Cygnet Read online

  Jagger kicked at a clump of grass, blinking. “My brain’s melting in this heat,” he muttered. He added with an effort at thinking, “I forget you can’t see moon changes under this mist. Women must know, though, they keep track of days. Except my gran.” A corner of his mouth went up. “She thinks we’re still in Withy Hold.” Then someone stepped between them and his face went dark again. Corleu breathed in the scent of hair rinsed with lavender water.

  “Da sent me to ride with you.”

  Tiel’s hair fell past her waist; behind its darkness, and her sun-polished skin, the pale swamp flowers grew, thickly clustered, carved of ivory, without a bruise of time on them. Corleu drew breath, feeling Jagger’s eyes boring at him. Someone else pushed among them, clung to Tiel’s skirt.

  “And me,” said Tiel’s youngest sister, her face and hands grubby from the bread and honey she was eating. Tiel, her face suddenly averted, lifted her up. The stiff, bulky line of Jagger’s shoulders eased; he grinned fleetingly.

  “Shall I send my gran, too?”

  “Why not.” Corleu took the child from Tiel, swung her onto the wagon seat. “Send the dogs, too.” He added abruptly, as Jagger turned, “It was you, then, calling me.”

  “What?”

  “You calling me names before the horse bolted. To wake me.”

  “I wasn’t calling you names,” Jagger said. “You didn’t give me time.”

  Corleu was struck mute for a time by the bone in Tiel’s bare ankle, by the gentle, light bird-gestures of her brown hands. The child did most of the talking. Tiel stirred now and then; the threads of her skirt dragging over wood grain seemed loud as language. She said little. Corleu felt the brief, dark, wordless glances she gave him, but she never let him meet her eyes. He wished another language would startle out of him, in the shape of small birds or pearls, for his head was as vacant of words as the sky. It’s my hair, he thought hopelessly, remembering his father’s warning. No one could love a head of hair like this. We could talk, once. What happened?

  That was north.

  “Shadow fox, fox shadow,” the child chanted, and Corleu tensed, his eyes flickering across the road. But it was only a rhyme for a hiding game. “Hide your fox, hide your shadow—”

  “Hide your face, hide your shadow,” Tiel corrected. Corleu glanced at her. She leaned toward the child; the long, dark, heavy line of her hair hid all but the brown curve of her cheek. “Go on. Red star, blood star…”

  “Find your eyes and see.”

  Find your voice and talk, you gabblehead, Corleu thought. The tall, graceful trees, thick with vine and moss, cleared ahead, gave him a glimpse of the wagons strung along the overgrown track, meadow feverishly green with dank, dark water beyond it, more trees.

  “It’s so empty,” he breathed. “We’ve seen no one since we left Withy Hold. Not a traveller, a trapper, a boat—you can’t walk a mile in Withy Hold without running into a field wall or stepping in a cow pile. Something hinting at people.”

  Tiel turned her head, let him meet her eyes a moment then; the dark, flickering glance dragged the breath out of him. “Strange,” she agreed, but nothing in her voice truly considered the word. She was content, her eyes seeking colors. Her hair rustled against her back as her head turned. “It’s so beautiful, it is odd no one has stopped here, of those who like stopping in one spot.”

  Corleu, watching her speak, almost stopped the wagon, wanting to taste and swallow the words coming one by one out of her full mouth. A wheel bumped over a stone; the child, climbing into Tiel’s lap, clutched at Corleu’s wrist with sticky fingers, dragged him back to earth.

  “Dancer danced to a dancer dancing,

  “Dance! said the dancing dancer,

  “Dance the dancer dancing—”

  “No,” Tiel said, laughing. “Dancing, the dancer danced—

  “Dancing dancer danced—”

  “Dancer danced—ah, my tongue’s muddled. Dancing the dancer—You say, Corleu.”

  “Dancing, dancer danced the dance.”

  “And danced,” they all chanted. “And danced. And danced.”

  “Tell story,” the child demanded, and Corleu’s tongue went on without them:

  “She danced on a hill, she danced in a rill,

  She danced on a moonbeam, danced in a dream,

  Danced on a star, danced very far,

  Danced in a bear’s den, danced home again.”

