Ten

Meguet picked her way across a dragon’s spine. It pushed itself in a sharp, uneven ridge of red stone out of dry, weathered earth; it was not high, but too long to walk around and almost too steep to climb. Nothing grew on it. On the other side of it lay more of what she had already crossed: the Luxour with no perceptible horizon, shimmering with heat or with air disturbed by the flicker of dragon wings.

She had left Rad’s village at dawn, sitting beside a young, straw-haired man on his cart. He was going to cut salt blocks, he had told her when she stopped him. There was a place he knew in the desert, a white pool of salt She needed to get to Draken Saphier’s court, she said. He looked surprised, but offered her a ride as far as the first wall of stone.

“I go due north,” he said, “to the dragon’s backbone. Then I go west along that to the end, and there’s the salt pond. You’ll want to keep going north.” He eyed her askance as she climbed onto the cart seat; an answer presented itself. “You’ll be a mage, too, then. We were all wondering. Only mages cross the Luxour on foot.”

“How do others get across?” she asked. He urged his donkeys forward.

“They ride. Mostly they go around to the east, then follow the river. Others come in caravans, on carts, well-supplied. Those who hunger after dragons. Most buy a heart and go home again.” He ticked at the donkeys; his voice was good-humored, unhurried. “Some stay along the river, spend their lives looking for crystal bones. A handful stay on the Luxour itself.”

“In the desert?” she said, startled.

“A half-dozen, maybe, I’ve seen; there must be others. They find their places in the rocks, their underground streams. They see their private dreams of dragons to live near—a shape of stone, a hot spring, an odd configuration of shadows at sunset—and there they stay. They find me or they find the gait, eventually. That’s how I know them.”

She looked at him, at the crook of his mouth, his eyes that expected no surprises. “You don’t believe in the dragons.”

He shook his head-, surprised-again. “But I love the desert. It’s enough for me, just the way it is, without suppositions. Most born around here never leave. Or like Rad, they come back. He never stays long, though. He believes in dragons, Rad. He’s seen them since we were small, running barefoot into the desert after lizards. ‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘look.’ But I’d never see. So I wasn’t surprised when he left for Draken Saphier’s court. All mages go there. Is that where you were born?”

“No.”

He waited, then flicked the reins idly. “I thought maybe so, because you came with him and you’re going back there. But they say the mages come from all over Saphier, to Draken Saphier’s court.”

She opened her mouth to ask a question, closed it again. Mages, she thought, and wondered if they were all as powerful as Nyx. She felt a familiar, terrible impatience, wanting to be there instead of here with a desert to find her way across, at least until urgency loosed her powers, pleated time and desert to take her where she was needed. Whether or not Rad Hex would search for her after he took the key from Nyx, she had no idea. She could do nothing for Ro Holding, staying in that village at the edge of nowhere. Nyx, she had reasoned starkly, would not sit still in Chrysom’s tower wondering where Meguet was. if she could find her way to Saphier. And if she came, she would not bother with a desert; she would go straight to Draken Saphier....

“There,” the young man beside her said. “The dragon’s backbone.”

The sun had risen above the distant blue mountains, begun its arc across the sky. It peeled shadow away from the dragon bone, left a low, jagged ridge cutting across the landscape, beginning and ending nowhere. He pointed.

“Salt’s there, at that end.” He looked at her a moment, silently; perhaps, Meguet thought, he did not believe in mages either, and saw only a woman, unprotected and ignorant, about to wander into a place abandoned by everything but light. He said only, “Rad’s doings taught me never to question mages; not even their answers make much sense. If you need me again for something, I’ll be at the west end for two days.”

At the top of the ridge, she could still see his cart, lumbering and patient as a beetle, crawling along the bone. She rested a moment. Ahead lay the odd, crazed towers and palaces and dragons’ wings of stone. Wind roused suddenly, pushed at her hard; she smelled sulphur, and a darker, sweeter scent, as if in some deep, moldering cave something huge had shifted, disturbing earth. She started down the slope.

Sometime later, she walked along shallow furrows, straight lines raked long ago across the ground as if by some giant claw. The scars had weathered, but never closed. She glanced up uneasily, wondering at the size of such a thing. A fierce, golden eye left an imprint of fire in hers. She looked down, blinking, and continued doggedly, wondering if she would become like the desert dwellers, seeing dragons everywhere. Her shadow fluttered like black fire in the wind: the loose, flowing garments she had taken from Rad. He had worked some magic into her velvet shoes, during one of his waking moments, so she could walk, he said, if she got restless while he mended himself. Wearing them, she would feel neither heat nor cold nor water nor stone; she would walk on air. Dust did not cling to them either, she noticed, though dust clung to her swearing face and wove itself into her hair. She carried a water skin and a pouch with some bread and fruit and goat cheese. She would find lizards when she ran out of food. She would find the water that the desert dwellers drank. She would cross the desert somehow; even the Luxour came to an end eventually.

Her shadow shrank; the eye overhead blazed at her. She felt even her bones shrink under its cruel gaze, as if the weight of light pouring down over her pushed her closer to the earth. She reached one of the strange ruins, steep upthrusts of stone that had weathered and sheared pieces of itself away. From a distance it had doors, broken towers, and fallen walls, empty windows framing sky. Close, it was simply a pile of rock. within which she found shade, a resting place. She ate and drank sparingly, then leaned against a slab of warm stone and closed her eyes.

She woke with a start at a sound, and found a woman watching her.

“Are you mage?” the woman asked. “Or dragon?” Her eyes were blue desert sky, split with streaks of silver lightning; she peered at Meguet, blinking. Her long hair was white, her hands slender and delicate. She wore a black robe and magic shoes;

there was no dust on them. “I hear you breathing. I cannot see so clearly now; everything breathes now. everything has wings. Which are you?”

“Neither,” Meguet said. She straightened slowly. stiff. The woman, perched on stone like a butterfly sunning, smiled, her smooth brown face breaking suddenly into a spider web of wrinkles.

“A riddle!”

“No. Only a woman crossing a desert.”

“You are not a mage.”

“No.”

“Then,” the woman said, “you have a chance of getting out.”

Meguet was silent, puzzled. She found her water skin, drank a mouthful, and held it out. “Arc you thirsty?”

“No. But thank you. I have learned to smell clean water, after so many years here. I never go thirsty.”

“Years.” Meguet swallowed, staring at the ancient, beautiful, half-blind face. “How many years?”

“I can’t remember. I only remember how old I was when I got lost here; after I decided to stay I started counting dragons instead of years.” She smiled again. “In dragon years, I might be five. Or a thousand. Or I may not even be born. They arc that elusive....”

“Are you a mage?”

“I was. Maybe I still am. I never think about it.”

“I thought that’s all mages thought about.”

“Being mages?” She nodded, her hair drifting in the wind, a long cobweb cloak. “You’ve been around them, to know that.”

“A couple of them. But how did you get lost? All you have to do is follow the sun or cross it, to find your directions.”

“Mages,” the woman said, “tend to get distracted in the Luxour. There’s such a tangled magic here. It lures you this way, that. It tantalizes, it whispers.” She put her hand on a jagged tower of rock- “It lies. It says: Once I was this, search me, find who built me. So you search, and once you begin to see one fine, lost palace, you begin to see entire kingdoms lost; you wander from min to ruin. trying to find a memory.”

“A memory of what?”

“Of those who might have lived here among the dragons. Or, dragon-born, built them.” She patted the stone fondly. “Oh, they’re like the dragons, these old stones. They never say yes or no, but always maybe. Maybe I’m stone. Maybe more than stone.”

“Then why did you never turn your back on them and leave?”

“Because by then you yourself live within the ruined palaces; you have inherited the forgotten kingdoms.” She stood up on the rock, let her hair flow on the wild currents. She held out her hand. There was a blood-red jewel on her forefinger: a dragon’s eye. “Come with me. I’ll show you where I live, among the lizards and the sand beetles and the blue-eyed snakes. There’s a well of water beneath the rocks, so deep I never touch the bottom when I bathe in it. A dragon sleeps at the bottom of the well. Sometimes at noon when sunlight pours between the rocks, I glimpse it, coiled, golden as the light. Come. I’ll show you.”

“I cannot,” Meguet said gently. “I must cross the Luxour. I dare not be distracted by it.”

“So I felt. when I was much younger. That a hundred reasons compelled me across the desert. But after a time, I realized there was no reason for me not to stay. No reason at all. What compels you?” “I must get to Draken Saphier’s court.” “Draken Saphier.” The woman’s face smoothed, as if she barely remembered the name. Then she gave a sudden laugh. It held memory, ambiguity, a touch of rue. “The Dragon of Saphier. I was in Saphier when his mother ruled.” She was silent a little, her silver-blue eyes looking inward. “Perhaps that’s why I lost myself in the Luxour so long ago. I, too, wanted the dragon’s child. But—“ She tossed her hands lightly, freeing memory. “I could never find the dragon. If you stay long enough, Draken Saphier will come here. The Luxour will call him home.” She waited; when Meguet did not answer, she turned, slipped away among the ruins, as swiftly and easily as a desert animal. Her voice drifted back. “The world beyond the Luxour is the dream. Stay here.”

Meguet rose. As she stepped out of shadow, light pressed down at her again, trying to melt her, reshape her into something shrunken and flat that huddled close against the earth. She drew long scarves around her face, her head, and marked a path from stone to stone, shadow to shadow. Water, the desert-mage had said- A well. Deep water. But perhaps that was also a dream, for nothing grew out of the ground but rocks. Still, she remembered the ice cave, the dragon’s cold breath. The memory itself cooled her until she reached another shadow. Stay, the desert said- Sit. Wait. There is no end to me, I am everywhere, and you will never find your way beyond me. There is no path out of me. Stop here. Stay. Rest. But she refused to listen, even when the light pressed her head down, her eyelids closed as she walked. The light was dragon’s breath; the Dragon hunted the Cygnet... She walked across the face of the sun itself, and she told the desert; I have fought the sun and lived. She stumbled into shadow and back into endless fire, and again into shadow until both sun and shadow weighed her down, and time and the sun seemed to have stopped.

Finally the hot black cooled; the sun loosed its grip of the desert. A lavender sky began to darken, reveal the first faint stars. She heard water bubbling around her, smelled sulphur. Her mouth felt stuffed with sand, her body worn like old stone. She sat, felt for the water skin, took a few sips of warm water. Her eyes burned suddenly, though she had nothing left for tears; her body shook in a sudden, noiseless sob of fear and despair. She calmed herself, watching the night deepen, the stars grow huge, impossibly close. She saw no shimmering wings, no shadows unfolding to block the stars. Perhaps all she had ever seen were Rad Ilex’s dreams. The vast, warm dark, the star-shot silence comforted her. Others have been lost here and lived, she thought. And I’m not lost yet. She ate fruit that had fermented in the heat, cheese that would not last another day. She lay back again, above the ground along a ledge of stone, feeling the stone pull at her bones as if to draw her into itself. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll walk before dawn. Just before she fell asleep, she saw the stars flow together against the dark, shape themselves into the dragon’s face.

The next day she walked into the dragon’s heart. It was vast, golden, seething with hidden fires that blazed within stone, sand, shadow. Plumes of steam blurred the landscape, were snatched up and shredded by winds that blasted from the dragon’s mouth. Mud bubbled and belched; the ground hissed. Even the air she breathed burned, rank and fiery with steam. Sometimes she could barely see to cross the sun’s path; other times sun was everywhere, glowing in water, leaping out of raw crystals or dragon’s eyes. Steam or dragon’s breath trailed through the ruins, shaped ghostly faces where windows might have been. The ruins gave some shelter from the light, and the hot, stinging winds, but even their shadows burned. She made some attempt to capture lizards, shards of sun or shadow that scattered at her footfall and darted among the rocks. But they were too quick, and she couldn’t remember which Rad had told her not to eat. She ate dried, crumbled bread, a withering apple. Her eyes closed. She forced herself to rise, find her direction. She could barely see the dragon’s backbone pointing east and west behind her; the great towers, the roiling steam, half-hid it. At least it was still behind her; she hadn’t begun drifting in circles. The broken fragments of the lost kingdom rose everywhere in front of her. She could only sketch a path from one shadow to the next, and hope they did not shift themselves from place to place, stones and memories of stone, like some moving labyrinth, to trap her there. She walked until she turned gold with dust, and her thoughts under the violent heat were distilled to vapor, blown away before she could grasp them. Finally, a dragon-claw of light raked through her eyes, into her mind, and, between one step and another, she fell into her shadow.

She tasted water, impossibly sweet and cold. She tried to speak, and choked- A hand cradled her head, raised it- She opened her eyes, trying again to speak, and saw a stranger turned away from her as he set the water skin down. Behind him stood a great dragon the color of twilight. Its eyes were stars, its wings, opening, spread purple-grey across the sky. She tried to rise, managed to lift one hand. The stranger turned to her. The dragon breathed; night swirled around her, a blinding dark without a star.

When she woke again, a vast, silvery tide had swept across the sky. The dragon, looming against the night, was a shadow limned by stars. One star had fallen near her, giving out a soft, unwavering glow in spite of the restless winds. The stranger sat outside the circle of its light; she saw his loose, pale desert garb straying in the wind. He might have been dreaming or watching dragons, but he sensed her waking. She saw a flash of silver beneath his sleeve as he reached out to touch the fallen star. It burned brighter, sent its soft light washing over her face; his was still in shadow.

She asked, “Is the dragon yours?” Her voice sounded thin, far-away, as if she were dreaming it. But he heard her, he had risen suddenly, noiselessly, to scan the dark.

“What dragon?”

“The one there against the stars.”

He saw it; she heard his breath. Then he settled himself again. “It’s stone.” His voice was low, dispassionate. “Sometimes I think these great stones change shape at night, wander where they will....” He passed her the water skin. “Hungry?”

“No.”

“You will be.” He passed her another skin, of honey wine. She drank a little, and closed her eyes. She saw dragon wings, sheer and delicate as moth wings, dusted with stars. She remembered then where she was going and why, and dragged her eyes open.

“I must go.” But she could barely lift her head. He took something out of a pouch, began peeling it; the wind brought her the impossible scent of oranges. He passed her a section, ate one himself. “It’s easy to get lost at night, even for a mage.”

The desert, it seemed, abounded with mages. “How many dragon years have you been here?”

He was silent; she felt him study her. “Not long enough,” he said at last, “to be unsurprised by everything. Have you taken to dwelling in the desert?”

“No.”

“Then you came to see dragons.”

“No.”

He handed her another piece of orange. ‘ “Then why are you walking through the heart of the Luxour?”

“I’m travelling north.”

“From where?”

She did not, she realized, even know the name of Rad’s village. “South.”

“Most people,” he commented after a moment, “would have followed the river around the desert.”

“I’m in a hurry.”

“The Luxour slows time for those who hurry; it elongates itself. It hides itself from the curious; it shows itself to the innocent, and the unwary. It works its own magic.” His voice sounded detached, as if his attention were roaming the desert around them, peering into moon-shadows, listening to the winds. “It is a place of enormous power, and when you reach for that power, it slips away to return when you have stopped looking for it.”

Scanning the night for intimations of such power, she saw only a great, sinuous spiral of stars following the moon’s path, that reminded her of Rad’s white dragon. She thought of him, drugged by some deep, healing sleep, and of the white dragon in Chrysom’s tower, and then of Nyx, finding the key in Ro Holding that would unleash the dragons of Saphier, and she moved abruptly, murmuring in frustration, blinking dust out of her eyes.

“Do these winds never stop?”

“Never,” he answered. “They are dragons’ breath, fire and ice.”

“I saw the ice-dragon.”

He leaned forward slightly, his voice less distant. “Did you.”

“Not the dragon itself—“

“No.”

“But the cave where it sleeps. Like a hole in the night.”

“Yes.”

“I heard it breathe.”

“And what else have you seen?”

“A shadow. But nothing that cast the shadow.”

He said, “Ah,” very softly. “And what else?”

“Nothing more. A heart, maybe. A bone- The mage I saw yesterday said there was a golden dragon at the bottom of a well. A dragon of light.”

“Mage.” His voice went flat on the single word; she sensed all his attention then, pulled back out of the night to focus on her.

“The one who lives among the rocks.”

“Does this mage have a name?”

“I didn’t ask. She is quite old and somewhat blind.”

He made a soft sound; his attention strayed again. “She may see better, then, on the Luxour, where nothing is quite as it seems.”

“She had lost, she said, all interest in magic long ago. How is that possible? To stop being a mage?”

“To stop being compelled,” he answered; his face was turned away from her again, to the dark, singing distances- He added after a moment, “I don’t know if that in itself is possible.”

“She seemed compelled by dragons.”

“On the Luxour everyone is compelled by dragons.”

She was silent: A dragon had compelled her into the hot, unbearable eye of the sun. She said, “It was kind of you to help me.”

“You’re not the first I’ve found overwhelmed by the Luxour,” he said. “It happens. People come looking for wonders, for the dragon’s claw, the dragon’s fire. They never stop to think that they might find what they are looking for. They see crystal bones, a piece of petrified fire, fragments of some long forgotten age. They never see the living fire that breathes over them out of a passing moment. I find them and they wake and tell me they were struck by sun. Then they stumble to the nearest village and buy a dragon heart and go home, never knowing they have worn dragon’s fire, they have stood within the dragon’s eye.”

She was silent, compelled, by something in his voice, to search the winds and stars for their reflections. “I thought it was the sun myself,” she admitted.

“I thought you must be a mage when I saw you,” he said a little drily. “With enchanted shoes and no food. No one has less common sense than a mage on the Luxour. But I didn’t recognize you, and I know all the mages of Saphier,”

“I’m not a mage,” she said. “A mage I met put the spell into my shoes.”

“Yes.” His voice went soft, very thin; he might have been listening to the sound of a shadow shifting across sand. “I recognized his spell. Mages leave fingerprints that the skilled can read. How well do you know him?”

She was silent, thinking of Rad with a dragon across his doorway, telling her what to fear. “Not well,” she said finally.

“Is he in his village now?”

“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “He comes and goes.” He moved. The mage-light flashed suddenly in her eyes. She winced, catching dust again, her vision blurring.

“I know those river villages,” he said. “Everyone knows everyone and everything.”

“It’s true.” She wiped tears from her eyes, shielding her face from the light. “I’ve lost track of time, here. It seems so long ago, now, that I walked out of the village. I don’t even know where I am; how can I know where a mage might be? Mages—except you—don’t pay attention to you unless they need you.”

“And did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Need you?”

She looked at him, her eyes finally clear, wondering at this stranger pushing her gently, question by question, into lies, and why she felt compelled to hide the sleeping mage within her thoughts. In the wider cast of light she finally saw his face.

She remembered to breathe after a time. It was the firebird’s face, older, passionate, controlled. She recognized the black brows slashing over cobalt eyes, the hard, clean-lined warrior’s face, weathered by experience. His long hair was varying shades of black and smoke and ash, tied back with braided ribbons of leather. The flash of silver at his wrists were the woven strands of time.

She swallowed drily. He said curiously, “You know me. I don’t know you.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said. She felt her body trying to grow small, push into the ground away from his eyes. “You wouldn’t,” she said again, desperately. “I’m just another face in those river villages you know.”

He held her eyes for a long time until it seemed she began to hear the secret voices of his dragons, and to see their wings moving in his eyes. Then his expression changed, lines deepening between his brows, beside his mouth. He said, “Rad Ilex sent you into the Luxour leaving the track of his sorcery in every step you take. Are you running away from him? You won’t elude him wearing those. He put some thought into your shoes, but into little else.” She did not answer. He touched the light again; it dimmed, throwing a welcome shadow over her eyes. “You are protecting him.” His voice was suddenly husky, edged with pain, his face so like Brand’s it startled her. “It doesn’t matter. I will find him.”

“Why?” she whispered. He set the pouch near her, along with skins of water and wine. He sat still again, as she had first seen him, but his hands were tightly closed, his face taut.

