PART TWO
  
THE
GUARDIAN

 

One
  

MEGUET Vervaine sat silently in the trappers’ boat, to their three eyes wrapped in authority and glacially calm; in truth she was deeply troubled and sitting in a puddle. Expressions haunted her: Nyx’s, seeing her; the face of the young man, whom she had never seen in her life, and yet who nagged at her, called her back the farther the river took her away. He was no one, she thought; Wayfolk, or part, with that odd hair; wanderer, who had found his way to Nyx’s doorstep. Or, more likely, since Wayfolk were rare in the Delta, he had trailed Nyx across Ro Holding, promising this and that in exchange for…what? What could he have that she might want, enough to keep him with her? Mute, maybe; he had not spoken but with his eyes. If she kept him to bed, she would not have to listen to him in the morning. But he looked troubled, haggard, ensorcelled maybe, but by Nyx—who had run out of Chrysom’s tower and out of Ro House and out of her own life in pursuit of freedom? It seemed unlikely she would extend her dark sorcery to humans just because for one year out of nine she had chosen to live in a swamp.

Meguet shifted; the trappers glanced uneasily at one another, unnerved by her as they were by the woman she had visited. The darkening water caught her eye; it went the wrong direction, she felt: away. The man’s face had pulled at her, his dark eyes clinging to hers, stunned by something she could not see. She touched her pale hair, thinking of his hair. Wayfolk did not live within walls or in swamps, nor did they know those expressions, or have that hair. Nor had Wayfolk ever disturbed her before, hung in her thoughts clear and hard-lined as the moon over Wolfe Sea, tugged at her, like the moon tugged the sea, so strongly she said sharply:

“Stop.”

The trappers eyed one another, wondering, obviously, how to stop the river. The one-eyed man asked gruffly, “Shall we turn to shore, Lady?”

“Turn back.”

“Will cost,” the younger man said timidly, and the older shoved at him.

“Will cost nothing,” he said hastily, “to the Cygnet. But, Lady, how far back? Not to the house again?”

She nodded. “To the house.”

The younger slumped over the oars. “It’s not for the likes of you,” he protested, “that witch’s house. She’s demented.”

Meguet smiled thinly. “She is my cousin.” They were silent then, rowing quickly, lest she reveal an arcane kindred power and find some unpleasant, peculiar use for parts of them.

They left her at the dock, gazing up at the opaque, dragonfly lights in the windows. What Nyx would say if she found Meguet spying on her was something Meguet chose not to contemplate. She heard a sigh behind her and turned, startled; the beautiful river-ghost in her water-stained tumble of lace sat in the prow of her boat and gazed mournfully mid-river. Meguet turned back and a blood fox’s eyes flared in the mooring light on the bank. She grew still, not touching her sword, for the blood fox, like the swan, was of an ancient lineage, and had known the Delta before humans. To Delta folk of old family it was not so much bad luck as bad manners to harm their neighbor. When the red-washed eyes vanished, she went up the stairs.

She passed the odd shadows clinging batlike to the walls of the entryway; they were alive, she sensed, but did not consider her worth peeling themselves off the walls to challenge her. No one was in the workroom. She crossed it, under the empty stares of owl and goat and muskrat. She heard voices near, and froze. A few murmured words, silence. She heard no steps. They were together, Nyx and the stranger, nearby. She saw a door in the far wall and opened it a crack. The room beyond was empty. She slipped noiselessly into it. If Nyx found her, she could protest that she was only wandering through the house searching for her to talk further, to reason, to argue. It sounded innocent enough: They had been friends once. The walls of the room were blood red; a stuffed white owl watched her from its perch, looking alarmed, ready to ask its question. The room offered her eight closed doors to choose from. She opened one at random, bewildered, and felt, eerily, as she passed into a dense silence, that somehow she had gone too far: Nyx was not only in some other room, but in some other time. The room she entered was a twilight place, everything in it—candlesticks and chairs and heavy curtains—mauve; it offered her only one door. She pulled it open, expecting the owl room again, but found another room with a great canopied bed and one shoe set neatly next to it.

The door closed behind her; already, she guessed, the twilight room was changing. She stood blinking, bewildered, feeling more lost than she had ever been anywhere in the wilds of Ro Holding. The old house would ramble forever in its memories, like some fey old woman rummaging through her past. She would wander with it until she was forced to call Nyx’s name for rescue. She closed her eyes, touched them with cold fingers, concentrated. After a moment, the Cygnet moved across her mind, the black swan flying against a circle of white. Instinct, and experience with that odd, secret habit, made her follow its direction. Eyes still closed she opened the door she had just come through and stepped into the room beyond.

Opening her eyes, she saw a hundred black swans flying around her. The vision lasted only a moment, and then the mirrors the swans had flown through were blank as sky. They changed again as she stood motionless, were suddenly busy with impressions. She saw herself in a small round mirror framed in silver, hung high on a wall. The big mirror beneath it reflected a room lull of opened chests and wardrobes, rich clothes tumbling out of all of them. An ornate, square mirror propped against that revealed a room blown entirely, it seemed, out of glass. On every wall, in every corner, high and low, mirrors of every size framed the house’s memories, some changing now and then, as if there were not enough mirrors, while at another moment it seemed that, as she stood there, mirrors were coming into existence around her, as if the house were baring its heart to one who could see.

Stunned, she could only stare, her eyes snagged by every peculiar revelation; not even growing up with Nyx’s astonishing gifts inured her to this. She was able to move finally, a slight, unguarded sound coming out of her, when she saw Nyx herself, in an oval, wood-framed mirror on the floor. She knelt down in front of it. Nyx and the young man were in a kitchen; ovens and spits and blackened hearths lined the stone wall behind them. They sat at a vast wooden table surrounded by books, nuts, torn loaves of bread, smoked fish, apples, cheese, onions, pitchers of water and wine. Nyx, holding a half-eaten apple between her teeth, was flipping rapidly through a huge book. The young man was reading, his lips moving noiselessly, a frown, intent and anxious, between his brows. Wayfolk he certainly was, with his brown skin and black eyes; that he could read at all was curious. That he wanted to read buried deep in a maze of walls in the middle of the sunless Delta was astonishing. He was, Meguet decided, in dire need of a spell. Or someone he knew was. She leaned toward the mirror, studying him, feeling something cold, dispassionate, ruthless in the scrutiny.

The man lifted his head; for a moment he seemed to gaze back at Meguet, puzzled, uneasy, as if the mirror were water between them and he caught a strange shadow in its depths. Nyx removed the apple from her mouth and chewed a bite.

“What is it?” she asked. “Did you find something?”

“Just a dead spider between pages.” He rubbed absently at the pale stubble on his chin. Nyx still watched him, not, it seemed, with a lover’s attention, but with a rather detached interest, as if he might, if coaxed right, predict, but then again he might not. “Nothing anywhere about a web. Not even in a rhyme for curing warts or jumping stooks.”

“Jumping stooks?”

“In a wheat field. It’s a smallfolk game.”

“Oh.”

He closed the books wearily, rubbed his eyes. “We’d get beaten for it when they caught us, but that was part of the game almost.”

Nyx, uninterested in stooks, pushed her book aside, pulled another from the pile. “I thought you Wayfolk had a rhyme for everything.”

“So did I.” He poured water, drank it. There was dust all over his hands; Nyx had a streak on her face. They had, judging from the crumbs on the table, been at this mystery for some time. “It’s a secret,” the Wayfolk man suggested. “This web. So secret it’s nowhere in these books. So it wouldn’t likely be in a rhyme smallfolk gabble at each other.”

“Nothing in this world is that secret.”

The man’s eyes flickered to her lowered head. He raised his hands to his face again, linking his fingers across his eyes. Meguet stopped breathing. She leaned forward, touched the cold face in the mirror, as if to draw his hands away, see what he was seeing.

Something is, she thought. You know something that secret.

His hands dropped. Nyx leaned back, contemplating him as Meguet was herself, so close to the mirror that her breath misted the cracked painted walls of the kitchen. Finally, Nyx spoke the young man’s name.

“You can still change your mind, Corleu. You can wake the Dancer now, if you’re fretting.”

Meguet, repeating his name silently, felt something stir deep inside her, like the Dancer herself might have stirred, in her cocoon of ice, at the sound of her name.

“No.” His hands closed; he said again, not looking up, “No.”

“You’re not fretting.”

He raised his head at the bait; Meguet heard his breath. Then he came close to smiling, a taut smile that barely grew past his eyes. “No. I don’t care anymore. The swamp is full of women trapped in mists, waiting for me. They can all wait till winter’s end.”

“Tell me,” Nyx said curiously, “what she is like. Tiel.”

He looked at her. “You wouldn’t even see her face, likely, if you passed her,” he said simply. “You’d see her dark skin and her dark hair and that would be all; your eye would say: She is Wayfolk. She—I could hardly see her face, when I—before I lost her. What it is like truly. She was like the world, like sky, like leaves, like night. Her face was my face. When that dark house fell and I ran into it, I never left her. I’m still there in that mist, like that ghost on the dock, like the Warlock’s shadow in the stars. I’m outside my heart, looking for the way back in.” He added bitterly, after a pause, “It was easy enough to leave. I only had to go through a door.”

Nyx was still, in a way that Meguet remembered: so still the watery sheen on the fabric of her gown seemed painted; no light trembled on the gold clip in her hair. Then her hand moved, fell across the open pages, close to Corleu’s hand. If she had straightened a forefinger, she could have touched him.

“You had no choice.”

“I should have stayed with her. I could have.”

“Then there would have been no mist trapping your company, no falling house, no spellbound love, no timely meeting with a bog witch—just a straight road through the Delta to the sea, because if you were a man who could not recognize that house, or had been warned by it, it would never have fallen into your life. Though,” she added, “that can’t be a flea’s worth of comfort.”

“Not even that,” he sighed, and dragged at another book on the heap.

Meguet watched, unblinking, scarcely breathing. It sounded simple enough: the Wayfolk man in trouble, needing a spell; Nyx helping precisely because it wasn’t simple, and all her life Nyx had loved nothing better than a challenge. That was all. Yet she could not move; she held the mirror with both hands, her eyes on the haunted Wayfolk face, learning every line and hollow of it, for the words he spoke were illuminating, like lightning shedding glimpses of a traveller’s road, some dark, ancient landscape within her mind.

The words almost came together, the landscape was almost revealed.

The dark falling house…

The Dancer…

The Warlock…

The web…

For a moment, as she concentrated, every mirror in the room showed her face: pale, intent, motionless, her green eyes narrowed, alert as a hunting animal after a scent. Then the road went dark again, the words fell apart, meaningless. She dropped her face against the mirror, wondering at herself, drawn upriver into a room full of mirrors by a Wayfolk man with no power, just a problem that, compared with Nyx’s usual swamp sorcery, sounded remarkably innocent.

Yet she stayed, her eyes rarely moving from him, and bored herself into a stupor while they read. They spoke little more, finally closed their books with weary thuds, and Meguet slipped away, through the workroom before Nyx returned to it. She borrowed the ghost’s boat and the dock lamp, and rowed herself downriver to the ramshackle inn where she had left her horse. The next morning, she sent the boat back upriver and rode out of the swamplands down to the sea.

She followed a narrow trail along the river, which widened and eventually became a road, a tavern at the point where it widened. Another half mile, and she caught a glimpse of Wolfe Sea, a line of deep grey running into the cloudy sky. The low swamp mists changed into a stormy winter sky over the city. The road beneath her crossed other roads now, fronted houses, buildings, boat docks. The river was growing broad, fanning out to mingle with the tides; sea birds and swamp birds wove overhead, with an eye to what the receding tide was leaving in the mud flats.

The road skirted wide around them; houses, shops, guild halls, warehouses, sprouted cheek by jowl, eye to eye across the road. The road itself was cobbled here, and in the late afternoon, crowded. Presently, the buildings yielded to a high stone wall that rambled along the road; ancient trees leaned over the wall, their bare boughs chattering together in the wind, like a private conversation between many very old friends. In the distance Meguet saw the sea again.

She heard it finally; the road wound around a curve in the wall and brought her to the gate of Ro House. It was late by then; the sea was very dark. A single red star broke through the clouds, hung low on the horizon: the Blood Star. The gate faced the sea; the waves turned sluggishly along the pale sand, broke with a frail, lacy line of silver that teased the eye and vanished. Beyond it, night fishers, their bows lamp-lit, flickered like fireflies on the vast restless dark.

The Cygnet flew diagonally across the gate, lit by torches on either side. Meguet rode up to it and dismounted. The Gatekeeper, who had seen her coming from his high perch on the wall, was already opening it.

“Lady Meguet,” he greeted her, and swung the gate wide. “Welcome.”

The house that the mage Chrysom had built on the curving shore of Wolfe Sea was a great, shining wheel of seven towers circling the high black tower above which the Cygnet flew on a pennant furling and unfurling, by day and night. The towers were built of granite and marble cut in Hunter Hold, of pale wood from the Delta and dark polished wood from Berg Hold and delicate glass blown in Withy Hold. A miniature city rambled around the tower walls, of stables, smithies, barns, kennels, hen coops, forges, tanneries, workshops, cottages with gardens in front of their doors. Some of the household and cottagers could trace their families back a thousand years to Moro Ro’s time. Behind the towers the outer walls sprawled out of sight, for Chrysom had made room for fields, ponds, pastures, a small lake around which ancient oak mingled with the vast, dark firs he had taken as saplings from Berg Hold. Legend had it that he had built the house to move from Hold to Hold, eluding siege like a flea eludes a hound’s tooth. At the end of the Hold Wars, the warlords had come to the Delta to pledge fealty to Moro Ro, in his house by the sea, and there it had stood since.

Meguet dismounted tiredly just inside the gate; the Gatekeeper held her horse while the stable girls ran across the yard. She lingered to talk to him. He was tall, muscular, with short, muddy sun-streaked hair, and eyes as silvery green as the scythe-shaped leaves on the swamp trees. He was a reticent man, with a clever, unerring eye, discreet despite the household gossip that found its way to him like water found holes in a sieve. He had opened the gate to Meguet for the ten years she had worn the Cygnet on Holder’s business. Though he was swamp-born, as far as she knew, he always guessed where she had been when she returned.

“Has the house been quiet?” she asked him. A corner of his thin mouth slanted upward.

“In a manner of speaking.” He wore the Cygnet at both wrists and over his heart, though on him they were apt to fly haphazardly, rucked up over his forearms, or half-hidden under a sheepskin vest. “I opened the gate a dozen times to the sons and daughters of the Delta lords. Most are still here.”

“To see Rush?” Meguet guessed. “Or Calyx?”

“Both.” He added, “And to see you.”

She didn’t ask who or why, having little interest in their neighbors. “Anyone else?” She liked to hear him talk. The rough, river-hatchling’s voice ran just beneath ten years of household polish; it surfaced now and then, unexpectedly.

“Merchants,” he said. “In and out again. A tinker, in but not out.”

“A tinker?”

“He has kin, he said.”

“Ah.”

“The Holder sent word to the gate that she will see you whenever you arrive.”

Meguet glanced at the third tower. Lights swarmed around it; the great hall looked aflame. “She’ll be at supper.” The Gatekeeper, eyeing something in her hair, seemed to weigh respect against inclination. He said:

“You had raw weather for a ride upriver.”

Meguet looked at him. “I suppose you can tell from the mud on my stirrup which bog I stood in to mount.”

“No.” He reached out, picked a feather from her hair. “I’ve seen you wear mud from all over Ro Holding. But the small birds this color orange live only in one place.”

Gazing at it, she thought of the small silent white birds caged in Nyx’s workroom. She took it grimly, let it flutter free. He watched it fall.

“You saw the Lady Nyx,” he commented. There was neither question nor curiosity in his voice, but she was irritated, at him for seeing a feather fall and thinking of Nyx, mostly at Nyx, for causing the tales that linked her to such small birds. She asked sharply,

“Is there anything else I’ve done that you need to tell me?”

He eyed her, his expression, in the torchlight, hard to read. “You sat for some time on the gutting board of a trapper’s boat,” he said. She stared back at him, impassive. Then she heard something beyond the tower-ring, across the back meadows and pastures: a weave of light and dark beating the air toward the small lake that lay hidden behind the thousand-year-old wood. She knew that sound, had heard that coming every year of her life.

