CHAPTER 1
Who is she?” Corleu demanded. “She stood in front of me with her eyes the only color in the world. She came out of nowhere to the top of that mountain like she knew I would be there, on that one day of all days in the year, she knew I would step across time from Delta to Berg Hold, and she came to meet me. I turned and there she was, holding that blade at my heart and all I could see was green, like the green of the cornfields of Withy Hold in late summer.” He was pacing; Nyx, curled in a chair, listened without moving, except her eyes, following him as he wove a convoluted path between chairs and book piles and the tiny round jar holding time. “Her eyes and her hair like when you tear the green leaves off corn and the pale silk holds to your fingers.”
“Why,” Nyx asked curiously, “are you comparing my cousin Meguet to a corncob?”
“Because that’s what I think of when I see her. My great-gran’s tale of Rider in the Corn. Green, she said, his eyes corn leaves and his hair corn silk. That’s all she ever said of him. He lay with her among the corn and then rode on.”
Nyx gazed at him expressionlessly out of her colorless eyes. Her fingers found a loose button on her sleeve, toyed with it. “That’s a preposterous idea.”
“I know.”
“You and Meguet related.”
“Moonbrained.”
“She is a descendant of Moro Ro’s wife.”
“And I’m nothing but Wayfolk. Almost nothing.”
A thin line ran across her brow. “What I want to know is what she was doing on that mountain. Did she hear you speak to the Dancer?”
He closed his eyes, sank into one of the chairs that for some reason were cluttering the workroom that morning. “I don’t know.” He dropped his hand over his eyes. “Dancer is freed.”
“What did you expect when you gave that fire to the Fire Bear?” she asked. He stared at her, felt the blood leap furiously into his face.
“You did—You knew—” He was on his feet suddenly, his fists clenched. Her cold eyes did not flicker. He whirled, found a door and let his fists slam into it. From within he heard the fluttering of startled birds. He dropped his face against the door, felt the sting of tears in the back of his eyes.
“Corleu,” she said softly, “to get what you want, you must give what they want. What did the Dancer say?”
“She said,” he whispered into the wood, “ ‘ask the Blood Fox.’ ” She was silent. He turned finally, found her gazing in conjecture at a twisted candle.
“Blood Fox… Last of the Hold Signs.” She drew breath. “So. That is why Meguet went to meet you in Berg Hold. Those powers you are waking must be finding their way into Ro House.” She rose abruptly, turned to him; he saw a shadow of color the candlelight dragged into her eyes. “You ask the Blood Fox.”
“That’ll be Warlock.” He swallowed drily. “I saw his shadow once.”
“Did the Dancer say anything else?”
“She said, ‘The thing sought lies always in the same place, but always in a different place, and that place is never far from the Cygnet.’ It’s no help.”
“Of course it is. Something near the Cygnet… a web. The Cygnet flies above it day and night… What gift did she say to give the Blood Fox?”
“She didn’t. But I figured out that one. Any smallfolk knows. ‘Shadow fox, fox shadow, hide your face, hide your shadow—’ It’s a hiding a game.”
“Go on.”
“ ‘Red star, blood star, find your eyes and see, find your—’ ”
“The Blood Star.”
“Cygnet broke the Warlock into pieces and trapped him in the Blood Star. What—what will happen—”
“I don’t know.” Her face seemed colorless in the shadows. ‘ “But it’s too late to undo.”
“How do I get the Blood Star to give it?” he asked her. “Hang on the horns of the moon and pick it out of the sky?”
“You make it.” She began pacing then, her feet following an independent path of thought. “And you make it fast. I don’t know how Meguet got to Berg Hold, but I doubt that she took the long way. Rush helped her, maybe. When she returns to the Delta, she’ll come to this house. She knows where to find you. And she wants you.”
“Why her? Why did she come for me?”
“I don’t know. She’s a mystery to me. She never was before this. She was only Meguet.”
