Kingfisher Read online

  He was a mystery. She would solve him, she swore, if every other mystery clinging like the old year’s dead wet leaves to the Kingfisher Inn eluded her. This mystery was her father. He had loved her mother once. They had made her, Carrie, with his dark hair, his eyes, and her mother’s urge to run.

  “Well, I’m not,” she whispered tersely to the boxes she pulled out of closets, dragging their frayed lacework of cobwebs adorned with desiccated sow bugs into light. “I’m not running yet.”

  She opened drawers, photo albums, tool chests, shoeboxes full of letters, rusty tackle boxes, suitcases that had been in the dark since her mother left. Her mother, who had fled as far south as she could go without leaving Wyvernhold, was back home from her brief visit north, and no help whatsoever when Carrie called her.

  “Why did I leave your father?” she repeated incredulously. “If you’re asking that question after all these years, then you already know the answer. Why are you still up there? Move down here, where it’s warm and beautiful. We’ll have fun together.”

  Zed, whom she’d hardly seen in a couple of days, appeared one morning as a step across the threshold of the farmhouse, making her straighten, turn eagerly toward the sound. After another step or two, she recognized him and drooped a little over the box of photos she had pulled out from under Merle’s bed.

  Zed himself appeared finally, walking carefully, tentatively through the old parlor, around piles of clothes, scattered papers, yawning chests and cases, their contents strewn across the floorboards like tidal debris after a tempest.

  She blinked at it, startled at the scale of her devastation.

  “He won’t let me talk to him,” she explained tightly. “He won’t let me ask. So I’m looking for clues.”

  “Find anything?” he inquired with caution.

  “No.”

  He thought a moment. “Maybe I could ask? He talks to me now and then. I think he likes me. I’ll buy the wolf a beer and tell him you’re—ah—worried?”

  She sighed. “Tell him I miss him, and I don’t understand a word he’s not saying.” She stared at the hillock of photos she had pulled out of the box, saw herself, gap-toothed and curly-haired, laughing up at her father. “I’m missing something,” she said slowly, frowning at the past.

  “What?”

  “Something. I’m not seeing it. Something’s under my nose . . .” She looked up at Zed again, saw his patient, mystified expression. She got to her feet finally. “Do you want some coffee? I think I made some. Maybe I didn’t.”

  He smiled, shook his head. “I can help you with this later. If you can tell me what you’re looking for. I’m working at the co-op this morning. You?”

  “Prep and lunch.”

  “I’ll come to the Kingfisher after work; maybe I’ll run into Merle.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said grimly.

  She took a question along with Hal Fisher’s daily note to the one other person she knew who could read minds, and whose behavior was also generally incomprehensible.

  “My father turned into a wolf a couple of nights ago and howled at me,” she told Lilith as she handed over the note. “Did you know he could do that?”

  Lilith stood stock-still in front of her writing desk, staring at Carrie through the half lenses balanced on the end of her nose.

  “Why did he do that?” she asked slowly. “What did you say to him? You’re not leaving us, are you?”

  Carrie swallowed what felt like a spoonful of dust. “You did know,” she whispered.

  Lilith looked at the envelope in her hand, fanned her face with it. “Well. Not that exactly. I’ve never seen him do that. But—”

  “But you’re not surprised.” Her voice shook. “What exactly is he?”

  “Ask him.”

  Carrie flung up her hands. “How? He won’t let me. Nobody answers questions around here! Nobody!”

  Lilith tried; Carrie saw the impulse in her eyes. But when she opened her mouth, nothing came out. She closed her mouth, and a floodtide of pain, sorrow, hopelessness broke across her face, deepening the fine lines on it and leaving a sheen of unshed tears in her eyes.

  Carrie put the back of her hand against her mouth, her own eyes filling. “I’m sorry,” she breathed, without knowing for what. “I’m sorry.”