“And you,” she said, “forgot an entire company.”

The spare, crooked smile flickering over his face again, into his eyes, made her smile. “Who?” he demanded. “Who entered or left missed my eye?”

“The wild swans of winter.”

 

Two
  

MEGUET stood in the black tower, watching for swans. Her high chambers overlooked the tower ring, household grounds, sea and the city beyond. It was too dark to see anything; there was not a single star in the sky, not even a splash of moonlight on the lake to show her where it lay. But still she stood there, silent, tranquil, feeling them drop toward the water, a great gathering of black and white swans from the far north, who waited, it seemed, for the fiercest winds to ride across Ro Holding. She had never told anyone but the Gatekeeper that she could feel the swans come and go. In that house, with its long, powerful and eccentric history, it seemed an unimportant matter.

She turned away from the window. Her attendants moved quietly through the rooms, clearing away her supper, the bath water, gathering her muddy clothes. No one else lived in the tower; it was used once every three years for the Holding Council. It held Chrysom’s haunted library, just above her, and beneath the tower, the maze where, legend said, his bones were buried. They were guarded, legend said also, by terrifying and awesome beings, whom Meguet and Rush and Nyx had once wasted days trying to find. Such tales clustered around the tower like the thousand-year-old rose vines, making it the most peaceful place in the house. The Holder and her children escaped to Chrysom’s library for quiet and conference; cottagers’ children crept like mice in and out of the exasperating and tantalizing maze. Other than that, no one used it but Meguet and her hardheaded attendants, who feared neither ghosts nor the long spiral climb to the top.

There was a tap at the door; word came that the Holder would see Meguet in Chrysom’s library. Meguet pulled on a long black wool dress that hid the greater part of her oldest boots, and set a braid, Wayfolk-style, to one side of her loose hair. Watching her fingers move in the mirror, she thought of mirrors; Corleu’s face looked back at her, innocent and dangerous and bewilderingly compelling.

She rose, went up the final spiral of stairs. There was wine in Chrysom’s library, and the makings of a fire and a view of the night from every direction through the ring of glass windows that circled the stones. The room still held obscure oddments of Chrysom’s sorcery; Nyx had taken some. It also held Rush Yarr, who had built the fire and was standing at a window with a cup in his hand, looking for stars apparently, but thrown back by the utter dark onto his own reflection in the glass.

“Meguet,” he said, recognizing her long, quick stride before he turned. He was a sinewy man with a lean, restless face. He had hair the color of a blood-fox pelt and the blood fox’s amber eyes without the wash of red in them. His family, who once fought Moro Ro under the sign of the Blood Fox, had perished at sea in one of their own merchant ships. He had been sent to Ro House at an early age, a year after Meguet had come. There, he fell in love with the Holder’s third daughter. The old stones still echoed with their quarrels years before, for she had not told him she was leaving, nor, returned for a visit, would she permit him to travel with her. So, ghostlike, he haunted the room where she had spent most of her time, waiting for her final homecoming, trapped, Meguet thought, unable to love a woman never there, unable to stop loving her.

He poured Meguet wine before asking the question she knew was foremost in his mind.

“Did you find Nyx?”

“Of course I found Nyx,” she answered. “The Holder told me to find her.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well, is it true she is eating small animals alive and gossiping with the dead?”

“She was doing those very things when I walked into her house.” Meguet sipped wine, and leaned her head back to look at Rush, who was pacing the length of the massive hearth. Ravens and gulls perched half out of the stone beneath the mantelpiece; the Cygnet, carved in black marble, flew above the fire. In that room, with its thousand-year-old collection of books and paraphernalia, Nyx had taken up residence as a child, reading constantly, spells seeping into her pale, luminous eyes, while Rush rifled through old jars and boxes, set minor fires and conjured up terrifying images in cloudy mirrors, which Nyx would summarily disperse. Meguet added with more sympathy, “She said she intends to come to the Holding Council.”

“How kind of her.”

“She’s learning things, Rush.”

“Learning what?” He was facing her suddenly, backed by fire and flying birds; something of Chrysom’s had somehow gotten into his hand. “A mean, petty magic—pirates pay her to foresee storms, merchants pay her to foresee one another’s misfortunes. She pays river-scum to bring her half-dead animals. She is Lauro Ro’s daughter. Or at least she was. I don’t know what she’s making herself into now.”

“A mage,” Meguet said simply.

“I want to talk to her. Where is she?”

Meguet cradled her wine cup in both hands, contemplated the shiver of light across it. Something in her grew alert, as always when Rush was fretting over Nyx. She said calmly, “Nyx is in a house upriver. Any trapper could tell you where. If you really thought she would listen to you now, you would not be standing here talking to me. She is doing what she thinks she must.”

“How can she think—”

“Be patient, Rush.”

“She’s in the Delta backwater, tearing the wings off birds and burning the bones of the dead.” His hand clenched tightly around the thing he held. Meguet, very still, watched needles of firelight dart across it. “None of us knows her anymore. None of us. We saw her last nearly three years ago. For all of five days. And not for two years before that. She is tearing at the Holder’s heart. And mine. And you say be patient.”

Meguet closed her eyes briefly, against the headache that was threatening. “You could simply forget her,” she suggested, not for the first time.

“She could be brought home.”

“No.”

“She belongs here. She could learn her sorcery here like she did when she was young.”

“You weren’t this bitter when she stayed for two years in Berg Hold. Or for a year in Withy Hold. Or in Hunter Hold among the witches.”

“She was learning things of value then, not—”

“How do you know? How do you know what she was learning? Do you think knowledge always lies in safe, clean places where nothing or anyone is disturbed? That you can always learn by daylight and always sleep without dreams afterward?”

“How can you defend her?” It was as much plea as demand; he stood so tensely, waiting for answer, that he might have been something Chrysom carved on the hearth along with the crows. She picked her words with care; if he wanted a quarrel, she thought, he could go find Nyx.

“She has great power, I think, though it’s hardly evident from what she does in the swamp. If she makes mistakes now, she may make great mistakes. But she—”

“Then she may harm herself, along with the swamp life. She should be brought home.”

“Nonsense, Rush, you can’t just walk into her house and—”

“Why not?” Rush demanded. “You did. So can I. So I will.”

“No. You won’t,” she said flatly. “Because you know her too well. You know that she will only love you freely if you let her come back freely. That’s why you are still here, shouting at me instead of her.”

Rush was silent, his jaw clamped. He whirled abruptly, having no other argument but confusion, and flung the thing in his hand into the fire.

They both jumped, he in surprise at what he had done, and Meguet because he had actually done it. She finished the movement on her feet. The fire made an odd, keening wail. She threw herself at Rush, who seemed too surprised to move, and knocked him away from the fire. Black smoke poured out of the hearth, obscuring the flames. Something snapped, and there was a stench that sent them both running to the windows.

They flung a few open before, weeping and choking, they headed up the stairs to the roof. The stones flashed green a moment; the smell followed them up, disgorged itself into the wind.

Meguet leaned on the parapet, wiping her streaming eyes. “I wish,” she said tartly when she could speak again, “you would stop doing that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“One of these days you’ll throw the wrong thing and blow Chrysom’s tower back to the quarries in Hunter Hold.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He leaned against the stones beside her, dragging at the north wind. “It—it tears at me that you can see her, talk to her, and I can’t.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. “I know. But she barely even talked to me. I startled her, I think, coming out of this world into hers… You’ll see her in spring. It’s not that long to winter’s end. Perhaps by then she’ll be out of the swamp, learning something less…dubious.”

“Dubious.” She felt him laugh noiselessly at the word. “There’s nothing dubious about what she’s doing. It’s disgusting.”

“Then how can you love her so? Can’t you love someone else instead?”

“I’ve tried.”

“And?”

“No one else in the world is a lank-haired, cold-eyed, sharp-tongued woman with enough sorcery in her to stand this house on its head.”

“Is there anything at all you like about her?”

“No. Just the smallest finger in each hand, the color that comes into her eyes under a full moon, the way her mouth shapes certain words. My name, for instance. The way she laughs, which she did once, three years ago. A soft, summery chuckle like blackbirds among the rose trees. The way she wears the color green. The way she looks sometimes, like a wild thing listening for another wild thing. The way she reads, as if words are air to be breathed. The way she kissed me when we were barely more than children, out of curiosity, behind the closed doors of the hay barn on the warmest day of the year, and the way she looked at me afterwards, as startled as if she had just invented a world. The way the shadows of the doves flying up into the rafters crossed and recrossed her face…” His hand was between Meguet’s shoulders by then, his fingers working at the knot from the day’s riding. She tilted her head back, loosening muscles, and saw, beyond the curl of the great black pennant whipping above their heads, the full moon revealed with a swan flying across it. She caught her breath; in the next moment the swan had dipped down into darkness and the moon had disappeared.

“I suppose there is no hope for you, Rush Yarr.”

“None.” He paused, added with a shade of reproach in his voice, “I would have ridden with you to see Nyx, but you didn’t tell me you were going.”

“The Holder tells me when to come and go. She didn’t mention you.”

“Must you be so blindly obedient?”

“Always.”

“Because she gave you a home?”

“Because I choose to.”

“She gave me a home, too, and family. I am obedient and respectful, too, but rarely at the same time.”

“You are of Delta blood. You have an archaic desire to rebel against the Holder.”

“And you, descended from Astor Ro, desire to obey the Holder, speak meekly at all times with downcast eyes, and never look out of high windows.”

“Astor Ro may have been afraid of anything not surrounded by high walls, but she fought at Moro Ro’s side during the Hold Wars and she was not afraid to tell him when to change his underwear.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read it in some old chronicle.”

“You never read.”

“I tried, when you and Nyx and Calyx all studied together. I never understood how you could. It made me feel strange.”

He gazed at her curiously, his hand still. “How?”

“As if I had read everything before, and yet I never had. As if I remembered things I never knew…” She shivered suddenly and he dropped his hand. “Let’s go back. The Holder is coming up. I want to see if there’s a library left.”

“What do you think that was?”

“What was?”

“What I threw?”

“I have no idea. Dead, it smelled like. A thousand years dead.”

A silken green pall hung over the library. They opened more windows, let the north wind scour the air, blow the green shade out to sea. Rush, having enchanted away his anger, left Meguet alone to wait for the Holder.

She came finally, near midnight; Meguet heard her footsteps walk into a dream, and she half-woke, trying to rise at the same time. Lauro Ro’s hand at her shoulder kept her still. The Holder crossed to the fire, and picked up a poker to stir the lagging flames. Of all her daughters, Nyx most resembled her, in her dark hair and her movements. The Holder’s hair, wild, night-black, flecked with white, was coiled, braided, pinned into submission every morning; by midnight the Holder’s impatient fingers had freed most of it. She was tall, big-boned, still slender; her eyes were dark as the Cygnet’s wings and her voice could—and did once or twice—carry from the top of Chrysom’s tower clear to the Gatekeeper in his turret beside the gate. She wore blue velvet that night, and rings on every finger, which sent jewelled lights spinning around the walls as she fanned the air under her nose with one hand. Rush Yarr considered her a throwback, in her darkness and strength and fearlessness, to Moro Ro himself.

“Has Rush been breaking things again?” she asked, opening a few more windows, and the damp sea winds danced into the room, waking Meguet further.

“He was upset about Nyx.”

“He is always upset about Nyx. I am upset about Nyx.” She gave the fire a final poke and turned, poured wine. “How is Nyx?” She handed Meguet a cup and sat down finally, near the hearth, with the poker and wood close at hand, for, like Nyx, she loved fires. “Will she come home?”

“She remembered her promise. She will come for the Council.”

“But not before.”

“No.”

The Holder’s mouth tightened. She pulled a pin of gold and pearl out of her hair, shook the falling strand free. Her feet worked out of her velvet slippers at the same time; she sat with her unshod feet on the stones like a cottager while Meguet stretched a worn boot to the fire and added, “I think she only does these things to see that she is able to do them. That’s what matters to her. She’s not destined for a life of petty witchery in the swamps. But this may not be the only strange path she takes.”

“She’s been away most of nine years,” the Holder said incredulously. “How much more of sorcery is there to learn?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wish I did know more.” She brooded at the fire a moment, her elbows on her knees. “Her father was ensorcelled,” she added, stunning Meguet, for the Holder never answered questions about her daughters’ fathers.

“A swan?” Meguet hazarded.

“No. A wolf in Hunter Hold. In the night hours when he was human, he never spoke of any such knowledge. She didn’t get it from him. Or from me.” She glanced at Meguet, reading her mind. “I broke the spell over him. I don’t know how. We were both surprised.” She smiled a little, remembering. Then she looked at Meguet again, her eyes dark and fire, a long look that took in more, sometimes, than Meguet knew about herself. “But you have more to tell me.”

Meguet, unsurprised, nodded. She took a sip of wine, held the cup in her linked fingers. “There is someone with Nyx.”

“Who?”

“A young man. I couldn’t tell at first what he was; he was dressed in rich, antique clothes. I learned later he is Wayfolk, with strange pale hair and a dark, harrowed face.”

“From watching Nyx work, probably. An apprentice?”

“Maybe.”

“A lover?”

“I hope not.”

“Why not?”

Meguet hesitated, received the Holder’s full attention. “I only looked at him once, and he never spoke. But something in him drew me back into the house after dark. I could not ride away and leave him there with Nyx, without knowing more. And yet there’s nothing to know but that he’s Wayfolk, with chaff from the fields of Withy Hold under his fingernails and a love named Tiel in his heart. On the surface.”

“On the surface,” the Holder repeated. Her eyes were still now, expressionless, reminding Meguet of the ancient, equivocal night in a stone-tortoise’s eye. “And under the surface? What exactly is my daughter living with?”

“I don’t know. Neither does she. A Wayfolk man with a secret…”

“What secret?”

“I don’t know.”

Memory, to her surprise, seemed as accessible as the memory of the house she had wandered in; small details became clear, including the landscape in her mind that the young man’s piecemeal rambling had formed. She began with her unremarked entry into Nyx’s house, and ended with Corleu taking the light out of the mirror, leaving Meguet in darkness in a room full of dark mirrors.

“I thought you might have sent me back anyway,” she finished. “But even returning there, and listening to them, I have no idea what they’re doing together.”

The Holder, still through the long tale, got to her feet in a whirl and prickle of lights. She poked at a log meditatively; Meguet could not see her face. The fire flared; she kept up a gentle but relentless nudging until sparks flew thick as stars up the chimney and Meguet cast a watchful eye at the ancient, mysterious, gleaming secrets along the mantel. Lauro Ro put the poker down abruptly, turned. The expression in her eyes startled Meguet; it was something like the impersonal, bone-searching gaze she had favored Corleu with.

“You followed the Cygnet into a room full of mirrors?”

Of all details her memory had woven together, it seemed least significant. “I didn’t know which way to go,” she explained, surprised. “It was like throwing grass into the air and following. I moved in the direction the Cygnet flew in my mind. That’s all. It’s nothing but a trick I play on myself. Sometimes when I’m lost impulse will find a path where reason can’t.”

Lauro Ro sat down again. She pulled the last pins from her hair, tossed them into her lap. Her hair, tumbling forward, hid her face again. But her voice sounded more familiar. “They were searching those old books for a web?”

“So it seemed.”

“Instead of waking the Dancer.”

“It seemed.”

“That’s a constellation.”

“His tale was full of stars.”

“Is Nyx in danger?”

The question started Meguet. “From what? A Wayfolk man who grew up jumping stooks?”

“Then why did you go back?”

Meguet was silent, gazing back at the Holder. She pulled herself up restively. “I don’t know,” she said, scrutinizing memory to find the bone in Corleu’s face, the fleeting expression that had turned her in her path. “Impulse.”

“Grass in the wind.”

“He disturbed me.”

“Before he even opened his mouth?”

“Yes.”

“So.” The Holder watched her pace. “If the man himself is not the danger, who is the danger?”

Meguet halted mid-step, as if the shadow of a raven flying out of the stone had suddenly barred her way. She stared down at the shadow, whispered, “Is that what I saw? Why I went back?”

The Holder shifted; a sapphire light flashed. She raised her head; her eyes had changed: They grew wide, luminous, vulnerable, like the eyes of a deer catching sight of a hunter’s arrow. She said nothing, left Meguet staring at her. Meguet took another step into the raven’s shadow, and stopped again.

