Kingfisher(74)

Val pulled out his cell. “Let’s just find out what’s got their attention . . .”

He regaled them for a while with an intermittent lecture involving tides, grasses, worms, mud, microscopic crabs, and salmon finding their way back home. “The great nursery of the sea,” he intoned, then was silent, causing his brother and his father to pull their eyes off the road ahead to look at him.

“What is it?” Leith asked.

“There is an island in the middle of the sluff. The slog.”

“Slough,” Pierce said.

“Slew. According to this article, which of course is suspect since Severen only knows who wrote it, it was once, to ancient indigenous peoples, a holy place. They believed, because of the positions of the moonrise around it, that the island was the birthplace of the moon. It had attributes, this island. It had powers of healing. Women came there to give birth. Small things left as gifts have been found by archaeologists and picnickers. Painted clay beads, bone flutes, shell belts. Fieldstones carved with pictures of objects used in daily life, or birds and animals, were transported to the island and laid down in shapes corresponding to the phases of the moon.” He glanced up at Leith’s sudden shift. “Yes. That’s probably where the knights are going. They seem fond of disturbing holy places. The site was most recently used, a century or two ago, by prospectors who built an alehouse on the island to carouse without complaints from the gentlefolk of Chimera Bay. There were rumors of a brothel as well. When the prospectors moved on, and the structures fell down, the island reverted to its former wild state.”

“Is it accessible?” Leith asked.

Val studied his screen. “It is . . . yes. By means of a footbridge, too narrow for cars.”

“But not for bikes.”

“If they want to risk it. I wouldn’t. It looks pretty rickety to me.”

“They are risking it,” Pierce said, looking over the driver’s shoulder at a distant span above silent waters surrounded by the gentle rise and fall of thick, sprawling forests.

The driver echoed him. “There they are, sirs. And losing no time about it. Sorry to be so slow around these curves. The limo doesn’t like to bend.”

A dark smudge moved across the span, which seemed cobbled erratically to begin with, and gently dilapidated, swinging a slat here and there. One dropped off, shaken loose by the powerful vibrations of well-kept machines. It seemed to Pierce to fall a long way before it hit the water, causing a raptor to change its mind and veer sharply out of its dive.

As he watched, a piece of high ground detached itself from solid ground and shifted, as the road slewed, to reveal the water around all sides of it. The bridge disappeared into the tangle of green near the top of the island.

The first of the knights vanished into it.

“What do they think they’ll find there?” Val wondered. “Gold the prospectors missed? The brothel?”

“What do you think, sirs?” the driver asked. “There are a couple dozen of them and, from the look of it, not much trouble they can get into.”

As he spoke, a streak of blood-red lightning shot up from the trees, made a smoking blur of the uppermost branches. The driver braked hard, nearly tossing his passengers onto the floor.

“Sorry, sirs,” he panted. “What was that?”

“Wyvern’s Eye,” Leith said tersely. “Step on it.”

The driver pulled up finally at the end of the narrow bridge. As he tumbled out, Pierce heard faint cries across the water that might or might not have been gulls.

“Are you armed?” Leith asked him. He had to think.

“Yes.” He touched his shoulder, where the knife lay in its hidden sheath. “Since this morning.” He added, as another bolt of fuming red lit up the crown of the island, “For what it’s worth.”

Val, standing still, his eyes narrowed at the island, said, “There’s a woman’s voice among the birds.”

“Not again,” Leith breathed, and began to run.

By the time they reached the island and stumbled, panting, into the trees, the shouting had stopped. Even the birds had quieted. There was a faint, calm rill of water, which, as they moved toward it, transformed itself in surprising fashion to Pierce’s ears. The water spoke a human language. The water was not water. The rill, low, sweet, calm, was human.

They followed the trail the bikes had left along a hiking path that was littered with torn branches and tire-scarred ground. The tangle around them opened to a wide clearing. Surrounded by brush and trees, it edged the top of the island, overlooking the waters of the slough as they were pushed inland by the tide toward the distant conjunction of water and earth, silver flowing and disappearing into the endless rise of green.

The woman, her back to them, was addressing the entire company of knights. They stood among the sunken patterns of fieldstone, small, dark standing stones, the drifts of shell and little piles of sea-polished stones left by more recent visitors. Their faces, half-hidden by visors and sunglasses, seemed both baffled and incredulous. The woman in black with the Wyvern’s Eye in her hand aimed it not at them but at the line of bikes that had fallen one over the next as though they had been ruthlessly shoved.

“It’s a long walk back to Severluna,” she said.

Then she was facing Leith, Val, and Pierce, her pale violet eyes unblinking, her face composed, ready for whatever came. In her other hand, the weapon’s red fuming eye still stared at the bikes.