“He injured my son.” His hands opened, closed again; he stared into the mage-light. “Brand,” he whispered. “My only child. He is lost somewhere in time, crying fire like a dragon, unable to speak anything but strange, jewelled spells. Rad forced him out of Saphier, and destroyed his only path back.”

“Why?” The word hurt, coming out, as if it were a strange, hard jewel.

“I don’t know. They had been friends. Rad Ilex had discovered something, I think, something of enormous power, dangerous to Saphier. Brand tried to warn me, Rad silenced him. I have been searching for them both. I have sent my mages searching for them. But Rad Ilex is elusive and my son is—anywhere. You have been with Rad in his village. Is he there, still? You do not know. He comes and goes. So he came and went in my son’s life and twisted him out of shape, and tore time itself apart to fling him beyond Saphier. Beyond even my sight.” He paused; she saw him swallow. “I taught Rad to do those things.”

She started to speak, couldn’t- She heard Rad’s voice: The Dragon of Saphier will test you and test you until you can’t call your own bones private ... The dragon of night and stars had been on Rad’s own threshold, had filled his own doorway. It was Rad who searched for the key, Rad whom the firebird attacked, Rad who had tested her himself... Rad who lay helpless against Draken Saphier, alone and dreaming, recovering from Brand’s fury.

Or was he? Had he lied to her, gone in secret to Ro Holding to trade her warnings for a key? Was he on the desert now, coming to find her, or had he sent her on an impossible journey to Draken Saphier’s court, simply to lose her and her suspicions to the Luxour?

“I can’t help you.” Her voice trembled badly, torn as she was between truth and lie, recognizing neither. She felt something like wind glide over her feet, and Draken Saphier rose, holding her shoes.

“You can help me,” he said simply. “You can stay here until Rad follows the path of his sorcery to you. Not even the whims of the Luxour can hide your steps from him. When he finds you, I will find him.” She stared at him, stunned. “Keep the food and water,” he said. “I’ll take the light.” He added, “Don’t try to walk in the dark. Things that are afraid of light, that bury themselves against the heat by day, dig out at night to feed. They are small, vicious, and can feel the vibrations of a falling pebble. As long as you stay still, you’ll be safe. And I’ll be here, watching.”

The light went out. He was silent. He had. she realized, faded into the desert: a dark streak of wind, a thinking stone. She lay still, scarcely daring to breathe, trying to remember why, in another time, in another country, she had not picked up a sword instead of a rose.

Eleven

Nyx sat in a white room, contemplating three black leaves floating in a bowl of water. The bowl was white; the table it stood on was white. Thin white curtains caught light before it spilled a hint of color across the white floor. Nyx wore a fine, flowing, complex assortment of garments, all of white silk. In the entire room, only her eyes had color, the lavender in them so deep it seemed, when she caught her reflection, a comment on her surroundings.

She was alone in the small chamber, whatever alone meant in a house full of mages. She had been treated with impeccable courtesy from the moment she appeared: a sorceress from a strange land walking a path of time into a ruler’s house, with a firebird she claimed was his missing son. This she explained to more mages than she had ever counted even among the dead in the history of Ro Holding. There was not a shadow of disbelief in their expressions, as the firebird cried noiselessly, constantly overhead. Of course this was Draken Saphier’s son, this wild bird trying impotently to turn them all into jewelled trees. Unfortunately, Draken Saphier was not there to thank her himself. Neither were Rad Ilex and Meguet, her eye told her, among this grave and attentive gathering. She must wait, of course, for Draken Saphier’s return. She had, she explained, urgent business elsewhere. No, they persuaded her, she must wait. Draken Saphier would want to question her more fully about his son’s enchantment, perhaps seek her advice- This, she had to admit, seemed reasonable, considering the state in which his son had returned, Draken Saphier’s arrival, they told her, was imminent.

It remained imminent. She had been given pristine quarters, three leaves in a bowl to contemplate, attendants of exquisite tact and skill who were all, she realized, mages of varying degree. Draken Saphier had not yet returned, but would soon. Soon became three days, and in three days she had been shown extraordinary things in the vast. white, light-filled palace. But she had seen nothing of the firebird.

She kept an eye out for him, as mages led her through the palace. It seemed an irregular assortment of cubes piled at varying heights, the whole house formed around a great square which was separated into formal gardens, and, at the center, a broad square of red and white stone. From the highest windows in the house she could see the pattern in the stones: the emblem of Saphier, an intricate, stylized weave of lines coiling, locking, parting, meeting. She wondered, if she walked that path, where it would end. It held, she realized after a time, the only curved lines in the palace. The palace had no round towers, no turrets, no spirals or circles, only a series of arched windows now and then, open to air and light, overlooking the gardens. The chambers and halls, corridors, stairways, all carried continuous straight lines from angle to angle as the palace turned at the comers of the square. Nothing was Jumbled, labyrinthine, untidy with past. Past had been relegated to memory, or it was framed in orderly fashion within the present. For a house full of mages of varying powers the space and pale walls and light would be calming, and the strict lines the eye perceived might order the mind. So much Nyx conjectured, though, within those lines, she was shown fascinating deviations.

“This wall is very old,” a very old mage named Magior Del, who was Brand’s great-aunt, told her. She was quite tall and thin, with hands that seemed all bone, translucent with age, and eyes as dark and still as the new moon. The wall, a great slab of pale wood at one end of a white room, was so completely and intricately carved with tiny figures that it seemed to move. It was a battle, Nyx realized, taking a closer look, depicted with ruthless and startling detail: Not even the cart horses seemed exempt from slaughter. Only birds, picking out an eye or a bloody heart, eluded arrow, spear, fire, club, stone. The carving of the devastation was elegant, skilled. She studied it, curiously; such fury seemed remote in the peaceful house.

“Where are the mages?” she asked, turning to Magior. She surprised a fleeting expression on the ancient, composed face.

“A mage witnessed it,” she answered. “He carved it. as an example of power he thought beyond the control even of sorcery. There were few mages then, and magic seemed a force as raw and random as lightning.”

“Then he didn’t connect sorcery with savagery,” Nyx commented. She turned away from the silent, frozen carnage, to a more tranquil tapestry hanging on a side wall. At first glance it seemed a tree full of birds and flowers, bright, varied blooms growing along the same bough, with small, vivid birds fluttering among the leaves. As she gazed at it, odd dark shapes intruded; broken pieces of shadow, faces, perhaps, half-revealed behind the leaves, or even within a flower, as if some other work were embroidering itself through this one. She looked closer, intrigued, trying to piece the darkness together, but it remained elusive.

“It makes me want to frighten the birds out of the tapestry, part the leaves,” she said, “to see what the tree is hiding.” She looked at Magior. “What is it? What do you see?”

“I am too old,” Magior said in her slow, dry voice, “to see anything. Flower and shadow, dark and light, in the end they are what they are. There is no resolution. You are unconvinced. What do you see?”

“A mystery,” Nyx answered simply. “What I would like to see, unless you have some objection, is the firebird.” Magior looked at her silently; she added, “It flew to me for help. I’ve grown—accustomed to it. To Brand. I’ve left work unfinished, which worries me, and will worry me until I see it completed. Or has he remembered everything? Is the spell broken?”

Lines moved across the aged face, undecipherable expressions. “The firebird is resting. It has several— roosts, I suppose we must call them. We thought it best to surround him with familiar faces, so that he could more easily remember his past. The past he remembers with you is intricately bound with the spell.”

“I see.”

“Please do not be offended.”

“No.”

“If he looks at you, he will only remember himself as the firebird, needing help.”

“And is he remembering himself?”

“It is,” Magior said after a pause, “an exasperating piece of sorcery.” Her face worked again. “When we follow his memories back, there is a point at which all we find, inevitably, is the bird’s face. The bird’s silent cry.”

“You go into his mind?” Nyx asked, startled.

“You didn’t?”

“Only to find the bird’s mind. And that was like entering some hard, polished jewel, where every part is like every other part. And yet Brand kept insisting that all he lost of time and memory could be found in that enchanted bird,”

Magior nodded. “So he still insists,” she murmured, “All we can do is wait for Draken Saphier.” She paused again, her eyes on Nyx’s face. “We wondered,” she said at last, “what you did with the bird’s fire and its voice.”

“I trapped them outside of the bird. I didn’t want to dodge its fire while I worked, and I couldn’t bear hearing its cry. No one in the house could. Have you heard it?”

“Once.” Magior closed her eyes briefly. “In the middle of the night. Its first cry. Before it vanished. A terrible, terrible sound.”

“The spell was cast here, then.”

“Yes. By a mage who also vanished.”

“Brand remembered something of that... He was afraid the mage had deceived his father, and was still here.”

“No,” Magior said a trifle harshly. “He has not been seen here since. He would not dare return.”

“I see.” Nyx kept her face and her voice calm, but still the dark eyes lifted, at some disturbance her impatience caused in the air between them. She asked quickly, “Something I wondered about: the time paths on Brand’s wrists. How did they get so black?”

“We assume the mage destroyed them, when Brand tried to escape him.”

“Would that be simple to do?”

“No. It would take enormous power. The paths are nearly indestructible. They must be so, or people might be left stranded in odd places, in strange times.”

“Who made them?”

“Draken. He fashioned all the paths of time.”

Nyx watched, the next day, the household guard gather in the stone square and perform a complex series of movements. They were very old, the young mage with her explained. Developed by the first mage-ruler of Saphier, for far different purposes. Now, despite the blades, it was more an exercise, a dance. The movements were slow, but Nyx recognized the whirling blades, the deadly rhythms of Brand’s attack on Rad Ilex. There seemed guards enough for every window and every mouse hole in the house, all wearing the path of time that lay under their feet, emblazoned in red across their breasts. They also wore the familiar silver on their wrists. The thought of such an army marching the spiralling paths of time disturbed Nyx profoundly. Yet all she saw of martial art was relegated to a dance, and all she saw of magic was the complete disappearance of the firebird.

The mage with her, Parnet, a sturdy young woman from north Saphier, with a fat braid of red hair and a milky, freckled face, said when the guard dispersed, “Perhaps you would like to see the lemon garden. The fruit is ripe now and the trees are beautiful.”

“I would rather see Brand Saphier,” Nyx said. She added, infected by the constant courtesy, “Please.”

“The firebird is resting,” Parnet said slowly. “I don’t know where in the house it might be.”

“I thought you were trained to read minds.”

“Oh, no,” Parnet said, her complacency shaken. “I mean, yes, we are, but not without careful regulations, and not ordinarily without permission. It’s punishable, though experiments are always made, among the younger mages. You can see such rules prevent a good deal of confusion, as well as animosity. Some mages are inclined to temperament.”

“I see,” Nyx said temperately. “Perhaps, then, at moonrise?”

“I’ll ask Magior for you.”

Nyx was silent, swallowing frustration. They had drifted to a stop beside an immense bowl of black marble, containing water. Above the water hung a huge tapestry of a man in a plain black robe, sitting on a floor of brilliant tiles, in front of a great black bowl of water. He studied it with interest, though it held, as far as Nyx could see, only a couple of threadbare patches.

“Who is that?” she asked. Parnet answered without a hint of judgment,

“No one. It is a question.”

“The man?”

“No. What you see: the real bowl, the tapestry bowl, the water, the man. It is all a question about you.”

“Me.”

“Few pass here without speaking. What you say about this tells something about you. Even those who say nothing tell something. It is one of the ways of grouping beginning mages, according to their perceptions of what is most important. You chose the man. Some ask what he sees in the water; others what relationship the real bowl has to the bowl of thread- I suppose that, in a land full of strangers’ faces, you would see the unknown face first.”

Nyx opened her mouth, hesitated. The house came alive around her suddenly, puzzle-pieces everywhere, springing out of what she had considered background. “The bowl in my room,” she said suddenly. “The color. Or rather the lack of it... This entire house is full of questions.”

“Yes.”

“How fascinating.” She gazed into the water, saw the color deepen in her eyes. “And there are no answers- Only responses. Some must find all that white in my chamber peaceful.”

“Yes.”

“And the walls of battle-scenes?”

“Some find them absorbing,” Parnet answered simply. “Most of them become the warrior-mages.”

“Is Brand a warrior-mage?”

“Brand is a warrior. He has no gifts for sorcery.”

“Yet he can walk the path of time on his wrists.”

“That is common here, for warriors,” Parnet answered, with a touch of surprise in her voice. Nyx frowned down at the water. She let one hand fall to her side, touch the tiny ivory ball that held Chrysom’s key. She saw Parnet’s reflection, her expression open, waiting, calm. She asked abruptly,

“And is the firebird itself a question? Or do you have a few answers for that here?”

Water rippled for no reason, obscuring both their reflections. Nyx turned her head, found Parnet still looking into the water. Her brows were raised slightly, worriedly; her face hid nothing. She said very softly,

“They have been trying, as you tried. All we can do is wait for Draken Saphier.”

“Who will return soon.”

“Soon.”

Nyx sat that evening after supper, gazing into the white bowl of water in her chamber, watching the black leaves turn and turn, fashioning, out of water and air, some mysterious path of their own. Thoughts as dark were beginning to shape their own patterns in her mind. She barely gave them form, or language, for in that house apparently not even memory was private. One black leaf had Draken Saphier’s name, one Rad Ilex’s, and the third the name of an unknown mage who had entered Draken Saphier’s house, ensorcelled his son, cast the blame on Rad Ilex, and vanished—or who had been taught by Draken Saphier, had learned far too well, and who, having fashioned the firebird and driven Rad Ilex away, still lived in the house, free and unsuspected. That mage would be among those working with the firebird now, to guard the spell. Someone close to Brand, who had flung him out of his world, destroyed the path back to it, and never expected to see him again.

Until I brought him back, she thought. Along my private path. The mage could destroy that, too, if Chrysom’s key were found.

But who? And why? And what had Brand witnessed that he had been so ruthlessly reshaped, and even human, had only the firebird’s cry to speak of it?

She reached out, turned a leaf over between thoughts, as if it were the page of a book. Its underside was gold. She watched it awhile, thinking of the silver paths, and Draken Saphier, who had a power like Chrysom’s. to fashion bridges across time. How expansive was that power? she wondered. And why did one of those patterns lead to Ro Holding? Or had the bird simply gotten lost in the strands of time, fleeing down a path that was being consumed by sorcery?

She turned another leaf idly; it was deep blue. Blue, gold, black... What would the third color be? Did the colors have significance, or was it another of the house’s questions? If she did not turn it, it would be any color she imagined ... She could find the firebird in the house, open Chrysom’s book and walk the path to the Luxour. The bird would follow. They would escape this house of puzzles, its bewildering courtesies and maddening equivocations. At least the desert would not equivocate: earth, stone, light, did not lie. Or did they? There were ancient magics in the Luxour. Brand had said, complexities even there. But Draken Saphier could be found, to free Brand from the firebird. Only for that, it would be worth some subterfuge to find Brand and leave. But if she fled with the firebird down one path, just as Draken Saphier returned by another, he would be mystified and justifiably outraged. She might put herself in danger; no one knew her here but Brand, no one could speak for her but a man whose memories of her might in their eyes be hidden within the firebird’s cry. She had already taken its defense, its voice; they might wonder what else she had done to it.

She shifted restlessly, touched the third leaf gently to still herself. Meguet... where in Saphier was she, if not in Draken Saphier’s court? With a mage hiding from Draken? Where would he hide?

The Luxour. Where the magic was unpredictable, and not even a mage could find a mage. And he knew the desert. He had been born there. Brand said, among the rumors of dragons....

She turned the third leaf. The door opened behind her; she turned her head, saw Magior Ilel and a strange mage in the doorway.

Magior said, “Brand will see you now.”

She rose, then turned back silently, looked into the bowl. Red as blood, as dragon’s fire, the third leaf... “Is it a question?” she asked.

“You chose the colors,” Magior said without a flicker of expression. “It is an answer.”

They led Nyx through endless airy corridors, toward chambers in an unfamiliar wing. Opening her mind a little, she sensed an enormous power, like a silent cataract. She barely touched it, a hand-brush against thundering, pounding water.

“Is this where the mages are trained?” she asked, and Magior cast a startled glance at her.

“Still your mind,” she instructed.

“It has been suggested before,” Nyx said tranquilly after a moment. “To no one’s satisfaction.”

“I do not mean to offend,” Magior said stiffly. “You are a stranger in Draken Saphier’s house. Your own powers are unknown to us.”

Nyx glanced at the shadow beside her, flung forward by the angle of light, of the nameless mage who walked noiselessly behind her. He wore the emblem of Saphier across his chest; he would know, she guessed, the deadly movements of the dance. She swallowed a sharp comment, concentrating on her surroundings. They had moved into a corridor of rich dark wood, carved with ancient scenes, she guessed, of Saphier’s history. A great bronze dragon clung to double doors at the end of the corridor. Warriormages guarded the doors. At a sign from Magior, they split the dragon in two, and through the open doors Nyx saw Brand.

The room was full of dragons, carved in wood, in red stone, in amber, painted, embroidered on tapestry, limned in ink on the margins and frontispieces of old books on stands and shelves. The chair Brand sat in had dragons’ faces lifting out of the arms, and dragons’ claws for feet.

“You wished to see me,” he said to Nyx. The politeness in his voice chilled her until she saw that his face was as rigid as his courtesy. The firebird’s cry of fury and despair, she guessed, was so close to the surface of his thoughts that it took all his patience to keep it from cutting to the heart of language. He glanced at the warrior-mage, and then at Magior, before Nyx could answer. “Why is Han here?”

“Only a precaution—“ Magior began. Brand rose abruptly, his mouth tightening.

“No one set such guards on me in Ro Holding.”

“My lord, you were a bird. Nyx Ro is an unknown quantity.”

“I know her. Dismiss him.”

Expression rippled across Magior’s face, a mingling of worry and doubt. The warrior-mage inclined his head, disappeared into thin air.

Nyx said carefully, “I haven’t seen you since we came here. I wondered how you were, if returning home had altered the spell at all.”

“No,” Brand said tersely. He paced among the dragons, touching an eye here, a claw there.

“It is a spell,” Magior said fulsomely, “of unusual complexity and power.”

“My father will help me,” Brand said. “There’s no more powerful mage in Saphier.”

“Where is he?” Nyx asked baldly, expecting a straight answer at least from him; his reply overrode Magior’s equivocation.

“He is expected back very soon.”

“Dragon-hunting,” Brand said, “in the Luxour.” He stopped pacing, to gaze at a jet-black dragon painted on what looked like some kind of leather shield. The dragon’s eyes were tiny, malevolent, red as garnet. “So I was told. He is drawn there sometimes, to search, he says, for his heart. Or he may be looking for Rad Ilex.”

“You expected Rad Ilex to be here.”

“I thought he might be.”

“Rad Hex has not been seen in this court since you vanished,” Magior said. “He would have been killed, that night, had he lingered a moment longer. So your father said. Only one moment.”

Nyx opened her mouth, closed it, swallowing a smoldering cinder of impatience. Brand said abruptly to her, “Then why are you still here? I thought you would have gone.”

“I was asked to stay,” Nyx said calmly, “to speak to Draken Saphier. It seemed a reasonable request. Everyone, it seems, expects him soon.”

Brand’s brows pulled together hard. He was silent a moment, his eyes on her, as if he had heard, even beneath the turmoil and frustration of the firebird’s cry, the equivocation in her voice. He said finally, “The Luxour is full of voices. So the mages say. The desert speaks. The stones and the silence speak. So they say. I doubt if I would hear much. But that makes it difficult for the mages to call my father home. And finding him, if he does not wish to be found, would be impossible. So I .am told. It’s hard for me to wait patiently. The most I can manage at moonrise is just to wait. It would be kind of you to wait with me, at least while I’m human. The mages have tried to work with me; they get no farther than you did. I don’t think anyone can help me but my father, and I have very, very little patience left for mage-work. So. Keep me company- Walk with me, in the gardens.”

