Kingfisher(30)

“I still don’t—”

“Oh, I know that story,” Morrig said with delight. “Calluna found the dying god when they were young—back when the world itself was young. I was, too, then, I remember. She revived him with water from her fountainhead.”

Holly eyed her askance, surprised, then found her voice again. “Yes. That’s what the king will send his knights searching for: the cup or vessel of power that returned life to the dying god.” Her mouth tightened; she refrained from whacking the floor again. “All its power is Calluna’s. I’ve been arguing for days with Lord Ruxley, ever since he came to tell me about the mistranslation Sylvester had discovered in a very early text, and what Lord Ruxley, as Severen’s Mystes, advised the king. But he won’t hear a word I say.”

“Neither will Sylvester,” Morrig said. “He complains that I have no textual proof. Textual proof. As though written words alone contain the truth about anything.” She smiled at Perdita. “He lets me borrow his books, you know. He trusts me with them.”

“Stubborn old men,” Holly fumed. “Both of them. You know the god Severen. Everything his name inspires turns to wealth or war. If the king’s knights find that vessel, no good will ever come out of it.”

Perdita, intrigued by the matter, said slowly, “Maybe it doesn’t exist to be found. Maybe the artifact is just a detail of a very ancient story.”

Morrig’s misty gaze held her a moment, speculating, Perdita sensed, about some completely different matter—new shoes or a bottle of aged brandy—for which her great-niece might come in handy.

Holly’s busy mind had already shifted toward possibilities. “Well,” she said, some of the annoyance melting from her face, “we have to assume it exists, as long as Lord Skelton and Mystes Ruxley are going to shake up the realm looking for it. There are at least a half dozen of Calluna’s former acolytes among the knights. We’ll convince one of them—or bribe her if nothing else works—to find the vessel and give it to us. And then we’ll hide it here in Calluna’s sanctum, where not even Severen himself would bother looking for it.”

Morrig opened her mouth; so did Perdita and the queen.

A bell rang, soft, sweet, from within the sanctum.

They closed their mouths, for the language of the sanctum was water, not words, and even Mystes Halliwell would not speak again until the ritual began.

Perdita checked the bone buttons on her tunic. The queen set a circlet of ivory and bone on her head. Perdita stepped to the door, opened it, and followed the mystes, the queen, and Morrig toward the slowly opening doors of the sanctum, where a young acolyte, surrounded by attendants and other acolytes, waited in the warm, steaming, gently swirling waters, to give birth.





9


While knights from all over Wyvernhold gathered in Severluna, Daimon found himself spending pearly dawn hours, blue, windy afternoons, flame-streaked dusks on the Severluna streets. As though his heart had turned to thread and Vivien held the end of it, he would lose interest, leave whatever he was in the middle of doing or saying, and find the quickest way through the twists and turns of byways and alleys to the inelegant, backwater neighborhood where she waited. Somehow she knew; she was always there, opening her door before he knocked. He didn’t ask. Her stray powers, like her smile, seemed at once very old and all her own.

The city changed in his eyes when she tugged at him. It lost its past, its history; it existed only as the place he traveled through to reach her.

Even the streets transformed themselves when he was with her. The cracked sidewalks, stunted trees along them guarded by broken iron railings, the hot, blustering whirlwinds of litter, food-cart smells and old leaves, the groan and belch of trucks, the constantly clamoring traffic interwoven with stray snatches of music, sirens, ringtones, shifted focus in his perception. He glimpsed wonder in the dusty whirlwind, a fierce and ancient energy within the raucous voices of the road; he overheard, within the passing drift of song from an open car window, an otherworldly language.

“What is it you do to me?” he asked Vivien, incoherently, he thought, but she seemed unsurprised.

“Nothing,” she answered. “You’re remembering.”

“Remembering what?” She didn’t answer. He took her arm, held her fast in the jostling foot traffic streaming along the bumpy sidewalk, the worn shopfronts. In the scrap of shadow from a sapling whose wind-whipped leaves flecked her eyes with gold, then shadow, then again gold, he asked, “Remembering what?”

She gazed at him. He heard the distant voices within the wind, the song beneath the squeal of tires, the quickening water that flowed, in truth or memory, down hidden paths beneath his feet to find the sea. The leaves that played with light above her copper hair seemed suddenly ageless, lovely in their flick and glitter, both new and older than all he knew.

His fingers opened, slid down her arm; she caught his hand. They walked again down some path that he had never taken but that he was beginning to remember.

The next afternoon, she took him so far he lost his way.

“There’s a special place we want you to see,” she told him as they walked. Sun dazzled on the hot streets, angled achingly bright off chrome and spinning hubcaps. It melted stucco, wood, stone, blurring lines and corners until buildings shimmered like light-struck water. Had she said we? he wondered. What happened to I? And how could he see anything at all in this light-drenched world? A building in front of him, small shops topped by weary apartments, melted completely under the sun; he glimpsed the green meadow where it had stood, the long grass freckled with wildflowers. The building returned raggedly, missing corners, windows. He shook his head to clear it.