The Cygnet And The Firebird Part 8

He shook his head. "Some say there are no dragons in Saphier, only the memories of dragons. But my father's mother went to the desert in south Saphier and came back with child. She ruled Saphier, and if she said her child was dragon-seed, no one would argue. The dragon was a great mage, she said, capable of changing shape. My father-" His voice caught. He gripped the arms of his chair, his eyes widening, as other memories s.h.i.+fted into place. "My father." He rose, paced, the tower room no longer a haven but a cage. "I wonder how long I have been gone. If he knows what happened to me."

"He must be searching for you."

"He may be mourning me, for all I know." He added savagely, "With Rad Ilex beside him."

"Is Rad Ilex your father's mage?"

He looked perplexed by the question. "My father's court is full of mages. My father is very powerful; he trains mages, those with special gifts, like Rad. It's not like this house. You seem to be the only mage. And you have little sense of order." She drew a breath, but found no argument- "Or manners."

"What?"

"No mage would speak to my father the way you speak to the Holder."

"She's my mother," Nyx protested.

"Perhaps it is because you have all the power in this house." He turned, pacing again; she stared at his back. "The mage would be stripped of power."

Nyx's brows lifted. She picked up a wine cup, blew the dust out of it and filled it. She took a sip, watched him turn, pace back. "Is that where Rad Ilex took Meguet? To your father's court?"

"I don't know. Perhaps, if my father still trusts him."

She took another swallow, set the cup down. "Fortunately, Meguet' s manners are better than mine. Who is this Rad Ilex? Do you remember?"

"Yes." He stopped, turned his face away. Nyx saw him tremble, in rage or grief, she couldn't tell. "He was born in the Luxour Desert, and he came to my father when he was a boy and said there were dragons everywhere in south Saphier. There have always been rumors of dragons. Crystals that look like dragon's teeth. Spiky plants that die and turn black and look like claws. My father always wanted to see dragons. He wanted to become one, like his father. He wanted to find his father, be taught by him. He says that a mage-fire like no other power runs through the blood of dragons and he wants that power. So when Rad said he saw dragons, my father took him into the house to train."

The door opened. Servants summoned by moonlight entered, bearing supper. Brand roamed again; Nyx watched him, wondering if he had come to the end of his memories, or the heart of them. He came back to the table, stood gazing down at the trays. "That's what I can't remember," he said at last, tightly. "That's where the wall is. I can remember loving Rad. And now I hate him. I would kill him as quickly as I tried to destroy his dragon. But I don't remember why."

"The firebird remembers."

He looked at her, his eyes dark, bruised, but he did not answer. Nyx pushed a tray toward him. "Eat something. If Rad Ilex wants the key and his dragon, he'll return here. But I want no blood shed in this tower. My mother forbade it."

He made no response to that, either. Nyx broke into an elaborate crust, found duckling flavored with orange and rosemary. She ate hungrily a few minutes, then asked, "Did your father find his father among the dragons?"

"No. He went with Rad to south Saphier- Rad was able to show him something-I don't know what. Enough to give my father some hope, whether it was truth or lie. In the Luxour, some villagers collect big, iridescent lumps of stone they say are dragon's hearts, and sell them. Those who buy them call them one thing, those who don't, another. Rad said he knew a way to draw the dragons into time, but that he had to find something. A key."

Nyx made a sound. "Not a book."

"He said key."

"How could he have known to find it in Ro Holding?" she breathed. "He knows too much, this Rad Hex."

Brand stirred edgily. "And where is he, if he wants this key so badly?"

"Being cautious, I suppose. Coming here, he must face you or the firebird. Perhaps-"

"I have remembered," he interrupted. "He will face me, not the bird."

"You have not remembered everything. We'll know at midnight."

His knife hit the edge of his plate; he pushed away from the table and rose, his shoulders bowed as if the firebird clung to his back. "What kind of a mage are you that you can't break a simple spell?"

She picked a bone out of a bite, watching him- "I suppose, by the standards of Saphier, not very apt. But I am considered adequate in Ro Holding."

He came back to her, head bowed, "Forgive me. You took me in, tried to help. It's not your fault you are pitted against the most devious mage in my father's court."

She frowned, thinking again of Meguet. "Where is Saphier? Do you cross a sea to get to it? Mountains? Maybe, if you could get home, your father could help you."

"Saphier is the world," he said absently. "I never looked beyond it." Then his eyes widened, and she saw the sudden flare of hope in them. She pushed back her chair, rose.

