CHAPTER 2
So the Wayfolk came down from the heart of Ro Holding to the Delta. Corleu, plodding through days, one eye to the road past his mare’s rump, the other to the strange, dark, tangled horizon, never knew exactly when they left the clear, endless blue of Withy Hold sky behind and passed into the Delta mists. There the sun was invisible by day; at evening it hovered, huge and blood-red, above silvery, delicate forests. The rich, steamy, scented air clung to everything, even time, it seemed, until it moved like the slow, indolent water moved, deep and secret. The bog mists, the great red sun, the lovely green drugged the eye. The final, glowing moments of sunsets, trees like black fire against a backdrop of fire, burned into memory; Withy Hold paled, ghostlike, into past.
Tul had guessed it: In the Delta, the Cygnet was invisible. In the Delta were low, sultry skies, smells of mud, still water, the sound of hidden water, the sound of a great river breaking up into roads and trails and ruts of water, black pools and backwashes, before it drained into Wolfe Sea. Huge, shy, graceful birds—yellow, rose, teal—cried at night in throaty, urgent voices. Flowers of burning colors floated on dark water, left their imprint on the eye like the sun. Like the old river road they followed, Wayfolk were drawn from wonder to wonder toward what lay beyond the mists. But the mists never parted and the road ran endlessly into them.
Corleu, driving at the end of the line, eating the dust Jagger’s wagon kicked up, felt a thought move, slow and fishlike, in his swampy brain. A warm weight sat on his head, his eyelids; sat on his thoughts, too, like hot light on water. The thought surfaced finally, making him lift his head, blink. The scythe-like, silvery leaves danced above his head, not a touch of autumn on them. We have been travelling forever, he thought surprisedly. Then the drowsy, sweating, perfumed air filled his veins again. The slow wagon ahead of him, with Jagger’s gran peering out the back, and the dogs trotting behind it, grew smaller and smaller. He drifted in and out of a dream of blue sky. “Limehead,” he heard someone call in the dream. “Catch a cuckoo in Corleu’s hair.” A bird had spoken, or the river. “Moonbrain. Corleu fell off the moon.” He was on the haystack again, with Jagger and Venn, pointing to the Blood Fox prowling, huge, silent, dangerous, along the horizon, dragging the star-limned shadow of the Warlock behind it. “Delta fought Cygnet under the Hold Sign of the Blood Fox… Milkhead. Stick your head in a bucket of milk.”
He raised his head, groggy, astonished at what he was hearing. A great blood fox flowed silently out of the shadows across the road under his horse’s nose. The horse reared, jolting Corleu awake; hooves pounded down on the blood fox’s shadow. Corleu, staring at the shadow’s human hands, nearly lost the reins when his horse bolted.
He pulled at them, shouting; horse and wagon careened across spongy, shifting ground toward a broad, lily-choked swamp. Water loomed closer; the wagon reeled, nearly throwing him; he wondered if he should jump. Then both he and the horse saw something at the water’s edge. The mare veered sharply away from it. The wagon groaned on its axle; things tumbled and smacked the floor. He got the wagon turned, its back wheel laying track within an inch of water, and he harried the mare back across the trembling ground to the road. He set the brake and jumped down, shaking, his head jerking back at the swamp where he had had a confused image of the blood fox’s shadow, standing upright, black as the inside of nowhere, juggling stars in its hands.
He saw no one, nothing but the lilies, little burning crowns of light on the dark water, all of them just opened that morning, it looked, or maybe the moment before he saw them. He heard a noise behind him and spun; it was Jagger, loping down road.
“Gran said you tried to drive on water,” he said. He had grown into a burly young man, grim, lately, a dark, puzzling force in the world, pent-up like a beer crock and apt to blow for no reason.
“Blood fox came out of nowhere,” Corleu said, and saw again its human shadow across the dust. “Ran under the mare’s nose, scared her.”
Jagger grunted. “Would scare me. I’ll send Gran to ride with you. She pinches if you fall asleep.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“She said you were drifting.”
“Maybe.” He shivered suddenly, breaking out of a dream. “Likely that’s all it was.”
“What was?”
