Kingfisher(60)



“She’s mad at me, too.”

“Only by default. You’re with us.”

Pierce started to reply, didn’t. He had no idea any longer what their mother might do or not do. He watched Leith, who was hidden from the basilisk’s eye by a long moving van. He reached the end of it, and the strange, upright coils of the snake’s body rippled suddenly. Its head turned almost completely sideways, staring down at the man walking toward it, visible now beside a small convertible with its top down. The driver, in the shadow of the beast’s oddly tilted head, dropped his cell and tried to crawl under the dash.

“That is the weirdest combination of creatures imaginable,” Val said, wonderstruck anew. “A variation of the feathered serpent, maybe? I wonder if it crows.”

“I think,” Pierce said uneasily, “we’re about to find out.”

The huge beak was opening wide above Leith. Weapons appeared in open windows: Wyvern’s Eyes, hunting rifles, bows. Leith shouted something; so did the man with the bullhorn. Leith moved to the middle of the empty lane, walked down it in full view of the basilisk. Behind him, cars stopped in the middle of their turns, transfixed by the knight on foot challenging the monster on top of the fire engine. One of the trucks let out an ear-piercing wail, an effort to distract it, Pierce guessed. Val moved impulsively from behind the line of vehicles to walk behind his father. The snake’s coils shuddered again all down the long body. The rooster beak answered the fire truck with a fierce, shrill cross between a rooster crow and a snake’s hiss that must have shaken windows all along the highway. Then it caught sight of Pierce emerging behind his brother.

The basilisk’s beak opened again. It made no sound this time. It enveloped Leith in a cloud of breath that was black, completely opaque, and stank of such acrid bitterness that a flock of starlings flying overhead rained down suddenly among the fire trucks.

The whiff Pierce caught made him gag, forced tears into his eyes. He heard children screaming and crying, people coughing and cursing all around him. He moved blindly, bumped into Val, who was bent over and throwing up his lunch. Pierce wiped his burning eyes with his sleeve, blinked vision desperately back into them, taking in dry, shallow breaths through his mouth.

When he could finally see again, the basilisk had vanished, leaving its cloud of appalling breath for the sea winds to shred. The body of his father, his blurred eyes told him, lay motionless on the road.

Pierce staggered toward him, still hearing sobs, moans, convulsive noises all around him. Those nearest the basilisk were dazed, hunched over and stumbling into the trucks, or tripping over one another. No one had yet come to the aid of the fallen knight. Pierce reached Leith finally, dropped to his knees. He put a hand on Leith’s chest, felt his heartbeat, then the breath move through him. Val staggered next to him, sagged down. He couldn’t speak; he queried Pierce with a bloodshot stare.

“He’s breathing,” Pierce told him. “I don’t see anything broken or bleeding. I think he just fainted.”

“Felled by the basilisk’s breath,” Val muttered hoarsely. “He’ll never live that down.” He held Leith’s shoulder, shook him gently. “Father? Are you in there? It’s safe. The beast is gone. Come back. Sir Leith Duresse. We need you. Please come back.”

Leith showed no signs of doing so. Val gave Pierce another haggard glance, then looked around helplessly at the still-afflicted fire crew.

A shadow fell over Leith. Pierce raised his head and found the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life standing over them.

She was speaking, he realized belatedly, still half-stunned, as flowers, pearls, jewels, fell from her full, rose-petal lips.

“My house is just up that drive.” She motioned toward a palatial estate on the cliff above them. “We’ve been watching the excitement from our deck. My driver can help you carry him to my car. The drive is clear of traffic, and he can wait for the paramedics in my guest room. I think it would be much quicker than waiting for an ambulance trying to get through this. Will you let us help you?”

Val was trying to tell him something, Pierce sensed. His wide-eyed, insistent gaze, his two-handed grip on their father, his alert, motionless warrior’s stance, all spoke, all said the last thing Pierce wanted to hear.

Pierce said, “Yes.”





18


Daimon rode through the streets of Severluna, paying no attention to where he was going. Where didn’t matter anymore: every street would take him there.

“Our world,” his great-aunt told him, “is always just a step away from anywhere. Don’t bother looking for it. You are already there in your heart.”

That much was true: he felt the moon-tug of that realm, the tidal pull of it overwhelming the kingdom of the wyvern, until very little of that world seemed important any longer. He lost the need of it, except in necessary ways: the place he went for clothes and food; the place where he was occasionally expected to appear, talk to faces that he remembered vaguely, in a dreamlike fashion. As in dreams, they were losing predictability; he was losing hold of their past. He saw them as from a distance: the queen who had never been his mother, the king who looked at him through wyvern’s eyes and knew nothing of the raven, the princess who fretted over him but no longer knew him, anything about him at all.

He had thought that the fay realm of Ravenhold was a dream; he learned that Wyvernhold was the unreal world. Its magic had fragmented; few possessed it. Every moment of its days was time-bound, counted, measured; the end of time was not forever, but death, and death waited everywhere, in every shadow.

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