“Do you want me to go back there and talk to Nyx?”

“Was Nyx settled there for the winter? Or will she move again before spring?”

“She said she has work to busy her there until spring.”

“I can imagine,” the Holder said, darkly. “I could call her home, I suppose. She could glare at me and pick bats apart in the middle of the night.” She stirred the fire with unnecessary force, scattering embers onto the floor. Meguet kicked them back in, leaning wearily against the stones. She felt bone-tired suddenly, ready to sleep where she stood, propped among the stone birds, beneath the Cygnet.

“How did the Wayfolk man get his hair?” she heard, a riddle in the dark, and realized that her eyes were closed. She said:

“Yes.”

“What?”

She opened her eyes, saw her own hair milky in the firelight against her black gown. “There,” she said, “is the question.” She dragged her hand over her eyes, remembering. “I looked at him, he looked at me. He recognized me. That’s what I saw in him. Why I turned back. We recognized each other.”

“From where?” the Holder asked. “Have you met him before on your travels?”

“No. Never.”

“Then how?”

“That,” she said, “I will find out.”

“Just be careful,” the Holder said somberly.

“I am always. And he is only Wayfolk.”

“He may be only Wayfolk, but he is with Nyx, and she is wandering in dangerous country. One of these days she may call up something she didn’t expect. She may have already, by the sound of it. Take Rush with you. You should not go alone.”

“I would rather take the Gatekeeper,” she said, surprising both herself and the Holder. “Rush would only fight with Nyx.”

The Holder looked at her silently, her expression unfathomable. “My Gatekeeper?”

“He knows the swamps.” She kicked a cold ember back into, the hearth. “There are fewer travellers in winter, for him to open the gate to.”

“He will not leave the gate. They never do.”

“If he will?”

The Holder was silent again, her eyes on the fire. “If he will go,” she said slowly, “take him.” She shivered suddenly, then gathered pins in her lap and stood. She put her hand on Meguet’s shoulder, kissed her lightly. “Watch over my spellbound child. But be careful of her.”

“I will.”

Asleep finally, Meguet dreamed a moon, and a strange pattern of stars beyond her window, in a windy, blue-black sky. A ragged edge of black cloud detached itself from the wind and sank earthward. As it neared her window, the winds stilled. Moonlight drenched the sky. The casement opened: A wild black swan lighted on the ledge, drew in its wings. It filled her window, huge, mysterious, darker than the night behind it. It watched her. Dreaming or awake by then—she hardly knew—she watched it.

 

Three
  

SHE was forced to wait before she went back upriver. Cold rain fell for days; the entire swamp, yellow-grey with mud, seemed to be sliding into the sea. She and Rush, both restive, took to the armory and threatened each other with antique weapons. Sons and daughters of the Delta lords, descendants of swamp dwellers and half-wild under their wealth and manners, joined them, looking for any sport in the drenched world. Meguet gave lessons to young men whose eyes constantly looked past her for a glimpse of Calyx, and then were suddenly on her, unbraiding her neat hair and studying her flowing, muscular movements. She treated them with a grave courtesy that was dampening, left them searching for Calyx, who was always elsewhere.

She forded the rivers and pools in the outer yard one day near dusk, when the hard edge of the rain had dulled. She surprised the Gatekeeper as she came up the steps along the wall to his turret. With thick sheepskin on the stone seats, a three-legged brazier between them, and their own voluminous, bulky cloaks, there was hardly room under the peaked stone roof for both. But he seemed pleased, if mystified, by her company.

“Lady Meguet,” he said. “It was brave of you to cross the yard. Some of the cottagers were fishing in it earlier.”

“I don’t doubt.” She held her hands to the brazier, looking curiously around at the scalloped edgings of marble on the open ledges, and along the roof. “This place was enormous, when I came last.”

“Before my time, then. Or I would have remembered you coming.”

She smiled. “It was another Gatekeeper, yes. An old man with white hair and black brows. I have forgotten his name. Or maybe I never knew he had one beyond ‘Gatekeeper.’” She paused, saw the flicker of smile in his eyes, and surprised him. “Hew.”

He blinked. “Yes. Most don’t know that, beyond the cottages.”

“I asked the Holder.”

“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “She remembered my name, did she? After ten years?”

“She must have considered it important.”

“And you,” he said mildly, “have found it suddenly important to know.”

“I asked her,” Meguet said, “ten years ago, the first time you opened the gate for me alone.”

He was silent; she watched a wave, storm-ridden, stumble wildly against the sand and fall a long, long way before it stopped. He reached for a little ebony pipe on the seat beside him, and found a taper. He met her eyes. “What can I do for you, Lady Meguet?”

“The Holder said you may not do it.”

“Ah.” He carried flame to the pipe with the taper; light flooded his hands, the lower part of his face. She realized then that he had been young, too, when she asked the Holder his name: a boy, straight out of the backwater, catching crayfish one day and guarding the Holder’s gate the next. “There is only one thing I would not do for you,” he said simply, and she sighed.

“You won’t leave the gate.”

“I can’t.”

“But why? You leave it nights to sleep, don’t you? Do you? You do sleep.”

“Sometimes here, other times I have a small cottage…” He studied her, his brows crooked. “I can’t,” he said again. “But tell me what I can do.”

“Tell me what binds you here,” she demanded, frustrated. The rain pounded down again; he shifted the brazier from the open window, his eyes straying by habit to the massive closed gate. He puffed on his pipe a bit, then said apologetically at the smoke:

“It keeps me warm, and awake when I’m up late, waiting… Nobody ever asked me that before. Not like that, anyway.”

“Is it secret?”

“Even so, I’d tell you. Because you know what you’re asking. The old man—the other Gatekeeper—came looking for me upriver. He had yellow eyes; with all that white hair he looked like an owl. I heard he was coming; word travelled faster than him, that some bird-haired old man wearing the Cygnet was stopping everyone, man and girl, and saying one thing to them. I was standing in my boat, hauling in a five-foot pike when he found me. He spoke. That’s the last I saw of the pike.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I have left the gate.’ I remember rowing downriver in such a panic I nearly wrecked myself among the ships coming into the harbor. That’s the last I saw of swamp and the first I saw of the city and the Holder’s house. I didn’t stop moving until I had shut the open gate and climbed up here to watch.” He smiled a little. “Later that evening the most beautiful woman in the world came up the steps and brought me supper. She asked my name and welcomed me into her house.”

Meguet leaned back against the stones. “What a strange tale. So you were born Gatekeeper.”

“Seems so. One day, I’ll do the same, leave the gate wide and hobble around the Delta until someone drops crayfish net or butter churn or bill of lading and runs to close the gate.”

“What happens if you leave?” she persisted. “For only a day or two. Three.”

“Makes my heart pound, just the thought. But why? Why me, of all?” Then he answered himself. “The swamp.” And then, “The Lady Nyx.”

This time his guesswork did not annoy her. She sighed soundlessly, sliding her hood back, for the brazier had heated the old stones well. “Nyx,” she said softly. He waited, pipe going out between his fingers, his odd, slanted, swamp-green eyes grave. “I think she may be in trouble. The Holder wants me to go and talk to her, but not to go alone. I thought of you. You know the swamp.”

“So do you.”

“You know the tales spread about her.”

“So does everyone.”

“But you would not spread others, if you saw her. You would be discreet, you would not be afraid of the swamp, and—I think—you would not be afraid of Nyx.”

“I’ve seen swamp magic.” He relit his pipe, added, glancing across the yard, “It’s a bloody, ugly kind of thing, some. But I can’t believe you’d be in danger at all from Lady Nyx.”

“She has someone with her.”

He said, “Ah,” softly. Then: “The Lord Rush Yarr knows sorcery. He is not afraid of Lady Nyx.”

“I’m afraid of his sorcery. And his temper. Nyx would toss us both out of her house and guard the door.” His eyes were on the yard again; she turned, saw some of their neighbors bundled faceless, splashing through puddles toward the gate. “If you can’t come, I will ask him, though. He doesn’t know enough to fear the swamp; he won’t be discreet with Nyx, but at least he cares for her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you miss the swamp?” she asked suddenly. “Your freedom?”

He smiled. “That’s why I like to see you come and go. Hear where you’ve been, travelling around Ro Holding like a tinker.” He flushed a little as she laughed. “Sorry. I had one on my mind.”

“I never met a tinker who roamed as far as I do.”

“This one might. Hunter Hold Sign on the back door of his house, and Withy Hold on the side. He could put Delta on the other side while he’s here.”

“It’s easy enough to paint a sign.”

“Or tell stories to the gullible.” He put his pipe down as the riders neared. “At least he did tell them. Mended pots and told tales, cottage imps in and out of his house. It caught their eyes, his little, black, rolling house. It caught mine.”

“You said he had kin?” she said absently, pulling her hood forward.

“No. He said.”

“He didn’t? He lied to get in the gate?”

“He claimed kin, I heard. But by the time he did his business and told his stories, kinship got confusing. Everyone knew he had kin, but no one claimed him. When they got that sorted out, he had disappeared.”

“He left the house.”

“No. I never opened the gate for him to leave. He’s hidden somewhere. Not even the cottage brats can find him.”

She waited for him to rise, followed him out into the rain-spangled torchlight. His story irritated her: too silly to heed, too disturbing to ignore. “A tinker,” she repeated, “in hiding in Ro House. Tinkers don’t do such things. They mend and move on. He must be somewhere among the cottages.”

“You must be right.” He stepped to the gate as the riders came up, bid them good night courteously, not missing a name or a half-hidden face. “He could put that dark house in the shadow of a wall, and you’d miss it.” He swung the gate shut again, faced her, the rain sliding down his bare head, wet hair hugging the lean lines of his face. “Or I would.”

She shivered suddenly, gathered her cloak close. “You wouldn’t,” she said. “You put him into my eye. Now I’ll be looking for him. A little black house in the shadow of Ro House.”

The heavy rain turned to snow the next day, to everyone’s astonishment, for it rarely snowed along the coast. The Holder’s children gathered one by one in Chrysom’s tower to watch it fall. Even Iris, who thought Chrysom’s library gloomy and sorcery incomprehensible, joined them and was entranced by the pale sky falling endlessly into Wolfe Sea. Meguet, staring out at the weather, was not entranced. Her eye fell on the Gatekeeper, in his turret across the empty yard. Even in that cold he kept watch.

She heard her name spoken; Rush was describing the sword-play lessons to Calyx.

“They are all in love with Meguet,” he said, “at least while they are with her, and she scarcely sees them.” He smiled as Meguet turned; he was slightly drunk. “Meguet loves no one.”

“So do I,” Calyx sighed. “They all have homes, don’t they? Why can’t they stay there?”

“Really, Calyx,” Iris said. “You might like marriage.” Iris, the oldest of the Holder’s daughters, had deep chestnut hair and violet eyes, and a head for the myriad small details that fretted each Hold or kept them peaceful.

“I will never marry,” Calyx said. “I am going to live in this tower and write a history of Ro House.” She sat leafing through an ancient, cracked book, looking like a winter rose, with her fine, silk-white hair, her skin flushed like dawn over hoarfrost on the top of the world. She had eyes the blue-grey of the northern sky, and bones so fine only the smallest of rings fit her fingers. Though the Holder had never told her, it seemed obvious where her father had come from. He was, Rush suggested, one of the ice-spirits of Berg Hold, who lured travellers to their deaths with their stunning beauty. Calyx agreed that, if nothing else, he had probably got the Hold right.

“You’re already too much in this tower,” Iris declared. “It can’t be healthy.”

“Meguet lives here. So I will.”

Iris eyed Meguet a moment, found answer to her own satisfaction. “Meguet is permitted to be eccentric by heritage.”

“This entire family is eccentric,” Calyx said, delving back into her book. “We have no known fathers, Nyx is a sorceress, Rush is hopelessly in love with a sorceress, and Meguet wanders everywhere and lives among ghosts. Our mother never married. I take after her.”

“Our mother never sat in a tower to avoid suitors.”

“They bore me. I would rather read history.”

Rush slipped the book out of her hands. “What is this?” he asked, leafing through it. “There seems to be a lot of vegetables in it.”

“It’s Rydel’s book on the growing of herbs and roses. I thought I would.”

“Would what?”

“I found a tiny, overgrown walled garden behind the back tower; Rydel wrote that Astor Ro had one that was latticed with vines, so she did not have to see the sky. I think this was her garden. Rydel planted roses there; perhaps some are still alive.”

“After three hundred years?”

“The rose vines on this tower are a thousand years old.”

“But Chrysom planted those. They must be magic.”

“Why must they be?” Iris demanded. “I don’t see why everything in this tower must be somehow touched by Chrysom. He’s been dead for centuries.”

“This entire tower is spellbound,” Calyx said composedly. “That’s why I like it. The roots of the rose vines are fed by Chrysom’s bones, buried in the maze.”

“Oh, really, Calyx,” Iris said in disgust. Rush laughed; Meguet, glancing at him, realized how rarely he did that, these days.

She poured herself wine, sat where she could watch snow and fire at the same time. Rush paced a little, restlessly, behind her. His feet stopped finally; she felt his hands on her shoulders.

“You look beautiful in that green,” he said. She dragged her thoughts back from the swamp, watched him thoughtfully as he moved to lounge on skins at her feet. He met her gaze. “Am I right,” he asked, “that you love no one?”

She did not answer for a long time. “You,” she said, “love everyone and no one. I love no one and everyone. Even you, Rush Yarr. As you sometimes love me. And sometimes Calyx. But always Nyx.”

“So,” he said, “you are not indifferent to the young blood foxes you teach.”

She smiled. “Of course not.”

“Don’t you want to marry, leave Ro House for a home of your own?”

“No,” she said. “Marry, perhaps. But leave this house? Never. It is my heritage, I think. So old, I am tangled in these old stones. I can’t separate myself.”

“One day you might,” he said, his brows knit. “One day.”

She shook her head. “I can’t explain it,” she said, indifferent to explanations. Calyx, listening, said gravely:

“Meguet is born to love a swan.”

“What?” Rush said, turning. Meguet looked at her, startled. Calyx gathered strands of imagination, began weaving them.

“A swan. One of the wild swans that come down late from Berg Hold. A great black swan, who comes once every three years to the lake. Once every three years, in the hour just before midnight, he takes on human form, and one year—perhaps this year—Meguet will stray to the lake under moonlight and find him, in the thousand-year-old wood where the trees will shift and hide them from all view. The mage who ensorcelled him is dead, and no one in the world is powerful enough to free him. So he is in despair of ever regaining human form. Meguet, finding him, will be his only solace, his only happiness. But, unbeknownst to him, there is someone even now growing powerful enough to free him, someone no farther from them than the Delta swamp—”

Iris, intrigued by the tale, interrupted harshly. “Oh, Calyx, she’d be more likely to burn his liver for him than turn him human.”

“She would not!” Calyx said indignantly. “Iris, I can’t believe you believe every stupid drunken trapper’s tale you hear about Nyx.”

“They’re true,” Rush said shortly. “Meguet knows. True, Meguet?”

Meguet sighed noiselessly, disinclined for a tempest. “Nyx would recognize an ensorcelled swan if she saw one.”

“Yes, but the question is: What will she do with it?”

“Stuff it and roast it for supper, I suppose.”

“Poor swan,” Calyx said temperately, opening her book again. “An unhappy end to an unhappy tale.”

“Anyway, Nyx may be wicked, but she is not disgusting,” Iris pronounced, contradicting herself, and Rush, as always, rose to the bait. Meguet moved from between their argument, to sit next to Calyx. Calyx knew odd things and Meguet had odd questions. Calyx smiled at her. The swan had met its destiny and she was already back among the roses.

“You know that garden, Meguet. Don’t you? Where the tower rooms had no windows above the garden wall, so that she would not have to look out.”

“Yes,” Meguet said. “I read about it once, and I searched for it. I wanted to look at the world out of Astor Ro’s eyes. She fascinated me: such fear and such courage. I could read Rydel’s books; she talked so much about plants instead of history.”

“Which book was it?”

“I don’t remember. Odd things, she wrote of, everything. I think Nyx took it. She rambled about her gardens and Timor Ro.”

“Timor Ro said she had mysterious powers.”

“Sorcery?”

“Something like, but even more powerful. Chrysom, Timor Ro said, stood in her shadow.”