  “What bear?” Tiel demanded, smiling, her eyes full on his face. They were the proper color for the sky, he thought, not blue, but deep, warm, shadowy brown, for day, for night. He shook his head, smiling back at her.

  “Fire Bear, likely. I only tell them, I don’t make them.”

  “Yes, you do. I’ve heard you make them, with Venn and Jagger.” Her face flushed suddenly, was hidden behind her hair. But she finished, “When you would sit by the fire late, behind our wagon. You thought everyone was asleep. But I listened.”

  He felt his own face warm. “They weren’t meant for you. Only for our potato ears and sheep brains.”

  “I know,” she said. Her face came out of her hair, composed again. “Goat brains, more like. Bat-wing ears. But I liked—I like how you say things. How you see. Even asleep, I’d hear your voice.” She was gone again, bird-quick. He swallowed, a blink away from letting the reins slide out of his hands, touch a strand of her hair with his fingertips, shift it aside to find her.

  He said unsteadily, for he had never put it to words before, “All stories seem old to me, even the ones born in my brain. Likely it’s because words are so old. Story words, that is. They carry bits of older tales with them. Like Dancer. She could be you, dancing. Or she could be the star Dancer, who brings you dreams from both the fair side and the terrible side of morning.” He paused. “It’s what I think I want to do.”

  “What?”

  “Go to Ro City and learn more words.” His mouth crooked. “Sounds silly. More stories, maybe. Something.”

  “But what would you do with them?”

  “I don’t know.” He flicked a fly off the mare’s rump with a rein. “Keep saying and keep saying them until I get all the way back to the first thing they mean.” He glanced at her, wondering if she wondered what murky waters lay between his ears. But she only asked thoughtfully:

  “Can you do the things your granda could? Or your mother? Foresee in water, in petals?”

  “Me? No. I only got his hair.” He slid it back between his lingers, to cool his face. “My mother tried to teach me petals, but all I ever saw in them was color, never any—never—” He faltered, his mind filling with petals then: dried roses, verbena, lavender…the pattern they had made under his mother’s breath, paths circling, circling…

  Something—an echo—made him realize she had spoken again. “What?” he asked, then knew he had made no sound. He had gone away again, to some place chill, lonely, terrifying. “What?” he said again, and came back to the pale, heavy misty sky, the long afternoon. He shivered suddenly in the heat. His eyes searched sky, trees, water, for some sign—any sign—of change: a hill, a different kind of tree, even a wild swan or a stork flying south for winter. “I think,” he said tightly, “I know where we travelled to.”

  “Where?”

  “Trouble.”

  But she did not seem to notice the word. The child sat drowsing in her arms; her eyes had strayed from Corleu to a long tumble of orange and yellow blossoms, all fully opened, he noticed, all perfect, not one too young or too old for the moment he saw them.

  “My mother foresaw this,” he breathed.

  “What?”

  “This place. Day after day circling under this grey sky, no true sky for stars to point the way, no moon, no sun…”

  “Yes, there’s sun. Look. It’s about to set.”

  The evening fire was beginning, the slow kindling of the horizon into gold, then red, then deep, deep purple before the black, starless night poured over them again. Tiel’s eyes filled with the sunset; her face he
ld the smooth blankness of a dreamer. She had forgotten Corleu.

  It’s this place, he thought, terrified. This place.

  They made a loose circle of the wagons in a meadow. Children of all ages broke out of the small colored rolling houses, flickered like night sprites in and out of the twilight. “Corleu,” a boy called, and then a girl: “Corleu.” In the dusk their faces blurred past him; their changing voices were unfamiliar. Surely there were not so many smallfolk in the company, he thought. There were too many voices, echoes of the past, as if they had carried even his own, Jagger’s, Tiel’s childhood ghosts down from the north. Then he saw Tiel, chasing after one of the small-folk, laughing, her hair rising in a slow, dark wave, then settling as she ran. The world went simple again, everything in its place, no mysteries beyond the mystery of Tiel’s hair, rising darkly and falling. Then a girl said, “Corleu” behind him and laughed. He turned quickly, for that voice, that laugh, was long past and far behind. Someone circled behind him silently; he felt a long skirt whirl and fall against him, a brush of long fine bones: hands, back, shoulders against his shoulders. He turned to face her, saw only Tiel, walking away from him as she carried the child across the camp.

