Kingfisher (7 page)

He vanished into the old bank vault. She waited thoughtlessly, amazed at the notion of snacking on the ideas of the best cook in the county. He returned with one arm lined with small plates, papers under the other arm. He let the papers splash on the table, and arranged the little plates like offerings around her. They held treasures, she saw with astonishment: geometric shapes of this and that layered on one another, unexpected colors catching the eye, orange topping cranberry topping an airy cloud of licorice, another of chocolate, none
of it, she suspected, tasting anything like the fruit or meat or sweet that the colors might suggest. Stillwater pushed a plate toward her, a tower of diamonds and squares and circles of the thinnest, brightest colors topped with a coiled ruby garnish, like a designer hat.

For an instant, as she raised her eyes from the lovely little makings to smile in amazement at him, she saw a stranger's eyes gazing out of what suddenly seemed the mask of a beautiful face. Tree-bark dark, they were, flecked with gold and luminous with an ancient light that had long since faded from the world she thought she knew.

He lifted the plate.

“Eat.”

WYVERNBOURNE

I
n Severluna, the youngest son of King Arden IX tied on his apron deep beneath the intersection of Severen Street and Calluna Way, and edged behind the water bar of the ancient cave. The apron was striped blue and green, the colors of water and moss, of the river goddess Calluna, from whose warm, steamy, smelly fountainhead within the stones behind the prince, the infirm, the depressed, and the curious had come for millennia to drink.

Prince Daimon picked up the sacred water pitcher, toasted the comely ticket-taker who sat on a stool at the cave entrance. He began to fill the little blue and green paper cups lined along the bar. The water, at least, was free. The god Severen, whose river began in the great, jagged snowy peaks to the east and crossed the land to merge with the Calluna and the bay, was worshipped for the precious metals he carried in his waters. His shrines were everywhere,
even there at the holy birthplace of the goddess. His gold, silver, and copper changed hands upstairs at the ticket window, the coffee bar, and the ice-cream bar whose specialty was blueberry-pistachio in honor of the goddess. Below, near the entrance to the sanctum, there was the small prayer pool in which pleas to the goddess were accompanied by gifts of coins and the occasional semiprecious stone. Despite the heat, the strong mineral odors, the depths to which visitors must descend seeking the goddess in her underworld beneath the streets, the domed and tiled antechamber seldom stayed quiet long.

Raised voices on the stairs, a gabbling echo of high-pitched bird cries, indicated a busload of young schoolchildren gamboling down the steps. Daimon brought up more cups from underneath the bar as the first of them exploded into view. A couple of tour guides from the upper regions divided them expertly, took one group through the jagged stone opening into the ruins of antiquity around the pool, while the others tasted the holy waters in the cups. The children made the usual gagging noises after a sip of warm liquid laced with lithium salts. Daimon showed them the spittoon-shaped vessel in which to pour the dregs or spit the unswallowed mouthful, while their gimlet-eyed chaperons watched.

“Skylar, either swallow or spit into the pot—don't you dare spit that at Sondra.”

Finally, the second group snaked through the narrow opening; for a moment, there was peace under the dome.

Daimon took a mop to some spilled water on the mosaic floor, which had been painstakingly repaired a century earlier after the streets had been laid down above the river, and
somebody got around to wondering where the goddess's cave had gone. One of the chaperons, who had lingered in the quiet, took a second look at the young man behind the water bar.

“Prince Daimon!” she blurted. “What are you doing down here?”

“Serving the goddess,” he answered, and wrung the mop sponge into the spittoon. He recognized the woman: Lady Clarice Hulte, whose elderly husband, Sir Lidian Hulte, was one of the king's knights. Her daughter, a plump, prim little girl with pigtails, had dumped her water into the hair of an obnoxious boy scrabbling for coins in the prayer pool, an action which the goddess, who had issues with the greedy Severen, would surely have approved.

Lady Clarice, whose pale, protuberant eyes her daughter had inherited, transferred her stare to the mop handle. “You're a noble of the realm, not a housemaid.”

“We choose the weapons that best serve the goddess,” Daimon said mildly. “I was in my father's service last week, putting his weapons to use. This week I'm in the queen's. She asked me to work in the shrine, learn the rituals of the goddess.”

“But she is not your—” Lady Clarice began, addicted as she was to arguing points of protocol. Then her mouth snapped shut; she flushed an interesting shade of plum. Behind her, the ticket-taker caught her lips between her teeth and stared raptly at the floor.

