The Cygnet and the Firebird Read online

  Meguet said softly, “I can fight my own battles. Though I didn’t think I would have to.”

  The Holder, who loved fires, eyed the empty grate wistfully. She said, “Neither did I, but then I never admitted to anything I had to defend. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you. When you are not guarding the Holding Council, I want you with Nyx.”

  Meguet, startled, said, “There’s not much I can do for her.”

  “I know that and I don’t care. I don’t want her alone with that stranger, and you’re the only one in the house she would put up with.” She kicked the grate moodily, and turned, gazing at the placid, murmuring hall as if mages were concealed in the hangings or underfoot beneath the carpets. “I want you with her in those night hours when the bird becomes human.”

  Meguet was silent, seeing again the rich and stunning shapes the bird’s cry had taken in the yard. “I wonder where he came from . . . I wonder if anyone is alive to miss him or search for him.”

  “I’m wondering who cast that spell and when Nyx’s meddling will bring yet another mage to my door.”

  “If that mage is still alive.”

  “There are too many mages.” Her fingers lifted to her hair, searching for pins to pull, but they were too well hidden. She folded her arms instead, frowning at her shadow in the torchlight. “Nyx assumes the mage is dead. I assume otherwise, for the sake of my house. That is why I want you with her. She trusts you, and you have more common sense than she does.”

  “Only for an ordinary world.”

  “That’s the one I want to keep her alive in,” the Holder said grimly. “She has so much power, and she has hardly scrubbed the mud off her feet from that morass she trapped herself in.”

  “The power was given to her freely.”

  “It’s not her heart that worries me now, it’s her magpie curiosity that picks at anything glittering of magic. She’s facing a twisted sorcery unfamiliar even to her. She may have terrorized the population of birds in the swamp, but she never made anything human cry so desperately. And all she can see of the sorcery is something she can’t do herself—she’s blind to danger, Even the young man seems dangerous to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think he’s just an innocent under a spell. He looks powerful and unpredictable.”

  “Like Nyx, not long ago.”

  The Holder’s brooding attached itself to her. “Meguet Vervaine, are you counseling compassion over common sense?”

  “Never,” Meguet said flatly, “where Nyx is concerned. But given the murkier sorcery she has dabbled in, she may have more success with a bird with a questionable past than a mage with a tidier history would.”

  The Holder made an undignified sound. “Let’s hope his past is tidier than hers. Wherever his past is. Or was.”

  “Perhaps he is from Ro Holding and he simply can’t remember. He does remember the Cygnet flying on warships.”

  “He’d have to be a very old bird.”

  “Or a young man trapped outside of his time.”

  The Holder touched her eyes. “That is something Nyx would find irresistible. But how much does she know about time? Is that common knowledge among mages?”

  “She pulled me within time to stand beneath the Cygnet’s eye. For all I know she may have all the Cygnet’s power.”

  The Holder drew breath. “Moro’s bones. It’s unprecedented.” Her eyes moved over the hall, searching. “Where is she? I asked her to stay through supper.”

  “I saw her talking to Rush. And then to Arlen Hunter.”

  “I don’t see her.”

  “She must be here,” Meguet said, failing to find her. “She doesn’t forget things.”

  “She forgets unimportant things,” the Holder said darkly. “Supper, her shoes, sleep, time. Maybe that mage returned without our knowing, ensorcelled us all again between a bite and a swallow. Maybe,” she added, with some hope, “he has found the book himself and vanished back into his own secret country.”

  “It can’t be all that secret,” Meguet pointed out, “if he has heard of Chrysom.”

  The Holder closed her eyes. “Don’t raise side issues,” she said tersely. “Find Nyx before the moon rises and I lose her again to that demented bird.”

  * * *

  The bird’s eye reflected a sorceress within its golden iris. It perched on a window ledge; its shadow, cast long and black by the torch beside the window, cut across the sorceress’s path to take shape against the hearth: a faceless dark beneath the stone Cygnet. Nyx was aware of the bird’s scrutiny and its shadow. She moved imperturbably through both, continuing her search for the missing book and waiting for moonrise. She had explored everything but the oddments on the mantel. There, she reasoned, it must be; the mage’s voice buzzing inside the cobalt box, the barely perceptible shift of weighty thought within the emerald bottle.

