CONTENTS

Meguet Vervaine stood at the threshold of Chrysom’s black tower, swans flying at her back and shoulder and wrists, swans soaring out of her hands. She had stood so for hours. Dressed in black silk with the Cygnet of Ro Holding spanning silver moons on mantle and tunic, she held the ancient broadsword of Moro Ro, unsheathed, tip to the floor, guarding against stray goose and cottage child’s ball and wandering butterfly, for within the broad, circular hall the councils from the four Holds had gathered to discuss their differences under the sign of the Cygnet and the formidable eye of Lauro Ro. In Moro Ro’s day, the threshold guards would have faced both chamber and yard, prepared for violence from any direction, not least from the volatile councils. Meguet, armed by tradition rather than necessity, faced the hall to keep the sun out of her eyes. She had gathered her long com-silk hair into a severe braid; her eyes, green a shade lighter than the rose leaves that climbed the walls of the thousand-year-old tower, kept a calm and careful watch over the sometimes testy gathering.

Members of the oldest families in Ro Holding had made long, uncomfortable journeys to meet for the Holding Council in a place where, not many weeks before, Meguet had found herself raising the sword in her hands to battle for her life. She did not expect trouble; it had come and gone, but some part of her still tensed at shadows, at unexpected voices.

But only the councilors themselves had provided any excitement, and that was contingent upon such complexities as border taxes. There had been sharp debate earlier in the day between Hunter Hold and the Delta over mines in the border mountains, which had kept everyone awake on the ninth day of the long council. Now, the heavy late-afternoon light, the pigeons murmuring in the high windows, and Haf Berg’s young, pompous, querulous voice maundering endlessly about sheep, threw a stupor over the hall. Meguet heard a snore from one of the back tables, She stifled a yawn. A sudden wind tugged at her light mantle. The air was a heady mix of brine and sunsteeped roses on the tower vines; it seemed to blow from everywhere at once: from past and future, from unexplored countries where wooden flowers opened on tree boughs to reveal strange, rich spices, and sheep the colors of autumn leaves wandered through the hills....

She felt herself drifting on the alien wind; a sound brought her back. The hall was silent; she wondered if she herself had made some noise. But it was only Haf Berg, sitting down at last, working his chair fussily across the flagstones. Lauro Ro watched him impassively. She sat at the crescent dais table, the Cygnet flying like a shadow through tarnished midnight stars on the vast, timeworn banner behind her. Her elegant face was unreadable, her wild dark hair so unnaturally tidy that Meguet suspected Nyx had bewitched it into submission. The Holder’s heir sat at her right, wearing her enigmatic reputation with composure. Lauro Ro asked, “Will anyone challenge Haf Berg’s painstaking examination of the problems of sheep pasturage on the south border of Berg Hold?” There was a daunting note in her voice. Only a pigeon challenged. Iris, on the Holder’s left, consulted a paper and whispered to her mother.

Rush Yarr sat beside Iris, and Calyx beside Nyx. The two younger sisters, one fair and reclusive, the other dark and distinguished most of the time by extraordinary rumors, bore the intense scrutiny of the council members calmly. When Calyx spoke, pearls and doves did not fall from her lips. When Nyx spoke, toads did not fall, nor did lightning flash. But it had taken days for the anticipation to fade.

The Holder spoke again. Linden Dacey of Withy Hold wished to bring up the matter of... Meguet tightened her shoulders, loosened them. A knot burned at the nape of her neck. She shifted slightly, easing some of her weight onto the blade she held. Across the room, the sorceress lifted her eyes at the flash of light.

They looked at one another a moment: cousins bound by blood and by secret, ancient ways. Memories gathered between them in the sunlit air. The swans on the hilt and etched blade in Meguet’s hands had taken wing, Nyx had transformed herself from bog-witch into Cygnet’s heir so recently that the sorcery in that hidden time and place beneath their feet must still be rebounding against the labyrinth stones. The sorceress’s eyes, mist-pale in the light, seemed mildly speculative, as if, Meguet thought, she contemplated turning her cousin into a bat to liven up the tedium. Meguet, returning her attention to the proceedings, half-wished she would.

Linden Dacey had brought up the matter of a border feud between Withy Hold and the Delta. A river had shifted, or been shifted; the south border, defined for centuries, was suddenly uncertain ... The great Hold banners swayed and glittered above her head as she spoke; eyes caught at Meguet. The Blood Fox of the Delta prowled on starry pads; one eye glinted as if thought had flashed through its bright threads. The Gold King of Hunter Hold, the crowned and furious sun, glared out of his prison of night. Meguet, gazing back, felt a sudden chill, as if the face of spun gold thread were alive again and watching.

Someone from the Delta interrupted Linden Dacey. There was an interesting squabble on the council floor. Old Maharis Kell jerked mid-snore out of his nap. The Holder let it rage a moment, probably to wake everyone up. Then she cut through it in a voice that must have brought a few cottagers in the outer yard to a dead stop. Rush Yarr slid a hand over his mouth. Calyx, catching a tremor in the air, glanced at him. Rush, Meguet noted, had recovered his sense of humor—or discovered it, she wasn’t sure which, for he had loved a sorceress who was never home for so long that likely even he didn’t remember if he had one. Calyx had entered the doorless walls of the tower he had built around himself, and he found her inside his heart.

Linden Dacey, finished finally, yielded debate to the chastened Delta councilor. Gold streaked suddenly through a west window. Meguet eyed her shadow, guessed at the time. Another hour. if that... The Delta councilor bit a word in half and was still. Meguet raised her eyes. On the dais, no one breathed. Behind her the yard was soundless. Not a child’s shout, a groaning wagon wheel, an iron blow from the smithy, disturbed the sudden, bewitched silence. Meguet stared at Nyx, wondering if, bored or daydreaming, she had thrown some spell over the council- But Nyx was entranced by the table, it seemed; she gazed at it, wide-eyed, motionless.

Someone had slowed time.

In the weird stillness, Meguet heard a footfall in the grass behind her. She whirled, her heart hammering, and brought the broadsword up in both hands. A man stood within the tower ring, staring up at the solitary black tower. The flaring arc of silver from the door as the broadsword cut through light startled him;

Meguet felt his attention riveted suddenly on her. In the brilliant, late light, the stranger cast no shadow.

She drew a slow, noiseless breath, tightening her hold on the blade, trapped in a world out of time by his sorcery and by her peculiar heritage: the sleepless compulsion to guard what lay hidden within the tower’s heart. The man’s face, blurred by the dazzling light or perhaps by shifting time, was difficult to see. He seemed a profusion of colors: scarlet, gold, white, dust, blue, silver, that sorted itself out as he moved, crossing the yard with a strong, energetic stride.

Tall as she was, Meguet was forced to look up at him. His hair and skin were the same color as the dust on the hem of his red robe and his scuffed yellow boots, as if the parched gold-brown earth of some vast desert blown constantly through sun-drenched air had seeped into him. A strange winged animal embroidered in white wound itself in and out of the folds of cloth at his chest. The robe was belted with a curious, intricate weave of silver; silver glinted also at his wrists beneath his sleeves. A pouch of dark blue leather was slung over his shoulder; another, of dusty yellow silk, hung beside that. He stopped in front of Meguet’s blade- She saw his face clearly then, as surprised by her as she was by him.

His eyes flicked over her shoulder at the motionless hall, then back to her. His broad, spare face was young yet under its weathering; his eyes, a light, glinting blue, were flecked with gold.

He said, amazed, “Who are you?”

Meguet, abandoned, with only a broadsword to protect the house against sorcery, found her voice finally. “You are in the house of the Holders of Ro Holding. If you have business with the Holder, present yourself to the Gatekeeper.”

He glanced behind him at the little turret above the gate, where the Gatekeeper leaned idly against the stones, a motionless figure in household black watching something in the yard. “Him.” He turned back. “He looks busy.” He touched the blade at his chest with one finger, but did not turn it. He grunted softly, his eyes going back to Meguet. “This is real.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you expect to do with it? You can’t keep me out of this tower with a sword. How can you have the power to see me through shifted time and still wave that under my nose? What are you? Are you a mage?”

“You have no business in this tower, you have no business in this house, and you have no business questioning me.”

“I’m curious,” he said. “You eluded my sorcery, and I had only thought to come and go so secretly no one would ever know.”

“Why?” she asked sharply. “Why have you come here?”

“I want something from this tower.”

She felt herself grow so still that no light trembled on the blade. “You may not enter.”

“There are a thousand ways to enter a tower. Every block of solid stone is an open doorway. You can’t guard every threshold.”

All fear had left her voice; it was thin and absolute. “If I must, I can.”

He was silent, puzzled again, at the certainty in her words. “It can’t be the sword,” he said at last. “The magic is in you, not that. True?” He caught the blade in one hand, so quickly that not the flick of an eyelash forewarned her. She wrenched at it; it might as well have been sunk in stone. “Not,” he mused, “the sword, then.” He loosed it as abruptly. She steadied herself, breathing audibly, while he studied her, his eyes quizzical, secret- “Perhaps,” he said finally, “it’s what you guard in this tower that gives you such power. Is that it?”

She raised the blade again, swallowing dryly. “No one may enter the tower at this time without permission from the Holder. Those are my instructions. You may not enter.”

“But the Holder will never know,” he said softly. “What I want has been hidden for centuries. No one knows it is here, and no one will miss it when it is gone. I will never return to Ro Holding. Let me pass. If all you’re brandishing against me is a point of honor, you won’t be dishonored. No one will ever know.”

“I will,” Meguet said succinctly. “And so will you. Honor is a word you would not bother to toss at me, if it meant nothing to you. You may not enter.”

He was silent again, so still he might have put himself under his own mysterious spell. His eyes had narrowed; light or memory flashed through them. “What made you time or honor’s guardian?” he breathed. “You have seen a few of its back roads, its crooked lanes and alleyways. Haven’t you. But you are not a mage- Or are you?” She did not answer. He stepped closer, she did not move. He stepped so close that the blade snagged the golden eye of the winged beast across his chest. He said, “If you do not let me enter, I will turn every rose on this tower into flame.”

“Then you will burn what you have come for.”

He moved closer. The blade turned a little in her hands as if the animal had shifted under it, and she felt me sweat break out on her face.

“I will seal every door and window in this tower, and turn it into a tomb for those you guard.”

“It is already a tomb.” Her voice shook. He stepped so close the blade slid ghostlike into him. Her shoulders burned at the sudden weight, but she held the blade steady under his expressionless gaze.

“If you do not let me enter, I will kill you.”

“Then,” she said, as sweat and light burned into her eyes, and the clawed, airy animal whipped beneath the blade like a desperate thing, “one of us will die.”

He stepped back then, as easily as if the great sword were made of smoke. The animal turned a smoldering eye at her and subsided into the cloth. The blade trembled in her hands; still she did not lower it. The mage’s face changed; the expression on it startled her.

“You deserve better than a doorway,” he said abruptly. “What kind of upside-down house is this where no power but honor is pitted against the likes of me? You can’t stop me. You can barely hold that sword. It is shaking in your hands- It is so heavy it weighs like stone, it drags you down. It is heavier than old age, heavier than grief. It falls like the setting sun, slowly, slowly. Watch it fall. Watch the tiny flame of light on its tip shift, move down the blade toward your hands. Watch it. The light trembles among the silver swan wings. What is your name?”

“Meguet Vervaine.”

“Is it night or day?”

“I do not know.”

“Are you awake or dreaming?”

“I do not know.”

“Are you a mage?”

“No.”

“Have you a mage’s powers?”

“No.”

“How do you have the power to see and move through shifted time?”

“I have no power.”

“Then who gives you power?”

“No one.”

“You have power. You are standing here talking to me when no one else in this house can move.”

“I have no power.”

“What gives you power?”

“Nothing.”

“You are guarding something from me as steadfastly as you guard this door. I will enter this tower. Do you have the power to stop me?”

“You may not enter.”

“Do you have the power to stop me?”

Meguet was silent. Wind brushed her face, a cool breeze smelling of twilight. For a moment she stared senselessly at what she saw: the inner yard, the towers, the outer yard through the arches, where cottagers’ children flung a ball back and forth, and the Gatekeeper on the ground, his back to her, opened the gate to a couple of riders. Then she looked down at her hands. They were locked so fiercely, so protectively around the hilt of Moro Ro’s sword that her fingers ached, loosening. The smell of roses teased her memory. I fell asleep, she thought surprisedly. / had a dream....

Then the Holder’s voice snapped across the chamber. “Meguet!”

She turned, startled. The sword slipped out of her hold, rang against the stones like a challenge, and she saw beside it the rose that had flung itself off the outer wall into the room to lie burning in her shadow. She dragged her eyes away from it to the dais.

Nyx had vanished.

Dream shifted into time, became memory; she felt me blood leap out of her face. She reached down, snatched up the rose and began to run.

On the dais, the sorceress had felt the sudden shift of time.

Intrigued, she simply sat still, not a difficult thing to do for one who had spent nights in the black deserts of Hunter Hold watching the constellations turn and the orange bitterthorn blossom open its fullest to the full moon. She saw Meguet bring up the sword in her hands, turn. The fair-haired stranger stopped at the threshold. Nyx’s attention focused, precise and fine-honed, on her cousin, who was waving a blade of sheep grass against the wind. Their voices carried easily across the eerie silence.

She watched, unblinking, while the stranger came so close to Meguet only the swans on the sword hilt protected her. Light sparking off a jewel in Nyx’s hair would have alerted the mage; when he forced her to move, he would not see her. But he backed away from Meguet, passed around her, left her defending a breached threshold in a dream. He had paused, for some reason, to pick a rose off the tower vines. He dropped it in Meguet’s shadow. He passed among the councilors with no more interest in them than if they had been hedgerows. At the stairs, beneath the Blood Fox prowling between green swamp and starry night on the Delta banner, he hesitated. The power within the tower was complex, layered as it was with Ctuysom’s ancient wizardry, household ghosts, the impress upon the centuries of every mage or Cygnet’s guardian who had left a trace of power lingering in time. Beneath that lay the entombed mage and the vast and intricate power within the Cygnet’s heart. He would not recognize that power, but he would be aware, like a man stepping to the edge of a chasm at midnight, that something undefined was catching at his attention. To separate what sorcery the stranger had come to find from the emanations of power and memory within the ancient stones would require at least a walk up the spiral stairs. When the stranger had felt his way through the lingering magic beyond the first curve, Nyx rose. She formed an image of Chrysom’s library in her mind, book and stone and rose-patterned windows, and stepped into it.

She waited.

The sight of Nyx reading at one of the tables made the stranger pause a heartbeat, as if his glance into the council chamber had snared her in his memories. But she gazed down at the page—a list of cows who had calved four hundred and ninety years before— with rapt attention. In that magic-steeped chamber he would not notice her mind working. He had reached his goal; his attention flicked like a needle in a compass toward what he had come to steal.

The stone mantel above the fireplace was littered with thousand-year-old oddments of Chrysom’s that had somehow survived accidents, misplacements, pilfering and spring cleaning. Nyx had no idea what they were, besides volatile and unpredictable. The stranger glanced briefly at them. He stood in the center of the room, sending out filaments of thought like a spider spinning a web, into tables, hearth, book shelves, ancient weapons, cracked, bubbled mirrors, tapestries on the wall. He ignored Nyx, who, surrounded by mysteries, was reading about cows. He moved finally, abruptly, across the room to kneel at the hearth. His hands closed around one of the massive cornerstones that was crusted with centuries of ash. He tried to shift it. Now that he had shown her where it was, Nyx asked before he found it,

“What in Moro’s name are you looking for in there?”

He was so startled that he nearly leaped back into his own time. Parts of him faded and reappeared; a wing on his robe unfolded in the air and folded itself back into thread- He did not so much turn as rearrange himself through shifting moments of time to face her. She recognized the white animal then, from some of Chrysom’s ancient drawings: She thought he had imagined it, from some tale so old there was scarcely a word for it in Ro Holding. The mage, his face a few shades paler than dust, studied her while he caught his breath.

He said abruptly, “You were in the hall, down there. I remember you now. Your eyes.”

She lifted a brow, “You saw me watching you?”

“No. I remember their color, when I passed the dais. Like a winter sky. You are a mage. It’s hard to tell, in this house.”

“People who belong in this house recognize me easily.” She rested her chin on her palm, contemplating him. “You are a thief. You are not from Ro Holding, or I would know you by now; your remarkable power would have caught my interest.”

‘ “You have some remarkable powers yourself,” he said with feeling. “You nearly turned me inside-out, scaring me like that.”

“I know a few things,” she said.

“You don’t know what’s in this stone. You never knew anything at all was in there. I can name it. That makes it mine.”

“Fine,” she said dryly. “I will let you keep the name. You may take that and yourself out of this tower. How dare you bewitch this entire house and wander through it, pilfering things? What kind of barbaric country taught you that?”

“Only one thing,” he pointed out. “One pilfering. That’s all I need. Something you have never needed. Let me take it and go. I’ll never return to Ro Holding again.”

“You have more than theft to answer for. You disturbed my cousin Meguet. You threatened her and tried to coerce her.” He opened his mouth to answer, did not. Nyx continued grimly, running one of Calyx’s pens absently in and out of her hair, “You used sorcery against her.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was curious.”

“You were cruel.”

He drew breath, his eyes nicking away from her; she saw the blood gather under his tan. “I was never taught,” he said finally, “to make such fine distinctions. In my country, ignorance is dangerous; curiosity can be ruthless. But I would never have harmed your cousin. I only wanted to know—“

“I know what you only wanted to know.” She paused, her own eyes falling briefly. She took the pen out of her hair and laid it down. She folded her hands in front of her mouth and looked at the stranger again. “But it’s none of your business. Now leave this house in peace.”

He paused, his eyes narrowed faintly, light-filled, hidden. “You’re curious, too,” he said slowly. “You want this thing only because you don’t know what it is.” She nodded, unperturbed. For a moment their eyes held, calculating, and then, abruptly, he yielded, tossing up a hand. “I never expected to find this tower so well-guarded. And now I have run out of rime....”

And he was gone, to her surprise, as easily and noiselessly as light fading on stones. Distant sounds wove into the air again: children shouting, cows lowing as they came in from the back pastures. The Holder, she remembered suddenly, would be discovering the empty chair beside her. But Meguet would reassure her. Nyx knelt at the hearth, touched the stone with her hands, and then with her mind. Neither moved it. She wrapped her thoughts around the stone, feeling its weight and texture, its size: a single block of charred marble in a hearth so old the stones were all sagging into one another. As she studied it, she felt something watching her. She lifted her head. A crow winging out of the mantel gazed at her out of its black marble eye.

She reached up, touched the eye. Nothing moved. Above it, in relief, the Cygnet flew the length of the mantel through a black marble sky, its eye aligned with the crow’s eye. She had to stand on air to reach it. The Cygnet’s eye moved nothing- She stood thinking, her own eyes flicking across the scattered convocation of crows, until in all their black stone eyes the pattern formed.

It was a constellation: All the eyes were stars, depicting the Cygnet flying across the night. A riddle, she thought, no one outside of Ro Holding would have guessed. She felt a rare impulse for caution, but dismissed it immediately, too close to the mystery, too curious. One after another she touched the dark stars. The stone, its mortar sifting dryly into the firebed, swung free.

She barely had time to look into it, when something struck her—a wind, a thunderbolt—and flung her at the mantel and then into it among the crows. She cried out, startled; her mouth was stopped with stone. She concentrated, found the face of one of the crows and gathered herself like a thought in its stony mind and then into a point of light within its eye. Beneath her, she saw the mage looking into the hollow stone.

Meguet, slamming the library door wide, knocked a shield off the wall. The mage, barely glancing up, flung a hand out impatiently, murmuring. The animal leaped from his breast, a sinuous blur of white that poured to the floor, bounded upward again, catching air with its wings, claws out, aimed at its prey. Meguet threw up her arm, wielding a rose against it. Something—the streak of red in the air, a sound she made—caught the mage’s attention. His head snapped around. For an instant the rose stunned him. Then he spoke sharply. The animal halted in midflight; white embroidery thread snarled in the air. Nyx dropped like a tear out of the crow’s eye, reappeared in front of Meguet. The air seemed to snarl in her wake as she dragged remnants of the mage’s spell from the air and threw them back at him. The mage began to fray in different directions at once, as if he were spun of fine threads of time, all unravelling. He cried something before he vanished. The cry skipped like a rock across water, snatched the gently falling thread. Cry and thread whirled away into nothing.

Meguet sagged against the open doorway, felt air and brought herself upright. “Moro’s name,” she whispered. “What did you do to him?”

Nyx, her eyes flooded with color, untangling herself from her sorcery, looked bewitched herself, something only half human. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never done that before.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I have no idea.” She drew a deep breath then;

her eyes relinquished color, became familiar. She glanced toward the noise that had followed Meguet up the stairs. She touched her cousin, who, having fought some ancient and very peculiar sorcery not many weeks before, seemed oddly shaken by a tidy piece of work. “Stay here. Keep them out. If he comes back, this time not even that rose will stop him.”

She crossed the room quickly, knelt at the hearth. Meguet, watching the air for a warning of color, was jostled by the first of the guard who, weapons drawn, flung themselves precipitously toward the threat to the house. Several of the more agile councilors were among them. Meguet heard the Holder’s voice farther down the stairwell.

She turned briefly, stilled the guard with a gesture. They quieted, peering over Meguet’s shoulders at Nyx, who was gazing meditatively into a cracked, charred stone adrift from the hearth. The silence spread; subdued whisperings passed it back to the crowd at the top of the stairs, until it reached even the Holder. Meguet felt her coming in eddies of movement as the guard pushed a path clear for her. She joined Meguet, who was guarding yet another threshold, eyed her daughter, and went no farther.

