Kingfisher(48)



“Reveal what, exactly?” Leith asked in his deep, sinewy voice that Pierce was coming to love. “Lord Skelton?”

“The landscape of the heart.”

There was a little silence that sounded, Pierce thought, bewilderingly like a comment. Then the king murmured, “Indeed an unpredictable place.” His eyes went to his daughter. “And you, Isolde? Are you joining Niles Camden’s expedition?”

She shook her fair head, her face, unlike her father’s, expressing exactly what she thought. “I am so underwhelmed by Niles’s ambitions. I’ve made plans to travel with Maggie Leighton. We haven’t yet decided where to start looking.”

“Good.”

“I want to go,” Prince Roarke said, taking his knife to the small bird on his plate. “There’s something compelling about this quest, even if, as Lord Skelton says, you may not know what you’re looking for until you see it, and if you look for its power, you may miss it entirely. It’s like taking the wyvern in the north. Maybe you glimpse the ancient memory of it, maybe not. But you bring home its shadow in your heart and the feeling that you have been seen.”

The king’s face loosened toward a smile. “I do remember that. It’s something you never forget. But no. You’ve been away from court long enough. I want you here with me.”

Prince Roarke looked at him silently, surprised. The king regarded his youngest son, who had scarcely said a word after greeting Pierce. Prince Daimon, busily deboning his bird with a culinary precision and eating very little of it, laid down his fork and met his father’s eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “I will go. I’m not yet sure where. Or with whom.”

Expression flowed through the king’s eyes, surfaced on his face, complex and fleeting; he studied Daimon with a stranger’s scrutiny, as though, in that moment, he did not recognize his son.

Daimon’s eyes dropped, hid from the wyvern’s gaze, and from the magus, who, frowning vaguely, seemed to be trying to remember something else lost in the mists of time and history, and whether or not it might in any way be important.

“Well,” he breathed finally, “what will come will come. We shall see in the end what shape, what face it takes.” His tangled brows knotted suddenly; he shifted the glasses on his nose, looking pained. “You need,” he said to Pierce, “to call your mother.”



The next afternoon, Pierce stood between his father and his brother among hundreds of knights in the sanctum of the god Severen. Like Val, he wore the dark uniform and the quilted jacket embroidered with the sign of Leith’s family: a black swan floating on a silver-blue lake, silhouetted against a full moon edged with a circle of stars. The sanctum was a huge, diamond-shaped structure whose great colored windows were so rich with coiling seams of silver and gold that light reflecting off them burned Pierce’s eyes and inspired the tears that were his first gift to the god. Through centuries, its lofty walls had acquired a crust of wealth that astonished the eye in every possible shape and from every possible cranny. In the center a great fountain shot sacred water upward through a lavishly decorated pipe, imitating the perpetual, vigorous power of the Severen River.

Mystes Ruxley, high above the gathering on an ornate, gilded pulpit, also endlessly imitated that flow.

“You will at all times uphold the laws of Wyvernhold. You will use all weapons in the name of the god Severen, and lead your quest in a manner that reflects the ancient traditions of this land and its king. You will . . .”

Pierce’s thoughts strayed to the small town on Chimera Bay that, no matter how far he traveled, would not let him go. Random memories surfaced: the strange ritual in the ghost of the old hotel; the past that clung there, a collection of fractured relics and small mysteries; the young woman with her smiling green eyes, her flowing golden hair and generous smile, those eyes reddened, heavy with unshed tears. Trapped in a fairy tale, she seemed to him, by the chef who refused to show his face. Again Pierce felt the pull of her, even across the distance, and his impulse to step once more onto that convoluted, obsessive path to her door.

“Go in peace, return safely with what you find, for every one of you, searching for such a prize will, according to the magus Lord Skelton, bring back what you need most. In the name of the god Severen, and with King Arden’s sufferance, go into the world with courage, humility, and the worthiest of intentions. As Lord Skelton might say, and probably did: Follow your heart, and you will always know where you are. This Assembly is ended. Praise Severen.”

The knights did so with such enthusiasm that the phrase bounced from wall to wall and even overwhelmed, for an instance, the incessant voice of the river god. Pierce felt a hand grip his shoulder; he turned his head, met Leith’s smiling eyes. He followed his father and his brother out of the sanctum into the long shadows and bright, sun-streaked late afternoon of Severluna, and he wondered what he could possibly find of value on this quest that he did not already, amazingly, possess.

Late that night, he finally called his mother.





14


News about the Assembly reached Calluna’s sanctum in piecemeal fashion. Short of listening through a keyhole, Perdita had to wait for Gareth to reappear, which he finally did late in the evening after the Assembly ended. They slipped out of the palace, away from knights and acolytes, to a quiet, discreet pub to talk. From Gareth, the princess heard the incredible tale of the secret son of Leith Duresse, whose wife Heloise had kept from him all those years.

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