The Cygnet And The Firebird Part 1

The Cygnet and the Firebird.

Patricia McKillip.

One.

Meguet Vervaine stood at the threshold of Chrysom's black tower, swans flying at her back and shoulder and wrists, swans soaring out of her hands. She had stood so for hours. Dressed in black silk with the Cygnet of Ro Holding spanning silver moons on mantle and tunic, she held the ancient broadsword of Moro Ro, unsheathed, tip to the floor, guarding against stray goose and cottage child's ball and wandering b.u.t.terfly, for within the broad, circular hall the councils from the four Holds had gathered to discuss their differences under the sign of the Cygnet and the formidable eye of Lauro Ro. In Moro Ro's day, the threshold guards would have faced both chamber and yard, prepared for violence from any direction, not least from the volatile councils. Meguet, armed by tradition rather than necessity, faced the hall to keep the sun out of her eyes. She had gathered her long com-silk hair into a severe braid; her eyes, green a shade lighter than the rose leaves that climbed the walls of the thousand-year-old tower, kept a calm and careful watch over the sometimes testy gathering.

Members of the oldest families in Ro Holding had made long, uncomfortable journeys to meet for the Holding Council in a place where, not many weeks before, Meguet had found herself raising the sword in her hands to battle for her life. She did not expect trouble; it had come and gone, but some part of her still tensed at shadows, at unexpected voices.

But only the councilors themselves had provided any excitement, and that was contingent upon such complexities as border taxes. There had been sharp debate earlier in the day between Hunter Hold and the Delta over mines in the border mountains, which had kept everyone awake on the ninth day of the long council. Now, the heavy late-afternoon light, the pigeons murmuring in the high windows, and Haf Berg's young, pompous, querulous voice maundering endlessly about sheep, threw a stupor over the hall. Meguet heard a snore from one of the back tables, She stifled a yawn. A sudden wind tugged at her light mantle. The air was a heady mix of brine and sunsteeped roses on the tower vines; it seemed to blow from everywhere at once: from past and future, from unexplored countries where wooden flowers opened on tree boughs to reveal strange, rich spices, and sheep the colors of autumn leaves wandered through the hills....

She felt herself drifting on the alien wind; a sound brought her back. The hall was silent; she wondered if she herself had made some noise. But it was only Haf Berg, sitting down at last, working his chair fussily across the flagstones. Lauro Ro watched him impa.s.sively. She sat at the crescent dais table, the Cygnet flying like a shadow through tarnished midnight stars on the vast, timeworn banner behind her. Her elegant face was unreadable, her wild dark hair so unnaturally tidy that Meguet suspected Nyx had bewitched it into submission. The Holder's heir sat at her right, wearing her enigmatic reputation with composure. Lauro Ro asked, "Will anyone challenge Haf Berg's painstaking examination of the problems of sheep pasturage on the south border of Berg Hold?" There was a daunting note in her voice. Only a pigeon challenged. Iris, on the Holder's left, consulted a paper and whispered to her mother.

Rush Yarr sat beside Iris, and Calyx beside Nyx. The two younger sisters, one fair and reclusive, the other dark and distinguished most of the time by extraordinary rumors, bore the intense scrutiny of the council members calmly. When Calyx spoke, pearls and doves did not fall from her lips. When Nyx spoke, toads did not fall, nor did lightning flash. But it had taken days for the antic.i.p.ation to fade.

The Holder spoke again. Linden Dacey of Withy Hold wished to bring up the matter of... Meguet tightened her shoulders, loosened them. A knot burned at the nape of her neck. She shifted slightly, easing some of her weight onto the blade she held. Across the room, the sorceress lifted her eyes at the flash of light.

They looked at one another a moment: cousins bound by blood and by secret, ancient ways. Memories gathered between them in the sunlit air. The swans on the hilt and etched blade in Meguet's hands had taken wing, Nyx had transformed herself from bog-witch into Cygnet's heir so recently that the sorcery in that hidden time and place beneath their feet must still be rebounding against the labyrinth stones. The sorceress's eyes, mist-pale in the light, seemed mildly speculative, as if, Meguet thought, she contemplated turning her cousin into a bat to liven up the tedium. Meguet, returning her attention to the proceedings, half-wished she would.

