Cygnet Page 7

  “But why?” he asked, thinking of the tongueless, fluttering birds. “It’s a twisted power you get out of all this slow, deep running water, all these bog pools layered with dead things.”

  “Power is power. It’s neither good nor evil, it’s simply there to be used, either way. It’s like fire. If you feed it silver it will shine like a summer’s day and speak to you as fairly, and if you feed it gall wood, it will turn black and stink like the dead, and prophesy sickness, storm, misfortune. All that matters is what you put into it.”

  He dropped pearwood onto the grate with a clatter. “Bird skulls,” he said tersely. “The beating hearts of fish.”

  “There’s power in the living and the dead. Power in the bird’s eye and in the eyeless skull. Not all knowledge is clean, innocent. I came here to learn, I don’t choose what to be taught. If there is knowledge to be taken from the heart of a fish, I take it.”

  “Is that all you know? This mean, bloody kind of power?”

  She was silent, absorbed in her reading, he guessed; he wondered if she had heard his rough question. She answered it finally, her eyes on the pages of her book, as if she were reading a tale from it. “In Hunter Hold, I lived among the desert witches, who are dedicated to the Ring of Time. Their lives are exemplary. I slept on bare ground, I wove my own garments, I ate nothing that possessed an eye or a heart. I learned how time is layered like tree rings, and how, with dedication and proper stillness in mind and body, you can see beyond the ring you circle at the moment. In Berg Hold, I studied with the oldest mage in Ro Holding, the last descendant of Chrysom.”

  “Who?” He was kneeling with his hands full of wood, entranced by the double vision of her: half unscrupulous bog witch, half the Holder’s daughter, with all the history of Ro Holding in her name.

  Her eyes flickered at him; her expression gave him a glimpse into his ignorance. “Chrysom was the great mage in the court of Moro Ro, who was the first ruler of Ro Holding—”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m overwhelmed. Chrysom built the house on the Delta coast, during the Hold Wars, where the Holders have lived for a thousand years.”

  “The house that flew.”

  “The house that flew.”

  “The air,” he commented, “must have been thick with houses once.”

  “Don’t take all day with the fire. Can you read?”

  “Yes. My granda got into the habit. It was a place to get away from being teased about being a moon-haired bastard. My mother kept his books.”

  “So you got his hair. He had some power, you said?”

  “I didn’t get that.”

  “How do you know?”

  He glanced at her, surprised. “I’d know by now, likely. I can’t foresee in small ways, in dreams or petals, like he could. He could float herbs on water and forecast from their shadows. My mother could do those things. I never could.”

  “You brought the Gold King’s attention to you somehow.”

  “I kept using his name in stories,” he sighed. “How was I to know he was listening?”

  “What was he like?”

  “A tinker,” he said tersely. Since there was no help forthcoming from Nyx Ro, he lit the fire himself with one of the fat candles that never seemed to burn down. The flame danced along the coralwood, spicing the air with a resin that smelled of oranges. He gazed into it, seeing again the brilliant, bitter gold face.

  “A tinker,” she repeated curiously.

  “And a king made of gold, chained to his own throne.”

  She glanced at him, startled, catching a glimpse of something, then losing it. “How strange,” she breathed. She went back to her reading. He watched her, as he tended the fire. Books piled up around her, threatening to topple as she worried at them, pulling them from mid-pile, flipping pages, then heaving them shut with massive thuds that sent dust flying and books swaying. Her hairclip was sliding down her back; her full sleeves kept tangling in her fingers; she would push them impatiently up one arm or the other, where they would slowly creep back down. He wondered suddenly at the power trapped in her, behind her intent, dispassionate gaze. He straightened; as if he had disturbed some delicate tension in the air, a pile of books sagged precariously.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked tentatively, and got the sharp edge of her tongue.

  “What do you think I’m looking for? I’m trying to find a gift for the Blind Lady.”

  “Oh.” He slid his hand through his hair, blinking, and found a blood-fox skull gazing back at him from a shelf. “The Gold King said a peacock feather.”