  “Carrie.” Lilith paused, swallowed. “Whatever you said—whatever you did—to make Merle shape the wolf, listen to him. Listen to that howling. He’s trying—”

  “I know. I know. But I don’t know why.” She blinked back tears, added, her voice a harsh husk of itself, “I don’t understand wolf.”

  “You understand fear. You understand beware.”

  “But of what?” she asked helplessly, and was unsurprised when Lilith did not answer.

  She saw Zed alone at the bar when she went through the swinging doors. She caught a glimpse of Merle later, when she was about to leave, alone again in the late-afternoon crowd, his pale eyes intent, unblinking, on her face. She blinked, surprised, and he was gone again, like shadow melting into shadow.

  He was talking to her, she realized then; he had her attention; he was telling her something.

  What?

  He didn’t have much, she thought, for a man who had lived in the same house at least since Carrie was born. Where were the elegant suits he had worn in the old photographs of the Kingfisher Inn during its shining years? Where were the silk ties, the expensive shoes? Locked away somewhere in the past, she guessed, in the ghost of the old inn. What he bothered to keep in drawers was frayed, worn. There was no word to express the state of his socks. She did find a few things her mother had given him in the years when she still liked him: beads for his hair, a gold earring, a piece of butter-colored amber on a leather tie.

  All signs of his previous life he had left elsewhere; only the Merle that Carrie thought she knew lived in that house with her.

  But I don’t really know you at all, she told him, and kept looking.

  She found the photo in a cardboard box of papers shoved into a corner of his bedroom closet. It was buried under old check stubs and statements from the years when he actually kept a bank account, tax forms from when he actually had jobs, outdated receipts that should have been tossed long ago. A handful of photos lay at the bottom: herself as a toddler on Merle’s shoulders, her parents in their wedding finery, her mother, very young, with long, wild hair and feathers hanging from her earlobes; she was standing beside one of the winding tidal streams, lifting her skirt above her muddy boots as she watched the water.

  The final photo startled her: Hal Fisher and Merle in all their glory, both in tuxes beneath the enormous chandelier with every light in it ablaze, and the reception room around them filled with women in heels and dark lipstick, men in suits and ties with jeweled pins. Hal and Merle were both smiling. It might have been opening night at the Kingfisher Inn as they welcomed the first guests. Behind them, a chef stood at the open doors of the huge dining hall, all its tables bright with cutlery, glassware, candles, and vases full of roses from the old gardens. The chef wore an old-fashioned cream-puff hat, black stovepipe pants; he, too, was smiling. Carrie, studying his smile, felt her skin constrict. She peered more closely at him. The warm, wide-set eyes, the Greek athlete’s profile looked oddly, disturbingly familiar.

  Todd Stillwater’s father, it had to be. He must have done something so unspeakably wicked that every mention of that name, his history at the Kingfisher Inn, was forbidden even unto the unborn generations. She crouched over the photo for a long time, gazing at the three of them: Hal, Merle, the chef. Finally, the idea floating around in her head became coherent.

  No way could she ask Hal. Her father refused to talk.

  Maybe Stillwater would.

  She took the photo with her when she drove to his restaurant on her day off. She went in midafternoon, in the calmer hours between lunch a
nd dinner. No wolf chased the pickup through the streets, nor did Merle fling himself between her and Stillwater’s name on the door. Why? she wondered. Where was he, if he felt so strongly about protecting her from some horribly lurking menace? She slammed the truck door a little crossly, climbed the worn marble steps, and opened the door to find Todd Stillwater sitting at the tiny bar, surrounded by paperwork.

  “We open at seven for dinner,” he said absently, without turning around. Carrie, surprised to find such cool elegance in the genial patchwork of downtown Chimera Bay, looked curiously at the black linens, the red cut-crystal vases, the thick marble walls of the early bank that stood sentinel against sound from the busy highway.

  “Pretty,” she said, and he turned.

  “Carrie,” he said, smiling, and stood up. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “Is this a good time?”

  “Perfect.”