“I think,” Magior murmured, “we should keep working. Such enchantments might be unravelled quite unexpectedly.”

“Perhaps the moonlight will unravel it,” Brand said, “since no mage in this house can.” His face was strained, taut; Nyx heard the noiseless cry emanating from him so strongly, she wondered that the dragons around them did not turn into spellbound jewels. His great-aunt heard it too, apparently; she bowed her head in acquiescence.

“Perhaps you are right,” she said. “I will wait for you here.”

He did not speak for a while; he took Nyx’s arm, his grip tight, as if he expected the moon to toy with her shape, too. They left the house, walked on wide paths of white stone that wandered among the rosetrees. Nyx, unused to such formal progression through a garden, found it bewildering, for a mage and a man about to fly away. She laid her free hand on his hand, reminding him that she was there, and said,

“I think—“

“Not here,” he breathed, and she was silent again until they passed through the courtyard of roses into a tiny walled garden full of lemon trees, soft paths of moss between fountains and moon-bright streams. He closed the gate behind them; his grip eased finally.

“It is my father’s meditation garden.” he said softly. “No one else comes here.”

“There is little hope of privacy in a house full of mages,” she pointed out.

“Perhaps. But I’m used to being private with you. No one told me you were still here. I thought you would have gone to look for Meguet.”

“All they knew of me is that I brought you here. They couldn’t have assumed you cared. Did you ask after me?”

‘No.’

“Then why are we here, whispering?”

“Because,” he said restively, “your face looks changed. Wary. It wasn’t only you studying me, in that tower. I had nothing else to watch but you. You do what you want, say what you think; you listen to reason, but not without arguing. Here, you pick your way from thought to thought as if you are afraid. No. Not afraid. But in danger. In my father’s house. Why?”

“I’m alone in a strange land, surrounded by mages of indeterminate power, and more warriors than I’ve seen in all of Ro Holding. It seems expedient for me to be somewhat wary. If you have one enemy, you might have two, and one of them under this roof.”

He stared at her, amazed. “Me?”

“You said yourself you can’t remember why Rad Hex turned you into a firebird. Conceivably to guard himself against something you saw, something you know.”

“A conspiracy? In my father’s house?”

She sighed noiselessly. “I can only guess. You tell me. You brought me here. And I can’t imagine even this place being completely private. Those goldfish are probably trained to eat whatever words fall like crumbs on the water.”

“No one speaks in here,” he said absently. His brows were drawn again; he glanced at the moon, then down at a little fish like an orange flame rising to the surface of the water. “The guard changes at midnight. I listen for that.” His fists clenched. “I can’t remember,” he said tightly, “how it feels to stand in sunlight. To fall asleep in a bed. To know where I was at noon yesterday. If my father does not come soon, I’ll go to the Luxour myself and find him.”

“Would the bird fly there?” Nyx asked curiously. He looked at her, his eyes shadowed, haunted.

“It flew to you,” he said slowly. “And here it sits in this house with you, waiting, though I assume that if it could find you in Ro Holding, it could find my father in the Luxour.”

“Why Ro Holding? If your father made the paths on your wrists, why would he have fashioned one to Ro Holding?”

He shook his head, disinterested. “I don’t know. He didn’t create the patterns out of time and space. He only forged the paths, and I don’t think even he knows where they all go. I think the firebird found Ro Holding by chance, though your power drew it, once it came there. Why? Is it important?”

“Perhaps,” she said evenly, thinking of the flashing blades of the ritual dance, the silver paths blazing on every wrist. Brand was silent, watching the occasional moonlit glint of color in the dark water.

He said very softly, “You could take me to the Luxour. The bird would follow you.”

“If your father doesn’t return soon?”

“Now.”

She looked at him, startled. “Why not Magior, or one of the other mages?”

“The bird follows you.” He paused; his face loosened slightly. “I follow you. I’m here with you in my father’s garden, where no one else is permitted. I trust you.”

“You might,” she said slowly, “but there’s little reason for anyone else to. trust a mage who absconds with you into the desert. If you vanish twice, they will be heart-struck. They are doing their best for you.”

“And their best is no better than what you did for me in that tower.” His voice sounded dangerously thin. “If I have to spend one more day covered with feathers and eating mice, and wake to myself again without seeing my father, I will walk out of this house and keep walking south, and no one will know where I am. You yourself want to go to the Luxour, Rad Ilex will be hiding there. It’s the only place in Saphier where he can hide from my father. And it’s the place to look for Meguet.”

“Let me go,” she pleaded. “By myself. That way you’ll be here, if your father is on his way back now. If not, I can look for him, and for Meguet.”

“No.” His hands closed suddenly on her arms; she felt the tension in his grip. “No. I will not wait here. I’ll walk out now. I know my father’s private passage from this garden out of the house. You can stay here and explain to Magior where I’ve gone.”

“Brand—“

“Now. Before midnight. I’m not a mage. If I tell Magior, and she thinks I’m unwise, she’ll keep me here. She’ll find ways. I can’t stop her. I am unwise, but if I don’t see my father soon, if this spell stays on me much longer, I will find a new voice for the firebird, and it will cry day and night without ceasing and no one in this house, not even you, will stop it.”

“All right.” She touched him gently, swallowing drily. “All right. I’ll take you there. Now. And I won’t walk. I think I have a path to the Luxour.”

“Where?” he asked, amazed.

“In my pocket.” She drew out the ivory ball. “Chrysom’s book.”

Twelve

Meguet waited a night and a day and a night for Rad Ilex. After staring down the moon and then the stars, listening for night-hunters, she finally fell asleep as the sky lightened, showing her broken airy palaces that would turn to stone at sunrise. She woke to light pounding down at her, ground shimmering with heat. She caught up the skins and pouch, and burned her feet running to shelter among the nearest stones. There she sat, shifting as the shadow shifted, her thoughts as formless and furious as the maddening heat. When night fell, she found a slab of rock to crawl onto, away, she hoped, from whatever small ferocious things might consider her supper. The first tiny lizard that slipped out of a crevice and ran over her nearly sent her tumbling to the ground. After that, she shared the stone with them, shaking them away with little more attention than she would give a fly. The inactivity was as maddening as the heat. If Rad Ilex did not bother coming for her, she assumed Draken Saphier would let the desert have her, a ghost to haunt the dream-castles. Dying alone in the middle of a desert in a strange land seemed preposterous. But if Draken Saphier told the truth, and she had helped the wrong mage, he had little reason to care what happened to her.

He might not even bother telling her if he caught Rad; he might just leave her anyway. That thought kept her awake the second night, listening for voices, for mage-work. In the darkest hour before dawn, when even the winds drifted gently, spent, she heard a pebble on the ground below her shift.

She tensed, thinking of the small, toothed animals. A lizard skittered across her hand. She flung it away, gasping. The lizard said as it fell,

“Meguet.”

She peered over the edge of stone, saw nothing. She had to wait for it to work its way up the rock again, and then, in deep shadow, it changed. Rad whispered,

“I know Draken is here. I want you to run from me. Now.”

She was silent, trying to pick out his face in the dark; it might as well have been the peeked and weathered stone speaking. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“What?”

“You want me eaten by the night-hunters.”

“What night-hunters?”

“The ones who can feet your running steps.”

“What are you talking about?” His voice, cobweb thin, took on slightly more substance. “There’s nothing but lizards in this part of the desert. And you’ve been sleeping with them.”

She was silent, her mouth tight, controlling a flash of temper as black as the sky. She said between her teeth, “Draken Saphier says they exist. You say they don’t. He told me not to move among them. You tell me to run.”

“Then believe him.” There was no anger in his voice, almost no sound but a taut urgency trembling between them. “Yes, there are terrible night-hunters. Yes, I want to kill you. So run from me, Meguet, quickly, because they will show you more mercy than I will. Run. Now. Run.”

She hesitated a moment, still trying to see his face. Then she slid off the ledge and ran across the cool, hard ground, blind until a light exploded behind her like the fallen star suddenly showering its pale fire across the sleeping desert. She tripped on a stone, came down hard, and heard, above her panting, Rad Ilex’s sudden, twisted cry. She caught her own cry behind her hand, feeling tears sting her eyes. There was another flash. She pushed her face against her arms, felt the ground shake a little, as if, deep beneath it, the dragons stirred, disturbed.

The night was still again. She heard a step. And then Draken Saphier’s voice: “You’re safe, now. I have him.”

She rose, trembling; she sensed only one shadowy presence in the dark. “Where? Did you kill him?”

“No. I need him alive to take the spell from my son.”

She brushed hair and dirt out of her face, tried to speak with dignity, though her voice shook. “Will you give me back my shoes now? I’ll walk home.”

He was silent. A thin, white light snapped through the air, hit the ground near her foot. She glimpsed something small, many-legged, trying to bite the blade of light impaling it. She froze, speechless, and then felt the black anger again, as if she were truly blind, and teased and teased by voices, light touches, questions without answers, without end: Who am I, Meguet? Who am f now? And now?

“Please.” Her voice trembled badly. “Give me my shoes and let me go.”

“Come.” He took her arm. “You want to go north;

I’ll take you. You’re barely fit to walk, and I owe you something for helping me, though until you ran from Rad, I was not certain you believed me.” She opened her mouth, closed it, speechless again. “Come to my court.” His grip was not tight, but she suspected he would not let her go. “Wherever you are going, my palace must be closer to it than the Luxour.”

She answered finally, wearily, using herself again as bait to lure truth, for her own hidden face only called forth other shifting faces. “It’s where I am going. The court of Draken Saphier.”

His voice sharpened. “You were walking to my house across the desert?”

“I’m a stranger in your land. My name is Meguet Vervaine. Rad Ilex pulled me out of the house of the Holders of Ro Holding, into the middle of the Luxour. He took me to his village from there- He was hurt; he hadn’t the strength to take me back to Ro Holding. I recognized you because your son is in Ro Holding, in the care of my cousin, Nyx Ro, who is a very capable mage.” He was absolutely motionless; she spoke to nothing, to the night. “Rad had told me certain things that made me wary of you. And you tell me things that make me wary of Rad. Whatever is between you is far too complicated for me to sort out. Perhaps Brand himself, when he is no longer imprisoned by the firebird, can make things clear.”

“Ro Holding.”

“Saphier is on none of our maps.”

“I have heard of Ro Holding.”

She was silent, aware of words scattered to a stranger’s winds, like birds flying out of her mouth that could never be caught. She felt ancient, uneasy stirrings. not from the Luxour, but within her, a faint flurry of voices through the ages: Meguet, what are you. are you doing, are you doing? I am blind, she told them fiercely, desperately. / am trying to see.

The night shifted, as if it, too, had caught an echo of her past. She said quickly, “Then you will know where to go to get your son. If not how.”

“Yes.” She saw, finally, in the slow ebb of dark, a line or two of his face. “The mage Chrysom was born in Ro Holding. It seemed he liked to travel. He left his name in the air of Saphier’s past.” She felt his hand again, lighter now; his voice was imperative, impatient of distances. “Come.”

Stars blossomed from the dark, shot in streaks of silver past them and back again, winding, weaving, circling, until it seemed they stood in a web of silver that was at once rushing away from them and frozen still. Draken spoke; the paths blurred together, silver into dark, except for one. He led her onto it.

They were met, in a great, orderly hall, by a turmoil. Meguet, blinking at noise made by dozens of people, brightly dressed at that hour of the morning, at the bronze lamps and mage-lights burning everywhere, realized she had walked barefoot into the house of Draken Saphier. Her hair was loose, tangled, her clothes sweat-stained and dusty, her hands scratched. Draken, seen for once in light, was frowning at the chaos. Something seemed to drag at him; there were taut, weary lines beside his mouth, between his brows. Rad, she guessed, weighed heavily, wherever he was.

Draken said nothing. He picked up a mage-light from a ledge, held it aloft. Red, smoky, sinuous lines of light whirled out of it, took shape in the air above the crowd. A dragon floated above them, wings spread, neck arched, glaring down at the gathering. It hissed suddenly; the air chilled; lamps flickered. Draken tossed the mage-light; it hung in midair, illumining silent, upturned faces. The dragon reached for the star, held it between its claws, stared into it.

“It is a question,” Draken said obscurely to the soundless crowd. “Contemplate it.” Then he added, “Magior.”

A tall, graceful woman with a still, seamed face came to him. She bowed her head. “My lord.”

“What is this unseemly behavior from my household, my mages?”

“My lord—“ She touched her eyes wearily. “Your son has disappeared.”

“Magior—“ His voice caught. Meguet wondered blankly if the silvery path had led them backward in time instead of forward. “What—“

“I mean, my lord, again. He has been here for three days.”

“Here!” He looked stunned, and then suddenly harried, his attention drawn to his restive prisoner. He asked incredulously when he was able to speak again, “Is the spell broken?”

“No, my lord. He was brought here by a mage from some peculiar country where mages, apparently, are neither trained nor disciplined- We worked with the spell, and at her insistence finally permitted Brand to speak to her. They were last seen entering your meditation garden. Before midnight, last night. Neither has been seen since. We have searched ruthlessly, my lord. They are gone.”

“Where?” Draken whispered. Nyx, Meguet thought. The name turned her cold as stone, as if it were a spell. Nyx in Saphier.

“I believe she intended no harm,” Magior was saying. “Brand insisted that no one could help him but you. She apparently has some knowledge of the timepaths within Saphier, which is perplexing because she had never even heard of Saphier before the firebird flew into Ro Holding—“

“The Luxour,” Draken said, his face taut, dark with care. Then he stopped breathing, stopped thinking, it seemed. It was something Meguet had seen Nyx do: grow so still she might have been painted on the air. “And that,” he said very softly, evenly, as if he were recounting the ending of a tale, “is why Rad Ilex went to Ro Holding.”

“Following the firebird, my lord?” Magior asked. His eyes went back to her.

“No doubt. For whatever his purposes. But Brand—was he well? What did he say? Does he remember anything? How could he speak at all?”

“Before he encountered Nyx Ro, he said that he could not even remember his name, where he was botn, or when. The spell permits him to speak only at moonrise, until midnight.”

“Strange,” he breathed. “And this mage helped him remember?”

“Enough so that she was able to bring him here. But he still does not remember the exact circumstances of the spell, and he still changes; he is a bird, my lord, except for those scant hours.” She shook her head. “It is an impossible piece of mage-work. We did our best with it- He was becoming extremely impatient, waiting for you. I’m sure that’s where they have gone: to search the Luxour for you.”

“Yes.” The lines were deepening on his face again: He still wore the dust of the Luxour, he had an unruly mage in his pocket, it seemed, and now a firebird to find among the dragons. He looked at Meguet. “Your cousin, Nyx Ro—is it likely she would have been so impulsive?”

“Oh, yes,” Meguet sighed. “But only to help Brand. She would never harm him. I watched her working with that spell in Chrysom’s tower. She may not be disciplined—she trained herself—but she is fascinated by what she can’t do, what she doesn’t know. If Brand told her anything at all about the Luxour, she would have felt compelled by more than the firebird to go there.”

“I see,” he said, unsurprised, and Meguet realized what she herself had conjured in his mind; a kindred spirit.

She added, “Nyx must have come also to look for me. I vanished with Rad Ilex; Brand would have told her to look for him in Saphier.”

“My lord?” Magior said abruptly, startled, staring at Meguet. “Is this another mage from Ro Holding?”

“She says she is not a mage,” Draken said, though his eyes held Meguet’s a moment before he answered, and there was the faintest thread of curiosity in his voice. “What we have here is the mage’s cousin, Meguet Vervaine. I found her wandering across the Luxour: She had been pulled into Saphier by Rad Hex.”

Magior’s brows rose. “How terrible,” she said blankly. “But, my lord, why?”

“It’s complex,” Meguet answered, trying to keep a straight course, in this land of tangled paths and shifting landscapes, toward essentials. “What I need to do above all is to find Nyx and go home. She is heir to Ro Holding, and the Holder will not sleep until she returns.”

“And we have kept her three days,” Magior said worriedly. “And now she is in the Luxour. My lord—“

“I’ll find her,” Draken said. “Even in the Luxour, I can find my own son.” He paused, thinking with an effort; he closed his eyes briefly, concentrating on a spell, or measuring his own weariness. He had been awake at night, listening for Rad’s footfall, as well as Meguet.

She said, “I will come.”

“There’s no need.”

“I need to come.”

He shook his head. “You’ll slow me,” he said inarguably- “You have no conception of the difficulties of the Luxour. Even mages can rarely find one another. The great stones seem to deflect power, or attract it, draw it in. The land changes spells as it changes its face.”

“You found Rad Ilex.” she reminded him, and felt concentration crumbling all over the silent hall. He said, lifting a hand to catch the mage-light as it fell from the dragon’s claws,

“I fought the Luxour for him and won. With your help.”

“My lord—“ Magior whispered.

“Yes,” he said tautly. “I have brought Rad Ilex with me. And now I must go back and find Brand. Magior, see that Meguet Vervaine is treated with utmost courtesy.”

“But what will you do with Rad Ilex?” she breathed. “What will contain him while you are gone?”

“Where is he?” Meguet asked, expecting no answer, but the entire halt waited, without a sound, for his response.

“I trapped him,” Draken said, “in a time-path I made. I tricked him into running down it, and then closed the path upon itself. It has no beginning and no end. I can hold him there, while I am away,” he added to Magior. “It will be draining, but not impossible.”

“My lord, take the mages to help you—at least a few!”

“No. We’ll only confuse one another. I need to find Brand and Nyx Ro quickly.” He handed Magior the mage-light; she stood gazing at him, an old woman with a star between her hands. “Keep the house orderly, and do not trouble Meguet Vervaine with details. Show her the gardens. Let her rest. Ask her no questions beyond what is customary to reveal the status of a stranger in the house. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“I will answer everything else when I return.”

He vanished; so did the dragon above their heads. Meguet, sagging suddenly on her feet, was grateful for Magior’s firm hold, as well as her silence, as she led Meguet through a thicket of curious gazes. Exhausted as she was, she saw the silver enclosing every wrist; everyone, it seemed, was imprisoned in the delicate weaves of time, on its never-ending paths. She made nothing more of it then, barely aware of washing, eating, in a chamber so full of light it seemed made entirely of gold- The light hardened into the golden face of the Luxour just before she fell asleep.

She woke hours later at dusk, to a vision of silver. She almost cried out, but she had no strength even for that. The tangle of silver floated, glowing, in midair, its lines blurred in the soft shadows. Rad Ilex, standing in the midst of endless layers of paths, put his finger to his lips. Half his face was masked in blood, the other half gilded with the dust of the Luxour.

He whispered, “Meguet.” His voice seemed to come from unexpected, ghostly places. She swallowed, felt the blood beating through her. “Where is he? Where did he go?”

“To find Brand,” she answered finally. “And Nyx. They went looking for him.”

“Nyx.”

“She came here.”

“To Saphier?” He moved slowly, as if caught in hard, rushing currents. He changed, she saw with horrified fascination, in unpredictable ways: He grew smaller, he lost perspective, a limb would disappear around an invisible comer, reappear. “Where is he?” he repeated.

“In the desert.”

He said, “Ah,” very slowly; the sound died on an ebbing wave. “The desert distracted him.”

“What?”

“He has lost hold of me a little. So I came looking for you. I need help.”

“I won’t argue that,” she whispered, still amazed.

“But why me? I’m no mage. And the last I saw of you, you tried to kill me.”

“I was trying to save you. If you hadn’t run, Draken would have attacked us both—“

“You lied to me. You said there was nothing more dangerous than lizards in the night.”

“I didn’t lie.”

“Draken killed something. With teeth. Beside my bare foot.”

She heard him sigh. “Meguet. Would you rather be in here with me? I would have said anything to make you run. Besides, I didn’t lie. Draken lied. He made that thing, then killed it. I know how his mind works. Can you get your own mind off small details for the moment?”