“There’s nothing ‘only’ about her,” he said. “She nearly sent me diving off the mountain, with her eyes and her sword. How do I make a Blood Star? With a wish and an adage?”
“Almost. It’s a very old, very primitive sorcery. The Blood Star does not threaten, foretell, defend. It is all but useless except as a kind of lantern or guide between separated lovers. The effort far exceeds the results, which is why the making is rarely heard of, now. There are much simpler ways of keeping track of people than fusing your heart’s blood into a glass ball.”
“Mine.”
“A drop or three.”
“I can spare that, likely. Where do I take it, though? Where would Blood Fox be, in the Delta?”
“There’s a place upriver, a strange place that resonates with ancient power. Long ago someone sensed the power, and carved statues among the trees there. One statue was of the Blood Fox as human. Or as warlock.”
He nodded. “Trappers passed that place when they brought me here. I remember the Blood Fox.”
“You’ll make the Blood Star there. The Blood Fox will find you.”
He was silent, remembering the shift of tree into blood fox into man, all one, all rooted in the still water. “She’ll know this is the last of them.”
“Meguet?”
“Will she know this place?”
“She has roamed in and out of the swamps since we were children. She’d know it, I think, but perhaps only as a garden of statues, not as a place of power.”
“Because she has no power,” he said evenly.
She eyed him. “Maybe it’s not such a moonbrained idea after all. She does have some kin in Withy Hold. Do you want to see her again?”
“No.”
“Then I suggest we assume she will be at your heels like your shadow. Get something to eat. Then I will teach you how to make the Blood Star.”
Later, he borrowed the boat from the silent ghost, who bestirred herself in her pearls and laces to fade into the afternoon. He placed a lit, shuttered lantern at the bow and rowed through slow, tangled paths where the hanging vines were just beginning to flush with green. On a sandy bank beside the statue grove, he pulled the boat ashore. In the dying light he gathered wood. The night fell quickly, a dense darkness unrelieved by stars or moon. The bitter cold that he felt did not disperse when he lit the fire with the boat lantern. The fire itself—made from odd things— was yellow as a hunter’s moon.
He carried pale, damp, rough sand from the bank and added river water to it. He worked it into a ball the size of his fist. As he molded and smoothed it, he murmured under his breath, over and over, the old rhyme he had known since he could find his feet and walk. Sweating, fire-scorched, mesmerized by his own monotonous voice, he laid the ball of sand in the fire. He watched it thoughtlessly, still murmuring, as the gold fire licked it. When it had turned black, he lifted it out again and broke it in half.
He slid a tough razor-edged piece of marsh grass over the forefinger of his left hand. Then he teased a bit of flame out of the fire onto the grass, laid the flame carefully in the center of one of the broken halves. He fed the flame three drops of his blood. The flame ran from gold to blood red. He closed the halves, laid the ball into the fire again. After a time, during which swamp animals came rustling to the edge of his light to watch, he pulled the ball out again. This time, with the heated blade of the silver knife he had taken from the house, he began to sculpt the sides of the ball. Molten silver from the blade, blood from his hand, streaked the dark sand as he worked. Sweat rolled into it from his face; words seeped into it, mingling with the river water. He layered the sphere with flat planes angling against one another. When he finished that, he was ringed with watching eyes.
He put the faceted ball into the fire. His voice stilled finally. Around him the night was soundless, in the slow, lightless empty hours between midnight and dawn. The fire flared, flared again, washing silver, crimson, black. The small dark ball in the heart of it began to glow.
The eyes around him blinked suddenly out, like vanishing stars. He heard the sighing passage through the underbrush of many small, invisible animals. Then he heard something else: a blood fox’s sharp bark in the distance. Another answered, just behind his back.
He heard that as from a distance, too. Everything seemed detached from him: the heat of the fire, the burns on his hands, his dry aching throat, the appalling, lonely silence of the night. More eyes ringed the fire, some high as his knee and higher, others close to the ground. All were a smoky, red-tinged amber.