Linden Dacey had brought up the matter of a border feud between Withy Hold and the Delta. A river had shifted, or been shifted; the south border, defined for centuries, was suddenly uncertain ... The great Hold banners swayed and glittered above her head as she spoke; eyes caught at Meguet. The Blood Fox of the Delta prowled on starry pads; one eye glinted as if thought had flashed through its bright threads. The Gold King of Hunter Hold, the crowned and furious sun, glared out of his prison of night. Meguet, gazing back, felt a sudden chill, as if the face of spun gold thread were alive again and watching.

Someone from the Delta interrupted Linden Dacey. There was an interesting squabble on the council floor. Old Maharis Kell jerked mid-snore out of his nap. The Holder let it rage a moment, probably to wake everyone up. Then she cut through it in a voice that must have brought a few cottagers in the outer yard to a dead stop. Rush Yarr slid a hand over his mouth. Calyx, catching a tremor in the air, glanced at him. Rush, Meguet noted, had recovered his sense of humor-or discovered it, she wasn't sure which, for he had loved a sorceress who was never home for so long that likely even he didn't remember if he had one. Calyx had entered the doorless walls of the tower he had built around himself, and he found her inside his heart.

Linden Dacey, finished finally, yielded debate to the chastened Delta councilor. Gold streaked suddenly through a west window. Meguet eyed her shadow, guessed at the time. Another hour. if that... The Delta councilor bit a word in half and was still. Meguet raised her eyes. On the dais, no one breathed. Behind her the yard was soundless. Not a child's shout, a groaning wagon wheel, an iron blow from the smithy, disturbed the sudden, bewitched silence. Meguet stared at Nyx, wondering if, bored or daydreaming, she had thrown some spell over the council- But Nyx was entranced by the table, it seemed; she gazed at it, wide-eyed, motionless.

Someone had slowed time.

In the weird stillness, Meguet heard a footfall in the gra.s.s behind her. She whirled, her heart hammering, and brought the broadsword up in both hands. A man stood within the tower ring, staring up at the solitary black tower. The flaring arc of silver from the door as the broadsword cut through light startled him; Meguet felt his attention riveted suddenly on her. In the brilliant, late light, the stranger cast no shadow.

She drew a slow, noiseless breath, tightening her hold on the blade, trapped in a world out of time by his sorcery and by her peculiar heritage: the sleepless compulsion to guard what lay hidden within the tower's heart. The man's face, blurred by the dazzling light or perhaps by shifting time, was difficult to see. He seemed a profusion of colors: scarlet, gold, white, dust, blue, silver, that sorted itself out as he moved, crossing the yard with a strong, energetic stride.

Tall as she was, Meguet was forced to look up at him. His hair and skin were the same color as the dust on the hem of his red robe and his scuffed yellow boots, as if the parched gold-brown earth of some vast desert blown constantly through sun-drenched air had seeped into him. A strange winged animal embroidered in white wound itself in and out of the folds of cloth at his chest. The robe was belted with a curious, intricate weave of silver; silver glinted also at his wrists beneath his sleeves. A pouch of dark blue leather was slung over his shoulder; another, of dusty yellow silk, hung beside that. He stopped in front of Meguet's blade- She saw his face clearly then, as surprised by her as she was by him.

His eyes flicked over her shoulder at the motionless hall, then back to her. His broad, spare face was young yet under its weathering; his eyes, a light, glinting blue, were flecked with gold.

He said, amazed, "Who are you?"

Meguet, abandoned, with only a broadsword to protect the house against sorcery, found her voice finally. "You are in the house of the Holders of Ro Holding. If you have business with the Holder, present yourself to the Gatekeeper."

He glanced behind him at the little turret above the gate, where the Gatekeeper leaned idly against the stones, a motionless figure in household black watching something in the yard. "Him." He turned back. "He looks busy." He touched the blade at his chest with one finger, but did not turn it. He grunted softly, his eyes going back to Meguet. "This is real."

"Yes."

"Well, what do you expect to do with it? You can't keep me out of this tower with a sword. How can you have the power to see me through shifted time and still wave that under my nose? What are you? Are you a mage?"

"You have no business in this tower, you have no business in this house, and you have no business questioning me."

"I'm curious," he said. "You eluded my sorcery, and I had only thought to come and go so secretly no one would ever know."