She put her hands to her eyes, still saw him floating in the dark behind her eyelids. “I was awake for two nights, terrified of those small details. Of such details are great lies formed. What do you want from me? Draken will bring Nyx back with him, and she and I will leave. If there is a threat to Ro Holding, we will face it there.”

“Of course there’s a threat. You’ve been in this house. Armed mages wear the paths of time on their wrists, and one of those paths, as the firebird has shown, leads to Ro Holding.”

Her hands slid down slowly to her mouth. The blood drained out of her face; the room darkened a little, a shadow forming against the dusk: the dragon, hunting. “But why?” she whispered.

“Saphier breeds warriors. War is our history, our heritage. You saw Brand fight me. The movements of his attack are as old as Saphier. Draken is a double-edged sword: the warrior-mage. His eye turned to Ro Holding when he found Chrysom’s writings here. I showed—“ He stopped abruptly; she heard his voice shake. “I showed him the path to Ro Holding.”

“You what?”

“Inadvertently. He discovered from Brand that I used to visit Chrysom. That I was searching for that key. That the key held in it paths of time beyond Draken’s knowledge. He wants conquest, even through time, and he wants the dragons’ power to make himself invincible.”

“He wouldn’t need much,” she said numbly, “in Ro Holding.”

“He wants that key. Does Nyx have it here in Saphier?”

“I have no idea.”

“If she does, and Draken realizes that, she is in terrible danger.”

“That key.” She felt again the sudden, blind anger at the confusion, tangled as the winds on the Luxour blowing from every direction, into which he inevitably led her. “Always that key. Draken never mentioned it. You want it. You told me that I would be in terrible danger from Draken. That he would sense my odd powers and take my bones apart to analyze them. All he did in the desert was take away my shoes. All he’s done to me here is give me a bed to sleep on instead of a stone.”

“He’s like that. He’ll bide his time. And then he’ll attack. Meguet,” he said urgently, at her silence. “You must help me. You can help me escape this. There’s not a mage in this house who would dare raise a finger against Draken Saphier. But you would never attract his attention. You must help me, set me free to help Nyx.”

“Help her!” Her voice nearly rose above a whisper, “All you and Nyx do is fight. I won’t free you to go and steal that key and leave her wandering alone in a desert—“

“She knows the path to Ro Holding. She got herself here.”

“I don’t know how she got here. You tell me this, you tell me that—and then you tell me that I know what you have told me!”

“You know the firebird.” He was breathing quickly, the time-paths blurring around him. “Its face is the true face of Saphier, and its. cry the only truth. Meguet.” His face darkened; he seemed to flatten, an upright shadow. “Think. Help me. I’ll come back when I can. If I can.” The paths vanished, swallowed in Saphier’s night. Only his voice lingered, urgent, imperative, to become her own voice as his faded. “Choose.”

Thirteen

Nyx stood with the firebird in the Luxour.

The firebird had perched above Nyx’s shoulder on a ledge of rock. It watched a splash of milky silver spilling into the sky above the distant mountains. Its beak opened; a sapphire dropped. It cried jewels now and then instead of fire: a single blood-red garnet, an emerald. It left, to Nyx’s bemused eye. a gleaming trail across the desert, as if it marked a path for Draken Saphier to follow.

She sensed power everywhere, as if the entire desert were under a spell, and its winds and piles of stone and vast stretches of nothing might change, at moonrise, into something completely different. It seemed always on the verge of changing. Stones shifted beyond eyesight; shadows tumbled across the ground, wind-blown, attached to nothing. Not even the ground felt solid; it seemed pocketed with echoing chambers, where things stirred, breathed, dreamed. Odd smells streaked the winds: sulphur, damp earth, even water, or some ancient memory of water. In the light of the rising moon the great piles of stone here and there took shape: They were dragon-bones and palaces; they reared, spread their wings; doors opened, windows filled with light.

The firebird cried a blue topaz. The moon slid free of the dark, jagged line of mountains. Nyx, watching, saw the bird seized, pulled almost into something else at the moment of transformation. Its eye narrowed, became slitted; its feathers froze into hard, smooth scales. And then Brand slid down off the rocks to her side, unsurprised, by now, at where he found himself under any risen moon.

“Did you feel that?” Nyx asked, amazed at the random, mindless power that had stopped for a moment to toy with a spell no one else could even grasp.

“Feel what?” Brand asked. He scanned the dark, looking for mage-fires, for his father to step out from behind a rock.

“Something emerged between the firebird and you. Only for a moment.”

He looked startled, torn between hope and alarm. “What?”

“Almost like a—“ She paused, trying to remember what it was almost like: the tapering head, the hard, tight skin. The word caught. “Dragon.”

He was silent, staring at her. Then he turned, impatient, frustrated. “Where is my father? I hoped the firebird would find him, fly to him the way it flew to you.”

“I doubt if even the firebird—whatever powers it has that you don’t—could isolate one mage in this windstorm of power.”

He shook his head a little, still searching. “I just see desert.” he murmured. “Rocks. The wind feels like wind. It smells like dragons’ breath. That must be the hot springs.” He looked at her. “Now what? Do we just walk?”

“I’m thinking,” she said absently, wondering if the whole of the Luxour were on the verge of turning itself into a dragon. In the next moment, it would become; but this moment, in terms of its own time, had begun before Ro Holding had a name, and might last until its name was forgotten. “No wonder Chrysom came here.... He must have loved this place.” She drew the ivory ball out of her pocket, opened Chrysom’s book. Many of its paths, she found, began and ended in the Luxour; it seemed riddled with secrets. “Yes,” she said finally, choosing one- “We just walk.”

The path brought them to the springs. The water churned and steamed in the dark; mud bubbled and snorted. Wind dragged steam over them, blew it away as quickly when they began to cough. Beneath the noise of water and the exuberant wind, Nyx was aware of something deep and constant, a heartbeat within the earth, so low she felt rather than heard it. She touched Brand.

“Do you feel that?”

“What?” he asked, wary again. “Am I changing?”

“No. It’s like a heartbeat.”

He listened. “No.” He roamed, peering into moonlit crevices, studying pale crystals that crusted the edges of the pools. He came back to her. “Nyx,” he pleaded, and she heard the urgency in his voice. Time, for him, would not slow even in the Luxour.

“Yes,” she said, but the wind brought her a breath of winter out of nowhere, and, wondering, she followed the chill.

Brand heard the heartbeat then; it came out of a hole in the night, a place so cold it was rimed with ice. For a moment, he forgot the firebird. “Is it a dragon?” he whispered, as if in his excitement he might wake it.

“I don’t know.”

“What else could turn desert into ice?”

“I thought they breathed fire.... I wonder if Chrysom mentions it.” She opened the book again; pages riffled quickly, stopping to show her what was on her mind: The Ice-Dragon... It exists, Chrysom had written, in a time accessible but not recommended. It is very cold, and the dragon, roused, is fearsome, a monster with night-black scales and white eyes. It will follow the time-path if you do not close it behind you.

“What does he say?” Brand asked.

“He saw the dragon.” The book misted away in her mind. “He made a time-path to it. I wonder if all his paths through the Luxour lead to dragons....”

“If you free a dragon, that would get my father’s attention.”

“And what will I do with the dragon?”

“My father could deal with it. He always wanted to see a dragon.”

“Your father might well be annoyed if I set a dragon loose into Saphier. Chrysom left them alone.”

“It’s not like you to be so cautious,” Brand commented.

“It’s not like you to be so impulsive.”

She saw him smile unexpectedly in the moonlight; the Luxour was working its odd magic on him. “My grandfather was a dragon,” he reminded her. “So they say. My father says the heart of power—“

“—is a dragon’s heart.”

“So perhaps we should look for my grandfather. See if he’s in the mage’s book. A dragon who could take the shape of a man. My grandmother didn’t find him fearsome. If you find that dragon, my father would be in your debt. He always wanted to know his father.”

She was silent, thinking of the smell of winter and the timeless dark of the ice-dragon’s cave. Could it do such things beyond its own world? she wondered. Breathe a perpetual winter over a land, imprison it in ice? A monster, Chrysom had written. What might the other dragons do if they were loosed? She drew an uneasy breath, beginning to understand what she had dropped into her pocket, and carried so carelessly into a land ruled by a dragon’s son who could forge the time-paths but not the patterns. To find dragons, he would need the patterns she had found-...

But it was Rad Ilex searching for the key, not Draken Saphier.

“Nyx?” Brand’s voice pleaded again, this time for dragons.

“All right,” she said slowly. “I’ll see if Chrysom wrote of a dragon he didn’t find fearsome.”

She found several, after perusing the book for so long that Brand had vanished by the time she finished. She looked around, startled, for the firebird, and found Brand finally, standing inside the ice-cave, shivering, listening to the heart of power.

The path she chose ended in one of the massive tumbles of stone. The winds smelled hot and dry there, as if they were about to burst into flame. She felt no heartbeat, but an odd shifting underfoot as if the earth were falling away like sand in an hourglass. The stones trembled a little. Nyx looked up, gripping Brand, in case she had to open a door into thin air and leave before a boulder flattened them. The bulky jumble resolved, as her eye travelled upward, into high, airy walls, half-broken turrets, moonlit windows.

“It’s a palace,” she breathed.

“It’s just stones,” Brand said. His voice was tense again; the moon was continuing its inexorable climb toward midnight. “What does Chrysom say about this dragon?”

“It is red as flame and breathes flame. However, when it understood him to be harmless, it ceased its baleful attack and permitted him to come close. Its eye, Chrysom said, seemed a portal through which he might walk.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s enormous.”

“What else? Did it speak?”

“It lies within a ring of fire.”

“Did it speak?”

“The point is: You can’t survive attack by fire.”

“Chrysom did.”

“Chrysom was a mage.”

“Did it speak?” he asked again, patiently, and-she sighed,

“It made, Chrysom said, overtures of interest in a language he found fascinating but obscure.”

“Meaning what?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It could be my grandfather,” Brand said hopefully. “If it saw one human, it would have known what my grandmother was, when it saw her centuries later.”

“How did she find it?” Nyx asked, puzzled. “Or did it find her? Did it walk its own path of time into Saphier out of some peculiar longing for a human heir to its powers?”

“No one knows,” Brand said. “She was a warriormage, like my father, very powerful, though she did not train mages. She must have come looking for dragons; the dragon may have let her find it. But I wonder why.”

“Perhaps, like Chrysom, it was very powerful and very curious. Perhaps it liked to travel. It had seen humans before, and it approached your grandmother in that shape so not to frighten her.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t sound like this dragon. This one likes sleeping in the hearth fire; it doesn’t travel.”

“More dragons than my grandmother’s must have travelled,” Brand pointed out. “Legends of dragons have come out of the Luxour for centuries. You saw my father’s dragon-room. Some of the things are very old.”

“How many dragons would it take to produce a legend?”

He hesitated. “None,” he admitted. “Some say the only dragon ever seen was by a mage having a bad dream on the Luxour. But they’re here,” he said softly, fiercely. “Even I can feel them. Chrysom saw them.”

“Yes.”

“Then find another. One I can see with you. It may recognize my grandmother in me. She had long black hair and blue eyes.” His hand closed lightly on her arm. “Please. I’m in no shape to worry about risks.”

She opened the book again.

The next path ended under the earth. They stood in a starless black, surrounded by thunder. Nyx, casting a mage-light so Brand could see, found water everywhere, dark rivers and cataracts tearing at the reflection of her light. The mage-light hollowed a vast cavern around them; its walls and ceiling receded into shadows. Brand, his face teared with water from a misty, roaring waterfall, asked incredulously,

“Are we still in the desert?”

“Chrysom says so.” She looked around, her hair shining with jewels of water. “How strange ... It’s as if the dragons create their own small worlds within the Luxour.”

Drawn to the plunging water, he missed a step in the shadows; she heard him splash. “What does he say about this one?”

She consulted the book again. “This dragon is white as bone, with eyes like blue water. It recognized the human form. It is a shape-changer, an imitator, capable of taking any form—“ Brand opened his mouth; she held up her hand. “It is quite old and transforms slowly, with much effort now. It breathes a kind of incandescence that shrouds it as it sleeps. The mist itself is a form of power. It seems to be a subtle labyrinth, a time-trap in which the unwary might easily become lost, if the dragon does not wish to be disturbed. Apparently Chrysom chanced on it at the right time.”

“Does it speak?”

“It has, Chrysom says, the power of communication.”

“Then let’s communicate with it,” Brand said tersely. Nyx looked past the book in her hand, at his set, tense face. “It may know my grandfather, at least.”

“Well,” she said after a moment, “I suppose it’s pointless to be cautious now.”

“It also takes up time.”

“At least, if we’re both trapped, I won’t have to explain to your father what happened to you.”

“Chrysom wasn’t cautious,” he reminded her. “And he lived to write the book.”

“True,” she said, but did nothing.

“Are you afraid of dragons?” he asked. “I didn’t think you were afraid of anything.”

“I seem to have grown cautious,” she admitted. “There was a time when, like Chrysom, I would have taken every path to every dragon, for no reason but to see them in all their power. Then, I supposed I had no one but myself to think of, and the acquisition of knowledge of any kind seemed more important than returning home in one piece.”

“I’m not in one piece,” Brand said starkly. But he was listening; his eyes were on her face. He stood with his arms folded, motionless, while the dark water poured endlessly behind him.

“This is not my land,” she said. “You belong to Saphier. I’ve brought you this far, and I am responsible for you on the Luxour. If I lose you to time, Saphier will mourn you and curse me, and if I lose us both—“

“Ro Holding will lose its heir.”

“I’m not accustomed,” she said apologetically, “to being this reasonable. But I have already lost Meguet somewhere in Saphier through my own willfulness, and I don’t dare lose you. I can’t go through my life scattering people into various bog-pools of time from which they might never return. I’m not afraid of much. But I am a little afraid of myself. And I am terrified of harming you.”

He stood silently, still motionless, his brows drawn, a peculiar expression in his eyes. Then he blinked, and the expression faded. “That’s odd,” he said.

“What is?”

“That’s all I thought I was to you: a puzzle to be solved. And so that’s all I thought you were: a mage with a puzzle to solve. Now—“ He hesitated.

“Now?”

“Now I wonder who you would be if I were not a man lost within a spell. Instead of dreading midnight, feeling time pass like this black water rushing away from me, I might ask you questions. For a change.”

She was silent, seeing him differently now, as if for a moment, in that place beyond the world, his face was no longer haunted by the firebird within. It belonged only to him, and she knew him and didn’t know him. She said tentatively, “What questions?”

“Anything. Why you’re always walking out of your shoes.”

“I find shoes distracting when I’m trying to think.”

“Or how you knew you were a mage when you were young, and there was no one in your house to tell you what you were.”

“I had Chrysom,” she said. She was motionless herself, caught in his odd stillness, the little ivory ball in one hand, the mage-light at her feet. Water misted over them both, luminous in the light: the dragon’s iridescent time-trap. She watched the light move in his eyes, the nick of cobalt beneath his dark, slanted brows.

“Chrysom is dead.”

“Chrysom brought us here.”

“Did you always follow his teachings?”

“No.”

“My father’s mages rarely question him. But the firebird follows you. As if you understand something more than power.” He moved; his face grew clearer, chiselled out of light and shadow, the water flecked and gleaming along his cheekbones. “What do you think the firebird knows?”

“That it might be safe with me.”

He blinked. “Are you saying—“

“No. Just that it couldn’t fly home to safety. So it flew to me.” She paused, her lips parted, remembering. “An odd choice, considering.”

“Why?”

“Not so long ago, I was learning sorcery in a bog. I burned birds in my fires and read the future from their bones.”

“You did.”

“I thought—a mage should know everything, no matter what the knowledge entailed. So I tried to learn everything.”

“Did you?”

“I learned to leave the birds in the trees.”

He smiled a little, his face losing its lean, feral cast, becoming, to her entranced eye, again a stranger’s face: someone who, in his forgotten past, had learned to laugh, who had been loved. “Except the firebird.” He moved again, step by step closing the distance between them. Light shifted over him, caught in the folds of cloth across his chest, traced the straight line of his shoulders. “Except the firebird. Your eyes have so much color now. What causes them to change like that?”

“When I work a spell.” She paused, scarcely hearing herself, wanting to reach out, touch a star of water at the hollow of his throat- “When I’m angry. When I find something—something of overwhelming interest.”

“And which is it now?”

“Probably not anger.”

He swallowed; the star moved. “Probably,” he said huskily, “you are casting a spell.”

She shook her head a little. “I’m not doing it.”

“You’re changing shape.”

“Am I?”

“You used to look like a mage.”

“What does a mage look like?”

“Like a closed book full of strange and marvellous things. Like the closed door to a room full of peculiar noises, lights that seep out under the door. Like a beautiful jar made of thick, colored glass that holds something glowing inside that you can’t quite see, no matter how you turn the Jar.”

“And now?” she whispered. He came close; the light at their feet cast hollows of shadow across his eyes, drew the precise lines of his mouth clear.

“Now.” he said softly, “you aren’t closed. You’re letting me see.”

He slid his hand beneath her hair, around her neck. She watched light tremble in a drop of water near the comer of his mouth. He bent his head. The light leaped from star to star across his face, and then vanished. She closed her eyes and he was gone: Her own hand shaped air, her face lifted to a dream. She heard his cry deep in her mind: the firebird’s voice torn free. She heard her own cry and opened her eyes. A jewel fell at her feet.

She looked at the firebird, her eyes as colorless as bone. It spread its wings, crying noiselessly as it swooped into the shadows, found stone rising everywhere, no way out. It circled furiously as she turned helplessly to watch it; its wild flight slowed, spiralled inward around her turning, and finally the light caught it, pale and fiery, masked even to itself, trying to change the dark, rushing water into gold. It settled at her feet. She knelt beside it, touched its breast lightly with her fingertips- Then she rose and opened a path back into midnight.

Fourteen

Meguet stood gazing at a waterfall that came out of a solid wall and vanished into stone. The water flowed noiselessly, ceaselessly, a thin, even wash that gradually fanned so wide it broke into graceful, shining threads before it disappeared. Mage-work, she decided, trying not to yawn. She had slept poorly after the sight of Rad Ilex in his prison; her dreams were fleeting, but seemed full of portents, urgent warnings that she could not quite understand. She hoped, when Magior appeared at mid-morning, to be taken to some peaceful place and allowed to contemplate grass. But Magior seemed to think she needed exercise, though she felt bruised in every bone from walking on fire, sleeping on stone “Is it real?” she asked, for Magior seemed to invite comment. “May I touch it?”

“You may,” Magior answered. Meguet touched one thread of water gently. It separated instantly, formed a double strand. She put her finger to her mouth thoughtlessly, then flushed.

“I beg your pardon. I must have thought I was still in the desert. I am very tired.”

Magior, oblivious to suggestion, moved down the hall. They were on some floor, in some wing of the vast house; Meguet had no idea how far they had gone. The long, pale corridors, the light-filled rooms, seemed never to vary. She remembered Nyx’s odd house in the swamp, which seemed to ramble forever in and out of memory. She asked, “Is the house real?”

Magior looked at her, astonished. “No one has ever asked before.”

“It seems we might be walking down a single hallway, through a few rooms; only the things in them change. There’s a timelessness about this place. As if it were constantly being made.” She added apologetically, at Magior’s silence, “My mind is still wandering in the Luxour, seeing odd things everywhere.”

“Yes,” Magior said vaguely- She led Meguet into a room full of gold.

It was stunning: a priceless collection of goblets and ums, vases, plates, sconces, baskets woven of flattened strands of gold, tiny, ornate tables, even a head molded out of gold, small statues of birds, lamps, a bouquet of golden flowers. As Meguet stared, the gold took on the hues of the Luxour: dust and light so rich it could not possibly fall for free. She followed Magior across the room; Magior stopped in front of a round gold table standing on three legs. On top of it stood a simple bowl carved of black wood.