“What is it?” she asked. She had evidently flung a trail of pins down the stairs; most of her hair had fallen loose. She was frowning deeply; her black eyes were expressionless, wintry, but she kept her voice low, “Was she harmed?”

“No. There was a strange mage. a thief, trying to steal something—she may still be in danger.”

“Moro’s eyes, she knows enough sorcery to make Chrysom sit up in his tomb—why didn’t she just let him have what he wanted?”

“Because she doesn’t know what it is.”

“I thought she knew everything by now.”

“She’s trying to be careful.”

The Holder stared at her. “Really. And how did this thief get past the Gatekeeper9”

“He slowed time.”

The Holder’s response caused even Nyx, feeling through the stone for mage-traps, to raise her eyes. The Holder, still furious, lowered her voice midsentence, “—in the middle of the Holding Council, wandering among us at will, it’s unthinkable, intolerable. You couldn’t stop him?”

Meguet sighed noiselessly. “I tried. All he wanted was something of Chrysom’s, nothing more serious. I had no power against sorcery. Nothing but a sword.”

The Holder was silent, gazing at her quizzically. Her eyes dropped to the rose in Meguet’s hand. Meguet, staring at it, felt the color blaze into her face. She lifted her other hand, pushed it against her eyes, and saw the rose again, lying beside the sword in her shadow.

She let it fall, as if a thorn had pricked her. “I was bewitched.”

“Apparently,” the Holder said curiously. “But, I wonder, by what?”

A murmuring rippled through the crowd at Meguet’s back; she looked up to see what the mage wanted so badly out of the stone that he had stopped the world.

Nyx held it in her hand: a golden key. ,

Two

Nyx was crouched under a table in the mage’s library a day later, picking at a crack in the stone floor with her fingernail, when the firebird flew over the gate. Engrossed, she did not immediately hear the effect of its arrival. The Hold Councils and most of the household were at supper; strings and flutes from the third tower played a distant, ancient music in the peaceful twilight that wove among the reeds and drums from the cider house. Nyx, dressed for supper, had forgotten it. Cobwebs snagged in her dark hair; absently, she had rearranged the elaborate, jewelled structure until pins and strands of tiny pearls dangled around her face. Her black velvet dress was filigreed with dust; she had walked out of her shoes some time ago. Her eyes, usually the color of bog mist, were washed with lavender. Her face had taken on a feral cast; she seemed to be scenting even threads of smoke ingrained in the ancient stone.

The disorderly clamor of people and animals finally intruded into her concentration. She straightened abruptly against the table top. Someone pounded on the door, then opened it.

“Nyx!”

It was Calyx, who, looking high and low in the shadows, finally looked low enough. Nyx, rubbing her head crossly, said, “I thought I locked that door. What in Moro’s name is that racket in the yard?”

“It’s a bird,” Calyx said dazedly. “What are you doing under the table? And what have you—“ Her voice caught; color washed over her delicate face. She found her voice again, raised it with unusual force. “Nyx Ro, what have you done with all the ancient household records I was studying?”

“Over there,” Nyx said, waving at a cairn of books as she crawled out. “A bird. What bird?”

“They’re all jumbled up! I had them all in order, a thousand years of household history—And look what you’ve done to this room!”

A pile of chairs balanced on a tiny wine table; shields and furs and tapestries hung in midair above their heads; bookshelves climbed up the stairs to the roof. Spell books, histories, accounts, diaries, rose like monoliths from the floor. Nyx, her arms folded, stood as still among them, eyes narrowed at her sister.

“Calyx,” she said softly. “What bird?”

“Look at this mess! And look at your face! There are black smudges all over it.”

“That would be from the chimney. Calyx—“

“You put your face up the chimney?”

“Evidently.”

“Why,” Calyx asked more precisely, “did you put your face up the chimney?”

“Because I’m looking for something,” Nyx said impatiently. “Why else would I crawl up a chimney?”

“I have no idea- I thought, after studying sorcery for nine years, you’d pull an imp out of the air to do it for you. Maybe I can help you. What is it we’re looking for?”

“Most likely a book.”

Calyx stared at her. “Did you,” she asked ominously, “look on the bookshelves?”

“Oh, really. Calyx.” She wiped at ash with her sleeve, her breath snagging on a sudden laugh. “You do keep dwelling on nonessentials. After studying sorcery for nine years, I have learned how to clean up a room.” She picked her way through the chairs to the windows. From that high place, she could see the parapet wall linking the seven white towers, most of the cottages clustered beyond the wall, and the vast yard with its barns and forges and craft houses that dealt with the upkeep of the household and the lands that rambled endlessly within the outer wall. One thing caught her eye instantly at that busy hour.

“The Gatekeeper is not at the gate,”

And then she saw the flash of fire that scratched the air with gold and turned a rearing cart horse into a tree with diamond leaves.

Meguet had been silting with the Gatekeeper in his turret when the bird flew over the gate. Dressed in corn-leaf silk the color of her eyes, strands of tiny jewels braided into her rippling hair, she had abandoned guests and musicians in the supper hall, pulled on her oldest boots and wandered into the summer twilight to talk to the Gatekeeper. She had seen nothing of him the day before; at the Holder’s request she had stood watch in Chrysom’s library most of the evening, while Nyx puzzled over the key she had found. Some of the gossip had evidently found its way to the gate; as she entered the turret, the Gatekeeper handed her a rose.

She eyed him; his lean, sun-browned face, with its silvery-green swamp-leaf eyes, was expressionless. She said, “It was red, not white.”

“I hoped you’d like this better.” Then she saw the beginnings of his tight, slanted smile, and she sighed and slid onto the stone bench next to him.

“I was hoping no one had noticed. Does gossip blow on the wind across this yard? Or do you hear through stone?”

“People like tales.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “For nine days you’ve stood at that tower door with a sword in your hands. When you suddenly toss it aside for a rose, it causes comment. What was he like, this mage who gave you the rose?”

“You should know,” she said grimly. “You let him in.”

He stirred; his eyes flickered away from her, across the wall, where the lazy tide sighed and broke. “He did get past me. Odd things have, in this house. Tell me what happened. No one saw him but you and Nyx, and the tales being spun around this mysterious mage make me afraid to open the gate.”

She smiled at the thought. “You’d open the gate to winter itself. Or time, or the end of it.” She brought the white rose to her face, breathed in its scent. He opened her other hand, dropped his lips on her palm where thorns had left an imprint.

“You fought a battle with the red rose.”

“I nearly lost it,” she said, and heard his breath.

“Tell me,” he said, and listened with the hard, expressionless cast that his face took on when something disturbed him. He applied a taper to his ebony pipe before the end of it, blowing smoke seaward, his eyes hidden. She told much of the tale to the rose, turning it in her fingers, finding memories in its whorl of petals.

“Is he expected back?” he asked. “Or did she kill him?”

“She doesn’t know. She told the Holder that if he is alive he might return, since he seemed that desperate.”

“For a key? To what?”

“Nyx thinks a book. Some secret magic book of Chrysom’s.”

“I thought she had all his books.”

“So did she.”

He turned his head, tossed smoke downwind. “What kinds of things would a mage keep hidden?”

“That,” she sighed, “is why Nyx refuses to let the stranger have what he wants, which is the advice that, at some length, the Holder gave her. If she knew, she might let him take it and stop threatening the house. But she is spellbound by this book that she can’t even find.”

“So is the stranger, it sounds, stopping time and threatening to burn the house down for it.”

“What was that like? Did you feel time stop?”

He shook his head. “Your com-silk hair caught my eye; I turned to look at you. I was hoping you would turn. Then I blinked, and there was your face. Then you vanished into the tower, and what caught my eye was the blade of silver light on the stones just inside the door. A moment later one of the tower guards ran for help. And I guessed what the light must be. I nearly left the gate. But I didn’t want to risk trouble letting itself out while I was gone, though it had wandered in without my help. So I waited. And the tales started flying like birds out of the tower, each one more colorful than the last.” He touched the rose in her hand. “They all said you were safe.” He paused, his eyes going seaward again, where white birds flashed over the water and dived- “I caught the gist of it: a mage, a key—“

“Don’t say it.”

“And a blood-red rose.”

She looked at him, said recklessly, “You were watching; you must have seen him pick it.”

He blinked, wordless, then pulled her close suddenly; she heard his heartbeat. “What do you think? That I would have stood here sunning myself like a tortoise while you defended a sleeping Holding Council alone against a mage who could have left you lying on your shadow as easily as the rose? Is that what you think?”

“Yes.” she said, for there were gates within gates into the house, and she suspected he watched them all. “No. Yes. What I think is that you know exactly what comes and goes through that gate.”

He was silent. His hold eased; he dropped a kiss on her hair, and said finally, “So I do. And in case die mage considers knocking at the gate next time, tell me what I should look for.”

“A man,” she said. “taller than me, by a few inches. With hair a dusty golden-brown and light eyes like water. The animal is embroidered on his robe.” She paused, thinking back. “He wears silver at his wrists—“

“Old?”

“No older than you. Taller than me—“

“You said that.”

“And he moves like a man accustomed to space.”

“You noticed a lot in an eye-blink,” he commented dryly. She looked at him, her eyes still and clear as the sky where the sun had set and the memory of light lingered. He swallowed a word. His face dropped toward hers. Their lips touched. And then he turned abruptly, snatching her breath along with his, and she saw the firebird over his shoulder.

It seemed to blow out of the sea like spume, so white it was, and so fast it flew; then, as it passed the turret, she saw the fiery wingtips and the long, graceful plumes that trailed behind it like flame. Its talons were silver. It gave a cry of such fierce fury and despair that it drove the blood from her face and brought the Gatekeeper to his feet. The busy yard stopped as if it were spellbound again. With the cry came fire: a forge-fire, and a hammer, and the hand holding the hammer froze into silver.

Meguet hit the ground running before she realized she had moved. There were cottagers’ children transfixed by the swooping bird; there were animals everywhere, it seemed—horses, cows still coming in to be milked, chickens, hounds. The bird, crying’ again, turned a comer of a barn into bronze, and nicked a hound’s ear. The hound bellowed, blundered into the cows; there was a small stampede toward the bewitched forge. Stable girls hurried to take in the horses, ducking their heads under their arms as at pelting hail. The bird wheeled above a group of barefoot children who had twisted themselves into a knot with a piece of harness. Meguet and several of the cottagers ran toward them as they struggled frantically- The bird’s fire missed the children, hit a cat slinking away into the shadows and turned it into a jewelled sword. Meguet snatched it up. Wielding it above the children, she startled them into tears. She cut them free of each other; they scattered, wailing, then turned again, too fascinated to find shelter.

She saw Rush Yarr and a few of the younger councilors on the tower wail with bows; household guards were racing to position themselves along the crenelation. She saw Rush fix an arrow, draw back and aim. She slowed, feeling a sudden, unreasonable dismay form like a shout in her throat. The bird, a swirl of white and red, cried its enraged sorrow; fire swept the wall, and all the archers ducked. The stones themselves turned gold.

“Nyx,” she breathed. The Gatekeeper, struggling with a panicked can horse, shouted at her.

“Meguet!”

“I’m going to get Nyx! Tell them not to shoot!”

“It’s not the bird in danger,” he retorted, holding the horse as stablers unhitched the lurching cart. “It’s -you standing there waiting to be turned into a silver rose.”

“It cries so,” she said, puzzled, hearing it again, a sound that made her throat constrict. The horse reared, throwing the Gatekeeper; it elongated itself as the fire hit it. Its dark hide turned to wood; harness rustled through its still, shimmering leaves to the ground. Meguet, hand to her mouth, stifling a cry, stared at the Gatekeeper. He glittered no more than usual, and, rolling promptly under the cart, seemed unharmed.

He shouted at her, “Go!”

She went, still carrying the transformed cat, out of habit, and dragging her skin high above her boots as she ran. Nyx, who seemed to have fallen like a rose off the vines, appeared abruptly in front of her outside the dark tower.

“I’m here,” she said, putting a hand on Meguet’s shoulder to keep from being run over. The bird cried above them; transfixed, they followed it with their eyes. Calyx, hanging precipitously out a window, ducked suddenly inside. A shower of bronze apples scattered on the grass.

“Roses,” Nyx said tersely, eyeing them. “Not Calyx.”

“Moro’s name,” Meguet said, dragging at air. “What is it?”

“A firebird.”

“It cries like wood might cry in the fire. Why does it cry like that?”

“They do, according to sources. The cry of the firebird is fierce, desperate, terrible. So Chrysom wrote of, he thought, a fabled bird.”

“It sounds human,” Meguet said simply, and Nyx looked at her, a colorless, dispassionate gaze. A line ran between her dark brows; she opened her mouth to answer, then turned her head as the guard, followed by curious guests, fanned across the tower yard. The bird cried again, wheeled at them, and they retreated beneath the archways of the tower wall. Fire washed through the archway at their heels, glazed the cobbles with opal. “Nyx, can you do something?” Meguet pleaded. “Before it gets hurt?”

Nyx glanced at her again. “You have a peculiar fondness for birds,” she said dryly. She lifted her hand as to a falcon; the bird circled the dark tower, circled again. Meguet, watching, thought she saw a thread form between Nyx’s uplifted hand and the bird, a gossamer strand of air that shimmered faintly with light against the evening sky. The bird cried once again, spiralling down toward them. Onyx roses swayed on the vine, broke free. Something else flashed in the comer of Meguet’s eye: Rush Yarr’s blood-fox hair. She turned, running again across the yard as he crouched in an archway, following the bird with his arrow.

“Rush!”

She knew his aim; it was far better than the sorcery he was evidently breathing into his bow. Concentrating, he did not hear her. He shot. Behind Meguet, Nyx flung out another thread. It caught the arching arrow mid-flight; the bird, riding air to meet it, picked it up like prey and cried its fiery rage. The fall of red and gold streaked the dusk. Meguet, running headlong into it, felt a moment of complete astonishment before her eyes filled with gold and then with night.

The evening was suddenly very quiet. The bird flew up the black tower and disappeared. Rush’s bow, dropping on the bespelled cobbles, seemed to echo within the tower ring- Nyx, motionless at the foot of the tower, met his stunned eyes. After a blank moment of shock, during which her brain seemed capable only of grappling with analogies, she regathered her attention and picked at the weavings of the force that had transformed Meguet. The spell, at first touch, seemed oddly seamless. Calyx, emerging breathlessly from the tower, bumped into Nyx; she stirred, blinking, overwhelmed again. As if the still emerald leaves had beckoned, they drew the three, along with guards and fascinated guests, to stand staring, speechless, trying to see Meguet among the leaves and roses.

“Oh, Rush,” Calyx whispered reproachfully.

“I didn’t—I swear I didn’t even see her!” He touched a glassy leaf tentatively; his eyes sought Nyx’s. “Can’t you do something?”

“I was trying!” she flared, exasperated, and Rush flushed a dull red.

“I’m sorry. I am so clumsy with sorcery. It makes me blind and deaf and extremely stupid.”

Nyx did not bother to answer. She touched the rose-tree here, there, with her mind. It was a great jewel of malachite and emerald, with ruby, garnet, amber and moonstone blossoming among clouds of paler jade. Within the jewel was Meguet; seeking her, Nyx found veil after veil of fire, and, at last, the face of the bird.

It was masked, like a swan, with red plumage; its eyes were golden. Sensing her, it cried. The Cygnet in front of it, flying on a long triangle of night sky, melted into a strange vine with swan-shaped leaves.

The bird was on the tower roof- Nyx spun her thread again, flung it like a message: / am the one you seek. The bird landed a moment later, noiseless, glowing faintly, its white and fiery red bruising the dusk, clinging, with silver talons, to the malachite leaves.

The faces around Nyx resolved themselves again. The Gatekeeper’s was among them, pale, expressionless, hard as the jewel he stared at.

“Apt,” he commented. His hand slid among the leaves and silver moms, closed gently around the stem. Nyx saw him swallow. “It was me put the idea into its head,” he added, ten years of courtly smoothness swamped suddenly by his river-brat’s accent.

“Me shouting at her like that.” Like Rush, he sought Nyx’s eyes. She said slowly, her arms folded tightly,

“It’s an intriguing spell. I can’t seem to find her, only the bird. It should be simple, but it’s not.”

“I’ll wait,” the Gatekeeper said.

“The bird is waiting, too,” Calyx said wonderingly. “It’s not screaming now. Is it real? Or sorcery?”

“I can’t tell yet,” Nyx said. She held its eyes, looking, with her smudged, jewel-framed face, as fey as the firebird. Voices disturbed her; they all turned, saw the Holder and her oldest daughter, surrounded by household guard, half the Hold councilors and their assorted families.

“There it is’” someone cried, as they crossed the yard. They gathered in sudden, perplexed silence around what it clung to. The Holder, her hair nearly as dishevelled as her daughter’s, studied the firebird grimly. The guard ringed it, arrows poised; Calyx cried in horror,

“Don’t shoot it! You’ll hit Meguet!”

“Meguet,” the Holder exclaimed, then took in the truant Gatekeeper, his hand, and what he held. Her dark eyes widened; her voice, raised, caused even the firebird to shift. “Moro’s eyeteeth! I’ll wring its neck!”

“Mother,” Nyx breathed.

“That’s Meguet? Are you sure?”

“Magic seems to follow her in that shape,” the Gatekeeper said.

“Why,” Lauro Ro demanded of Nyx, “are you just standing there? Are you waiting for the roses to bloom?”

“I’m waiting,” Nyx said tartly, “for some peace and quiet.”

“After alt that time in the bog, what you don’t know about birds, inside and out, you could thread a bead with. How could you let this happen? Can she breathe in there? Is she even alive?”

Iris, her stately and practical eldest, glanced at Nyx’s frozen face, and then at the guests fascinated by the sorcery and by the threat of explosion between the Holder and her unpredictable heir. Troubled, she touched her mother’s arm. “Mother, Nyx knows what she needs to work with, and if it’s peace and quiet, you could at least stop shouting. How could anything possibly be Nyx’s fault? Do you think there is anything she wouldn’t do for Meguet?”

The Holder looked at her dusty, barefoot heir, standing dark and stilt, with the first wash of light from the rising moon spilling over her shoulder. She gestured at me guard; they lowered their bows, but kept their tight, watchful circle. Nyx, her voice low, taut, said,

“There is no reason to think she isn’t alive. But the bird’s magic is random, uncalculated, and very strong. What I need to know is if the bird is the sorcerer or the sorcery. The maker of the magic, or simply its bewitched object. For some reason, it’s difficult to tell. It shouldn’t be this difficult, but it is. I can’t find Meguet at all. You’ll have to be patient. Please. If you startle me bird, it may scream again, and I’ll have twice the mystery to undo.”

The Holder sighed. Arms folded, pins dangling in her wild hair, she looked much like her magical daughter. “I’m sorry,” she said. “All this sorcery makes me edgy. It’s quiet, now. And not afraid of any of us. It didn’t, most likely, fly into my house to turn Meguet into a rose-tree. Was it looking for you?”

“I think so.”

“The guard say it snatches arrows out of midair.”

“It caught mine,” Rush said. “Meguet was running to stop me; she got tangled in its cry.”

“There’s a blacksmith in the yard with a silver hand,” the Holder said grimly. “If this bird is the sorcerer, it has much to account for. May we watch? If it turns you into a black rose-tree, may I wring its neck then?”

Nyx smiled a little. “Please.” The smile faded; her brows twitched together again. “What intrigues me most is something Meguet said. She has no power of sorcery, but sometimes she can make very complicated things very simple, by looking at them from an angle I miss. She said about the bird: It has a human cry. That, I think, must be what makes its cry so terrible.”

The bird had not stirred since the Holder startled it; it clung like something carved of marble to its spell. A curve of moon rising behind the east tower caught in its silver talons; they flashed like blades. Its eyes, flooding with moonlight, turned milky. Nyx looked at it, leaving her mind open, still, tranquil, an invitation for whatever violence or enchantments or speech it might be moved to. It gazed back at her, as still as she. She tried again to find some thought of Meguet within its spell: Leaves moved through her eyes, endless leaves and petals of carnelian and beaten gold, as if she wandered through an enchanted garden.

Moonlight touched the jewelled leaves, spilled its cold fire over the bird. It roused abruptly, crying its fierce and terrible cry, but its fire only fell pale and spent, harmless as the risen moon’s light. As it moved, leaves trembled. The Gatekeeper, still holding a stem, found his hand at Meguet’s neck, her hair falling over his arm. For a moment her eyes were malachite, and then they were her own, blinking, surprised, at the Holder’s face. The bird landed at her feet in a flood of light. The cry it gave, as it transformed itself, was fully human.

Three

He looked without expression at the arrows aimed at him, as if he did not recognize them, or as if such things, in his peculiar life, were commonplace. Meguet, stooping instinctively for the sword she had dropped, started as it slunk away under her hand. No one else moved; his cry held them spellbound. But nothing of its raw fury and despair lingered in his face; he did not seem to realize he had made a sound.

He was oddly dressed, in a tattered dirty tunic of blue silk, and an embroidered belt of raw red silk. Beneath that he wore a close-fitting garment of gold thread or mail. His soft leather boots were torn and scuffed. He wore strange metal bands at his wrists, intricately fashioned, as if strands of molten metal had been poured over each other in a wide filigree. They looked fire-scorched, so blackened they might have been made of iron. His hair, thick, black, fell past his shoulders. The moon, striking his face at an angle, illumined half: a dark brow, long bones at cheek and jaw, skin drawn tightly across them. The other side of his face was dark.

He did not speak; he seemed resigned to whatever impulses his actions might have inspired. Nyx, connecting moonlight with the pale fire that had come out of the bird before it changed, asked abruptly,

“How long are you human?”

He seemed surprised that she had thought to ask. “Until midnight.” His voice was nearly inaudible. “Then the bird hunts.”