  The bird opened its beak. No cry came out of it, no fire, but the sorceress turned to face it.

  “Be patient,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten you.”

  She folded her arms, leaned against the mantel, frowning slightly, studying the bird. The red on its folded wingtips made an elaborate chessboard pattern against the white. Its longer plumes trailed down the stone, delicate puffs of white that stirred at a breath. Its sharp talons caught light like metal; the mask of fiery feathers around its eyes gave it a fierce and secretive expression. Nyx, slowly dissolving within an amber eye, saw only herself in its thoughts. Whatever language it spoke—bird or human—was hidden.

  “You are well guarded,” she commented, returned to herself on the hearth. The bird did not shift a feather, as motionless as if it had become one of its own enchantments. The fire still hung in Nyx’s ear. She toyed with it absently. The bird opened its beak soundlessly, in recognition.

  Red the color of the bird’s mask snagged her eye. She turned her head, studied a tiny red clay jar on the mantel. It was shaped like a hazelnut with a flat bottom and a cap of gold. The clay was seamed with minute cracks, as if whatever it held had seeped out centuries before. Nyx picked it up, weighed it in her hand. Chrysom, who had, centuries after his death, gotten suddenly more complex, might have left an empty bottle on his mantel, or a mage’s trap. A day or two ago she had known how he thought. Now, she was not so sure.

  “Well,” she said, and met the bird’s intent golden stare. “Better sorry than safe.”

  She gazed down at the jar, letting her thoughts flow like air or water into the spider web of cracks. The rough, dry edges permitted her only so far, no farther, into their tiny crevices. What stopped her, she couldn’t tell; it had no substance. The gold cap, molded into the clay by the slow shift of particles of metal, seemed solid; touching it, her thoughts turned into gold.

  It was of a piece, like the bird, like the bird’s enchantments: a weave of magic so fine she could not isolate a single thread. Baffled, she withdrew from it, fascinated by her ignorance.

  She put it back on the mantel, picked up a round bottle of opaque, swamp-green glass, no bigger than her palm. Its neck was short, slender, and had no opening. But it was not empty. Something within it shifted against the glass sides; the bottle tilted sluggishly in her hand, then rolled upright. Her thoughts grew crystal, rounded, green, then eased inward, dropped away from the glass into the tiny pool of magic it enclosed.

  She fell into a great pool of nothing. The world lost hold of her, sent her tumbling headlong into an endless mist. Startled, she nearly withdrew; then, curious, she continued falling, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, moving toward nothing until she realized she could fall forever in that tiny bottle and never reach the bottom.

  She withdrew slowly, finding stone walls beyond the mist, books, the bird’s unblinking eyes. It took some effort; she rested a moment, wary now, but still intrigued, before she explored farther. She chose something black: glass or stone carved into a little block of shadow. It was wrapped in a web of silver filaments that wound around one another and parted and crossed again in an endless
, intricate pattern. Concentrating on a single filament, she found herself on a silver road.

  She did not need to move; it moved beneath her, swift as wind. Darkness dropped away from the road on both sides, as if the small block enmeshed in the silver had no reality itself. The silver turned and coiled, looked back, crossed itself, moving so fast she felt she had left her thoughts at some forgotten crossroad. The road went everywhere and nowhere, it seemed. On impulse, she dropped off the rushing silver into the darkness within it.

  She found herself in a cube of night, with the silver running in front of her, behind her, underfoot and overhead, like a net. She tried to withdraw, but she could not reach past the silver. It was too intricate, it moved too quickly; catching hold of it was like trying to hold water pouring down a cliff.

  So I am caught, she thought, like a fish in Chrysom’s net. But what is the net made of?

  The way out of the trap was to become the trap. . . .