  In the light of day rather than streetlamps, so was he, she thought dazedly. His black tie was loosened around his unbuttoned collar, his sleeves rolled halfway up forearms lightly furred with gold against a darker gold that, her fingers anticipated, would be warm and textured to the touch. She swallowed, wondering why she had never noticed forearms before, or the amazing bones of the wrist.

  “I just came to talk,” she said uncertainly.

  “Good idea. I’m just going over accounts, nothing that can’t wait.” He rose, pulled out a couple of chairs at one of the tables beside the windows. “Sit down. Or would you like to see the kitchen? Sage is out shopping; she should be back anytime now to help me plan the dinner menu. Much as it ever gets planned. I’m impulsive, like you with your bites. You’d be welcome to stay for that. In fact, it might—”

  “I came to ask a question,” she interrupted.

  “What’s that?” he asked promptly, and she sat down awkwardly, with a thump, laying the envelope on the cloth between them. He sat, too, looking at it expectantly. “One of your recipes?”

  She shook her head and drew out the photo.

  He sat silently a moment, gazing at it. His brows peaked; he bent closer to it suddenly. “Is that—is that Hal Fisher? In a tux? Wow. Where— Wait. Is that— That’s the chandelier in the Kingfisher bar.”

  “It’s the old hotel.” She tapped Merle’s smiling face. “That’s my father.”

  “I’m damned.”

  Her finger shifted to the face under the cream-puff hat. “That looks,” she said steadily, “like you.”

  He picked up the photo wordlessly, angling the old black and white to deflect the light from the window. “It does,” he breathed. “It could be me.” He dropped it onto the table, stared at her. “I had no idea.”

  “No idea what? Is that your father?”

  “I have no idea,” he said, his eyes, wide and startled, meeting hers, and she felt the sudden rush of blood from her neck to her hairline.

  “Oh.”

  “No, it’s okay—”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “It’s just that—”

  “I only just found the photo hidden away in my father’s closet. I’d never seen it before. And the chef—he looks so—”

  “Yes, he does.” He brooded over the photo silently while Carrie, her face still burning, watched him. Thoughts whirled in her head; she caught at them, trying to make sense of them. If Todd Stillwater didn’t know his father—if that chef was his father—then whatever horrors he had inflicted on the Kingfisher Inn resonated in his name—in his son’s name—but had nothing to do—

  “But had nothing to do with you,” she whispered. He glanced at her, his eyes, silvery gray as a blade, tarnished with thoughts, memories.

  “My mother fled from my father as soon as she could after I was born. She took me south to Severluna. I always thought my name—Stillwater—was her maiden name. But maybe not.” He touched the photo lightly, near the chef’s face. “That might—that might explain— It must have been something he did—”

  “Yes.”

  “The tensions I’ve felt around that place—”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what he might have done? Anything at all?”

  She sagged against the table, sighing deeply. “How could I? No one ever answers any of my questions. I was hoping that you knew what happened. Why everything fell apart at the Kingfisher Inn, why Hal and Lilith stopped speaking, why Ella blames somebody with your name for everything, but she draws in small and tight like a snail whenever I ask.”

  His eyes dropped; he studied the photo again, while she studied his eyelashes, the exact color of his hair, the pale matte brown of a walnut shell, against the warmer shade of his face. Where does he find that sun around here? she wondered. He was gazing back at her suddenly, and she felt the fire across her face again, but not even that could make her look away.

  He seemed oblivious; he only said, “I’m glad you brought this; it explains a lot. I had no idea what I was asking the other night. I don’t want to cause worse feelings by taking you away from the Kingfisher. Maybe we could work something out part-time? Let’s think about that. No decisions yet. But while I’ve got you here, let me show you what I do. I have some bites left over from lunch you might be interested in. Can I bring you a taste?”

  “Sure,” she said dazedly.

  “I don’t use menus, but I have written down a few of my recipes. Let me bring those, too; they’ll give you an idea . . .”