“What,” the Holder asked sharply, “does it hunt?”

“I think mice.”

“Who are you? What kind of outlandish place are you from, flying into my house, frightening my household, turning my niece into a rose-tree?”

Meguet, glancing around for the niece in question, took a step backward suddenly, found her own shape against the Gatekeeper.

“The bird cries. It changes things.” His voice held a hollow, haunted weariness. “I cannot stop it. Are you the mage?”

“No. I am the Holder of Ro Holding.”

“Ro Holding.” The blankness in his voice was stunning. Then he added, ‘ “The realm of the Cygnet. I have seen the black swan flying on warships’ sails. Or the bird has. One of us. Or perhaps it was only a picture. I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember your name?” Nyx asked. He looked at her for a long time before he answered.

“You are the mage.”

“I am Nyx Ro. And mage, sorceress, bog-witch, something of everything.” She was holding his eyes, speaking slowly, calmly, using words like tiny grappling hooks to draw and fix his attention. “You are ensorcelled. You came for help.”

“Yes,” he breathed. “The bird cries for help—it transforms its cries to jewels, gold, anything precious to catch the eye.”

“How did you know to find help here?”

“The bird knew.”

“You are the bird.”

He opened his mouth, closed it. His face changed suddenly, like shifting flame: For a moment he was going to scream. And then it changed again, forgetting. “No. The bird is the sorcery.”

“How long have you been ensorcelled?”

“I do not know. A week. A month. A century. I do not know.”

“Where are you from?”

“I have forgotten.”

“What is your name?”

“I have forgotten,” he whispered. Nyx was silent; her own eyes, catching the moon’s pale fire, turned misty, inhuman. Meguet, resigned to the expression in them, knew she had ensorcelled herself by her own curiosity. After a moment, Nyx loosed the man, turned her gaze to the Holder. Her brows crooked questioningly. The Holder, equally resigned, flung up a hand.

“All right. I am curious, too. But I will have no more sorcery from that bird. Keep it out of sight, and in Moro’s name give the man something to eat besides mice.”

The man slid to his knees. His head bowed; he held his arms together as if they were bound, elbow to upturned wrists that the strange, latticed metal protected. His fingers spread wide and flat, a gesture that riveted Nyx’s attention. “This to the Cygnet,” he said. “All the time I hold.”

The Holder sent him, under guard, to be fed, washed, clothed and presented to Nyx’s scrutiny in the mage’s tower before the bell in the north tower changed night into morning. Nyx returned to what a hasty eye might have deemed the disaster in the library. So orderly was her chaos that she saw at a glance Calyx’s futile attempts to straighten things. Musing, the stranger’s gesture repeating itself in her mind, she stared into the eye of the Cygnet flying through black marble above the mantel. Beneath the Cygnet, things glinted in candle and torchlight: tiny opaque bottles, dark glass boxes that refused to open, mysterious things carved in amber, wood, gold, that had no openings yet when shaken moved from the liquid rolling within them. She fingered a seamless cobalt box; something buzzed in it like a furious insect. She still did not know, after years of wandering, study, work, what magic lay within that tiny box. What she had finally learned was why she was still ignorant.

The door opened; Meguet, about to enter, stopped in the doorway with an amazed face peering over her shoulder. She turned with barely a flicker of expression, and took the tray that had followed her up. The door closed; she stood, with more expression, looking for a place to set Nyx’s supper.

“Just let it go,” Nyx said. Meguet, who had been transformed into a rose-tree with less notice, yielded calmly to the whims of sorcery and left the tray hanging in midair. “Thank you.”

“Your mother asked me to bring it. She said you hadn’t eaten all day.”

“How could she remember that? I didn’t.” She waved the tray across the room. Meguet, glancing around, caught sight of ancient weapons hanging like icicles above her head. She moved promptly, joined Nyx at the hearth, where nothing hung overhead but a faded tapestry. Nyx, bread in one hand, cold chicken in the other, asked,

“Where is he?”

“In a bath, I think. What is it in you that causes furniture to behave in such a peculiar fashion?”

“I prefer a world in a constant state of transmutation,” Nyx said with her mouth full.

“Is that what you will tell the Holder?”

“Is she coming up?”

“She’s hardly in the mood to leave you alone up here with a man who turns cart horses into trees by breathing.”

“Oh.”

“So she said.” .

Nyx shrugged. “The bird’s spells wear away by moonlight. Luckily. You made a beautiful rose-tree.”

“A rose-tree,” Meguet said with feeling. “In front of half the household. Why did you wait for the moon to rescue me? You could have spared me some dignity.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

Meguet gazed at her. She folded her arms, leaned against the mantel. She rarely made unnecessary movements; the heel of her boot ticked uneasy questions against the hearthstones. “You mean you couldn’t.”

“I couldn’t.” She put down a chicken bone, eyed it with a bog-witch’s speculation, then licked a finger. “That’s what fascinates me so. To break a spell, you simply unweave it, strand by strand, until the spell does not exist. Of course, doing this, you are liable to catch the attention of the sorcerer who cast the spell, who may look askance at your meddling. I couldn’t undo the spell over you because I couldn’t find a single strand. It was of a piece, that magic, like a single jewel. Very beautiful.”

“You mean if the moon hadn’t risen—“

“Eventually I would have worked it through. There is always a way. Always. But the moon worked faster.”

Meguet was silent. A night breeze drifted through the windows, scented with roses; she saw in memory the rose on her shadow. She asked slowly, her fingers gripping hard on her arms, “Is there a connection between the mage and the firebird?”

“I don’t know.” Nyx poured wine, stared into it without drinking, her dark brows knit. “Is there a connection between a mage looking for a key and a firebird flying over a wall? If the mage had come a month ago and the firebird tomorrow, I would say no. But they came one after another, and both from lands beyond Ro Holding.”

“He spoke of warships.”

“Then the spell may be very old and the mage dead. Which may make it easier for me. Or more difficult, if the spell is archaic. How long has it been since warships sailed under the Cygnet on Wolfe Sea?”

“Centuries.” Meguet shivered suddenly, envisioning time- “Ensorcelled so long, no wonder he cries like that. But will the mage or sorcerer be dead? Didn’t Chrysom live for centuries before he even built this house for Moro Ro?”

“Legend says.”

“What did he say?”

“Chrysom said very little about himself; he hid his life behind his spells. And apparently he hid a few spells as well, locked away in a secret place.... Meguet, if you had something to hide in this room, where would you hide it?”

“Up the chimney. Under a hearthstone. In a table leg. Unless I were a mage. Then—“ She shook her head helplessly, blind to sorcery. “I don’t know how mages think.”

“I do. I want to know what you think.”

“What am I hiding?”

“A spellbook. It may not look like a book; it may look like a doorknob. It might even be a book within a book, lines hidden between lines, words within words, but I’ve searched every book in here that was made before Chrysom died.”

“Someone took it.”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the spells would have become common knowledge by now. I’ve suspected for some time that a book had been lost or hidden. What gave the visiting mage a clue to look for the key, I have no idea. Perhaps he will come back and I can ask him. Perhaps he realized what I did: that Chrysom hints now and then at spells which are unknown, even to the mage Diu, for he never told me.”

Meguet nodded blankly. The ancient mage Diu, a descendant of Chrysom’s, was such a legendary figure it was difficult to conceive of him still alive and swapping spells. “Why? What made you suspect?”

“These,” Nyx said, touching the mysteries on the mantel. “He never makes use of them in any book I’ve ever seen, and I thought I had all his books. And because I came across an odd mark now and then at random, in the margins of his spellbook: a C or a crescent moon holding an M in its arms. The key has the same design on its handle. I’ve always thought the spells he marked with that sign were incomplete, or so old they are little more than curiosities. But now I know he completed them in another place. A secret place, locked by the key he hid.”

“But why would he hide them?”

“That,” Nyx said softly, “intrigues me most of all. What kinds of spells did he feel compelled to hide?”

Meguet recognized the gleam of compulsion in her eye: the sorceress in pursuit of the unknown. It had led her most recently into a morass, and the house into turmoil. Meguet said resignedly, “So you tore the room apart searching for this secret book that may or may not exist.”

Nyx nodded, unperturbed, chewing again. “Every crack, every glass rose, every stone and every stone bird in this hearth. I’ve searched as a mage searches, and I’ve searched with nothing more than my eyes and my bare hands.”

“Then it’s not here.”

“I think it is here.... Chrysom kept everything he used in this room- He lived here; his bones are still here, buried beneath this tower. Even after a thousand years, these old stones are saturated with his magic. They send a signal like a beacon, a ghostly signal, but visible to those who can see the imprint of power....”

“Like the bird? Is that what drew it?”

Nyx was silent, her eyes on Meguet while she mused, using the calm in her cousin’s face to focus her thoughts. “I still don’t know,” she said at last, “where that bird’s sorcery comes from. Perhaps it was simply made to find this place. Or any place of power.”

“For yet another mage?” Meguet looked shaken. “Nyx, how many mages will we have to contend with?”

Nyx shrugged. “It’s only speculation. I’ll worry when I find something to worry about.” She paused, listening, the wine halfway to her lips. She put it down abruptly. “Like now. My mother is coming.”

The room composed itself in an eye-blink, as if, Meguet thought, its tidy self had been simply waiting in abeyance around the moment of time Nyx searched through- Carpets and skins lay underfoot, weapons and tapestries hung on the walls, books surrounded them on shelves and pedestals. The account books Calyx had been studying lay open on a table, her pen angled on a page to mark a place. The mound of chairs that had been balanced in an impossible pyramid on the wine table fanned around the hearth; not a shadow or a flame had been misplaced. Nyx picked her supper out of the air and set it on a table. The door opened.

The Holder entered, followed by her two older daughters, and Rush Yarr; a pair of armed guards flanked the stranger. Even dressed in more civilized fashion, he looked formidable, tall and muscular, something of the bird’s wildness about him. Meguet, remembering the rage and desolation in his cry, wished she had thought to arm herself, for he was a man unaware of his own anger. The bird’s fury shaped itself into jewelled leaves; what form the man’s might take was as yet unknown, perhaps even to himself.

But, entering, he seemed quiet enough. He barely glanced around himself; his eyes found Nyx and clung. Nyx gestured at a chair; he sat hesitantly, as if he had forgotten how. Meguet moved unobtrusively to a table near him, leaned against it. Rush Joined her. The guards stood behind the Holder and her daughters, silent, watchful. Nyx, at the hearth, studied him, fingering a strand of tiny pearls sliding down over one ear.

“Is there a name I can call you?” she asked. “One you might remember to answer to?”

He was silent, dredging unknown fathoms of memory. He said finally, “Every name I reach for eludes me. It might be anything. Or nothing.”

His face formed suddenly, clearly, under Nyx’s absent gaze, as if, until then, she had only seen the firebird. His eyes reminded her of something. She slid the strand of pearls behind her ear and remembered what: the little cobalt box on the mantel behind her. She blinked; the entire room was still, everyone fascinated, it seemed, by her silence. She gathered her thoughts, which had been fragmented by a color. “Two things I must do first. I want the bird’s fire and I want its cry.”

His lips parted; he whispered, “How?”

“I’ll tell you how after I have done it. I don’t want to be turned into a gaudy pile of leaves every time it looks at me. And the cry that bird makes is like the crying of every bird I have ever tormented in my sorcery- It would wear me to the heart.”

He was staring at her, transfixed, as if she had just changed shape, or taken shape, in his eyes. He made a sudden movement, muscles gathering, his hands closing on the chair arms. The cry came and went like lightning in his face. Silver flashed from behind the Holder as one of the guards moved. Meguet caught his eyes, held him still. Nyx continued, her voice grim but deliberate, “Mages find themselves sometimes on strange roads, in strange places. You can trust me, but you don’t know that. My past casts a shadow. If you want a mage without a shadow, you must fly farther north, to a mage called Diu, who is very old and tired, but would do a favor for me if I asked. You must—“

“The bird found you,” the man said. He was still gripping his chair, but he had made no other movement. Nyx waited; he added, some feeling breaking into his low voice, “I don’t know how long the bird flew to find you. But, entering this house, it cried its magic until you listened. You must do what you can. What you want. The bird will choose to stay or go. It’s no question of trust. Or of choice, for me. I have no choice.”

The Holder opened her mouth, closed it as the sorceress’s eyes flicked at her. Nyx said, answering her unspoken question, “I cannot know how the bird found me, or why, or if it was sent until I begin to work. I suspect that the spell was cast very long ago, and that the bird came here simply because it sensed a thousand years of magic in this tower. So I will assume that, for now, all I have to do is remove a spell.”

“And if the bird was sent?” the Holder asked. “Perhaps by the mage who appeared yesterday? You may put the entire house in danger.”

“Well,” Nyx said softly, “it won’t be the first time.”

“But—“

“You have heard that bird cry. Is there anything you would not do to stop it, if you could?” The Holder was silent; jewels sparked on her hands as they clasped, containing a mute argument. Nyx added, “I can stop it. I can help. If I bring down sorcery on this house, then we will find a way to deal with that. But now, the bird is here and the sorcerer is only a possibility. I must begin with the magic I see, not with the ghosts and shadows conjured up by fear.” She looked at the man again. He had not moved a muscle or an eyelash while she spoke; still she was not certain how much he understood besides hope. “So,” she said, toying with an earring, a circle of amber ringed with pearls, “we will wait for the bird to return. Tell me what you remember of your wanderings.”

“I remember sea. I remember the bird flying through a storm of burning arrows. I remember me face of a small boy just before he was caught in me bird’s fire. I remember waking in snow, in mud, sometimes in trees, sometimes falling out of the air and running from hunters.”

“And before you were spellbound?” The earring fell off; she caught it in her palm. She dropped her other hand toward the metal on his wrist, but did not touch it. “What are these?”

He gazed at them without a flicker of recognition. “Armor, of some kind, I think.”

“May I see?”

“They don’t come off.”

“Do you remember any place? A city? A house?”

He paused, made an effort. “I remember a door- way.”

“A doorway?”

He shrugged slightly. “Nothing more. A marble doorway, with a marble pot of flowers beside it.”

“What was inside the door?”

“A noonday shadow. That’s all I remember, except that I saw it, not the bird, because I remember the scent of the flowers and the soft air. It could be any door, anywhere. It means nothing.”

“What did you mean when you said to the Holder, ‘All the time I hold’?”

He was on his feet, then, with no warning. Meguet, pushing away from the table, saw the cry beginning in his face. Then she heard the midnight bells, and saw the fiery plumage streak his back. She checked her instinctive movement to Nyx’s side, having no desire to be caught in the enchanted fire. The bird finished the cry in midair. Fire swarmed at Nyx; Meguet heard Calyx cry out behind the silken, red-gold wall. Nyx opened her hand, held up her defense: an amber earring.

Fire kindled in the amber, a reflection of the onslaught of flame. It kindled in Nyx’s misty eyes, washed them with color. For a time her mind was an amber, fire-filled jewel guiding the magic, inviting more, expanding endlessly as it flooded into her, while, to watching eyes, the small jewel in her hand focused and ate the fire. The gorgeous and magical imagery of the bird’s enchantments changed and changed again in her mind as it tried to change her: black roses, emerald leaves, snowflakes of silver latticed like the odd armor, birds with sapphire wings and eyes, golden lilies, bird-eggs of topaz and diamond. The threads of the spell were a tapestry of tiny detail worked by a skilled hand. Dimly, as she dragged the fire and rich images endlessly out of it, she heard the bird’s ceaseless cry.

Then there was only pale moonlight in her mind, a final rose the- color of mist. She could see again; she dropped her hand, blinking. The bird, perched on the chair, was silent. The air darkened slowly, candlelight and shadow. The faces gazing at her looked haunted, exhausted by the cry. She lifted the amber, red-gold now and cracked like glass, and put it back in her ear; her hand trembled slightly.

“So the bird knows where it is,” she said.

“Nyx,” the Holder breathed, and nothing more. Beside her. Calyx lifted her face from her hands; tears slid between her fingers. Rush, stunned by the sorcery, moved behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. The guards’ faces looked pinched, as if they had been standing in a freezing wind. Iris had gone. Nyx’s eyes moved to Meguet. Her face was composed, watchful, as always, but so white it might have been carved of snow.

“That must have wakened the house,” Meguet commented. Her voice shook suddenly; she put her hand to her mouth, hearing an echo of the fury and the sorrow. “Can you find a jewel hard enough to hold its cry?”

“Maybe,” Nyx said softly. Her eyes were wide, luminous; they seemed to look through Meguet. “Maybe one.” Meguet, recognizing that expression, felt herself grow very still; she seemed to pick out of Nyx’s mind the jewel that hung there. “You do it so easily, Meguet, when you need to, but I have never tried. Yet I saw it all within the Cygnet’s eye....” “What?” Calyx and the Holder asked together. “All the fractured moments within the whole, like light fractured within the prism ... a moment shirting into all its layers. If I could throw the bird’s cries into another layer of time, we would not hear them and it would still have its voice. I have taken its fire. That cry is its heart and the only word it knows. I will not take its heart.” She paused, her eyes clinging to Meguet in lieu of the great dark prism beneath the tower that was the Cygnet’s eye. “I looked into the Cygnet’s eye, and saw its power. But did it only show me things I could never know? Or did I take that power?” Meguet, transfixed, birdlike, could not look away. The room was soundless. “You wander through the walls of time at need; so did I, that one time, flying faster than thought. But can I wander at will? I am the Cygnet’s heir: Did it give me only what I needed, or what I wanted? I wanted everything I saw.... For that one moment, I flew within time, but did I fly? Or did the Cygnet?” The black tower walls wrapped around her like the small, circular chamber at the heart of Chrysom’s maze. Concentrating, her gaze still on Meguet, she saw the black prism, the faceted eye of power, hanging in the still darkness within a triple ring of time. “You could cry into that silence,” she told the bird. “I did.”

The bird cried. She heard it standing once again beneath the great prism, which was no longer dark, but fire-white, sculpted with planes of light. The cry filled the chamber, buried deep where only the Cygnet would hear it. It cried, and cried again; the stone walls echoed with its tale, as if it had found the safe and secret place to tell it. Nyx, gazing into the prism, listening for one familiar word, saw Meguet’s face reflected in every plane. Then she saw Meguet, in the shadows on the other side of the prism, caught in the tangle of cries, as if Nyx, using her face to open memory, had pulled her into the fractured time.

She blinked; the prism faded, and she saw Meguet’s face again, a stillness in it like the stillness of stone. The mage’s tower circled them again, with its triple ring of stone and night and time. Color flooded suddenly into Meguet’s face; she stared, incredulously, at Nyx. The bird cried, but its cries were soundless now, its story hidden.

The Holder and Calyx were both on their feet.

“Where did you go?” Calyx demanded, astonished. “You both vanished.”

“I sent the bird cry into the heart of the maze,” Nyx said. She ran her hands through her hair wearily, scattering jewels, her eyes on Meguet. “I seem to have pulled us both along with it.”

“That’s not possible,” the Holder said. She appealed to Meguet. “Is it?”

“No.” She drew breath, shivering slightly. “There was no need for me there.”

“I needed you,” Nyx said. “You took me there in memory. Who knows which of us guided whom? The bird is crying to the Cygnet instead of to us, which means we can all sleep soundly.” She dropped her hand on Meguet’s shoulder, and smiled a little, tightly. “Maybe that’s all we did; walk back into memory, and leave, appropriately, a bird cry there.”

Meguet, still standing tensely, shook her head. “You shifted time,” she said simply, “not memory.” She paused, listening to her words, or to other words echoing under the moonlight. The Holder said softly, her dark, troubled eyes on the sorceress’s face,

“ ‘All the time I hold-‘ “

Four

Meguet watched the dawn unfurl like a wing of fire across the Delta. She had wakened early, anticipating a summons, and had seen the Gatekeeper, anticipating dawn, extinguish the torches beside the gate. Beyond the wall, the waves picked up light, rolled it into scrolls and unrolled it again, like a spell in some forgotten language across the sand. She dressed quickly, without waking her attendants, pulling swans down her wrists and across her shoulders, for despite the mysteries and magic, there was yet another prosaic day of council ahead of them, if they could dodge the sorcery falling headlong out of the air. She braided her hair as she went down. Crossing the yard, she caught a breath of the moist, dank sweetness of the inner swamps, lily and mud and still, secret waters. The Gatekeeper’s face turned toward it; she wondered if he had smelled it, too, if he were breathing in memories. And then he saw her.

His breakfast followed close behind her. He shared it with her, the tray balanced between them in the tiny turret. He buttered hot bread for her, offered pale, spiced wine from his cup, peeled quail’s eggs. She nibbled, weary and absent-minded, listening, in some deep part of her, for the Holder’s voice.

He said, “I saw light all night from the mage’s tower.”

Her eyes, following the white thread of a gull’s flight, nicked to his face. “Then you were awake all night.”

“I thought it best,” he said wryly, “the way things have been getting past me.” He cut wafer-thin strips of melon and passed her one. “I don’t know what to expect next.”

She saw then the familiar shadows under his eyes, that came when he saw too little or too much in the small lonely hours of the night. She set the tray aside abruptly, shifted to sit beside him.

“Nobody knows,” she said, and told him what the firebird had said, what Nyx had done. When she finished, her head in the hollow of his shoulder to dodge the flood of morning light, he commented,

“She has a way with birds.”

Meguet lifted her head, eyed him narrowly. He let her see the faintest line of a smile beside his mouth. “You had better be smiling,” she said dourly.

He smoothed her hair, “It’s not so long ago that she had us all dancing at shadows because of birds. Now here’s another over the gate so fast it left the Gatekeeper of Ro House standing with his mouth open in a wake of pinfeathers. I might as well row myself back to the swamp.”