  She could not hold a single, wild thread; she might, leaping out of the dark, out of herself, hold the entire moving, glowing web. Unthinking, forgetting even her own name, she expanded into the darkness, and then, at all points and loops and crossroads, into the rushing current of silver.

  The flowing pattern froze. Suspended, her mind the intricate net of filament, she saw what the dark had hidden: cubes within cubes of patterned silver, each a completely different weave, growing smaller and smaller but never vanishing. If she could move between them from one cube to the next, if she could walk each pattern . . . But what were they?

  And then she remembered the filaments, blackened with age and fire, on the wrists of the stranger. His hands opened wide, as if to loose some lost power within the patterns. He spoke . . .

  She whispered, “Time.”

  She was suspended within tantalizing spells for time. But what spell opened the paths to use? How could she get here, there, or anywhere on those fantastic silver roads that led nowhere outside the box? How, she wondered more practically, could she get herself outside the box?

  I got in, she reminded herself. I can get out.

  But if she had flung herself down a deep, dry well, that would be easy to say and not so easy to do. She swallowed, for the second time in her life, the little, cold, pebble-hard fact that all her will and all the knowledge she possessed might not be enough to find her way back to the world.

  I am looking into Chrysom’s eye, she thought. Into his mind, which until now I thought I knew. This is one of the puzzles in the missing book, which is why I cannot solve it. Yet.

  Later, after she had contemplated the frozen, glowing paths without inspiration, she felt again the feathery touch of fear.

  They will find me, she thought, in the library, silent, blind, motionless, holding the box in my hand. Will they have the sense to leave me with it? Rush wouldn’t. He would smash it, to set me free. I could be trapped in its broken shards forever . . . I should have taught Rush more sorcery. But I never had the patience. And he would never stop to think.

  She quieted her unruly thoughts, focused them again. Nothing to do, it seemed, but pick a path again, see if her thoughts might lead somewhere, if the path wouldn’t. She narrowed her vision, dropped onto the nearest pattern. Instantly she felt it move, dividing, looping, flowing everywhere and nowhere, as it had before, and she was powerless to control it.

  Time, she thought. What is it? A word. To endow a word with power, you must understand it.

  Settling into that one place to begin to understand Chrysom’s spell, she saw a man in the distance ahead of her.

  His head was bent slightly; he did not turn or speak. He simply walked, his eyes on the flow and weave of silver as if, out of the endless twists and turns, he fashioned a solid path and followed it.

  She found the path he left, a stillness in the wild flow, a single strand of silver frozen among the rushing patterns. Amazed, she followed it, wondering if Chrysom had set a shadow of himself within the paths to guide the unwary mage. The road beyond the guide began to blur into darkness. Nyx quickened her pace; as if he felt her sudden fear, he slowed. Closing the distance between them, she recognized him.

  She caught her breath, stunned at the sight of the long black hair, the warrior’s straight line of shoulder. Turning, he met her eyes, held them. She blinked, and the tower stones formed around them, the moon hanging in the black sky beyond a window. Gazing at her, still caught, perhaps, in some twist of past, for an instant he recognized himself.

  “My name is Brand.”

  - Five -

  With the name came memory. He flinched away from it as from fire; for an instant his human face became the firebird’s cry. Then his eyes emptied of expression: the dreamer waking, the dream forgotten. She whispered.

  “You were with me in Chrysom’s box. You led me out.”

  He only gazed at her blankly. “I don’t remember.”

  “Brand.” She added, at his silence, “That is your name. You just told me.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  The door opened. Preoccupied, she did not loose his eyes, just held up a hand for silence. She received it, so completely she wondered if she had thrown a spell across the room. “You remember,” she said. “Your eyes remember. The bird remembers.”

  “The bird—” He paused, bewildered. “The bird is sorcery.”

  “It cries your sorrow.”

  “It cries jewels as well as sorrow. Are those mine also?”

  “Perhaps. If you are a mage.”

  He was silent again, throwing a net into the still black waters of memory. The net came up empty. “Why would I be that?”

