Cygnet Page 8

  In his memory the place was green, sun-soaked, still as a stone with heavy, late summer heat. He had gone in there years ago, looking for something. Someone? Tiel, maybe, though that long, ago it would never have been her, luring him in there. Perhaps it had only been the thought of a few moments in the shade that took him away from his work, to fight through berry brambles and wild roses, long grasses, vines hanging from the trees in walls of leaves, encircling the place. The trees, he noticed then, grew in a circle.

  He had been surprised at the silence, he remembered. He had stood there a long time without realizing time was passing, for it seemed that in the next moment whoever or whatever he had sought, or had summoned him, seemed about to move, to speak. But always in the next moment, never now… He heard his name shouted, in a world so far away the voice was like an insect’s. And then he realized there were no insects in that hot, sweet-smelling place; there were no birds. Nothing rustled, nothing made a sound…

  Turning in sudden panic, he had tripped over something half buried in the grass.

  Now, the vines and brambles were a brown weave that hid nothing. They did not give way easily, even then; he had to fight his way among them, old as they were, and so closely knit that rose twined with berry or grape indiscriminately. Emerging finally into the ring, he was battle-scarred, almost warm. A light, icy snow began to fall, whispering softly against the branches, the first noise he had ever heard in that place.

  He went to the center of the circle. He found what he had tripped over so long ago, and he knelt down to uncover it, pulling the frozen weeds and grasses from it until he could see it: a dark round stone, slightly hollowed in the center, where over the centuries, gifts laid there had gradually worn away the stone.

  You will summon, Nyx had said. You will summon…

  “But how?” he whispered. “I have no gift.”

  Offer her your eyes…

  Then he remembered, from so many past years that it seemed another life: a dozen grubby children clinging to one another, hand to hand in a circle spinning faster and faster around someone—Tiel?—who had covered her eyes with her hands, and was herself spinning dizzily as they chanted at the tops of their voices:

  Lady come, lady come,

  Find my eyes, find my eyes,

  Circle, circle…the blind can see!

  Breathless, still kneeling among the weeds, he put his hand on the stone. He heard the rhyme he spoke as if the grass had spoken it, or the snow, or the distant voices of children:

  In a wooden ring

  Find a stone circle…

  Stone, trees, fields vanished in a fiery blaze of summer night. He saw her: the Blind Lady, who wore the Ring of Time and saw out of the eyes on the Peacock’s tail. The Peacock’s tail was a spray of white fire against the dark; its head was turned toward the Blind Lady, its visible eye was sapphire. The Lady herself had hair the color of the moon; strands of starlight wove from the Ring on her hand. She was beautiful and terrible, with her blind face and the constantly weaving strands of light between her fingers. Her head moving slightly from side to side, she seemed to search a darkness she could not see.

  “Who summons me?”

  The voice came from the stars, but the footsteps breaking the icy grass were behind Corleu. He turned on his knees, startled out of his vision, falling back against the stone. The face he saw struck him dumb.

  It was an old woman’s strong, fleshy, lumpy face. Her eyelids had sunk over her eyes; her face itself seemed to peer from side to side as if to smell Corleu or hear his breathing. She wore layers of old wool and linen—skirts and shifts and shirts, shawls and aprons of all colors, all faded, dirty. Frayed threads hung from every hem and sleeve, every seam, cuff and collar. She was big, shapeless, her hands gnarled and swollen with age. As she listened for answer, she gathered threads absently from a frayed vest, began to pull them, weave them. On one forefinger she wore a tarnished silver ring.

  “Who summons?” she demanded again; her voice was deep, brusque. Her shoes, Corleu saw, were sewn of peacock feathers.

  He found his voice finally. “I summoned you.” He shifted hastily out of her way, when it seemed she would walk over him or through him. She kicked at the ground until she found the stone. She settled herself down on it with a sigh, and felt at her threads again.