"Why?" she asked sharply. "Why have you come here?"

"I want something from this tower."

She felt herself grow so still that no light trembled on the blade. "You may not enter."

"There are a thousand ways to enter a tower. Every block of solid stone is an open doorway. You can't guard every threshold."

All fear had left her voice; it was thin and absolute. "If I must, I can."

He was silent, puzzled again, at the certainty in her words. "It can't be the sword," he said at last. "The magic is in you, not that. True?" He caught the blade in one hand, so quickly that not the flick of an eyelash forewarned her. She wrenched at it; it might as well have been sunk in stone. "Not," he mused, "the sword, then." He loosed it as abruptly. She steadied herself, breathing audibly, while he studied her, his eyes quizzical, secret- "Perhaps," he said finally, "it's what you guard in this tower that gives you such power. Is that it?"

She raised the blade again, swallowing dryly. "No one may enter the tower at this time without permission from the Holder. Those are my instructions. You may not enter."

"But the Holder will never know," he said softly. "What I want has been hidden for centuries. No one knows it is here, and no one will miss it when it is gone. I will never return to Ro Holding. Let me pa.s.s. If all you're brandishing against me is a point of honor, you won't be dishonored. No one will ever know."

"I will," Meguet said succinctly. "And so will you. Honor is a word you would not bother to toss at me, if it meant nothing to you. You may not enter."

He was silent again, so still he might have put himself under his own mysterious spell. His eyes had narrowed; light or memory flashed through them. "What made you time or honor's guardian?" he breathed. "You have seen a few of its back roads, its crooked lanes and alleyways. Haven't you. But you are not a mage- Or are you?" She did not answer. He stepped closer, she did not move. He stepped so close that the blade snagged the golden eye of the winged beast across his chest. He said, "If you do not let me enter, I will turn every rose on this tower into flame."

"Then you will burn what you have come for."

He moved closer. The blade turned a little in her hands as if the animal had shifted under it, and she felt me sweat break out on her face.

"I will seal every door and window in this tower, and turn it into a tomb for those you guard."

"It is already a tomb." Her voice shook. He stepped so close the blade slid ghostlike into him. Her shoulders burned at the sudden weight, but she held the blade steady under his expressionless gaze.

"If you do not let me enter, I will kill you."

"Then," she said, as sweat and light burned into her eyes, and the clawed, airy animal whipped beneath the blade like a desperate thing, "one of us will die."

He stepped back then, as easily as if the great sword were made of smoke. The animal turned a smoldering eye at her and subsided into the cloth. The blade trembled in her hands; still she did not lower it. The mage's face changed; the expression on it startled her.

"You deserve better than a doorway," he said abruptly. "What kind of upside-down house is this where no power but honor is pitted against the likes of me? You can't stop me. You can barely hold that sword. It is shaking in your hands- It is so heavy it weighs like stone, it drags you down. It is heavier than old age, heavier than grief. It falls like the setting sun, slowly, slowly. Watch it fall. Watch the tiny flame of light on its tip shift, move down the blade toward your hands. Watch it. The light trembles among the silver swan wings. What is your name?"

"Meguet Vervaine."

"Is it night or day?"

"I do not know."

"Are you awake or dreaming?"

"I do not know."

"Are you a mage?"

"No."

"Have you a mage's powers?"

"No."

"How do you have the power to see and move through shifted time?"

"I have no power."

"Then who gives you power?"

"No one."

"You have power. You are standing here talking to me when no one else in this house can move."

"I have no power."

"What gives you power?"

"Nothing."

"You are guarding something from me as steadfastly as you guard this door. I will enter this tower. Do you have the power to stop me?"

"You may not enter."

"Do you have the power to stop me?"

Meguet was silent. Wind brushed her face, a cool breeze smelling of twilight. For a moment she stared senselessly at what she saw: the inner yard, the towers, the outer yard through the arches, where cottagers' children flung a ball back and forth, and the Gatekeeper on the ground, his back to her, opened the gate to a couple of riders. Then she looked down at her hands. They were locked so fiercely, so protectively around the hilt of Moro Ro's sword that her fingers ached, loosening. The smell of roses teased her memory. I fell asleep, she thought surprisedly. / had a dream....

Then the Holder's voice snapped across the chamber. "Meguet!"

