CHAPTER 2
Meguet stood at the edge of the lake beyond the thousand-year-old wood, watching the swans. Iris had brought the house back to the Delta; the swans, casting black and white shadows on the surface of the water, wove a tranquil dance among themselves. Used to flight, they seemed unsettled by the flight of Ro House. Meguet, drawn out of sleep by a dream of them, had slipped out at dawn. Every image in the dream, every word, had transformed itself into swan, until their elegant, masked, enigmatic faces had crowded into her mind. She had carried all their faces across the misty pastures, past the dark, dreaming wood. Finally, at the lake, the swans had shifted from her mind into her eyes: The great company clustered in the lake as usual, busily feeding. She felt her mind empty of them, grow still, peaceful.
A swan detached itself from the group in the middle of the lake. It glided toward the shore where Meguet stood. She watched it thoughtlessly. It was huge, as black as if it had flown straight out of midnight. Its smooth, steady drift toward her was soothing, almost a dream itself. It drew quite close, so close she could see the dark, steady gaze of its reflection. She blinked, surprised, for the swans kept to the far shore. It breasted the shallows, came on, its graceful head lifted as if to meet her eyes. Fully awake now, she watched it, not moving, not breathing. It stirred the muddy bottom, so close she might have touched it, or it her, extending its strong, quick, dangerous neck.
It roused so suddenly that she started. For a moment the air was black with feathers. Its wings beat; rising, it drew a wet wing tip across her lips. Darkness thundered around her, tangled in her hair. She caught her breath; lifting her face, she saw the sky again. Sunlight shot across the lake. She tasted lake water on her lips, felt it on her face. The great swan had vanished, like the night, into light.
She turned finally, startled, wondering. Sunlight raced across meadow, pasture, illumined the back towers, but could not reach across them to Chrysom’s tower, still shrouded in its darkness. As she looked at it, wings filled her mind again: dark crow wings rustling with uneasiness.
In the west tower, all the kitchen chimneys were smoking. The first of the Hold Councils was due soon. A messenger, arriving to request a guide through the swamps for a Council, assorted family, curious kin, retinue, bag and baggage, had spent a night wondering where Ro House had gone. The house was back the next morning. Meguet, greeting the messenger, had seen him torn between asking and appearing lunatic. “Hunter Hold Council,” he said, and the household bustled with preparations.
Meguet, walking into that tower in search of breakfast, found the Holder, surrounded by half the tower staff. She caught Meguet’s eye, sent them all flying, and gestured Meguet into an antechamber.
It was a tiny room off the main tower door, close as a bear cave and chilly even in midsummer, with a double thickness of stone. Even the chairs were stone: ledges beside the fire, in the windowless walls. There Moro Ro had taken council with Chrysom, where not even a mouse could overhear without being seen.
The Holder swung the door to with a thud that cut short all sound. It was, Meguet thought, like being entombed.
“Tell me what you dreamed,” the Holder said abruptly. She looked pale, edgy; Meguet tensed at the question.
“I dreamed of swans.”
“Living or dead?”
She felt the blood leave her face. “Living.”
“I dreamed all my children were dead.” She turned, grabbed the poker, toppled the neatly burning pile of logs on the grate so that they nearly slid onto the floor. “Rush dreamed that Nyx had become something so terrible that he did not recognize her. He shouted at me this morning because I refused to let him ride upriver with you. If this is something—” She stopped, began again. “If this is something of Nyx’s doing, I can’t let him go there.”
“No,” Meguet said flatly, and the Holder looked at her, hope waging against suspicion in her eyes. “I would sooner suspect the Gatekeeper of intending harm to this house.”
“Then what is troubling this house?” the Holder demanded, her voice rising in relief. “Even Iris was in tears this morning. Iris hasn’t cried since she was two. I haven’t even seen Calyx. She shut herself up in Chrysom’s library.”
“The Dancer is troubling this house. The Dreamer of Berg Hold. We brought her with us.”
“But how? How did she get in? The Gatekeeper never left the gate, he never opened the gate—that was my command.”
“I don’t know.” She rubbed her eyes wearily. “I don’t know how she got in. Maybe she followed me off the mountain top. I couldn’t even stop an unarmed Wayfolk man from getting away from me. How could I stop the Dancer?”