Meguet raised a brow. “All she ever did was garden.”

“Mysterious, secret powers, they were.”

“Calyx, you’re inventing this.”

“I’m not. He said she used them only for Ro Holding.”

“Did he say what powers?”

“No. He said such things were not to be known.”

“He must have meant her peach brandy. Calyx…if someone spoke of waking the Dancer, what would that mean?”

“The Dancer trapped in ice by the Cygnet,” Calyx said promptly. “Guarded by the Fire Bear.”

“In the sky?”

“On the top of the highest peak of Berg Hold.”

“Berg Hold,” Meguet repeated, oddly startled. There was a place, not between lines of a tale, but in Ro Holding, that a Wayfolk man might find if he persisted. “How would—how would the Dancer be wakened?”

“Only the Fire Bear can free her, and it has no more of its fire.”

“Then how—”

“But, she may be wakened on the last day of winter.”

“Why the last—”

“Then, if you bring her a question, she will wake just long enough to answer or predict, without moving from the ice. Which is safest for us all, since, freed, the Dancer dances chaos into the world.”

“Why chaos?”

“Because she is no longer trapped in dreams; she can turn all our waking lives into dreams, and nightmares.” She read a page or two, while Meguet, frowning, imagined the Dancer dancing free.

“Why the last day of winter?” she asked. Calyx pondered, smoothing a single shining hair back into place.

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “because the constellation of the Dancer sinks out of sight during spring, leaving only the Fire Bear visible, watching her over the edge of the world.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I watch the stars,” Calyx said simply. “Sometimes it seems that all the constellations exist in a strange, ancient tale that we only catch glimpses of, in our short lives, while they move slowly as centuries through it.”

“A piecemeal tale,” Meguet murmured, and thought of another piecemeal tale she had heard from within a mirror. “But what, I wonder, is the tale?”

She and Rush went to the armory awhile, and then, sweating, tired, still armed, they flung cloaks over their light shirts and went riding to cool themselves. The sky had emptied itself for a time of rain, snow, wind, and there was nothing left in the pale, silken clouds to fall. The air was still; only a thin, dark thread of crow flight seamed it now and then. They rode across field and meadow, an unbroken plane of white, passing birch a shade whiter than the snow. The thousand-year-old wood, a dark, glistening green powdered with snow, seemed the only color left in the world. They rode to the edge of it and paused, questioning one another silently. The tangled, massive, sweeping boughs had caught most of the snow before it touched ground. The snow itself had caught the frail winter light, leaving a dense, sweet-smelling shadowy world among the black trunks that rose toward a green-black mist higher than Chrysom’s tower. It looked, Meguet thought, like a giant’s garden.

She turned her horse into it; Rush followed.

“We just left the world behind,” he said, glancing back: Towers, gardens, pasture, sky had all vanished.

“Speak quietly,” Meguet warned him. “The trees are more restless in winter. Cold wakes them.”

Rush stared at her. “It is true, then. I never believed it.”

“That they shift?” She looked at him, amused. “Why would you believe everything else that Chrysom said, and not this?”

“I don’t know. Moving trees? Maybe if they roamed under my window I would consider it.”

“You’ll consider it if they start,” she said softly, and he eyed her again, askance.

“You’ve been caught in that?”

“Only twice.”

“Twice!”

“Sh.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s like being lost in a forest the size of Berg Hold… The trees shift, and all their memories move with them, century upon century of dreams, until you don’t know anymore what’s tree and what’s only a dream of tree.”

“It’s only a small wood.”

“I know. But Chrysom took them from the northern forests so long ago there must have been a sea of trees bigger than Wolfe Sea. It’s that they remember, I think, and that’s the memory you get lost in.”

Rush shivered lightly. “Cold,” he commented. He reached out to touch one swollen black trunk. Knots and boles like small animals ran up it, peered, frozen, at the riders. “Cold,” he said again, as if he had felt the heart of the tree, and Meguet had a sudden image of tree roots, chilled in the unexpected weather, stirring just beneath the earth. She picked up her pace a little. The swan lake lay just on the other side of the wood. Like the trees, the swans were born to a land of fierce winter; the snow, it seemed, had followed them south.

“Rush,” she said impulsively, keeping her voice low, and hoping he would, “I must ride back upriver as soon as the weather clears. To talk to Nyx. The Holder told me to take someone. Will you come?”

He was watching her as he listened, his face as cold and set as the wrinkled faces of the trees. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you need company? You never have in your life. Why, to see Nyx? What is she doing?”

She drew breath, her mouth tight. “Rush. Don’t shout here.”

“I’m not going to.”

“You are. Just say yes or no. Shout among the swans.”

“I’m not—”

“You are. Please. Say yes. Say no. Then don’t say anything more.”

“Why—” She stared him into silence, saw his eyes widen in comprehension. He unclamped his jaw, said, “Yes,” and watched the trees in an uneasy fascination.

They were nearly through the wood, with a tree or two between them, when Rush vanished. He was there one moment, and then, obscured by two trees aligned by eyesight, if not by distance, he was simply gone. Meguet circled the trees several times, called him softly. He was nowhere, it seemed, or she was. She reined, feeling the blood run quick and cold through her. Trees filled her sight wherever she looked. She moved forward, she thought, toward the lake. Trees shifted in front of her, faded as she circled them, or did not when she rode up to them. She cursed softly, helplessly, feeling the chill damp air clinging to her. “Not now,” she pleaded, numbly. “Not now.” But trees and the dream of trees rose in her path, huge, tranquil, ancient and endless as the forests of a world a thousand years younger. She called his name desperately, careless now of their peace, and heard a rustle like wind around her. She smelled wood smoke.

She turned toward it with relief, without thinking. Trees opened in front of her to dense shadow. Within shadow was a denser shadow: a small black wagon like a house, its slanted roof painted yellow, Hold Signs on back and side. And in front of it, roasting a swamp lizard: a tinker.

He lifted his black shaggy head, smiled. Gold gleamed in his ear, around his neck, and, she imagined, from his eyes.

“You’ll pardon me, Lady,” he said. “I’m a solitary man. Crowds like that in the yard when I entered frighten me.”

Meguet stared at him. There seemed a patch of sunlight beside his fire, or some odd reflection from the flames. “Why did you come into this house?” she asked, for he was no tinker, nothing she had ever encountered.

“To patch pots.”

“We have no need of another tinker.”

“You never know,” the tinker said. He turned his spit thoughtfully. The lizard’s eye, open and emerald green, regarded her.

“You must come with me,” she said, dragging her eyes from the lizard. “In the name of Lauro Ro.”

“Why?” the tinker asked, wide-eyed. “I have done nothing more than pass through her gate.”

“She has a pot to patch.”

“She has, in this great house, a tinker for every broken pot.”

“She has not yet had you to mend a pot for her.” The patch of sunlight appeared to be moving with the tinker. It was his shadow, she realized suddenly, a subversion of light that left her breathless. She kept her body very still, kept her face calm, though it felt cold and white as snow. “You must come with me. The trees are shifting, it is not safe here.”

“You are armed,” he said surprisedly, and the jewel in the pommel of the sword she wore winked as at a touch of light in that dark place.

“It is my right to bear arms in this house.”

“Against a poor tinker?”

“You troubled the Gatekeeper, who has an eye for trouble. You are skulking like a thief in these woods without a broken pot in sight. Since you did not give your true name to the Gate-keeper, you must give it to the Holder, for you are in her house.”

He did not answer her. His yellow-gold eyes seemed to reflect fire as he gazed at her. A corner of his mouth had crept upward in a smile. “And you?” he said finally, softly. “You looked straight at me, through those shifting trees; your eyes picked me out of the shadows. Who are you?”

“Meguet!” Rush called, from some place far away, within trees, behind trees, encircled by trees.

“Meguet,” the tinker repeated thoughtfully. He turned the spit again; the lizard’s eyes were faded now, filmy with smoke. “Meguet,” he said again. “Pretty. But who? Who dwells behind your eyes?” He fingered the lizard, picked an eye out of its head, tossed it into the air. Falling, turning, turning in the air, it flashed now emerald, now coin-gold.

Sudden, dark, overwhelming anger drove Meguet forward, past revulsion and fear, to the fire and the charred, one-eyed lizard, and the tinker who dared his ugly sorcery within the Holder’s house. She drew the sword at her side, thrust it down through the flames until the tip rested against the tinker’s heart.

It was Moro Ro’s great sword and it shook slightly in one hand, but the tinker seemed impressed. He looked up at her, still turning the lizard’s eye between his fingers. “Meguet,” he said curiously, his eyes full of yellow light, and suddenly her mind was full of light, as if the sun had struck her.

“Meguet!” Rush shouted behind her. The fire flared silver, swallowed the lizard, Moro’s sword. Half-blind, she swung her horse, confused, trying to see Rush. She saw the tinker’s wagon; its back door with the gold sun on it slammed shut. Then the air cracked oddly around her, as if a tree had snapped in two. The dark walls of the tinker’s house crawled with flame.

She cried out. Rush tugged at her reins; she jerked free, turning back to stare at the tiny house, with its four black walls and its yellow roof and yellow lintel, until the silver flames engulfed it and Rush wrenched at her reins again.

“Meguet! The trees!”

They were rustling, sighing, drawing back from the fire. “Meguet,” Rush pleaded. “He’s burning in his house.” He looked shaken, white; as usual, Meguet realized, his sorcery must have gone awry. The flames were dying already, without reaching toward the tree boughs; that much he had done right. She let him lead her finally. She glanced back one more time, incredulously, to seek a hint of what she had glimpsed in the fire-chewed bones of the wagon. The lizard in the fire moved its head to look at her. Both eyes were in its head and they were yellow-gold.

 

Four
  

YOU burned a tinker in the thousand-year-old wood?” the Holder said incredulously. Half the household had stood in windows and doorways, on the parapet wall between the back towers, watching the silver smoke rising out of the trees. Household guard, riding out to investigate, had found Meguet and Rush emerging from the trees, grim, silent, exhausted from the twisting paths of the disturbed and dreaming trees. The Holder, the guard told them, would see them immediately.

“He was not a tinker,” Meguet said abruptly, breaking a silence that had lasted from the wood to Chrysom’s library, where the Holder and Calyx had been watching the oddly glittering smoke. “And he is not dead.”

Rush stared at her. “He’s dead. Whatever he is. I burned his house with him in it—”

“Why?” the Holder asked sharply. “What had he done? In Moro’s name, why did you set fire to a tinker?”

He closed his eyes. “I did not intend to. I was trying to circle his house with fire. Not burn it down.”

“Then why—”

“I missed.”

“Oh, Rush,” Calyx breathed, hands over her mouth. “You never could do that right.”

“He’s not dead,” Meguet said wearily. She began to tremble suddenly; methodically, she tried to unbuckle the sword belt dragging at her side so she could sit. Her hands shook; the buckle would not loosen. Calyx’s hands moved under hers, flicked it open; she sat down finally, the sword across her knees. The Holder touched a pin in her hair, frowning down at Meguet, then swung back at Rush.

“Why?”

“He was threatening Meguet.”

“A tinker?”

“She had drawn her sword against him.”

“So Meguet was threatening the tinker. And you set him on fire. I gather this was no ordinary tinker. Meguet, why did you take up arms against a tinker?”

“He isn’t a tinker.”

“Wasn’t,” Rush murmured.

“He isn’t dead.” She heard him gather breath; she leaned forward in the chair, gripping its arms, gazing at him. “The yellow star its lintel, the yellow star its roof, the four stars of red and pale marking its black walls, the blue star marking its door latch. That’s the house you burned, Rush.”

In the silence, the Holder pulled at a pearl hairpin. The pin came out; a strand fell. “That’s a Hold Sign,” she said harshly. “Meguet.”

“Yes.” She met the Holder’s eyes. She was still trembling; the jewels in Moro’s sword and the sword belt shivered with light. “And the dark house that falls from the sky, in the Wayfolk man’s tale.”

The Holder stared at her, her face waxen against her dark, scattered hair.

“What Wayfolk man?” Rush demanded, and the Holder turned, looking, in the cast of firelight, fierce, dishevelled, oddly like Nyx. Rush swallowed. He said again, more quietly, “What Wayfolk man?”

“A man with Nyx. Meguet saw him.”

Rush’s face whitened. Meguet found herself on her feet again, speaking as calmly as she could. “A young man wanting a spell from Nyx. He spoke of a little dark house falling out of the sky—”

“That’s a song,” Calyx said wonderingly. “The house you never leave.” She paused, blinking at something in the fire. “And it’s a Hold Sign. The Gold King.”

“His eyes were gold,” Meguet said. Her voice faltered; she finished in a whisper. “The tinker’s eyes were gold. He was roasting a lizard. When the house burned, I saw the lizard’s eyes. They looked at me and they were gold.”

“Sorcery,” Rush said flatly. The Holder said nothing. Her eyes searched Meguet a moment, then hid their thoughts. She pulled at another pin; it glittered to the floor.

“Nyx could fight it,” Calyx suggested. “She would come home for this.”

“No,” the Holder said sharply.

“But, Mother, she has studied sorcery for nine years! If she can protect this house, she will, I know it—”

“I don’t want her fighting anyone! I will not bring Nyx into danger.”

“But if this house is in danger, we need someone to protect it, and Nyx—”

“No.”

“Are you afraid,” Rush asked abruptly, “that it’s not this house she would fight for?”

The Holder’s face flamed. He had struck her wordless; wordless, she struck back. The force of her blow rocked him a step and shook a few pins out of her hair. Rush dropped his face in his hands; she rubbed her wrist. She spoke first, grimly. “This is not the time, Rush Yarr, to show me my worst nightmare.”

Rush reappeared; Meguet, shocked motionless, saw the blood between his fingers. Calyx, looking cross, pulled a square of lace from her sleeve and he applied it to his nose. “You hit like a blacksmith,” he commented. Meguet, gripping the sheathed sword with both hands, eased her grip and set it down.

“We cannot start fighting each other,” she breathed.

“No,” Rush said. “I’m sorry.” He sat down; so did the Holder.

“So am I,” she said after a moment. “It would be easy to blame Nyx for every evil in the Delta now, but for eight years before this, her reputation has been blameless. Don’t overlook that, Rush.”

Calyx picked pins off the floor, began to tidy her mother’s hair. “There’s old Diu up in Berg Hold. Chrysom’s descendant. We can send for him.”

“No.”

“Well, Mother, we have a sorcerer living in the thousand-year-old wood who frightened Meguet, who is not afraid of anything. What do you want to do about him?”

“I don’t know yet.” She looked at Meguet. “Is that why you went into the wood? Did you suspect he was there?”

“No. I didn’t know where he was.”

The Holder straightened, tugging her hair out of Calyx’s hands. “You knew he was in this house? You didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t—The Gatekeeper mentioned a tinker in a little black wagon who came into the house and vanished. I wasn’t looking for him, no. But I recognized him when I saw him.”

“Then why did you go into the wood?”

“The trees were beautiful,” she said helplessly, puzzled. “Quiet, mysterious in the snow. They drew me in.”

“They weren’t quiet for long,” Rush said dourly. “They rambled all over, especially after I tried to set them on fire. The tinker must have misjudged my power, or he would not have bothered to hide in his house.”

“Or perhaps your ineptness terrified him,” the Holder murmured.

“But why,” Calyx said, setting a final pin in place, “would a sorcerer disguise himself as a tinker, drive around in a wagon reminiscent of a constellation and hide himself in the thousand-year-old wood?”

“Why,” Rush asked, “would a Wayfolk man speak to Nyx of that same house?” The Holder’s eye fell on him; he added carefully, “It begs an answer.”

“Well,” the Holder sighed, “Nyx is the one to ask. But,” she added emphatically, “I do not want her back here. I would irritate her and she would upset me.”

“Mother, you are being completely unreasonable,” Calyx said softly.

“So is Nyx. Meguet will speak to her when the weather clears.”

“She asked me to go with her,” Rush said. The Holder raised a question with an eyebrow. Meguet shook her head.

“He would not leave the gate.”

“Good,” the Holder sighed. “It would terrify me if he did. Then go with her, Rush. But,” she said severely, “do exactly as Meguet tells you, and do not antagonize Nyx.”

“But what about the tinker?” Calyx persisted.

“We’ll wait.”

