Kingfisher(4)

His thoughts were anything but calm. Old questions surfaced urgently, obsessively, along with new. Who was his father? What was he like? What had he done? Had he ever left Cape Mistbegotten to follow the long road south to Severluna? Had he known such as those formidably trained, confident, trusted young knights?

Had he been one?

Was he alive or dead? If dead, how had he died?

If not, where was he?

There were no answers, Pierce realized finally, in this place where he had been born. Wind, sea, the ancient house, even his mother all told him nothing. Sitting on the wall, staring at the fog bank rolling across the horizon told him nothing either. He stood, backed a step or two away from the land’s edge, perplexed by an impulse growing in him, as mindless and undefined as the forces under his feet. It was not until he finally turned, got back into the car and started it, that he understood what he would do.

He went as far, then, as the end of the drive. He turned the engine off again and was gazing at the closed door of the garage when his mother stepped into view through the driver’s side window. She bent to look at him as he jumped. Her eyes were wide, her red-gold hair loose and roiling in the wind. It dawned on him, as they both fumbled to open the door, that she had been waiting for him. She had known what he was thinking before he did.

“Pierce?” she said, as he got out. Her husky voice, oddly tremulous, the pallor in the lovely face, the green rainbow of letters spelling Haricot arching over the embroidered bean vine on the apron she had neglected to take off, amazed him. He had never seen her afraid before. He was going to do this thing, he realized, astonished anew. He was actually going to leave home.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “Mom. Really.”

“It was those knights,” she said bitterly. She was trembling, her hands tucked under her arms as though she were cold. “Their fault.”

“They just got lost.” He put an arm over her shoulder, turned her toward the house. “Let’s go inside. Don’t worry. It’s just something I have to do.”

“No. I need you to stay here, help me at Haricot. You can’t leave. You need to know so much more than you do. So much that I haven’t taught you yet.”

He pushed the heavy front door open. The great hall, a shadowy, drafty remnant of a bygone age, held as many cobwebs as there were oddments to hang them on. The full body armor of some long-dead knight stood on one side of the huge fireplace so rarely lit that the pile of logs and driftwood in it probably housed any number of creatures. The knight’s helm, a beaky thing with slits for vision, seemed to stare speculatively at Pierce.

He asked impulsively, “Was my father a knight?”

Heloise sank into one of the worn couches scattered around the room. She eyed the cold hearth expressionlessly; Pierce thought that, as ever, she would maneuver around an answer. Her face crumpled abruptly. She tossed a streak of fire at the dry wood with one hand, and with the other, brought the hem of the apron to her eyes. The pile flamed amid explosions of resin, cracklings, and keening that, to Pierce’s ears, might not have entirely been the voices of wood.

“Yes,” she snapped. “Yes. And he still is.”

Pierce’s breath stopped. Everything stopped; his thoughts, his blood, even the fierce, hungry ravages of the fire froze in a moment of absolute silence. He sat down abruptly on the couch beside his mother. He took a breath, another, staring at her, then heard the fire again, and his own breathing, as ragged as though he had been running.

“He’s alive?” He felt the blood push into his face, the sting of what might have been brine behind his eyes; he seemed, weirdly enough, on the verge of crying for the man who had not died. “What—where?”

Her full lips pinched; her own face had flushed brightly, furiously. If he had touched her cheek, she might have burned him. Her lips parted finally, gave him the word, a hard, dry nugget of sound.

“Severluna.” He didn’t move, just let his eyes draw at her, asking, asking, until she finally spoke again. “He has been, since before he was your age, a knight in King Arden’s court. We met there—”

“You—”

She held up a hand; he waited. More words fell: flint; fossils; hard, cold diamonds. “We met and married there.” His throat closed; he swallowed what felt like fire. “I had a child. A son.”

His mouth opened; no words came. He felt the wave break again behind his eyes, the ache of salt and blood.

“The year your father took my small son to King Arden’s court to be trained and educated was the year I knew, beyond all doubt, that he had never loved me. He loved the queen. Only her. Always her. Before, during, and even now.

“So I ran.” Her own eyes glittered. Pierce watched one tear fall, saw her catch it in her palm, her fingers close over it, so rare it was, so powerful. “I took you with me. I didn’t—I didn’t know that then. I came here, to the place we chose, during the first year of our marriage, to be alone together. I thought we were alone. I had not realized then that he had brought her with us; even then he carried her everywhere in his heart.” His lips parted to ask; she opened her empty hand to stop him. “No one lived here; it was his inheritance. He came looking for me. Once. To ask me back to Severluna. I told him no. Never again.

“By then I knew about you. I didn’t tell him. I kept you here, after you were born, so far from king and court that you would know nothing of your father’s life. Down there, no one gives a thought to the distant, isolated margins of the world. I wanted to raise you so far from Severluna that anything you heard or read about it would seem as unreal as a fairy tale.”