  Nyx Ro lifted her head, looked at him with as much expression as the skull behind her. She slammed her book, then glared at a pile threatening to topple. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know what you were doing.”

  “Do I have to tell you everything?”

  “It’s easier,” he said steadily, “if you do. That way you won’t have to shout at me.”

  “I’m not used to explaining things. Nothing around here asks.”

  “Nothing around here has a tongue to.” He added, at her silence, “Likely I won’t either, much longer.”

  “Likely.”

  “There’s a stuffed peacock around here somewhere, could I get a feather from that.”

  She folded her arms, still frowning at him, but no longer in irritation. “A peacock feather. Are you sure he said that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think. Remember the words.”

  He did then. “I’m wrong. He said: ‘Offer her what’s on the peacock’s feather.’”

  “Ah,” she said softly. “That’s clear enough.”

  “Is it?”

  “You tell me. What is on a peacock’s feather that a Blind Lady might want?”

  He stared at her, his eyes widening. He shifted closer to the fire, feeling the old house shunt a breath of winter up from the cellar. He said after a moment, “The dark house of Hunter Hold fell in the Delta. Will I find the Blind Lady here, too, or do I go back up to Withy Hold in midwinter?”

  She was still searching among her books, slowly now, absently, as if she knew what she looked for but had misplaced it and memory might find it before her hands did. She paused, favored him with a long, dispassionate gaze. “That’s a good question,” she said. “What do Wayfolk say about the Blind Lady?”

  “What all folk say, likely. She wears the Ring of Time. She dealt death with her eyes until the Cygnet tricked her into gazing at her reflection in the full moon and she blinded herself. The Peacock guides her across the night sky with all its eyes. In Withy Hold, they say she weaves the threads of lives, meetings, partings, marriages, births, such. She weaves out of the dark and light of days.”

  “To the witches of Hunter Hold, she is only a tale. Time is not woven, they say, of threads that can be broken.”

  “In Withy Hold, they gave her gifts, long ago. To coax her into weaving fortune. One farm I worked had a giving place: a little ring of trees with a stone in it, where things were brought to her. The lord who owned the farm plowed around the trees, even though no one comes there now. He said it was a ring of time.”

  “You went into it,” she said with sudden insight. He nodded.

  “I wanted to stand inside time.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. What would? It was only story.”

  She bent over her books, found what she wanted at last, it seemed, for she read silently a long time, while Corleu kept the fire going and watched for a shift of light beyond the windows. But whether it was night or day, he could not tell, for all any of them gave was a reflection of the room. Nyx Ro closed her book finally. She stood silently, her arms folded, musing on something in the dusky shadows that hid the room’s true dimensions. She said abruptly:

  “Where did your grandfather get his hair?”

  Surprised, he told her the tale of the Rider in the Corn, as he had remembered his great-gran telling.

  �
�She died,” he said, “before I was old enough to understand it, or ask her more. Something must have caught her eye about him besides his hair. But she was old, and years might have changed him from stableboy on a nag to a corn-lord on a stallion.”

  “Perhaps.” She was still eyeing him, in a meditative measuring way that made him uneasy. “For someone who just came face to face with a story, you’re far too ready to dismiss them. The Gold King’s eye fell on you because you were looking at him, apparently, and what made you bring him to life is a mystery that may well have begun among the corn. Maybe you have some gifts, maybe not, but the Gold King summoned one of Wayfolk to find this treasure for him, not a powerful sorceress who might take too much interest in it. So. My hand must be on none of the work that may need doing for this. Everything must be done by you. Your hand on the wood the fire burns, your hand on the making and unmaking. Will you try?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll try anything. But you must keep in mind I’m still an ignorant gawp under this hair, and not even you with all your power can make a fish gallop.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” she murmured. She left her book lying open, came to the fire. “Find some warmer clothes around this house. You’re going to Withy Hold tomorrow.”

  He nodded, not pleased but unsurprised. “I’ll need a horse,” he said. “Will there be one roaming somewhere in the house?”

  “You won’t need a horse,” she said. “You’ll bring Withy Hold to the Delta.”