Meguet looked at it, aware of Magior watching her silently. “There must be a land,” she commented finally, “where wood is more important than gold. But somehow I do not think it’s Saphier. What is this? Some kind of test?”

“In a way,” Magior said calmly. “There are no answers- Only responses. Some see the wood more valuable than the gold. Others find its presence troubling, want it removed.”

“Do you always test your guests?”

“No.”

“Then why me? Because I am a stranger from another land? Is my presence troubling?”

“No,” Magior said quickly. “Only the circumstances which brought you here.”

“You mean Rad Ilex.”

“I mean Brand Saphier. Rad Ilex is no longer a question; he exists only in Draken Saphier’s mind. I know you are tired and need to rest. May I show you one more room? And then, I promise I will take you into the gardens.” She moved without waiting for an answer. Meguet, bewildered, followed her down an interminable hallway, up a staircase or two, down another corridor until she thought her feet would simply stop, plant themselves in the floor, and she would become one of the house’s ambiguities, for other guests to find troubling and wish removed.

A dragon reared in front of her; she paused mid-step, blinking. It was attached to doors, which armed guards opened, breaking the dragon in two. The inner room was full of dragons. She stopped in the center, turning slowly, for she had never imagined them in such vivid colors, with varying expressions and forms. They were woven on banners, tapestries, sculpted of bronze and clay, painted on wood, on silk, carved into chairs, screens, boxes. She tried to see them all, tried to look everywhere at once, until her eye was caught by one and it drew all her attention.

It was painted on a shield: a dragon black as shadow, with wings of shadow, and blood-red eyes of such malignity that, staring at it, she felt her heartbeat. Behind her, Magior was so still she might have vanished.

“Is it real?” she asked finally; her voice sounded thin, tense.

“Why that one?” Magior asked abruptly. “Why not others of far more beauty, far more mystery?”

“This one is terrifying. What terrifies also fascinates.”

“So does beauty fascinate. Why do you fear this? It is only imagined: None of them is real. Why choose this, as the one truth in the room?”

Meguet turned. She closed her eyes briefly, felt the weariness in them, hot and dry as dust. “I don’t mean to offend,” she said. But the old woman frowned.

“You are more than just a stranger. If I had to place you, I could not be sure... But you felt the power, as we walked down the hall?”

“What?” Meguet shook her head, perplexed. “I don’t understand.”

“The mage’s power. Your cousin felt it.”

“I’m not a mage.”

“Perhaps not. But Draken was right to ask me to question you. Your responses, even allowing for your unfamiliar surroundings, are not innocent.”

“Innocent of what?”

“Experience,” Magior said. She read the expression in Meguet’s eyes; the lines moved on her face.

“Draken asked you to do this?” Meguet breathed.

“He is curious about you. You are in his house. He is always curious about those within his house.” She turned. “Come. I promised to end this. I am sorry it has upset you. It was not Draken’s intention.”

“What was his intention?”

“To see if you possess power. Sometimes those who are gifted don’t know it. Come with me. I’ll take you to a more tranquil place. One without dragons.”

Meguet walked alone among rose-trees. The vast house met her eye whichever direction she turned: a world enclosed, constantly looking inward toward the path of time at its heart. She could not stop her restless movements, though they led nowhere. In the distance, through the roses, she could see the movements of the household guard, a bright army wielding spinning shafts of light as they performed their ancient ritual. “Ritual” was the word Magior had given her:

It was, she explained, little more than a meditation exercise. The meditators outnumbered all the inhabitants of Ro House. And that number, she had been told, did not include the warrior-mages.

She watched them as she paced, guessing that she herself was watched by someone, somewhere. It did not, she admitted to herself, take extraordinary subtlety to weigh the dangers of one mage, however powerful, against an army trained to march through time. The dragon, red-eyed and malevolent, loomed in her mind: destroyer, death-giver. That dragon she had recognized, of all those Magior had shown her.

The Dragon hunts the Cygnet.

But which dragon? Draken Saphier? Or the dragons of the Luxour which Rad Hex wanted so badly to see?

Draken wanted the key, too. So Rad had said. Better, she thought coldly, to let the mage loose the dragons into Saphier against that army, than to watch its bloody dance across Ro Holding. Rad had been in the Luxour looking for dragons; Draken had been searching for the mage who had ensorcelled his son. Draken had saved her life, even knowing she protected his enemy. Still, he did not trust her: He had had Magior question her. How far, Meguet wondered uneasily, would he permit his curiosity to go?

The Dragon hunts the Cygnet.

Draken Saphier was in the Luxour, looking for his son. Who was with Nyx.

Rad, not Draken, had come to Ro Holding to steal a key. Rad had named Draken Saphier as the threat to Ro Holding, yet he himself dreamed dragons on the Luxour, longed to set them free. Draken, he said, wanted Chrysom’s key. Yet Rad had ensorcelled an entire court to obtain it. So he had ensorcelled Brand Saphier, both Brand and Draken insisted, and his own spell was not strong enough to contain Brand’s rage within the firebird. But it was the firebird’s magic that had wounded Rad: It had been made, he said, to kill.

She sank down wearily on a stone bench. Did Nyx have the key with her? she wondered. She might have brought it to bargain with Rad for Meguet. Or she might have simply dropped it into her pocket and forgotten it was there. Was Draken only searching for his son? It was Rad who had talked of the key, of dragons; Draken had spoken most passionately of his son.

But he knew of Chrysom, of Ro Holding. He had brought Meguet into his house, and for all Meguet could see, every door was guarded. He would find Nyx, bring her back with him. And then what would he do?

The Dragon hunts the Cygnet.

She pushed her fingers against her eyes, blocking light, and the dragon rode the dark behind her eyes. She smelled roses. The dark became her shadow, with a red rose lying in it. Choose, the mage had said. The rose or the sword.

Choose, the colorful, motionless dragons around her had said, and she had found the face she had been warned to fear.

She stood abruptly, the images growing clear in her mind. The red rose. The black dragon. She drew breath, feeling her hands grow icy with terror, for she had made her choice about Rad Ilex before she ever learned his name. In Chiysom’s tower she had wielded his rose against a dragon of thread; he would have the key now, if he had not paused to protect her from his own sorcery. If she had picked up the sword, he would not have recognized her in that brief, tense moment; he would have loosed the dragon, distracting Nyx, then taken the key and fled, leaving Nyx frustrated but safe in Ro Holding, never knowing what Rad had stolen.

If she had picked up the sword.

The rose had cost them all. But the mage was still asking her to choose between the sword and the rose, for if she refused to help him, he would be at Draken Saphier’s mercy. There had been no mercy in the firebird.

The red rose. The black dragon.

The Dragon hunts the Cygnet.

She had seen the dragon’s face.

Rad Ilex had left a rose in her mind. Draken Saphier had left a dragon, and it was not one of the Luxour’s half-dreams, entrancing in their mystery, floating between worlds. A dark and killing thing, she carried in her mind: It had, of all the dragons in Draken Saphier’s house, come alive within her heart and spoken.

The Dragon hunts the Cygnet.

She was in the dragon’s house.

Magior took her back to the mages’ wing that evening. She recognized the long, dark hallway, the great bronze dragon at the end of it. She asked, trying to keep her voice calm, controlled, “Is Draken Saphier back?”

“No,” Magior said, as the dragon doors were opened for them. “I am taking you to supper with the warrior-mages.” Meguet felt her face whiten. Around her the dragons seemed to come alive; their golden, glaring eyes, their brilliant wings, their breaths of fire burned the air with color, Magior glanced at her, as if she felt the sudden chill in Meguet’s mind. “It is considered an honor.”

“Then,” Meguet said numbly, “I am honored.”

“They will treat you with all due courtesy. There is no need to fear them.”

“I’m hardly used to the company of mages. Nyx is the only mage I know.” And Rad Ilex, she remembered, growing cold again at the thought that he might appear, bloody and helpless, floating above the mages as they ate. Guards opened tall red doors on the other side of the dragon-room; murmuring voices, the smell of food spilled into the air. Meguet walked blindly forward into a sudden silence, as faces turned curiously toward her, the stranger from the land at the end of one twisted strand of silver around their wrists.

“This is Meguet Vervaine, of the court of Ro Holding,” Magior said, leading Meguet to a chair. Even the long tables were placed in a square; what seemed a hundred mages faced the intricate spirals and coils of Saphier’s emblem patterned in the floor. They wore the emblem, Meguet saw, on their breasts, each path colored by a different thread. “She is,” Magior continued as they sat, “quite weary from her ordeal with Rad Ilex in the Luxour and is not to be overly troubled with questions. Those of you who saw her at Draken Saphier’s brief return know already that she is not a mage, though she is kin to the mage Nyx Ro. She is, however, by the standards of Ro Holding, a warrior, and has shown interest in the movements of the warriors’ ritual.”

Food, borne by a hand and a sleeve, appeared on Meguet’s plate; she stared at it, wondering what she could possibly be expected to do with it. The mage sitting on her left, a woman with white-gold hair and a hawk’s restless, hooded eyes, said kindly, “The movements of the warriors’ dance are quite old. I take it you have no such tradition among your warriors in Ro Holding?”

We barely have warriors, Meguet thought starkly, then stilled her thoughts, lest the mage forget her manners and listen. She said, trying to find her usual composure, as if she had not fallen out of the sky into this elegant and dangerous land, “No. Only games and exercises involving appropriate weapons.” She hesitated; the hawk’s eyes watched her, waited for the trembling in the grass, the revealing word. “You call it ritual. In Ro Holding, while Brand Saphier was with Nyx, I saw him use that ritual to try to kill.”

Again there was silence, even from the far table; the still eyes gazing at her reminded her of the dragons. Magior asked, her voice dry, precise, “Whom? No one of Ro Holding, I hope.”

“Rad Ilex.”

“Brand’s father teaches him many things,” the strange mage answered smoothly. “He is extraordinarily skilled and proficient. As tired as you arc, I am sure it would be as tedious for you to listen to an account of a warrior’s training in Saphier, as it would be for you to disclose your own warriors’ training. In battle, as you know, everything becomes a weapon.”

“You must eat,” Magior murmured. “How will you recover your strength?”

Meguet picked up her fork, ate a tasteless mouthful. A man at a side table, with the stamp of Draken Saphier in the bones of his face and his black hair, commented, “The ritual originally involved ceremonial blades carved of bone- Since they could be played, it is assumed that the dance was performed to music.”

“Perhaps a hunting ritual,” someone else suggested, and the ensuing argument, tossed back and forth across the tables, brought to light an endless list of ancient and startlingly named battles.

“Much of the music in Saphier,” the mage beside Meguet said, “originated in the battlefield, or the training field. In the Battle of Toad Stone, whistles made of raven bones were blown, to scare the scavenger birds from the dead.”

“Toad Stone?”

“Two clan families fought over a great stone that resembled a toad. They revered the toad as kin to the dragon, a link between worlds, a messenger, perhaps. The dragon, in Saphier, is the symbol of all power: the power of magic, of battle, of art, of birth. I would imagine it means the same in Ro Holding.”

“There are no dragons in Ro Holding.”

“Some say there are none in Saphier. I meant in tales.”

“There are no tales of dragons,” Meguet said reluctantly, as if the mage might deduce from this no standing army, no fleet of warships, no revered toads and almost no mages.

The hooded eyes widened a little. “How curious. What, in Ro Holding, symbolizes power?”

The Cygnet, Meguet thought, and wondered if she would survive that supper to breathe under its familiar stars again. “In ancient tales,” she said, “the sun symbolized the fury of war.”

“And now?” the mage pressed, her gaze, intense and curious, searching for what Meguet strove to hide.

“Now it just grows crops.”

“But under what symbol do you fight now?”

“Another ancient symbol,” she said desperately. “A random grouping of stars. Is it the dragon you carry into battle? Or is it the symbol on the floor, there and within the square: the patterns that your warriors dance?”

The golden eyes flickered slightly. “The symbol,” she said vaguely, “is not at all ancient, unlike the ritual. If you were stronger, I could show you one or two of the exercises the warrior-mages are taught. They are quite simple.”

“I’m not—“

“So you say. Magior seems less certain. The exercises are designed to wake dormant power through physical movement, and then to channel that power, focus it, and release it as a weapon. The waking and release of power occasionally surprises those who think they have no such gifts- Magior rarely makes mistakes about those with potential for power.”

The room was silent again, as if, Meguet thought, the mages’ attention were tuned, beneath their lively conversation, to her voice. She said more calmly than she thought possible, “I have no such power. And I have no interest in it. My place in the Holder’s house is bound by ancient traditions; I have no desire to trouble those traditions by changing my ways, even if it were possible. You understand tradition in this house, I know.”

Magior moved her cup an inch, found no argument beneath it. “Perhaps,” she said slowly, “you should consider the matter. In a day or two, if Draken has not returned, and you are stronger, we will broach the subject again. Tradition has its uses, and its limits. It ceases to be useful when it stands in the way of knowledge.”

“I would not want,” Meguet sighed, “to cease to be useful to the Holder.”

“No. But—Enough. You have scarcely eaten. We will trouble you no more with such matters tonight.”

In bed at last, exhausted with fear, she could not sleep. She lay staring into the dark, wondering if she could get out of the house without being seen, find her way back to the Luxour before the mages began to pick her apart. But if Draken returned with Nyx, if Meguet abandoned Nyx, if Draken found Meguet vanished ... She tossed answerless questions in her mind for so long that the blood-stained face appearing behind its glowing silver prison seemed another dire portent.

“Meguet.”

She was sitting bolt-upright, she realized, with both hands over her mouth. She dropped them. He could not seem to find her; he looked here and there as through shifting layers of time.

“Meguet. Help me.”

She swung out of bed, stood in front of the floating, luminous weave. “Rad,” she breathed, and tried to touch it; her cold fingers closed on air. His voice sounded weak, distant; still he could not see her. “Rad.” Her voice shook. “I’m here.”

He saw her finally. “You’re so far away,” he said. “Down a stairwell, at the end of a long hall. I’m getting lost, here. You must help me. Please.”

“Yes.”

“Please. Quickly. You must listen to me, you must believe me.”

“I do.”

“If you don’t, I’m dead, and you will have Draken Saphier with his army in Ro Holding searching for that key. You’re in his house, you must have seen something to make you doubt that his intentions are as peaceful as Ro Holding’s heartland. He will burn across those fields of sheep and wheat until peace is a charred memory, and there is a warrior-mage in every Hold, and a dragon coiled around Chiysom’s tower.”

“Rad.” She tried to grip the weave again, pull him closer. “Can you hear me?”

“Of course.”

“Then why aren’t you listening to me?”

“I’m trying to tell you—“

“Rad. I have seen that dragon. It is black as night, and its eyes arc fire. Please. Help me.”

He was silent, gazing at her, one eye out of dust, the other out of blood. He was trembling, she saw; the desert and the time-prison, as well as the firebird, had drained him. He said very softly, “Did they question you?”

“They have begun to. I don’t want Nyx in this house. Help me find her in the Luxour. I’ll set you free—tell me what to do before you disappear again.” She slid her hands over the air, groping for a single thread of silver, as if she could pull the weave apart.

“Meguet. You need a time-path.”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “How do I get one?”

“There is a guard outside your door.” She nodded; there was a guard at every door. “Open the door. Let the guard see me. I’m enough to amaze anyone for a split second. I don’t have much strength in here, but I can disarm a guard who is not a mage. If he feels it, Draken will only think I am testing his power, Let’s hope the guard is not a mage. Open the door.”

She opened the door with shaking hands, gasped something unintelligible at the young man who stood there. He whirled into the room, a movement out of ritual, and stopped himself dead mid-step at the sight of Rad’s face. Meguet swung the door shut with one foot, grabbed a bowl of water with three leaves floating in it, since the guard had nothing obvious in the dim, silvery light, by way of arms, and broke it over his head. He fell to the floor in a pool of water, a leaf clinging to his hair.

Meguet tossed the pieces of the bowl on the bed, checked the motionless body. “Not even a knife,” she said, frustrated. “What in Moro’s name do they use for arms in Saphier?”

“That is a mage,” Rad said tersely. She stared at him, then began to move again, dressing quickly in the light, silken garments they had given her. She bent over the guard, touched the paths on one wrist. “You can’t remove the time-paths,” Rad said. “Just hold one. I’ll open a path for you. Any warrior is taught this—it takes no power. You must walk down the path to me. Draken won’t sense anything until you reach me. The path will end inside his trap. Don’t enter; I’ll be able to walk your path out. When I’m free, he’ll know it. But I’ll open another path to the Luxour, then; we won’t return here.”

“What about the mage?” she asked.

“What about the mage?”

“He’ll wake,” she said, holding the silver tightly, as if mage and time might disappear together. “He’ll tell Magior—“

“Meguet. He’ll tell the entire house. It will take them just long enough to find breath to say ‘Luxour’ before they know where we have gone. They’ll come looking for us, they’ll come fast, and they will be the warrior-mages. But they’ll have to search the Luxour for us, and a hundred mages on the Luxour will confuse even Draken. For a while.”

He was shaping time as he spoke, weaving a pattern around them, silver smoke in the dark; she could not tell if the path lay before her, or behind her eyes, within her mind.

“Trust me,” she heard Rad say. The guard stirred a little under her hand. She heard Rad say something else—in her mind or beyond it—and she rose. Come, the path said, the frozen shining stream at her feet, and she followed it into Draken Saphier’s tangled weave.

Fifteen

Nyx sat outside a ruined palace, listening to the dry shift and stir of dragon wings. Earlier, the palace had been a pile of stones; twilight had reshaped it, given it depth, subtle colors, ghosts. She had been reading Chrysom’s book, searching for Brand’s grandfather, since his father had either left the Luxour or been swallowed by it. The firebird had flown somewhere within the rocks, dropping darkly gleaming garnets like a trail of blood through the shadows. Nyx drew her mind out of dragon-paths long enough to make a mage-light so that Brand could find her when he changed. Then she wandered back with Chrysom underground, within still water, up cold barren peaks, into magical rings of mist and gold and fire. Some part of her, listening for Brand, was aware of the gently changing hues of blue above the mountains where the moon would rise. She refused to look, for that might slow the moon. She refused to let her thoughts stray, for then she would find Brand’s cobalt eyes looking back at her through every page she turned. The moon took its time, leaving her adrift among the dragons until a footfall brought her out of dragons’ time into her own, and she closed the book in her mind.

The moon had not yet risen, but the man who stepped into her mage-light was so like Brand that she almost said his name. And then she saw the white in his long dark hair, the lines beside his mouth. He looked at her silently, out of Brand’s eyes. She rose slowly, making no ambiguous movements, for she sensed an enormous power in him, as if in his dragon blood he had inherited something of the Luxour. He stood motionlessly, taking in what she revealed to the inward and the outward eye, before he spoke.

“You are Nyx Ro.”

“Yes.”

“I know all the mages of great power in Saphier, and therefore you are not of Saphier. You know my face, therefore you know my son.” He paused; she saw his eyes follow the glittering path of garnet into the stones. His lips moved soundlessly. He turned abruptly, disappeared for a few moments among the caves and crevices; Nyx waited. He returned without me firebird. “It’s sleeping,” he said. “On a high ledge, with its face toward the moon.” She saw him swallow. “I think he can get down.”

“He says he’s grown used to finding himself in odd places when the bird changes.”

“Where did you find him in Ro Holding?”

“He flew over the walls of Ro House, and started turning can horses into trees with diamond leaves. Cobblestones into glass. He changed my cousin into a rose-tree. He was very nearly shot. His cries were terrible.”

“Yes,” he said huskily. “I heard him—it—cry before he vanished from Saphier. And then what? You calmed him. You call the bird him.”

She nodded a little wearily. “Brand and I have argued over this. He insists the bird is sorcery, that it has nothing to do with him. But I think he is the man and he is the firebird, and the bird cries of all the things the man can’t remember, in the only language he will permit himself to use.”