“Technically, no,” Daimon agreed. “The queen is not my mother, so I was not dedicated at birth to the goddess. But I see no reason to displease either of two such powerful women. Do you?”

A faint squeak came out of the ticket-taker, a similar sound out of Lady Clarice. “I do beg your pardon—” she managed faintly.

Daimon shrugged a shoulder and began lining more cups along the bar. “What for? Nobody cares. Even if I weren't a bastard son of my father, I'd have to outlive four siblings and their offspring before I could possibly be king of anything. And when you consider—”

The ticket-taker straightened abruptly on her stool. “Oh, stop. Forgive him, Lady Clarice; his true mother took one look at him when he was born and dropped him on his head.”

Lady Clarice, stunned and swaying to stare at the ticket-taker, recognized the youngest offspring of Queen Genevra and King Arden. She swallowed audibly. Princess Perdita gave her a friendly smile, then shifted her gaze to frown at her half brother.

“Shame, Daimon. Apologize to Lady Clarice for teasing her.”

“I am sorry for teasing you, Lady Clarice,” Daimon said amiably, turning a spigot to refill the sacred water pitcher. In the silence before the water began to flow, the distant voices of children deep within the cave echoed incomprehensibly off the stones.

“I'll just—” Lady Clarice said weakly, taking a step or two backward. “I'd better see to—”

She turned, plunged into the cave. Perdita looked reproachfully at her retreating shadow.

“She didn't give me her ticket.”

Daimon and his half sibling had been born in vastly different circumstances, but so closely in time they might have
been twins. The fair-haired, gray-eyed, muscular Daimon had entered the world in a busy public hospital on the outskirts of Severluna. Willowy Perdita, with the king's black hair and golden eyes, had been born minutes earlier in a pool of warm water within the palace, surrounded by midwives and attendants of the goddess Calluna. By some royal sleight of hand, Daimon, howling in his crib in the hospital nursery, had been spirited away within an hour to grow up with Perdita.

Daimon had never known his mother. The queen had given him only the most meager bone of truth at an early age: that his mother had died after giving birth to him. What Queen Genevra actually thought about the matter, she never said. Gossip said a great many conflicting things for a few years, as the court watched Daimon grow. Then it lost interest. When he found the reckless courage to ask the king, his father said briskly, “You are my son. The rest is my business.” Daimon guessed from the place where his mother had chosen for him to be born that she was used to taking care of herself. She was nobody, or anybody at all, until she had caught the king's eye. That the king had not left him nameless and orphaned but had reached out to find him, told Daimon something. But he was never sure what.

Daimon finished filling cups, put the mop back in a cupboard, and emptied the dregs in the vessel down the drain in the floor where it was filtered, cleaned, and piped back into the river downstream. He was aware of Perdita's voice—something about an upcoming fete, someone she hoped would be there—as a light, pleasing counterpoint to his thoughts. When her voice suddenly invaded his distraction, he was startled.

“Daimon! Where are you? I've been talking at you—you might as well be on the moon for all you're listening. What are you thinking about?”

He shook his preoccupations away, smiled at her. “Sorry. You were saying?”

“No. Really. What were you thinking? I've never seen that expression on your face. Are you in love?”

He knew the one on hers well enough. He felt that glittering, potent gaze from the place where, in a different myth, his third eye might have been, down to the soles of his feet. Witch, he thought. Sorceress. He shifted, dropping his own eyes, and took a cloth to a nonexistent spill on the bar.

“How should I know? I've never been there before.”

“Who is she?”

“You were saying about a fete? Hoping who might come?”

He still felt that intense, ruthless regard, heard her draw breath. Then the children came spilling out of the cave, running upstairs in anticipation of ice cream, despite the unreasonable demands to
Walk! Walk!
Some unfortunate visitor coming down against the tide stopped and pressed himself against the wall until the frothing school of bodies vanished into the upper realms. He descended finally, interrupting Perdita's single-minded pursuit of her half brother's private concerns.

“Gareth!”

She sprang off the stool and flung her arms around the visitor. Daimon's mouth crooked. He couldn't, himself, appreciate the subtle fascinations of Gareth May that turned the willful Perdita into a boneless butterfly. But he was grateful for the interruption. The young knight gave him a
little, formal nod over Perdita's shoulder; Daimon saluted him genially with the bar cloth. In the little, quiet interim between visitors, while the lovers murmured, Daimon could hear the voice of the goddess, whispering as the waters quickened against the stones in the distant underground.