  He stared at her. “How?” His voice had lost all sound.

  “You will make a Ring of Time.”

  He wandered in and out of rooms the next morning, found clothes finally, in a trunk sitting strapped and ready for a journey in an empty room. He pulled out wool and leather and linen, hardly seeing what he put on, feeling, even after he had dressed, that there was something he had forgotten. But there were good boots on his feet and a heavy cloak over one arm, and a list in his head of all he would need for a long, hard journey north into winter. It would take more than the color of his hair to shorten the road to Withy Hold, and he expected to be hunting up a horse somewhere along the river by evening. The faint, melancholy sound of a reed pipe accompanied him as he left the room.

  He found Nyx Ro brooding over a book beside her fire. He stood watching her pale, still, secret face; the way her long, unruly hair slid over her shoulder; the way she picked at things with her fine, callused fingers—a bead, a button, a loose stitch—as she read. Her coloring reminded him of Tiel, yet she was unlike in every way: She was lonely, fearless, wild and powerful, and her knowledge was a vast country he scarcely knew existed.

  She lifted her eyes, caught him watching. She said only, rising, “I thought you were a ghost, in those clothes.” She went to one of her tables, cleared of all but a round bubble of a bottle and an odd assortment of things around it. “Come here, Corleu. This is where you will make your ring.” He joined her silently. All the oddments around the jar were labelled in some painstaking, flowery, antique script. He read a label.

  “Is that real?”

  “Of course.”

  He stared at her. “Is this going to work?”

  “Even,” she said, “for the likes of you.” She shifted, watched him from the far side of the table. He drew breath, feeling a wintry chill in his bones, as if by accident, moon-blinded eyes had met his eyes. “All you must do now is lay a fire within the jar from the things as I have placed them. Begin at the top of the circle, with the flaked moonstone, and go to the left from there.”

  He reached for it; as though it lay within a charmed circle, it seemed too far to touch. His hand fell, empty, on the wood. “I’m afraid,” he said, not looking at her. “Of this, of the Blind Lady, of being in this house, of leaving this house. I’d go through this ring and run and keep running, likely, leave them all there in that summer place, if not for leaving Tiel there, too—”

  “Tiel.”

  He looked at her then, wanting to swallow the name, put it back into his heart where it was hidden even from Nyx’s strange, clear eyes. But her eyes asked, relentlessly.

  “I left her,” he said softly. “Tiel.”

  “Ah.”

  “For that house.”

  “I see.” She seemed to: as if the green, peaceful private world had formed in the air between them. “Tiel,” she said again, musing, curious; and at the reminder, or the rare gentleness in her voice, his hands eased open. He reached for the moonstone.

  “The Ring of Time is a circle of stars, a silver ring on the Blind Lady’s finger,” she said as he worked. “The Ring has no beginning, no ending. Meddling with time, past and future, is a sorcery I have little skill in. But this Ring you are making is very simple; your hands do the work, not your mind. It opens only to the present, in another place. There are more complex rings, that open to remembered past. Two or three mages even wrote of Rings into the future. But they left no spell for that; if they returned at all to write about the future, they did not recommend it. They say little about their journeys, they seem to have lived brief lives afterwards…or perhaps they made the Ring a final time and stepped through it forever.

  “For you, it will simply be a door opening there, and then back here.”

  Corleu, listening, was laying the strangest fire he had ever made in his life: a tiny thing inside a squat glass bottle that was so round he thought his breath might unbalance it. Into its narrow mouth he dropped filings of gold, of black dragon’s bone, purple-green scales from the wings of a flying lizard, half a silver ring, a crushed pearl, twists of paper that held the dried tears of a weeper-owl, a single eye from the tail feather of a peacock, a long, silver hair.

  “Do I drop myself in there last?” he murmured. “Or does time come out of the bottle?”

  He added a bone button and a bit of amber enclosing a drop of wizard’s blood that was the color of tarnished silver. He paused then, gazing at the fragment of amber, and wondering at the slow seep of time out of the tree that had enclosed and frozen a pearl of wizard’s blood…and how time, too, had slowed within that magic drop of blood so that it had waited for the tear of amber to slowly weep around it.