She turned, startled. The sword slipped out of her hold, rang against the stones like a challenge, and she saw beside it the rose that had flung itself off the outer wall into the room to lie burning in her shadow. She dragged her eyes away from it to the dais.

Nyx had vanished.

Dream shifted into time, became memory; she felt me blood leap out of her face. She reached down, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the rose and began to run.

On the dais, the sorceress had felt the sudden shift of time.

Intrigued, she simply sat still, not a difficult thing to do for one who had spent nights in the black deserts of Hunter Hold watching the constellations turn and the orange bitterthorn blossom open its fullest to the full moon. She saw Meguet bring up the sword in her hands, turn. The fair-haired stranger stopped at the threshold. Nyx's attention focused, precise and fine-honed, on her cousin, who was waving a blade of sheep gra.s.s against the wind. Their voices carried easily across the eerie silence.

She watched, unblinking, while the stranger came so close to Meguet only the swans on the sword hilt protected her. Light sparking off a jewel in Nyx's hair would have alerted the mage; when he forced her to move, he would not see her. But he backed away from Meguet, pa.s.sed around her, left her defending a breached threshold in a dream. He had paused, for some reason, to pick a rose off the tower vines. He dropped it in Meguet's shadow. He pa.s.sed among the councilors with no more interest in them than if they had been hedgerows. At the stairs, beneath the Blood Fox prowling between green swamp and starry night on the Delta banner, he hesitated. The power within the tower was complex, layered as it was with Ctuysom's ancient wizardry, household ghosts, the impress upon the centuries of every mage or Cygnet's guardian who had left a trace of power lingering in time. Beneath that lay the entombed mage and the vast and intricate power within the Cygnet's heart. He would not recognize that power, but he would be aware, like a man stepping to the edge of a chasm at midnight, that something undefined was catching at his attention. To separate what sorcery the stranger had come to find from the emanations of power and memory within the ancient stones would require at least a walk up the spiral stairs. When the stranger had felt his way through the lingering magic beyond the first curve, Nyx rose. She formed an image of Chrysom's library in her mind, book and stone and rose-patterned windows, and stepped into it.

She waited.

The sight of Nyx reading at one of the tables made the stranger pause a heartbeat, as if his glance into the council chamber had snared her in his memories. But she gazed down at the page-a list of cows who had calved four hundred and ninety years before- with rapt attention. In that magic-steeped chamber he would not notice her mind working. He had reached his goal; his attention flicked like a needle in a compa.s.s toward what he had come to steal.

The stone mantel above the fireplace was littered with thousand-year-old oddments of Chrysom's that had somehow survived accidents, misplacements, pilfering and spring cleaning. Nyx had no idea what they were, besides volatile and unpredictable. The stranger glanced briefly at them. He stood in the center of the room, sending out filaments of thought like a spider spinning a web, into tables, hearth, book shelves, ancient weapons, cracked, bubbled mirrors, tapestries on the wall. He ignored Nyx, who, surrounded by mysteries, was reading about cows. He moved finally, abruptly, across the room to kneel at the hearth. His hands closed around one of the ma.s.sive cornerstones that was crusted with centuries of ash. He tried to shift it. Now that he had shown her where it was, Nyx asked before he found it, "What in Moro's name are you looking for in there?"

He was so startled that he nearly leaped back into his own time. Parts of him faded and reappeared; a wing on his robe unfolded in the air and folded itself back into thread- He did not so much turn as rearrange himself through shifting moments of time to face her. She recognized the white animal then, from some of Chrysom's ancient drawings: She thought he had imagined it, from some tale so old there was scarcely a word for it in Ro Holding. The mage, his face a few shades paler than dust, studied her while he caught his breath.

He said abruptly, "You were in the hall, down there. I remember you now. Your eyes."

She lifted a brow, "You saw me watching you?"

"No. I remember their color, when I pa.s.sed the dais. Like a winter sky. You are a mage. It's hard to tell, in this house."

"People who belong in this house recognize me easily." She rested her chin on her palm, contemplating him. "You are a thief. You are not from Ro Holding, or I would know you by now; your remarkable power would have caught my interest."

' "You have some remarkable powers yourself," he said with feeling. "You nearly turned me inside-out, scaring me like that."

"I know a few things," she said.