“Just a daydream.”
“What? Blood fox?”
Corleu looked at him, then away, picking through shadow at the swamp’s edge. The perfect lilies teased him again, irritating, like the whine of an unseen insect. “No. Thought I saw something, is all. It scared me. Jagger, how long ago did we cross over from Withy Hold?”
Jagger shrugged. “Days. Week or two maybe.”
“A month?”
“Maybe.”
“Two?”
“Why?” There was sweat on Jagger’s face, dust on his shoulders; he did not want to tally time. “Do you have urgent business in the city?”
“Look around you.”
“What of it?” Jagger demanded, not moving.
“Just look! We left Withy Hold in autumn! Where’s the dead leaves, the birds flying south overhead, the flowers withering away? Where’s the season? Feels like we’ve travelled into winter, but nothing dies here. Nothing dies,” he said again, with a curious prickling of fear, but Jagger only looked annoyed.
“Winter’s gentler in the Delta,” he said brusquely. Corleu snorted.
“So gentle here that death tiptoes past the flowers. And where,” he added, “is everyone in this wonderland? Could harvest all year long, here, if you drain a field or two. Yet we meet no one.”
“Too far from the city.”
Corleu eyed him askew. “You don’t find it peculiar?”
“You’ve never been to Delta before, why should you find it one way or another? It’s Delta, nothing we’re used to—”
“It’s Ro Holding, not the backside of the world! Winter travels, just like Wayfolk. It should have caught up with us by now.”
“Winter.” Jagger squinted at him. “A week or two out of Withy Hold—”
“Or a month or two—”
“We’ve been slow in this heat!”
“It shouldn’t be this hot!”
“You’ve never been here before.”
“No one has!”
“There’s old road under your feet—”
“Road to where? We’ve been nowhere but here, days, weeks—the same sky, same trees, same flowers that always look like they bloomed just a moment ago when your back was turned. Just exactly where are we, here?”
“Delta,” Jagger exploded. “You cob-haired gawp, where do you think? We’ve found a road leads out of the world? Have you been sitting back here with your face in the cider?”
“Don’t call me cob-haired.” His fists were clenched; he heard himself, the edge in his voice, the idiotic words, in sudden wonder. He and Jagger hadn’t brawled in years. But there was something between them, like air tense with storm, and Corleu couldn’t put a name to it. He eased his hands open, said more calmly, “It feels strange here to me, is all. Something does.”
Jagger kicked at a clump of grass, blinking. “My brain’s melting in this heat,” he muttered. He added with an effort at thinking, “I forget you can’t see moon changes under this mist. Women must know, though, they keep track of days. Except my gran.” A corner of his mouth went up. “She thinks we’re still in Withy Hold.” Then someone stepped between them and his face went dark again. Corleu breathed in the scent of hair rinsed with lavender water.
“Da sent me to ride with you.”
Tiel’s hair fell past her waist; behind its darkness, and her sun-polished skin, the pale swamp flowers grew, thickly clustered, carved of ivory, without a bruise of time on them. Corleu drew breath, feeling Jagger’s eyes boring at him. Someone else pushed among them, clung to Tiel’s skirt.
“And me,” said Tiel’s youngest sister, her face and hands grubby from the bread and honey she was eating. Tiel, her face suddenly averted, lifted her up. The stiff, bulky line of Jagger’s shoulders eased; he grinned fleetingly.
“Shall I send my gran, too?”
“Why not.” Corleu took the child from Tiel, swung her onto the wagon seat. “Send the dogs, too.” He added abruptly, as Jagger turned, “It was you, then, calling me.”
“What?”
“You calling me names before the horse bolted. To wake me.”
“I wasn’t calling you names,” Jagger said. “You didn’t give me time.”
Corleu was struck mute for a time by the bone in Tiel’s bare ankle, by the gentle, light bird-gestures of her brown hands. The child did most of the talking. Tiel stirred now and then; the threads of her skirt dragging over wood grain seemed loud as language. She said little. Corleu felt the brief, dark, wordless glances she gave him, but she never let him meet her eyes. He wished another language would startle out of him, in the shape of small birds or pearls, for his head was as vacant of words as the sky. It’s my hair, he thought hopelessly, remembering his father’s warning. No one could love a head of hair like this. We could talk, once. What happened?