She heard his breath. He moved closer to her, leaning against the stones between her and the firebird’s trail of jewels. He studied her silently again. Magelight catching in his eyes revealed fine rays, like dragon’s gold, across the cobalt. “You are perceptive,” he commented, “for so young a mage.”

“I’ve seen his face,” she answered grimly, “when as a man he hides from memory. It’s like a man flinching from fire.” His own face changed, as if he had felt the sear of memory; for an instant he wore Brand’s expression. “What is it?” she whispered, shaken. “What is it he will not remember? Do you know?”

He looked away from her, down at a single jewel. “I heard Brand cry out,” he said tautly. “And then I saw the firebird, and the mage who had ensorcelled him. I heard the firebird’s cry before it disappeared. No one else had been with them, to witness what had happened between them. No one in my court could give me the shadow of an explanation why the most gifted mage I have ever trained had cast a spell over my son. No one. I questioned everyone, often, and in every way I could, with and without language.” He paused; the lines along his mouth deepened. He met her eyes again. “They had been close. That’s all anyone could tell me.”

“Yes.” Her voice caught. “So he said.”

His expression did not change, but she felt the sudden shock within his thoughts, as if it had disturbed the air between them. “He remembered?”

“A few things. The mage’s name. That once he loved him and now he wants to kill him. Even the firebird recognizes the mage.”

“And what more does he remember?”

“Saphier. You. That’s why we came here: to search for you. He is convinced you can remove the spell because you are the most powerful mage in Saphier.”

“The mage who made the spell will unmake it,” he said harshly- “I have him.”

She made an abrupt, uncalculated movement; her body peeled itself away from the stones, stiffening. “You have Rad Ilex?”

“I trapped him on the Luxour two nights ago.”

She reached out to touch him, did not. “Please.” She felt herself tremble, windblown. “Was there a woman with him? He pulled my cousin out of Ro Holding; I came to Saphier to search for her—“

“You followed Rad Ilex out of Ro Holding?”

“No, I came later. She is tall, with long pale hair—“

He was nodding. “Meguet Vervaine.” he said, and for an instant she saw gold rays of dragon-light burn in his eyes. “I found her half-dead, alone in the Luxour.” Nyx tried to speak, put her hand over her mouth. “I was suspicious of her at first. She tried to protect Rad Ilex, she lied about herself and him. But I persuaded her to help me trap him. She did, and so I took her with me to my court, where she is safe, cared for by my mages. She knows that you are here in Saphier, and that I am searching for you.”

“Thank you.” She closed her eyes, felt a burning like hot, dry winds, the merciless sun, behind them. She said again, numbly, “Thank you. I would have blamed myself forever if she had died here, alone and lost in a strange land.”

“Blaming Rad Ilex seems more to the point. He brought her here. Under duress, you say. Then why would she have tried to protect him from me?”

“I don’t know.” She eased back against the stones, considered the question blankly. “Falling headlong into another world, perhaps she trusted no one. One mage had already terrified her; perhaps you frightened her even more. She isn’t used to mages.”

“I fed her, spoke gently to her. She recognized me as Brand’s father and as Saphier’s ruler. Still she tried—“ He lifted a hand, let it fall. “It isn’t important. I have you all now: Brand and Rad Ilex, your cousin and you. As you said, I must have frightened her, and it is sometimes difficult to think clearly in the Luxour.”

“But where was Rad Ilex?” she wondered, puzzled. “Why was she alone? If she ran into the desert to escape him, why would she try to protect him?”

“People do strange things when they are confused by circumstance. She said, when she finally told me her name, that she was walking to my court.”

“Across the desert? On foot?”

“So she said.”

“But if she was running away from Rad Ilex to your court, then why was she afraid of you, and trying to protect Rad at the same time?”

“I thought,” he said patiently, “you might explain that.”

She brooded, her brows knit. “It makes no sense. Meguet usually makes more sense than that.”

“Is she a mage?” he asked abruptly. She transferred her brooding from the ground to him.

“No,” she said, surprised. “Why ask me? You recognized what I am the moment you saw me. You were with Meguet; if you were curious, you would have answered that question, one way or another.”

“At first I thought not. And then I saw -,.” He hesitated. “A shadow. Perhaps it was only the Luxour.”

She was silent, gazing at him, trying to put pieces together: Meguet protecting Rad Hex from Brand’s father, Meguet trying to walk alone and powerless across a desert to get to Draken Saphier’s court, Meguet casting a shadow of power when she no longer had the strength to move. “It makes no sense,” she said again, baffled. “If Rad Ilex left her in the desert to die, then why would she—and if he didn’t, then what was she doing there? She has more intelligence than to try to cross a wasteland like this on foot.”

“One or two other things I found puzzling also. Why did Rad Ilex go to Ro Holding? And how did you get from Ro Holding to my court, and then from my court to the Luxour? Rad Ilex wears the timepaths I forged for him, and so does my son. But Brand’s were destroyed. So. You must have walked paths of your own making.”

She opened her mouth to answer, and hesitated, unwilling, without knowing why, to open the marvels of Chrysom’s book to Draken Saphier. As the answer hung in the air between them, she saw his eyes change, and she realized that he had known the answers to those questions even before he had found her on the Luxour. His eyes caught mage-light, turned gold. Dragon’s eyes, she thought, frozen under the strange, inhuman gaze, and then: Meguet was born knowing what to fear,

She remembered the figures standing in the doorway of Chrysom’s library, as the time-paths slowly misted the world with silver: the young man with Meguet’s hair, and her heritage, with the warning to the Cygnet in his eyes....

The stones and shadows were misting around her now, washed with gold; the pale mage-light burned gold. The key floated in a dark, secret place in her mind. But the dragon-eyes permitted no secrets; the key might as well have been in her open hand. It turned slowly in her mind, as if touched by invisible hands, that could not, for the moment, break through its mystery to open it.

Then the dragon closed his eyes; the gold melted into shadow and stone and light. Nyx blinked, saw Draken frowning deeply, concentrating, but not on her. She took a step away from him, another. He did not notice, lost in some private, harrowing moment. At her third step, his eyes opened. The taut lines of his face loosened; he sagged against the stones, spent and amazed.

“I’ve lost him,” he breathed. “How could he escape a time-path looped back into itself?” He was silent, working out an answer; so did Nyx, in case the knowledge came in handy. But it only mystified her. “He had help,” Draken said flatly, and Nyx felt herself grow cold with fear.

“No,” she said quickly. “Not—“

“No one in my house would have helped him. No one else.”

“She wouldn’t have. She couldn’t have. She has no power.”

He shook his head impatiently. “She wouldn’t need power for that. She’ll be with him now.”

“No.”

He pondered, his eyes human again. “The Luxour,” he said at last. “They’ll come here. It’s the only place in all Saphier where he can breathe a moment or two longer, though he is dead now, as he runs.” Then a ghost of memory haunted his face; he whispered. “Brand.” He turned away from Nyx, slumped against the wall, his face hidden in one upraised arm.

She heard a sound: stones shifting, dragon-claws scraping over them. It was Brand, she realized, climbing down from the firebird’s roost. The garnets had vanished. Standing within the dragon’s golden eyes, she had not seen the milky rising of the moon. Draken lifted his head, listening as Brand followed the path of the mage-light through the stones to Nyx.

He stopped when he reached me light; she saw him rock on his feet, as if a wind had pushed him. Then he made a sound, a broken word, and slid to his knees at his father’s feet. Draken bent to pull him up, then knelt himself, as if even he could not bear the weight of all the bird’s enchantments, and drew Brand into his arms.

Brand, lifting his face from Draken’s shoulder, found Nyx, and stretched one hand out to her. Draken’s shadow lay between them; she could not bring herself to move. Draken said, bringing Brand to his feet,

“Nyx Ro said she found you in Ro Holding.”

“The firebird found her.” His eyes clung to her a moment longer, and then returned to his father- His hold on Draken’s arms tightened a little. “She gave me the only hope in the world of finding you again.”

“Yes. I did not know how or when or where I would see you again, since your time-paths were destroyed.”

“Nyx has a book. The ancient mage Chrysom of Ro Holding fashioned time-paths all through the Luxour. I made her bring me here to search for you. When we could not find you, I made her search for dragons. For my grandfather.”

Draken looked at her, his expression unfathomable. “And did you,” he asked, “find dragons?”

“No.”

“Nyx decided that, even for a desperate man in the shape of a firebird, the dragons were too dangerous.”

“That was wise of her.” He touched his son’s hair lightly, let his hand drop to Brand’s shoulder. “What a strange thing to find in Ro Holding: the paths to the dragons of the Luxour.”

“And equally strange,” Nyx said tightly, “to find on a warrior’s wrist the path from Saphier to Ro Holding.”

They both looked at her as she stood alone, the mage-light casting her shadow wide and dark across the stones behind her. Draken seemed only thoughtful, but Brand, troubled, left his father abruptly.

“Nyx.” He put his hands on her shoulders, frowning, then kissed her, as if to change the expression on her face. He succeeded only in changing his father’s expression. “How can you believe that my father will be anything but grateful to you, to your house, to Ro Holding, for caring for me?”

“How could I?” she wondered.

He held her a moment longer, searching her eyes, tuned to the undercurrents in her voice, but not understanding them. He turned to his father again, said tautly, “Help me. Please. Nyx tried to remove the spell, Magior has tried—I can barely remember day, and I am beginning to hate the night. It’s like drowning, every midnight, night after night after night. Only Nyx has made it bearable.”

“I see.”

“You can remove the spell. You taught Rad Ilex everything.”

“Rad.” Draken’s mouth tightened. “For a day or two I had him trapped.”

“You found him?” Brand said sharply. “Where?”

“Here in the desert. But he managed to escape.” He touched his eyes. “I am sorry.”

“Free me.” For a moment Nyx, used to all Brand’s expressions, barely recognized him: He wore the cold, intent, merciless face of a warrior of Saphier. “We’ll both find him.”

Meguet, she thought, chilled, and a stranger’s eyes nicked at her, as if responding to her fear, yet hardly seeing her.

“He must be here still,” Brand added. “Where else could he go without leaving Saphier? Unless he went back to Ro Holding. But he wants Chrysom’s key, and Nyx has it here. He must have known she would come here to find Meguet-“

Nyx closed her eyes, heard Draken say, “Chrysom’s key.”

“His book. The key is the book. Father—I am only human by moonlight, only until—“

“Listen to me.” Nyx, wondering if she could fray into wind before either of them noticed, opened her eyes at the urgency in Draken’s voice. He took Brand’s face between his hands. “Listen to me,” he said again. “I will try to help you. But I may fail.”

“No.”

“Listen. I know Rad’s power. The Luxour shaped it. Before he could speak, he understood the language of these winds, the stones; he heard the dragons breathe before he knew the word for dragon. I don’t know what of all this vast and unpredictable power around us went into the making of that spell—“

“Why?” Brand whispered. He was trembling; Nyx saw a streak of silver run down his face. “Why did he do this to me? I can’t remember.”

Draken shook his head. “I never knew,” he said bitterly. “I only saw you after you had changed. When your human cry became the firebird’s cry. You will remember. Look at me.”

They were both silent. Nyx, sensing all Draken’s attention on his son, was caught in the spell of the Luxour as its magic responded to Draken’s making and unmaking. Their shadows, etched lean and black across the ground, changed shape: A great dragon spanned the circle of light, its black wings closed, its long neck bent toward me thing it held mesmerized beneath its gaze. The shadow of the firebird lay beyond Brand; winds shifted it, colored it yellow, red, peacock-blue. Then the dragon’s wings lifted, opened, folded around the gaudy shadow, swallowed it into blackness. Nyx, staring, raised her head abruptly, startled by a movement above her head. Something shifted in the night: A head as bright as blood rose clear against the moon. Fire streamed out of it, washed red across the stars. The great head disappeared. Nyx found Brand again; spells flowed over and away from him like tattered rags: an owl wing, a lizard claw, a lion’s face, his father’s face, a dragon’s misty, glittering breath.

Then the magic flowed elsewhere, left their shadows intact, shifting, as Draken’s hands fell from Brand’s face, and Brand, white, tearless, took a step back from him.

“I’m sorry,” Nyx heard Draken whisper. And then she opened Chrysom’s book, chose a dragon at random, and ran.

Whether Draken tried to follow her or not, she was unsure: What leaped at her like a great wind, nearly tangling the strands of the path in her mind might easily have been the raw power sweeping across the Luxour, forming its own spells around anything magical. She found herself in the deep caves, among the roaring waterfalls where Brand had forgotten, so briefly, the memories that constantly reshaped him. Her own memories threatened to distract her; she felt the sudden loss of him like a hollow in the air beside her, a silence where his voice belonged, stone where her eyes expected his face. But she had no time for such unusual feelings; she had no idea whether Draken would pursue her or Rad Ilex first, and she had to reach Meguet before he did.

She turned another page, opened another path. This one ended among the stones and dream-palaces, too close to where Draken had found her. She opened another path instantly, and fell into a place so black she thought she had reached the ice-dragon’s hole torn out of the night between the stars. But the air was warm, tranquil; she caught her breath a moment, reading a phrase or two about the dragon hidden within this shadow.

... a small and exquisite creature, with scales like gold leaf and shining copper... its eyes are azure. By temperament elusive but not unfriendly ...

She opened its path back into the Luxour, and came face to face with a warrior-mage.

He carried ritual blades; they and the time-paths on his wrists glittered like frost in the moonlight. His black garments flowed on the wind; odd colors seemed to flame and break free from them, then fade into night. With mages’ sight, they recognized one another.

“Nyx Ro.”

She stopped herself from vanishing before he attacked; he sounded only surprised.

“Yes,” she said tersely.

“Draken Saphier is looking for you and his son. Where is Brand?”

“He flew ahead,” she said, hoping it was somewhere near midnight. The mage looked disturbed.

“Rad Ilex is loose in the Luxour. It’s not safe for the firebird to wander.”

“How—“

“Meguet Vervaine is with him,” the mage said without expression. “Your kinswoman. The warriormages are searching the Luxour-“

“She was obviously under duress,” Nyx said quickly. “He ensorcelled her.”

“Most likely,” the mage agreed politely.

“How many of the warrior-mages are out here?”

“All of them.” He shook his head a little, fretfully. “Magic blows like sand in your eyes, here. It’s hard to distinguish minds, even faces, from the lies the desert tells. Even those of us searching together got separated. You must not lose the firebird.”

“No,” she said, and he vanished, leaving a shining, faceless ghost of himself imprinted on the wild winds. She opened a path hurriedly to anywhere, and nearly scalded herself in steam from a boiling pool.

She backed away from the heat and cloying smell, and found a slightly cooler place where she could think. Surrounded by the bubbling pools, the mists, she felt hidden for the moment. She wiped steam-slick hair out of her face, and wondered starkly how, in a desert full of wild magic and mages who could barely find each other, she could possibly locate the two who had fled there to hide.

The Luxour itself had shaped Rad’s power. So Draken had said, and if Rad could wear the faces of the desert, stones and dragon-dreams and shadows, and empty his mind of all but the constantly shifting winds of power, then even Draken with his dragon’s eyes and relentless mind would have trouble picking him out of the air. But how Rad could hide Meguet, Nyx was unsure. Rad might transform her into a moon-shadow, but not even he could hide her thoughts. Nyx would be on her mind, Ro Holding, the Cygnet; words foreign to Saphier would drift into Draken’s mind. If the warrior-mages did not find Meguet first. Like Draken, they would search for her to find Rad. Would Rad, knowing that, abandon Meguet to plead coercion and duress to Draken Saphier? Meguet would more likely fight what would be the shortest battle in her life. And if Draken didn’t kill her, he would use her to force Nyx out of hiding.

And to yield the key. She stirred, remembering her own danger, and made herself as transparent as the steam billowing around her. But what, she wondered, would he do about Brand? Rad Ilex, she was certain, had not cast that spell. If not even he could remove it. Brand would wrench the firebird’s voice out of the Cygnet’s labyrinth, and its fire from Nyx’s hold, and sear the burning desert itself with his despair.

But the firebird had attacked Rad. Brand had named him the maker of the spell.

Meguet had tried to protect Rad from Draken.

Rad knew who had cast me spell. He had been there.

She felt her body shocked into visibility; even in the steam, her skin was cold.

No witnesses, Draken had said. No one else saw, but he and his son and Rad.

Three leaves. One blue as Brand’s eyes. One gold as the Luxour. One as red as the black war-dragon’s eyes.

She whispered, “Draken.”

As if she had summoned him, he began to shape himself out of the mists in front of her.

She ran before he had a face. But his mind’s eye saw her and the random path she had pulled from Chrysom’s book. He pursued her, a single burning dragon’s eye in the dark, a force like night-wind at her heels. He could, she remembered with horror, forge his own paths, not from place to place perhaps, but from here to nowhere. As quickly as she shaped Chrysom’s path, he reshaped it, cutting through her weave of silver, leaving her on an edge of nothing, or turning her own path back on itself, until she lost all sense of Chrysom’s design, and guessed that the path she fled down would loop through itself to lead her inevitably, strand by shifted, twisted strand, to the Dragon of Saphier,

In desperation she opened another path, and then another, flowing away from that. She shaped a third, a fourth, flinging them into the dark, and running without knowing what dragons waited at their endings. She opened others, sending filaments of silver like crazed nets to catch a drifting moment and open it. She gave Draken no time to alter them before she spun another, sent it branching away into the unknown. Finally, she opened two that, by some luck, were so close they seemed almost indistinguishable. She fled down one, leaving Draken to snarl the other until he wove it through itself and then found he had trapped nothing.

So she hoped. The path she followed remained true to Chrysom’s pattern. She had no idea where it led; there could be no worse, she reasoned, than the dragon hunting her. When the path ended, she closed it behind her, let it fade back into possibility, and then into a dream that only Chrysom’s key would bring to life. Stranded on some island of time within the Luxour, she turned to face the dragon.

At first she thought she was alone. She stood at the mouth of a cave so massive even her mage’s eye could not find walls or ceiling. But she smelled earth, wet stone, heard the slow drip and trickle of water, She took a step forward, sensed something where her eye saw only air. Tentatively, she let her thoughts flow around it: It might have been the ghost of stone that had once filled the cave. As she had with Chrysom’s tiny jars, she let her mind drop into it.

She seemed, for an instant, made of light, as if the sun burned behind her eyes, and all her bones were lucent and bright as fire. She could not speak or think; she was as formless and bright as air at noon in the Luxour. Then the sun blinked, and she felt cold stone beneath her face, her body, and realized she had fallen. She pulled herself up, shaking, stunned, blind, waiting for the pain to begin, the punishment for touching fire. But she felt only the cool breath of the cave. She opened her eyes finally, and saw the dragon.

Its shadow had been burned into her mind, it seemed; her eye shaped a darkness against the dark. The heavy bulk of its head loomed above her; it could have swallowed her and scarcely noticed. Its huge eyes glittered faintly, flecks of light as colorless as stars. Its voice filled the cave or her head, slow, ancient, dry, dust blowing across dust.

“Who are you?”

Her own voice sounded small, trembling in the vastness. “I’m sorry—“

“Answer.”

“Nyx Ro. A mage. I came—I was running—I didn’t see you. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

She heard its breath, long and endless. “Nyx Ro. Running. From where? To where? Answer.”

“I was running away. From another mage.”

“What mage?”

“Draken Saphier.”

She had no idea what those words might mean to it: The act of running would not occur to it, and she could not imagine anything it would be compelled to run from. A great nostril, vague and colorless, expanded slightly; she heard a hiss from it. “When humans run, they run from the greater to the lesser fear. They do not run down the spider webs of time where unknown dragons wait. How did .you find me? Answer.”

“I have a book of paths—“

“You did not make them.”

“No.”

“I eat paths of the makers I dislike.” It seemed to shift. A hollow echo rolled through the cave; light sparked as its scales dragged across stone. Still she could not see its color. She swallowed.

“You eat power.”

“I dislike minor annoyances.”