The ball in the fire had turned clear as glass, red as blood.
He did not touch it. The fire sank around it, yellow again. He stood up. A great blood fox walked into the light. The fur on its massive shoulders was bristling. Its eyes were cloudy, yellow with the fire. It was dancing a little, singing its high, eerie whine before it barked and attacked. The shadow stretching from its hind paws beyond the fire’s circle was not an animal’s.
“Shadow Fox, fox shadow,” Corleu said to it. His voice was so hoarse it might have been the blood fox’s growl.
“Hide your face, hide your shadow.
Red star, blood star,
Find your face, find your shadow,
Find your heart and follow.”
He reached into the fire, drew out the star that hid a pearl of blood in its heart and caught fire in all its glittering facets.
The blood fox stood silent as the trees around it. Its eyes burned into Corleu’s; they seemed suddenly faceted, like the Blood Star. For a moment, his detachment vanished under that inhuman gaze; he wanted to wrap the dark around him like a cloak and slip away before he became a human swarm of blood foxes, furious with him for disturbing the Delta night.
The Blood Fox faded away. A darkness formed where it had been, shaped a man in the firelight, a patch of night with a face that shifted, blurred, re-formed. Corleu stared at it, his thoughts reeling between terror and wonder; he felt as if he were falling again through that long, black, starry night in the Gold King’s house.
“You have something I want,” the shadow said. Its face stilled enough to form: long, sharp-jawed, red-browed; then the lines of it fractured again. Its voice was deep, husky, a blood fox voice. Corleu swallowed.
“I made it for you.”
A shadowy hand reached toward it, passed through it, darkening it briefly. At the cold touch Corleu, trapped between shadow and fire, would have backed into the fire if he could have made himself move. He glimpsed eyes, amber flames swarming across them.
“What do you want for that?” the shadow asked with a snap of teeth.
“Just—just a small thing.”
“That’s a small thing. That’s my heart you hold in your hand. Be careful what you ask for, or I’ll set a blood fox shadowing you to nuzzle out your heart.”
“I’m not—It’s not for me I’m asking.”
“Who then? Who sent you?”
“The King in the dark.”
The shadow made a complex sound, part human, part blood fox’s curious whine. “So the King goes hunting… You put your heart’s blood into that. Into my heart. You want something worth that much to you. Corleu. That’s your name. You’ve said my name now and then in your life.”
“I’m sorry I ever learned to talk,” he said starkly, and the shadowy face gave a lean, sharp-toothed grin.
“There is no idle chatter in the world. So here you stand with my heart in your hand, asking nothing for yourself?”
“I’m to be paid later.”
“To be paid. Or to pay?”
His voice shook. “Both.”
“I know that King, with his heart of fire. He stalks everyone’s days. What does he want? What small thing?”
“Something hidden away in secret for safekeeping. The Gold King told me to go to Withy Hold, offer the Lady there a peacock feather and ask. She told me to take fire and ask the Dreamer on the top of the world. Dreamer told me to ask you. All of them gave me pieces of a puzzle, none of them a whole answer. So I made this for you.” It burned in his hand with cold fire. He wiped at sweat and smoke on his face. “I need you to finish the puzzle.”
“How small is this thing that sent you wandering the world?”
“Small as the heart of something wild that flies by night over Ro Holding.”
The shadow was still; even the lines hinting of bone-structure stilled briefly, and gave Corleu a clear glimpse of its honed, red-furred, feral face. It made a soft whistling noise, like a branch keening on the fire, and blurred again. “He’s been thinking, that King… And you are feet and hands and eyes to find it. What of yours does he hold hostage?”
“My heart,” he whispered.
“Give me mine. I will tell you what I know.”
“How?” he asked, his heart pounding in sudden hope. “How do I give it?”
“Lay the Blood Star in the fire.”
