Kingfisher(3)

His tall mother, nibbling a strawberry, glanced at him past the ear of Cape Mistbegotten’s only sheriff. Her eyes, a rich blue-green, narrowed, questioning. Pierce took off the apron and scrubbed his hands at the sink, hearing her voice through the falling water.

“Well, I can look, Arn. But it’s been a while since I’ve done anything like that. I’ve been retired for years; cooking is my magic now.”

Ha, Pierce thought, and felt her gaze between his shoulder blades.

“Thanks, Heloise,” the sheriff said. “It’s the third time those interpretive signs and telescopes on the point have been vandalized, and I still haven’t got a clue. If you could just—Well, keep an eye on them now and then, when you have a moment.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

There was a short silence. Pierce, drying his hands, heard what Arn Brisket was not saying, what he’d not been saying since the third time Heloise had told him no. Not for the first time, Pierce wondered why. Arn was decent, honest, with maybe more shoreline on his head since the first time she had said it, but his chestnut mustache was still bold and thick as a squirrel’s tail. And it would be a timely solution. Pierce froze then, at that unexpected thought, staring at the towel in his hands with its little edging of green beans.

“Pierce.”

He looked up dazedly. Arn had gone; his mother, trying to retie her apron without tangling her long red braid in the strings, nodded in the direction of her office. Pierce went to her, took the ties out of her fingers. They seemed oddly chilly. He swallowed something hard in his throat.

“I’ll just get the crab pot on to boil first.”

She nodded again, briefly, left him without looking at him, her backbone straight and rigid as a flagpole.

Staff chattered again, voices muted, as he filled the huge pot with water. Arn, they talked about softly, and his stubborn, persistent longing, since his wife’s death a decade ago, for the sorceress turned cook and gardener. Pierce heaved the pot onto the stove. His thoughts drifted to the strangers who had gotten so completely lost they had managed to find Desolation Point, the westernmost thrust of land on the entire Wyvernhold coast. So did everyone else’s thoughts, then. The knights might have come and gone from Haricot, but they had left behind them vivid impressions. Pierce responded absently to the questions and comments as he lingered beside the crab bucket. The strange idea in his head took on clarity, dimension. He nudged an escaping crab back into the bucket and felt his mother’s eyes again. But she wasn’t visible; she was in her office, checking the evening menu or balancing accounts while she waited for him.

Or maybe sitting motionlessly, watching him out of a borrowed pair of eyes.

He left the crabs to the staff, went out the back door through her rambling, burgeoning kitchen garden, and drove home.

Home was on the outermost cliff on the cape, where it jutted into the wild sea amid the shards and wreckage of time and the raw, irresistible forces of nature. Shreds of morning mist still hung from the high branches of the ancient trees around the pile of stone and wood that had been Pierce’s father’s house. And his father’s before him, and his father’s father’s, back to some distant past long before the watchtower that had guarded the headlands had been torn down to add a wing to the family hall.

“This house is yours,” his mother had told him years earlier, when he was too young to understand what she wasn’t telling him. “Your father gave it to me before he left us. Now I’m giving it to you, so that you’ll have something from him. So that you’ll always have a home here with me and the trees and the sea.”

Even then he had felt the twist of bitterness that this place was all he knew of a father: no voice, no expressions, no touch, only these huge, silent rooms full of heavy, ornate furniture and paintings of the dead who had lived in them. There was no picture of his father. As Pierce grew, so did his questions. But his own mother seemed to know little more than he did about his father. He was gone, she only told him. He had left the house to her, and now it was Pierce’s to keep forever. At any request for even the simplest of answers, she flung up a mist of silence, or sorrow, or absentmindedness, and disappeared into it. Pierce had no idea if his father was alive or dead. Nothing, anywhere in the vast house, including his mother, indicated that he even had a name. Pierce asked the housekeepers and gardeners, many of whom had grown up in Desolation Point, what they knew; he flung questions at random through the rest of the town. Everyone, wearing the same slightly uneasy expression, gave him the same answer.

“Ask your mother.”

He veered his small, weathered Metro away from the rutted, overgrown drive to the house, parked instead on a paved overlook at the cliff’s edge. Crenellated stonework marked the edge of safety. Beyond it, waves heaved and hammered at gigantic slabs of stone that had been, at some lost point in time, determined to burrow beneath the edge of the earth. The cliff bore signs of that ancient struggle. Layered and veined with changing eons, it had been twisted upward by the power of the collision. Jagged, broken edges of land reared out of the water like the prows of a ghostly fleet of ships. Time had laid a thin layer of dirt and decaying things on the top of the cliff. The house, the trees, stood on that fragile ground while the battle, frozen but not forgotten, bided its time beneath.

Pierce got out of the car and wandered to his favorite corner of the wall, where tides in their raging broke high above the land, where the cliff swallows nested, gulls rode the wind below him, sea lions and whales slid through the waves as easily as he moved through air. That afternoon sea was calm, idling between tides. Waves gathered around the rocks, broke indolently against them, creating brief, lovely waterfalls of foamy white that flowed over the dark, wet stone and drained back into the sea.