  He vanished into the old bank vault. She waited thoughtlessly, amazed at the notion of snacking on the ideas of the best cook in the county. He returned with one arm lined with small plates, papers under the other arm. He let the papers splash on the table, and arranged the little plates like offerings around her. They held treasures, she saw with astonishment: geometric shapes of this and that layered on one another, unexpected colors catching the eye, orange topping cranberry topping an airy cloud of licorice, another of chocolate, none of it, she suspected, tasting anything like the fruit or meat or sweet that the colors might suggest. Stillwater pushed a plate toward her, a tower of diamonds and squares and circles of the thinnest, brightest colors topped with a coiled ruby garnish, like a designer hat.

  For an instant, as she raised her eyes from the lovely little makings to smile in amazement at him, she saw a stranger’s eyes gazing out of what suddenly seemed the mask of a beautiful face. Tree-bark dark, they were, flecked with gold and luminous with an ancient light that had long since faded from the world she thought she knew.

  He lifted the plate.

  “Eat.”

  PART TWO

  WYVERNBOURNE

  7

  In Severluna, the youngest son of King Arden IX tied on his apron deep beneath the intersection of Severen Street and Calluna Way, and edged behind the water bar of the ancient cave. The apron was striped blue and green, the colors of water and moss, of the river goddess Calluna, from whose warm, steamy, smelly fountainhead within the stones behind the prince, the infirm, the depressed, and the curious had come for millennia to drink.

  Prince Daimon picked up the sacred water pitcher, toasted the comely ticket-taker who sat on a stool at the cave entrance. He began to fill the little blue and green paper cups lined along the bar. The water, at least, was free. The god Severen, whose river began in the great, jagged snowy peaks to the east and crossed the land to merge with the Calluna and the bay, was worshipped for the precious metals he carried in his waters. His shrines were everywhere, even there at the holy birthplace of the goddess. His gold, silver, and copper changed hands upstairs at the ticket window, the coffee bar, and the ice-cream bar whose specialty was blueberry-pistachio in honor of the goddess. Below, near the entrance to the sanctum, there was the small prayer pool in which pleas to the goddess were accompanied by gifts of coins and the occasional semiprecious stone. Despite the heat, the strong mineral odors, the depths to which visitors must de
scend seeking the goddess in her underworld beneath the streets, the domed and tiled antechamber seldom stayed quiet long.

  Raised voices on the stairs, a gabbling echo of high-pitched bird cries, indicated a busload of young schoolchildren gamboling down the steps. Daimon brought up more cups from underneath the bar as the first of them exploded into view. A couple of tour guides from the upper regions divided them expertly, took one group through the jagged stone opening into the ruins of antiquity around the pool, while the others tasted the holy waters in the cups. The children made the usual gagging noises after a sip of warm liquid laced with lithium salts. Daimon showed them the spittoon-shaped vessel in which to pour the dregs or spit the unswallowed mouthful, while their gimlet-eyed chaperons watched.

  “Skylar, either swallow or spit into the pot—don’t you dare spit that at Sondra.”

  Finally, the second group snaked through the narrow opening; for a moment, there was peace under the dome.

  Daimon took a mop to some spilled water on the mosaic floor, which had been painstakingly repaired a century earlier after the streets had been laid down above the river, and somebody got around to wondering where the goddess’s cave had gone. One of the chaperons, who had lingered in the quiet, took a second look at the young man behind the water bar.

  “Prince Daimon!” she blurted. “What are you doing down here?”

  “Serving the goddess,” he answered, and wrung the mop sponge into the spittoon. He recognized the woman: Lady Clarice Hulte, whose elderly husband, Sir Lidian Hulte, was one of the king’s knights. Her daughter, a plump, prim little girl with pigtails, had dumped her water into the hair of an obnoxious boy scrabbling for coins in the prayer pool, an action which the goddess, who had issues with the greedy Severen, would surely have approved.

  Lady Clarice, whose pale, protuberant eyes her daughter had inherited, transferred her stare to the mop handle. “You’re a noble of the realm, not a housemaid.”