Cygnet Read online

  “What thing?”

  “A little thing.” He tapped the knife against his teeth, musing to himself. “A very small thing…”

  “Where?”

  “That’s just it.” He raised his head to smile at Corleu. “It’s possible, Corleu, that I don’t know where this small thing is. I’ve mislaid it, lost track of it, it went its way through time without me. It’s entirely likely that you’ll have to find it for me, as a clever young man who found his way through my door could do.”

  “Where?” Corleu whispered.

  “Back, ahead, before, behind. It may be hidden in a stone, a star, another child’s song. I have a few friends who might have glimpsed it, might have heard, might know exactly where. For instance, you might ask the Blind Lady. You’ve seen her silver ring. If you had something in trade, something she might wish for, as I have wished for this thing… For instance, you might give her what’s on the peacock’s feather. That’s all we’re in the business of here, you understand, Corleu. Trade. A bit of labor for me, a return to you of what I’m keeping of yours. A little something for us all.”

  “What is it you want?”

  The tin plate in the tinker’s hands was beginning to glow; light reflecting off it turned his face gold. His eyes, contemplating Corleu, were gold as coins. For a long time he looked at Corleu without answering, only smiling his tight smile, while the light crept over fire, water, lilies, even the black horse, coloring them gold.

  “A small thing, Corleu. Just a small thing.”

  “But what—” He had to struggle to find air. “Tell me what—”

  The circle in the tinker’s hands was acquiring a face. The tinker covered his face with it like a mask. The gold light spilled over his hair. The eyes in the circle opened, blazing gold, tempestuous. The hot light flared into Corleu’s eyes. He flinched away from it, crying out, “I don’t know what you want!”

  “Find it…”

  The world flooded with light. He threw his arms over his eyes, feeling the sun drench him, close around him like the hot, heavy, clinging embrace of the summer days he remembered. A voice blasted at him like a roaring furnace. He dropped his arms, trembling, feeling oddly scorched.

  He stood in a vast hall of pure gold, no other color; the light cast no shadows. Upon a gold dais sat a gold throne; upon the gold throne sat the Gold King. Lip, eyelash, fingernail, he could have been melted and stamped for coins. His face was a mingling of tinker’s face and the sun-face in the Hold Sign of Hunter Hold: wide-boned, wide-eyed, crowned with wild locks of gold hair. He wore a massive sword and armor spiked with points of gold at neck and wrist, knee and elbow. He was chained by one ankle to his throne.

  Corleu stared at him, stunned.

  “Don’t fret, Corleu. You’ll find it.” The tinker-king moved restively, testing his chain, pulling it after him as he paced. “A quick young man like you, who can see through dreams and shadow-lands. Who knows? If you find this for me, I might see my way to rewarding you with other things you might have seen and coveted, along your way.” He held up a gold-armored hand as Corleu opened his mouth. “Now, don’t be hasty. I know all you want now is your love beside you, and an open road through the Delta to the sea. I’ll give you that, don’t fear. But, as you search for this, you may begin to think a little, about what else you might ask for. I can listen, I’m prepared to be accommodating.”

  “Why?” he asked, his voice raw with bitterness and terror for Tiel. “Of every sheep-brained fool in Ro Holding, why did you pick my life to fall into?”

  The tinker-king laughed, swinging his heavy chain with an effort. “You were easiest to spot, with that hair. You were always saying our names, stargazing, never thinking who might be listening. Why did you go into my house? You knew what it was. Everything you ever heard about that dark house said: ‘Do Not Enter.’ And what do you do? You get a little weary of looking at mists, of not seeing the sun or the stars that turn time in their cogs, so you throw yourself headlong against the oldest warning of all. Look at you, standing here while your love wanders in an empty garden without you. Who else would have left her there at such a moment? Who else in Ro Holding would have been that moonbrained?” A sound came out of Corleu, half sob, half wordless agreement. “Ah, I told you, don’t fret. I need you, so I took you.”

  “If you—if you harm her, any of them—”

  “You’ll what? Stop the dark house from falling? Stop the sun from rising?” He turned again, grimacing slightly as he dragged his chain. “It’s a simple business, Corleu. You’ll see. If you give me what I want, I’ll give you what you want. But you must never tell. Listen to me. Don’t speak. You must never tell anyone what you are looking for. Because, then, even if you find it for me, you will never find, either awake or dreaming, anywhere in your life, this little misty, timeless garden you have abandoned.”