  “Corleu. Of the Wayfolk.”

  His heart hammered. He stared at the frail, colored threads between her twisting fingers; he wanted to touch her hands, beg her to be gentle.

  “Well?” she said. “You summoned.”

  “I came—I—The Gold King sent me to you.”

  Her pale, shaggy brows lifted; her sunken eyelids twitched, trying to open. “He! Why?”

  “I must find something for him, he said. He doesn’t know where it is; he said you might. He said offer you what’s on a peacock feather and you might help me.”

  She dropped her threads, groped toward him. “Let me feel you. For all I know of humans, you’re all made of thread or light.” Her hands roved over his hair, bumped against his cheekbone, his jaw. He felt the silver ring against his throat, cold or hot, like the silver fire he had dropped into the jar. “No, flesh and blood as ever. You came here once before, I remember.”

  “Yes.”

  “No one comes here. They used to, they brought me gifts to turn my weaving their way. Sometimes they moved me. They praised me, they called me beautiful.” He felt her shake with silent laughter. “Was I or was I? I never knew. Why did you come here so long ago?”

  “I don’t know why. I thought the tree ring hid a secret. I wanted to know what. I was of that age, when everything seems to say something, even an old stone.”

  “And did it speak?”

  “Nothing spoke. The silence spoke. I ran.” The sleet had turned to snow, drifting down in another ageless silence. “I never forgot the sound of this place.”

  “It was me you heard, weaving.”

  “Likely.”

  “And you came back and brought me a gift. I can’t see you, but that King had his eye on you. Well, where is it?”

  “What?”

  “My peacock feather.”

  He drew breath, his eyes flickering across the tangled ring around him. He caught one of her gnarled hands before it went back to its endless work. He held her fingers lightly against his eyes.

  A quick wind shivered through the bare trees. “So…the King found a way to make you desperate, did he? Something you want badly enough to give me sight?”

  “Yes,” he said, and felt the snow slide like an icy sweat down his face.

  “Tell me what the King seeks.”

  “What the Cygnet is hiding.”

  He heard her breath, a harsh, wordless sound. Her fingers twitched, as if to weave his eyelashes. “Yes… Oh, yes. He’s been thinking, in that little black house of his. He’s been thinking… And he reached out and trapped you to do his bidding. You’re trapped like him, like we all, or you’d be running like a hare by now back into the daylight.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “No.” He shifted, murmuring with despair, and her hand tightened across his eyes. “Hush, now, let me think. It wouldn’t be lying around like a pebble, would it? Would it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s hidden too well even for my seeing eyes. But I hear thoughts and whispers along my threads now and then, from those who have guarded it through the centuries. Let me remember them… There’s a secret within a secret… A web. There’s a secret at the center of a web. Above that web the Cygnet flies night and day.”

  “A web—”

  “That’s as it comes to me, in broken words and memories. A web in darkness. It’s not there, what you seek.”

  “Not—”

  “No.”

  “Then what—”

  “The secret of where to look is there.”

  “A web under the Cygnet,” he repeated, bewildered, reaching toward her hand so he could see.

  “Not yet, not y
et, these are my eyes still.”

  “But you must tell more! I can’t go looking at every spider web spun under the Cygnet’s stars. You must know something more, something clear—”

  “It’s from my eyes that small thing is hidden. Not only from innocent Wayfolk eyes, but from such as fought the Cygnet. It’s layered in secrets like an onion, not like a hazelnut you can crack with one blow. However”—she pulled his head back against her knee, her fingers weaving in his hair—“if you’re this desperate, you may want to ask the Dancer. She sees into dreams, she may have seen more than I. Yes. Wake the Dancer at the top of the World. Offer fire to her Fire Bear and it will leave you alone. She may know. It’s all I can give now, but when you find what the Gold King seeks, then none of us will refuse you. Whatever your Wayfolk heart desires…or whatever heart you have by then. Find my eyes, find my eyes… The blind can see.”