  “Time passes,” Nyx Ro said, “in as many overlapping lengths as notes in a song.”

  He thought of Tiel then, caught in such a motionless pool of time. Dried, crumbled lily petals fluttered from his fingers down into the jar; he almost saw her there, a tiny young woman with petals in her hair and a lizard’s scale beside her for a pool. But it was only an odd reflection in the glass.

  “Could I walk through this Ring to Tiel?”

  “She doesn’t exist in any time you or I know. She is like a thought in the mind of the Gold King. You would never reach her through this Ring. You might see her reflected off a moment of time, like an image in a mirror, but only that.”

  He shook pale fragrant powder of the hoof of the extinct blue horse into the jar, and, finally, black dust from the obsidian deserts in the barren southern regions of Hunter Hold, which had been formed out of layer upon layer of volcanic fires.

  “Breathe into it,” Nyx said. Corleu leaned over the jar; gold, obsidian, petals, swirled in his breath; the round glass misted. “Now pick up the fire.”

  He reached for the fingernail of frozen silver fire that lay like a dead leaf on a silver plate. Quiescent as it was, it burned his fingers slightly, though with heat or cold he wasn’t sure.

  “The only thing complex about building this Ring is gathering the materials for it. That alone could take a lifetime. Sorcerers have died squabbling over a drop of spell-steeped blood in amber. I was fortunate: I took mine from Chrysom’s tower, though it took me years to recognize it for what it was. Put the jar there on the floor, in that silver circle. When you drop the flame into it, step back quickly, or you will become part of the Ring. Which may be an interesting fate itself, but you probably would not appreciate it.”

  The fire that kindled and exploded out of the bottle licked the rafters: a flowing, changing l
oop of pure silver. It gave little more warmth than something held for a long time in a closed hand. Corleu could have stepped through it easily, though at this point, he would only have travelled as far as Nyx’s untidy table.

  As he watched, mute with wonder, night dropped like a filmy eyelid down over the center of the circle. He could no longer see Nyx; she stood somewhere on the other side of darkness.

  “It is complete.”

  He drew breath, watching silver fall like water through the air, cast its glow on stone and wood and the threadbare velvet on a chair. Nyx stepped from behind it; for a moment her eyes were the same color as the falling silver.

  “Good,” she said, with as much expression, Corleu thought, as if he had just made a broom handle. “Now, Corleu, you must envision where you are going, on the other side of this door. Think of the place in the field you stood in, long ago, where people left weavings, or fine thread for the Blind Lady to weave into their good fortune. It will be a silent place, bare now, stripped by winter, an odd lonely place where no one ever comes except those of us who felt her presence once. To others it’s only a little ring of trees, and an old stone, once flat, but hollowed slowly through centuries by the weight of those gifts, by the touch of hands. You may have to move the wild grasses to see the stone. When you see it you will know. And in that place you will summon the Blind Lady. You will summon. You will summon… Go now…”

  He stepped forward into the Ring, and remembered, too late, what he had forgotten. “I have no gift!” he cried. Nyx Ro’s words followed him through time.

  “Offer her your eyes.”

  He stepped onto a field he had harvested.

  The clouds hung heavy over it; he smelled snow in the air. The trees lining the edge of the field seemed to lift the cloud away from the earth with their bare branches. A crow, picking among the ice-rimed furrows, eyed him and startled away. In the distance, between gentle slopes of field, he saw the prosperous stone farmhouse, chimneys smoking, animals secured, gates shut. In late summer, the Wayfolk camped under the grove of trees behind the house. He could have walked there, found their wagon ruts, traces of their nightly fires. Then memory pulled his eyes to the crest of a hill a couple of fields away. The hill was plowed but for a small tangle of trees, brambles, underbrush on the top. The snowy furrows circled away from the little wood, ring after ring spiralling down from the top of the hill until it sloped away into other fields. Corleu began walking toward it.