She made a movement, half a step. “I won’t disturb—“ Black moons sculpted out of the dark descended behind her, slid together and locked. She stood ringed by dragon-claws, and wondered if some of the minor annoyances it ate were human. She said carefully, “I would not make much of a meal. You have already terrified me. Your power is like the Luxour’s, ancient and unimaginable. You don’t need to threaten me, any more than the sun needs to threaten. I must get back to the Luxour. Those I love are in terrible danger. If there is a price I must pay for disturbing you, just tell me.”

It made another sound, a faint, distant rumble. “Who disturbs the Luxour? Answer.”

“Draken Saphier. And his mages.”

An eyelid descended; stars vanished, reappeared, “A dust storm. A random shift of rock. The Luxour will survive that.”

“Yes.” Her voice shook again. “But Brand Saphier may not. And Ro Holding may not—“

“Human names. Human dreams.”

“That’s all I know. That’s what I am. I have no dragons’ time for loving. While I stand here in your hold I am disturbing you, and those I love might cease to exist. Please let me go. Tell me what I must do. I will leave you in peace; you’ll never see me again. Please.”

“You woke me- Nyx Ro. Weaving my secret path out of mages’ fire.”

“Destroy the path behind me,” she said desperately. “I don’t have the power to make such things, only to follow them.

“Who does make them? Answer.”

“He is dead.”

“Who else?”

“No one.”

“Why have you come here? What petty breath of storm across the Luxour sends humans running in fear beyond time? Answer.”

She drew breath, held it, feeling as if its thoughts had looped back through themselves, trapping her within some answerless question. There was no place where she could hide herself from its bright, relentless eye. It would burn the leaves of Chrysom’s book inside her mind; it could turn her bones to gold and hoard them until trees grew on the Luxour- She searched for an answer it had not already heard, and remembered at last the word for what she fought.

“The dragon’s son,” she said.

The dragon was silent. She waited a moment or two, listening, before she realized that the black around her held no more subtle shades of dark, nor did the stillness hold more questions. She turned, trembling again, and opened Chrysom’s book to fashion a simpler path back to the Luxour.

Sixteen

Rad Ilex took one step onto the Luxour from his timepath and vanished. Meguet, looking for him wildly in the moonlight, saw winds, shimmering veils of dark and silver, swirl around her. She closed her eyes and heard Rad’s voice.

“Meguet.”

“What?” she said tersely. She opened her eyes, saw nothing now but the vast, wind-swept desert.

“I’ve made you invisible.” For a moment, she was afraid to move; she stared rigidly ahead, lest she look down and find she stood on nothing. “Don’t be afraid,” he added. “You can see yourself. I can see you.”

“I can’t see you.”

“Wait.”

Slowly he shaped himself out of air and night; she saw the strange winds glide over him. He said softly when his face became more than a blank shadow, “I’m using the power of the Luxour to do this. It’s a turbulent force all across the desert. Draken will have trouble isolating me from it.”

“What causes it?”

“The dragons, I think. They breathe power; they dream it; it escapes from all their private worlds into the desert. I can disguise myself in it. But hiding you will be more difficult. Look.”

She looked down and saw a moon-shadow the strange power had shaped, that clung to her invisible heel: a black swan, its wings outstretched. She swallowed drily. The shadow peeled away, flew into the wind.

“Will he see—“

“I don’t know. The magic creates itself constantly, especially when it responds to other sources of power.” She stopped searching the night for the shadow of the Cygnet, and met his eyes. “I can hide from Draken Saphier. Perhaps I can hide you. But you cannot hide from the Luxour.”

He was worried, she realized, and with reason; she felt the ground drop away again, as if she stood on nothing. “It’s a power,” she heard herself say, “that rouses only in defense of the Cygnet. When Ro Holding itself is in grave danger.”

She saw his grim face tighten. “Now?” he demanded incredulously. “In the middle of the Luxour with a hundred mages and Draken Saphier alert for any hint of power?”

“If Draken threatens Ro Holding, or Nyx in such a way that Ro Holding itself is threatened, then by my heritage I must fight for the Cygnet. Even on the Luxour. Even against a hundred mages.”

Another shadow formed, broke away from her: a black rose. She heard his breath. “How were you trained? And by whom?”

“No one,” she said simply. “I was born. I am the Cygnet’s eye, its hand. At such times. Now, I’m only a woman in a desert in the dead of night, facing danger without even a sword.”

“A sword. You saw how much use that was to you in Chrysom’s tower.”

“I know. But it would make me feel better.”

“If I could risk it, I would make you a hundred swords. But if you raise a weapon against the warriormages bearing the ritual blades, they will fight back. They are fast, ruthless, efficient. You saw what Brand could do. And he’s not even a mage.”

She nodded, her eyes wide “They lied to me.”

“Who?”

“The warrior-mages. They said the dance was only ritual. I didn’t believe them and they knew it.”

“They are preparing for war. They don’t care where. They want to experiment with an attack through time: an army of mages and warriors and dragons that can appear and disappear seemingly out of nowhere. Ro Holding is as good a place as any to begin.”

She stared blindly at the ground, trying to think. “We must find Nyx.”

“And that key, before Draken does. I can hide it forever from him among the dragons.”

“They will still have time-paths,” she said starkly. “Who will hide Ro Holding?”

He shook his head, scanning the desert. She saw nothing move in the moonlight but dust; they might have been the only people on the Luxour. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Can you find some water? With your face like that, you look already dead.”

“Oh.” He touched it; the dark mask of blood and dust vanished. His own face, taut with weariness and pain, was no more comforting. He stood silently, letting his mind wander, she guessed, for a long time. He seemed to draw strength from the desert’s power, calm from the ancient, unchanging mountains; his face eased a little as he contemplated the thing he loved. He stirred finally; she said,

“Now what?”

“There are a dozen mages prowling nearby, but neither Draken nor Nyx.”

“I don’t see anything,” she said, shaken. “Can they see us?”

“I can’t see them either. But I can tell the difference between a warrior-mage’s power, and the Luxour’s. That’s what keeps me safe. To them, I am another random thought of the Luxour.”

“And what am I?”

“In danger,” he said. “Let’s search among the stones and pools; it would be easier for her to hide there than out here.”

They emerged from another silver path onto the banks of a steaming waterfall that poured down steps it had carved in stone washed with all the colors of opal. Rad was silent, searching again, Meguet guessed, while the damp, cloying mist billowed around them and away, finding nothing of them to cling to. She heard Rad breathe finally,

“I think she’s here....” Then he vanished again within his thoughts. Meguet watched the colors in the water swirl, form a reflection of her face. The reflection slid leaf-like down the steps before it broke apart. A warrior-mage appeared out of nowhere, stared into the water. He turned abruptly, searched the mist. Meguet, not daring to breathe, turned her thoughts to steam, stone, crystal. Then the mist itself leaped at him, poured, burning, into his mouth as he .drew breath to scream. He fell backward into the scalding water and followed Meguet’s reflection into deeper water. Meguet saw a silver path begin to form in the air above him, break apart as he sank. One of his ritual blades spun out of the water, snagged on the crystals along the bank. She eyed it, but seemed oddly incapable of moving.

She heard Rad’s whisper close to her ear, and started. “I found Brand. The firebird. But I can’t find

Draken-“

She allowed herself to move finally, tried to touch him. “Let’s find Nyx. She must go home- She won’t leave until she knows where I am.”

“She won’t leave without you,” he said, startled “I must stay. I can’t hide behind the walls of Ro House and wait for Draken Saphier to bring his war there. If I must fight, I must fight here.”

“You’ll die,” he said incredulously.

“Either here, or in Ro Holding. As I would have died defending Chrysom’s tower, if Draken Saphier had come to steal that key instead of you. It’s my heritage.”

“It’s ridiculous,” he snapped, but no more, for the mists, snatching at Meguet’s thoughts, whirled into a high white tower covered with what, at first glance, seemed to be red roses, but which changed, to Meguet’s horror, into the black dragon’s malevolent, flame-red eyes. They looked everywhere, the eyes of Draken Saphier; they saw through mist, through Rad’s spell, through her mind into the Cygnet’s eye.... “Come,” Rad said, gripping her. She could not move. He pulled her roughly away from the image, and down another silver path.

Here they were surrounded by bubbling pools; even the mud spoke. Meguet could scarcely see the wall of yellow rock rising above the mud-pools, which she might have touched with the point of a broadsword. She waited while Rad searched the place; his thoughts came back to her,

“You must leave,” he breathed. “You’ll kill us both.”

“Then leave me.”

“No.”

“Were they real?” she asked. “The dragon-eyes?”

“One might have been. Draken knows how to play with the Luxour’s power. But only as a man with one finger knows how to play a flute. I still can’t find him. Finding him will be dangerous enough, but it’s far more dangerous not knowing where he is.”

“Hide.” she suggested after a moment. “I’ll bring him to you.”

He looked at her darkly, but said only, “You’ll do that soon enough as it is. I want the key first. And then you and Nyx Ro out of Saphier. Then I want Draken Saphier. In that order.”

She did not bother to answer. She saw something move in the solid wall of yellow stone. Mist, she thought, a trickle of water. But something made her reach out to grip Rad, warn him silent. Her fingers closed on nothing; he had vanished even to her eye. The dark shifting became a crack in the stone. The crack widened as she stared. Then the face of the rock tore like paper and a dozen warrior-mages emerged.

She was surrounded in an instant; their whirling blades spun, plunged into the ground around her, elongating into a high, deadly cage so tight she cut her forearm, turning. The teasing desert gave one blade swans on its hilt, down its blade; she reached for it desperately. It snapped silver light, numbing her hand. She stumbled back, cut her shoulder on another blade. She caught her balance desperately, stood trembling while the mages appeared and disappeared into the mists, searching for Rad Ilex.

The ground around her turned to boiling mud. It swallowed the mages’ blades, along with one mage who, leaping for Meguet, turned visible in midair as a wave of mud flung itself up and shaped him before it slapped him down. Steam blew everywhere, glittered with fine grains of silver and gold. Meguet, feeling a hand close on her wrist, pulled against it. It pulled harder; the silver grains snaked into a pattern around them. The pattern shattered like glass. She heard Rad cry out; the grip on her wrist slackened, tightened again. Light flashed, bright and painful as a flashing mirror; the island she stood on melted beneath her. She had no time to scream before she was dragged into mud. Like the mist, it found nothing of her to grasp. Silver wove in the murk; she could see again suddenly, as the mud pool faded. Still Rad remained invisible. Or was it Rad? she wondered suddenly, panicked. Was it Draken Saphier instead, leading her down the time-path? She pulled free abruptly; a flock of tiny swans formed themselves out of the silver path, soared upward, flew in a ring around her. She stopped, tense, her eyes wide, searching nothing.

“Meguet.”

It was Nyx. The swans scattered at the word, turned back into silver. Nyx appeared a moment later, pale, and dishevelled, her eyes full of color, but, to Meguet’s eye, unharmed. Nyx took a deep breath, closed her eyes. “Meguet,” she said again. “What a place to find you in. A lake of boiling mud.”

“Nyx.” She felt, saying the name, as helpless as she had ever been in her life, finding the heir to Ro Holding underground in a strange country, while a deadly storm of magic raged above their heads. “Do you have any idea what kind of danger you’re in?”

Nyx nodded. “I know exactly what kind of danger I’m in. And so are you and so is Ro Holding.” Her voice sounded composed, but as she touched Meguet’s bleeding forearm, Meguet saw her hand shake. “You’re hurt.”

Meguet ripped a length of silk loose from her torn sleeve impatiently. “Nyx, listen to me—“ She stopped abruptly, searching the soundless dark beyond the time-path. “Where’s Rad Ilex?”

“Still battling mages.” She took the silk, wound it methodically around Meguet’s arm. “I thought he would be safer without you.”

“He said so, too. But he wouldn’t leave me.”

“You might as well be carrying a blazing torch, the way power is escaping you.”

“I can’t help it. Rad complained, too.” Nyx checked her shoulder; Meguet shrugged away. “Nyx, listen.”

Nyx folded her arms, stood quietly, her eyes colorless again, “fm listening.”

“I want you to give me that key and go back to Ro Holding before we take another step in the Luxour.”

Nyx raised an eyebrow. “You do. While you do what? Battle the warrior-mages of Saphier with your good intentions? Don’t be preposterous.”

“Then give the key to Rad and go home. He can find the dragons, bring them to the Luxour to fight Draken.”

Nyx was silent a moment, her fingers tight on her arms. Her eyes slid away from Meguet’s, the expression in them unfathomable. “Does he imagine them to be so obliging? To rouse themselves to fight for or against Draken, at the whim of whichever human reaches them first? They are very dangerous.”

“I don’t know.” Meguet rubbed her eyes wearily. “I don’t know what he thinks, except that this is what he wants. He takes power from the Luxour, he says. Maybe that would persuade them. At least he could hide the key from Draken. Or you could. Hide it on some path and go.” Nyx remained unmoved; Meguet’s voice rose. “Nyx, you are heir to Ro Holding!”

“I might as well be heir to the moon if we can’t stop Draken here and now. I know what he wants. I’d go home only to sit in Ro House and wait for him and his army of mages and dragons to knock at the gate. I saw your kinsman with his com-silk hair appear in Chrysom’s tower just as I left with Brand- He came to warn me,”

“Then why did you leave? Nyx, what possessed you to come here?”

“What possessed you to think you could cross the Luxour on foot to Draken Saphier’s court?”

“I had to find the danger—I couldn’t see it sitting safely in Rad’s village.”

Nyx shrugged slightly. “And I couldn’t see what the firebird saw, by sitting safely in Chrysom’s tower. Nor could I find you. A minor point to you, perhaps, but it seemed important to my mother. What was the warning you were given?”

“I saw a dragon of night and stars across Rad’s doorway, in the morning light. At first I thought Rad was me danger—he knew too much—and Draken, when he found me in the desert, was persuasive. I didn’t know—I was confused—“

“With reason.”

Meguet paused, remembering the dragon, her hand straying to her shoulder. “I doubt that Corleu even knew the word for what he was compelled to warn you of. The Dragon hunts the Cygnet. That is the warning.”

“I thought as much.” Nyx gazed at nothing, wandering a tangled path of magic or memory, while Meguet contemplated their dubious fates grimly. “Brand,” Nyx said softly. The color washed into her eyes at the name. “He might stop Draken.”

“Why should he?”

“It’s complicated,” Nyx said, and nothing more, seeming, for once, at loss for words. Meguet, looking at her, found the unspoken words in her eyes.

“Nyx Ro,” she said incredulously, the blood startling through her. “He’s a warrior!”

“So? You love a Gatekeeper.”

“At least he is part of Ro Holding.” Meguet laid a hand on her forehead, where the headache was beginning, and added crossly, “Moro’s name. Brand himself barely knows who he is. Other than the son of a ruler who wants to scorch the four Holds of Ro Holding with dragon-fire. Is he Saphier’s heir?”

“I forgot to ask.”

“Oh, Nyx, really.”

“Such things are unimportant in Ro Holding. You know that. I never knew my own father’s name.”

“That’s because your mother fell in love discreetly and in private, and not, I would imagine, in the middle of a strange land with a man who spends most of his day in a tree.” She was holding her shoulder as she spoke, frowning at the nagging pain. “You love him for the color of his eyes.”

“Most likely,” Nyx said temperately. She drew the ivory ball out of her pocket, opened it, and extracted something that looked like a brown, withered hand.

“What is that?”

“Olem root. From Berg Hold.” She applied it gently to Meguet’s shoulder. A numbness washed across the pain; the scent of cloves and earth and mint seemed to quiet even the nickering ache behind her eyes. “Country magic. It will cling there until the bleeding stops, and then it will drop away and wither again. A trifle gruesome, but it works.”

“Yes,” Meguet sighed. “Thank you. So. Brand will stop his father from destroying Ro Holding for your sake?”

“Not exactly for my sake,” Nyx said, but did not elaborate, nor did she allow expression into her eyes. She took the amber earring from the ivory, hung it from her ear. Gold fire shimmered across it, faded. “As you say, we hardly know each other. But,” she added on a breath, “he knows his father even less,”

“What—“

“We must find the firebird now. Quickly.”

“Draken will be with him.”

“Draken was alone, when I saw him last. I’m hoping the Luxour separated them.”

“What about Rad?” Meguet asked anxiously, as Nyx shaped the silver pattern into their future. “Should we leave him on his own?”

“He would only distract the firebird. I want all of Brand’s attention.” She listened a moment, for what Meguet could only imagine: dragon’s breath, the silent voices of the mages, the footsteps of the dragonlord. “Come.”

Winds, desert, stars, spilled around them at the path’s end. Meguet saw the broken palaces rising up against the night. The transparent, elusive colors in a dragonfly’s wing illumined windows, flickered away. In the next moment, the palaces were only stones.

“Should we hide?” she whispered to Nyx. “Are we invisible?”

Nyx shook her head. The wind tossed her hair into dark, tangled paths; for an instant her eyes reflected moonlight. “I want the firebird to find me.”

“What if the mages find you first?”

“That’s a risk I’ll have to take. Meguet—“ she breathed, as stars sparked in the ground around Meguet, shifted to form a familiar constellation. “Will you stop that?”

The Cygnet rose above their heads, star-fire marking its wings, its cold bright eye, until the winds picked the stars apart and they fell like fading embers into the dark. “It’s the Luxour,” Meguet said a little wildly. “I can’t control it.”

“I can’t either.”

“What do you want me to do? Should I hide?”

“Go wait among those stones. Maybe their power will disguise yours.”

Meguet left her alone, barely more than a shadow in the desert, using a power at once simpler and far more complex than any mage’s power to call the firebird. Turning as she entered the nearest mass of stones, she saw tiny black swans form and fly out of her footprints in the dust. Appalled, she moved deeper into the stones.

Moonlight pulled her own shadow from the dark;

she looked up and saw again the haunting shift from jumbled stones to the sagging walls and broken towers of a great ruined palace. Her mind wandered down an imaginary time-path and found the palace again, in a moment so close to the Luxour’s time that the two worlds of desert and palaces, made unstable by enormous, random powers, were constantly overlapping. The moonlight in the high windows grew filmy with butterfly colors. The colors washed away; the cold light poured down stone. She heard Nyx’s voice.

She walked soundlessly to the opening in the stones, looked out. The firebird had come to Nyx; as it spiralled around her, she coaxed it down. It came to rest finally in front of her. It gazed at her a moment, motionless, crying neither sorrow nor fire. And then it changed.

He is free, Meguet thought with wonder, and then, as the stones around her shifted, he changed under her eye: She saw the broader, more powerful line of his shoulders, the white in his hair. She felt something flash out of her entire body; the winds took her fear and shaped it into the dragon’s shadow.

Nyx vanished. Draken simply turned his head, looked at the stones where Meguet was hiding, and Nyx appeared again.

“No,” she said sharply.

“Then give me what I want.”

“Where is Brand?”

“Where I left him. Give me the key. Then I will set you and Meguet on the path to Ro Holding. You can go home.”

“And wait for you.” Her voice shook with anger. Draken said very softly,

“Yes.”

Meguet felt her body flash again. This time her own rage shaped the shadow that flew, soundless and dark as night, with its coldly burning eye on Draken Saphier. She flew and did not fly; she felt the power gather in her again, as the black swan neared him. Blue light flickered along its wings. He must have heard the winds part for it; he spun suddenly, flung up his hand. The black dragon formed against the moon and stars, its red eyes flaming. It opened its mouth, swung its long neck down and caught the black swan as it flew into Draken Saphier.

He cried out, as the blue flame rippled over him. Then the dragon broke the swan’s neck and tossed it away. Meguet, still caught in it, felt herself grow limp and thoughtless with its death, falling farther and farther away from a point of light that grew small, so small she could scarcely see it, though it seemed, as she fell. the only important thing left to do.