  “Only another mage could have rescued me from Chrysom’s spell.” She heard something from the door then, not sound so much as a rearrangement of disturbed air. She asked, because it had to be asked, not because she had much hope of answer, “Do you know the mage who wears a white dragon on his breast?”

  His head lifted slightly; he gazed beyond her, as if dragons were gathering soundlessly in the shadows just beyond the candlelight. For an instant he seemed to see what lay beyond the light: the country where he had been named. The memory faded; he shook his head. “I cannot see that dragon.”

  “The mage?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know the mage?”

  He started to speak, stopped. All color left his face then; his hands clenched. Nyx saw the firebird cry in his eyes, of grief and rage and danger.

  Red shimmered in the corner of her eye. She turned her head, saw Meguet, dressed for supper, slide a blade noiselessly off the wall. Whether she wanted it to fight mages or dragons, Nyx wasn’t sure; either, it seemed suddenly, might blow in unexpectedly on the night wind. She turned back to Brand, touched the metal patterns on his wrists lightly. When he made no protest, she lifted his hands in hers.

  “Is this the path of time you followed here?” He looked at them, mute. “All Chrysom’s paths are silver. How did these get so black?”

  He shook his head, seeing nothing of mage or time or color in the blackened metal. “I don’t understand. The bird brought me here. Not these.”

  “You are the bird,” she reminded him patiently, and as patiently he replied,

  “The bird is sorcery.”

  Meguet tugged at Nyx’s attention. She still stood silently at the door, but her face was pale and her eyes flicked at every breeze-strewn shadow. She met Nyx’s glance, asked softly, “Is the mage looking for him?”

  “Probably.”

  “Nyx—”

  “It’s an interesting problem,” Nyx admitted. “It’s hard enough to hide the key, let alone the bird.”

  “Where did you put the key?”

  “In my pocket.” She added, at Meguet’s expression, “It refused to change its shape, and I couldn’t think what else to do with it.”

  “So you took it to the council hall?”

  “Well, I could hardly slide it under a carpet. If the mage returned, I wanted to be there.”

>   “I didn’t,” Meguet said succinctly. She made a move toward a chair, then drew back to the door, looking, Nyx thought, with the gold threading through her loose hair, and the ancient sword, almost as tarnished as the metal on Brand’s wrists, half-hidden in the silken folds of her skirt, unlikely enough to startle even the mage again. Nyx said,

  “You might as well sit. I doubt that either dragon or mage will use the door.”

  Meguet did so, but reluctantly, still holding the sword. “Dragon,” she said, “being the little winged animal made of thread.”

  “According to Chrysom, who must have roamed farther than I ever realized, dragons are made of flesh and blood and fire, and most are not small.”

  “How big,” Meguet asked after a moment, “is not small?”

  “Huge. So Chrysom said.”

  Meguet shifted uneasily, hearing dragon wings in the rustling wind. “Well,” she sighed, “at least they can’t come through the windows. Did Chrysom happen to say where there might be dragons?”

  Nyx shook her head. “Like the firebird, he considered them fable. Or he wrote as if he did. Now, after coming out of that black box, I’m not sure what he knew, where he travelled, or when. He—”

  “What black box?” Meguet’s eyes fell to what Nyx still held in her hand, and widened. “That? You were in there?”

  “My mind was.”

  “Moro’s name. Why?”

  “It seemed a good idea at the time. Not,” she admitted, “one of my better ones. I wanted to see if any of those odd things were the missing book. This is full of paths, twisting, turning, looping strands of silver. I think they lead to different times, moments within moments, perhaps the sorcery the mage used to slow time. But I don’t know how to use them, and I think the knowledge is in the missing book, as well as in the firebird’s memory.”

  “That was the spell he rescued you from?”

  “Brand. Coming out, he remembered his name. But nothing more, not even that he had walked a path of time with me in that box, and led me out.”

  Meguet closed her eyes, dropped a cold hand over them. “I don’t know why your mother bothered to send me up here.”