He stepped from behind the water bar and slipped into the cave.

Underwater lights limned the large, round pool of the headwaters that in earlier centuries had been caught in a basin of brick and colored tiles, ringed by stone steps where sufferers could lower themselves into the soothing embrace of the goddess. Pillars, plaques, broken statues haunted the shadows, wandering downstream as far as they dared. Seeking the upper world and light, the Calluna would ultimately find the swift, broad waters of the Severen as well. The river god would sweep the slower, shallower waters of the goddess into his bed, dissipating hers as god and goddess became one. Now the goddess's waters were trapped in enormous underground pipes beneath the city streets. They never saw the light before they joined the Severen in its chilly, muscular flow to the sea.

Daimon stood at the edge of the pool, where Calluna's first visitors had painted their gifts to her on the raw stones: animals, birds, flowers. The earliest image of the goddess's face floated among them, inspired by the moon, archaeologists thought, reflected through a hole in the upper ground onto the dark water below. She had enormous, staring eyes; a wreath of hair or light rippled around her face. She watched. Daimon, meeting her dark, urgent gaze, found as much pain as power in it. She understood the sufferers who sought her. She understood her fate.

Moved by the glimpse of ancient glory and sorrow, Daimon bent, dipped his fingers into the pool, watched the ripples form and slowly spread.

Perdita called his name, needing him back; he heard the clamor of other voices in the antechamber. As he turned, a pair of bewitching eyes opened across time, space, memory, and smiled, blurring the face of the goddess in his thoughts.

In the dark privacy of the cave, he smiled back. But, he remembered, he had a lunch to get through first with his father, whose unexpected summons earlier that day took precedence.

When his shift behind the goddess's water bar ended, he ascended to the upper realms, unlocked his electric bike from the parking rack, and made his way through the busy, labyrinthine streets of Severluna to the calmer, tree-lined avenues that ended at the vast grounds and high towers of the palace of the Wyvernhold kings on the cliff above the sea.

“The queen asked me to talk to you,” King Arden said.

They sat in the king's private chambers, eating a seafood stew, a salad of strawberries, hazelnuts, and a dozen kinds of baby greens, and chewy, sour rolls flavored with rosemary. The servers had withdrawn; they were completely alone, which Daimon found disquieting. As the youngest of Arden's five children, and illegitimate to boot, he enjoyed a certain amount of lax attention, an absence of scrutiny from his father as long as he did what the king asked when he remembered that Daimon was around.

“About what?” Daimon asked bewilderedly, and caught the flash of the wyvern's attention. But the king hesitated. He trawled for a bite, then lost interest in it, and let go of
his spoon. He sat back, gazing at Daimon, an odd, quizzical expression on his face. He was a handsome, energetic man who commanded respect, explained succinctly when he had to, and held his secrets as close as any gambler; Daimon was unused to seeing him uncertain about anything.

“She said it's time. High time, her exact words. That I talk to you about your mother.”

Daimon, stunned, felt the blood flush into his face.

“Now? Why?”

“I have no idea. Genevra is an acolyte of the goddess. She pulls things out of the air sometimes. Ties up a loose thread before anyone else sees it. She herself never wanted to know anything more about your mother. And I never meant to not tell you. The time just never seemed—easy. But she said you have a right to know, and now is better than not.” He was still again, frowning at the past. “I wish,” he breathed finally, “that I understood it better myself.” He raised his salad fork, aimed it toward Daimon's plate. “Eat. While I find the place to begin.”

Daimon took a few tasteless bites, listening to his father's silence. “I always thought,” he said slowly, trying to help, “that she must have been independent, maybe poor, considering where I was born, but someone who didn't expect—who wanted to take care of herself.” He looked at the king, so lost in the past, it seemed he had all but forgotten his son. “She must have had a name. You could start there.”

The king stirred, rearranged a few leaves in his salad. “Her name was Ana. That's all I knew of it. I met her at a party. I don't remember whose. I was much younger, then; life and details blur. Her face never did. It is as clear in my
memory as yesterday.” He paused, seeing her again, Daimon guessed, the face that had never changed with time because she had so little left of it. “She had come to Severluna at the invitation of your great-aunt Morrig. They were related in some far-flung way; they shared ancestors in a family whose name is in annals older than Wyvernhold. Are you in love?”

Daimon coughed on a hazelnut. “I don't think so,” he said vaguely, and was held in the wyvern's intent, powerful gaze.