That was north.
“Shadow fox, fox shadow,” the child chanted, and Corleu tensed, his eyes flickering across the road. But it was only a rhyme for a hiding game. “Hide your fox, hide your shadow—”
“Hide your face, hide your shadow,” Tiel corrected. Corleu glanced at her. She leaned toward the child; the long, dark, heavy line of her hair hid all but the brown curve of her cheek. “Go on. Red star, blood star…”
“Find your eyes and see.”
Find your voice and talk, you gabblehead, Corleu thought. The tall, graceful trees, thick with vine and moss, cleared ahead, gave him a glimpse of the wagons strung along the overgrown track, meadow feverishly green with dank, dark water beyond it, more trees.
“It’s so empty,” he breathed. “We’ve seen no one since we left Withy Hold. Not a traveller, a trapper, a boat—you can’t walk a mile in Withy Hold without running into a field wall or stepping in a cow pile. Something hinting at people.”
Tiel turned her head, let him meet her eyes a moment then; the dark, flickering glance dragged the breath out of him. “Strange,” she agreed, but nothing in her voice truly considered the word. She was content, her eyes seeking colors. Her hair rustled against her back as her head turned. “It’s so beautiful, it is odd no one has stopped here, of those who like stopping in one spot.”
Corleu, watching her speak, almost stopped the wagon, wanting to taste and swallow the words coming one by one out of her full mouth. A wheel bumped over a stone; the child, climbing into Tiel’s lap, clutched at Corleu’s wrist with sticky fingers, dragged him back to earth.
“Dancer danced to a dancer dancing,
“Dance! said the dancing dancer,
“Dance the dancer dancing—”
“No,” Tiel said, laughing. “Dancing, the dancer danced—
“Dancing dancer danced—”
“Dancer danced—ah, my tongue’s muddled. Dancing the dancer—You say, Corleu.”
“Dancing, dancer danced the dance.”
“And danced,” they all chanted. “And danced. And danced.”
“Tell story,” the child demanded, and Corleu’s tongue went on without them:
“ She danced on a hill, she danced in a rill,
She danced on a moonbeam, danced in a dream,
Danced on a star, danced very far,
Danced in a bear’s den, danced home again.”
“What bear?” Tiel demanded, smiling, her eyes full on his face. They were the proper color for the sky, he thought, not blue, but deep, warm, shadowy brown, for day, for night. He shook his head, smiling back at her.
“Fire Bear, likely. I only tell them, I don’t make them.”
“Yes, you do. I’ve heard you make them, with Venn and Jagger.” Her face flushed suddenly, was hidden behind her hair. But she finished, “When you would sit by the fire late, behind our wagon. You thought everyone was asleep. But I listened.”
He felt his own face warm. “They weren’t meant for you. Only for our potato ears and sheep brains.”
“I know,” she said. Her face came out of her hair, composed again. “Goat brains, more like. Bat-wing ears. But I liked—I like how you say things. How you see. Even asleep, I’d hear your voice.” She was gone again, bird-quick. He swallowed, a blink away from letting the reins slide out of his hands, touch a strand of her hair with his fingertips, shift it aside to find her.
He said unsteadily, for he had never put it to words before, “All stories seem old to me, even the ones born in my brain. Likely it’s because words are so old. Story words, that is. They carry bits of older tales with them. Like Dancer. She could be you, dancing. Or she could be the star Dancer, who brings you dreams from both the fair side and the terrible side of morning.” He paused. “It’s what I think I want to do.”
“What?”
“Go to Ro City and learn more words.” His mouth crooked. “Sounds silly. More stories, maybe. Something.”
“But what would you do with them?”
“I don’t know.” He flicked a fly off the mare’s rump with a rein. “Keep saying and keep saying them until I get all the way back to the first thing they mean.” He glanced at her, wondering if she wondered what murky waters lay between his ears. But she only asked thoughtfully:
“Can you do the things your granda could? Or your mother? Foresee in water, in petals?”
