Kingfisher(63)

“You could,” Morrig said, “just go there and see what you see. Be a questing knight. Take a look. You know yourself well enough by now to recognize what might be important to us.” He looked mutely at Vivien, appalled at the idea, wondering how she could expect him to leave her and go off searching for a fish fry in the nether regions of Wyvernhold.

“Come with me?” he pleaded. She reached across the table for his hand, gripped it tightly.

“I can’t travel with you,” she said gently. “Not openly. None of us can. It would attract attention, especially from the king and his magus, who have their eyes on you already. Lord Skelton might begin to think too much and discover us. We must have that cauldron back first.” She raised his fingers to her cheek, her brows crooked. “But don’t worry. We will never be far from you. No farther than it takes for you to find me now. Do this for me?”

Reluctantly, later, he nerved himself to enter the vast, dusty, overwhelmingly packed rooms of the Royal Library to look for maps. The older the better, he decided, since no modern map would have anything to do with Ravenhold. He needed one map to pinpoint Chimera Bay, which he was not entirely sure how to spell, and another, the oldest he could find, to look for words, place names, that, like fossil footprints, might indicate the values of a forgotten realm.

He got vague directions from a librarian and wandered through collisions of architectural styles, as rooms expanded through the centuries to admit new collections. A map framed on a far wall beckoned; he followed its summons and found himself in a room so cluttered with moldering tomes that it made him sneeze.

Near him, an elbow slid off the page of a tome and hit the table hard. A head, haloed with sunlight from stained glass, turned toward him as the elbow’s owner rubbed it. They gazed at one another with surprise.

Then the knight hastily pushed back her heavy, ornate chair, and Daimon said as quickly, “Dame Scotia. I didn’t mean to startle you. Don’t tell me you read as well?”

She subsided, showing him the enormous, gaudily illustrated work. “I’m researching my ancestor, Tavis Malory, to find out if he was truly as dreadful as his contemporaries said. I do intend to go questing. I keep intending to go. But I can’t seem to find my way past all the books, these and Lord Skelton’s.”

“Tavis—” Past surfaced unexpectedly; a title came to mind. “The Life and Death—of course.”

“Have you read it?”

“Hasn’t everybody? That’s what made me want to run around in armor swinging a broadsword at people. I remember now.” He glanced at her curiously, wondering what it was about her that seemed to clear his head, convince him, for just a moment, that he belonged back in the mundane world. “Where will you quest, when you do?”

“I haven’t decided yet, Prince Daimon. It seems such a complex notion: finding a vessel belonging to a god, lost for who knows how long except in tales. I’m at a loss trying to find a beginning point. If you don’t mind my asking, how did you make the decision?”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh.”

“Like you, I’m still here. But I have decided to look at a map. A very old map. Like this one.”

He crossed the room to study the map on the wall that had lured him in. It was large, studded with wyverns’ nests, a realm with borders puffed and vague as clouds, mountains like inverted V’s, forests of what looked like brown chimneys billowing green smoke, abounding with animals extinct, and imaginary, and occasionally, like the spouting whales frolicking off the coast, still existent. Wyvernhold, in huge gold-leaf letters, spanned the landmass. “Later than I thought,” he commented, studying it closely, and came nose to nose with a peculiar creature. It appeared so suddenly that it took his breath away. “And there it is. So that’s what a chimera looks like . . .”

He heard the chair scrape stone again. “May I?”

“Of course.”

She came to stand beside him, silent for a moment, until she gave a sudden chuckle. “There.” She tapped the glass over the northeastern, mountainous portion of Wyvernhold. “The Triple-Horned Mountain Sheep. My family crest. Not lovely, but fearless and quite strong. They would even attack wyverns who were after their young.”

“Everyone fought the wyvern, once, it seems.”

“Where is the chimera?”

He pointed to the fire-breathing lion with the body of a goat, and a writhing serpent for a tail, hovering over a bay in the northern coast of Wyvernhold. “Chimera Bay. That’s where I would look. If I were questing.”

“Why there?” she murmured, studying the strange beast. “Is a chimera particularly dedicated to Severen?”

“I don’t know.”

“The goat part looks female.”

“So it does,” he said, recognizing the very full udder. “I need an older map. A map older than Wyvernhold, to know.”

“To know what, Prince Daimon?”

“If the bay had other names. Older names. What early beings might still be living, forgotten, in the chimera’s shadow.” He glanced at her; she still studied the map, fascinated, it seemed, by the variety of beasts.

“So you are?” she asked. “Questing? That’s why you need the map?”

“Yes.” He turned away restively, full of sudden impatience, to go so that he could come back. “As soon as I can. Tomorrow. At dawn.”