“Take me with you,” she sighed. “I’m housebound with this council. I want to pick lilies in a bog and have you braid them in my hair.”

“They must be getting edgy, the Hold Councils.”

“They’re curious. I’m edgy. The Holder looks as if she swallowed a thunderbolt. Her house was spellbound by a mage with no good intentions who may or may not return, and her heir is up in Chrysom’s tower with a bird who may be trouble or may not, but most likely has trouble on its tail. In the middle of this, she has to sit through speeches about sheep.”

“What kind of trouble does she look for from the firebird?”

“The mage who cast the spell.”

He made a soft sound, stirring. “Another one? How many mages are we looking at?”

“Maybe this one will knock on the gate.”

“They don’t seem in the habit of knocking. Why would a mage twist a man out of his shape for all but a few moonlit hours? Only to make him remember that he’s human?”

“That’s all he does remember.”

“Not what he did to get himself turned into a bird?.”

Meguet was silent, thinking of the cries that came and went across the man’s face like lightning across a barren landscape. She said, “The bird remembers.”

“But not the man.” His eyes strayed seaward. “So. I must watch for a dangerous and cold-blooded mage.”

“If he’s still alive. And if—“ She paused again, her brows crooked uncertainly, her eyes on another bird: the Cygnet, flying across the mantle of the bell ringer entering the north tower to summon the councilors together.

“And if what? What do you see, Meguet?”

She blinked, her thoughts clearing. “I see that I must leave you.”

“If what?” he asked insistently, holding her with nothing more than the tone of his voice, his eyes. She gazed back at him, perplexed, hearing again the terrible, desperate cry of the firebird.

“If” she said, “the bird is innocent.”

Nyx, present to the outward eye during the council that day, was so preoccupied that Calyx touched her once or twice, wondering obviously if she were still breathing. All her attention was focused in the high tower room, where the mage might return. He would want the key. He would guess that she had hidden it in a different place. She had spent some rime before dawn trying to turn it invisible, or change its shape into one of Calyx’s hoary household records, or a rose among the hundreds on the tower vines. It resisted all enchantment. She gave up finally and put it in her pocket, a solution which would have horrified the Holder. Nyx did not approve of it herself, but she had run out of ideas by morning. The mage might disrupt the council, demanding the key, but the worst he would most likely do would be to give everyone something to talk about besides border tolls. The bird, she suspected with no particular evidence, might fare differently. So she had separated them, the key and the bird, in hope that me strange, ruthless mage, seeking one mystery, would ignore the other.

She carried the key with her to the great hall in the third tower, where the councilors ate savory delicacies with their fingers, drank wine, and continued their endless debates while families and guests slowly gathered from woods and gardens, city shops and neighbors’ houses, for supper. She had promised the Holder that for one evening at least, she would not shut herself up behind another locked door with yet another bird. But birds and rumors shadowed her, it seemed. As she bit into melted cheese wrapped in butter pastry, young Darl Kell of Hunter Hold, who had eyes like some of the frogs she had used in her fires, asked with a bluntness he meant to be charming,

“Is it one of yours?”

She raised a brow mutely, her tongue busy dodging hot cheese.

“The great bird in the tower. A bit of your leftover magic from the swamp?”

She coughed on a pastry crumb. “No,” she said when she could speak- “If nothing else, I’m tidy. If I transform something, it stays transformed, and I don’t leave it a voice to complain with.”

Darl Kell flushed to his broad ears. “You’re not like your sisters,” he said, and stalked off to gaze at Calyx. Nyx brushed crumbs off her silk and wished she could be as tidy in life as she was in art. Someone pushed wine into her hand and said, his voice too close to her ear,

“He could stand some room for improvement, if you’re in the mood to transform.”

She looked up, into the smiling eyes of Urbin Dacey, whose father led the Withy Hold Council. He was tall and black-haired and amber-eyed. She had noticed those eyes several times during the council, and had wondered what perversity they watched for. She took a sip of wine, and answered equably,

“I don’t transform by whim. And I don’t practice such sorcery on humans.”

“Pity. His ears could stand some.” He turned deftly, lifted a plate of stuffed mushrooms as she opened her mouth. “What sorcery do you allow yourself to practice on humans?”

“As little as poss—“

“You have been practicing some on me.”

“What?”

“I’ve felt it in the council chamber. You meet my eyes with your pale moon eyes. You draw at me. Calyx is very beautiful, but she is day, and you arc night, secret, beautiful, mysterious, perhaps dangerous. Are you dangerous at night?”

Nyx gazed at him, a mushroom halted midway to her mouth. “What in Moro’s name are you talking about?”

His smile never faltered. “I believe I make myself clear. I am falling a little in love with you.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” She bit into the mushroom, added, chewing, “Love is the last thing on your mind.”

He was silent, looking down at her so long that she wondered if she had left mushroom in some unsightly place. “It’s a game,” he said lightly. “You should learn to play it. It gives the world grace.”

He slid the glass from her hand, took a sip of wine, and slipped it back between her fingers. She said softly, “And how well you play it. You must practice often.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“Unfortunately, I lack grace.” She set the glass on the table and stood quietly, not moving or speaking, simply looking at him until his smile finally faltered and he turned away.

She picked up the glass again, took a hefty swallow. Someone else stepped to her side and marvelled, “You made Urbin Dacey blush.”

She lowered the glass with some relief. “Rush.”

He brushed a crumb off her sleeve. “It takes a complex sorcery to discomfit Urbin. He won’t give up easily, though. I’ve seen him watching you. He plays a game he hates to lose.”

“I have no time for games,” she said, feeling the weight of the key in her pocket- Rush looked at her silently a moment; she glimpsed a familiar curiosity in his eyes and wondered what realm she had neglected to explore- He asked the question in his eyes.

“Does sorcery preclude love?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s not in Chrysom’s books.”

“Is that all you—“ he began, then saw he was being teased. He smiled a little, still curious, while she helped herself to a plate of tiny biscuits rolled in poppy seeds and spices. She said, because he wanted to know, “I take after my mother, who roamed Ro Holding when she was young and found three fathers for three daughters. Sorcery does not preclude curiosity, and I have satisfied my curiosity at times. But—“

“With whom?”

Like her mother, she ignored the question. “But you have to stand still for love. I could never stand still.”

“Like Urbin,” he said, then flushed a little. But she mulled that over calmly.

“Maybe. But at least I’m honest.”

“Yes,” he said, not looking at her, but she saw the memories in his eyes. “Urbin has a thousand ways of saying one thing. You don’t hide behind language, which is why he can’t find, among his thousand ways. the one way to make you listen. Neither could I,” he added, but lightly, and she smiled, seeing no bitterness in his eyes.

“Now,” she said, “we listen to one another.” She touched his arm and turned, to find Arlen Hunter in her path, who had come to tell her what he believed about her, and what he didn’t, feeling it was important for her to know. She extracted herself abruptly from his muddle of awe and prurience, deciding that no effort to please her mother was worth becoming civilized for this. She slipped away to wait for moonrise.

Across the hall, Meguet, disarmed, dressed in red silk and gold, found siege laid against her own patience. Tur Hunter, blue-eyed, golden-haired, heir to Hunter Hold, had lost, he said, his heart to her green eyes. He was smiling, but relentless, burning hot and cold, and willing to fight a slight to his pride. She said carefully, “My own heart is bound to this house; my eyes are not free to stray.”

“Not from the gate?” he said, his smile thinning, and she felt the blood rise in her face. “Your whims are your business, but you should have some respect for your own heritage. What in Moro’s name can you do with a Gatekeeper?”

“Love him,” she said simply, with no tact whatsoever. Tur Hunter snorted, flushing.

“What will you do? Marry him and live among the cottagers?”

She shrugged slightly. “I hadn’t thought. If past is status, some among the cottagers can trace their families back a thousand years, when Moro Ro’s status in Ro Holding was that he had a bigger cottage than anyone else and a bloodier sword.”

“And what does your Gatekeeper have?” he retorted. “Born among tortoises and river rats, he still has the swamp in his voice. You’ll tire of that soon enough.”

“Then,” she said, keeping her voice steady with an effort, “it is not worth your breath to interfere, since I will cast him aside eventually over the cadence of lilies and slow dark water and small birds in his voice.”

Tur was silent a breath, then changed weapons. “Now,” he said solicitously, and took her hand in his, “I have put you in the position of having to defend him. I have made you angry. That was hardly my intention. If the Holder hasn’t interfered in your infatuation with the murkier side of the Delta, it must be because she is wiser than I am, and knows it is like the elusive, colorful swamp lights, of little substance and will burn itself out. Tell me what I can do to persuade you to forgive me.”

She almost suggested something. But the Holder was beside her suddenly, as if summoned by the swamp lights smoldering in the air between them.

“Tur,” she said, fixing a dark eye upon him, “stop trying to lure my niece to Hunter Hold; I need her here. She is one of the foundation stones of this house, like my Gatekeeper, and I won’t free her for all the gold in Hunter Hold. Go and get me wine and take it outside and drink it.” She took Meguet’s arm, forcing Tur to loose her hand, and led her to the hearth. It was cold, unoccupied, and offered a moment of privacy within the crowded hall.

Meguet said softly, “I can fight my own battles. Though I didn’t think I would have to.”

The Holder, who loved fires, eyed the empty grate wistfully. She said, “Neither did I, but then I never admitted to anything I had to defend. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you. When you are not guarding the Holding Council, I want you with Nyx.”

Meguet, startled, said, “There’s not much I can do for her.”

“I know that and I don’t care. I don’t want her alone with that stranger, and you’re the only one in the house she would put up with.” She kicked the grate moodily, and turned, gazing at the placid, murmuring hall as if mages were concealed in the hangings or underfoot beneath the carpets. “I want you with her in those night hours when the bird becomes human.”

Meguet was silent, seeing again the rich and stunning shapes the bird’s cry had taken in the yard. “I wonder where he came from ... I wonder if anyone is alive to miss him or search for him.”

“I’m wondering who cast that spell and when Nyx’s meddling will bring yet another mage to my door.”

“If that mage is still alive.”

“There are too many mages.” Her fingers lifted to her hair, searching for pins to pull, but they were too well hidden. She folded her arms instead, frowning at her shadow in the torchlight. “Nyx assumes the mage is dead. I assume otherwise, for the sake of my house. That is why I want you with her. She trusts you, and you have more common sense than she does.”

“Only for an ordinary world.”

“That’s the one I want to keep her alive in,” the Holder said grimly. “She has so much power, and she has hardly scrubbed the mud off her feet from that morass she trapped herself in.”

“The power was given to her freely.”

“It’s not her heart that worries me now, it’s her magpie curiosity that picks at anything glittering of magic. She’s facing a twisted sorcery unfamiliar even to her. She may have terrorized the population of birds in the swamp, but she never made anything human cry so desperately. And all she can see of the sorcery is something she can’t do herself—she’s blind to danger. Even the young man seems dangerous to me.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think he’s just an innocent under a spell. He looks powerful and unpredictable.”

“Like Nyx, not long ago.”

The Holder’s brooding attached itself to her. “Meguet Vervaine, are you counseling compassion over common sense?”

“Never,” Meguet said flatly, “where Nyx is concerned. But given the murkier sorcery she has dabbled in, she may have more success with a bird with a questionable past than a mage with a tidier history would.”

The Holder made an undignified sound. “Let’s hope his past is tidier than hers. Wherever his past is. Or was.”

“Perhaps he is from Ro Holding and he simply can’t remember. He does remember the Cygnet flying on warships.”

“He’d have to be a very old bird.”

“Or a young man trapped outside of his time.”

The Holder touched her eyes. “That is something Nyx would find irresistible. But how much does she know about time? Is that common knowledge among mages?”

“She pulled me within time to stand beneath the Cygnet’s eye. For all I know she may have all the Cygnet’s power.”

The Holder drew breath. “Moro’s bones. It’s unprecedented.” Her eyes moved over the hall, searching. “Where is she? I asked her to stay through supper.”

“I saw her talking to Rush. And then to Arlen Hunter.”

“I don’t see her.”

“She must be here,” Meguet said, failing to find her. “She doesn’t forget things.”

“She forgets unimportant things,” the Holder said darkly- “Supper, her shoes, sleep, time. Maybe that mage returned without our knowing, ensorcelled us all again between a bite and a swallow. Maybe,” she added, with some hope, “he has found the book himself and vanished back into his own secret country.”

“It can’t be all that secret,” Meguet pointed out, “if he has heard of Chrysom.”

The Holder closed her eyes. “Don’t raise side issues,” she said tersely- “Find Nyx before the moon rises and I lose her again to that demented bird.”

The bird’s eye reflected a sorceress within its golden iris. It perched on a window ledge; its shadow, cast long and black by the torch beside the window, cut across the sorceress’s path to take shape against the hearth; a faceless dark beneath the stone Cygnet. Nyx was aware of the bird’s scrutiny and its shadow. She moved imperturbably through both, continuing her search for the missing book and waiting for moonrise. She had explored everything but the oddments on the mantel. There, she reasoned, it must be: the mage’s voice buzzing inside the cobalt box, the barely perceptible shift of weighty thought within the emerald bottle.

The bird opened its beak. No cry came out of it, no fire, but the sorceress turned to face it.

“Be patient,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten you.”

She folded her arms, leaned against the mantel, frowning slightly, studying the bird. The red on its folded wingtips made an elaborate chessboard pattern against the white. Its longer plumes trailed down the stone, delicate puffs of white that stirred at a breath. Its sharp talons caught light like metal; the mask of fiery feathers around its eyes gave it a fierce and secretive expression. Nyx, slowly dissolving within an amber eye, saw only herself in its thoughts. Whatever language it spoke—bird or human—was hidden.

“You arc well guarded,” she commented, returned to herself on the hearth. The bird did not shift a feather, as motionless as if it had become one of its own enchantments. The fire still hung in Nyx’s ear. She toyed with it absently. The bird opened its beak soundlessly, in recognition.

Red the color of the bird’s mask snagged her eye. She turned her head, studied a tiny red clay jar on the mantel. It was shaped like a hazelnut with a flat bottom and a cap of gold. The clay was seamed with minute cracks, as if whatever it held had seeped out centuries before. Nyx picked it up, weighed it in her hand. Chrysom, who had, centuries after his death, gotten suddenly more complex, might have left an empty bottle on his mantel, or a mage’s trap. A day or two ago she had known how he thought. Now, she was not so sure.

“Well,” she said, and met the bird’s intent golden stare. “Better sorry than safe.”

She gazed down at the jar, letting her thoughts flow like air or water into the spider web of cracks. The rough, dry edges permitted her only so far, no farther, into their tiny crevices. What stopped her, she couldn’t tell; it had no substance. The gold cap, molded into the clay by the slow shift of particles of metal, seemed solid; touching it, her thoughts turned into gold.

It was of a piece, like the bird, like the bird’s enchantments: a weave of magic so fine she could not isolate a single thread- Baffled, she withdrew from it, fascinated by her ignorance.

She put it back on the mantel, picked up a round bottle of opaque, swamp-green glass, no bigger than her palm. Its neck was short, slender, and had no opening. But it was not empty. Something within it shifted against the glass sides; the bottle tilted sluggishly in her hand, then rolled upright. Her thoughts grew crystal, rounded, green, then eased inward, dropped away from the glass into the tiny pool of magic it enclosed.

She fell into a great pool of nothing. The world lost hold of her, sent her tumbling headlong into an endless mist. Startled, she nearly withdrew; then, curious, she continued falling, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, moving toward nothing until she realized she could fall forever in that tiny bottle and never reach the bottom.

She withdrew slowly, finding stone walls beyond the mist, books, the bird’s unblinking eyes. It took some effort; she rested a moment, wary now, but still intrigued, before she explored farther. She chose something black: glass or stone carved into a little block of shadow. It was wrapped in a web of silver filaments that wound around one another and parted and crossed again in an endless, intricate pattern. Concentrating on a single filament, she found herself on a silver road.

She did not need to move; it moved beneath her, swift as wind. Darkness dropped away from the road on both sides, as if the small block enmeshed in the silver had no reality itself. The silver turned and coiled, looked back, crossed itself, moving so fast she felt she had left her thoughts at some forgotten crossroad. The road went everywhere and nowhere, it seemed. On impulse, she dropped off the rushing silver into the darkness within it.

She found herself in a cube of night, with the silver running in front of her, behind her, underfoot and overhead, like a net. She tried to withdraw, but she could not reach past the silver. It was too intricate, it moved too quickly; catching hold of it was like trying to hold water pouring down a cliff.

So I am caught, she thought, like a fish in Chrysom ‘s net. But what is the net made of?

The way out of the trap was to become the trap....

She could not hold a single, wild thread; she might, leaping out of the dark, out of herself, hold the entire moving, glowing web. Unthinking, forgetting even her own name, she expanded into the darkness, and then, at all points and loops and crossroads, into the rushing current of silver.

The flowing pattern froze. Suspended, her mind the intricate net of filament, she saw what the dark had hidden: cubes within cubes of patterned silver, each a completely different weave, growing smaller and smaller but never vanishing. If she could move between them from one cube to the next, if she could walk each pattern ... But what were they?

And then she remembered the filaments, blackened with age and fire, on the wrists of the stranger. His hands opened wide, as if to loose some lost power within the patterns. He spoke ...

She whispered, “Time.”

She was suspended within tantalizing spells for time. But what spell opened the paths to use? How could she get here, there, or anywhere on those fantastic silver roads that led nowhere outside the box? How, she wondered more practically, could she get herself outside the box?

I got in, she reminded herself. I can get out.

But if she had flung herself down a deep, dry well, that would be easy to say and not so easy to do. She swallowed, for the second time in her life, the little, cold, pebble-hard fact that all her will and all the knowledge she possessed might not be enough to find her way back to the world.

I am looking into Chrysom’s eye, she thought—Into his mind, which until now I thought I knew. This ‘is one of the puzzles in the missing book. which is why I cannot solve it. Yet.

Later, after she had contemplated the frozen, glowing paths without inspiration, she felt again the feathery touch of fear.

They will find me. she thought, in the library, silent, blind, motionless, holding the box in my hand. Will they have the sense to leave me with it? Rush wouldn't. He would smash it, to set me free. I could be trapped in its broken shards forever... I should have taught Rush more sorcery. But I never had the patience. And he would never stop to think.

She quieted her unruly thoughts, focused them again. Nothing to do, it seemed, but pick a path again, see if her thoughts might lead somewhere, if the path wouldn’t. She narrowed her vision, dropped onto the nearest pattern. Instantly she felt it move, dividing, looping, flowing everywhere and nowhere, as it had before, and she was powerless to control it.

Time, she thought. What is it? A word. To endow a word with power, you must understand it.

Settling into that one place to begin to understand Chrysom’s spell, she saw a man in the distance ahead of her.

His head was bent slightly; he did not turn or speak. He simply walked, his eyes on the flow and weave of silver as if, out of the endless twists and turns, he fashioned a solid path and followed it.

She found the path he left, a stillness in the wild flow, a single strand of silver frozen among the rushing patterns. Amazed, she followed it, wondering if Chrysom had set a shadow of himself within the paths to guide the unwary mage. The road beyond the guide began to blur into darkness. Nyx quickened her pace; as if he felt her sudden fear, he slowed. Closing the distance between them, she recognized him.

She caught her breath, stunned at the sight of the long black hair, the warrior’s straight line of shoulder. Turning, he met her eyes, held them. She blinked, and the tower stones formed around them, the moon hanging in the black sky beyond a window. Gazing at her, still caught, perhaps, in some twist of past, for an instant he recognized himself.

“My name is Brand.”

Five

With the name came memory. He flinched away from it as from fire; for an instant his human face became the firebird’s cry. Then his eyes emptied of expression: the dreamer waking, the dream forgotten. She whispered,

“You were with me in Chrysom’s box. You led me out.”

He only gazed at her blankly. “I don’t remember.”

“Brand.” She added, at his silence, “That is your name. You just told me.”

“I don’t remember.”

The door opened. Preoccupied, she did not loose his eyes, just held up a hand for silence. She received it, so completely she wondered if she had thrown a spell across the room. “You remember,” she said. “Your eyes remember. The bird remembers.”

“The bird—“ He paused, bewildered. “The bird is sorcery.”

“It cries your sorrow.”

“It cries jewels as well as sorrow- Are those mine also?”

“Perhaps. If you are a mage.”

He was silent again, throwing a net into the still black waters of memory. The net came up empty. “Why would I be that?”

“Only another mage could have rescued me from Chrysom’s spell.” She heard something from the door then, not sound so much as a rearrangement of disturbed air. She asked, because it had to be asked, not because she had much hope of answer, “Do you know the mage who wears a white dragon on his breast?”

His head lifted slightly; he gazed beyond her, as if dragons were gathering soundlessly in the shadows just beyond the candlelight. For an instant he seemed to see what lay beyond the light: the country where he had been named. The memory faded; he shook his head. “I cannot see that dragon.”

“The mage?”

“What?”

“Do you know the mage?”

He started to speak, stopped. All color left his face then; his hands clenched. Nyx saw the firebird cry in his eyes, of grief and rage and danger.

Red shimmered in the comer of her eye. She turned her head, saw Meguet, dressed for supper, slide a blade noiselessly off the wall. Whether she wanted it to fight mages or dragons, Nyx wasn’t sure; either, it seemed suddenly, might blow in unexpectedly on the night wind. She turned back to Brand, touched the metal patterns on his wrists lightly. When he made no protest, she lifted his hands in hers.

“Is this the path of time you followed here?” He looked at them, mute. “All Chrysom’s paths are silver. How did these get so black?”

He shook his head, seeing nothing of mage or time or color in the blackened metal. “I don’t understand. The bird brought me here. Not these.”