“Me? No. I only got his hair.” He slid it back between his lingers, to cool his face. “My mother tried to teach me petals, but all I ever saw in them was color, never any—never—” He faltered, his mind filling with petals then: dried roses, verbena, lavender… the pattern they had made under his mother’s breath, paths circling, circling…
Something—an echo—made him realize she had spoken again. “What?” he asked, then knew he had made no sound. He had gone away again, to some place chill, lonely, terrifying. “What?” he said again, and came back to the pale, heavy misty sky, the long afternoon. He shivered suddenly in the heat. His eyes searched sky, trees, water, for some sign—any sign—of change: a hill, a different kind of tree, even a wild swan or a stork flying south for winter. “I think,” he said tightly, “I know where we travelled to.”
“Where?”
“Trouble.”
But she did not seem to notice the word. The child sat drowsing in her arms; her eyes had strayed from Corleu to a long tumble of orange and yellow blossoms, all fully opened, he noticed, all perfect, not one too young or too old for the moment he saw them.
“My mother foresaw this,” he breathed.
“What?”
“This place. Day after day circling under this grey sky, no true sky for stars to point the way, no moon, no sun…”
“Yes, there’s sun. Look. It’s about to set.”
The evening fire was beginning, the slow kindling of the horizon into gold, then red, then deep, deep purple before the black, starless night poured over them again. Tiel’s eyes filled with the sunset; her face held the smooth blankness of a dreamer. She had forgotten Corleu.
It’s this place, he thought, terrified. This place.
They made a loose circle of the wagons in a meadow. Children of all ages broke out of the small colored rolling houses, flickered like night sprites in and out of the twilight. “Corleu,” a boy called, and then a girl: “Corleu.” In the dusk their faces blurred past him; their changing voices were unfamiliar. Surely there were not so many smallfolk in the company, he thought. There were too many voices, echoes of the past, as if they had carried even his own, Jagger’s, Tiel’s childhood ghosts down from the north. Then he saw Tiel, chasing after one of the small-folk, laughing, her hair rising in a slow, dark wave, then settling as she ran. The world went simple again, everything in its place, no mysteries beyond the mystery of Tiel’s hair, rising darkly and falling. Then a girl said, “Corleu” behind him and laughed. He turned quickly, for that voice, that laugh, was long past and far behind. Someone circled behind him silently; he felt a long skirt whirl and fall against him, a brush of long fine bones: hands, back, shoulders against his shoulders. He turned to face her, saw only Tiel, walking away from him as she carried the child across the camp.
He drew a deep breath, moving through the still, heavy dusk as if it were thick with ghosts. He took the ax from inside the wagon, walked down the stream to cut wood. The underbrush rustled, as if someone walked beside him. The slow water murmured his name. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. “Corleu,” a girl whispered: the young, flaxen-haired lord’s daughter who had stopped him in a field one day. He smelled again the crush they had made of grasses, of wildflowers, mingling with the scent of her body. A flower or a finger brushed his mouth. He turned, felt again the quick, light touches of someone’s body, circling him as he turned. Skirt wrapped around his ankles, a hip touched his. He dropped the ax, reached out with both hands to catch the dancer. No one was there. Leaves rustled, farther down the stream.
He came back under full night. Around the camp fires, he saw faces that bewildered him with their sullenness. Where did you go, Corleu? eyes asked. Who have you been with? They gazed at him without smiling, without moving, their bodies shadowed, only their expressions molded in both dark and fire. You, their faces said, with envy, longing, mistrust. You.
He concentrated the next day, as intent on moving into one simple moment after the next as if he were piecing his way step by step across a bog. The reins in his hands. The string of wagons—blue, yellow, white, red—with drying clothes flapping and children’s brown faces peering out the backs. A woman singing behind him. The song stirred his memories. The deadly, silver smiles of scythes among the ripe wheat, the dry hwick of their work. Women bent, bundling the wheat; he and Tiel, Jagger and Venn, and Lark, their hands almost too small, picking up the bundles, leaning them together in threes. He, then Tiel, then Jagger. When Tiel’s hands slowed, brought her closer to Corleu, then Jagger’s movements would slow, until she was centered between them, then closer to Jagger. All afternoon, sun soaking into them; the whirling glint of metal; a baby crying; the smells of wheat, earth, wild flowers; their joking; Sorrel ahead, singing as she bound up the stalks. Singing of… what?
