothing but the lilies, little burning crowns of light on the dark water, all of them just opened that morning, it looked, or maybe the moment before he saw them. He heard a noise behind him and spun; it was Jagger, loping down road.

  “Gran said you tried to drive on water,” he said. He had grown into a burly young man, grim, lately, a dark, puzzling force in the world, pent-up like a beer crock and apt to blow for no reason.

  “Blood fox came out of nowhere,” Corleu said, and saw again its human shadow across the dust. “Ran under the mare’s nose, scared her.”

  Jagger grunted. “Would scare me. I’ll send Gran to ride with you. She pinches if you fall asleep.”

  “I wasn’t asleep.”

  “She said you were drifting.”

  “Maybe.” He shivered suddenly, breaking out of a dream. “Likely that’s all it was.”

  “What was?”

  “Just a daydream.”

  “What? Blood fox?”

  Corleu looked at him, then away, picking through shadow at the swamp’s edge. The perfect lilies teased him again, irritating, like the whine of an unseen insect. “No. Thought I saw something, is all. It scared me. Jagger, how long ago did we cross over from Withy Hold?”

  Jagger shrugged. “Days. Week or two maybe.”

  “A month?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Two?”

  “Why?” There was sweat on Jagger’s face, dust on his shoulders; he did not want to tally time. “Do you have urgent business in the city?”

  “Look around you
.”

  “What of it?” Jagger demanded, not moving.

  “Just look! We left Withy Hold in autumn! Where’s the dead leaves, the birds flying south overhead, the flowers withering away? Where’s the season? Feels like we’ve travelled into winter, but nothing dies here. Nothing dies,” he said again, with a curious prickling of fear, but Jagger only looked annoyed.

  “Winter’s gentler in the Delta,” he said brusquely. Corleu snorted.

  “So gentle here that death tiptoes past the flowers. And where,” he added, “is everyone in this wonderland? Could harvest all year long, here, if you drain a field or two. Yet we meet no one.”

  “Too far from the city.”

  Corleu eyed him askew. “You don’t find it peculiar?”

  “You’ve never been to Delta before, why should you find it one way or another? It’s Delta, nothing we’re used to—”

  “It’s Ro Holding, not the backside of the world! Winter travels, just like Wayfolk. It should have caught up with us by now.”

  “Winter.” Jagger squinted at him. “A week or two out of Withy Hold—”

  “Or a month or two—”

  “We’ve been slow in this heat!”

  “It shouldn’t be this hot!”

  “You’ve never been here before.”

  “No one has!”

  “There’s old road under your feet—”

  “Road to where? We’ve been nowhere but here, days, weeks—the same sky, same trees, same flowers that always look like they bloomed just a moment ago when your back was turned. Just exactly where are we, here?”

  “Delta,” Jagger exploded. “You cob-haired gawp, where do you think? We’ve found a road leads out of the world? Have you been sitting back here with your face in the cider?”

  “Don’t call me cob-haired.” His fists were clenched; he heard himself, the edge in his voice, the idiotic words, in sudden wonder. He and Jagger hadn’t brawled in years. But there was something between them, like air tense with storm, and Corleu couldn’t put a name to it. He eased his hands open, said more calmly, “It feels strange here to me, is all. Something does.”