  He drew a deep breath, moving through the still, heavy dusk as if it were thick with ghosts. He took the ax from inside the wagon, walked down the stream to cut wood. The underbrush rustled, as if someone walked beside him. The slow water murmured his name. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. “Corleu,” a girl whispered: the young, flaxen-haired lord’s daughter who had stopped him in a field one day. He smelled again the crush they had made of grasses, of wildflowers, mingling with the scent of her body. A flower or a finger brushed his mouth. He turned, felt again the quick, light touches of someone’s body, circling him as he turned. Skirt wrapped around his ankles, a hip touched his. He dropped the ax, reached out with both hands to catch the dancer. No one was there. Leaves rustled, farther down the stream.

  He came back under full night. Around the camp fires, he saw faces that bewildered him with their sullenness. Where did you go, Corleu? eyes asked. Who have you been with? They gazed at him without smiling, without moving, their bodies shadowed, only their expressions molded in both dark and fire. You, their faces said, with envy, longing, mistrust. You.

  He concentrated the next day, as intent on moving into one simple moment after the next as if he were piecing his way step by step across a bog. The reins in his hands. The string of wagons—blue, yellow, white, red—with drying clothes flapping and children’s brown faces peering out the backs. A woman singing behind him. The song stirred his memories. The deadly, silver smiles of scythes among the ripe wheat, the dry hwick of their work. Women bent, bundling the wheat; he and Tiel, Jagger and Venn, and Lark, their hands almost too small, picking up the bundles, leaning them together in threes. He, then Tiel, then Jagger. When Tiel’s hands slowed, brought her closer to Corleu, then Jagger’s movements would slow, until she was centered between them, then closer to Jagger. All afternoon, sun soaking into them; the whirling glint of metal; a baby crying; the smells of wheat, earth, wild flowers; their joking; Sorrel ahead, singing as she bound up the stalks. Singing of…what?

  A baby’s rhyme, a nonsense tale about a little black hut with a gold roof and a lintel of gold that tumbled out of the sky, and how you must never pass beneath the lintel, for if you do, you will see it is not a hut at all, but—

  Corleu!

  His head jerked. The world built around him again: mist, pale green, and the feverish colors of the flowers. His throat swelled with a silent protest. He felt the sweat on his face. Luckily the horses were still plodding in line. He thought of calling Jagger, but what could he say? I was dreaming again. You gawp. He concentrated. The reins in his hands… The little hut with the gold roof, falling, falling out of the sky…

  He was still concentrating at the end of the day, so hard he had all but forgotten how to speak. Stop wagon. Feed and water horse… The water in the skins was low, so he slung them over his shoulders, walked through the camp as through a company of shadows, ignoring all claims on his name. Find flowing water, kneel. Open skins… Then, at the bottom of the shallow stream, he saw jewels flash. He stared at them, and finally recognized what he had not seen since Withy Hold: stars, reflected in the water, so clearly he might have picked them out like pebbles. If he looked away from them, they would vanish, something warned. So he knelt on the bank without moving, gazing at the ring of stars the Blind Lady wore on her finger. The water darkened; the stars grew bright, luminous, fire-white. They held all time, those stars, and he watched, his lips parted, scarcely breathing, for it seemed that any moment the dark within the stars would open, show what lay beyond the endless night.

  Something struck him so hard he sprawled with a grunt on the muddy bank. Someone straddled him, gripped his shirt at the throat. His head rattled a few times against the ground before his eyes adjusted to the milky light that the moon shed behind the mists. He cried sharply, astonished, “Jagger!”

  The weight shifted off him. Jagger was breathing heavily, a dark, aggrieved presence in the dark.

  “Do you know,” he demanded, “how long you’ve sat there? Just sat, like a rabbit cross-eyed under the moon?”

  “I just got here, you muckerhead! I just came for—”

  “It’s full night!”

  Corleu’s breath stopped. He sat up; his eyes went back to the water. But the stars were gone; they never could have been there. He made some sound Jagger took as argument.