“For what?”

“For the pot to break,” the Holder said darkly, “and give us something to mend.”

“I found your tinker,” Meguet said to the Gatekeeper, climbing up the steps to join him later. It was dusk; stone and sea and sky were all of the same raw grey. Children flung snow at each other in the yard; men stood around the forge fires, drinking ale and watching the world go dark. The Gatekeeper, lighting his pipe and trying to rise at the same time, took in smoke; she waited, standing on the top step, until he settled it.

“Sorry—”

She had disturbed him, she realized suddenly; shifting for her to enter, he did not look at her. She saw his jaw tighten in his lowered face. He drew a clean breath finally.

“You startled me. I heard you and Rush Yarr were found among the shifting trees. No one knew there was a tinker involved.” He looked at her finally, eyes narrowed against his smoke. “Is that what burned?”

“His house.”

“But not the tinker.”

“No.” He sat very still, pipe still in his hand, waiting. “You must keep watch for the tinker coming or going through the gate. But be careful of him. He is quite dangerous.”

He gazed at her, his face dark against the darkening sky. “Lady Meguet,” he said finally, “it’s not me went in the back wood to roust out that tinker. Is he still there? Or does anyone know?”

“No.” She thought of the lizard’s gold eyes, and shivered lightly. “He could be anywhere.”

He murmured something, shifting; forgetting her, he spat suddenly over the window ledge. “He had trouble painted all over his house, and yet I let him in. He spoke fairly enough, and gave me his reasons… I should have known. A tinker wearing gold, and hardly a pot in sight. What is he, then?” She hesitated, caught his full, angry, insistent gaze. Astonished, she heard herself answer:

“Rush Yarr thinks a sorcerer.”

He still watched her. “You don’t.”

“No. I’m not sure what he is.”

“But you guess.”

Pressed, she flared at him suddenly. “I’m only seeing shadows. You are overbearing.”

“Nyx,” he said, and she stared at him, speechless. “You only get like this with me when it’s Nyx on your mind. That’s a broad leap to make, from this house upriver to the swamps. From tinker to the Holder’s daughter.”

She stood up so abruptly she hit her head on the low, slanted stone roof. She sat back down, tears of anger, pain, frustration springing into her eyes. “How dare you,” she demanded, rubbing her head furiously, “tell me what I am thinking. You have no right to judge Nyx, even if you were born among the small orange birds.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” He had one arm around her shoulder, his head close to hers; it was his hand, then, rubbing her hair. “I’m not judging Nyx, I swear by the next thing comes off the river bottom. I’m Gatekeeper, and it’s up to me to put a name to everything on two legs that comes in and out of this house. There’s no name for that tinker.”

“You assume because the tinker is evil, that Nyx must be—”

“No. You connected them, not me.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m saying.”

“I’m sorry. Nobody ever taught me any manners. I only—I would cut my heart out for this house.” He was stroking her hair now, his voice, tense with his own frustration, close to her ear. “And it was me that let the tinker in. I have never made a mistake before.”

She lifted her head, sliding her hand under his hand; she sat back against the stones, flushed, her hair dishevelled. He watched her, the small lines gathered at the corners of his eyes. She stood up again, carefully, and saw how his hands lifted as if to guide her, then fell. She said, more calmly, “You were right about Nyx. I am going upriver with Rush to talk to her. Don’t tell me to be careful of her.”

“No,” he said quickly. “I like living.”

She opened her mouth, closed it. Her mouth crooked. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Nyx worries me so. And this house.”

“I know that.” He stood up so swiftly she feared for his head, but he was used to dodging the slant. She felt his arm hover protectively around her, above her head as she ducked under the stone lintel. She went down the steps slowly, wanting to look back and not daring. She looked back finally, met his eyes.

She and Rush left two days later. The rains had slowed, but the river was still full, swirling angrily, opaque with silt. Once out of the city, she had to choose her paths carefully; the path along the river bank was under water in some places. In others, the river had spilled far over into other pools and creeks, and they had to backtrack, skirt, go south, Rush pointed out too often, to go north. It was wearisome, with the rain falling intermittently; neither of them spoke much. Rush’s face was pale, set; he looked constantly ahead in his mind, seeing a woman he had not seen in nearly three years, instead of what lay under his nose. Meguet had to guide him around soggy bogs, pull him away from the crumbling hillside. It took them an entire day just to reach sight of a tavern she knew that had a couple of rush-filled mattresses, and a meal. She said with relief, “I thought it might have fallen into the water.”

“What?” Rush said, roused. “That shack? That’s an inn? How much farther is it? Can we get there tonight?”

“We’ve been slowed by the flooding. Dark falls fast here. I don’t know how long it will take us to reach her house, but we can’t do it tonight.”

“I’d rather sleep in the rain than in that flea-bitten hut.”

“Suit yourself,” she said tiredly, then saw something within the trees: a black that took her breath away. Rush made a comment she did not hear; her attention was busy, trying to pick the black thing apart from the woods, make a familiar shape out of it. It moved as they moved, toward them; Rush, catching sight of it, fell silent.

It was a woman. Meguet eased in her saddle as she came closer: a woman in black, with her cloak lifted, held against her face, covering nose and mouth. She fluttered oddly, with wind that was not there. She stopped in the middle of the path, waited for them. Meguet saw ash-white threads endlessly circling the dark hem of her cloak; her lips parted.

“It’s a witch,” she breathed.

“What?”

“From Hunter Hold. Look at the pattern on her skirt and her cloak. Look at her sandals—they make them of bitterthorn. She must have walked all this way… No.” A chill ran through her, of wonder and fear. “No. She has sent herself ahead of time.”

“She what?” Rush said incredulously.

“She is in Hunter Hold. And she is here. She sent her image along time with a message.”

“Are you sure?” Rush asked urgently. “Is it sorcery?”

“No. They only walk the path of time.” She quickened her pace then, rode alone to meet the witch.

She was an old woman, grown strong and implacable as thorn and iron in the black desert of Hunter Hold. Her grey eyes were milky, as if she had looked too often at the full moon. She blinked uncertainly at the black-clad rider in front of her, as if desert winds were blowing a fine mist of sand before her eyes. Then she dropped her cloak from her face.

“Meguet Vervaine.”

She felt her face blanch. “Yes.”

“You must beware.”

The witch’s voice, for all her stamina, was fragile as a glass bell. Her image flowed in the wind of another Hold. Meguet, aware of the rain touching dead leaf and twig and water with slow, delicate fingers, of Rush’s horse stirring wet leaves on the trail behind, answered finally, “Yes.”

“You must go back. You must watch.”

“What—” She drew breath. “What have you seen?”

“In the last full moon, I looked along the path of time and I saw a lady as beautiful as night walking toward the house of the Holders of Ro Holding. She walks along the line of time, and the great house stands in her path, and as she walks, she grows vast or the house grows small, small enough for her to crush underfoot if she keeps along that path.”

“A lady.”

Meguet swallowed, her voice shaking. Nyx, she thought, Nyx as dark as night. But the witch had seen a different path.

“She may know the house is there, or she may not, I could not tell, for she is blind. You must watch for her. Will you watch, for the Holders of Ro Holding? You can see. Will you watch?” Meguet was wordless, shivering badly. The woman huddled into her shapeless clothes, took a step back into her own time. “Watch!” she pleaded, in her fine, frail voice. “Watch, for the Cygnet!”

“Meguet,” Rush breathed, and she started.

“Watch!” the old woman cried. “You have the eyes.”

Somehow her voice came clear, certain. “I will watch.”

The sending faded; a darkness crumpled in the air and vanished. Meguet watched the place where she had been, as if she might see the beginning and end of time appearing there. She felt a touch on her arm and whirled, pulling her horse back.

“Meguet.” Rush stared at her, startled, disturbed. “What did she say to you?”

She touched her eyes, closed them and saw the dark of night, the dark of time. “We must go back,” she whispered.

“Now?” he said sharply.

She opened her eyes. “Rush,” she said, “the witch gave warning to the Holder’s house. Warning to the Cygnet. Nyx can wait. She is not the danger. Ro House is in danger and it can’t wait.”

“Warning of what?”

“I don’t know. A blind woman.” She turned her horse blindly, night falling fast, and the threads of paths through the swamp as tangled as the threads of time. “Some blind woman. She must not enter the House. I must go back and warn.”

“Why you?” Rush asked bewilderedly. “Why did she cross your path, and not the Holder’s?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or the Gatekeeper’s?”

“Rush, I don’t know. She told me to watch. How can I watch anything in the middle of this swamp with night coming on—”

“You can’t,” Rush said, for once making a decision for her. “Unless you know how to throw your image across the Delta.”

“No.”

“Then,” he said, resigned, for she knew he would not let her ride back alone, with such strange things happening around them, “we will spend the night in the shack and be home tomorrow.”

They entered the gate again at nightfall, worn, mud-stained and drenched; the rains had started again. Rush rode ahead to the towers to speak to the Holder. Meguet relinquished her horse at the gate. The Gatekeeper, holding a torch above their heads, took a sharp look at her face and said cautiously,

“Is it Lady Nyx?”

“No.”

“Then what?” He drew her to shelter against the wall, beneath the turret, replacing the torch in its sconce.

“You must beware,” she said. His eyes widened. “Think,” she pleaded. “Think. Has a blind woman entered this house since I’ve been gone?”

He was staring at her, so still she gripped his cloak, shook him a little, alarmed. “No,” he said abruptly. “No.” His hands rose, closed over her hands. “No stranger has entered or left, and no one blind.”

“She’s beautiful, the witch said. A blind woman, beautiful as night.” She glanced at the gate; he had closed it securely behind her. “You must watch for her. She must not enter.”

“No,” he said again. “Who is she?”

“I don’t know. The witch didn’t say. She walks the path of time toward this house. Blind, she may know or may not know this house is underfoot.” She felt him shudder; his hands tightened.

“But who?” he insisted. “She must have a name. Tinker has no name, the blind woman has no name—Meguet, you must find out. How can I guard against something that has no name? How can you?”

“How can I find out? I barely know they exist! I’m not like Nyx to know sorcery, or Calyx who has read everything in Chrysom’s library twice—”

“You know they’re dangerous. The witch came to you.”

She stared at him, wordless, frustrated. “Hew, what do you expect me to do? Stand at the gate and ask her name when she enters? That’s for you to do.”

“It’s for me,” he agreed tautly. “And by then it will be too late. You must help me. You grew up in this house. You have ancient memories in your past. The witch came to you.”

“She crossed my path. She said my name.” She was shivering in the rain; rain rolled down his face like tears. Wind dragged torchlight over them, pulled apart the cloak of darkness they stood wrapped in. She saw them suddenly as from another angle in the yard, a cottager’s window, the alehouse doorway, a tower casement: she gripping his cloak, he her hands; his face, an inch or three higher, inclined slightly, the hard spare lines of it dark and fire, reflections of the pale Delta river in his eyes.

She whispered, “Gatekeeper.”

“Lady Meguet.”

“I must go.”

“Say my name again before you go.”

“Hew.”

“Meguet.”

 

Five
  

THE Holder sat late with her family that night in Chrysom’s library. Meguet, who had shed her drenched, muddy riding clothes for black velvet and pearls, sat on a stone seat against the stone wall. The chill kept her awake, the stones kept her upright; demands beyond that, she felt, were unreasonable. Yet the Holder made them.

“What blind woman?”

“I don’t know,” Meguet said.

“Tell me again what the witch said. Tell me exactly.”

She was pacing back and forth in front of the fire, the swing of her heavy, wine-colored gown mesmerizing. Iris, looking perplexed, was doing some needlepoint. Calyx sat in the shadows listening intently, looking, in white velvet and diamonds, like something carved out of frost. Rush was frowning, his eyes lowered in concentration; he was, Meguet thought, about to snore.

“Beautiful,” Meguet said for what seemed the third or eighth time, “as beautiful as night, and blind.”

It was then Calyx spoke. “That’s simple,” she said. “It’s the constellation. The Blind Lady who wears the Ring of Time. The Silver Ring of Withy Hold.”

The Holder stared at her. She was not prone to throwing things besides her voice, but she did then. The poker struck the hearth with a snarl of stone and iron that brought Rush upright, feeling for a weapon that he had taken off hours ago. He froze under the Holder’s glare.

“Another Hold Sign.”

“Strictly speaking,” Calyx began, “the Blind Lady is not—”

“How could a constellation walk through the gate?” Iris asked.

“The tinker did.”

“The tinker is not—”

“If we guard the gate,” Rush said. “If the Gatekeeper watches, she can’t enter.”

“The tinker did,” the Holder snapped.

“We weren’t warned.”

“The Gatekeeper let him in.”

“He wasn’t warned either,” Rush argued reasonably. “This time, Meguet told him.”

The Holder paced a step, whirled. “The Gatekeeper is responsible for whoever enters or leaves this house.”

“But, Mother—” Calyx began.

“He should have known. As he recognized himself Gatekeeper, he should recognize anything this dangerous to Ro House. The Blind Lady. The Silver Ring. The Dark House. The Gold King. Something is gathering against this house—” She turned again, for Meguet had made a sound. The Holder gazed at her, waiting, her eyes hardened already against what Meguet would say.

“The Wayfolk man,” she breathed. “Corleu. He spoke of these things. The Dark House. The Dancer. The Warlock.”

“The Dancer is guarded by the Fire Bear,” Calyx said wonderingly. “The Warlock is the Blood Fox’s shadow. Berg Hold and the Delta.”

The Holder’s arm swept impulsively toward the mantel, where Chrysom’s crystal jars and boxes and cut stones gleamed like jewels in the shadows. Meguet closed her eyes. But Rush spoke a moment later. She had checked her gesture; they were all still alive.

“We’ll bring him here. The Wayfolk man.”

“No,” the Holder said harshly. “Not into this house.”

“Under guard, bound, locked away—what more could he do?”

“I will not have him anywhere in this house.”

“Then elsewhere,” Rush said bewilderedly. “In the city, somewhere—”

The Holder, her mouth tight, picked up the poker, sent a small avalanche of coals rattling through the grate instead of answering.

“Somewhere safe from Nyx?” Iris asked. “Where might that be, Rush? If Nyx wants him with her, she has the power to keep him. Against you, against Meguet, against anyone.”

“Thank you,” the Holder said icily.

“I’m being sensible, Mother. Someone has to be.” She flushed suddenly under the Holder’s gaze. She continued with a stubborn, curious dignity. “All I can see is what is obvious, and that is what most of the people of Ro Holding see. You all see through the confusion in flashes of magic and learning. I can’t. I just recognize the simple things. If Nyx is doing all this, none of us can stop her. If she is innocent, then she’s bound to be in danger.”

The Holder set the poker down with a sigh. She said nothing for a moment; her fingers worried at her elegant hair, but for once the pins were too skillfully hidden. She folded her arms instead; her eyes went to Meguet.

“You thought the Wayfolk man was not the danger.”

“I think,” Meguet said carefully, pulling together the dreamlike scraps of his tale, “he is trying to rescue someone. The dark house fell unexpectedly into his life. The tinker is the danger. Part of it.”

“And the tinker is here.”

“If we guard against the Blind Lady, keep her from entering—”

“I think we should bring them both here,” Rush said implacably. “Nyx and the Wayfolk man.”

“Oh, Rush, use your head,” Calyx said impatiently. “You weren’t listening to Iris. If she is dangerous, do we want her in the house with the tinker? And if she is not, she is much safer being away from here. And what I think—”

“If she—”

“What I think,” Calyx said, raising her delicate voice as much as she ever did, “is that if Nyx and the tinker were working together, this is where she would be. Here, in this house, with him. I think we should guard the house against the blind woman. The tinker is doing nothing; maybe he can’t, without her.”

“What I want to know,” Iris asked, “is: Are they sorcerers? Or something to do with the Holds?”

The Holder touched her eyes. “Iris, how can you say such things so calmly?”

“Well, we do have to know.”

“I know.” She consulted Meguet again, with her eyes. “You’ve seen more of this than anyone. What do you think? What are they?”

They all turned to her expectantly. She answered after a moment, softly, reluctantly. “The Wayfolk man spoke of waking the Dancer on the last day of winter. That is not sorcery. That is a tale out of Berg Hold, as old as Ro Holding.”