Corleu knelt close to the flames, let the prism slide among them. Just before the flames closed over it, he saw the jumbled patchwork of a man in all its facets.
The shadow stepped into the fire. Flames flared high above his head, closed like the petals of a burning flower. Corleu flung himself back, watched, breathless, as the flames swirled and parted, died down again and the Warlock stepped out of them.
He stood over Corleu, grinning his fox’s grin, lean-flanked, his shoulders bunched with muscle, the hair on his head and body the red of the blood fox’s pelt. He tossed black, broken pieces of the prism in his hands, juggled them a moment into a whirling black circle.
“The thing you seek is well hidden, even from that King’s gold fingers, which go everywhere. But I have heard, in all my eons of wandering, dragged after a Blood Fox with its nose to the wind and its ear pricked to every whisper: The thing you seek will be reflected in the eye of the Cygnet.”
“Reflected in—But what does that mean?” he cried. “It’s only another riddle!”
“That’s all I know.”
He let the pieces of the prism fall into one broad palm. Then he covered them with the other. When he opened his hands again, the black glass had fused into a swan in flight.
He dropped it into the fire. It exploded, flinging glass, burning wood, shards of flame, into the night. Corleu, still crouched, ducked behind his arms. All around him he heard the whisper and crackle of leaves as the animals scuttled away.
“Thanks,” the Warlock said. “I’ll remember you.”
“The web. The eye. The Cygnet.”
Nyx was pacing. Corleu, slumped in a chair, watched her. It had taken him the rest of the night to return, and for what, he wondered bitterly, as he climbed the shivering stairway near dawn. What he sought was only tale. Just a story, a lie, to set him moving, rousing all the sleeping powers in the Holds. The thing was a dream, a lure to catch a Wayfolk fool, to trap his thoughts, keep his eyes from seeing what his hands were waking.
He said as much to Nyx. She stopped mid-step, looked at him with her cold, searching, inscrutable eyes.
“If you think that, you are a fool. The thing itself is of more power than what you are waking. Why else would it be so carefully hidden?”
“What’s to be done, then?”
“Be quiet and let me think…” She paced barefoot, a heavy gown of grey velvet swinging as she turned. She had been awake all night, he judged; her eyes looked luminous, and her temper was short. “If these powers disturbed Ro House enough to catch Meguet’s eye, then that’s where they all will gather. The place where the Cygnet flies, day and night. That’s the place of power that draws them: Ro House. Tell me again.”
He told her wearily, for the hundredth time. “A secret at the center of the web, over which Cygnet flies, day and night. That was Blind Lady.”
“The Dancer.”
“The thing sought lies always in the same place, but always in a different place, and that place is never far from the Cygnet.”
“The Warlock.”
“The thing you seek will be reflected in the eye of the Cygnet.”
“Cygnet. Cygnet. Cygnet.” She whirled, to contemplate him again, her arms folded, her mouth taut. “The thing you seek, Corleu, belongs to the Cygnet, I would guess. An ancient power that’s waking other ancient powers. Not even Chrysom hinted of anything like this. I want it, as badly as I do not want the Gold King to keep it.”
“You’re still not forcing me to tell you.”
“That wouldn’t be finding it, would it. You’d never see Tiel again, and you would hate me, and refuse to find this thing at all. Then we’d have chaos on our hands at Ro House. If not already. Ro House… A web. The Cygnet flying…” She stood still then, still as one of the carved, dead trees in the statue grove, her hands open at her sides, her head bowed, contemplating her reflection in the water. He couldn’t hear her breathe. Finally he heard the statue speak. “The maze.”
“What?”
She lifted her head, her face white, still. He had never seen such color in her eyes. “Chrysom’s maze. The black tower. The Cygnet pennant that flies on the tower roof, summer, winter, day and night. The secret of where to find this thing is at the center of Chrysom’s maze.”
“Where is that?” he asked wearily. “Where do I go this time?”
“To the house of the Holders of Ro Holding.”