  “You go off,” he continued doggedly, “you’re gone hours, you come back looking like you’ve been some secret place, with your ax but no wood, or your skins—” He picked them out of the mud, flattened by Corleu’s back. “Empty. I had to follow you, to see where you go when you go.”

  Corleu rolled to his feet wordlessly; Jagger caught his wrist, nearly sent him into the water. Down the bank a blood fox’s eyes caught some stray swamp light, flared amber red at them.

  “It’s this place,” Corleu said. He was breathing so shallowly he could hardly speak. “This place. It’s bewitched. I tried to tell you—”

  “Not this place, it’s you!”

  “No—”

  “You look at us all like a stranger, like something is swallowing you from inside. You barely talk anymore, even to her; you don’t see us, not even her—”

  “Who?” He jerked at the suddenly painful hold. “Who?” he said through gritted teeth. Jagger hauled him closer.

  “Who. You blind owl. We watch her, she watches you, and you walk past her like she’s smoke. It’s you her eyes follow. And you don’t—you don’t even—you sit here staring at water while Reed and Dawl and Steof and me, we have to fight to lie in her path for her to walk across while she watches you—they all do. Watch you. You with that hair the color of—”

  Corleu wrenched free. “Bird-shit. Slug-slime. I’ve heard all the white words there are by now. I can’t believe you’re standing there throwing your tongue around the color of my hair while you’re knee-deep in trouble and sinking fast. Can’t you see it? We blundered onto a road to nowhere; we drove our wagons outside time into a haunted place. Things are strange here. Things are dangerous.”

  “Something is,” Jagger said tightly. “And it’s you in danger. You’ve got us all smoldering and you’re too spellbound to see—”

  “It’s not me!”

  “It’s you wandered out of the world, not us. Someone twisted your path for you, and if you don’t find who, you’ll keep on reeling through your days, trapped inside your head. I’d say most likely Steof, his mother knows things.”

  “No.” He gripped Jagger’s shoulders. “It’s none of us! Jagger, I’ve seen Blood Fox with the human shadow here. I felt the Dancer dance circles around me. Tonight you stopped me falling headfirst into the Ring of Time at the bottom of the water. It’s a dream world we wandered into, and it scares my blood thin. We think we’re heading south through Delta, but we’re only cir
cling and circling, that’s why we never meet anyone, and why we never reach the sea, because there is no sea, there is no south, no north, we’ve travelled outside Ro Holding and not even the Cygnet itself can see into this land.”

  “You’re babbling,” Jagger breathed. “You’re moonstruck.”

  “But what moon?” Corleu shook him furiously, rocking him off balance half a step. “We left moon and stars in Withy Hold!”

  “You don’t even care.”

  “Of course I care. Why do you think I’m shouting myself blind, you stump-headed—”

  “You don’t even ask what I’m talking about.”

  “What?”

  “You just ramble. You don’t care who.”

  Corleu was silent, baffled by the mist in Jagger’s head. He closed his eyes wearily, looking for words, and saw Tiel behind them, her hair so straight and heavy that when she swung her head it fanned the air and fell strand by strand back into place. He swallowed. “That’s why.” He opened his eyes to Jagger’s night-hollowed eyes. “That’s why you’re angry at me. Because I followed her here, instead of taking my moonhead to Hunter Hold, out of her sight. But can’t you see for once it’s not Tiel matters, what matters is this place we—”

  The night exploded in his eyes; he found himself trying to finish with his face under water. I should have gone to Hunter Hold, he thought bleakly. He felt Jagger’s hands hauling at him. He turned and kicked hard; there was a cry and a massive splash. He waded out, dripping and coughing, saw again the chilling, red-washed stare of blood-fox eyes.

  He woke near dawn, and, still half-dreaming, had all the horses loose and wandering off into the trees. Then he walked aimlessly across slow branch water, through perfumed woods—in circles, he thought likely—but he kept moving, until heat and weariness wore him down. He rested under a cascade of lilies flowing down tree branches into a small, deep pool. He sat shredding the perfect flowers, listening to the furious, distant shouting. “Corleu!” they called; gathering up the horses, they would blunder across him eventually. “Corleu!” He picked another flower, tossed it into the pool. It floated, turning delicately on an invisible current.