“You are the bird,” she reminded him patiently, and as patiently he replied,

“The bird is sorcery.”

Meguet tugged at Nyx’s attention. She still stood silently at the door, but her face was pale and her eyes nicked at every breeze-strewn shadow. She met Nyx’s glance, asked softly, “Is the mage looking for him?”

“Probably.”

“Nyx—“

“It’s an interesting problem,” Nyx admitted. “It’s hard enough to hide the key, let alone the bird.”

“Where did you put the key?”

“In my pocket.” She added, at Meguet’s expression, “It refused to change its shape, and I couldn’t think what else to do with it.”

“So you took it to the council hall?”

“Well, I could hardly slide it under a carpet. If the mage returned, I wanted to be there.”

“I didn’t,” Meguet said succinctly- She made a move toward a chair, then drew back to the door, looking, Nyx thought, with the gold threading through her loose hair, and the ancient sword, almost as tarnished as the metal on Brand’s wrists, half-hidden in the silken folds of her skirt, unlikely enough to startle even the mage again. Nyx said, “You might as well sit. I doubt that either dragon or mage will use the door.”

Meguet did so, but reluctantly, still holding the sword. “Dragon,” she said, “being the little winged animal made of thread.”

“According to Chrysom, who must have roamed farther than I ever realized, dragons are made of flesh and blood and fire, and most are not small.”

“How big,” Meguet asked after a moment, “is not small?”

“Huge. So Chrysom said.”

Meguet shifted uneasily, hearing dragon wings in me rustling wind. “Well,” she sighed, “at least they can’t come through the windows. Did Chrysom happen to say where there might be dragons?”

Nyx shook her head. “Like the firebird, he considered them fable. Or he wrote as if he did. Now, after coming out of that black box, I’m not sure what he knew, where he travelled, or when. He—“

“What black box?” Meguet’s eyes fell to what Nyx still held in her hand, and widened. “That? You were in there?”

“My mind was.”

“Moro’s name. Why?”

“It seemed a good idea at the time. Not,” she admitted, “one of my better ones. I wanted to see if any of those odd things were the missing book. This is full of paths, twisting, turning, looping strands of silver. I think they lead to different times, moments within moments, perhaps the sorcery the mage used to slow time. But I don’t know how to use them, and I think the knowledge is in the missing book, as well as in the firebird’s memory,”

“That was the spell he rescued you from?”

“Brand. Coming out, he remembered his name. But nothing more, not even that he had walked a path of time with me in that box, and led me out.”

Meguet closed her eyes, dropped a cold hand over them. “I don’t know why your mother bothered to send me up here.”

“I don’t know, either. Why did she?”

“I’m supposed to guard you. At best a futile notion, at worst laughable.”

Nyx turned, set the box carefully back on the mantel. “My mother worries too much.”

“How can you say that? The mage is not only looking for the key you are carrying around in your pocket, but for the firebird, both of which are in the place he will obviously return to, unless you spun him into thread so thoroughly he is still trying to untangle himself.” There was a tap at the door; she nearly jumped, then rose with more dignity, “That will be Brand’s supper. The Holder requested your presence in the hall.”

“I can’t go now,” Nyx said absently. “I’m thinking.” She sat down, slipped her shoes off and propped her feet up. Arms folded, she frowned at midair. A wide-eyed page set the supper tray on a table, seemed inclined to linger to watch the firebird eat, and encountered Nyx’s eye. Meguet, left between the pensive sorceress and the ravenous man, sat tensely, watching for a thread of white dragon-wing, a dull gold face in the shadows, and wondering what raw deed the firebird’s jewelled enchantments hid. She murmured, “There are too many mages.”

Nyx’s eyes rose, fixed on Brand. She nodded, still frowning. “He could have ensorcelled himself.”

“And the other mage is following to free him?”

“It’s possible. There is a way to find out.”

“How?” Then she leaned forward, gripping the sword hilt. “No.”

Nyx shrugged. “I don’t see how we are to get closer to the truth this way. The man retreats constantly into the firebird. If we let the mage find him, Brand might remember himself along with the mage.”

“Not here. Not in this tower, in the middle of the Holding Council. They may be bitter enemies. The entire house would be in danger. I think you should hide the firebird—“

“Where?” Nyx asked. “In the maze beneath the tower?”

“Of course not.”

“Then where?”

“In the thousand-year-old wood. Not even the mage would find him among the shifting trees.”

“I could find him easily there. What I can do, I must assume the mage can do.”

“Then somewhere in the city, or in the swamp—“

Nyx’s mouth crooked. “I can’t disappear into the swamp with a bird. My mother would spit lightning. I would prefer to face the mage.”

“I’ll leave,” Brand said abruptly. They both looked at him, startled, as if they had forgotten he could speak. Disturbed, he pushed away his food. He came to stand before Nyx. “I didn’t know the bird would endanger you.”

Nyx checked her immediate response, said patiently, “You might walk out of here, but the bird would return. It’s you who must learn to cry jewels. To cry sorrow. Or the bird will never set you free.”

He shook his head at her obtuseness. “All I know,” he said, “is that the bird came to you, sorcery to sorceress. First you must deal with the sorcery. Then I will be able to remember.”

She drew breath. His eyes held some of the bird’s fierceness, but it was the fierceness of desire, of determination. “All right,” she said at last, wondering that he had guided her so skillfully out of one maze, only to be so blind in another. “I will work with the spell awhile, instead of your human memory. One can’t be more difficult than the other. But I have already tried to find my way into the spell, and gotten nowhere.”

“Try again,” he pleaded and sat down on the window ledge where the bird had waited for the rising moon.

She found the bird’s face within his thoughts; its spellbound mind yielded nothing to her of memory or enchantment. When the bird itself reappeared, Nyx slipped within its mind, as easily as she had dropped into Chrysom’s tiny box. For a time, she wandered among the bird’s enchantments that bloomed ceaselessly behind its eyes, and faded again without the fire that fashioned them. They formed like dreams around her, thoughtless, intangible, with nothing of either mage or Brand in them. She found her way out again, and said, studying the bird with some perplexity,

“This is exasperating. The bird won’t give me a path into the man; the man won’t give me a path into the bird. It’s as if they exist in separate worlds. I might as well be back in Chrysom’s black box for all the sense I can make of this.”

“There is always a way,” Meguet said sleepily. “You told me that.” She received no answer; Nyx had disappeared again. To Meguet’s eye, she looked pensive, very still, as if she were chasing the tag-end of some sudden, imperative notion in her head. She did not move; she scarcely seemed to breathe. Meguet sighed noiselessly, and settled back in her chair. Just before her eyes closed, she saw the white dragon’s golden eye in the shadows beside the hearth.

She was on her feet almost before she had opened her eyes. The dragon was gone; Nyx had not moved.

“Nyx,” she whispered, shifting toward her, the blade poised in her hands. “Nyx.”

Nyx did not answer. Meguet, glancing at her, saw her frowning at the bird, her arms folded. She did not move, she did not blink. Meguet raised her voice. “Nyx!”

“She won’t hear you,” the mage said. He was still invisible, though she caught the flick of a drain’s wing, the shift of a claw here and there, as he moved noiselessly, restively, in front of the mantel. Listening, she heard faint music, soft laughter on the parapet wall. He read her mind- “I didn’t meddle with your time. I didn’t come for trouble. I came only for the key.”

Meguet screamed Nyx’s name. Nyx remained oblivious, but through a south window Meguet saw one of the turret-torches raised aloft, as if the Gatekeeper had felt her desperate need. She heard voices within the tower, guards and pages tossing alarms down the stairwell, a flurry of running in the outer yard.

“I sealed the door,” the mage said. “They won’t get through. Where is the key? Just tell me that. I’ll find it and go.” He spoke softly, as if not to disturb Nyx, but Meguet heard the strain in his voice. She wondered if he hid himself from Nyx or from the firebird.

“She put it somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I think in a book. One of the household records over there, I don’t remember which—“

“You’re lying.” He sounded amazed. “I didn’t think you could lie. Where is it really?”

“Among the roses on the vines.”

The dragon eye came closer; she shifted a step or two toward Nyx. “A good place to hide it. One rose among a thousand roses. But even if I picked them all, I’d never find it there. Where is it really hidden?”

“The firebird changed it with its cry,” she said desperately, and he was silent, as if at last he believed her. Fists battered at the door; voices, impatient and furious, made improbable suggestions about makeshift battering rams, and Rush’s makeshift sorcery.

“Meguet,” said the air, startling her with her name. “I can’t wait for tomorrow’s moonrise. Where is the key? If you don’t tell me, I will turn this household, one by one, into screaming firebirds. Beginning with the Gatekeeper.”

“So,” she whispered, her mouth dry, “this is your spell.”

“So it seems.”

Nyx turned abruptly, pulling amber from her ear lobe. She held it up. The bird, freed from her mind, cried soundlessly. Its enchanted fire leaped from the amber, illumined the mage for a breath. He vanished before the fire struck him, but not before the firebird had seen his face.

The bird cried. Its noiseless cry became the man’s cry, of such fury and agony that it froze both Nyx and Meguet and silenced the crowd outside the door. Brand moved under their amazed eyes, tore swords off the wall. The white dragon leaped to fly. The blades in Brand’s hands spun and flashed in a whirling, singing dance of death too quick to follow. Meguet, mesmerized by its glittering intricacy, moved a fraction too late to intercept the dragon in its deadly flight. The blades soared upward, turned again, came down so fast at the dragon that when the mage halted them in midair. Brand lost his balance, stumbled against them- He was instantly surrounded by a ring of swords, shear-edged, gleaming like ice. The white dragon slipped under his blades and flew headlong into the amber fire. A swirl of leaves the color of bone and pearl scattered to the floor.

Brand, his face white, set with fury, was thwarted only for a moment by the blades. He changed himself; the firebird cried within the ring. It caught air, flew above them. Nyx’s searching amber found the mage again: a flickering just visible beside the windows. He shifted. The fire continued out a window; Meguet heard an outraged shout from the yard. The firebird circled, its wings brushing wall and torch fire, silver talons outstretched to tear the mage out of the air and hold his shape. The fire swept over him again. He moved, fading, but not quickly enough; the bird’s claws raked his outstretched arm before he vanished. Nyx, sweeping the amber fire across the dark, following his movements with a mage’s eye, nearly transformed Meguet as he reappeared beside her.

“Give me the key,” he said to Nyx. “Or I’ll take her with me.” His voice shook; Meguet saw the blood under his tattered sleeve.

“Take the spell off Brand,” Nyx said with disconcerting control, “and we’ll discuss the key.”

“He is fighting his own way out of it,” the mage answered. “If I take your cousin, you’ll never find her.”

“Brand is fighting you,” Nyx said evenly. “He is still spellbound. Remove the spell.”

Meguet, disinclined to being haggled over, slid smoothly out of the mage’s grip, whirled away from him. He vanished again; this time he threw up a mist to scatter Nyx’s fire. Meguet, swinging her blade, attacked a sudden shower of rose petals as the fire hit the mist. The bird snatched at them as futilely; she ducked as one of its claws tangled in her hair.

“Moro’s eyes,” she breathed. The bird became man, desperate, furious, bewildered, and then bird again, taking wing. Gold fire flared, limned the mage, and encased half the household records in amber. The bird swooped at random, swooped again, then cried noiselessly as its talons snagged the mage and dragged most of him into light. The mage spun away;

the bird’s claws scored his shoulders just before he vanished Someone cried: Brand or the mage. Brand appeared again, blurred, half-bird, half-man; blood dripped from his fingers. The bird wrenched him out of shape, took wing, and Meguet saw its broken, bloody talon. She cried, a sudden, helpless pity snagging at her voice,

“Nyx, stop this! Can you stop this?”

Nyx cast her a glance, frowning slightly. The color had come into her eyes. “This makes no sense,” she murmured, and the amber flared again. Something flew through the window, shadow-dark, as graceful as the dragon. Meguet, expecting dragons, saw it in the comer of her eye and turned her head. The fire transformed it instantly: A black swan circled in golden flame became a white rose falling through the fire into shadow.

Tears pricked her eyes, for no reason, she insisted to herself: Everything was enchanted, even the air. The mage was at her side again, and then the firebird overhead, swooping, talons open, descending toward him.

He seemed to slow the bird; Meguet saw its movements overlapping, image fanning out from image in the air. But he could not stop it entirely. In that charmed moment gold turned and turned through the air, clinked finally at the mage’s feet. Bending, he eluded the bird’s grasp; its talons flashed, scarred empty air just above him. He could not seem to balance himself; he gripped Meguet, dragged at her until she stumbled. The stones rose like water around her; a key floated on them into her hand. Then whispering air and fire slashed down again at the mage. He gasped, reaching for the key as for a spar in the shifting world. His hand locked around Meguet’s wrist. She gave one terrified cry and then he pulled her into stone.

Nyx, staring at the stones where Meguet had vanished, found her nowhere. The firebird, searching as futilely for its prey, gave a soundless cry and glided to the window, with Brand as lost inside it as Meguet was inside the mage’s time. She whispered, “Meguet.”

A deep, rhythmic thumping began at the door; they had brought up something for a battering ram. Nyx lifted her head, her face mist-white in the candlelight. The floor was littered with the fire’s enchantments. She checked her first, absent impulse to open the door to the battering ram, which would have proceeded across the room and out a window, taking the bird with it. She raised her voice instead.

“Stop—“ Her voice caught; she cleared her throat. “Stop pounding! I’ll open the door.”

“Quiet!” the Holder said sharply, and the din outside the door ceased- Nyx broke the mage’s spell; the door opened, spilling guards into the room. They stared at the glittering debris from the fire: pearl leaves, rose petals, books sealed in amber. Then they saw the blood on the firebird, and a whispering began.

The Holder tugged at the pearls at her breast, her eyes, wide and dark, reflecting something of Nyx’s expression. “What happened?”

“The mage came back,” Nyx said. “The firebird attacked him. They seem to know one another.” She stopped, pulling at a strand of sapphires in her hair. She frowned, searching for words, her eyes going back to the stones. The Holder read her mind.

“Where is Meguet?”

“The mage took her.”

“Took her! Moro’s bones, took her where?”

“Somewhere. Some time. Some place.”

“Why?”

“She was attached to the key I threw him.” The strand of sapphires came loose, dropped to the floor. She touched her eyes and added, “He’ll be back. Probably to exchange Meguet for the key.”

“Moro’s bones,” the Holder breathed again. “How many keys does he want?”

“Just one. I gave him a false key to make him leave.” She paused, feeling the weight of the Holder’s still, black gaze. “There are things that are not making sense—“

“You,” the Holder said succinctly.

“I mean, other than that.”

“What in Moro’s name possessed you to put either of your lives in danger for the sake of some moldy sorcery no one has paid attention to in a thousand years?”

“It’s not—“

“Why didn’t you give the mage the key the moment he came back for it?”

“Because—“

“Instead of jeopardizing the house and losing Meguet in some time beyond memory arid some place without a name? And why is that bird still a bird? You’ve been immersed in sorcery since you learned to read—what’s so difficult about turning a bird back into a man? Surely you’ve done more complex things with birds. How do I know this one won’t attack you next?”

“Because, I don’t think—“

“And where in Moro’s name is my Gatekeeper?”

Nyx glanced around the room. “I saw him come in. I think it was him.”

“If that mage stole him as well as Meguet—“

“No, it was my fault-I was fighting with the bird’s fire. I must have changed him into something.”

The Holder closed her eyes, pushed her hands through her hair. Pins flew. “You’re a sorceress. Do some sorcery. Disenchant that bird. And my Gatekeeper. Find Meguet. And if that mage returns, give him whatever he wants, including the bird, if he wants that. I want no more bloodshed, mage’s battles, stopped time or misplaced people. I want to end this council in even less excitement than it began. I want it to be a dull reference in the history of Ro Holding, not an entire flamboyant chapter,”

“Yes.” Nyx’s voice came with effort. “I am sorry.”

“And do it by dawn.”

She did not quite slam the door. Nyx sat down, blinking, her face stiff. She stirred a couple of garnet rose petals with her foot, trying to think; her mind only filled, like the tower room, with enchantments. The door opened softly. She lifted her head. Calyx entered, side-stepping spells.

“I’m sorry about the books,” Nyx said wearily. “They’ll change back at moonrise tomorrow.”

“Never mind the books.” She touched Nyx’s hair gently, removed a dangling pin. “I only wanted to tell you that the Gatekeeper is at the gate.”

She straightened a little, blinking. “Is he?”

“He could never have gotten through the door. You only thought you saw him.”

“Most likely.”

“Should someone tell him about Meguet?”

“He knows.” She added, at Calyx’s puzzled expression, “Rumor is faster than thought in this house.”

“Besides,” Calyx said comfortingly, “you’ll find her by dawn.”

“Only if the mage brings her back from wherever he went. I don’t even know the names of places beyond Ro Holding. Do you?”

“Just what Cado the Peculiar mentions.”

“Who?”

“He was the fourth son of Irial Ro. He was called Cado the Restless when he was young. He signed on a merchant ship, disappeared for eleven years and then came back to astonish his family with tales of one-legged giants, women made of gold, flowers with eyes, sorcerers with tails. According to the historian Blaconnes, it is most likely that Cado went ashore at Hunter Hold, lived an obscure and happy life digging for gold in the Junil Mountains, until the woman he lived with ran away with a rich miner. Then he shipped himself back home, whereupon, meeting his wife again, he thought it prudent to invent a few marvellous lands.”

“Oh.” Nyx’s eyes strayed to the firebird, its eyes hooded in the torchlight. “The firebird would know where the mage went.”

“The bird can’t speak.”

“And the man can’t remember.” Nyx sat silently, contemplating the pair, then touched Calyx, who was working the pins back into her hair. “You’d better go. If I lose you as well as Meguet to the mage, I’d be better off living an obscure and happy life as a swamp toad.”

“Our mother ordered supper sent up to you.”

“She’s still feeding me. That’s a good sign.”

“You’re too much alike, that’s all.” Calyx bent, kissed Nyx’s cheek. “Be careful.”

Alone, Nyx studied the sleeping firebird. Her supper came; she ate a few bites, pacing, her eyes, colorless and heavy, focused on the bird, while her mind drew constant, fraying patterns between the firebird, the man, the mage, the blackened weavings of metal on Brand’s wrists, the silver paths within Chrysom’s box.

“You know,” she whispered to the bird, who had tucked its head under its wing. “You know where they have gone.”

But all its memories were enchanted.

She sat down finally in a chair beside the firebird, waiting for me mage to return. He would know the difference between a key made by Chrysom’s hand, and one by hers; he might have felt it, her mind instead of Chrysom’s as he fell back through time, if Meguet hadn’t been holding the key. He hadn’t been too hurt to work a spell; most likely he could heal a scratch or two- And his white dragon lay in a pile of pearl leaves; if it were more than thread, he might return for that. And where was the book he so desperately wanted? He must have it already, she reasoned, since he wasn’t contorting time to look for that, too. A book without a key was far more valuable than a key without a book....

Her eyes closed. The key floated behind her eyes: gold, with an ivory-and-gold haft, a C or a crescent moon holding an M in its arms. Mage Chrysom. Chrysom’s Magic ... the key ...

She woke at the sound of the council bells. The sun was up; it flung the bird’s shadow over her and glittered in amber, garnet, as if its own fire might wake the things frozen in time, waiting for the moon. She felt the key in her pocket, heard the bird pecking water from a bowl. There was no sign of the mage or Meguet.

She slumped in the chair, feeling the tear in the tidy fabric of household life where Meguet should have been. The mage must return for the key. If he did not bring Meguet with him, there would be a mages’ war in the dark tower, despite the Holder’s wishes. It was inconceivable that he would not bring Meguet. But why had he not returned? Was he afraid of the firebird? Would he return at moonrise, when the bird changed? Would Brand remember him? Would the Holder wait patiently through another moonrise?

“She has no choice,” Nyx murmured. “All she has is me.”

She pulled the key out of her pocket, baiting the air with it, in case the mage lurked in some moment where a flash of magic from Chrysom’s tower would snag his attention. She turned it over in her palm; the gold caught a fiery tear of light. The crescent moon arched over the upside-down Mage.

Her lips parted. She felt a stirring deep in her, as if small birds had suddenly scattered through her into light.

Chrysom’s Work.

She whispered, “The key is the book.”

Six

Meguet watched the sun rise over a nameless land.

She had been sitting for hours on bare ground, thoughtless and stunned, under a sky full of unfamiliar constellations. There was some protection in the night. Unless she looked up, her eye did not have to acknowledge that she had travelled beyond Ro Holding: the dark might have belonged anywhere. She sat quite still where she had fallen, waiting for Nyx to rescue her, while the night stirred constantly around her, winds roaring and subsiding, hissing sometimes, me warm, malodorous breath of something she refused to imagine. Now and then the mage murmured, moving restlessly, but he never woke. She did not try to rouse him. Nyx would find her, take the key, and they would vanish before she caught a glimpse of this strange place somewhere beyond the Cygnet’s wing.

But the morning light seared the land’s image into her mind. It unfolded desert, vast, barren, gold as a hawk’s eye, with juttings of bare stone like fantastic towers and crazed palaces. It was noisy; the winds blew unexpected notes through those stones. It smelled of sulphur and something charred; it hissed and steamed, in the distance, from boiling underground waters.

She drew against herself, feeling dangerously exposed, as if the stones had eyes. They might, in that weird place: the ground itself had mouths. Mages might be riding the air above her head. And there she sat, dressed for last night’s supper in a gown as red as fire that flowed like fire on every passing breeze. Her thin velvet slippers would have sailed away in the wind; her sword had vanished somewhere between here and there- And even shod and armed and fitted for a journey, she could not have chosen here instead of there: Ro Holding might lie beyond the distant, shimmering peaks or, as easily, within the winds.

