Kingfisher(28)

“It might well be. The king called for an assembly of the knights of Wyvernhold, which means everybody still capable of hobbling into his presence.”

She glanced into the rearview mirror to back out, but a car had already pulled in line behind her. She recognized the device on the pennant flying on the hood. “Lord Kraken,” she marveled. “He’s got to be at least a couple of centuries old. What is my father up to? Are we going to war with somebody? You’ll tell me, won’t you?”

He laughed. “I wouldn’t know how to keep secrets from you.”

She caught sight of Daimon, then, ahead of them in the line. Wherever he had come from, he hadn’t yet had time to change into the formal black leathers and quilted jacket with the golden wyvern opening its wings across his shoulders, and depicted on the crest over his heart. He balanced on his bike with one boot on the ground, listening to the giant Sir Bayley Reeve, who stood athwart his own motorcycle five times the size of Daimon’s.

“Gareth,” Perdita said, coming to an abrupt decision, “can you drive this?”

He looked pained, as though she had asked him to pedal a tricycle to the Assembly. “Must I?”

“I’m going to be so late . . .” She leaned over to kiss him before she opened the door. “Just leave it anywhere near the garages, with the keys in it. Thank you, Sweet.”

She jogged down the drive and slid onto the bike behind Daimon, interrupting Bayley Reeve’s move-by-move rendition of a wrestling match he’d won.

“Sorry,” Perdita told him. “I’m desperate. Daimon, can you cut through the garden to the back courtyard?”

She felt his silent grunt of amusement. “You reek of beer,” he commented.

“Please?”

“Well. Possibly the guards will recognize us and we won’t get shot. But I will be viewed askance for days from every conceivable direction.”

“Just hurry, and maybe no one will notice.”

He was already veering out of line. As they sped on the verge along the drive to the nearest paved path through the immense garden, Perdita took a firmer hold on him and aimed for his ear.

“Do I know her? This woman you’re in love with?”

The bike careened abruptly, nearly sending them into a fishpond. Daimon righted them, curved around the water, then made his own path between the hedgerow and the herbaceous border, to the consternation of the gardeners deadheading the roses between them.

“Sorry!” Perdita called to them. “Daimon—”

“I’m not in love.” The bike sped from grass to gravel as it met the drive again, this time edging between taxis that had already deposited their passengers at the king’s front door, and were moving more quickly. Half a dozen palace guards spilled down the marble steps after the racing bike. Perdita turned quickly to call to them.

“Sorry! I’m late! So you are seeing someone.”

“I didn’t say that.” He churned up gravel turning along the side of the west wing of the palace, then veered again, heading for an arch in a walled courtyard. Perdita, clinging tightly, wondered if he was trying to throw her off the bike.

“Do I know her?”

She felt him draw breath, let it go. “No.”

“Why not?” He didn’t answer. “We’ve always told each other who our latest passions are. Why is this one such a secret?”

At the arch, guards raised their weapons and shouted, then recognized the pair as they skidded through into the broad, quiet yard behind the palace. Daimon brought the bike to a halt at the stairway to the goddess’s sanctum.

He said, as Perdita got off the bike, “Because I’m obsessed. Because I don’t know, in a clearer light, exactly what I’d see.”

She stood still, gazing at him with sudden, rabid curiosity. The expression in his eyes, above an implacable smile, warned her away.

“Thanks for the ride,” she said, and ran for the stairs.

The stairway curled up the inner walls of a lovely white-marble tower inlaid with a winding filigree of blue and green marble. A briny wind off the bay whistled through the filigree. Perdita pushed open the upper door and stepped into another world, this one entirely Calluna’s.

It was the antechamber to the sanctum, where water piped from Calluna’s cave filled richly decorated pools for giving birth, for meditation, for healing. The antechamber had no windows, only blue and green walls down which Calluna’s water slid endlessly, silently, reflecting fire from candles of every size and shape lined along the walls on river-smoothed stones brought up from the goddess’s cave. A carved replica of Calluna’s earliest face hung above the closed doors of the Inner Sanctum, watching her waters fall.

As Perdita hurried across the wide antechamber toward the line of private rooms where the mystes and the acolytes kept their robes and effects of office, a door opened softly and closed. Perdita slowed, blinking. The man turned swiftly down the inner stairway nearby without noticing her. But in that brief glimpse she recognized him, as well as whose chamber he had slipped out of.

Leith Duresse.

She had grown up aware of him, not really knowing why for years, only understanding finally that it was her mother’s awareness of him she had sensed at a very early age. Other knights could come and go, their faces blurring into one another; she always saw Leith clearly: the tall man with the black hair and broad shoulders, eyes the turquoise of Calluna’s walls in the sanctum. Always shadows in them, Perdita saw, always something she could not grasp. Then one day she did. Maybe someone had said something. Maybe it was the way he had looked at the princess, from behind that tangle of passion, guilt, love, acknowledging his fault. Or maybe he had opened the door of her mother’s chamber in that place where only women came, just at the moment when she was old enough, knew enough, to understand what she saw.