A baby’s rhyme, a nonsense tale about a little black hut with a gold roof and a lintel of gold that tumbled out of the sky, and how you must never pass beneath the lintel, for if you do, you will see it is not a hut at all, but—
Corleu!
His head jerked. The world built around him again: mist, pale green, and the feverish colors of the flowers. His throat swelled with a silent protest. He felt the sweat on his face. Luckily the horses were still plodding in line. He thought of calling Jagger, but what could he say? I was dreaming again. You gawp. He concentrated. The reins in his hands… The little hut with the gold roof, falling, falling out of the sky…
He was still concentrating at the end of the day, so hard he had all but forgotten how to speak. Stop wagon. Feed and water horse… The water in the skins was low, so he slung them over his shoulders, walked through the camp as through a company of shadows, ignoring all claims on his name. Find flowing water, kneel. Open skins… Then, at the bottom of the shallow stream, he saw jewels flash. He stared at them, and finally recognized what he had not seen since Withy Hold: stars, reflected in the water, so clearly he might have picked them out like pebbles. If he looked away from them, they would vanish, something warned. So he knelt on the bank without moving, gazing at the ring of stars the Blind Lady wore on her finger. The water darkened; the stars grew bright, luminous, fire-white. They held all time, those stars, and he watched, his lips parted, scarcely breathing, for it seemed that any moment the dark within the stars would open, show what lay beyond the endless night.
Something struck him so hard he sprawled with a grunt on the muddy bank. Someone straddled him, gripped his shirt at the throat. His head rattled a few times against the ground before his eyes adjusted to the milky light that the moon shed behind the mists. He cried sharply, astonished, “Jagger!”
The weight shifted off him. Jagger was breathing heavily, a dark, aggrieved presence in the dark.
“Do you know,” he demanded, “how long you’ve sat there? Just sat, like a rabbit cross-eyed under the moon?”
“I just got here, you muckerhead! I just came for—”
“It’s full night!”
Corleu’s breath stopped. He sat up; his eyes went back to the water. But the stars were gone; they never could have been there. He made some sound Jagger took as argument.
“You go off,” he continued doggedly, “you’re gone hours, you come back looking like you’ve been some secret place, with your ax but no wood, or your skins—” He picked them out of the mud, flattened by Corleu’s back. “Empty. I had to follow you, to see where you go when you go.”
Corleu rolled to his feet wordlessly; Jagger caught his wrist, nearly sent him into the water. Down the bank a blood fox’s eyes caught some stray swamp light, flared amber red at them.
“It’s this place,” Corleu said. He was breathing so shallowly he could hardly speak. “This place. It’s bewitched. I tried to tell you—”
“Not this place, it’s you!”
“No—”
“You look at us all like a stranger, like something is swallowing you from inside. You barely talk anymore, even to her; you don’t see us, not even her—”
“Who?” He jerked at the suddenly painful hold. “Who?” he said through gritted teeth. Jagger hauled him closer.
“Who. You blind owl. We watch her, she watches you, and you walk past her like she’s smoke. It’s you her eyes follow. And you don’t—you don’t even—you sit here staring at water while Reed and Dawl and Steof and me, we have to fight to lie in her path for her to walk across while she watches you—they all do. Watch you. You with that hair the color of—”
Corleu wrenched free. “Bird-shit. Slug-slime. I’ve heard all the white words there are by now. I can’t believe you’re standing there throwing your tongue around the color of my hair while you’re knee-deep in trouble and sinking fast. Can’t you see it? We blundered onto a road to nowhere; we drove our wagons outside time into a haunted place. Things are strange here. Things are dangerous.”
“Something is,” Jagger said tightly. “And it’s you in danger. You’ve got us all smoldering and you’re too spellbound to see—”
“It’s not me!”