Light sparked everywhere in this hard, bright place, finding flecks of gold in the sandstone, turning silvery in the steam. It snagged under the mage’s shoulder, and from there, leaped painfully into Meguef's eyes. She blinked, saw the gold key half-hidden under him. He had that, she told herself; he had no use for her. But would he bother to send her back? She could take the key, hide it from him. bargain with him... But he had seen the key across time itself; it seemed unlikely that his mage’s eye would miss it under a rock. Both eyes were still closed; not even the sun had wakened him. She reached for the key quickly, slid it into her pocket. He did not move. She shifted closer after a moment, touched him.

She heard his breathing then, shallow and erratic, saw the chalky whiteness beneath the sweat and dust on his face. Pain clawed furrows between his brows. He stirred a little, as if he felt her gaze; he murmured something, wincing, and lay still again, while the dust drifted over him.

Horror, fine and dry as the dust, prickled over Meguet: that he might die and leave her alone in a strange land which might as well have been on some distant star. She stood up, panicked, searching the plain for a blue thread of water, a dark thread of wood smoke, symmetrical shapes of houses or a village among the broken tumbled towers of stone. They might have been the only living things in the world, she and the mage, and he was only half-alive. What water there was bubbled and stank; shadows on bare ground provided the only shelter she could see. She knelt again, trying to calm herself. The mage might have broken a bone, falling. But, running her hands over him, she felt nothing out of place. He didn’t seem to notice her, not even when, with some effort, she rolled him on his side to study the marks the firebird had scored across his shoulders.

The weals were long but shallow; they looked irritating but hardly deadly, unless the bird carried some unexpected venom in its talons. The thought panicked her again; she closed her eyes, felt the desert sand in her throat, the hot sun melting into her skin. She must find shelter, water to clean his wounds. The nearest shadow, flung by a jagged and oddly folded stone, she could reach in a dozen steps. But the distance between shadow and mage seemed insurmountable. She rolled him gently on his back again, and slid her hands under his arms. It was only when she tried to lift him that he came alive, jerking out of her hold, crying odd words, names out of dreams or nightmares.

She let him lie and knelt beside him, wondering what he might have inadvertently summoned. She stroked his hair, murmuring. She had missed something; the bird had hurt him in some deep, subtle way. She contemplated the problem, her eyes wide, gritty, her thoughts stark as light, while she drew her fingers across his cheek, his hair, until he quieted again. Then, slowly, carefully, she coaxed his boots off.

They were fine leather, scuffed and scratched, big enough to fit over her feet and her shoes. He lay still, in the safe, private place where he sheltered against his pain. He did not stir even when she checked his robe for pockets. She found one in a side seam, and rifled it. She drew out a worn, jagged triangle of crystal or glass larger than her palm, the broken leaves of some dried herb, a tiny cube of gold etched on all sides with a delicate pattern not even the heavy crystal battering it had scarred. She sniffed the leaves:

something pungent, unfamiliar. She could start a fire with the crystal and the dried leaves, though there was nothing to feed it. The sun had already burned everything. As she returned his odd possessions, the mage murmured again, frowning at the light; already it had become fierce, heavy, burning brass. She had to move him, find water, or she would die there beside a stranger under a strange sky. She stood up, blocked the sun on his face with her own shadow, scanning the land for one place more likely than another.

Above her, a shadow blocked the sun.

She looked up. The sun had vanished; an odd mass of air had swallowed a piece of sky overhead. She could not see what hovered; it was nothing, of no substance, but it cast a shadow all around her. She forced her eyes down finally, not wanting to look, but seeing it, black and clean-lined in the light: the shape of the little white-winged dragon of thread, but huge enough to swallow the sun,

Winds flew across the plain; blowing between cracks and towers of stone, they sounded deep, wild notes. Other voices bellowed among them from beyond the edge of the world. Meguet heard her own voice making an unfamiliar sound. She dropped, huddled against the mage, hiding her face from all the hidden eyes around her.

“Don’t die,” she pleaded numbly, scarcely hearing herself. “Don’t die. I can spin hope for us out of a stone’s shadow, but I cannot deal with dragons. Please wake. Please.”

The mage did not answer. Shadow peeled away from the ground, left her to the sun. The winds blew dust and great stone flutes, but the otherworldly voices had sunk to a distant murmur. Steam shot a feathery plume out of the ground. The earth shook a little, as if something enormous, invisible, had walked across it. The steam dwindled; earth settled itself. Meguet straightened cautiously, wondering what other sorcery to expect from that exuberant, deadly place.

It seemed for the moment quiet. She rose, went in search of water.

She found, not far from the boiling pools, great thin crescents of something as darkly iridescent as beetles’ wings. Upright, they were nearly as tall as she, but they were light enough to drag. She took four of them, made her way slowly, doggedly, through the heat back to the mage. She looked back once; the crescents trailing from under her arms grooved the earth behind her like some great claw. She closed her eyes against the sight, trudged on, awkwardly, her footsteps echoing hollowly in the mage’s boots.

She dug shallow holes with the sharp end of one claw, balanced the claws on either side of the mage’s body like four bedposts. Then she tore her skirt loose from the bodice, and picked apart a side seam. She dragged the length of silk across the claws, forced it down the sharp ends so that it stretched like a rippling canopy above the mage. He stirred, his face easing. She tore the sleeves from her bodice and wiped the sweat from his face. She rose again, as oddly dressed as she had ever been in her life, in tattered red silk bodice, long white linen shift and oversized boots, to look for water.

There was water everywhere, it seemed, but it boiled and stank and grew crusts of oddly colored crystals where it splashed. She wandered in a wasteland of heat and steam and bubbling mud-holes, her hair plastered down her back, her mouth so dry she would have drunk what steamed in the rifts and crevices of rock if it had not been too hot to touch. She sat wearily on a sandstone ledge, searching for green in a parched land, while her eyes teared at the smell, and behind her, she heard the sudden hiss of jetting water and steam. She leaned back, resting in the shadow, and felt a drift of cold on one cheek.

She found a cave of ice.

It was small, dark, and it steamed like the water holes. Its mouth was rimmed with icy teeth; the threshold was solid ice. Beyond the threshold lay shadow so black she guessed the earth had fallen away there into some deep chasm of time. From the chasm, icy air blew constantly. There were noises, too, shifts like stone against stone, a kind of subdued, rhythmic bellowing, as if a mountain were snoring. She broke off a piece of ice, sucked it. It tasted of earth rather than rotten eggs. She stepped out of one boot and used it to knock down a fat icicle. Limping, the ground burning through her slipper, she made her way back to the mage, carrying a boot full of ice.

She bathed his face with ice, forced it between his lips. Then she turned him over, washed the dirt and dried blood and torn cloth out of his wounds. He scarcely stirred until she touched a corner of one ragged cut above his shoulder blade. Then he stiffened, crying sorcery and dreams carelessly into the wind. She looked more closely, saw something the color of silver trapped there.

She drew it out: a broken piece of the firebird’s talon.

She was trembling and nearly in tears when she finished; the mage, having wakened every snoring dragon in the world, finally subsided when she put ice against his back. On impulse, she felt in his pocket again, drew out the broken leaves. She lay one on the ground, caught the sun in the crystal, and focused it until the dry leaf smoldered. She held it under the mage’s nose His eyes opened. He stared at her expressionlessly, then at the silken canopy, the dark curved spikes that held it up, the icicle melting in his boot. He tested his back, wincing a little. He gazed at her again, this time with amazement.

“Did you do all this?”

She sat back on her heels, answered wearily, “No, of course not- I summoned my attendants.”

“You did this without sorcery?”

She closed her eyes briefly, looked at him again. His face was pale as old ivory; he carried his voice from word to word with an effort. She asked, “What else was I to do? You dragged me into this wasteland dressed for supper. You refused to help me. I could have sat here and wept, I suppose. But you only would have died, and I need you to take me home. Why in Moro’s name did you pick the middle of a desert to fall into?”

“It’s my home,” he said simply. He drifted a moment, asked, when she thought he had fallen asleep again, “Where is the key?”

“I have it.”

He held up a hand, his eyes still closed, and murmured. “Let me see it.”

She did not move. “Swear to take me back to Ro Holding. What I’ve done for you, I can undo. This time I have a weapon.” His eyes opened; she held up the little shard of silver. “I will use it.”

She heard his breath stop. Then he drew air deeply, blinking. “Of course I will take you home.”

“How can I trust you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you can’t. But it’s hard for me to believe you would put that sorcery back where you found it. It would be a bloody and noisy piece of work. And you would still be forced to keep me alive. Unless you want to wait here alone, hoping that someone will rescue you. If you choose to do that, remember that the only thing you’ll want to eat are the rock lizards. The smaller black ones, not the yellow. You can boil them in the steam pools. They’re less tough that way, than if you roast them. There’s not much to bum, anyway. But if you do want a fire—“ He stopped, shifting ground a little. Meguet, still clinging to the shard, her only argument, said tautly,

“What do I bum?”

“I’ll make you something, before you kill me.”

“I don’t want—“

“You will, with that. It is a dark magic that goes straight to the marrow.” He added, at her silence, “I’m trying to persuade you to trust me.”

She ran one hand over her face, felt the fine dust clinging to her everywhere, even beneath her eyelids. “How can I?” she demanded. “You attacked my cousin and stole from her. You cast a spell over the Holder’s house. You did such terrible things to Brand that he can’t speak of them, he can’t even remember them. He can only cry the firebird’s rage. I don’t trust you. The only reason I did all this for you is so that you will stay alive to take me back to Ro Holding.”

He stirred again, wincing, his eyes straying to the bare, distant crags. He said tiredly, “I doubt that your cousin tossed the real key to me. She just wanted me out of the tower. So, you see, I may be forced to return to Ro Holding for the true key.”

“You dragged me into this crazed, dragon-haunted place because of a fake key?”

He lifted one hand, touched her arm, speechless a moment “You’ve seen dragons?” he asked huskily.

“I saw a shadow. You cried out such strange things when I tried to move you. I thought you summoned it. It hovered above us, hiding the sun. It was invisible and yet it cast a shadow.”

“A shadow.”

“It looked like a shadow your white dragon might have cast. Only a hundred times bigger. I was afraid—I was afraid it might attack.”

“Oh, no. They never do.”

“Your white dragon did.”

“That’s sorcery. I made it from a petrified dragon’s heart. I’m not sure how real it is. But I’ve grown fond of it. I left it there, didn’t I,” he added, remembering. “In the tower, with the firebird.”

“It is, I think, a pile of white leaves.”

“Until moonrise. And then it will change and Brand will see it.”

“Who is he?”

“Brand Saphier. His father, Draken, rules Saphier. This is the Luxour Desert in south Saphier. The edge of the world, some call it. I was born here,”

That explained his coloring, she thought. “And why,” she asked steadily, “did you turn Brand Saphier into a firebird?”

He moved abruptly, as if the tiny blade of talon in her hand had touched his back again. He answered, his eyes shadowed, heavy, “If I had made the firebird, the magic would be part of me. It could do no more harm to me than my reflection could. The spell that enchanted the firebird is deadly to me.”

She was silent, weighing his words against every inflection in his voice, every change of expression in his face. “Assuming it’s not yours,” she said tautly, “then who cast the spell?”

His brows drew together hard; his eyes shifted away from her, toward some memory. “It’s not a thing,” he whispered, “I want even the wind to know.”

“Then why did the firebird attack you?”

“I think it was made to kill me.”

Meguet stood up. Standing brought her into the stifling light, but movement helped her think. In this case, thinking proved futile. She dropped her face in her hands, saw the fierce light behind her eyes. “I don’t know how to believe you.” She lifted her head, blinking the mage’s face clear again. “I don’t know what’s truth and what’s lie, between you and the firebird.”

“You don’t have to trust me,” he said simply. “You’re entirely at my mercy. No one knows where you are. Brand would guess his father’s court. If he remembers Saphier at all. You can threaten me with that sorcery, but if you hurt me you will only be forced to care for me so that I won’t die, so that I can take you home....”

“And if the key is the real one?” she demanded, torn. “You’ll vanish with it, leave me stranded here among the dragons. Why should you take the trouble to return me, and face my cousin and the firebird again?”

“It can’t be the true key.” He turned his face restlessly away from her. “Your cousin is too shrewd.”

She knelt, chipped a piece of ice with the crystal, and put it to his lips. There was color in his face now, a feverish glitter in his eyes. “Why,” she asked abruptly, frowning down at him, “did you pick that rose for me?”

“Because,” he said softly, “you made me remember what words like honor and courage mean. Why did you pick up the rose instead of the sword?”

She sighed, defeated. “I wish I knew.” She turned, lifted the dripping icicle out of his boot. She held the boot upside-down; me key dropped out onto the ground.

He picked it up, studied it curiously. He traced the crescent moon of ivory with his forefinger, and then the letter that clung in gold to the dark of the moon. She watched his face.

“Which is it?”

He shook his head. “Every spell carries somewhere in it the mage’s signature. It may be the order in which things are done. Or the favorite spellbook used. Or some familiar element. Chrysom liked riddles. Unexpected images. Your cousin had no time for that. This has no centuries clinging to it. No riddles except for its shape. Nothing of Chrysom’s; something of a mage I wouldn’t have recognized.”

“How do you know so much about Chrysom? Is Saphier in another time? Or are you a thousand years old?”

“I like to wander ... sometimes I wander in and out of time. I learned things, watching Chrysom. I would go and build his fires, fetch things—“

“You spoke to him?”

“He never asked where I was from. But we spoke of time, how it turns and loops.... He knew I didn’t belong mere. He spoke of a spellbook of time he had written. He had hidden it, but he gave me hints, from time to time, when I came. From time to time.” He smiled a little, holding the key one way, and then another. His smile faded; he saw the shadow behind the key. “So you see I must return to Ro Holding.”

“Why?” she asked wearily. “What more do you need to know of time? You and Nyx will only fight each other.”

“I must have the key. I need it. Your cousin only wants it out of curiosity. I need it for my life.”

“Tell her that,” she said, startled. “She’ll help you.”

“Mages don’t help one another.”

“In Ro Holding—“

“Not in Saphier. And I can’t tell her why. I can’t even whisper it to air. Not in Saphier. And most certainly not in that tower in front of the firebird.”

“Why? What are you to the firebird?”

He kindled a tiny flame out of nothing, set the crescent moon on fire. “Once,” he said, “we were friends.” He let the flame devour moon and letter and shaft, like a candle, until the flame danced on a tear of gold on his palm. He blew it out, let the tear melt into the ground, and buried it. “Now,” he explained, “there is only that much of your cousin to be found in Saphier. What is her name?”

“Nyx Ro.”

His brows went up. “She is—“

“The Holder’s heir.”

“And you, Meguet Vervaine?”

“Her cousin,”

“And?” He smiled a little at her silence. “The woman who sees into time- You saw the dragon’s shadow. It takes a great, complex power to find the dragon.” His eyes wandered to the jagged, barren thrusts of rock, the varying hues of gold and dust, the plumes of steam. “That’s why I love these deserts. From the time I was young, I could catch glimpses of the dragons. A shadow. A wing folded into a rock. A roar that is not wind. Light that is not sun. If you saw an entire shadow, it is more than most see in a lifetime. I dream of seeing them emerge from stone and air and light....”

“Are they ghosts?” she asked, entranced.

“No. I think they shift in and out of time. Which is why,” he added obscurely, “I need that key.”

“Can’t you open the book without it? If you know Chrysom’s ways?”

“I do know Chrysom’s ways,” he said, but no more. He slid his hand into his pocket, brought out the little cube of gold. “You used a dragon’s tooth to start that fire,” he commented- Her eyes widened, going to the crystal. “And claws for the canopy. They leave pieces of themselves around.”

“I heard one snoring, I think, in the ice cave.”

“I tried to see that one. No light will shine in that dark, not even fire. It lives in some black plane so cold its breath freezes even in this heat. It must look like its own shadow, to the human eye,” He set the cube down on the ground.

“What is that?”

“Supplies. For when I travel.” He murmured something. One side of the cube opened; he shook a water skin out of it. “Size,” he said, as Meguet’s eye tried to fit the full skin back into the tiny cube, “is illusion. I didn’t want to frighten you before, with my sorcery.” He shifted to hand her the skin, then sagged back wearily, settling himself into the ground as if he drew some deep, healing comfort from it. “I have a house in a village on the edge of the desert. I can take us both that far. I need to rest before I return to Ro Holding. You saved my life, but there wasn’t much of it left. If I hadn’t taken you with me, I would be lying here dreaming while the sun and the sand and the carrion snakes worked their magic on me.”

She brought the skin down incredulously, splashing herself. “You deliberately brought me with you? To help you?”

“I hoped you would. I was desperate. But I didn’t expect—“ He shifted again, his eyes on the dark spikes holding up her billowing skin above his head. “I didn’t expect you to find ice in the desert. I didn’t expect you to see the dragon’s shadow.”

She looked at him, frowning again, but feeling the strange desert working its magic of light and illusion into her bones. She said abruptly, “Do you have a name?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “I thought you’d never ask. My name in Draken Saphier’s court is something he gave me, and that only mages use. In this place I love, where I was born, my name is Rad Ilex.”

Seven

In the black tower, Nyx waited for the mage and the moon.

The Gatekeeper came before either one of them, at evening when the household had gathered for supper and the yard was calm. Nyx, deep in contemplation of Chrysom’s key, which opened nothing in itself that she could find, scarcely heard him knock. She lifted her eyes to find him in front of her, an occurrence so rare that for a moment she wondered if the tower were the gate and the Gatekeeper watched them both. Then she remembered why he had come.

“Hew.” She pulled her bare feet off the nearest chair. “Sit down.”

He shook his head. “I came to ask you.”

“About Meguet.” She was silent a moment, studying him, her eyes luminous with sleeplessness. Gatekeepers of Ro House were rooted like stone and vine to the house. When they grew old, they wandered away looking for an heir to some peculiar power which Nyx had never explored. The Gatekeeper, his own face set and shadowed with weariness, did not look accessible to exploration.-But a part of him had gotten tangled in the fire’s enchantments, the night before; she was aware he had been there, though in what form she was not quite certain. Instead of waiting, like the mage’s dragon, for moonlight to free him, he was on his feet in front of her, looking perplexed- If, as she suspected, he saw everything that came and went in and out of Ro House, including ghosts and portents and the Cygnet itself, he would have known Meguet had gone. But not where.

“I thought,” he said, “the bird might have told you something by now about where it came from.”

“It’s a good guess that’s where the mage took Meguet,” Nyx said. “But where is still a mystery. He left something here; he may stilt return.”

“With Meguet?”

“If not,” she said grimly, “I’ll search for her.”

He sat down then, his head bowed, his eyes on the floor where it had opened like a mist to Meguet’s falling. Would it, Nyx wondered suddenly, open also to the Gatekeeper who opened and closed every door? But he did not seem inclined to dive headlong into solid stone. He asked, “Where would you look? Or would you just fling yourself blind into time beyond Ro Holding? Did the bird or mage give you a word to guide you?”

“Not yet. Why? Do you know of places beyond Ro Holding?”

“Me? No. I know the gate and the house and the back swamps of the Delta. The winds don’t blow me names of other places. And even so, what name would mean more than another? Unless you could tell me.

“And what would it be worth then? Would you leave the gate for Meguet?”

He lifted his head, met her eyes, his own colored like the silvery bog-mosses and about as transparent. “You would leave the house for her.”

“My mother told me to find Meguet. I have no intention of finding out what life is like with my mother and without Meguet.” He said nothing, still waiting for an answer; she added, “I’ll find her. If the mage brings her back, I’ll do what I must. If I have to search for her, I do have the means and I’ll discover how and where any way I can. It’s only a question of time.”

“I have more than enough of that, during the night at the gate.”

She was silent again. Something vital hovered beyond her memory: He had been in the tower, seen the mage and Meguet, but in what shape? Had she seen his face? Or only something she recognized as Gatekeeper that had entered a mage-locked room, and had been transformed by the bird’s fire just long enough to have known what became of Meguet? She eased back in her chair. Meguet would remember. She said softly, “What time you have is counted by the movement of the Cygnet’s stars. I’ll find Meguet. If you leave the gate, my mother will only have me searching for you as well.”

He stirred a little. “And if you leave? Who will search for you? How far beyond the Cygnet’s eye can you go, before you come to a gate without a Gatekeeper to open it?” She stared at him; he met her eyes again and said more plainly, “There is only one gate in this house and everything enters and leaves by it. Including the odd mage. It’s bad enough losing Meguet to a place with no name. But you are more than mage, and if you vanish from this house without the Holder’s knowledge, if you leave the named world, then you must either find yourself another Gatekeeper, or pay the one you’ve got with a time and a place to find you in. Gatekeepers grow old at the gate; they don’t get thrown out of it before their time. Which is what will likely happen to me if I let you out under strange stars.”

“You let Meguet go. And the mage.” He said nothing; she straightened, frowning. “Hew, what are you seeing that I missed?”

“I only want to know where you go when you go. That’s all I’m asking.”

“You’re not asking. You’re making demands. You’re only asking what little you’re asking so that you can search for Meguet if I fail.”

“Both,” he said softly. “Both of you.”

“How? If you cannot leave the gate?”

“It’s not a question anyone will bother asking if the Holder loses you. Least of all me.” His face eased a little, at her expression. “It’s only what you didn’t notice, following Chrysom’s path into sorcery. A little household magic. It’s an ancient house, and it has its ways and means. I’m one of them. That’s all.”

“Is it?” she breathed. “Is that all you are? A little household magic?”

“You know that. It’s why you’ve been talking to me, instead of telling me politely to mind my business and let you mind yours.”

“You could stop me from using all the power of Chrysom’s sorcery to go where I want?”