“You’re supposed to know such things! It’s your heritage, your duty to protect the Cygnet.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“Then, where were those in you who should advise you? Weren’t you listening to them?”
“I thought—I thought so. Maybe I haven’t learned how yet.”
“You’d better learn fast. We have the Hunter Hold Council on our doorstep and a mad dreamer under our beds. What’s next?”
“Worse,” Meguet said tightly. The Holder’s eyes widened.
“What worse?”
“The Warlock.”
The Holder pulled a pearl out of her hair and flung it across the room. “Send the Gatekeeper to me.”
Meguet gave him the message, then sat in the turret, watching the gate and waiting for him. A company of hunters rode out; no one requested entry. The Gatekeeper returned soon, his face impassive. Meguet asked him, as he joined her:
“What did you dream?”
“Of you.” He reached across, took her hands, wanned his own. “No good watching for the Warlock.”
“Why not?”
“He’ll get in. Like the Dancer, he’ll come when he comes.”
Meguet slumped back against the stones. “Did you tell the Holder that?”
“Yes.”
“Did she believe you?”
“No. I told her Dancer must have danced herself over the wall, because I kept a lizard’s eye on that gate night and day in Berg Hold. What did you dream?”
“Just swans.”
He smiled his quick, tight smile. He leaned forward, kissed her gently. “Don’t blame yourself so.”
“If we hadn’t gone to Berg Hold—”
“The Dancer would have come to us here.” He watched her. “And if, and when the Warlock comes?”
She shuddered. “Don’t say it. Words come to life, these days.”
“What then? What are they gathering for, like crows on a carcass? What’s in that maze but a wizard’s time-picked bones?”
“It’s a place to hide.”
“For what? Until when?”
“I don’t know!” she flared. “Don’t push at me with questions, I am so tired of hearing that answer from myself. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” He was silent; she raised her eyes finally, found a curious, dispassionate expression in his light eyes.
“You beg such questions,” he said abruptly. “If only because you’re the one in this house thinking for the house. And you get angry with me because I see that.”
“I told you,” she said helplessly, “I am part of this house. A lintel, a casement, a stone seat in a stone wall, some old walled-up grate that hasn’t been on fire since Chrysom’s time.”
“A lintel.” He pulled her hands to his mouth. “An old grate. A tower, more like. Chrysom’s tower, strong, mysterious and covered with roses.” He opened her hand against his mouth, said, breathlessly, head bowed, ”Will I come to you, or will you come to me?”
“Come to me.” She opened her other hand, laid it against her eyes. “At least in the tower you can see the gate.”
“For whatever use.”
“The Holder should send for Nyx.”
He removed her ring finger from his mouth. “Nyx.”
“She could fight a Warlock. She’s a sorceress.”
“And bog witch, which is of more use. They don’t fight clean.” He kissed the center of her palm, then relinquished her hand. “She’s coming home for the Council. So I heard. Gossip about Nyx doesn’t stand around idle.”
“I think,” Meguet said, “that won’t be soon enough.” She rose, edged past him. “We’ve given the yard enough to talk about this morning. I’m leaving tomorrow to ride upriver.”
“With Rush Yarrow?”
“No. With an armed guard. I want that Wayfolk man. He’s the one who can answer questions.”
“When will you leave?”
“At dawn.”
“So,” he said, meeting her eyes. “Meguet.”
A swan wing, glistening, crossed her mind. She said, “Midnight.”
She rode across the yard the next morning with twenty of the household guard behind her, all in black, with a black, silken pennant flying overhead. The Gatekeeper, crossing in front of her to open the gate, looked up at her briefly. She saw night in his eyes, swamp leaves, secret, wind-stirred pools. His thoughts dragged at her; she closed her eyes, set her face resolutely toward the gate. Behind her eyes were moving, fire-edged shadows. A silver goblet spilled wine over white fur. She heard the gate open. She rode forward mechanically, her eyes on the road between the gateposts, where the Gatekeeper, moving, laid his shadow across her path.
