Kingfisher(84)
Another word came out of the cook, a wild bird cry, echoing itself again and again. He pulled frantically at the knife, his hands growing slick; the kitchen blade seemed rooted in the table, oblivious to any power but its own. He spoke again to the women, words entwined with the sounds of birds and insects, frogs and snakes, creatures that ran on four legs and named themselves with other than language.
“Promises,” the youngest said, the one who had his eyes. “Promises. I am only part fay, the tiniest breath left from those days when human and fay crossed paths, and yet I feel I know you. What have you done to yourself?”
“Time to go,” the third said, her pale eyes pitiless. “Time to go home.”
“I don’t know!” he shouted, finding one final way to say what he needed. “I don’t know where it is! It vanished from my sight years ago. Maybe decades, maybe centuries—I don’t remember! It was useless to me—I stopped seeing it, and it was gone.”
They had no faces suddenly; they had no substance; three shadows stood together, hollows of air and space. On the floor, the path of their true shadows deepened, took on dimension. The thing that had been Stillwater was losing its shape, blurring into a slurry not unlike one of his strange culinary inventions. So were the walls and ceiling of the kitchen; the machines, the table, everything that was not human dissolved. Colors ran, whirled, shed light, as though, Pierce thought, the world itself had gotten snagged in one of the machines and was turning into something only almost familiar. Then, for the briefest, most exquisite moment, he saw the world that engulfed the fay: such a wealth, a treasure of beauty, of scents and sounds, air as fine as silk, heavy gold light falling extravagantly everywhere, free for the taking, loveliness wherever he looked, as though he had never fully opened his eyes before, and now he could see what he had missed, what had always been there, all along, if only he had looked.
Then all he saw was that long stretch of shadow, opening like a door. The cry of loss that came out of it as it closed sounded completely human.
25
Daimon, stopped at a light on the highway running along the water in Chimera Bay, saw a sign ahead of him, swaying from the scaffolding covering much of a dilapidated old hotel. ALL YOU CAN EAT, it said, FRIDAY NITE FISH FRY.
The light changed; he started forward. He angled across the next lane and pulled into the parking lot, sat idling, gazing at the extremely unlikely sign, and the even more improbable Kingfisher Bar and Grill, whose customers all seemed to own one version or another of the same dented, rackety pickup.
He heard another bike turn in behind him. In that same moment, the world began to ripple around him. His inarticulate protest was echoed by a sudden shift of gears behind him. The stranger’s bike roared; the town vanished into mist and trees, and he heard another voice raised in a cry of complete astonishment.
He turned, found Dame Scotia Malory, pale and breathless, searching the air for whatever was left of Chimera Bay.
“What— Where— What just happened?”
“Dame Scotia,” he said, astounded. “What are you doing here?”
“Following you.”
“Here?”
“Here is where you went. So I—” Her voice wobbled; so did her bike. She got off it, kicked its stand in place, and turned a slow circle, blinking rapidly at the tall, silent trees, pennants of mist hanging from their boughs. “Princess Perdita asked me to follow you. So I—” Her voice trickled to a whisper. “So I did.
“Here?” he repeated sharply, and she shrugged helplessly.
“It’s where you went.”
Daimon parked his own bike, frowning, watching her turn another bewildered circle, searching for anything familiar. Memories appeared in his mind like stepping-stones; he tracked her backward to the royal library, to the palace garage.
“Why on earth,” he asked with some annoyance, “would Perdita ask you to follow me all the way up the north coast?”
“Well.” Her face, still colorless, seemed to shield itself then behind a warrior’s mask, calm, watchful, focused on that fraught question. “It seems she met your mother. Who explained what she, and Lady Seabrook, and your friend Vivien Ravensley have in mind for you. At the least, a wedding. At most, war between Wyvernhold and Ravenhold. Between you and your father. The end of the rule of the Wyvernbourne kings.”
Daimon, staring at her, felt the fog that had taken up residence in his head fray a little, breeze-blown, hinting at the precipice on which he stood. “That sounds,” he said, his eyes narrowed against the mist, “that sounds like some old story.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“How did it end?”
“Badly. Very, very badly.”
He was silent again, his eyes on her face now, using its calm to look as clearly as he could into the swirling, unsettled mists of the past weeks. He had met a young woman with astonishing eyes. She had taken him into another world, showed him marvels, the most marvelous of which was how she had made him see so clearly the drab, pointless, unfeeling world he had been born in, devoid of vision, trivial to the extreme, and completely unworthy of his curiosity and his love. In return, she had asked him only the simplest of favors: to find a cauldron, to help her regain her lost realm, to become her consort when she was crowned queen.
He closed his eyes and glimpsed the edge of the precipice at his feet, the long, long fall into the unknown.