He shook his head. “It’s a power with a singular purpose. To protect the Cygnet. Only that. Tell me where you are going, beyond the Cygnet’s eye, and you are free to go.”

“But why you?” she asked, fascinated. “Why must it be you who will come searching for us? You are bound by household magic to the gate.”

“And by other magics to Meguet,” he said softly. “That’s why it must be me. How is what I’ll figure out later.” He rose; she watched him, wordless. His eyes flicked at the firebird, then back to her. “You must make him remember. Or time, for you, will begin and end at the gate to Ro House. It’s the way of the house, to protect.”

“Will I know these things when I am Holder? All the household magics? Or should I begin to ferret them out now?”

He smiled his tight, wry smile. “I don’t know. It’s my guess that whatever you want the house will give you. There’s never been a mage-Holder of Ro Holding. Once you start looking, who knows what you’ll find?” He bent his head and left her staring at the door he closed behind him.

After a time, she transferred her gaze to the firebird.

It was nearing moonrise; the sky at the bird’s back had grown milky. “You,” she said, “must find a way to remember.”

The bird cried its silent cry, then was still again, waiting for the moon. Moonlight touched it. The bird spread its white wings, dropped down from the ledge. As it reached stone, it changed: Brand stood in a mingling of moonlight and candlelight. Other enchantments changed: The amber-sealed books were free; garnet and opal petals swirled together to form a glittering mist that slowly dispersed. Beside the hearth, leaves of pearl and bone drew together, formed the mage’s dragon- Hovering in the shadow of the wrong world, it seemed both real and unreal. Fire picked out a scallop of thread along one unfurled wing, turned it into a delicate layering of flesh and bone.

Nyx, marvelling at it, froze it with a word before it could fly. She heard Brand move and turned quickly, but he had only stepped closer to see the dragon. Memories struggled into his face. He whispered, “Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Rad Ilex. The mage I fought last night.”

“He hasn’t come back yet. Why do you want to kill him?”

“Because—“ He stopped, linked his fingers over his eyes. His voice came harsh with pain. “He betrayed my father. He betrayed me- He trapped me in the firebird’s shape. His face is the last thing I remember, the first thing the firebird saw.”

“Why?” She stood as motionless as the dragon, scarcely daring to ask questions, lest the sound of her voice disturb the fragile cob-weave of his remembering. “Why did he put you under that spell?”

He was silent a long time; his shoulders dragged. “I don’t remember,” he said bitterly.

“Do you remember who you are?”

“I am Brand Saphier.” His hands slid away from his eyes; he turned. His face looked ashen, haunted, but his past had etched expression back into it. “My father is Draken, Lord of Saphier.”

Nyx’s eyes flicked, at the name, to the dragon at his feet. “Draken?”

“His father was a dragon.”

Wordless, Nyx found herself staring at him, searching for the dragon. She found the firebird instead, its beautiful, proud, ruthless face within Brand’s face, as if some boundary between enchantment and truth had grown strangely fluid. She said finally, softly, “Sit down.” She sat at the table, still studying him, wondering if the spellbound man would prove even more exotic than the spell.

She said, “In Ro Holding, there are no tales of dragons. You could walk the four Holds and find maybe four people who even know the word. Setting aside physical complications, is that customary behavior in Saphier, humans mating with dragons?”

He shook his head. “Some say there are no dragons in Saphier, only the memories of dragons. But my father’s mother went to the desert in south Saphier and came back with child. She ruled Saphier, and if she said her child was dragon-seed, no one would argue. The dragon was a great mage, she said, capable of changing shape. My father—“ His voice caught. He gripped the arms of his chair, his eyes widening, as other memories shifted into place. “My father.” He rose, paced, the tower room no longer a haven but a cage. “I wonder how long I have been gone. If he knows what happened to me.”

“He must be searching for you.”

“He may be mourning me, for all I know.” He added savagely, “With Rad Ilex beside him.”

“Is Rad Ilex your father’s mage?”

He looked perplexed by the question. “My father’s court is full of mages. My father is very powerful; he trains mages, those with special gifts, like Rad. It’s not like this house. You seem to be the only mage. And you have little sense of order.” She drew a breath, but found no argument- “Or manners.”

“What?”

“No mage would speak to my father the way you speak to the Holder.”

“She’s my mother,” Nyx protested.

“Perhaps it is because you have all the power in this house.” He turned, pacing again; she stared at his back. “The mage would be stripped of power.”

Nyx’s brows lifted. She picked up a wine cup, blew the dust out of it and filled it. She took a sip, watched him turn, pace back. “Is that where Rad Ilex took Meguet? To your father’s court?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps, if my father still trusts him.”

She took another swallow, set the cup down. “Fortunately, Meguet’ s manners are better than mine. Who is this Rad Ilex? Do you remember?”

“Yes.” He stopped, turned his face away. Nyx saw him tremble, in rage or grief, she couldn’t tell. “He was born in the Luxour Desert, and he came to my father when he was a boy and said there were dragons everywhere in south Saphier. There have always been rumors of dragons. Crystals that look like dragon’s teeth. Spiky plants that die and turn black and look like claws. My father always wanted to see dragons. He wanted to become one, like his father. He wanted to find his father, be taught by him. He says that a mage-fire like no other power runs through the blood of dragons and he wants that power. So when Rad said he saw dragons, my father took him into the house to train.”

The door opened. Servants summoned by moonlight entered, bearing supper. Brand roamed again;

Nyx watched him, wondering if he had come to the end of his memories, or the heart of them. He came back to the table, stood gazing down at the trays. “That’s what I can’t remember,” he said at last, tightly. “That’s where the wall is. I can remember loving Rad. And now I hate him. I would kill him as quickly as I tried to destroy his dragon. But I don’t remember why.”

“The firebird remembers.”

He looked at her, his eyes dark, bruised, but he did not answer. Nyx pushed a tray toward him. “Eat something. If Rad Ilex wants the key and his dragon,

he’ll return here. But I want no blood shed in this tower. My mother forbade it.”

He made no response to that, either. Nyx broke into an elaborate crust, found duckling flavored with orange and rosemary. She ate hungrily a few minutes, then asked, “Did your father find his father among the dragons?”

“No. He went with Rad to south Saphier- Rad was able to show him something—I don’t know what. Enough to give my father some hope, whether it was truth or lie. In the Luxour, some villagers collect big, iridescent lumps of stone they say are dragon’s hearts, and sell them. Those who buy them call them one thing, those who don’t, another. Rad said he knew a way to draw the dragons into time, but that he had to find something. A key.”

Nyx made a sound. “Not a book.”

“He said key.”

“How could he have known to find it in Ro Holding?” she breathed. “He knows too much, this Rad Hex.”

Brand stirred edgily. “And where is he, if he wants this key so badly?”

“Being cautious, I suppose. Coming here, he must face you or the firebird. Perhaps—“

“I have remembered,” he interrupted. “He will face me, not the bird.”

“You have not remembered everything. We’ll know at midnight.”

His knife hit the edge of his plate; he pushed away from the table and rose, his shoulders bowed as if the firebird clung to his back. “What kind of a mage are you that you can’t break a simple spell?”

She picked a bone out of a bite, watching him- “I suppose, by the standards of Saphier, not very apt. But I am considered adequate in Ro Holding.”

He came back to her, head bowed, “Forgive me. You took me in, tried to help. It’s not your fault you are pitted against the most devious mage in my father’s court.”

She frowned, thinking again of Meguet. “Where is Saphier? Do you cross a sea to get to it? Mountains? Maybe, if you could get home, your father could help you.”

“Saphier is the world,” he said absently. “I never looked beyond it.” Then his eyes widened, and she saw the sudden flare of hope in them. She pushed back her chair, rose.

“What do you remember?”

“These.” He turned his wrists up, spread his fingers, as if the tarnished metal wove through blood and bone into his fingertips. “They are all the paths to Saphier.”

“Paths of time.” She drew her finger down a weave lightly. “I thought so. But are they always so tarnished?”

“No,” he said, puzzled. “They should be silver, like the paths inside your tiny box. You need to know the path before you travel it; that’s why you couldn’t find your own way out.”

“You led me out,” she said abruptly. “You are also a mage.”

He shook his head. “I am a warrior. I don’t have mage’s gifts.”

“But you wear these- You can use them.”

“Yes.” He hesitated, still perplexed by them. “It is something my father taught me.”

“Do you always wear them?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why are you wearing them now? As if you know you might need them? Or you were working a time-spell, or travelling a path when you were transformed?” She saw his face change, as he veered dangerously close to memory. He said quickly,

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember,” she asked after a moment, “how to use these?”

“Yes.” He rubbed at one, trying to polish it with his thumb. “They arc so dark. As if some enormous power ran through them.” He looked at her; she saw Saphier in his eyes, future instead of past. “I can go home.”

“Yes.”

“Tonight. Now. Before I change.”

“Yes,” she said, breathless at the thought. “But if you leave, and Rad Ilex does not return with Meguet, how will I ever know where to look for her? Can you wait a little longer for them?”

He gave her a distant, masked glance: the firebird’s eyes. “I forgot he must come here.”

“I will give him the key and his dragon for Meguet,” she said. “I will not give you to him, or him to you. If you fight him, it must be in Saphier, or my mother will never forgive me for that as well as for a few other things she won’t forgive me for by now. Please,” she added, at his weary, desolate expression. “Only a little longer.”

“And then what? If he does not come?”

“Then,” she said steadily, “you will teach me the path to Saphier and I will look for her myself.”

He was silent, studying her, as if she had flung some peculiar spell over herself- “You would walk into a strange land to search for her?”

“She searched for me once in a strange place. She is part of Ro Holding, part of this house. It’s inconceivable that she is wandering around lost in some other country.”

“You are eccentric.”

“Even,” she said dryly, “in Ro Holding.”

“My father’s court is structured according to precise law. Within that law, nothing disorderly exists for long. Either it shapes itself to law or it is destroyed.”

Her brows rose. “Does that include guests?”

“It is my father’s working philosophy,” he answered simply. “Out of order comes art. The art of government, the mage’s art, the art of poetry, the art of war. We do not give ourselves the luxury of eccentricity.”

“Perhaps freedom is a luxury,” she said. “But that aside, there must be someone you would wander through a stranger’s land to find.”

She saw it again in his face: the sudden, desperate aching shadow of memory, the firebird’s cry. He whispered, “No one has come searching for me.”

She blinked, shaken by a glimpse into something more complex than she could unweave, or even imagine. She touched him; he looked at her, mute again, unable to give her either dragon heart or stone.

“We’ll go to Saphier now,” she said abruptly, and felt her own heartbeat. “It’s cruel to keep you.” And safer, she thought, remembering the spinning swords, than another battle in the tower. “Take me to your father’s house. If Meguet is not there, then teach me the paths so that I can return to look for her if I have to. Will you do that?”

“My father can, easily. And he will, in gratitude. The Holder will not even know you have been gone. Thank you.” He took her hands, dropped his face against them. “You took me in when no one in the world recognized me as human. Whatever else the bird knows, it knew enough to come to you.”

And not, she observed with a certain grimness, to Saphier.

The word, spoken aloud in the tower, would find its way to the Gatekeeper, following its own peculiar path within the house’s time. Brand held out his hands, spread his fingers as if to channel the flow of light from the silver. The bands remained black. He closed his eyes, walking the path in his mind- After a while, he put the bands against his eyes. Nyx felt pity well up from some deep place within her, as if hidden water had broken through layers of earth and hoary stone and old leaves. She put her hand gently on his shoulder.

He whispered, “I am half man, half bird, and I am lost, with no way home.”

“There is always a way,” she said. “Always.” He looked at her, read the promise in her eyes. After a while he moved to his place at the window, and waited silently for oblivion and the firebird.

Eight

Meguet sat rapt beneath the risen moon.

In its light silver feathers of steam or dragon-fire glittered and faded. The high, jagged towers of stone transformed themselves. Here a great wing unfolded against the stars almost as slowly as the stars behind it moved. There an eye shone, moon-white or darker than the night. A craggy head lifted, or had just lifted before she saw it. A moon shadow, massive and curved, lay across the ground, cast by nothing visible. Crystal flashed. Vague, dark, iridescent colors swam against the stars and vanished.

Beside her, the mage lay watching with her. Sometimes he watched her; she felt his eyes. “You see,” he murmured now and then. “Did you see that?” His voice, worn, fading, sounded tranquil; he was lost in some fever-dream of dragons that he had pulled her into. She saw through his eyes, she thought, most likely. But still she watched, as he dreamed dragons and set them free into the night.

“We should go,” she said now and then, for he shivered, though warm wind or dragon-breath sighed over them. She had taken down her canopy to see the sky. Things that had come out of his cube—wine, salted fish, bread, dried apples and figs—littered her skirt.

“Yes,” he said, but made no effort to move. “I wanted you to see this, if you could.”

“I see,” she said softly. “But I don’t know what I see.”

“Time shifting. Dragon-paths. Chrysom saw this. He made the key to unlock their paths into time.”

“Can they see us?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Far better than we see them. We glimpse them indirectly, and with the heart more than the eye.”

She looked at him. An odd, heavy, nameless feeling pushed through her; she scarcely knew what to call it. Hunger? Sorrow? Desire? “I wish,” she whispered. “I wish.”

“What?”

“I don’t know... I wish I could watch you free them with that key.”

“You can. Stay here until you have seen the dragons fly. Until I draw them out of stars and stone, until bone and blood cast shadows instead of dreams. Stay until you have seen the dragons’ fire.”

She dragged her eyes from the stars, still heavy with the strange, impossible yearning. “I cannot. The white dragon waiting for you in Chrysom’s tower must be enough for me. I was not born to see dragons.”

“They get into your blood. They call you in some secret language spoken by stones. They show you a shadow, they leave a bone behind. And so you spend your life searching for them... Stay until I free them.”

“I don’t dare,” she whispered. “You were born under the dragon’s eye. I was born under the Cygnet, I have never in my life come so close to forgetting that.”

“The Luxour will make you forget.”

She was silent, remembering the desert by day, hot and golden as some vast wing stretched taut to catch the light, the massive framework of its bones visible just beneath the surface of the stones.

“We must go,” she said, but did not move, still riding the dragon that was the Luxour through the stars. Finally she felt his hand, and saw her skirt attach itself to her again. Everything had vanished back into the little cube. Only the dragon claws, scattered in the sand, told where they had been.

“We must go,” he said, and the stars blurred together to form their path.

Night, where the path ended, was unexpectedly still. Here and there a light that was not a star burned, illumining a circular window or a door. Even the winds were silent. Pebbles shifting under Meguet’s feet as she turned sounded loud enough to wake the sleepers within the small stone houses. The handful of them, huddled together in the vast dark, seemed an unlikely place for a mage to dwell.

The mage, rising, lost his balance; Meguet caught him. He dropped an arm over her shoulders, and was still a moment while the earth settled. She whispered, “Where are we?”

“On the south edge of the Luxour.” He added obscurely, “Safe. Even mages have trouble crossing the Luxour. This is my house.”

She helped him toward one of the simple wooden doors. It had no latch. He placed his hand flat against it and it opened. Sudden light spilled over them. Within, the little house was bare and tidy as the desert. The sandstone walls were unpainted; a single rough-woven rug lay on the stone floor. His table held none of the disorder of magic and mundane—books, apple cores, crystals, bones, assorted nameless things—that Meguet had come to expect of mages. Except for a layer of dust, it held nothing at all. Another door opened to a tiny chamber that held a wooden chest and a pile of skins and neatly folded blankets. Only the collection Of colored desert rocks on the stone ledge above the hearth was unnecessary. Other things, a couple of copper pots, a clay water jar, oil lamps, sat neatly in their niches and, like the table, gathered dust.

She said, helping him sit on one of the unpainted benches beside the table, “You don’t come here often.”

“Not as often as I want.” He smiled at her as she moved through the lamplight. “There are some clothes in that chest. People will think I conjured you out of gold and fire and ivory, the way you are now.”

She eyed him. He did not seem in much pain, but his eyes were bright with fever and he moved and spoke slowly, as if air were too heavy to shift aside, too heavy to breathe. Worried, she asked, “What will heal you? Are there desert plants I can find?”

“No. I need to rest.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been attacked by an enchantment before. I’m sorry,” he added, at her expression. “You’ll have to wait. I’ll take care of myself if you don’t want to look at me.”

She sat down on the opposite bench, dropped her face in her hands, felt the desert grit behind her eyes. “Nyx will be waiting for you to bring me back. In exchange for the true key. She’ll wonder when you don’t come.”

“Most likely, she’ll assume I died.”

“And left me stranded. Moro’s eyes. What does that key open?”

“Stone. Sky.” She looked up at the longing in his voice. “It opens time itself to reveal the dragon’s face.”

She felt again a touch of his desire to wake dreams, to step into them. But she said only, “There are no dragons in Ro Holding- Nyx only wants the key because she does not know what it is. When she finds out, perhaps she won’t want it anymore.”

“Some say there are no dragons in Saphier, either.”

“There are no tales of dragons in Ro Holding. Why would she want a key to unbind dragons in Saphier?”

“Because it exists?” he guessed. She was silent at that, knowing Nyx.

“But if you told her what danger you are in—“

“I can’t speak of it,” he said. He didn’t; she was left listening to the silence. It took on an eerie quality then, as if the sandstone walls were paper-thin and something crouched beyond them, listening to her listen. She stirred finally.

“Tell me what to do for you.”

“Mages,” he said, with a faint grimace as a memory clawed his back, “are easy to care for.” He glanced into the other room: Skins and blankets had sorted themselves into a bed on the floor. Another formed beside the hearth. A thought struck her; he looked at her, reading her expression, or her thoughts. “Water. There is a river behind the house. It’s slow and warm even at night. If you want to bathe in that, I’ll set something on the bank to guard you.”

“I’ll guard myself,” she said, uneasy at what guardian he might conjure up. But he sent one anyway, she noticed later, as she stood in dark water that mirrored a silvery stream of stars. An upright bar of light, elusive as color in moonlight, stood near her clothes. Exactly what it might do, she never knew; nothing disturbed the night. She emerged finally, dried herself with a blanket, and dressed in long, thin, flowing garments the colors of the desert. She sat on the blanket, combing her hair with her fingers and letting it dry, thinking helplessly of Nyx and the Holder, and the Gatekeeper, who had opened the gate for her into a stranger’s country. She lay back on the blanket, wanting the river to speak with his voice, the night to curve itself in his shape against her- Hew, she said without sound, wanting to protect even his name from the vast, dangerous, magic-riddled land.

After a while, she went in, found Rad Ilex asleep at the table- She touched him; he vanished so abruptly that horror flashed through her: He had not been real at all, only some sending of himself. Then he reappeared, looking dazed.

“Meguet. I forgot you. You frightened me. I was dreaming of the firebird. Only it had a human face.”

“Whose face?” she asked, wondering what faceless mage he feared. But he said nothing more. She helped him rise; the bed, it seemed, was too far for his strength. He walked two steps and sagged into the pile beside the hearth, so deeply asleep he did not feel her undress him and wash his wounds with something besides the ice of dragon’s breath.

At dawn she stood at the open door, watching the village wake. A patch of stone houses beside a river’s bend, it seemed little more than a scattering of pebbles between two planes of earth and sky. The south Luxour was flat as water, but she could see far in the distance the tiny, fantastic shapes of stonework among which dragons, or tales of dragons, dwelled. Along the river, in patches of green, sheep and goats grazed. People bringing buckets to the village fountain looked at her curiously. They did not speak, but their eyes said: The mage is back. Their faces looked brown and tranquil, like the desert stones. One old woman driving a cart stopped in front of Meguet, handed her a stone that had been rolling among some sacks in the cart.

“For Rad,” she said. She had a broken tooth, and a face as wrinkled as a root. “For healing my donkey, last year.”

“But what is it?”

The woman’s sparse brows and the reins flicked up at the same time. “A dragon’s heart.” The reins came down, the cart lurched forward. “I’m going out again for stones. Tell him to stay home, this time. There’s nothing good beyond the Luxour.”

“How do you know?” Meguet asked curiously. “How does news find its way here?”

“People come and go- And they come back again, for they leave their hearts in the Luxour and they wander back all hollow looking for them. Sometimes,” she added with a half-smile, “I find them first. I keep them safe on my shelves until they’re claimed.” She ticked to the donkey; Meguet stared after her. The dragon’s heart, big as a cabbage, crystal under a thin, worn layer of stone, weighed heavily in her hands. She wondered if the ghosts of dragons came back through time, searching for the hearts that the strange old woman harvested in her cart. Most likely, she thought, taking another look, it was just a rock.

She turned to go in, and coax breakfast out of the sleeping mage. Something blocked her way.

It was as if the shadow in the doorway had become a sheet of night with a constellation flying across it, and once she stepped into that night there was no way out of it, no book of time, no gate, just the icy outline of a great dragon with eyes and teeth and talons of stars, breathing a pale, glittering cloud of stars into the dark. She stood transfixed, staring into the dragon’s fierce and empty eye, until, with terror and astonishment, she recognized the challenge.

She made some noise. She was aware that, beyond the dark, something fought towards her. A hand reached through the stars where the dragon’s heart blazed, a furious, white-hot jewel pulsing with the fires it breathed. The hand caught her, pulled her into the dragon, and then into light.

“Meguet?”

She dropped the dragon’s heart. It shattered on the stone floor, shards of crystal flying everywhere. She stared down at it, sorrow for the old woman’s simple gift knotting the back of her throat.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “She left it for you.”

“Meguet.”

She looked up finally, to meet the mage’s eyes. They were lucent as the morning sky, vast as the desert. She blinked, and was suddenly no longer in his hold, but on the other side of the room, watching expression break into his face. He seemed to hold himself upright with an effort, as if, caught in the wake of her movement, he had lost his balance. He looked less feverish, but the weariness dragged at his shoulders. He said finally, “You are a mage.”