Slowed as they were by spring-swollen ground, by water flooded with storm-pushed tides and snow melting in the upper lands, they reached Nyx’s house at mid-morning two days later. It looked more shrunken than mysterious in the spring light. Vines tugged at it here and there, threatening to encroach beneath a window sash, to pull off a corner beam. A motley gathering of old boats set the company on the dock. Meguet took two guards with her; they climbed the stairs cautiously.
Nyx came out to meet them on the porch. She looked dishevelled, dressed in threadbare velvet; her long dark hair fell untidily past her waist. Her face was pale, lean, smudged with tiredness and what looked like old ashes. She said, frowning:
“Meguet.” She cast a glance at the group on the dock, and her frown grew pinched. “If you’ve come for me, that’s far too many for courtesy, and far too few to do any good. I told you I would return home in spring.”
“If I had come for you,” Meguet said evenly, “I would have come alone. And unarmed. I have come for the Wayfolk man.”
“Why?”
“The Holder wishes to see him.”
“The Wayfolk man is gone.”
“Gone where?”
“He stepped through his circle of time. He might have gone anywhere.”
“He might have.” Nyx’s colorless eyes met hers, expressionless. “He might have gone upriver. He might have gone into a room in this rambling, changing, shifting house. He might have—”
Nyx’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know this house shifts itself?”
“I came back to spy on you.”
“Really.” She drew breath. “Really, Meguet. You do take chances. Did it ever occur to you that wandering around in a bog witch’s house might be dangerous?”
“Has it occurred to you yet that the Wayfolk man is dangerous? I came back that night when I saw you last, for only one reason: I looked at him and was warned.”
Nyx was silent. She pushed her hair back from her face absently, studying Meguet. “You never even spoke to him.”
“I know.”
“You saw him last in Berg Hold. He told me.”
“Yes. I came for him then. He disappeared into silver.”
“That was the Ring of Time. He stepped through it again two days ago. I cannot tell you where he went.”
“And why did he leave you so precipitously?”
“He is only Wayfolk,” Nyx said. “My work must have troubled him.”
“He stayed with you a long time before it troubled him.”
“Did my mother instruct you to question me?”
“She instructed me to find Corleu. I will find him.”
Nyx’s eyes flickered, a touch of color in them. “You even know his name.”
“Yes.”
“He is Wayfolk. Powerless.”
“He made a Ring of Time. He wakes power wherever he goes. And those powers are disturbing Ro House. I want him. Let me search the house.”
Nyx did not move. She said softly, “Meguet. You must not stand between the Wayfolk man and those powers.”
“Someone must,” Meguet said tautly. “Will you? Where do you stand? With the Wayfolk man, with those powers, or with Ro House?”
“I stand for myself,” Nyx said sharply and stood aside.
Meguet beckoned the guard up from the dock. She went first into the house. When she passed through the hallway, she heard Nyx’s cold voice behind her: “Stop.”
She held one arm across the door. Meguet waited, poised for anything from Nyx: charm, nightmare, a moment’s private conversation. Nyx spoke privately to the air. “These belong to the woman who entered. You will not harm them.”
She dropped her arm, turned away, letting the guards enter. Meguet’s skin prickled. “Who were you talking to?”
“My doorkeepers. They guard me, day and night. They never sleep. No one passes them without my permission.” She put her hands on Meguet’s shoulders, held her lightly. Her eyes seemed enormous, mist-cold. “Except you, my cousin Meguet. Except you. I have often wondered why.” She loosed her, as the guard, taking the stairs cautiously, began to file in. “Search.”
“The rooms in the house shift constantly,” Meguet said to the guard. “Don’t let it alarm you. If you get lost, you will be found.”
“By what?” someone wondered dourly.
“I will find you.” Nyx glanced at her sharply. She said no more, led the way through the single door opening out of the workroom. The hearth had been cold, she noticed, empty even of ashes. The air smelled only of a slight cellar damp. Nyx, she thought, is leaving. The guard separated, opened other doors, scattered themselves through rambling corridors, where the threads of time frayed and broke and knit again. Meguet wandered with them until she was alone, in a room empty but for a great loom, the thread in the shuttle a color not used before.
She opened the only door in that room, wanting one room, expecting one room, and found it: the room full of mirrors. She felt a sudden chill down the corridor, like a wind from a broken window, or the swift turn of a sorceress’s attention. She closed the door abruptly. All the mirrors were black.
