Kingfisher (17 page)

She opened her mouth, heard herself howl with the wolf as the moon began to disappear.

She woke and heard the wolf at the door.

This time she rolled out of Zed's bed and tripped over the brick under the broken stove leg, so she knew that she was finally awake. She heard Zed moving behind her, muttering drowsily until he tripped over the same brick and cursed.

Carrie threw open the door and saw moonlight drenching everything in a misty glow, burning the tidal strands running through the grasses, the dark and bright mystery of living water flowing out of the hidden source within the trees, the silent, glowing hills.

The moon's ancient, beautiful face, her spangled fingers of light, the streams milky with her reflection, the glittering air all but transparent over the distant, luminous source stunned Carrie. As she stood on the threshold of the night, she heard the song of the wolf within the eerie light transform itself in her ears.

It was not the language of fear, she realized, but the language of love.

And then she saw her father, in the meadow under the soft touch of moonlight, changing into shape after shape in an intricate dance of power, or the constant folding and refolding of life in all its variations. Man became wolf became deer became hare became bear became cougar became porcupine became salmon leaping out of the water, became white heron became owl, soundless in the transfixed eye of the moon. Then owl became man, hair and long beard of moonlight, tall, hale, and older than time. Then man became Merle, her father, the shape she knew.

She swallowed fire; she was shaking; she tasted tears catching in her smile. Zed put an arm around her, held her tightly.

The man became raven, followed the path of the moon into night.

O
n the narrow coast road beyond the ancient forest, a mountain face covered with trees on one side, and a long craggy drop to the sea on the other, the limo rounded a curve and drove straight into a blinding wall of fog.

It was so thick, the world vanished. Pierce could not see so much as a weed in a ditch beside the road. He could not, he realized, see the road. Even the little wyvern ornamenting the long hood of the limo wavered in and out of the sluggishly drifting fog. The driver slowed to a sudden caterpillar crawl, causing Val to pull out his earbuds, and Leith to blink the abrupt nothingness out of his eyes and channel the intercom.

“This is not good.”

Pierce stared incredulously at the nothing and waited for the strike from behind, the beginning of the pileup along the steep, two-lane highway.

“Shall I try to back up, sir?”

“Mist,” Val observed with seemingly pointless interest, as though it were a hitherto mythical sea creature.

“No,” Leith said tersely. “Don't back up.”

“I think you should get out, sirs. I'll keep inching along. I think now, sirs, would be a good time for you to get out.”

“So do I,” Val said, and promptly opened a door. It scraped against something invisible, but left room for him to slither out. Leith motioned for Pierce to follow; Pierce hesitated.

“You're coming, too,” he said.

“Yes. In a moment. Go,” he added, and Pierce moved finally, reluctantly, out of the car and into the cloud. It was annoyingly damp and chilly, oddly silent as well, he noticed, then realized why.

“I can't hear the waves,” he said to the fraying figure of his brother, whose red hair was the most visible thing left of him.

“No,” Val agreed. “Fascinating, isn't it?”

“It's fog,” Pierce protested. “It's blinding, it's dangerous, it is not fascinating. And where's our father? Did he get out of the limo? Where is the limo?”

“Mist,” Val said again, a point of argument so pointless that Pierce ignored it.

He turned restively, trying to spot Leith, trying to see the car, listening for the inevitable collision of traffic, tires screaming, metal accordion-pleating against the rear end of the limo. He heard nothing, not even the cry of a gull. He took a few steps, one hand out to feel the trees he could not see: a steep slope full of them, tall, thick pillars of red whose green boughs stretched out endlessly, greedily, to gather up the cloying, obscuring wet.

They were all apparently receding from him as he moved. The ground that should have been running sharply uphill was simply lying there, no matter which way he turned, flat and vaguely rocky underfoot. He heard something finally: his own heartbeat, uncomfortably loud, as if the fog had pushed powerful, invisible hands against his ears.

“Val?” he said, suddenly without much hope of an answer. He had wandered out of the world he recognized, leaving even Val and their father behind, along with his sight, his hearing, and, once again, any kind of a weapon.

He heard an inhuman snort, an answer to his call, as though he had awakened something within the fog. He froze, hoping it would go back to sleep. A stone skittered across the ground. Something enormous yawned, sucking in mist; it swirled, ebbed toward the indrawn breath for a long time, it seemed, before fog blew back out again, accompanied by an odd smell of charred, damp wood.

Pierce stopped breathing. His skin grew colder than the fog. The fire-breathing cousin of the wyvern was, unlike the extinct wyvern, a myth. It had inspired a rich hoard of tales in early Wyvernhold history, especially those illuminating the prowess of legendary questing knights. It was a fantasy, a symbol, no more than that. At least it should have been.