  “I don’t know what you want!”

  The cry echoed off gold walls, splintered in corners where lines of gold melted to a single point. Corleu, his unanswered plea bouncing all around him, felt himself fall again, the endless falling within dreams. Eyes watched him: the Peacock’s tail, the Blood Fox’s yellow star, the Fire Bear’s ice-blue stare. He heard his younger voice, telling story…

  The tinker sat beside his fire, roasting something small on a twig. Overhead the mists were darkening; the curve of gold in the chain around the tinker’s neck caught, from somewhere, a stray spark of light.

  “Bite?” he asked genially. The small thing on the stick was charred. Corleu’s throat knotted at the smell. He shook his head, his eyes gritty from the harsh smoke roiling up from the spattering flames. He had fallen on his knees, supplicant to a tinker-king, but he had torn his voice raw with his last cry. He could barely whisper, as the thing on the stick dripped into the fire and the heat and the smoke billowed over him.

  “Just. Tell me. What you want.”

  The tinker lifted the twig from the fire, slid the small, bloody, burned thing off and bit into it.

  “The heart of the Cygnet.”

  Four

  CORLEU opened his eyes.

  His face was in a puddle, one foot was in a stream, and the water in both places was freezing—that much he realized before several hands heaved him up and tossed him like a hay bale into the bottom of a boat. His head cracked against an oar; the breath was knocked out of him. Stunned, he could not move. The boat rocked under him; a pair of boots settled next to his ear.

  “That’s it. That’s the last of it.” The boat wallowed away from the bank. Current caught it. The oarlocks rattled and creaked.

  “Petrified blood-fox spoor, she said,” a younger voice objected. “She wanted that, she said.”

  “She may want what she wants, but nothing petrifies here. Things molder or get eaten here.” The boot near Corleu’s ear lifted, tapped his cheek. “This one is fresh dead. His skin is still on his bones.”

  “He never came out of the bog,” the second voice protested. “Bones buried in the bog, she said.”

  “Where’d he come from, then? Fallen out of the sky?”

  “We could toss him over, let a bog-hole chew on him, then pull him out again. He’d be authentic then. A true bog man.”

  Corleu caught his breath at the idea. There was a sudden silence; even the oarlocks were silent. “He’s alive.” A hand pulled his hair, tugged his head up. “He’s breathing. He’s bleeding quick blood.”

  “Well, how were we to know? What was he doing—lying alive in this sour mire?”

  “Throw me rope. Quick!”

  Corleu moved dizzily, futilely. His hands were caught, knotted behind his back. When he opened his mouth to protest, a cloth smelling of old fish was jammed between his teeth. He was rolled onto his back. He blinked the faces above him clear against the misty dawn.

  “He’s not a bog man,” a heavy-set, one-eyed man pronounced finally. “Nor marsh bones. Nor even dead.”

  “Toss him down the next sinkhole,” a skinny young man with a wispy b
eard suggested. “Then we’d have it: dead bones out of the marsh.”

  The one-eyed man considered Corleu dispassionately. He shifted a twig from one side of his teeth to the other. “She won’t pay for murder. I’m not climbing those stairs for nothing.”

  “She’ll never know!”

  “She’ll know. I gave her murdered bones once, and she said they did nothing in her fire but weep and complain at her until she stopped and buried them. None of my fault, they never complained to me, so how was I to know? But she knew. Things talk to her.”

  “Then what will we do with this one? Heave him back on shore?”

  “He’ll be annoyed by now, likely. I’m too old for dealing with him if we untie him, and you’re too puny. If we leave him here tied in this wild, that will be murder. Turtles would eat him if blood fox didn’t.”

  Corleu chewed ineffectually at the cloth in his mouth. A grey-brown world slid past him. Tall trees with pale trunks rose out of the water, their long scythe-like leaves long fallen; the boat tacked unhurriedly around them. Carpets of rotting lily pads sent a bitter smell along the breeze. The dawn world rustled and cried with hunger. A snake, draped in deep blue scallops along a branch, straightened like a whip and dropped into the water, narrowly missing the boat. An oar slapped at it. Water flecked Corleu’s face. A thought was reeling crazily into his head: that this was the true Delta, of snakes and slow cold murky water and trees that had not only left summer behind but autumn as well. The boat passed vines cascading down from a rotten bough into the water. They hung limply, leafless, shrivelled with cold. He had a sudden vision of Tiel sitting under them, growing pale, drawn with despair, fading away like a ghost in a fading dream world. He pulled at the rope, gave a muffled groan of such fear and frustration and bewilderment that the eyes above him became almost human.