“Meguet!” The door latch rattled, the door shook. “Meguet!”
She did not answer. Standing in the middle of the room, she watched the mirrors. All her thoughts were focused on one thing. The house heard her, showed it to her: the Cygnet in flight in all of its eyes.
They darkened again. Corleu, she thought, holding his face in her mind. You saw where he went from this house. You heard. Show me.
Others watched in her; she sensed their sudden waking interest, alert to her focused attention. They had watched him from the first, she realized then, before she even knew them. They had pulled her back into Nyx’s house, to hear his voice, listen for his name. The Wayfolk man was the danger to the Cygnet.
Fire flared in the heart of each dark mirror. A hand held the fire. The flame moved slowly, revealed a slab of marble, a lion’s paw, a gryphon’s eye. The flame shifted across the mirrors, across the dark between walls. Travelling, it illumined, briefly, a Wayfolk face.
“Meguet!” There was a shock of noise that should have broken the door. But Meguet, intent on the mirrors, held the door firm with nothing more, it seemed, than blind desire, and the old house strained to do her bidding. The blood had washed from her face; she could not move, she could scarcely breathe. The Wayfolk man had stepped through time into Chrysom’s maze.
The mirrors shook around her. The walls of the room shuddered, undulated. She whispered drily, “Not yet. Not yet,” and they held, as if the hands of all the ghosts of her ancestors stood with the ghosts of the house to buttress them.
Faces formed under the flickering light: brightly masked, half-human, half-animal. The flame moved from one carved, motionless face to the next. Meguet put her hands to her mouth, made a sound, another. He had found his way to the center of the maze.
“How?” she shouted furiously, and found no answer within herself, only a strange, watchful silence. “How?”
“Meguet!”
She turned, flung herself against the trembling door, felt the power threatening it, pushing inward against it, beating through her, like a heart, like wings. “Who is he? Nyx, who is he?”
He stood in the dark, surrounded by statues, in the small, empty chamber that all passages but one led away from. He had found the one passage. But he could not breach time itself. He turned in the dark, she saw from the changing light, like one uncertain. “He cannot,” she whispered through dry lips. “He cannot go within time.” The door bucked, throwing her. “Nyx!” she cried, still watching, as she picked herself up. “Nyx!”
“Meguet!”
She clung to the door again, felt a thousand years of power within her shielding the door to watch Corleu. “Who is he? Nyx, who is the Wayfolk man?”
“He said he is kin!”
“Kin to what?”
“To you! Meguet, what are you?”
Meguet closed her eyes. The door exploded inward with a sound like all the sorrows of the house. It flung her against a mirror, and then into the mirror. For an instant she saw room after room in the overburdened house torn by the conflict of powers in it. Walls and corners drew together, flattening; walls shrank. Ghosts thinned like spun thread. Guards tumbled, crying out soundlessly, terrified. Then they merged into wood, into warped glass. Meguet screamed, “No!” She felt glass against her mouth, glass tears falling from her eyes. Then the glass itself spun and spun toward nothing. Dimly, she heard it shatter.
She sat up slowly, amid an odd debris: a few rotten boards, a pink shoe, a pair of spectacles, a broken cauldron. She was sitting on bare, muddy ground where the house had stood. As if they felt the weight of her gaze, the ancient stairs gave up their hold on the leafless shrubs, slid with a dry clatter, like a pile of old bones, onto the dock. The drowned ghost stood up in her boat, staring upward under her hand. She vanished quite suddenly. So, inexplicably, did her boat. Guards in torn, mud-streaked uniforms pulled themselves upright, looking sour. Nyx, surrounded by a pile of old books and some broken jars, stirred near Meguet. She turned on her side, wincing. A book slid down the hillside, hit the river and floated.
She followed it a moment with her eyes. “Chrysom’s,” she said wearily. “They are indestructible.” She sat up, brushed old leaves out of her hair, then surveyed the destruction she and Meguet had wrought between them. She turned her head finally to stare at her cousin. “What exactly are you?”
Meguet slid her hands over her face, as much to evade that sudden, intense scrutiny, as to try to contain the headache that was rioting behind her eyes. “Desperate.” Her voice shook badly. “Nyx, what is the Wayfolk man doing in Chrysom’s maze?”