He heard the dragon's voice.

Pierce.

He caught a breath, coughed on cold, ash-soured air. The deep voice seemed to resonate from the stones buried beneath the earth; Pierce felt it underfoot, heard it with his bones. The constantly shifting mist frayed just enough to give him a glimpse of an outline paler than the mist: an
enormous, crested neck, a lizard's maw trickling smoky mist out of nostrils the size of platters and ringed with a red, pulsing glow.

Go no farther. You are not welcome in the north.

“I'm— We're just on our way to Chimera Bay,” Pierce stammered. “Only that far. At least for now.”

No.

He cudgeled his brain a moment, trying to remember any scrap of story that gave him a clue about how to talk to dragons. Mostly, he guessed, there was not a lot of talking, just fire and gore. He gave up, asked baldly, “Why not?”

The mist flamed in front of him; he felt the warmth, smelled the harsh, dry dragon's breath.

You have chosen. Come no closer. This is my world.

He blinked and recognized the cold encircling him, the soundless, invisible landscape, the baleful dragon: the heart of the matter. Val had seen it, felt it, immediately.

Mistbegotten.

“Mom?” he whispered, and the dragon roared.

That cleared the air, though Pierce, dropped and clinging to earth under the weight of the vast, endless, reverberating thunder, didn't notice until the sound growled and echoed away into the distance. He raised his head cautiously, opened his eyes, and heard the plaintive cry of gulls, the surge and break of the waves.

“Pierce!” his father called, and he got up, brushing away the needles that clung to him, dropped from the finally visible trees.

He stumbled downhill, saw the limo across the road, waiting in a viewing area overlooking the sea. Val and Leith
stood with their backs to the water, trying to find Pierce among the thick, silent ranks of giants climbing up the mountainside.

“I'm here,” he said, reaching the road, still feeling the smoldering glare of invisible dragon between his shoulder blades. Its thunder echoed in his heartbeat, his blood. The mist clung to his skin like the touch of the sorceress's hand. He wondered if even his shadow had turned pale.

As he crossed the road to the overlook, he saw Leith's face grow tight, his brows knot. Val's normally unruffled expression mutated into an odd wariness.

“Mist,” he said for the third time, and Pierce nodded wearily. Leith's eyes flicked between them.

“What?” he demanded. “What was up there? What happened to you? You look white as a ghost. You're shivering.”

“Ah—” Pierce said, and stuck. One angry parent seemed more than enough. But this was between the two of them, he remembered; the seeds of the dragon's wrath had been sown before he was born. “She—ah—she doesn't want to see us. Any of us. She thinks that's why we're travelling north. I must not have explained things very well when we talked.”

Leith took a step closer, his hands tightening. “What did she do to you?”

“She roared at me.”

“She what?”

“Well, it probably wasn't her. It was her making. Her illusion. I couldn't see it too well in that mist. But it was huge, and it smelled like burning embers, and it made a noise like a mountain blowing its top.”

“Dragon.” Val's face had gone pale, but it had lost its
tension; his eyes, vivid with sudden comprehension, narrowed at his father. “She still loves you,” he said incredulously, and Leith's face flamed as though the dragon's fire had scorched it.

“I doubt that her passion has anything to do with love at this point,” he said brusquely.

Val gazed quizzically at him, looking unconvinced. Pierce, remembering his last evening with his mother, the fierce anger in her that had shaped flames, that had shaped tears, wondered at his brother, who could draw such conclusions out of a seemingly impenetrable mist.

He said uncertainly, “Maybe you should talk?”

Leith spread his arms wordlessly, dropped them. “She doesn't want to see me. You just said.” He turned abruptly, walked back to the limo, then paused before he opened the door. He spoke again, his back to them. “She told me as much the last time I saw her, before you were born. From what I understand of quests, we go where they lead.” Val opened his mouth, promptly closed it again. Leith added, as though he had taken the unspoken point, “It led us here. Yes. But was that the quest, or was that your mother interrupting it? Let's get back on the road, see where it takes us next.”

Not far, Pierce saw with disbelief. They might as well be walking, considering how difficult it had become to move just a few scant miles along the road. They had passed through an elegant little resort town with wide beaches and monolithic rocks crusted with sea life wandering in and out of the tide, when the town's four lanes dwindled again into two, then into none. The limo came to a halt at the end of
a long line of traffic curving along the water and disappearing around the next bend.