She stood in her chambers later, staring out at the night. Rain and wind gusted across the yard. She could not see a single light on the sea. The only light in the world was in the Gatekeeper’s turret, and the torches he kept lit beside the gate to guide travellers in the dark. She saw the brazier light obscured a moment, reappear. He was still there, at the cold, late hour, still watching.

She reached for her cloak.

She felt, walking through the storm, as if she walked the surface of Wolfe Sea, with all the spindrift flung about her, and the small, high fire pulling her like the moon pulling tide. He did not hear her mount the stairs; he could only have heard the booming tide, the wild wind. She stood, darkly cloaked, hooded, at the top of the stairs, at the edge of his light, and as he turned his head, she wondered if he could see her face at all, or if he would speak some name other than hers. He looked at her. Wordless, rising, he stepped into the rain. He slid her hood back with both hands, slipped her long, pale hair free until it streamed with the torch fire in the wind. She took his face between her hands, drew it down and down until she tasted the Delta river currents running in his mouth.

The wild rain wore them apart finally. They huddled close to the brazier, dripping, blinking in the light. The Gatekeeper watched Meguet; she watched the shimmering heat, too weary to think. He said finally:

“So green, your eyes. Not a Delta green. Nothing under these mists is that green.”

She raised her eyes. There were threads of silt and gold in his hair she hadn’t noticed, a line along his mouth, a scar high on one cheekbone, near the eye. He waited calmly, undisturbed by her silence; his eyes, far paler green than her own, had flecks of white in them. She said, “My great-grandfather was of Withy Hold. His eyes got so, looking at the corn, they said. He liked to wander, too. He was a strange man… Do you mean to stay here all night?”

“Yes.”

“The blind woman must not come into this house. Calyx says she is a Hold Sign.”

He blinked, as though her words had flicked like rain across his face. “Then I must be careful,” he breathed.

“Yes.” She leaned back against the wall, all her weariness roiling through her, all her fears. She slid her hands over her face, felt the sting of tears in the back of her eyes. She felt his hands follow her hands, slide down her wet hair, unpin her wet, sodden cloak.

“All in velvet, you came out,” he marvelled. “In pearls. You’re soaking.”

“I wanted to hear your voice.” He smiled his tight, slanting smile. She added, “I don’t know why.”

“The world’s a wild place beyond Ro House. You’ve known a good deal of it. You’re not content with what’s bred within walls.”

“So it seems.” She drew breath as he leaned into her cloak, caught her pearls between his teeth. “Hew.”

“Meguet.”

“Could you be content, in the late hours some night, watching the gate from Chrysom’s tower? You must sleep sometime.”

He lifted his head; her hands were in his hair. He drew them down, kissed her fingers. “Will you help me watch?”

“I will.” She laid her face against his hair. “From my chambers you can see the swans, you can see Wolfe Sea, you can see the barred gate and the turret where the Gatekeeper sat tonight with all the house asleep, but for one woman watching him. Watch until you can no longer watch alone. Then come to the black tower, and I will keep watch with you.”

He waited until she thought he would not come. And then he came one night, unexpectedly, in some dark, lost hour adrift between midnight and dawn. She was dreaming of swans, gliding on the lake, white and black, shadows and reflections of one another, elegant, proud, secret. One black swan lifted a wing; she felt the chill of the air it had disturbed, then a play of feathers across her mouth. She lifted her hands, shaped and molded the feathery dark until a man moved under her touch and she finally woke.

He rose after a while, to stir the fire and light candles. He opened a casement to look across the yard at the gate. A mix of rain and snow tumbled past him; he stared down the hard bitter wind without flinching. He shut the casement finally, slid into bed beside Meguet, smelling of winter and cold as iron.

She rolled on top of him; slowly he stopped shivering; the warm firelight lay over both of them. He slid the furs down, fanned her hair across her back.

“Is the gate still closed?”

“Closed and barred.” He went on with his task, separating the rippling strands to his liking. “Lady Meguet. Do you remember the first time you left the house on Holder’s business, all in black, with the swans flying at your back and side and shoulder?”

“Yes.”

“You took my breath away.”

“I don’t recall you looked overawed.”

“I was trying to stay on my feet, not topple over in your wake. You rode through the gate like night itself. I had only just come; I was overawed by anything. You looked at me and thanked me. You wouldn’t remember that.”

“I do,” she said, smiling. “You caught my eye. Brown and hard and half-wild, like you knew all the secret places of the backwaters. I wanted to say more, but you looked so stern and solemn.”

“So did you. You scared me silly.” He began weaving strands of hair like a net. “Ten years ago, that was. Now you have been all over Ro Holding, and I have seen only as far as I can see from the gate in any direction.”

“Don’t you miss the river?”

“How can I? My heart is nailed to that gate. I had to come here to find it.” She bent her head to kiss him; his net unravelled.

“I could never leave this house either,” she said.

“Why so? You’ll marry, you’ll leave—”

“Do you think so?” she asked, gazing down at him out of her cool, clear eyes. “No matter how far I go, I always come back here. Rush Yarr says that in a place as old as Ro House, and among such old families, more than faces and names are handed down. Memories, he says, echoes of the past. Sometimes I can see it…”

“See what?”

“Back. Far back. As if I’m seeing through a long history.” His hands were still now, his breath barely stirring her hair. “When I watched Nyx in secret, inside her house, I felt it then: that others were watching out of my eyes, evaluating what I saw, showing me what to see…”

He made a soft sound, drew her hair back from her face. “Swamp’s like that,” he said. “Layering year after year, bone on bone; if you dig deep enough, you’d find the beginning of things. And the gate.”

“The gate?”

“Watching, I lose time, now and then. A thousand years passed through that gate. A thousand years of names spoken, shadows riding across the threshold. Sometimes I wonder if a few of those whose names I know are ghosts, riding into another century that still exists somewhere inside the house.”

She pushed her face against his chest. “Don’t talk of shadows.” She slid her arms around him, watching her shadow on the wall hold his shadow. “Just once, here, let’s leave trouble out in the cold.” He turned, easing over her, sliding his hands through her hair as he kissed her, drawing it out along the pillow, like wings.

She was half asleep when she felt him pull back the furs. She reached out, but he was already up.

“Where are you going?”

“Just to the window.”

This time she went with him, stood wrapped in furs while the rain blew into her hair. The torches beside the gate still burned; the bar across it had not shifted. Beyond the wind-whipped pools of light, only a tower light or two, a cottage light, broke the wild dark.

“Nothing could be out on a night like this.”

“Someone’s always up, always thinking, even in a storm like this.”

“Not tonight. There’s no world left out there. Only Ro House, in an ancient night before there were stars.”

“You must be right,” he said, his eyes still drawn to the gate. “Before people. Only you and I and the swans on the lake…” He turned to her, so quickly his eyes still carried some reflection of the dark. He pulled the fur away from her and lifted her naked in his arms like an offering to the wind and rain and the ancient night. Cold took her breath away, and then he did, head bowed over her body, drinking in the hard rain.

Asleep finally, she felt him loose his hold of her, draw back the furs. She groped for him, murmuring. The winds were singing madly around the tower. “Don’t,” she pleaded, her eyes closed. “Nothing is out there.”

“I must watch.” He sounded still asleep.

“Stay with me. Don’t leave me yet. Not even dawn is at the gate.”

“The gate moved.”

“It’s only wind at the gate. Only rain.”

“I must watch.”

“I’ll watch,” she said, and felt him sink back. She pushed against him; he wound his hand into her hair. “I’ll watch,” she whispered, and drew his other arm around her.

“You watch, then,” he sighed, and she felt his body ease back into sleep. “You watch.”

He was gone when she woke again. She rose, went to the casement, and saw familiar movement within the turret. She watched him, wondered if he were watching the black tower. Something strange hit her hand, spilled over the stones, down the wall; blinking, she saw her own shadow. She raised her head, and saw the sudden light fall over the sea.

She dressed quickly, ate something she did not taste. The morning lured her: a taste of spring, though the air was still brittle with cold. She went downstairs, watching for the Gatekeeper’s turret in every southern window. Walking outside, between the towers, she saw him again, framed in every archway she passed along the wall. Turning into one, finally, she found her way blocked.

An old woman stood within the archway, half in shadow, half in sunlight fanning over the cobbles. She seemed to be seeking the sun with her face; her heavy eyes could not lift to see. She was dressed oddly, layered with old clothes. A cottager, Meguet thought, someone’s ancient kin wandered away from the hearth.

“Are you lost?” she asked. “May I help you?” The face swung toward her, strong and hard, mottled like an apple. For a moment, Meguet felt that she was being scented.

“Ah. Meguet.” The old woman lifted her hand to the ragged edge of lace trailing out of a hole in what looked like a skirt made out of sacking, over a longer gown of stained velvet. Her fingers pulled at the threads, twitching. “Lost? No. I found my way here. I came out to smell the spring.”

“How did you know my name?” Meguet asked curiously. “You must remember voices. But I don’t remember you.”

“Your name is here.” She held out the threads her restless fingers had woven together. “I have all the names.” She pulled up the worn velvet; beneath it was a skirt of tapestry edged raggedly with muddy cloth of gold. Beneath her motley layered skirts, Meguet glimpsed strange boots covered in peacock feathers. “Here they all are. All of Ro House.” On the hand that wove she wore a tarnished silver ring.

Meguet was silent. She closed her eyes, feeling the light on her icy face. She could still speak; the horror, a blow falling across a long distance, had not reached her yet. “They said,” she whispered, swallowing the burning in her throat, “you were beautiful.”

“So I was. So I was.”

“How—how did we—” But she knew before she asked. She heard the Gatekeeper’s dream-heavy voice: The gate moved. She heard her answer. She opened her eyes, beginning to tremble. The pool of light was empty. A peacock feather watched her from the shadow, then vanished.

She pushed her face against the stones and wept.

 

Six
  

IN the shadows, someone touched her. She whirled, breathing hard, back against the stones. She stared at the Gatekeeper through swollen eyes.

“You left the gate,” she said, stunned. “In broad daylight.”

“Moro’s eyes,” he said, staring back at her. “You’re weeping in broad daylight.” He reached out, pulled her away from the stones, held her tightly. In the yard behind him, stablehands were staring; faces clustered at the thick glass windows of the cider house. “I watched you cross the yard from Chrysom’s tower in the sunlight. You disappeared under this arch and you didn’t come out.”

“Did you see her?”

“Who?”

She pushed against him, hands on his shoulders, to look at him. “Who.” She watched the color drain out of his face. He set his hands flat against the wall on either side of her, leaned against them, not looking at her. “It was my fault,” she added wearily. “I would not let you watch.”

His head lifted; his back straightened, as if her words were something edged, dangerous, that had touched him unexpectedly. “Then, it was?”

“Yes.” Her eyes filled again; light blurred into dark around his face. She heard him catch his breath.

“Meguet…” Then he swung his heavy cloak around her, gathered her into it. “Come with me.”

She walked with him through the cottages, scarcely seeing the people that gazed, shaken, at the pair of them. He pushed a door open; she sank onto a bench, dropped her face into her hands, trying to think rather than to weep. She heard Hew stirring, hearth-sounds, the snap of fire across kindling.

She dropped her hands finally, said numbly, “I must tell the Holder.”

“I’ll come.”

“There’s no need—”

“I let trouble in,” he said grimly. “Through my gate, they came. The tinker in his dark house, the Blind Lady—”

“You know her.” She stared at him. “You know her.”

“I know them both. I have over enough time to think up there, see pictures in my pipe-smoke and put them together. That tinker rolling across the threshold of this house in his black house with the Gold King scowling on the back door, telling his tales, then vanishing—”

“You told me. You tried to warn me.”

“And the Blind Lady. ‘My lady walks on the moon’s road, shod, she is, in peacock feathers, all eyes, she is all eyes, but for her moonstruck eyes.’” He gave a short laugh, not smiling. “A love song, that is.”

She was wordless, taking in finally the fragile, faded books that stood on oak shelves against the whitewashed walls, the dark, carved furniture with a flower winding down a chair-arm, a leg ending with a cat’s face, both flower and face worn smooth by centuries. Hew poured her wine; she took a swallow; he watched her, the hard lines running along his mouth. He said again, “We’ll go together to the Holder.”

“Yes.” She set her cup down, her eyes going to the fire. “Soon.”

“Meguet.”

“Soon.” She raised her eyes from the fire to his face. “First I have to find them.”

“Where?” he demanded. “They move in and out of shadows, they’re hardly real—”

“They’re in this house. They came in through the gate. They’re real enough to have come from somewhere, be somewhere. They know me. I’ve seen them both; they’ve said my name. The household guard might raise the dust looking for them and never notice them.”

“They’re dangerous.”

“I only want to find them. I only want to—” Her voice shook suddenly; she folded her hands tightly, steadying herself. “When I tell the Holder that the Blind Lady is in this house, I want to give her something more than just that. Perhaps, if I go quietly, in secret, I might learn what they want here. Why they have come into Ro House. We have to know, Hew. We must know.”

He closed his eyes, breathed something. She stood up restively. “Do you have a sword?”

“For what?” he asked. “Skewering the guests?”

“A knife?”

“Bread knife.” His eyes opened, withholding expression. “Where will you look? There are people moving constantly up in the towers, down in the cellars, across fields, through cottages, everywhere but Chrysom’s tomb. There’s no place for secrets in this house.”

“Chrysom’s tomb.” She stopped moving to gaze at him. “The maze beneath the tower.”

“That’s no secret, either. Every cottage brat old enough to lose front teeth knows how to get into that maze.”

“And how far do they get?”

“Never far.”

“How far did you get?” she challenged him, and saw the flicker of memory in his face.

“Not past the place where all the rotting strings unwound,” he said. “Seemed no one got past there. Unless you.”

“No.” She touched the window glass lightly with her fingers, her breath misting the blade-sharp edge of shadow the tower wall laid across the light. “Nyx and Rush and I spent days trying to get past the first few turns. We would turn a corner and wind up walking into a closet, or a pantry. Or a cupboard under a stair. Always through some door we could never find again. As if whatever Chrysom built that maze to guard is too precious, or too terrible, for humans.”

“Did he build it to guard against a tinker and a beggar woman?”

“Maybe not. Maybe. Maybe they got no farther than the first few turns. But even that’s a place to hide. The black tower, where so few come.” She turned toward the door. “I’ll get—No. If I take a sword out of the armory, they’ll wonder… I’ll get one off the council chamber wall.”

“For what?” he asked her tersely. “Tinker doesn’t burn, what makes you think he bleeds?”

“It makes me feel safer.”

“Then I’ll carry the bread knife. It’ll be as much protection.”

“No,” she said, her eyes widening.

“I’m coming.”

“You can’t leave the gate.”

“Am I at the gate?”

“But, Hew! Who will open and close? What will people think, seeing the turret empty in daylight? They’ll think you died. What will the Holder say?”

“What will she say to you, going into that dark and lonely place alone?”

“It’s my business,” she said obstinately.

“What is? Defending the house? There’s a guard for that. What makes it your business to track danger and power into such a place? Are you a sorcerer yourself?”

“No,” she snapped. “What business is it of yours to abandon the gate for this?”

“None of mine. None of yours. So.” He swung the door open. “My lady Meguet, let us get on with it.”

Only one door in or out of the maze never vanished: one set in the stone wall behind the dais in the ancient council chamber where Moro Ro had claimed, in the Sign of the Cygnet, all Ro Holding. As usual, the chamber, which took up the entire ground floor of the black tower, was empty. The banners of Hunter Hold and Withy Hold had been hung; the silver and gold thread winked in the morning light. The vast banner of Ro Holding hung behind the dais, hiding the door, so fragile and old that black swan melted into blue-black night, and only the tarnished threads depicting the stars of the Cygnet in flight seemed to hold the darkness together.

Hew took a torch from the stairway; Meguet chose a sword from the wall of ceremonial swords forged for each Holder, and then held the Cygnet away from the wall until, bending, Hew had carried the fire safely through the small door. She let it fall behind her and entered. Fire ran down the steps ahead of them, nibbled at an ancient dark. She smelled earth, stones, but no wood fires, no lingering odors of cooking. She heard nothing.

Hew, moving down the steps ahead of her, stopped at the foot of the stairs. She whispered,

“What is it?”

“I was only remembering what all the younglings hope to find but are terrified of finding: the fearsome beings, the guardians of Chrysom’s tomb. Do you think there’s truth to that?”