"What do you remember?"

"These." He turned his wrists up, spread his fingers, as if the tarnished metal wove through blood and bone into his fingertips. "They are all the paths to Saphier."

"Paths of time." She drew her finger down a weave lightly. "I thought so. But are they always so tarnished?"

"No," he said, puzzled. "They should be silver, like the paths inside your tiny box. You need to know the path before you travel it; that's why you couldn't find your own way out."

"You led me out," she said abruptly. "You are also a mage."

He shook his head. "I am a warrior. I don't have mage's gifts."

"But you wear these- You can use them."

"Yes." He hesitated, still perplexed by them. "It is something my father taught me."

"Do you always wear them?"

"I don't think so."

"Then why are you wearing them now? As if you know you might need them? Or you were working a time-spell, or travelling a path when you were transformed?" She saw his face change, as he veered dangerously close to memory. He said quickly, "I don't remember."

"Do you remember," she asked after a moment, "how to use these?"

"Yes." He rubbed at one, trying to polish it with his thumb. "They arc so dark. As if some enormous power ran through them." He looked at her; she saw Saphier in his eyes, future instead of past. "I can go home."

"Yes."

"Tonight. Now. Before I change."

"Yes," she said, breathless at the thought. "But if you leave, and Rad Ilex does not return with Meguet, how will I ever know where to look for her? Can you wait a little longer for them?"

He gave her a distant, masked glance: the firebird's eyes. "I forgot he must come here."

"I will give him the key and his dragon for Meguet," she said. "I will not give you to him, or him to you. If you fight him, it must be in Saphier, or my mother will never forgive me for that as well as for a few other things she won't forgive me for by now. Please," she added, at his weary, desolate expression. "Only a little longer."

"And then what? If he does not come?"

"Then," she said steadily, "you will teach me the path to Saphier and I will look for her myself."

He was silent, studying her, as if she had flung some peculiar spell over herself- "You would walk into a strange land to search for her?"

"She searched for me once in a strange place. She is part of Ro Holding, part of this house. It's inconceivable that she is wandering around lost in some other country."

"You are eccentric."

"Even," she said dryly, "in Ro Holding."

"My father's court is structured according to precise law. Within that law, nothing disorderly exists for long. Either it shapes itself to law or it is destroyed."

Her brows rose. "Does that include guests?"

"It is my father's working philosophy," he answered simply. "Out of order comes art. The art of government, the mage's art, the art of poetry, the art of war. We do not give ourselves the luxury of eccentricity."

"Perhaps freedom is a luxury," she said. "But that aside, there must be someone you would wander through a stranger's land to find."

She saw it again in his face: the sudden, desperate aching shadow of memory, the firebird's cry. He whispered, "No one has come searching for me."

She blinked, shaken by a glimpse into something more complex than she could unweave, or even imagine. She touched him; he looked at her, mute again, unable to give her either dragon heart or stone.

"We'll go to Saphier now," she said abruptly, and felt her own heartbeat. "It's cruel to keep you." And safer, she thought, remembering the spinning swords, than another battle in the tower. "Take me to your father's house. If Meguet is not there, then teach me the paths so that I can return to look for her if I have to. Will you do that?"

"My father can, easily. And he will, in grat.i.tude. The Holder will not even know you have been gone. Thank you." He took her hands, dropped his face against them. "You took me in when no one in the world recognized me as human. Whatever else the bird knows, it knew enough to come to you."

And not, she observed with a certain grimness, to Saphier.

The word, spoken aloud in the tower, would find its way to the Gatekeeper, following its own peculiar path within the house's time. Brand held out his hands, spread his fingers as if to channel the flow of light from the silver. The bands remained black. He closed his eyes, walking the path in his mind- After a while, he put the bands against his eyes. Nyx felt pity well up from some deep place within her, as if hidden water had broken through layers of earth and h.o.a.ry stone and old leaves. She put her hand gently on his shoulder.

He whispered, "I am half man, half bird, and I am lost, with no way home."

"There is always a way," she said. "Always." He looked at her, read the promise in her eyes. After a while he moved to his place at the window, and waited silently for oblivion and the firebird.

Eight.

Meguet sat rapt beneath the risen moon.

In its light silver feathers of steam or dragon-fire glittered and faded. The high, jagged towers of stone transformed themselves. Here a great wing unfolded against the stars almost as slowly as the stars behind it moved. There an eye shone, moon-white or darker than the night. A craggy head lifted, or had just lifted before she saw it. A moon shadow, ma.s.sive and curved, lay across the ground, cast by nothing visible. Crystal flashed. Vague, dark, iridescent colors swam against the stars and vanished.