“Looking for something.”
Meguet dropped her hands, feeling the thousand-year-old fear like some icy wind, blowing off a place the sun never touched. Nyx’s eyes, catching at hers, seemed the color of that wind. “Looking for what?” she asked sharply.
The force of Nyx’s attention lessened finally. “He never told me. He is under duress not to tell. Something of Chrysom’s, I would guess, of great, secret power he may have hidden in the maze. Except that…”
“Except?”
“Not even Chrysom had power like yours,” Nyx said simply. Meguet, staring back at her, felt the chill again: this time, oddly, not an ancient fear for the Cygnet, but one a small night-hunter might feel for its bones, at owl wings darkening the moon. She got up too abruptly, had to quell the brawling in her head.
“It was only your power,” she said recklessly, “seeped into that crazed old house. I could not cast a spell of my own to save my life.” She counted heads swiftly, saw with relief that no one had been rendered into glass and framed. She held out a hand to Nyx. “We’re getting no farther than nowhere, sitting in the mud.”
For a moment it seemed the hand grasping hers was of stone, and the weight she pulled at was the stone-tortoise’s ponderous, time-burdened shell. “There are two things of great power in Ro House that I never knew existed,” Nyx said softly. “One is hidden in that maze. The other is you. If you will not tell me, Meguet, I will find out what you know, how you know it. One way or another, I will find out.”
White, mute, she set her teeth, pulled against Nyx’s grasp. Nyx, rising suddenly, nearly sent them both tumbling down the hillside. “Please.” She freed herself from Nyx’s hold. Her fists were clenched; the river blurred. “Please,” she whispered. “Just come home. Help us.”
The Gatekeeper found them a day or two later, trailing the twilight into the gate, a bedraggled company that caused him to lose his habitual impassivity.
“Lady Nyx,” he said, helping her dismount from behind Meguet. “Welcome.” Nyx, barefoot as the house had left her, grunted sourly as her foot hit a stone.
“Hew,” she said. She gestured a stableboy toward the great sack of books another rider carried. Then she folded her arms over her worn, archaic, velvet gown and surveyed the towers. “At least the house is still standing.”
The Gatekeeper held Meguet’s stirrup. She dismounted wearily, her face stiff. She could not smile at him; she could not even speak, until he touched her gently, as to help balance her, and then she could look at him, let him calculate the impossible distance the hand’s-breadth between them was. His hand rose toward her cheek, cupped air, dropped.
“You had a rough journey,” he breathed. She nodded, looking away from him until she could answer steadily.
“It isn’t over yet. Did the Hunter Hold Council arrive?”
“Not a sign of them. They’ll be a few days crossing the swamp. Lady Nyx, do you want a mount to ride to the towers?”
She shook her head. “I’d rather crawl, after that ride. I’m used to walking barefoot.” She took a step and stumbled, grasping at Meguet to keep her balance. Brows pinched in pain, she turned up a dirty foot. Blood welled across it.
She eased down, still clinging to Meguet, and picked up the glass she had stepped on. “What is this?” she asked, and Meguet tensed at the sharpness in her voice.
She took it from Nyx; red, it was, with curved, jagged edges. “It looks like part of a glass cup,” she said, puzzled. “A hollow ball of some kind. Why—”
“One of the juggler’s,” the Gatekeeper said shortly. “I missed it, lying there. I beg your pardon, my—”
“What juggler?” Nyx interrupted. Meguet stared at him.
“You let a stranger in the gate?”
“Not that I know,” he said, and she saw how his eyes had darkened with weariness, and the skin hugged the sharp bones of his face. “Unless he slid like a shadow under the gate. I took him for a cottager, juggling for the children. Smith, by the look of his shoulders.”
“You don’t know him,” she whispered, cold. “You don’t know his name.”
He hesitated. He put his hand to his eyes and said tiredly, “I never saw his face. Only his back and his juggling. Always those red glass balls. If he is a stranger, I don’t know how he got in.”
“You said it: a shadow under the gate.” Nyx took the glass from Meguet, dropped it. It shattered into fine sand, lay sparkling in the torchlight. “He is no stranger,” she said grimly. “He’s the Warlock with a heart of glass, and he has just laid blood across this threshold.”