  “Should we let him talk? Ask him what left him here?”

  “No,” the one-eyed man said. “Let her ask. She might find a use.”

  The boat meandered endlessly under the colorless sky. Great white birds cried hoarsely overhead, their wings rattling like old bones as they flew. Now and then a blood fox barked in the distance. They were travelling south, Corleu saw, with an eye on the current. Deeper into the Delta. Shivering with cold, he dreamed the sun, a fuming, hot-eyed, petal-haired face busy eating day and stars, the world, time. It fixed its furious gaze on him, said his name: Corleu. He jerked himself awake, heard a bird cry mournfully: Corleu.

  The trees thinned; water shunted into a slow side channel and from there bled into a wide lagoon. They passed a great, dark tangled cave of tree roots where a huge tortoise older than Ro Holding, it looked, slowly blinked at them as it turned itself into stone. Its neck protruded from a shell ruffled with white agate; its jaws could have enclosed Corleu’s face. Its eyes, velvety with age, pondered him and narrowed into slits of night.

  The boat slipped through lazy shallows, among a grove of statues: old, worn, silvery stumps still rooted in the water, that some passing artist had whittled into shapes. A huge, long-legged egret gazed upward, its beak open as if to nibble at the sun. A squat toad sat on the water, its rolled tongue about to snap and snag the boat. A child, pulling her skirt above her knees, waded through dead lily pads; a lily trailed from her long hair. A naked man with the bunched, bulky shoulders and pointed teeth of a blood fox smiled at Corleu. He started; human blood fox became tree again, its shoulders molded of broken boughs, one eye a dark stain of pitch.

  “Blood fox,” the young man said, and Corleu turned his head. A huge one gazed at them from the shore; the young man stared back at it, an odd mix of hate and wonder in his eyes. “Big. Look at its eyes. Evil. Beware the blood fox casts a human shadow.”

  “That’s a worn old tale. Blood fox isn’t evil.”

  “It kills. I saw it kill a hunter once.”

  “What was hunter hunting?”

  “Blood fox.”

  “So, then. Bad luck to kill a blood fox.”

  “They’re bad luck. Look at its eyes. Blood fire in them. Look at it. How it’s watching. How it’s watching.”

  “Delta belongs to the blood fox,” the one-eyed man said. “It laid claim long before us. Long before any Ro held Ro Holding.”

  “It hates us. We took the Delta from it. We kill it, with long knives and nets for sport.”

  “It doesn’t hate us, any more than the little-boned animals it eats hate it. Things are killed. Things kill.”

  Corleu shifted, trying to make himself smaller against the cold. Shadow darkened over his closed eyes. He smelled damp earth, roots that snaked over the banks to slide deep into the water, weaving, in their ancient courses, doors, windows, pathways for the small animals. He smelled water everywhere. He opened his eyes. Moss hung like women’s hair from the tree boughs, the only color to be seen; the sky seemed very far away. Something swam after the oars, grabbed one; there was a tussle between rower and water before whatever it was sank away.

  “One of hers?”

  “No. Old stone-back tortoise.”

  “Did you see its eyes? Old as Ro Holding.”

  “Older.”

  Hours later, the boat eased toward a dock. For an eye-blink, Corleu saw a luminous woman, all in weedy white lace, sitting in the prow of a long, graceful boat; the woman she spoke to, all in black, lifted a pale face toward the passing boat. Then the bright ghost vanished. A lamp hung on a mooring stump spilled light across the dark; moths as big as birds flickered around it. The men made for the light. On the hillside above the water, Corleu saw a house; one thick, smoky window burned red as a fox’s eye. The men pulled him to his feet. He stumbled onto the dock and fell, half frozen and dizzy with hunger. They hauled him up again, pushed him toward the rickety wooden stairway that curved up to the house. Before they could begin the climb, the woman, still sitting shadowlike in the long boat, spoke.

  “You’re late,” she said coldly. “You took all day.”