“No.”

“There’s a power stirring in you. I can feel it- You hid your thoughts from me. You folded time as you moved.” He waited, then pleaded tiredly, “Trust me. Please.”

She was silent, feeling the warnings of her heritage wash over her like a slow, endless tide. The Dragon hunts, the tide said. The Dragon hunts the Cygnet. Then the warnings passed and she could speak again. She said with rare bitterness, “All you care about is power. All of you.”

He made a soft sound, shaking his head, the shadows deepening on his face as if she had somehow hurt him. “That’s not true. But I can sense it in you— something unusual, unnamed. The power that permitted you to see me when I cast the spell over Ro House. The power that forced you to guard the tower, to see through sorcery. But you aren’t a mage. What is the power?” She was silent, backed against the wall, splinters of the dragon’s heart glistening, sunlit, at her feet. He sat down finally, listening to her silence. He said to the table top, “It’s my fault. I have a mage’s habits. I wander where I have no business going. I won’t trouble you with my curiosity. You don’t have to be afraid of me. But you’re afraid of something, in a land that never even existed for you before yesterday.”

It was a long time before she answered, and then because she had no other hope of understanding what she feared except for the mage she was afraid to trust. She whispered, “A dragon made of stars, hunting through the stars. A threat to Ro Holding. To the Cygnet.”

His head went back; his face, stone-still, was white as bone. “How could you—“ he breathed. “How could you know that?”

She moved then in sudden fury, leaning over the table, her hands coming down flat, hard on the wood. “You knew.”

“Listen to me.” He gripped her wrist. “Listen.”

“You talk too much, Rad Ilex. You make me see dragons among the stars, but you don’t show me what they hunt. You say you want a key, only a key, just a small key to unlock the gate to an unarmed land that doesn’t even know the word dragon. You drag me here and I can’t even warn—“ She lifted her hands again, let them fall helplessly, beating at her own futility. “I can’t even warn. But I can fight. This is where the danger begins. Where there are dragons.”

“Meguet—the dragon—“

“How far is Draken Saphier’s court? Is it close? If you won’t tell me, the villagers will. I’ll walk across the Luxour if I must. I’ll ride in that old woman’s cart.”

“Gara. Her name is Gara.” He stopped to catch his breath. “Walk out of the door. I won’t stop you. The Luxour may stop you, or it may not; I won’t. But when you get to Draken Saphier’s court, the dragon there will stop you. He will sense the power in you, and he will test you and test you until you can’t call your own bones private. The Dragon of Saphier is dragon-born, a mage who trains mages. He trained me. What he wants more than anything is to find the path to me power within the dragon’s heart. His father’s power. For that he needs a certain key.”

Meguet gazed at him. She began to tremble suddenly. She sat, her face hidden behind her unbound hair, behind her hands. “Nyx,” she whispered, so softly that not even the dragon’s heart broken at her feet could hear. The mage heard; his own voice was feather-soft.

“Yes.”

“You must get the key from Nyx. Then, with the key in Saphier, the danger to Ro Holding will no longer exist.”

“The danger will still exist. And it may well be insurmountable.”

She lifted her head, stared at him again, her own face pale, stunned with shock. “Then I will go to Draken Saphier’s court. If the danger must be fought there.”

“You cannot fight Draken Saphier,” he said flatly. “Your power comes and goes apparently, and from what I’ve seen, when it goes you can’t even fight a dragon made of thread.”

“If I must go there, I will be there.”

“How—“

“I will be there.” She linked her hands tightly, dropped her face against them, avoiding his curious, questioning eyes. “You must go back to Ro Holding and get that key.”

“She won’t give it to me without you.”

“And the Holder will never let me return if I go back now. The danger showed its face to me here, not there. If I leave Saphier, how will I recognize danger when it reaches Ro Holding?” She paused, trying to think- “I’ll give you a message for Nyx.”

“You’ll trust me with a message?”

She shook her head a little, wearily. “I trust you to get that key you want. Little more. Tell Nyx—“

“She’ll never believe you chose to stay. She’ll think I coerced you. I did once before.”

She frowned at the dust on the table, brushing at it, as if to find some message hidden in the wood. She felt drained, hollow, as if she had left her heart somewhere in Saphier and could not return home until she found it. Her finger shaped a swan’s wing in the dust; she saw the black swan flying through the tower window, just before she vanished into Saphier. She said abruptly, “Tell her to tell the Gatekeeper of Ro House that he is about to find a dragon at his gate and only the key she has will lock the gate.”

He looked dubious. “You want me to give her a message for the Gatekeeper?”

“He is no ordinary Gatekeeper.”

“Is that so.” He leaned forward a little, caught her eyes, curious again. “A Gatekeeper,” he mused, and she felt her face warm. “And this will persuade Nyx not to fight me.”

“I don’t know. I do know you’ll get the key any way you can. Tell her I had a vision of what the dragon is hunting.”

“Come with me,” he said insistently. “Home to Ro Holding. It’s Saphier’s dragon. I’ll fight it.”

“If that were true,” she said sharply, “I would not be seeing visions in your doorway. You love Saphier’s dragons too much to fight them.”

He swallowed, said heavily, “Then promise me you will wait here for me. You will not cross the Luxour without me.”

“I will go where I must,” she said. “I cannot promise anything,”

He opened his mouth, closed it. He stood up, holding her eyes, as if me path to Ro Holding lay there, not within his memories. He closed his eyes at last, his face white as tallow, his shoulders straining against some enormous burden. She saw him vanish finally. And then he was back, no longer standing but fallen among the glittering fragments of the dragon’s heart.

She made a sound, staring at him, for he seemed, amid the light and stone and scattered crystals, another vision, a foretelling. But, touching him, she felt his weight, and heard his ragged breathing. He lifted one hand weakly, dropped it over his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Meguet- It was too far...” He fell asleep there within the broken heart. She closed her eyes, felt the long, dark tide of dread and warning well through her. Its ancient voices finally ebbed and she could move again. She picked shards of crystal from beneath the mage, and saw the Cygnet’s eye in every shattered piece.

Nine

In Chrysom’s tower, Nyx stood spellbound, exploring the gold key she held. The sunlight had faded some time ago; the long summer dusk had filled the tower room and darkened. She scarcely noticed light or lack of it; her mind had become the size and shape of the key. The key was the book; the book, she suspected, was the key to the paths of time in the little black-and-silver box. It would teach her how to pick one path, control its speed, follow its turns, focus its end. She could find a path to match the twists of time on Brand’s wrists, if she could find the spell, if she could open the book ... The book remained stubbornly a key.

Her thoughts turned around themselves, like the graceful lines of gold. The key is the book, the book is the key. The key is the key to itself, it unlocks itself.

It might unlock a path to Saphier, she knew, for Chrysom had seen dragons. Had they been the elusive dreams of Saphier, becoming real as he looked at them?

The key is the key. The key opens itself. Her mind roamed within its gold and ivory. Chrysom, it said at every touch. Power was implicit in it, like the power in a tuned, silent siring. There was a way to touch it, make it sound....

Chrysom. she said within it, but the name did not change it. She tried other words from his ancient spells; none revealed the book. She tried her own name, and then Moro Ro’s name; the key ignored both of them. Time, she guessed. Book. Open. Mage. Unlock. Finally, she told it what it was. and what it must become- Key, she said within it, and the key blossomed like a flower in her mind.

It remained a key in her hand; she was aware, in some distant place, of its shape and weight. But the spells, written in Chrysom’s clear, precise writing, turned slowly, page after page, in her mind. Some were labelled incomprehensibly; others dealt directly with the oddments that still survived after a thousand years to be recognized. The pages slowed under her scrutiny, stopped when she studied them, turned easily when she wished to go on. She found the box finally: the drawing of a dark cube scrolled on all sides with silver ink.

Time-Paths, the spell said. Pages of miniscule explanation followed. Nyx, engrossed, wandered down path after path of spells, and found at last the one she wanted.

Saphier, it said. Here Be Dragons. She followed it, memorizing its patterns. Other spells and paths, labelled strangely, wandered through Saphier; Chrysom, evidently, had found something there to fascinate him. But she concentrated on the path that ended at the ruler’s court, hoping that, after so long, it was still there, or that Chrysom’s journeys had led him into a time more recent in Saphier’s history than his own.

She became aware, dimly, that stars had been burning in the dark around her for some time, a curiosity which coaxed her out of the key finally to investigate. She found candles lit throughout the room- Brand, his supper finished, sat in a window waiting for her.

A moon-paring hung over his shoulder, high above the swamp. She slipped the key back into her pocket, rubbed her eyes tiredly. Movement felt strange; she tried to remember how long she had been standing there, bewitched with Chrysom’s knowledge. His taut, uneasy face told her: long enough.

“What were you doing?” he asked. “You didn’t move, you wouldn’t speak- I thought some spell had been cast over you by that key.”

“No.” She drifted to the table, her thoughts inlaid with winding paths of silver. She ate bits of cold peppered meat, and bread and a stew of mushrooms and leeks, until she felt she had climbed out of the little black cube into her own time again. She poured wine, drank a mouthful, then turned. In the candlelight her eyes held a trace of lavender. “I found Chrysom’s path to Saphier.”

She heard his breath catch. He moved away from the window, relinquishing the bird’s familiar place. “I can go home?”

“I’ll take you.”

“How?” His fingers twisted the blackened path on one wrist. “How?”

“The black cube. You came into it once, to rescue me. Do you remember?”

“No.” Then he shook his head a little. “Perhaps. It’s like a dream—“

“It was real,” she said soberly. “I was lost and you led me out. That’s when you remembered your name.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, but for once with regret. He added, “I would like to remember that I did something for you.”

“You will.” She nibbled pieces of slivered carrots and almonds with her fingers, thinking. “Where would Rad Ilex most likely have taken Meguet?”

His face tightened at the name, but he did not retreat from it. “My father’s court,” he said after a moment. “It’s where he lives.”

“He’d go there even after casting a spell over you?”

“He wouldn’t expect to see me. He is still free to come and go from Saphier; my father must not suspect him.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s a place to start.”

“My father will help you. He can send his mages searching across Saphier, even across the Luxour if need be. Not every mage can cross the Luxour. So I’ve heard- They say ancient magics, old as the beginning of the world, blow across it like wind. But some mages learn to anticipate the winds.”

“Rad Ilex?”

He was silent, struggled again; he nodded briefly. “Yes. And my father. And some others.”

“It sounds fascinating.”

“Perhaps- I never understood his love of the Luxour.”

“Your father’s?”

“Rad.” Blood streaked his face suddenly; he turned away from her, but she saw him tremble. She wondered uneasily what jagged edge of truth waited for him in Saphier. She dipped her fingers in orange-scented water, wiped them on a napkin, then pinned up a stray coil of hair. She said slowly,

“I should tell my mother that I’m going.”

“Will she let you go to a strange land?”

“Most likely she’ll be so amazed I told her that she won’t ask where. But I don’t know how long it will take me to find Meguet, and I don’t want her thinking I’m in danger.”

“My father will protect you,” he said swiftly. “Nothing will harm you in Saphier.”

Absently she looked for her shoes, found them on her feet. She brushed a crumb off her skirt. “I’d better change. I can’t wear silk shoes across a desert, if it forces me to walk.”

“There will be no need for you to go. The mages will search the Luxour.”

She stared at him- “A desert full of magic, and you expect me to sit in your father’s house trying to watch my manners?”

He blinked. “I forget,” he said, “how much freedom you have- You choose to come and go; my father’s mages do his bidding. You also do things for love.” His face closed abruptly, before she could question him. She said to his set profile,

“I’ll be back as soon as I speak to my mother.”

His brow crooked anxiously. “It’s late,” he reminded her.

“I’ll hurry. If Rad Ilex comes—“

“Do you expect—“

“No,” she said quickly. “Though it would be worth this key and more to find Meguet here instead of there. If he comes, tell him to wait for me. Don’t touch him. Don’t let the firebird break out of you.”

“How can I stop the bird?” he demanded.

“Find a way. Do anything to keep Rad Ilex here. The heart of sorcery is the clear and patient mind. So Chrysom says. I am trying to be patient and clearheaded, for once in my life. But if the mage vanishes again with Meguet, I am liable to lose my temper and do something impulsive.”

“My father says the heart of sorcery is the fire that forges the dragon’s heart.”

“He does.”

“So he teaches.”

“Moro’s eyes. Just don’t fight.”

She summoned one of the tower pages, sent him running to the Holder’s chambers to request a few moments’ privacy. Then she vanished, reappeared in front of her startled attendants, picking jewels out of her hair. She changed quickly, packed a few oddments of her own. She felt for the amber at her ear lobe, and tossed everything—earring and key and cloak, comb and little jewelled mirror, a few dried herbs—into an ivory ball so tiny it seemed invisible in her pocket. The key, now that she understood it, had consented, to her relief, to fit itself inside the ball,

She didn’t bother with stairs and towers; she simply appeared in front of her mother. The Holder had dismissed her attendants and was pacing; seeing Nyx she barely changed expression, as if what she frowned at were only an extension of her thoughts. She said,

“Where is Meguet?”

“I believe, in a land called Saphier.”

“Where is that?”

“I have no idea. It’s not on any map I can find.”

The Holder was silent. Her arms were folded tightly; she seemed too disturbed even to throw hairpins. “You said the mage would return for the key.”

“So I thought,” Nyx said.

“Then where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have told the Holding Council that Meguet is guarding you, and that you are guarding Ro House against the return of the mage. Rumors are already—“ She stopped, touched her eyes. “Rumors.”

“They follow me, don’t they?” Nyx said softly. “The bog-witch alone in the tower with a bird...” Her own arms were folded; she was frowning, reflecting her mother, but pensively, at the problem itself. “The mage slowed time and fought me for that key. It seemed most reasonable to think he would return for it.”

“Then where is he? Surely he didn’t find Meguet an adequate substitute!”

“I think—“ Nyx hesitated, received the full brunt of the Holder’s troubled, angry gaze. Her brows lifted a little; she said patiently, “If you are going to shout at me, shout. I’ll listen.”

“What I think,” the Holder said tersely, “is that my youngest daughter and heir stays alone in that ancient, magic-riddled tower with a dangerous bird, waiting for the return of a very dangerous mage, and that my niece is lost in a country that exists on no map, and at the mercy of that mage. Shouting would hardly satisfy. Reducing the hearthstones to rubble with a poker might. Now. Tell me what you think.”

“I think I can find my way to Saphier.”

The Holder shouted, “What?”

“And I think I know why the mage has not returned.”

“You are not going to Saphier,”

“I might have to search for Meguet.”

“No- Absolutely not.”

“Mother, I may have no choice. From what Brand has said, Saphier is not the most hospitable place in the world. It sounds fierce, violent, power-ridden. The mage may be the least of Meguet’s problems.”

The Holder’s tight grip of herself loosened suddenly; she pulled a net of gold thread and emeralds from her hair, flung it to the floor. She stared at Nyx, hair tumbling around her shoulders, her eyes night-dark, lined with pain. She said harshly, “I forbid you to leave this house. You said the mage will return. Wait for him. I will not lose both you and Meguet to some barbaric land beyond Ro Holding. Meguet is resourceful; she may be able to find her way back—“

“No.” She gazed at her mother, her throat tight. Her face had lost color. “I won’t let you sacrifice Meguet for me.”

“You sacrificed her for a key.”

“I—“ She swallowed, unable to speak, then steadied her voice. “I make mistakes. Yes.”

The Holder closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“I was careless.” Nyx spoke carefully, her eyes wide, colorless as cloud. “But I’m not entirely without resources myself. Meguet fought for me. I owe her. I think I can find a way into Saphier.”

“But why?” The Holder’s voice rose again, dangerously. “Why must you go there if you expect the mage to come here?”

“I think he can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Return. I think he was injured by the firebird.”

“Moro’s eyes,” the Holder breathed. “Badly?”

“It’s not a question of degree—“

“Do you think he’s dead?”

“I have no idea.”

“You saw him before he disappeared. What had the bird done to him?”

“It was enough,” Nyx said slowly, “that the bird had done anything at all to him. If he had made the firebird, with all his formidable power he should have been able to control it. He never tried to harm it; it was trying to kill him- It drew blood; it lost a talon. That may have been enough to kill the mage.”

“A bird claw? I don’t understand.”

“The spell itself. The sorcery that transformed the firebird. It might have been deadly to the mage.”

The Holder stared at her. “I thought it was his spell.”

“So did I, until I saw him wounded. I think Meguet may be somewhere in Saphier with an injured mage on her hands,”

The Holder was silent. She turned abruptly, found the nearest chair and sat. “Then whose spell is it? Are we to expect yet another mage who won’t bother to use the gate?”

“I don’t—“ Nyx’s voice shook suddenly with worry. “I don’t know what to expect next.” She leaned against the massive fireplace, gazing down at her mother, and finding some comfort from the solid stones. “I’ve never asked your permission to leave the house before.”

“I know.”

“I’ve rarely even told you where I was going. I’m your heir, yes, but I’m also all you’ve got for a mage, and I must be free to work. Though I realize I’ve hardly given you much, these past months, to have faith in.” The Holder shifted, gestured wordlessly, her ringed hands flashing, falling. “All you’ve seen me do here is turn the Hold Signs back into embroidery and silence a bird, which rumor already told you I could do.”

“Nyx—“

“All I seem to do with the firebird in the tower is to fail- It does seem a simple thing to do: change a bird back into a man, something any mage could do.”

“It must,” the Holder said, “be a very subtle sorcery.”

“Oh, it is. Very subtle. And so stubborn, it seems to me at times that Brand himself cast the spell, masked himself behind the firebird, and refuses to relinquish it.”

The Holder made a noise, staring at her daughter. “He enchanted himself?”

“I don’t think so. But I am beginning to think he has some very powerful reasons to avoid becoming himself again. And I think the truth of the matter lies in Saphier. He cannot return on his own; the timepaths on his wrists have been damaged. I must take him.”

“I don’t like this,” the Holder said. “A ruler’s son, ensorcelled and exiled—it sounds dangerous. It’s not your business to solve Saphier’s problems.”

“No. But Brand has given me no reason to believe his father won’t want him back. If I were missing in a strange land, you would be grateful if someone brought me home,”

“Yes, but—“

“Also, there is Meguet. I can’t leave her there.”

“No. But—“

“But, why me? Because you have no one else who can do these things.”

“You are my heir.”

“I am your mage. This is what mages do.”

“I don’t like it.” The Holder rose abruptly to pace again, down a woven path of flowers and ivy to its edge and then back again. “You are too much like me,” she said abruptly. “Strong-willed and prone to wander. What if I lose you to Saphier? Where will I go to look for you? You can’t even tell me where this land is, assuming it exists now, at this moment and not some other, which occurs to me to wonder about since it doesn’t exist on any map.”

“The problem,” Nyx said carefully, wondering herself, “may not exist either. It’s not something to worry about until we must,”

“That,” the Holder said explosively, “is the kind of muddy thinking that has led you into trouble before.”

“Perhaps. But I’ve always found my way home. Somehow,” She put her hand on her mother’s arm. “Please,” she said softly. “I didn’t run away nine years for nothing. I am a sorceress. Let me do some sorcery.”

The Holder came with her to the tower. The midnight bells had not yet rung; Brand, whirling mid-pace as the door opened, was still human. Nyx cast a glance around the room; he answered her unspoken question.

“No one came. No one that I could see.”

“All right,” she said tautly. “We’ll go there.” She turned, looked at the Holder a moment, wordlessly. She said with wonder, “I’ve never said goodbye to you before.”

“Don’t say it now,” the Holder said fiercely. She touched an errant strand of Nyx’s hair, then dropped her hand, stepped back- “Just go. Return Brand to his father, find Meguet, and come home. Nothing more complicated than that. Promise me.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I can.” She drew the ivory ball out of her pocket, gazed into it. She could see the key floating in the dark; she touched it with her mind. Pages turned, time-paths wandered through them, through her thoughts, into me room itself- She was vaguely aware that Brand had knelt at the Holder’s feet He said something, rose again through a misty net of silver. Something else happened as he stepped to Nyx’s side and the room itself wavered, dreamlike, beyond the widening silver filigree: There were unexpected sounds, sudden movements. A door opened; faces appeared, then faded into a soft darkness that grew so deep it swallowed even me bright stars of candlelight Nyx, paths rushing everywhere around her, struggled a moment to remember the faces. Not Meguet, though one had her hair. Not the mage. She was aware of Brand with her, a presence and a name, though he had moved behind her. Saphier, she said, and all the glowing paths around them froze and vanished. All but one ... She stepped onto it; it began to move. As she shifted the path to form the pattern that led to Saphier, elusive sounds, faces, drew urgently at her attention, demanding to be named. She pushed them away, concentrating, intent on accurately shaping the whorls and crooks of time and distance so that the path would end in Saphier and not in the middle of some sea. It was not until she had formed the final turn and something vast began to shape itself beyond the dark, that she relinquished her attention to memory, and the sounds, the faces, came suddenly clear.

A knock--. The Holder turned, and the bells began to ring. The door opened... The Gatekeeper, his face hard, white, as it was when he swallowed fear whole and tried to hide it in some private place ... The face beside him was so unexpected that for a moment she felt only amazement: dark-skinned, pale-haired, eyes as dark as the first night of the world- It was Meguet’s kin, her unlikely shadow, as powerful and as powerless, standing under a roof that was not stars or light. And then she saw the warning in his eyes.

She felt the blood startle out of her face. The darkness ebbed, revealing a quiet, shadowy hall, a house at night, some time after, she guessed, the midnight bells had rung.

The firebird flew ahead of her toward a moving circle of light.