Kingfisher(83)

The knights were looking at Niles Camden, who finally proffered judgment. “If you let one or two of us watch you cook—”

“Certainly.”

“To see that nothing handled is of metals dedicated to Severen.”

“Yes.”

“And that these machines truly cook, and are not weapons, and therefore dedicated to the god—”

“Of course.”

“Then maybe we can—”

The knife slid out of Pierce’s hand as someone passed him. His fingers tightened on air. He glanced around, startled, but saw only the listening knights, and Sage, who had slipped in somehow, likely at the sound of her name. Her back to Pierce, she eased herself around, between, toward her husband on the table, whose hold on Carrie had taken on a less fantastic shape.

“Ah,” Stillwater said, smiling at the ripple through the crowd. “And here Sage is to help you all find places at our tables. If you would follow her—”

Out, he meant to say, when a seam of silver parted the air above Sage, caught light as it spun itself down. Somehow, Stillwater’s word got stuck. His mouth opened wider and wider around it; still he could not push it out. His fingers uncurled; Carrie stumbled away from him as he bent down over himself. Knights near the table backed abruptly into one another, away from Sage and the strangely afflicted Stillwater, who was losing masks like leaves dropping away from him, until only one was left.

The word came out finally, a stunned shriek, and Pierce saw the kitchen knife again, nailing the chef among his machines to the table by one bloody foot.

“Take the machines,” Sage cried, turning away from him to face the knights. “Take them all to Severluna and throw them into the river. They are weapons. They are as powerful and destructive as any you carry. Go away and take them with you and never, ever eat anything they might tempt you with, because you will never again want anything but air until you die.”

The bones were sharp in her wan, wasted face; her long hair hung limply; her eyes were hollowed with a human hunger. Behind her, Stillwater was tugging at the knife in his foot; it refused to give him up. Pierce would not have recognized him. His hair was a cloud of tangled dark, his eyes an astonishing peacock blue flecked with gold, his lean, high-boned face wild in its beauty, a face that had been once worn very close to earth.

A wolf howled from the street outside. Then it howled at the door, and again, within the walls. Stillwater stopped moving, gazed incredulously toward the sound. Carrie, who stood holding one of his machines, a soda siphon by the look of it, above his head in case he escaped, smiled suddenly at what bounded through the knights, knocking half of them off their feet.

“Hey, Dad.”

The wolf leaped up onto the table; machines wobbled and crashed. The wolf snarled, showing teeth inches from Stillwater’s face.

“You can’t be here,” Stillwater panted raggedly. “You can’t get past my wards. You never could. You—”

He stopped speaking. His face turned reluctantly, angle by angle, toward what his eyes did not want to see.

Three women stood across the threshold of his escape.

At first glance, Pierce guessed, they were family, stopping in for a bite: daughter, mother, grandmother. Their eyes held a similar expression of recognition, satisfaction, the successful completion of some task, maybe something as simple as finally finding the time to meet together. Then he felt his skin prickle. What they recognized was Stillwater, or whatever went by that name, now that he had shed every disguise. They knew his oldest face.

An odd cast of light behind them caused their shadows to meet in front of them, form one long, straight line of dark that rolled through the old vault, into the kitchen to the table. Knights, oddly silent, swallowing their words, shifted away from that dark, pushing against one another to avoid its stark edges.

“There you are,” the oldest said. Her eyes were smudged silver, her hair white as moonlight.

“And about time,” the younger said. Her face looked backward and forward, lingering in the mellow season of beauty between young and old. “You’ve lived so quietly up here, you must have thought we had forgotten you entirely. But we have never for a moment forgotten. The wolf recognized you. He called us until we finally heard him.”

The youngest of them, slight and ethereally slender, gazed at him curiously out of his own rich, fay eyes. “You stole our cauldron, that feeds anyone, everyone, and is never empty. Yet you made these machines. You make hate with them, and you feed it to humans. You hated your own world; you hate this one as much. What a strange existence. You never used what you had stolen. What did you do with it?”

Behind the creature that was Stillwater, Carrie lowered the machine she held over him. She set it very quietly on the table and backed away from the impending storm. Leith, his eyes never leaving the three, held out his hand to her, helped her down. The wolf, turning restively on the table, shoved against the trapped cook once or twice, knocking his body out of its precarious huddle over the knife, its compromise with pain. His mouth opened again; the anguished word that came out was incomprehensible. Then the wolf flowed carelessly down onto the tangle of shadows and turned human.

He turned his back to Stillwater, asked the three tersely, “You? Or me?”

“He might prefer you,” the oldest said, her silvery eyes as cold as the metallic machines around the cook. “You are powerful, Merle, and you might find a way to give him oblivion. We can take him back to the place he fled so long ago, the place where he was born. He has something that belongs to us; he will not die before he tells us where it is.”