  They all started. The one-eyed man said breathlessly, “Thought you were the ghost herself—”

  “We’ve been talking.” She stepped forward into the moth-stippled light. Her face, it seemed to Corleu—spare, proud, untamed—might have been the face of the dark, secretive woodfox, perhaps, or the beautiful, imperious wild swan. Her eyes, so pale they seemed to hold no color, went to Corleu’s face. “What’s this?” she said sharply.

  The one-eyed man sighed hopelessly and was silent. The young one said brashly, “Bones, ma’am.”

  “Bones.”

  “You said bones out of the swamp. We found them lying, so we took them.”

  She gave an exasperated hiss, like an old swamp tortoise that just missed its prey. “You bubble-fish, I told you bones!”

  “Yes, ma’am. We—”

  “He’s not even dead! Or is it just my eyesight going, too? Is he a ghost over his bones?”

  “No, ma’am. He—”

  “Are you?” She reached out, pulled the cloth from Corleu’s mouth. He took a deep breath that did not smell of fish. Her eyes caught at him again; he kept looking for color in them. “Are you dead?”

  He shook his head, though not with absolute certainty. “I’m Wayfolk.”

  “With that hair?”

  Then he knew he was among the living. “With this hair.”

  “What would Wayfolk be doing in the Delta swamp in midwinter? Catching butterflies?”

  He was silent. Her strange eyes were pulling his thoughts off balance, and suddenly he realized why. “They’re like the mist we travelled in,” he breathed. “As if you looked in at us.”

  “What?”

  “It was never winter there. I thought it should have come, but it was always warm. It wasn’t Delta, where I was.”

  “Well, then, where was it?”

  “I don’t know. I kept falling. Sky, maybe.”

  “You fell out of the sky.”

  “Swamp gas ate his brain,” the young man suggested, grinning. The woman ignored him.

  “A
nd what,” she asked softly, “were you doing in the sky?”

  “Talking to the sun.”

  She pulled her eyes from him abruptly; he swayed as if the world had shifted. “Bring him. He is obviously a lunatic, a runaway, most likely. No one will miss him. I might as well keep him to clean my hearth. Did you get everything else? Blind-fish? The roots of bog lilies? Canaries?”

  “There was the blood-fox spoor,” the one-eyed man said heavily, and she glared at him. “Petrified. Things don’t linger here to petrify.”

  “Tortoises do,” she snapped, and he sighed. “Get the spoor. And bones. Old bones. I need old eyes to see out of. Do you understand?”

  His head ducked turtle-like into his thick neck. They followed the woman up steps that hung together on a promise. The porch slanted crazily over the water; the windows sagged in their frames, looking neither in nor out, curiously opaque. The men deposited Corleu and the squirming sacks at the open door, then retreated to the top of the stairs. The woman heaved the sacks over the threshold herself. She turned to the men, who were eyeing Corleu with a morbid, fascinated speculation.

  “Go,” she said sharply, and they did so, old rails groaning under their feet. She touched Corleu gently. “What’s your name?”

  “Corleu Ross.”

  “Corleu. Come in. You didn’t fall out of the sky dressed for winter, did you? Did they give you anything to eat?”

  “Only that fish-blown cloth.” He felt an odd resistance at her threshold, shadows dragging at him like water, and he stopped, finding the same resistance in his thoughts. But she put her fingers lightly on his wrist, coaxing him forward.

  “Never mind them.”

  “I have trouble with houses, is all. What are they?”

  “Just my doorkeepers. My house wards.” Dragging sacks behind her, she led him through a short hallway, into a dark room that smelled, he thought, like cider gone bad. She snapped her fingers. Fat candles in fantastic holders lit themselves. Chairs, small tables, books, seemed to arrange themselves hastily, as if in the dark they had been wandering around. Corleu stopped again, not knowing if his head or the room were shifting. Walls had been torn away to make one huge room of oddly vague dimensions. In the middle of the room was a fire pit, open on all sides, with an enormous chimney straddling it. Several large tables stood around the fire pit, cluttered with stones, knives, glass pipes, crystals, nuggets of silver and gold, books, feathers, clothes, jewels cut and uncut, small bones, bottles full of tinted liquids and salts, jars with things floating in them—shadowy, withered and half-formed things that brought Corleu out of weariness and hunger and memory to stand prickling with horror, wondering what trouble he had just carelessly walked into.