  Six

  SCREAMING, he fell into a room full of mirrors.

  Raising his head, gathering breath again with his throat raw from his last cry, he opened his eyes and saw, all around him, within mirrors ancient and ornate, framed plainly in wood or silver, oval, square, diamond, hexagonal, vast mirrors too heavy to lift propped against the wall with smaller mirrors strewn against them: crouching figures in torn silk and muddy leather lifting thorn-scarred faces, staring with black, empty eyes. For a moment he did not recognize himself.

  The breath left him in a long, shaking sigh, with a sound to it like an unshaped word. He got to his feet; so did his reflections. He had an eerie feeling that even at his back his reflection was gazing at him. As he turned to look, all the images vanished.

  He stood like a ghost in a room full of mirrors that took no notice of him.

  “I’m dead,” he said, startled. He heard Nyx Ro calling his name. Her voice sounded sharp, bewildered. He looked around for a door, saw only mirrors crowding the walls, a few hanging bannerlike from the ceiling, their faces blank as the Delta sky. He touched one; he could not even cast a shadow.

  In sudden panic, he spoke Nyx Ro’s name.

  She appeared in one of the ornate mirrors. “I couldn’t find you,” she said tightly. “I heard you scream. I couldn’t find you.”

  “I can’t find a door.” He turned again, searching, and caught his breath at the sight of Nyx multiplied, in threadbare blue velvet, her face waxen, a smudge of ash across one cheekbone. “I can’t see myself at all. Only you.”

  “I can only see you,” she said. Her arms were folded tightly; she was frowning, at once disturbed and curious. “I thought I knew every room in this house. Why didn’t you come back through the Ring?”

  “I did,” he said tersely.

  Her eyes widened. She said, “Corleu. Can you touch my hand?” She held it out to him; his fingers were stopped by cold glass.

  “Am I some place out of time? Is that why I can’t see myself? Should I break a mirror?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Mirrors hold your image; they should be treated with care.”

  “These don’t. They’re all ignoring me. I saw myself in all of them, and then I vanished, as if an eye blinked somewhere, or they stopped thinking of me.”

  For a moment, even she stopped thinking of him. “How strange,” she breathed. “How strange… A secret room within a house full of a thousand secrets. I wonder what it sees when no one is here?”

  “If you wait long enough, no one will be here, and then you can find out, likely.”

  She held out her hand again. “I don’t know why you’re still standing there complaining. One of me is real. Find me.”

  He circled the room, touched her glassy hand in every glass. Finally, in a small mirror ringed in tarnished silver, he felt her hand close on his. He stepped forward. The mirror widened into a ring of motionless, icy fire. He stepped through it into her workroom.

  The ring dwindled swiftly until there was nothing left of it but a tiny circle of silver that dropped back into the round glass jar. Nyx left it sitting within the circle painted on the floor. She looked for chairs; they had all gone elsewhere. Impatiently, she pulled a couple out of the floorboards, great, shapeless things smelling like mushrooms from the cellar. Corleu sat down gratefully; his eyes closed.

  He was on his feet in an instant, pulling away from a glimpse of the Ring he had fallen into. Nyx watched him dispassionately.

  “Why did you scream? Did she try to harm you?”

  “No.” He wheeled at her abruptly. “You tricked me. I had nothing to give her but my eyes.”

  She shrugged. “It worked, didn’t it? What did she give you in return?”

  “Not much.”

  “Did you tell her what you were looking for? Did she recognize it? As something valuable? Something of power?”

  “She recognized it, yes. A toad in a hole would recognize it.”

  “But she didn’t—”

  “No.”

  “Did she help at all? Was she angry with you? Did she not want you to find it?”

  “Oh, she does want me to find it.” He found a wall in front of him and paced back. “She does.”

  “Did she make any suggestions?” Nyx asked patiently.