Beside her, the mage lay watching with her. Sometimes he watched her; she felt his eyes. "You see," he murmured now and then. "Did you see that?" His voice, worn, fading, sounded tranquil; he was lost in some fever-dream of dragons that he had pulled her into. She saw through his eyes, she thought, most likely. But still she watched, as he dreamed dragons and set them free into the night.

"We should go," she said now and then, for he s.h.i.+vered, though warm wind or dragon-breath sighed over them. She had taken down her canopy to see the sky. Things that had come out of his cube-wine, salted fish, bread, dried apples and figs-littered her skirt.

"Yes," he said, but made no effort to move. "I wanted you to see this, if you could."

"I see," she said softly. "But I don't know what I see."

"Time s.h.i.+fting. Dragon-paths. Chrysom saw this. He made the key to unlock their paths into time."

"Can they see us?"

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Far better than we see them. We glimpse them indirectly, and with the heart more than the eye."

She looked at him. An odd, heavy, nameless feeling pushed through her; she scarcely knew what to call it. Hunger? Sorrow? Desire? "I wish," she whispered. "I wish."

"What?"

"I don't know... I wish I could watch you free them with that key."

"You can. Stay here until you have seen the dragons fly. Until I draw them out of stars and stone, until bone and blood cast shadows instead of dreams. Stay until you have seen the dragons' fire."

She dragged her eyes from the stars, still heavy with the strange, impossible yearning. "I cannot. The white dragon waiting for you in Chrysom's tower must be enough for me. I was not born to see dragons."

"They get into your blood. They call you in some secret language spoken by stones. They show you a shadow, they leave a bone behind. And so you spend your life searching for them... Stay until I free them."

"I don't dare," she whispered. "You were born under the dragon's eye. I was born under the Cygnet, I have never in my life come so close to forgetting that."

"The Luxour will make you forget."

She was silent, remembering the desert by day, hot and golden as some vast wing stretched taut to catch the light, the ma.s.sive framework of its bones visible just beneath the surface of the stones.

"We must go," she said, but did not move, still riding the dragon that was the Luxour through the stars. Finally she felt his hand, and saw her skirt attach itself to her again. Everything had vanished back into the little cube. Only the dragon claws, scattered in the sand, told where they had been.

"We must go," he said, and the stars blurred together to form their path.

Night, where the path ended, was unexpectedly still. Here and there a light that was not a star burned, illumining a circular window or a door. Even the winds were silent. Pebbles s.h.i.+fting under Meguet's feet as she turned sounded loud enough to wake the sleepers within the small stone houses. The handful of them, huddled together in the vast dark, seemed an unlikely place for a mage to dwell.

The mage, rising, lost his balance; Meguet caught him. He dropped an arm over her shoulders, and was still a moment while the earth settled. She whispered, "Where are we?"

"On the south edge of the Luxour." He added obscurely, "Safe. Even mages have trouble crossing the Luxour. This is my house."

She helped him toward one of the simple wooden doors. It had no latch. He placed his hand flat against it and it opened. Sudden light spilled over them. Within, the little house was bare and tidy as the desert. The sandstone walls were unpainted; a single rough-woven rug lay on the stone floor. His table held none of the disorder of magic and mundane-books, apple cores, crystals, bones, a.s.sorted nameless things-that Meguet had come to expect of mages. Except for a layer of dust, it held nothing at all. Another door opened to a tiny chamber that held a wooden chest and a pile of skins and neatly folded blankets. Only the collection Of colored desert rocks on the stone ledge above the hearth was unnecessary. Other things, a couple of copper pots, a clay water jar, oil lamps, sat neatly in their niches and, like the table, gathered dust.

She said, helping him sit on one of the unpainted benches beside the table, "You don't come here often."

"Not as often as I want." He smiled at her as she moved through the lamplight. "There are some clothes in that chest. People will think I conjured you out of gold and fire and ivory, the way you are now."

She eyed him. He did not seem in much pain, but his eyes were bright with fever and he moved and spoke slowly, as if air were too heavy to s.h.i.+ft aside, too heavy to breathe. Worried, she asked, "What will heal you? Are there desert plants I can find?"

"No. I need to rest."

"How long?"

"I don't know. I've never been attacked by an enchantment before. I'm sorry," he added, at her expression. "You'll have to wait. I'll take care of myself if you don't want to look at me."