Kingfisher(25)
Daimon, struggling with his father’s startling revelations, responded to the simplest of them. “They can’t stand each other. Why would Sylvester take anything to Lord Ruxley before he brought it to you?”
“It is a matter for the Mystes Ruxley, not the lord. Some ancient artifact of the god Severen’s—a cup, a pot—came to light in a manuscript Lord Skelton has been translating.” The king paused a moment, studying his bread plate as if the crumbs on it might shift into language and illuminate a mystery. “I don’t entirely understand the significance. Which isn’t surprising, considering the maze of Sylvester’s mind. The part I do understand is that he says the object is ancient, valuable, and powerful beyond belief.”
Daimon pursed his lips to whistle, refrained. “What on earth is it?”
“Sylvester seems to think it important enough to call an assembly of the knights of Wyvernhold. He and Mystes Ruxley will explain it.” He paused, chewing over the matter with a bite. Daimon recognized the more familiar expression in his eyes, now: the gleam of the wyvern, roused. “I have no idea what this object is, but I think what Sylvester has in mind is along the lines of an old-fashioned quest. It sounds to me like the perfect diversion.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“You must have heard the rumblings of discontent from knights born in more isolated parts of Wyvernhold—in the eastern mountains, along the north coast—about regaining the sovereignty that was lost when the first King Arden Wyvernbourne’s army pulled all the little, bickering kingdoms together under his rule and created Wyvernhold.”
“Something of it. Surely nobody’s serious.”
“The notion seems to spread more often in peaceful times, when there’s little else to complain about. That somehow the romance and glory of those realms would return along with their reclaimed boundaries and their names. It’s a foolish, dangerous idea. Something as common as water rights could tangle the courts for years, not to mention the temptation for each small kingdom to build up its own standing army, just in case. If the magus and the mystes can sell this idea of an artifact that powerful and valuable free for the finding and the taking, it will scatter the knights across Wyvernhold and give them all something else to think about besides reclaiming long-lost kingdoms. I have no intention of becoming Arden the Last, who let Wyvernhold scatter into thousand-year-old fragments.”
Daimon, trying to imagine such a marvel, found a flaw in his father’s thinking. “What if it’s real?”
He felt the weight of the wyvern’s regard again, golden and unblinking. “Then one of my children had better find it for me.”
—
Daimon joined Vivien Ravensley that evening for dinner in the Gold District. The district was one of the outermost in Severluna. Blessed a couple of centuries before by the god Severen with a stray nugget of gold, it had attracted swarms of prospectors. A sanctum had been built near the site of the finding. The gold ran out not long after the sanctum was completed; the disappointed prospectors moved on. Even the god himself moved on; at least the sanctum’s Mystica did. The sanctum, unsanctified, wore many faces through the years. Now it was The Proper Way, a restaurant and brew-pub named after the street on which it stood.
They sat at one of the little outdoor tables overlooking the distant lights floating on the dusky blue Severen: night-fishers, barges, cruise and container ships following the river to the sea.
Vivien had caught Daimon’s eye at a party one late night, an endless affair that drifted from place to place by the hour, its cast changing across every threshold. He kept seeing her at odd moments: once leaning against a colorful paper-covered wall, her hair a sleek helmet of burnished copper around her face, another time between two marble statues, her own face as matte white as theirs, her eyes a rich peacock blue flecked with gold that turned fiery when someone struck a match to light a candle next to her. Looking for her, he didn’t find her; she seemed to become visible only when he thought she had gone. Then she would appear again across yet another threshold and give him something new to notice: her very long, thin fingers, her smile that made him think of otherworldly beings whose names were slowly vanishing from the language.
Finally, she turned that smile to him and beckoned.
They put in an order for steak and vegetables and watched their supper cook on one of the blazing grills on the restaurant deck. As they ate, Daimon told her about his lunch with the king.
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” Vivien commented. “Your mother enchanted the king for a night and—”
“Came up with me. Yes. It seems extremely tactful of her to vanish like that. Asking for nothing from my father, no money, no help—and then considerately dying. If it hadn’t been for my great-aunt Morrig, not even my father would have known I existed. I certainly would never have known. I could be out in the dark now, repaving highways or working on one of those container ships, instead of having a palace to return to after sitting here with you.”
She looked at him over a forkful of blackened carrots. Passing car lights caught her eyes, kindling that strange golden fire in them. “You’re not. Returning. Are you?”
He smiled, entranced by that fire. “How could I?”
He was very familiar with her tiny, untidy apartment overlooking the sleepless streets and the broad, busy river. But he had no idea where she worked. She only laughed when he asked, and hinted of something involving dogs, or small children, or the elderly. “Very boring,” she told him. “I do it; I get paid; I don’t want to think about it.”