  “She said there is a web…a secret at the center of the web. The Cygnet flies over it day and night.”

  “And that’s where it is?”

  “No. That’s where the secret of finding this thing is.”

  “A web…” She was silent a little, her brows puckered, a fingernail between her teeth. He looked at her in the candlelight, Lauro Ro’s daughter, with her cold, curious eyes that, for all their look into power, had never glimpsed what there was to fear.

  “It’s not just story,” he said harshly. Her eyes rose to his face.

  “I guessed that much.”

  “If I give the Gold King what he wants, he won’t just vanish back into words. Nor will she. Likely that’s where the stories will end, because now they wear them like rags and tatters, but they’ll grow too big, too powerful for us to keep them trapped in words.”

  She was gazing at him, motionless. “Are you warning me?”

  “You don’t know what it is I’m trying to find. I do.”

  “Well, Corleu, what use is there fretting until I do know? Are you going to stop looking for it? Leave your Tiel sitting there forever in a dream?” He was silent, trapped. “That’s why I want this thing. I can use it against them, if need be. Was that all she said? A web?”

  “She said to ask the Dancer.”

  She was still then, her eyes narrowed; he stood tense, waiting for her to catch a glimpse of what he sought. But she said only, “Sit down. Tell me a story, of Corleu and the Blind Lady. Maybe then you won’t be afraid of the dark.”

  He sat. He dropped his face in his hands. “She was like…she was like this house. Old, rambling, crazed, untidy, like a beggar woman you might see at a crossroads, mumbling to herself, her fingers moving always, weaving, weaving… At the end, she made me look at her weaving. She threads even the stars into it. I saw the Ring of Time she makes, where all the threads there are flow together and you can’t see one life, one star, from another, and outside that Ring there is nothing.” He raised his head. “That’s the Ring I fell through. I thought I would fall into that nothing.”

  She mused over that, twisting a pearl button. “Yet even she is trapped, Corleu. Even she. And what you saw is only another story, of the Weaver of Withy Hold. The Cygnet holds her powerless.”

  “And even that is only another story.”

  “Well, story or no, the thing you are looking for is real enough. Isn’t it?”

  “Likely,” he said after a moment.

  “So you move from tale to tale to get it.” She studied the pearl, as if the light shifting across it wove a pattern. “A web…beneath the Cygnet flying day and night. Why does that tease my memories? Something I read when I was little, something I saw…”

  “In your books, maybe.”

  “Then again, maybe I dreamed it.” She
drew herself up. “You’d do best to go ask the Dancer.”

  “I’d sooner find the web than wake the Dancer.”

  “Why?” she asked, surprised. “All the Dancer does is dream, beneath the ice.”

  “I’ll have to carry fire to face the Fire Bear. And I’d sooner find the web than travel to the top of the world and wake someone who dreams sometimes like what appears in your fires.”

  “You find the web, then,” she said, turning. “Meanwhile, I’ll find what fire you must take to the Fire Bear.”

  “I’m not going there.”

  “You’ll go.”

  “I won’t need to.”

  “You’ll go,” she said, and there was a flicker of something deep in her eyes, another glimpse into his seeking. “That’s what they want.”

  Wordless, he watched her cross the room. She turned at the door. “There’s food in the kitchen. I baked bread. Someone will come to the door tonight. My doorkeepers will give him what he has come for. If you stay in here, you may see one or two of them. Don’t look directly at them; they take offense. Good night.”

  The kitchen, he had discovered, never moved. It could be found at the bottom of some stone steps, which sometimes moved, but never far from what they were attached to. Corleu carried books down with him, roamed through them for a web as he ate fresh bread and goat cheese and cold smoked river trout. The only web he found was cobweb. Wandering upstairs hours later for more books, he was startled by voices. Something vague and bulky in the shadows that looked like a misshapen hand or a forked root turned a pale eye at him and hissed. He stopped staring hastily, built up the fire and settled beside it with more books.