Kingfisher(66)

Val said quickly, after she vanished, “I am older than you, far more experienced with fighting whatever she might conjure up, and I’ve been with him my entire life. Please. Let me go.”

“I can lie better than you,” Pierce said.

“How do you know?”

Pierce gazed at him helplessly. “Because there’s so much I don’t know about either of you. I could invent all kinds of things and believe them at the same time. And I’ve been around a sorceress all my life. Look at your face. Have you ever told a single lie?”

“Of course I have.”

“That must be the first. You can’t even lie convincingly about lying. Your eyes don’t know how.”

Val said nothing, just looked at him with such burning, pleading urgency that Pierce yielded and stayed behind to await the cheese rinds and the rats that, he expected, would be inevitable.

It did not take Val long to get into trouble. After some roaming and futile banging at walls, during which time stood around and watched, judging from the lack of even a hairbreadth of movement from light or shadow, Pierce found a plate on a cracked and blistered wooden chest. As promised, it held some furry cheese whittled to the rind, and a couple of rock-hard heels of bread. He looked at it glumly, wondering how his father and brother were faring. Also as promised, a rat popped up from behind the chest, eyed Pierce warily.

“Help yourself,” Pierce told it, and turned away to find another wall, another weapon.

He dumped the dead plant out of a cast-iron pot, and was trying to put a dent in a windowless wall inset with an incongruous window seat, when the rat leaped up onto the seat and stood staring at him.

“Sorry,” Pierce sighed. “You’ll have to wait for the next meal after whatever that one was.” He whacked at the wall with force, determined to fight his way back into the world by whatever worked. The rat did not move. Pierce glanced at it again. Something in its dark, fixed gaze, its complete lack of instinct or common rat sense, made Pierce’s skin prickle.

He lowered the pot, whispered, “Mom?”

The wall around the window seat blew into fragments. The rat, squealing, leaped one way, Pierce another. When the shards of lath and plaster finished falling, and the dust settled, he felt light and heard the distant roar of the sea.

A series of muffled explosions thundered methodically around him, followed by some furious shouting just before the floor collapsed under his feet. He thudded down an inch or two, and walls around him collapsed, dissolved, like the long spiral of chambers within a shell fraying apart, opening up to reveal its outer structure. He stood in the lovely mansion he had seen from the road, with its airy rooms overlooking the highway and the sea, its windows stained the mist and pearl of what he finally realized was dawn.

Across the road, down a long, empty beach, a crow chased a seagull. Their cries were audible even above the waves. Pierce, watching the crow gain air and peck at the gull’s feathers, shivered suddenly, amazed at the power that his mother possessed to have torn apart the sorceress’s spell like a squall hitting a haystack. He watched for a time, wondering if she would turn and fly back to him. Both birds vanished behind a jut of headland. He waited, as the sun revealed its waking eye between two layers of cloud, then closed it again and carried on unseen. Pierce opened a sliding deck door, stepped outside, taking deep breaths of the briny, chilly air. He heard voices, and went to look over the side of the deck.

Val and Leith stood below. Val was pulling on his jacket and sliding weapons into its hidden pockets. Leith, holding Pierce’s clothes and boots and the kitchen knife, was scanning the lower windows and shouting his name.

Pierce called back, then found his way down swiftly and joined them. Leith, looking pale and harried, reached out, hugged him tightly with one arm, then handed him his pants.

“Hurry,” he begged, “before she comes back. I’d rather face the kraken at the bottom of the sea than that again.”

Val was looking askew at Pierce, astonished. “How on earth did you break that spell?”

“I didn’t. Our mother found us.”

Leith stared at him. “That was Heloise?”

Pierce nodded, pulling on his shirt. “The sorceress made a mistake and let a living animal into her spell. I told you,” he added to Val, “that you couldn’t lie.”

“You were right.”

“What animal?” Leith asked.

“A rat. My mother has a habit of watching out for me. She uses just about anything with eyes.” He paused, added with wonder, “I can’t believe she came all the way down from Cape Mistbegotten for this.”

“She was the dragon,” Val reminded him.

“No. That was only her making. She probably borrowed some other local creature for that illusion.”

“But she wasn’t the basilisk.”

“No. I was wrong about that.”

“We were all wrong,” Leith murmured. He gave Pierce his jacket and the knife. “Where is she? Where did they both go?”

“Last I saw, they went flying down the beach. And I think you’re right,” Pierce added uneasily. “We should get out of here before the sorceress comes back.”

Val produced his cell. “I’ll call our driver.”

Leith, still looking unsettled, incredulous, said, “I can’t believe . . . I had no idea she could— Did you have any idea she was that— Do you think she knew that Val and I were in trouble? Or did she only do this for you?”