Kingfisher(62)

He was silent, trying to recall exactly why. His own past blurred into another; he could scarcely envision a time before he had known Vivien. Who had he been, he wondered with a strange, quick tremor of panic, before he was the raven’s child?

He heard a clink, blinked, and saw Dame Scotia bending to pick up the wrench she had dropped. He saw her, he realized, as he saw no one else those days. Perhaps only because she was a stranger, and therefore not tediously predictable.

He shook his head a little, settling a bewildering stir of thought.

“Anything I can help with?” he asked.

“Just tightening this and that, Prince Daimon. Making sure things don’t fall apart. Thank you.” She smiled again, left an imprint on his mind of calm, violet eyes, an expression absurdly free of complications. “That’s another thing I accidentally became good at.”

In the middle of the night he woke himself up thinking: Chimera Bay.

The words haunted him when he woke again at dawn. He didn’t recall where he had heard them, or why they might be in any way important. He threw on some clothes, fended off the usual meaningless questions and conversations, and rode back in time to the one place left that made any sense to him.

This time, he found himself at Vivien’s door. As always, she opened it before he knocked. He entered wordlessly. She put her arms around him and took him nowhere and everywhere at once. Memories his own and not his own drifted like richly colored dying leaves through his head; he did not know, any longer, who he was except in her enchanting eyes.

He asked his mother about his vanishing past. She had put on a hundred masks to watch him grow; she would remember.

But she did not seem interested in it, either. “That was the wyvern king’s world. The place I couldn’t enter unless I was disguised. I juggled colored cloth balls at your fourth birthday party; I measured you for your first formal suit. I watched you in your first tournament from a concession stand. Glimpses of you were all my life, then.” She gave him a lovely, bittersweet smile that touched his heart. “Now I can stand here looking at your face.” She cupped it lightly with her hands. “And showing you mine. Why should I want to remember that past?”

They were in the tiny village called Ravensley, sitting at a sturdy wooden table in the cottage that Vivien’s apartment sometimes mysteriously became. She was out in one world or the other. Ana had poured tea in the pot on the table; neither of them drank it. The village was a place of shallow dimensions, Daimon sensed, like its photograph. He had never seen another cottage door open or anyone walking on the street. In a place beyond eyesight, it held villagers, tourists, traffic of every kind. In this moment, this memory, it held only an open door, a table, a teapot, no voices but their own.

Morrig entered then, glanced around for another chair, and there it was, along with another teacup. Daimon watched her guardedly, aware now of the power she hid behind her dithering ways.

“Tea,” she remarked, gazing into the cup. “Why never brandy? What is Chimera Bay?”

She looked questioningly at Daimon; he tried to grasp a slippery recollection, not easy in a place that seemed to be somebody else’s fraying memory. For some reason the queen’s lover, Leith Duresse, surfaced.

“I woke last night,” he explained, “and the words were in my head.”

“I know,” Morrig said. “I heard them, and I wondered.” She linked her fingers, clad in lacy, fingerless gloves, beneath her chin and regarded him out of mist-colored eyes older than Wyvernhold. “Try,” she suggested gently, and it came: supper on the day of the Assembly, Leith sitting beside his newfound son, Pierce Oliver, who was explaining something to the king, and to Sylvester Skelton.

“A fish fry?” Daimon said. “Can that be right?”

“Chimera Bay is a fish fry?”

“The fish fry is in Chimera Bay.” She nodded encouragingly, looking baffled, while his thoughts blundered about in the mists of her gaze, trying to see. “Friday fish fry,” he amended, then glimpsed another piece. “A ritual. Lord Skelton called it a ritual. Yes. Pierce Oliver had taken something from a ritual in Chimera Bay, involving fish. A knife, I think it was.” He hesitated, hearing fragments he had been paying little attention to, until now. “Lord Skelton seemed to make a connection between the knife, the fish fry, and Severen’s sacred artifact.”

He felt wind stir through the door of the cottage, smelling of asphalt and brine. Somewhere, in the past or future, brakes screeched, then an owl. Morrig’s attention had withdrawn so far from him or anyone, she might have been one of the cottage’s memories: the old woman sitting over her tea, motionless, shrouded in shadow.

Then she raised her cup, took a sip of tea, and made a face.

“Where is Chimera Bay?”

Ana shook her head. “Somewhere north?”

“I have no idea,” Vivien said. Daimon started, and she smiled, sitting among them unexpectedly, holding her own flowered cup. “Daimon, my love, do you?”

“Not a clue.”

“What might be there,” she persisted, “to make it at all important? To us, that is? A shrine? A well?”

“A place,” Ana said more clearly, “that might hold our past? Anything of Calluna’s?”

“I don’t know,” he said helplessly, and added, “I could ask Lord Skelton.”