“Why not? The stars are falling out of the sky and turning into tinkers. If we ever find the center of the maze, I suppose we’ll know.”

“Maybe it’s a Ring of Time, the center. Chrysom walked out of Ro Holding into past or future.”

She was silent, hovering at his shoulder, watching gryphons, dragons, hawks, lions, shrug themselves out of the marble walls of the maze. Under torch fire, they raged silently, bidding the trespasser beware. “Why?” she wondered, forgetting to whisper. “All this for his own tomb? What is he still guarding after a thousand years? Are a mage’s bones so precious? Do they turn to gold?”

“I’ve never heard such.” He took a step, then stopped, handed the torch to Meguet. “You lead.”

“Why? Neither of us is likely to wind up anywhere but in a pantry somewhere, interrupting a cook’s apprentice and a scullery boy kissing.”

“You’re the one bearing arms,” he said wryly, and, edgy as she was, she almost laughed. She moved; he followed her. Walls broke between passageways; she slipped at random between them. Passageways split, forked away into the silence, forced her to choose between one shadow and another. She chose thoughtlessly, according to the glint of light in a gryphon’s eye, the gesture of a lion’s paw. At any moment, she expected, the walls would subtly shift, dissolve and simply vanish into the dark. A door in front of them would open to some tower or another; they would emerge under a stairway, trailing cobwebs and blinking at the light. The small door, closing, would melt into wood or stone around it. But the walls held longer than she would have believed. Hew walked quietly beside her, watching the dark beyond the edge of light around them, sometimes watching her. He said once, softly:

“They’d never have gone this deep, surely?”

“I don’t know.” She added after a moment, “I’ve never come this far myself.”

“I doubt anyone has.”

“Why?”

“No threads left, no candle nubs, no smoke marks on the walls or on the floor…”

“It must run underground even past the tower ring. We’ve been walking forever, it seems.”

“Into or out of forever.”

She looked at him, surprised. “Do you mean like the thousand-year-old wood? Part real, part dream?”

“No. Well, maybe, or partly a different time. Or a slower time. In our own time, the House time, the maze never goes beyond the tower ring. But in a different time, it is vast and the center can be reached.”

“And the House?” she asked, startled and intrigued by the intricate turn of his thoughts.

“Ro House does not exist now.”

“Or the gate?”

He smiled a little. “Perhaps the gate. But open or closed? And who watches?”

A tongue of gold fire dropped out of a lion’s mouth and fell, burning, at Meguet’s feet.

She whirled, the torch outstretched, spinning a circle around her. She saw no one. A coiled snake of fire dropped out of a hawk’s talon; a gold eye rolled from a gryphon’s face, spilled fire on the floor. She drew her sword, circled again, her eyes wide, both torch and blade probing the empty dark. More fire fell, ringing them both with gold, she saw in horror. “Hew!” she cried, losing him as he circled at her back. He swung his heavy cloak around her suddenly, and gripped her, swept her off her feet. She struggled instinctively, desperately, hating to be bound, needing freedom to move, to fight. The torch slipped dangerously close to his face. He flinched back, gasping. But he kept his grim hold; he lifted her, tossed her away from him over the burning ring of gold. She lost her balance, tangled and weighted in sheepskin; she stumbled to her hands and knees. Turning, she saw only a tower of gold.

She whispered, “Hew.” Within the fire something shaped: a woman clothed in stars and night, stars clinging to her black hair, her beautiful face moon-pale, her blind eyes closed. She lifted her hands, pulled a glowing thread taut between them until, under the lick of fire, it began to fray.

Meguet screamed his name. A small dark wagon with a roof of light and a lintel of light rolled through the flames. Its door opened. She saw the Gatekeeper of Ro House rise amid the flames. He walked away from her for a long time, it seemed, or into a different time, while the door in the black house opened slowly, revealing a starlit dark.

Meguet rolled to her feet, flung herself, eyes closed, through the fire. She careened into Hew, knocking him off his relentless path. Groping for balance, he caught at her, dragged her down under him as he fell. She pushed at him desperately, winded; sagging against her, his hand on her shoulder, his arm across her hair, he gave her no help. She edged out from under him finally. When she dragged his arm off her hair, it fell back laxly against the floor. He did not move.

Pulling herself to her knees beside him, reaching out to him in bewilderment, she saw the blood on the knife in his hand.

A sound came out of her, echoed off the corners of the maze in a harsh, terrible tangle. Laughter wove into her cry. Lifting her head, she finally saw the Gold King.

He stood within the fire. He wore armor hammered of gold; his hair and eyes and the seven-starred crown on his head were gold. Only his laughing mouth was dark, a hollow that might open into another world, another time, and she knew he laughed at her because she did not know, seeing him, if she knelt beside death or dream. In sudden fury, she pulled the knife from Hew’s hand, flung it with deadly accuracy into the Gold King’s open mouth.

A darkness burst out of the tinker-king, flooded the walls, buried flame and torch fire until she could see only the barest, silvery outline of stone animals in the wall. She got to her feet and ran.

The stones began to come alive under the strange glow. A hawk cried; a gryphon shifted a wing; a dragon pointed her path with an upraised claw. She ran without hesitating, not even considering choice, and as she wound deeper into the maze she realized, chilled, that she recognized the path she took.

I have walked this before, she thought, prickling with terror, knowing it was not true. But, as memory guided her, she made choices: right at the gryphon’s snarl, left at the lion’s roar, between walls at the graceful shift of a unicorn’s horn. Who sees out of my eyes? Who walked this before me? Whose memories have I inherited? And then, rounding a corner beneath a dragon’s outspread wing, she knew that she had shifted into a different time.

That was why the stones moved, she realized; in her own life they might have spent a century lowering an eyelid. She swallowed drily, trembling, sensing movement around her from those that dwelled in the dark of this time. Walking into a small, circular chamber, she caught glimpses of colored horn, of fur, of rich cloth, of sword blades so massive she could not have lifted them. Here were the huge and terrible creatures of legend white-toothed, masked, prowling at the edge of an eerie, silver-green glow that came from a globe hanging over a black effigy and tomb. Chrysom’s tomb, she thought in horror, but its guardians recognized something in her and let her pass among them. As she stepped beyond time, she stepped beyond wonder, beyond terror, beyond any thought of her own. She gazed at the effigy; then the globe above it dragged at her eyes. Staring into it, she saw back along her own history: a past full of names of those born to see, to watch, hers among them, though at that moment she could not remember which was hers.

The tomb faded into its own moment; the globe changed shape.

A huge, faceted crystal, suspended from nothing upon nothing, glowed like a moon at the center of the maze. Its facets blazed with a white light that slowly faded, until, blinking away splinters of light, she could see the black swan flying in every plane. The swans faded; faces began to appear within the globe, of men and women she should not have recognized but did: Rydel the gardener; the mage Ais; Tries, physician to Jain Ro; the Lady Seine, historian and poet; Paro Ro’s horse trainer Jhen; Eleria Ro’s cousin Shadox; all of them descendants of Astor Ro, all secret guardians of the Cygnet. She saw her own face last, broad-boned, green-eyed, and then realized, from the pearls braided into the long hair, and the darker, straighter brows, that she looked at Astor Ro.

Motionless, submerged in her heritage, she felt no surprise. The face within the crystal spoke:

“Who are you?”

She answered, her voice expressionless, a dreamer’s voice. “I am Meguet Vervaine.”

“Why were you born?”

The answer, like her movement to the heart of the maze, came without hesitation. “I was born to serve the Cygnet.”

“To what are you sworn?”

“To guard the Cygnet. With my life. For all of my days. Beyond my days and my life.”

“You will walk in the Cygnet’s eye. You will guard. You will defend.”

“Yes.”

“Our memories are yours, our eyes are yours. Your heart is ours and your body and the strength of your hand.”

“Yes.”

“Our gifts are yours. Our experience is yours. We will guide you, watch with you.”

“Yes.”

“You will obey us.”

“Yes.”

“Why have you come here?”

“The Cygnet is in danger.”

“What must you do?”

She felt an ancient rage within her, honed thin and sharp as the mage-forged blades she sometimes practiced with. She said, “I will seek the danger to the Cygnet. I will hunt it down. I will destroy it. For this we were born.”

“Meguet Vervaine, Guardian. Put your hands to the Cygnet’s eye.”

She reached out, placed her hands on the cold planes of the prism. Astor Ro’s face faded. Through the white fire that flooded the crystal, the black Cygnet flew, imprinting itself in her eye, in her mind. A whispering began, within the prism or her mind. The fierce light died. She held the night sky and the constellations between her hands. As the stars slowly revolved, she drank in knowledge with the night.

The crystal vanished when she finally dropped her hands. The moment of time that had opened for her closed again, hid its treasure. In another moment, she saw Chrysom’s effigy on a tomb of black marble, the globe above it, the huge, strange guardians moving restlessly around it. And then that layer of time also hid itself. She stood in the dark at the center of the maze, and watched torchlight mold the stone animals out of the darkness at the top of the wall, before the torchbearer turned the final corner and illumined the moment around her.

She stood in a small circular chamber. The guardians of Chrysom’s tomb no longer moved; they surrounded her, half-sculpted out of the marble wall and painted. There was no sign of globe or tomb or effigy. There was only a shadow slanting across the ceiling, which the busy torchlight searched and shaped into the Cygnet in flight.

The Holder carried the torch.

 

Seven
  

SHE said softly, “I thought so.”

Meguet felt the last, familiar layer of time slide into place; she stood again in her own present. “You know what I am.”

“I know,” the Holder said. “The powers that protect the Cygnet do not keep the Holders ignorant of its guardian. For some time now I have wondered about you.” She paused. There was not a pin left in her hair; it flowed wildly down her back. Her eyes looked weary, bruised by conjecture. She added, “You would not have come down here, the Gatekeeper would not have left the gate, unless there was dire need.”

Meguet put the back of her hand to her mouth. “The Blind Lady has entered.” Her voice trembled. “We looked for her. They were both here, in the maze. Blind Lady and tinker.”

The Holder stepped closer; firelight ran over Meguet’s dishevelled hair, her singed skirt. “You found them,” she said harshly.

“The Gate—Hew—I left him. He was hurt. Dead, maybe.” She swallowed, calmed her voice from habit, though she had begun to shake. “I must find him. I had to run—”

“Yes.”

“I ran—beyond time, I think. Into the heart of the maze.”

“Here.”

“Yes, only—within. Within this place. I must go back and find Hew. He fell on his knife.”

The Holder closed her eyes. “Moro’s name. You cannot go back there.”

“I must find him.”

“No. I’ll send the guard.”

“They won’t get far enough. They won’t get past the periphery. No one does. Except you.”

“I came another way,” the Holder said obscurely. “Gatekeepers don’t kill themselves without regard for the gate.”

“He didn’t—I knocked him down.”

“Oh.”

“He was walking into the tinker’s house. I—he might have been dead then, I don’t know. I tried to kill the tinker.”

“It does seem futile.” She touched her eyes delicately with her fingers. “The powers you have inherited are formidable, but I don’t think you are able to use them to rescue a Gatekeeper. They rouse to protect the Cygnet.”

“I know, but—”

“Those two may be waiting for you.”

Meguet felt a familiar stillness settle through her, as when she had chosen a path or an action and choice lay in the past, in another time. “Then,” she said, “I will meet them.”

“Meguet Vervaine, I forbid you to do this!”

“Will you let me take the torch, anyway?” She added, under the Holder’s outraged stare, “I am overly fond of your Gatekeeper.”

“So you would leave me in the dark.”

“I’ll light your way back first. It’s not far, is it? The way you came in?” She looked around, at the strange menacing figures surrounding them, wearing their bright masks of paint. She had seen them many times, she knew, through many centuries. “It’s quite close…” she said surprisedly. The Holder watched her, face impassive. Her fingers lifted, worried her hair for a phantom pin. She gave up, tossing her hand in the air.

“I dislike changing Gatekeepers.” She gave Meguet the torch. “Lead.”

Meguet bowed her head; the torch shook in her hand, then finally steadied. She turned, and, stepping forward, flung a circle of light around the Gatekeeper.

She stopped, catching breath. He kept moving, slowly, with a weary, dragging persistence, until he was close enough to reach out, gather her against him with one arm. She whispered, “Hew.” She put her free arm around him tightly and felt him wince.

She drew back, still holding him lightly. He carried his singed cloak under one arm; there was blood in his hair, a streak of blood along one torn side of his tunic. He smiled a little, then started as the Holder stepped into the light.

They looked at each other for a long time. Then the Gatekeeper let go of Meguet, bent his head respectfully, and the Holder said, “Hew, what are you doing here? This place is for mages and Holders, not Gatekeepers.”

“I heard Meguet’s voice, my lady. I followed it. Hours, it seems I followed.”

“Are you badly hurt?”

“I’ve been worse, my lady.”

“I thought you were dead,” Meguet said numbly. “I saw you walking into the tinker’s house.”

He looked at her wearily. “It’s not a tinker you were fighting, my lady Meguet. It’s not a tinker lives in that dark house. Down here, there’s no one to keep secrets from, unless this cheerful crowd around us.”

“That may well be,” the Holder said grimly, “but until I know better what danger we’re in, I prefer to have only a tinker under my house.”

“And a blind weaver, my lady. She got past my sleeping eye.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“How did you escape from them?” Meguet asked. He shook his head.

“I didn’t. I woke up and it was dark and they were gone. So were you. I thought they had you. Then I began to hear your voice. Here, around this corner, there around that, words I couldn’t quite hear… I was circling you, I think, forever it felt. You never sounded frightened. Never troubled. You were safe, I thought, but I could never find you. It helped me, hearing you, kept me from sitting down and falling asleep.” He was holding his arm tightly against his side. Meguet saw him blink away sweat. The Holder said abruptly:

“The house must be in a turmoil by now. Meguet, lead us back up.”

Meguet raised the torch above her head, illumined the tall, still, half-human figures ringing them. A horned face, its human part blue, its horns gold, gazed back at her out of blue and gold eyes. She reached out impulsively, touched its clawed, jewelled hand.

It swung gently aside, revealing steps. The Gatekeeper made a sudden noise, of recognition and wonder. “We came down those,” he breathed. “My lady Meguet, is there a maze or is there not? Or is this all in the mage’s mind?”

“You should know; you walked as much of it as any of us.”

“While you spoke, who were you speaking to all that time?”

The lie came easily to her, she found, as they must come, she realized, for the rest of her life. “Only myself,” she said, “guiding myself, feeling my way…” She opened the small door at the top of the stairs, pushed the heavy, dark banner aside. Through the open doors of the tower, the Gatekeeper’s empty turret hung like a delicate carving against a blue-grey dusk.

With the Holder’s permission, Meguet helped him back to his cottage. He sat stiffly on the hearth bench, the jagged tear in his side cleaned and dressed, watching her gaze dubiously at his pots.

“I can cook what I have hunted,” she confessed finally. “But I’m no good in a kitchen.”

“Never mind,” he said. He stretched out his good arm. “Sit with me a little, Meguet.” She dropped beside him on the bench. Her skirt was torn at the knee where she had fallen; her braid was coming apart; there were, she was certain, smudges of sweat and dust on her face. He kissed her for a long time. Night laid dark wings against the windows; the world was oddly silent.

“No wind,” she said at last, surprised. “No rain.”

“Stars, maybe. Entire constellations…” But neither of them moved to look. “Spring, soon.”

She leaned against him, watching the fire, thinking of the tinker’s fire. “What happened to you,” she asked, “in that gold ring of fire? I saw you walking toward the Gold King’s house. Do you remember the open door of his house? It was full of night and stars.”

“All I remember is falling.”

“That was after, when I pushed you away from the house.”

“No, before. When I threw you away from the fire. You hit me with something.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did. That sword you carried. I saw its pommel coming at me. That was that for me until I woke alone in the dark.”

“Then you walked in your sleep. Or maybe it was an illusion of you, walking. Or a sending through time, like the Hunter Hold witches. The Blind Lady pulled a thread between her hands while you walked…”

“They didn’t harm me.” He looked down at her wryly. “You did most of it.”

“I did,” she said, startled.

“They didn’t hurt you?”

“No. I threw your knife at the Gold King. He was armed in gold, then, and crowned, and laughing at me. I hit him.”