“It’s you wandered out of the world, not us. Someone twisted your path for you, and if you don’t find who, you’ll keep on reeling through your days, trapped inside your head. I’d say most likely Steof, his mother knows things.”
“No.” He gripped Jagger’s shoulders. “It’s none of us! Jagger, I’ve seen Blood Fox with the human shadow here. I felt the Dancer dance circles around me. Tonight you stopped me falling headfirst into the Ring of Time at the bottom of the water. It’s a dream world we wandered into, and it scares my blood thin. We think we’re heading south through Delta, but we’re only circling and circling, that’s why we never meet anyone, and why we never reach the sea, because there is no sea, there is no south, no north, we’ve travelled outside Ro Holding and not even the Cygnet itself can see into this land.”
“You’re babbling,” Jagger breathed. “You’re moonstruck.”
“But what moon?” Corleu shook him furiously, rocking him off balance half a step. “We left moon and stars in Withy Hold!”
“You don’t even care.”
“Of course I care. Why do you think I’m shouting myself blind, you stump-headed—”
“You don’t even ask what I’m talking about.”
“What?”
“You just ramble. You don’t care who.”
Corleu was silent, baffled by the mist in Jagger’s head. He closed his eyes wearily, looking for words, and saw Tiel behind them, her hair so straight and heavy that when she swung her head it fanned the air and fell strand by strand back into place. He swallowed. “That’s why.” He opened his eyes to Jagger’s night-hollowed eyes. “That’s why you’re angry at me. Because I followed her here, instead of taking my moonhead to Hunter Hold, out of her sight. But can’t you see for once it’s not Tiel matters, what matters is this place we—”
The night exploded in his eyes; he found himself trying to finish with his face under water. I should have gone to Hunter Hold, he thought bleakly. He felt Jagger’s hands hauling at him. He turned and kicked hard; there was a cry and a massive splash. He waded out, dripping and coughing, saw again the chilling, red-washed stare of blood-fox eyes.
He woke near dawn, and, still half-dreaming, had all the horses loose and wandering off into the trees. Then he walked aimlessly across slow branch water, through perfumed woods— in circles, he thought likely—but he kept moving, until heat and weariness wore him down. He rested under a cascade of lilies flowing down tree branches into a small, deep pool. He sat shredding the perfect flowers, listening to the furious, distant shouting. “Corleu!” they called; gathering up the horses, they would blunder across him eventually. “Corleu!” He picked another flower, tossed it into the pool. It floated, turning delicately on an invisible current.
“Corleu.”
Tiel stood beside the tumble of lilies. He stared at her; she looked like something the morning had just fashioned out of shadow and light and the mysterious, silvery green leaves. “Corleu,” she said again, softly, when he didn’t speak. “They’re all angry with you. Jagger says you’ve gone moon mad.”
“There’s no moon,” he said. But there was, he realized; she had brought it with her: moon and stars, the memory of the green-scented summer nights.
“Everyone is looking for you. Jagger says you should go back to Withy Hold, the Delta mists are driving you loony.”
He shook his head. “This road goes one way only, and where, none of us knows yet.” He barely heard himself; he wanted only to sit and look at her, in the bewitched morning, while the world turned circles around them.
“Delta,” she reminded him, but there was the shadow of a question in her voice.
“No.”
She paused, perplexed. Their eyes held in the silence. She swallowed. “Corleu,” she said, and, surprised, he felt as if no one had ever spoken his true name before. “What—what’s to be done, then? If this is not true Delta, then where do we find it?”
“I don’t know. But I can’t just go on blind; there must be something to point, someone to say why all this, why this place that never changes, why…” But under her gaze he was forgetting why he cared, why they should not circle forever in that changeless, sultry, scented air. Her body had pulled back from him a little, disturbed at his words. But her eyes clung. Within them he watched doors open, one after another, revealing things he had never seen in her before. Her voice sank, barely more than a whisper.
“Maybe if you—if you come back with me and try to explain—Maybe, Corleu, maybe if—” She faltered into silence. They stared at one another, lost, he felt, in a dream within a dream.
