Kingfisher(32)

“Around,” Daimon answered briefly; his brother looked skeptical.

“Not around here, you haven’t. Whoever it is, she’ll have to wait, or there will be an empty chair with your name on it around the dais table at lunch and hundreds of knights all asking the same question—”

“All right,” Daimon said, backing as he spoke. “All right.”

“Not to mention our father.”

“I’ll get changed.”

“You look—” Roarke hesitated, groping; the intense gaze under black, level brows reminded Daimon forcibly of their father. “Like you’ve been seeing visions. Like you’ve been in some other world.”

Wyvern’s eyes, Daimon thought, but without wonder: Roarke was the king’s heir. “Well, I’m here now,” he said with regret. “I suppose I should thank you.”

“Don’t bother,” Roarke answered cheerfully. “Just be there.”

—

Daimon slid into the empty chair between his other half siblings, Prince Ingram and Princess Isolde. As he sat, his father rose to give his welcoming address. Round tables, clustered thick as lily pads in the Great Hall, were ringed with men and women in black; only the beasts, real and mythical, embroidered above their hearts, and the great, long-necked, amber-eyed wyverns flying across their backs, were permitted color.

“Welcome, Knights of Wyvernhold,” King Arden began, and Daimon’s attention promptly wandered to the far regions of Severluna, where a woman with marble skin and eyes colored like a peacock’s tail was no longer expecting him.

He quelled an urge to push his chair back, throw his jacket with the wyverns clinging to it onto the empty plates, and lose himself in the city. “. . . Mystes Ruxley will now bless this Assembly in Severen’s name.”

Across the table, the dour, ivory-haired mystes rose, his robe of office glittering with threads of gold and silver, the symbols of the river god, along with the jewels the mystes wore in his belt, on the collar around his neck, and on both hands.

“In Severen’s name,” he intoned sonorously, the last thing Daimon heard until a salad plate glided under his nose, and he realized that Isolde was talking to him.

“Where have you been, Daimon? No one’s seen you for days.”

He had the entire table’s attention, then, even the king’s. Mystes Ruxley, on one side of the king, opened his mouth to expand the question. The slight, wiry magus Lord Skelton, who was straightening his spectacles to observe Daimon more clearly, somehow dropped them into his water glass.

“Clumsy,” he commented, and held his open hand over the water. The spectacles rose, neatly folded and drip-free, into his palm. He blinked at everyone watching him now instead of Daimon. “I beg your pardon.”

He slid the glasses back on his nose and looked again at Daimon. What he saw through the circular lenses seemed to surprise him; his pale blue eyes, enlarged by the lenses, widened to fill them with the peering, questioning gaze.

“Where have you been?” Daimon heard him wonder. Attention had drifted away from the question; it got lost in the sudden ring of fork against porcelain. Servers in their bright uniforms circled the table, proffering buns; others stood attentively behind the king, holding pitchers of water, bottles of wine, ready to replace the slightest sip. Daimon, absently pulling a bun into bits, helplessly pondered the magus’s question.

Where, indeed?

Finally, there seemed some end in sight to the endless occasion. The king rose, spoke again; a few words drifted into Daimon’s head: a supper, a tournament, the formal opening of the Assembly, the purpose of which Lord Skelton and Mystes Ruxley would explain. And then everyone was rising, including Daimon, who left only his empty chair to answer some question that had begun with his name. In a blink, he was one of hundreds of black uniforms; after a blur of time, he was finally out, away, on his bike and leaving the tediously familiar behind him as rapidly as he could.

This time, Vivien met him in the past.

He tailed a roaring truck as it turned down the street where she lived, and there she was, waiting. There they both were, he realized suddenly, standing in the miserly shadow of a sidewalk tree. He stopped his bike, staring, oblivious to the screech and bellowing horns and curses behind him. Vivien gestured; he moved again, finally brought the bike to a halt under a NO PARKING sign.

The gray eyes, he saw, held the familiar, magical parings of gold in them that would catch fire under any passing light. She wore a flowing skirt, a tunic; her long, white-gold hair was pinned carelessly; blowing strands framed her lovely face. The expression in those eyes, fierce and watchful as she studied him, was not something, he guessed, she would have let his father see in the brief hours they had been together.

He swallowed dryly, tried to speak, suddenly as confused as the small whirlwind in a nearby alley, gathering up scraps, torn paper, dust, then letting them all go without knowing why.

“All these years,” he said finally, raggedly, “you’ve been dead.”

She smiled a little, fierceness melting into unexpected tenderness. “I never went that far away from you. Lady Seabrook found me various masks to wear so that I could sometimes see you, watch you grow.”

“Lady Seabrook,” he repeated, astonished. “My dotty great-aunt Morrig?”

“Your dotty great-aunt made me a field squire so that I could watch you train. I sold ice cream in Calluna’s Cave when the queen first took you there to see it. I taught you how to drive.”