“Did he drop dead?”

“Not noticeably.”

“Then what?”

“Then I ran.”

“Did they follow you?”

“I don’t—I don’t think so.”

He grunted. “They were in hiding. Waiting, it seems like. We disturbed them, they showed us a trick or two and then hid themselves again.”

“Waiting.”

“So it seems.”

She was silent. A finger of fire caught color from sap and turned gold. She started. She turned abruptly, caught his arms so tightly he winced. “Hew. When is spring? When is the last day of winter?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“How soon?” She shook him a little, when he didn’t answer. “That’s what they’re waiting for! The Dancer, the Blood Fox’s human shadow, the Warlock—”

“The Warlock?”

“The other Hold Signs!” She loosed him, sprang up to pace, thinking furiously. “How many weeks of winter left?”

“Days, more like.” He watched her, nursing his side, his face hard, expressionless as always when he was disturbed. “I must watch for a Warlock now, at the gate. And all the Hold Councils themselves beginning to come soon. What do you see in all this, Meguet?”

She whirled, her face white. “I have to stop him.”

“Who?”

“The Wayfolk man with Nyx. He’s going to Berg Hold, to wake the Dancer. On the last day of winter.”

“He’d be gone by now,” Hew said, and brought her to a halt in front of him. “Unless he can fly across Ro Holding. Wayfolk don’t fly. But they’re not afraid to travel.”

She swung to the hearth, brought her fist down on the stones. Then she dropped her face against her arm. “I’ll leave now. Tonight.”

“You’ll never make it. Never to Berg Hold by winter’s end. You might make it past the Delta.”

“Then what?” she said bitterly. “Will we stop the Dancer coming in the way we stopped the Blind Lady? I can’t do anything right. I try and try and only make things worse.”

“Why is it you who should be trying? You, more than the Holder or Nyx or Rush Yarr? Why, Meguet? Why is it you must stop the Wayfolk man in Berg Hold?”

Because I can! she said fiercely, but only to herself, her eyes still hidden in the crook of her arm. She felt him pull at her gently.

“Don’t. Not twice in one day. I’ll watch, this time. I swear. Day and night.”

She turned her head, gazed down at him, dry-eyed. “I must get to Berg Hold.”

“But how?”

“Rush. Maybe he learned something useful from Nyx. Or the witches of Hunter Hold. Maybe they know a way I could walk through time. I could get to Hunter Hold before winter’s end.”

“Rush Yarr’s sorcery might land you in the middle of Wolfe Sea.”

“I have to risk something! It’s because of the Wayfolk man these things are happening. I don’t know how or why, but he is dangerous, and I must stop him.”

“With what?” he demanded. “With what power? Moro Ro’s sword that you have to hold steady with both hands? Why you? Why you that must fling yourself across Ro Holding into the endless snows of Berg Hold to keep the Dancer from dancing?”

“For the same reason that you watch the gate, night and day, summer and winter. Because you must. I have old eyes in me, Hew. Old voices. They make me see, they make me do what I can. I was born rooted to the past in this house.” She added, “The Wayfolk man needs no power to be stopped. I could threaten him with Moro Ro’s sword and he would take it seriously. All I need to do is get there…”

“Take the house,” he suggested. “It used to fly for Moro Ro.” She stared at him. “That way I wouldn’t have to fret about you.”

“Chrysom moved it.”

“Did he?”

“During the Hold Wars.”

“Well,” he said, “from the sound of it, that’s what we may be heading toward. Did he take that power with him when he died? Or did he leave something to the next Holder, in case of trouble in the Delta?”

“I don’t—I don’t know.”

“Who would know?”

“I don’t know.” She pushed her hands against her eyes.

“Rush Yarr?”

Her hands dropped. She gazed down at him, then she bent swiftly and kissed him. “Calyx.”

“You want to move my house where?” the Holder said incredulously.

“The highest peak in Berg Hold,” Calyx said. She was at a table in Chrysom’s library, walling herself up with books.

“It would fall off,” Iris said practically.

“Well, then as close as possible to the top. Meguet could climb the rest of the way. If people are meant to consult the Dancer, there must be a way for them to get up.”

“I’m coming with Meguet,” Rush said. “To protect her from the Fire Bear.”

“This house hasn’t moved in centuries!”

“Does everything go?” Iris wondered. “Barns, hen coops, the thousand-year-old wood?”

“Tinker and Blind Lady?” Rush asked. The Holder, gazing at Meguet, toying with the amber around her neck, shook her head.

“It’s no longer possible. Is it?”

“The house was made to move.”

“Across Ro Holding?”

“Legend,” Calyx murmured with satisfaction, “says so. Legend says that during a siege by the Delta armies, the house moved to the northern fields of Withy Hold.”

“Legend,” Iris said sharply and poked her needle through cloth. “It’s a thousand-year-old tale.”

“So,” Rush said grimly, “is what we’ve got living beneath this tower.”

“Either this house goes to Berg Hold,” Meguet said, “or Rush must find a way to send me there.”

“If you want to get there, you’d better take the house,” Calyx said.

“I think it’s safer to guard the gate against the Dancer,” Iris said. “What will people think if Ro House vanishes?”

“We’ll bring it back,” Calyx said, flipping pages. “The question is: Who actually moved it, during Moro Ro’s time?”

“Chrysom must have,” the Holder said.

“Maybe he left a spell,” Rush suggested.

“I’m looking,” Calyx said. She added, “You could help, instead of pacing around and shaking Chrysom’s things up.” Rush, tossing something iridescent in his hand, moved to her side. Meguet watched them turning pages in rhythm, their heads bowed over books, absorbed. She saw Iris watching also, a curious smile in her eyes. She threaded her needle through cloth and put it down.

“If the witches warned of the Blind Lady, why didn’t they warn of the Dancer?”

“The Blind Lady weaves time,” Meguet said. “The witches explore it. They consider the Blind Lady nothing more than a childish tale of life and death. Until she walked down one of their paths, and they saw the Lady’s face.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Iris sighed. “I don’t see how you could make any sense at all of a tinker in Chrysom’s maze.”

“The house,” Calyx said suddenly, “was moved two hundred years after the Hold Wars.” Her face was suffused with a delicate rose; finding a footprint on the trail of some historical mystery gave her pleasure.

“By Chrysom?” the Holder asked.

“No. He had been dead for fifty years. By Brigen Ro’s oldest son. He moved it from the Delta to the black desert of Hunter Hold.”

“Why?”

“It’s not clear… Brigen Ro was upset and made him bring it back immediately. There is a reference by Brigen’s son to one of Chrysom’s books.”

“Nyx probably has it,” Iris said, picking up her needlework again.

“No, it’s here. Brigen’s son, apparently, just moved the house to see if he could. He sounds like you, Rush.”

“Thank you.”

“But what,” Meguet asked, “made him think he could?”

“Let’s find out,” Calyx said, picking up a small, frail book with letters on the cover in faded silver, “what Chrysom has to say.”

They watched her, while she turned pages silently. Meguet, too restless to sit, moved next to the Holder beside the fire, and wished that, when she had changed out of her torn skirt, she had put on a string of beads to worry. But she stood with her usual calm, back against the hearth, hiding a terrible impatience.

Calyx made a satisfied noise. “Here we are. According to Chrysom, the power to move Ro House is passed from generation to generation of Holders’ children, who are born with an innate ability, for the Holders instinctively seek out as mates those who may inspire the power within the child conceived.”

The Holder looked startled. Iris murmured, “Really, Calyx.”

“So Chrysom says.”

The Holder cleared her throat. “All children? Or one, specifically?”

“Nyx,” Rush said shortly.

“No.” Calyx looked solemnly at her mother. “Always and inevitably the first.”

They all gazed at Iris. She put down her needlework uncertainly, flushing. The Holder’s brows had risen. She pulled a pin out of her hair absently, her mind running down the past; a smile, reminiscent, wondering, touched her eyes.

“Mother,” Iris said accusingly.

“Well, I didn’t know,” the Holder said. “He seemed a very practical man.”

“I can’t move this house.”

“Chrysom says you can.”

“He’s been dead for nine hundred years!”

“Eight hundred and fifty,” Rush corrected.

“I don’t have any gifts for magic! I never had any.”

“You have one,” Calyx said. She sat back in her chair, smoothing a strand of hair back into place. She narrowed her eyes at her sister. “Iris Ro, you are not going to sit there and tell us you won’t even try! You must. For the sake of this House. It is your duty.”

Iris stared back at her, mouth pinched. Then she looked at Meguet, standing motionless at the fire, her eyes enormous, dark with urgency in her pale face. She flung her needlework down and got to her feet.

“It won’t work.”

Calyx smiled.

Iris was still protesting on the night before the last day of winter, but with less conviction. Midnight was the preferred time, Chrysom suggested, if possible, since people and animals would be less disturbed than by leaping in broad daylight from one Hold to another. Meguet and Rush spent the day finding merchants, guests and other assorted visitors, and persuading them to shelter somewhere in the city. At dusk, when the household was sorted out, and the last visitor had departed, she had climbed wearily to the Gatekeeper’s turret, sat with him silently, watching the sun go down over the grey, crumpled sea. She could smell spring now, from the swamps: a hint of perfume over the layered scents of still water and mold, all overlaid with the wash of brine from the outgoing tide. A single swan rose high above the lake; the Gatekeeper said drily, watching it, “This’ll save them a flight north.”

Near midnight she stood on top of Chrysom’s tower, with Rush and the Holder and her children. The wind-whipped Cygnet flew above them on its black pennant. Above it the constellation itself flew in and out of thin, bright clouds. The full moon that had blinded the Lady of Withy Hold hung white as bone in the sky.

Iris stood silently, apart from them. She must, Calyx instructed her endlessly, root herself as fast as Chrysom’s rose vines to every stone, mouse, dirty pot, child and chick, sleeping peacock, weed, swan and thousand-year-old tree within the rambling walls of Ro House. Iris had explained as endlessly that she couldn’t, no one could, it was not possible… But she said nothing now; her profile, under flickering light, looked unfamiliar in its calm. She was gazing down at the yard, one hand on the stones, as if she were watching a horse race, or children playing. She had stood like that for an hour.

Clouds swarmed over the moon, swallowed it. Meguet, watching a fleet of night fishers on the sea, saw them vanish suddenly, as if they had all slid down into the black water. Her lips parted; she held the parapet stones, waiting for the wind to hit. She heard Rush’s sudden breath. But no wind came: There was only a dark like the darkness in dreams through which they floated, a quick scratch of light across the ground below now and then, and all the constellations shifting in a stately dance above. She smelled a hint of green from Withy Hold, no more than a thought of leaves in the quickening trees. In the charmed silence no one spoke. Meguet sensed stirrings behind her, a gathering that she dared not turn to see, as if the ghosts that frequented Chrysom’s tower—mages, guardians, the odd son or daughter drawn to sorcery—had come up to watch the stars. If she turned, she knew, she would see nothing: They might have been there, in the endlessly folded tissue of time, or they had never been there.

She smelled snow. In a moment or two the wind struck: a blast as bare and merciless as frozen stone. A white peak loomed over Ro House like a jagged tooth. The stars had disappeared. Snow, torn like spindrift off the crest of the mountain, scattered over them. Calyx reached out to Iris, gripped her hand, and she lifted her head, startled. They all ran for the stairs.

They huddled next to the fire, shivering, drinking wine. The shadowed, vulnerable expression in Iris’s eyes caused the Holder to say fretfully, “You will only have to do this once more. Then never again, I hope.”

Iris, crouched close to the flames, looked at her. She said softly, “I carried everyone’s dreams…it was like moving the world in a bubble. I even saw my child’s dream. I know where that ring you lost is, Calyx. I know where all the mice live, in every crevice. I know what the peacocks see in the dark. I sensed those in the house that do not belong here. Only they were hidden. Only they… And the Gatekeeper. I had trouble keeping track of the Gatekeeper. I kept mistaking him for other things.”

“The gate, most likely,” Meguet suggested. “Sometimes I think he himself gets lost in it.”

“And you, Meguet. I kept mistaking you for ghosts.”

“Ghosts,” Rush repeated. The wild winds fluting through the tower seemed to echo the word. Iris smiled at him tranquilly.

“Oh, yes. They all came, too.”

Meguet woke before dawn. She could scarcely see the Gatekeeper at the wall, though by the faint red glow of his brazier she knew that Iris had not forgotten him. She dressed swiftly, went down to the armory where she found Rush choosing a sword. Horses were already saddled, waiting for them. The household, considerably startled at finding itself snowbound, had not ceased its smooth operation. The early winds eased as the sun rose. A wave of fire washed down the mountain, splashed around them: the warning of the Fire Bear.

The Gatekeeper opened the gate, his face impassive as Meguet rode through. She looked at him briefly, her own face settled into a stiff, deceptive calm. Neither spoke.

The path up the mountain was narrow, rubble-filled, steep. The edge of the world fell away from them, it seemed, on one side; on the other, bare slabs of rock, the bones of the mountain, pushed upward toward the top of the sky. They rode until the path grew too rough for the horses. A gold, raging face sprang at them as they rounded a turn on foot, breathed fire over the white world below. Meguet, shielding her face from the sun, said breathlessly, “I can smell it. I can almost taste it.”

“What?”

“The end of winter.” A sudden panic seized her; she pulled herself over crumbled boulder, past the solitary, twisted, stunted trees. “Hurry, Rush.”

“We’ll break our necks.”

“Hurry.”

Shadows were peeling off the mountain as the sun climbed higher. Meguet, sun in her face constantly, wondered if the Fire Bear had roared this golden light at the Cygnet. She increased her pace, breath tearing at her, and saw, from the very top of the mountain, a blinding flash of silver.

She cried, “Rush!” He was beside her, then not, as she pulled herself up, clinging to anything solid: rock, icicle, even, she thought, the blinding surface of the snow, light, and shadow.

Something bulky blocked the sun, hissed at her. She nearly slid down the mountain. The Fire Bear was white as snow, with red eyes and red claws; it paced just above her on a flat, bald slab of granite, shaking its shaggy head, trying to hiss fire. Then, fretfully, it turned away, its attention caught, and she pulled herself onto the stones, the breath running in and out of her like fire. She heard Rush call her name, but she could neither move nor speak.

The Fire Bear was busy eating fire. It was a blue-black flame the Wayfolk man had laid on the snow, and it seemed to take its fuel from the snow. Corleu’s back was to her; the Fire Bear was between them. He stood looking down at a smooth ice sculpture that lay like a statue on the top of the peak. He spoke.

Meguet moved forward. The Fire Bear saw her move, but busily ate its fire. Corleu’s eyes were on the beautiful face trapped within the ice at his feet; he said, as Meguet stepped beside him, “Is that all you can tell me?”

He was shivering, lightly clad; his face looked raw in the cold. Meguet wondered suddenly how he had climbed the mountain in those clothes, and what he had done with his footprints.

“Ask the Blood Fox,” the Dancer murmured, her eyes open, but unseeing. “Take him a gift.”

“What gift?” There was no answer; he raised his voice desperately. “What gift?” Then he saw Meguet, a tall, black-clad figure holding with both her hands a sword that hovered near his heart.

He stepped back, his breath scraping in horror. He recognized her; she saw that in his eyes, as well as a reckless despair that made him tense to run, to attack. But there was nowhere to run, and Moro Ro’s sword was dogging his every move.

“In the name of the Holder and the Cygnet, you must come with me.”

The Fire Bear roared.

Black flame washed over them. Blind, Meguet leaped, felt cloth, bone in her grasp. Then she stumbled; they both fell against the ice-statue, who turned under them, murmuring, then turned again. Corleu pulled free; Meguet, finding him again in the dispersing mist, saw him stop mid-pace, stare at the Dancer.

She rose in a fluid, graceful movement. Smiling, she stepped out of the pool of melting ice. Her hair fell to her feet, one side white, the other black. She shook it back, laughing, and raised her hands to the sun.

Corleu shouted, “No!” He backed a step, another. And then a silver circle floated around him, and he vanished into it. The Dancer turned a circle, faster and faster, until her hair whipped around her, black and white. The black and white blurred into snow and shadow.

The Fire Bear blew a final breath of night and shambled over the edge of the world.

Meguet stood alone, on the top of a mountain on the top of the world, listening to the spring wind.