He wanted to put his cheek against her long eyelashes to feel them brush his skin. He wanted to gather all her long, heavy hair into his hands until they overflowed with darkness. He wanted to circle her bare ankles with his fingers, her bare neck with his hands. He wanted to fall into her eyes with all the opening chambers in them, and keep falling and keep falling… He whispered, “Tiel.” And then she fell toward him, seemingly from a long distance, and as she fell, he felt himself yearn toward her as if a wind had pushed him.
The block of night across the small pool finally caught his eye. It had been dragging at him for some time: a square of black between his hand and her breast, a flick of dark over her closed eyelids, hidden within the braid his busy fingers had unwoven. He raised his head, one of her bodice laces between his teeth, blinking at strands of her hair that clung to his eyelashes. There it was, fallen out of nowhere: the tiny house. Four black walls, the gold roof, the lintel of gold. Standing without sound or movement in a riffle of mist.
He was still, so still that Tiel, fingers tangled in his hair, finally opened her eyes. She turned her head. Her lips moved silently, as if they were remembering a song. Then she sat up in horror, tugging at her bodice as if the lintel were an eye. “What is it?” she breathed.
Four stars its walls, one star its roof, one star its lintel, and the blue star its latch, so he had heard the lord’s daughter describe it, in formal language, as she lay beside him, her ringed hand pointing out stars in a warm night tumbling with wind. The Hold Sign of Hunter Hold: seven stars that trapped the golden warrior’s face of the sun.
The little dark house that falls from the sky…
He shuddered, feeling the cold tighten his skin, the bone-bare chill of recognition.
“Corleu!”
He dropped his face, kissed her numbly. “My mother saw it. Something falling. And she saw our path in her petals circling, circling…”
“But it wasn’t here when we came!”
“It was always here. It’s the dream we’re in.” Still holding her tightly, he eased to her side, his eyes intent on the house. He breathed, “And there’s the door.”
“What door?”
“The door out of the dream.”
She stared at him. “How do you know? How can you say that’s the way out, just looking at it?”
“It’s a door. It’s the only door we’ve come across anywhere for weeks. You come in a door, you go out.”
“No.” She pushed against him suddenly, her face in his neck, hands gripping his shirt. “No. Wayfolk don’t cross under doorways.”
“Listen to me.”
“No! I’m not listening!”
He kissed her hair, her jaw, found her lips again. “Listen,” he whispered, and she stopped him speaking, plundering his words until he fell back, inarticulate. A stone, intruding between soft ground and his head, made him remember how to talk. “Listen to me,” he said, blinking, hoisting to his elbow. “Listen. We’re all spellbound in this dream country. Nowhere is where we’re going. There’s a door out. It’s here, to be opened now— now, or we may be left here on our own in a world where nothing lives as easily as in one where nothing dies.”
“Find Venn’s mam, she knows things—”
“No. What if it goes? What if it’s our only way and it disappears? My da was right. Not even the Cygnet can see through this mist. The only one can see in it and around it and beyond it is trapped in that little ancient house…”
“What are you saying? Whose house is it? Who is trapped?‘’
“And he trapped us…”
“Who?”
He had made the first movements away from her without realizing it: pulling up, beginning to rise. She grasped at him in horror, and he felt the blood lurch out of his face, at where his next steps would take him.
“I’ll be back,” he said, pulling her to her feet as he rose.
“No! Corleu, no!”
“I will.” He pulled her against him, hard, and even then he felt the cold slide shadowlike between them. “Wait for me.”
“How can you leave me?” she cried, as he loosed her, and, stepping away, he felt his whole body pull toward her. He caught his breath, dazed, her face and the house and all the colors of that enchanted world blurring together in his eyes.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I love you, I love you.”
“Corleu!”
“I’ll bring you back the stars…”
He was running, half-blind, along the edge of the pool, when he heard her scream at him again.
“Corleu! It’s the house! It’s the black house with the roof of gold that falls from the sky! Don’t go into it! Don’t! It’s the house you’ll never leave!”
He ran faster. In another country, he heard oars in an oarlock, water stroked and lifted, words. He left all his thoughts behind, ran under the gold lintel, into the dark.
He stood with his eyes shut, waiting.