“Sorry, sirs,” the driver announced upon consultation with his dash. “Both lanes are blocked up ahead for nearly a mile. They don't know how long before the road is cleared.” He paused, listening again. “They're—ah—they're advising people to turn around, catch another road back in town that runs through the hills around the—ah, the—ah—problem.”

He sounded oddly shaken. Leith asked, “What exactly is the problem?”

“Seems to be a mythological beast in the middle of the road, sir.”

Val ducked instantly over his cell phone, working rapidly. Leith closed his eyes briefly, opened them, and said grimly, “Which beast?”

“Ah—they're not sure, sir. The fire department managed to get some trucks through from the next town before traffic got too tangled. They tried to chase it away with hoses and sirens. The beast is sitting on top of one of the trucks. They've sent a photo to the Royal Herald in Severluna.”

“I've got it,” Val said briefly, and held it up.

Pierce broke their mystified silence. “It looks like a snake with a rooster's head.”

“Basilisk,” Val murmured, entranced by the vision, the enormous, upright coils balanced between the fire-truck ladders; the fiery cockscomb fanning the fowl's head above its huge, open beak; the visible eye, round, golden, with a mad red flame in its center. “Isn't there something weird about the basilisk's eye? Oh, here it is, in the Royal Herald's
description. Its look can kill.” He paused; his brows went up. “So can its breath.”

“I doubt that your mother is planning to kill anyone,” Leith protested. “Except maybe me.”

“I've been eyeballing the situation, sir,” the driver said over the intercom. “I'm fairly certain I can get the limo turned around soon. There's a wide bit in the road ahead, and we're creeping closer to it as more cars ahead are turning for the detour.”

“It's probably just another illusion,” Pierce guessed. “It won't hurt anyone, and it can't get hurt.”

“No,” Leith said abruptly. Val looked at him, his eyes narrowed.

“No, which, sir?” the driver asked.

“No, don't turn. Stay in line.” He reached across Pierce, opened the door, and stepped out. “And you stay here,” he told his sons.

“But—” Val began.

“You told me to talk to her.”

“But what if it's not her? I mean, not her making?” Pierce argued. “I might be wrong about that.”

“It hasn't done anything more dangerous than commandeer a fire truck. Besides, what are the odds that two mythological beasts appear along the same road within half an hour of each other, and they're not from the same source?”

“What if it's not sorcery?” Val asked simply, balancing halfway out the door behind Leith. “Do you know how to kill a basilisk?”

“Look it up,” Leith said shortly. “Call me and let me know how if I get into trouble.”

“I think you should—”

“I think this is my fight and not yours.” He pushed against the limo door until Val yielded, shifted back, and Leith closed it. “My fault, my affair, and my basilisk. Find your own mythological beast.”

They waited until he had glanced back once, several cars ahead of them, before they followed him.

Val slipped an assortment of chains, sticks, and metal balls into various hidden pockets, along with the small, deadly Wyvern's Eye. Pierce, blankly considering his own arsenal, pulled the kitchen knife out of his pack. Val showed him one of the sheaths sewn into his jacket lining. The driver stuck his fist out the window as they passed, and raised his thumb.

“Good luck, sirs. Be careful.”

They did not have to walk far before they saw the beast.

Its body, uncoiled, would have been longer than two or three fire trucks. Its head, with its blazing frill of cockscomb and the great wheels of its eyes, was raised, alert, over the front end of the truck, peering out of one eye, then the other, at the people milling around it with weapons, news cameras, cell phones. Leith, walking toward it on the opposite side of the road, was half-hidden by the idling vehicles. The fire truck the beast had landed on was angled across the road, stopping traffic in both directions. Its former occupants had abandoned it hastily, judging from the wide-open doors. A man spoke into a bullhorn, trying to persuade people back into their cars. They ignored him; so did the beast.

“I wonder if it knows—” Val started, then answered himself. “Of course it knows we're here if it's our mother's making. That's why it appeared.”

“It's another message for us,” Pierce said tightly. “She knows we didn't listen to the dragon. Maybe I should call her.”

“A basilisk with a phone?”

“She's probably at home in Desolation Point, watching us in water, or in the mist, or in a pot of chicken soup or something. I had no idea she could make anything like this. I had no idea—” He paused, added heavily, “I'm glad I didn't know. It wouldn't have been so easy to think of leaving her.”

“Maybe she didn't know either,” Val suggested. “Maybe she was never this angry before.” He sounded unusually somber. Pierce glanced at him, and he added, “I haven't seen her since I was a child. I've been with my father most of my life. She doesn't have a reason to think that I care about her. That I even remember her. You, at least, she knows she loves.”