Kingfisher(23)

“Technically, no,” Daimon agreed. “The queen is not my mother, so I was not dedicated at birth to the goddess. But I see no reason to displease either of two such powerful women. Do you?”

A faint squeak came out of the ticket-taker, a similar sound out of Lady Clarice. “I do beg your pardon—” she managed faintly.

Daimon shrugged a shoulder and began lining more cups along the bar. “What for? Nobody cares. Even if I weren’t a bastard son of my father, I’d have to outlive four siblings and their offspring before I could possibly be king of anything. And when you consider—”

The ticket-taker straightened abruptly on her stool. “Oh, stop. Forgive him, Lady Clarice; his true mother took one look at him when he was born and dropped him on his head.”

Lady Clarice, stunned and swaying to stare at the ticket-taker, recognized the youngest offspring of Queen Genevra and King Arden. She swallowed audibly. Princess Perdita gave her a friendly smile, then shifted her gaze to frown at her half brother.

“Shame, Daimon. Apologize to Lady Clarice for teasing her.”

“I am sorry for teasing you, Lady Clarice,” Daimon said amiably, turning a spigot to refill the sacred water pitcher. In the silence before the water began to flow, the distant voices of children deep within the cave echoed incomprehensibly off the stones.

“I’ll just—” Lady Clarice said weakly, taking a step or two backward. “I’d better see to—”

She turned, plunged into the cave. Perdita looked reproachfully at her retreating shadow.

“She didn’t give me her ticket.”

Daimon and his half sibling had been born in vastly different circumstances, but so closely in time they might have been twins. The fair-haired, gray-eyed, muscular Daimon had entered the world in a busy public hospital on the outskirts of Severluna. Willowy Perdita, with the king’s black hair and golden eyes, had been born minutes earlier in a pool of warm water within the palace, surrounded by midwives and attendants of the goddess Calluna. By some royal sleight of hand, Daimon, howling in his crib in the hospital nursery, had been spirited away within an hour to grow up with Perdita.

Daimon had never known his mother. The queen had given him only the most meager bone of truth at an early age: that his mother had died after giving birth to him. What Queen Genevra actually thought about the matter, she never said. Gossip said a great many conflicting things for a few years, as the court watched Daimon grow. Then it lost interest. When he found the reckless courage to ask the king, his father said briskly, “You are my son. The rest is my business.” Daimon guessed from the place where his mother had chosen for him to be born that she was used to taking care of herself. She was nobody, or anybody at all, until she had caught the king’s eye. That the king had not left him nameless and orphaned but had reached out to find him, told Daimon something. But he was never sure what.

Daimon finished filling cups, put the mop back in a cupboard, and emptied the dregs in the vessel down the drain in the floor where it was filtered, cleaned, and piped back into the river downstream. He was aware of Perdita’s voice—something about an upcoming fete, someone she hoped would be there—as a light, pleasing counterpoint to his thoughts. When her voice suddenly invaded his distraction, he was startled.

“Daimon! Where are you? I’ve been talking at you—you might as well be on the moon for all you’re listening. What are you thinking about?”

He shook his preoccupations away, smiled at her. “Sorry. You were saying?”

“No. Really. What were you thinking? I’ve never seen that expression on your face. Are you in love?”

He knew the one on hers well enough. He felt that glittering, potent gaze from the place where, in a different myth, his third eye might have been, down to the soles of his feet. Witch, he thought. Sorceress. He shifted, dropping his own eyes, and took a cloth to a nonexistent spill on the bar.

“How should I know? I’ve never been there before.”

“Who is she?”

“You were saying about a fete? Hoping who might come?”

He still felt that intense, ruthless regard, heard her draw breath. Then the children came spilling out of the cave, running upstairs in anticipation of ice cream, despite the unreasonable demands to Walk! Walk! Some unfortunate visitor coming down against the tide stopped and pressed himself against the wall until the frothing school of bodies vanished into the upper realms. He descended finally, interrupting Perdita’s single-minded pursuit of her half brother’s private concerns.

“Gareth!”

She sprang off the stool and flung her arms around the visitor. Daimon’s mouth crooked. He couldn’t, himself, appreciate the subtle fascinations of Gareth May that turned the willful Perdita into a boneless butterfly. But he was grateful for the interruption. The young knight gave him a little, formal nod over Perdita’s shoulder; Daimon saluted him genially with the bar cloth. In the little, quiet interim between visitors, while the lovers murmured, Daimon could hear the voice of the goddess, whispering as the waters quickened against the stones in the distant underground.

He stepped from behind the water bar and slipped into the cave.

Underwater lights limned the large, round pool of the headwaters that in earlier centuries had been caught in a basin of brick and colored tiles, ringed by stone steps where sufferers could lower themselves into the soothing embrace of the goddess. Pillars, plaques, broken statues haunted the shadows, wandering downstream as far as they dared. Seeking the upper world and light, the Calluna would ultimately find the swift, broad waters of the Severen as well. The river god would sweep the slower, shallower waters of the goddess into his bed, dissipating hers as god and goddess became one. Now the goddess’s waters were trapped in enormous underground pipes beneath the city streets. They never saw the light before they joined the Severen in its chilly, muscular flow to the sea.