"You don't know what's in this stone. You never knew anything at all was in there. I can name it. That makes it mine."

"Fine," she said dryly. "I will let you keep the name. You may take that and yourself out of this tower. How dare you bewitch this entire house and wander through it, pilfering things? What kind of barbaric country taught you that?"

"Only one thing," he pointed out. "One pilfering. That's all I need. Something you have never needed. Let me take it and go. I'll never return to Ro Holding again."

"You have more than theft to answer for. You disturbed my cousin Meguet. You threatened her and tried to coerce her." He opened his mouth to answer, did not. Nyx continued grimly, running one of Calyx's pens absently in and out of her hair, "You used sorcery against her."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I was curious."

"You were cruel."

He drew breath, his eyes nicking away from her; she saw the blood gather under his tan. "I was never taught," he said finally, "to make such fine distinctions. In my country, ignorance is dangerous; curiosity can be ruthless. But I would never have harmed your cousin. I only wanted to know-"

"I know what you only wanted to know." She paused, her own eyes falling briefly. She took the pen out of her hair and laid it down. She folded her hands in front of her mouth and looked at the stranger again. "But it's none of your business. Now leave this house in peace."

He paused, his eyes narrowed faintly, light-filled, hidden. "You're curious, too," he said slowly. "You want this thing only because you don't know what it is." She nodded, unperturbed. For a moment their eyes held, calculating, and then, abruptly, he yielded, tossing up a hand. "I never expected to find this tower so well-guarded. And now I have run out of rime...."

And he was gone, to her surprise, as easily and noiselessly as light fading on stones. Distant sounds wove into the air again: children shouting, cows lowing as they came in from the back pastures. The Holder, she remembered suddenly, would be discovering the empty chair beside her. But Meguet would rea.s.sure her. Nyx knelt at the hearth, touched the stone with her hands, and then with her mind. Neither moved it. She wrapped her thoughts around the stone, feeling its weight and texture, its size: a single block of charred marble in a hearth so old the stones were all sagging into one another. As she studied it, she felt something watching her. She lifted her head. A crow winging out of the mantel gazed at her out of its black marble eye.

She reached up, touched the eye. Nothing moved. Above it, in relief, the Cygnet flew the length of the mantel through a black marble sky, its eye aligned with the crow's eye. She had to stand on air to reach it. The Cygnet's eye moved nothing- She stood thinking, her own eyes flicking across the scattered convocation of crows, until in all their black stone eyes the pattern formed.

It was a constellation: All the eyes were stars, depicting the Cygnet flying across the night. A riddle, she thought, no one outside of Ro Holding would have guessed. She felt a rare impulse for caution, but dismissed it immediately, too close to the mystery, too curious. One after another she touched the dark stars. The stone, its mortar sifting dryly into the firebed, swung free.

She barely had time to look into it, when something struck her-a wind, a thunderbolt-and flung her at the mantel and then into it among the crows. She cried out, startled; her mouth was stopped with stone. She concentrated, found the face of one of the crows and gathered herself like a thought in its stony mind and then into a point of light within its eye. Beneath her, she saw the mage looking into the hollow stone.

Meguet, slamming the library door wide, knocked a shield off the wall. The mage, barely glancing up, flung a hand out impatiently, murmuring. The animal leaped from his breast, a sinuous blur of white that poured to the floor, bounded upward again, catching air with its wings, claws out, aimed at its prey. Meguet threw up her arm, wielding a rose against it. Something-the streak of red in the air, a sound she made-caught the mage's attention. His head snapped around. For an instant the rose stunned him. Then he spoke sharply. The animal halted in midflight; white embroidery thread snarled in the air. Nyx dropped like a tear out of the crow's eye, reappeared in front of Meguet. The air seemed to snarl in her wake as she dragged remnants of the mage's spell from the air and threw them back at him. The mage began to fray in different directions at once, as if he were spun of fine threads of time, all unravelling. He cried something before he vanished. The cry skipped like a rock across water, s.n.a.t.c.hed the gently falling thread. Cry and thread whirled away into nothing.

Meguet sagged against the open doorway, felt air and brought herself upright. "Moro's name," she whispered. "What did you do to him?"

Nyx, her eyes flooded with color, untangling herself from her sorcery, looked bewitched herself, something only half human. "I'm not sure," she said. "I've never done that before."