Kingfisher(61)

“Silly way to live,” Morrig said. “What’s the point of being so tidy you can’t see beyond the rules you’ve made for everything? Look at this world instead.” He could see it now, as she and Vivien and his mother had taught him: the lovely, timeless place hidden within the noisy, jangling, quarrelsome, troubled world where even the wyverns were nothing now except a word. “Once our true realm ran from one horizon to the other, from day to night; you could move from one end to the other with a wish. A step. What Sylvester Skelton calls his magic flamed in every blade of grass, every flowering tree. Now, time gets in the way. It scattered us; we withered in it, even those of us closest to being human. The world of the wyvern king trampled us without even knowing we exist. We need our cauldron to remake our world. Find it.”

“Find it,” his mother pleaded.

“Find it,” Vivien said, always with a kiss, “for us.”

“Where are you these days?” his father asked, startling Daimon on his way out. No one really knew him anymore, so why would anyone pay attention to what he did? “You drift in and out like a ghost; your body is here, but your eyes never are. And then you vanish entirely, and I think you’ve followed the path of the questing knight. Then you’re back; you’ve gone nowhere at all, except that you’ve never left the place you think you come home from.” Daimon, his mind in the wyvern’s world at that moment, saw the wariness in his father’s eyes. “Who is she?”

“No one,” Daimon told him, feeling the long, powerful flow and drag on his heart, the summons of the invisible on the verge of becoming visible if he took that step, that leap. “I’ll get over it,” he added, absently, words his father wanted to hear. “Just give me time.”

As he learned how to see into that timeless place, he learned more of its past.

It was a piecemeal process: he never knew what he would see, or when it might have happened; as in dreams, there was no past, only now.

He parked his bike at a crossroad, took a step, and Severluna vanished. The broad meadow where the Calluna River found its way into light surrounded him. What he thought was the sun flashed on the horizon. But his shadow lay in front of him; a twin sun above him illumined the vast flow of green around him. The second star on the horizon was rich bronze-gold; it pulsed with a clamor of hammering that echoed across the plain. Great black flocks of ravens swirled up and out of the glow, as though somehow they had been forged within its fires. Everything—the genial sky, the flowering grass, the earth itself—seemed to emit a low, sweet hum he could feel reverberating through the ground, up into his veins and sinews. He stood rapt, a note the earth sang.

At the corner of another street, he stepped into night, and saw the source of the second sun. It was the cauldron he had seen before, under the familiar tree. The woman he remembered stirred the shining liquid within it with her great wooden spoon; this time she sang that pure, constant hum. So bright the cauldron was that it blotted out the stars. The moon, awash with its light, was a faint, thin pair of bronze horns tilted above the tree.

A procession made its way from night into light: four women carrying a long bronze shield with a dead man lying upon it. He had no eyes; there was a bloody hole where his heart should have been. Following him, a man carried a spear that wept blood; another held a knife, its blade curved like the moon in the tree.

The woman stirring the pot raised the bowl of her spoon, poured the molten liquid over the blind face. Then she gestured.

The women raised the shield, tilted it, and the body of the fallen warrior slid, disappeared into the cauldron.

“That’s what you want me to find?” Daimon asked Vivien, who was suddenly on the sidewalk beside him, surrounded by endlessly moving bodies dodging around them.

“Yes,” she said. “But after being in time all these—well, however long—we don’t know exactly what it will look like. You’ll recognize it as we would.” She smiled; her palm rested briefly on his heart. “Here.”

“Did the warrior come back to life? Or did he get eaten?”

Her mouth crooked; she answered patiently, “He was drinking beer and toasting the moon an hour later.”

“Are you certain my heart is big enough for this?”

“I’m certain that your heart will grow large enough to take that great power when it reveals itself to you. As it will. You are the raven’s son.”

He rode in a daze, found himself back on the palace grounds. He got off his bike, walked it behind the sanctum tower to the royal garages, where he found a woman crouched on the floor beside her bike and wielding a wrench.

She rose swiftly when she recognized him.

“Prince Daimon.”

She looked familiar: those long bones, the honey-colored hair, that height. Standing, they were eye to eye, and suddenly he remembered.

“Dame Scotia. You were the black knight who forced me to yield to you.”

She smiled; that, too, he remembered.

“It is strange,” she commented, “not knowing who you’re fighting. In tales, it seems romantic: the nameless, invisible knights, the shining armor, the great swords. That’s why I took to it. In truth, it’s stifling and awkward, lumbering around wearing all that weight and trying to see out of a slit in your helm.”

“You made yourself good at it.”

She shrugged lightly. “I had several older cousins to practice on. You made yourself good at it, as well.”