Then the hard ground shaped under her again;

someone gripped her, shook her. “Meguet!” She opened her eyes. The world was still black, but she recognized Rad’s voice. She lifted her head, saw Draken rising. She heard a strange noise beside her; Draken, hearing it also, vanished just before the mage-light struck.

So had Nyx; the light snaked across the air where she had been, and picked one of the warrior-mages out of nothing. Her ritual blades and time-paths caught the light, flared brighter than the moon. Then she seemed to lose all light, become a piece of nothing darker than the night. She fell without a sound. Another mage appeared beside her; power snapped back at Rad. The stones shook around them; a shard flicked across Meguet’s cheek. She flinched, heard Rad breathe something.

“Stay here,” he said, and vanished. She stumbled to her feet, gripping stones to keep her balance, and looked out.

She saw a calm and empty desert. Then both Rad and Nyx seemed to waver in and out of the air, as if they were being pulled into eyesight and constantly pulling themselves back. As the silent struggle gradually and relentlessly worked them visible, the warrior-mages appeared around them, still as monoliths in the moonlight.

Draken saw her. He was an eye in her mind instantly, blood-red and unblinking, staring everywhere she fled, forcing her finally into a maze where she took every wrong turn she could make, and every wall that stopped her turned into the dragon’s eye and forced her on. Once she turned and stood in its glare, refusing to move- The eye turned to fire in her head; from some far place she heard her own voice. She ran.

Abruptly, she could see again. She was on her knees, clinging to stone, trembling as if she had been running for her life through the maze of palaces on the Luxour. Draken had turned away from her to watch the firebird come.

It flew fast, and it flew straight to Rad Ilex.

He could not seem to move; he could only watch it, his head uplifted. He tried to speak; he could not. The bird’s silver claws shone like ritual blades; they were open, curved, and dropping toward his heart. Nyx’s face was turned toward the bird; she too struggled to speak. Meguet, freed from Draken’s attention, walked the maze in her mind to what the dragon had sought: the eye of the Cygnet.

Nyx, she said, from that secret place, and Nyx met her eyes.

Power swept through her, from the Cygnet to the Cygnet’s heir. Nyx shook free of the web of minds that held her, and cried to the firebird,

“Brand’ Not Rad! It’s your father’s spell! Remember!”

The firebird faltered above Rad. It tore its voice out of Ro Holding and screamed, falling as if it had been shot. Brand, his face rigid with the firebird’s fury, rolled to his feet and leaped in a single unbroken movement, at his father. Draken, startled, nearly unleashed mage-fire; he pulled it back quickly as Brand’s body struck him. He staggered, regained his balance and gripped Brand. The back of his hand, coupled with the weight of time-paths, whipped across Brand’s face. He fell like the firebird had out of the air, and lay still.

A few of the warrior-mages stirred; Meguet heard an indrawn breath. Draken met their eyes, said calmly, “It was necessary. He will understand.” He looked at Nyx. “The key.”

Her eyes flicked at Meguet, leaning drained and helpless against the stones. She bowed her head. Something small, burnished with amber fire dropped into her hand. Draken, his eyes on it, stepped toward her. She flung the amber at his feet.

It exploded with all the firebird’s beautiful enchantments. For a moment Draken vanished among them:

a scattering of garnet roses, a diamond snowfall. But as he picked himself out of the spell he had made, the mages held Nyx, shaped her back into the waning moonlight as she tried to vanish. Draken, shaking gold leaves out of his hair, stepped across Brand’s body to her.

“Perhaps.” he said, “you will give me something to fight after all in your peaceful kingdom. You and your cousin who is not a mage.”

He held her eyes and held out his hand. After a long time, during which she stood like the warriormages, a standing stone beneath the setting moon, she reached into her pocket for the key to all the dreaming worlds.

Seventeen

The first of the dragons appeared at dawn. Nyx watched the line of light above the mountains turn fiery with sunrise, and listened to Brand breathe. He might have been the firebird still, his bruised face empty, his thoughts hidden from her. Twice she had heard him try to speak in the night, then stop. He sat beside her on bare ground. The mages had tied his hands behind his back, while his father roamed the time-paths. They did not, Nyx guessed, want to use power against Draken Saphier’s powerless son. Rad slumped against a rock near him. A web of power, spun from mage to mage across the circle, trapped him in its intricate strands; Nyx caught a glimpse of it in the dawn, fine-spun and dangerous, each tendril clinging to Rad, trembling a warning at his every breath. It vanished from eyesight, then; the mages hid it from the light of day. She felt no such elaborate constraints on her; they knew she would not leave Meguet or Brand. The mages had left Meguet free; they watched with cold curiosity the odd enchantments the Luxour pulled out of her. She was mage and not mage. Nyx they understood; they might not, Nyx feared, let Meguet return home. Meguet sat near Rad, leaning against the same rock. She watched the sunrise absently, frowning a little; Nyx wondered if Meguet saw, instead of the rising sun, the great shining prism hidden within time, which was the Cygnet’s power and its eye.

She heard Brand’s breath catch. An eye had opened in the distant mountains: a second sun, red-gold, naming through the harsh, barren crags. A crag unfolded, extended itself upward in a broad sweep of gold. Another eye opened. The true sun rose above them. Shadows scattered away from the mountainside as the dragon’s face emerged. A second crag broke away, moved upward into the sky, to catch the wind. The dragon shrugged itself out of the mountain, soared upward, light sliding like molten gold across its bright scales. In that moment Nyx felt the slackening of the mages’ guard. It did not matter; as they watched the dragon burn across the morning, no one could have moved.

It came straight to them; its vast shadow, flung forward, reached them first. It seemed, as the earth darkened beneath its broad underbelly, to have swallowed the sun. Then it veered, loosed the sun from beneath its wing. It settled on top of the steep ruin of stones near them. It stretched its wings in the light; gold shook into their eyes. Then it faded into itself among the rocks, its brilliant, craggy profile to the light. One eye stared down at them, wide and ruthless as the sun.

Nyx felt a touch, and started. Brand had shifted closer; his shoulder brushed hers. She looked at him; the dragon had wakened something in him besides the firebird’s silent, endless cry.

“My father—“ His voice caught. He began again, softly, but Nyx sensed the mages’ attention riveted on them. “He won’t stop this, until he finds his own father. The dragon-mage.”

“I know.”

“Such monsters will make a wasteland out of Ro Holding.” He closed his eyes, his face twisting. “Why must he take Ro Holding? There is a land for him at the end of every path.”

“He glimpsed the power in Meguet,” Rad Ilex said wearily. “It’s mysterious, beyond his control, beyond his experience. He will take apart Ro Holding to find the source.” Meguet’s eyes nicked to him. She turned her face away abruptly, her mouth tight. He reached out with some effort, as if he lifted stone instead of bone, and touched her. “I’m sorry. If I hadn’t dragged you here with me—“

“If I had just let you take the key,” Nyx said bitterly.

Meguet’s head bowed. “If I had not picked up the rose.”

“It’s my father’s fault,” Brand said with savage lucidity. “None of yours. Any of you.” He struggled impatiently with his bonds, and added dispassionately, “I would like to kill him.”

Nyx asked tentatively, “Do you remember—“

“Everything.” He stopped. He raised a shoulder, brushed it against his swollen cheek, where a few fragmented time-paths had imprinted themselves in blood. He looked at Rad finally and said again, “Everything. You told me this would happen. That you needed to leave Saphier to look for Chrysom’s key, and you told me why. You had told my father, in all innocence, that it existed, and then you realized that all the innocence was yours. You knew he would kilt you for the key. I didn’t believe you. Then he came in and I saw his eyes. Dragon’s eyes. You had already opened a path to Ro Holding. He—I—“ He shook his head. “It becomes confused here. He tried to stop you—I tried to stop him—I don’t know how I thought I could.” He swallowed, added huskily, “He was no one I knew then. Not my father—No one. He had transformed himself. He was the dragon. And I became the firebird.”

“He made the firebird to kill me,” Rad said, and then was silent, as if words, like his hands, were fixed to the mages’ web of power and had become too heavy. He lifted his head suddenly; Nyx, following his gaze, saw a piece of morning sky detach itself and fall. Against the gold-brown desert its shape became visible; a sky-blue dragon, smaller than the first, with eyes like cloud. It dropped onto another pile of stones, and vanished again; with difficulty she saw it settle itself, now stone-brown and grey, flecked with black, a rock-dragon hidden among the rocks. “I envy him,” Rad whispered. “Seeing all their private worlds.” Only Brand stared at the ground, seeing nothing. “Brand,” Rad said, again with effort, and Brand turned his dark, empty stare at him. “He didn’t know you either, then. You were someone for him to use. He would have used anyone.”

“Don’t defend him,” Brand said fiercely. “Not to me.”

“I’m not. He barely glimpsed then what he is bringing to the Luxour now, and if you hadn’t been there, he would have turned himself into the firebird to stop me.”

“I was there. And so were you. He had no mercy for either of us. It was cruel. And unforgivable.”

“Yes. I’m only explaining why—“

“Power. I know my father that well at least.” He made a sudden, furious attempt at the leather thongs binding his wrists. The mages watched impassively. Nyx, her throat aching suddenly, reached out to loosen them. Light charred the ground under her hand; the snap of air numbed her fingers. She started to rise, swallowing anger, to plead with the mages. Meguet’s eyes caught her, wide, warning, and held her still.

“But why,” Nyx asked Rad, when Brand had calmed himself, “did Brand become human again, those few hours every night? Why would Draken have done that?”

“I don’t think Draken did,” Rad said softly. They watched a crimson dragon, long and sinuous, flicker in and out of time, its scenting tongue bright and quick as lightning, burning and vanishing. The winds of the Luxour finally dragged it into shape; it took its place on another ruin. “Brand and I met in secret at moonrise. Draken transformed him into the firebird at midnight. I remember hearing the changing of the guard, how the familiar ritual noises frayed apart at the cry of the firebird. I think Brand broke his father’s spell every night trying to remember the significance of moonrise, of midnight. Not even Draken could cast a spell more powerful than love, or rage, or grief.”

Brand shook suddenly with a terrible, noiseless grief. He bowed his head, hid his face behind his hair;

Nyx saw the tears fall on the barren ground like rain. She eased closer to him, slipped her arms around him. He dropped his face against her. Her hold tightened; she felt her own tears slide into his hair. The mages cast no spell to stop her. She held him until his trembling eased, and her own eyes were hot, heavy. She sat back; he raised his head, shook the hair out of his face. He leaned forward, kissed her; she tasted his tears. He said softly,

“And so the firebird found you,”

“If the firebird had come to Ro Holding a month or two earlier, it would never have come to me.” Her voice shook. “In some ways, I was as ruthless as your father. The small birds in the back swamps of the Delta know. Meguet knows.”

He rested his face a moment longer against her dusty hair. “My father does not intend to war against swamp birds,” he said wearily. “And whatever you did to Meguet, she still loves you and she is still alive.”

Another dragon broke into the morning, this one building itself out of a line of stones half-buried in the ground. It was huge, as grey as smoke, with a flattened, predatory skull. Its eyes sparked light like diamonds; they looked as hard and cold. One of the mages whispered uneasily to another as it took to the air. Its shadow slid slowly over them; it circled and settled on a massive rise of stones as grey as itself. Something in the distance disturbed it, perhaps an image drifting out of the winds. Its jaws opened; a colorless light flashed out of it. One of the piles of stone exploded, left a ghostly image of ruins where it had stood. The shock of boulders hitting the ground rocked the mages on their feet.

“Moro’s name,” Meguet whispered. Nyx watched her tensely, wondering if she were about to vanish to fight a dragon that made even the mages wary. Another appeared. This one Nyx recognized: A drifting wall of steam among the pools tore itself open to reveal an empty blackness, a hole in the shape of a dragon, with eyes like stars, and breath that froze the rocks it settled on. A few cracked; fragments rattled down. It curled and breathed; the hot morning light slid like white fire over the ice on the dark stones.

“How many more?” Meguet asked rigidly.

‘Tm not sure.”

“A dozen? Two?”

“Maybe. Not that a dozen more or less matters much.”

“Draken can’t control them all,” Rad said. His head jerked, as if a strand of the mages’ web had tightened around his throat. He swallowed, leaned back silently.

“He is looking for his father,” Brand said. “His father will control them.”

“I hope,” Nyx murmured. Meguet turned her head, looked at Nyx without fear, without hope. simply recognizing the frail bonds of time and memory between them. With a shock deep in her, as if something named Ro Holding had suddenly ceased to exist, Nyx realized that the Luxour might hold the only moments they had left. All for a firebird, she thought numbly. All for a key. For a challenge to a mage on a warm summer day. She stared blindly at her eyeless shadow, felt sorrow, heavy, motionless, endless, begin to replace her bones.

More dragons became visible: one of air, translucent, its bones pale light, its wings faint shimmerings of heat; another, formed of twilight cloud, with scales of deep purple, blue-grey, violet. A white dragon, carved of ivory, it seemed, and as delicate, shaped itself out of steam and rode the wind to its distant perch. The stones were filling with dragons, watching the desert like birds of prey. A cobalt dragon flew out of the broken roof of one of the palaces, and then a black one with rust-red wings broke out of the palace’s shadow, its great, ax-shaped head lowering on its long neck to study them as it passed.

And then Draken Saphier came out of a flash of silver.

He studied the dragons surrounding them, their heads and great winged bodies etched in vivid, powerful lines against the sky. He said to the mages, “There are others. I haven’t found my father- He may be one hidden in a misty time-path with dangerous properties for the unwary. Have they been quiet?”

“The dragons, my lord?” With a start, Nyx recognized Magior.

“Our guests. What have I missed from Meguet?”

“A comment or two, my lord.”

“I can imagine.” He took a ritual blade from her, walked over to Brand. His shadow fell over his son;

Brand lifted his face. Whatever his eyes held made Draken toss the blade on the ground. He squatted in front of Brand, held his shoulders. “Listen to me—“ He dodged spit, said again, patiently, “Listen.” Brand gazed past him, motionless now. “I was aiming that spell at Rad Ilex. You flung yourself in the way, in some misguided attempt to protect him. You fled before I—“

“You,” Brand said furiously, “destroyed my timepaths so that I could never return to Saphier! So that I could never speak the truth, never say that you had made the firebird out of me to kill Rad Ilex.”

“That’s not true,” Draken said gravely.

“What’s not true?”

“That I never wanted you to return. I would have searched for you in every world we conquered.”

Brand’s face flamed. He rolled so fast, his father barely had time to move; his sharp kick caught Draken Saphier in the chest, but only hard enough to stagger him. Brand, his hands tied, was off-balance as he rose. Draken spun around him, slid one arm between his wrists and Jerked upward on the leather thongs. Brand gasped. Draken forced his rigid arms higher; the blood ran out of his face; his eyes closed.

“Listen to me,” Draken said again, very patiently, and Nyx thought coldly: Either here or in Ro Holding. She flung power across the web and ducked into her own shadow. Meguet, moving faster than the eye could follow, was a blur, picking up the blade Draken had dropped. Nyx’s power tangled in the web; it became visible for a second, a flaring crosshatch of light that dissipated just before it touched Draken. Meguet, nearly invisible, brought the ritual blade slashing down between Brand’s wrists. It cut through the leather, but Draken misted away at its touch. Meguet vanished as he reappeared; the Cygnet, blown across the winds like black flame, marked the place where she had been.

Then a strange light sprang down out of nowhere, peeled layers of wind and power and time itself apart like paper to find her, force her, pale and shaking, back into eyesight, despite all the Cygnet’s power. Nyx, stunned, dragged her eyes away from Meguet finally, traced the light through the air above their heads, through the bright morning sunlight, up stone and the shadow flung by stone, to its source: the dragon’s mouth.

Around her no one moved. No one spoke. Even the mages were staring upward. Rad Ilex might have unbound himself from their loose and fraying concentration and slipped away, but his eyes too were on the dragon slowly rising on the stone pile above them, unfurling its wings to fly.

It had risen with the sun, Nyx remembered: the golden dragon with the red-gold eyes. It had perched up there all morning without a claw or a wing-bone moving, its great eyes smoldering down at them, unblinking, until it had opened its jaws and caught Meguet with a flick of light as easily as a swamp toad catching a butterfly.

It dropped off the stones; the sky darkened as. it flung its shadow over them all. It came down fast, for all its bulk; still no one moved, not even Draken, for it held them all with its fiery eyes. It could have landed on them, or scorched them all to ash, stray shreds of power for the winds to play with; no one could guess what it might do, and no one lifted a finger to stop it.

It vanished. So did the light holding Meguet. Nyx still searched the sky for it, her eyes bewildered by its absence, until movement among the motionless mages drew her attention back to earth.

A strange mage walked among them toward Draken. His hair was gold, his eyes were amber flecked with red. He wore a robe of dragon scales that drifted and glowed like the strange desert winds. His face was clean-lined, hard and powerful, like the desert itself, a thing so ancient it had been scoured by wind and sun and time of everything except its essence.

He stopped in front of Draken, studied him expressionlessly. Draken’s face lost color in the light;

Nyx saw him try to speak, falter. The dragon spoke first, his voice low, sinewy, harsh with unexpected inflections. “You are mine.”

Draken’s eyes burned, the dragon’s gold in them reflecting light. “I am Ragah’s son.”

“She gave me no name,” the dragon said indifferently. “She asked me to name her and I did. A word that means ‘night-fall.’ For her hair, and her powers that waxed by moonlight. She sent a message to the dreaming winds that she wanted a dragon-born child. I heard her dream in my dreams. She haunted the desert, she sent her wish on every wind, and I dreamed and dreamed until she roused me, drew me out of my world into this place. And I remembered the human-born, the human shape. And now you are here, Ragah’s son, rousing dragons with your dreams.”

“I was looking for you.” Nyx heard the wonder in Draken’s voice. “I didn’t know I had already found you.”

The dragon sighed, a long, slow, lizard’s hiss. “You have found me.” His burning, light-filled eyes moved to Brand, standing in Draken’s shadow, and to Meguet, who still held Magior’s ritual blade. He turned then; his slow, unblinking gaze swept around all the mages’ faces. His hand opened. Nyx saw the mage-web become visible, shining, all its strands linked to Rad. The dragon’s hand closed. The strands snapped in his grip, vanished. Rad gripped the rock, pulled himself to his feet, trembling with exhaustion, or with wonder. “You have dreamed,” the dragon said to Draken, “of dragon-wars and found me.”

“Teach me,” Draken breathed. “Teach me. The heart of power is the dragon’s heart. You have all the power of the Luxour in you, all the power of the dragon-worlds, all the power of time. You haunt my dreams, your shadow spans my life. I have looked for you since I was born.”

“You woke me.”

“Yes.”

“And you brought me here.”

“Yes.”

“For this.” His face tightened; deep. bitter lines formed. “For this.” He looked at Nyx. His eyes were endless; they had seen forever, and they left her breathless, as if, meeting them, she had begun a slow fall off the world. They went to Brand again, who gave him only an expressionless, unyielding warrior’s stare. The dragon sighed again. “What will you give me to teach you?”

“Anything.”

“Your son?”

“Anything.” The word nicked across Brand’s face; he closed his eyes. “Everything.”

“Seven years.”

“Seven. Twelve. A lifetime.”

“Seven I will take from you. In return, I will teach you what you need to know before I will permit you to call yourself my son.”

“Yes,” Draken breathed.

“If, in seven years, you have not learned what you must learn, I will kill you.” Draken opened his mouth to answer, did not. “Answer,” the dragon said. Nyx, staring at him, felt the cold silken touch of dread and wonder glide over her.

“Yes.”

“So dragons treat their children. So I have learned from you, as I waited on that bright, high place, listening to your son. As I woke in my quiet dark to listen to the mage who, running for her life away from you, found herself faced with me. All these small, disturbing human voices. Because of you, I was wakened; because of you I listened, having nothing else to do. You taught me.”

Draken was silent. He turned his head, looked at Nyx, as did Brand, Rad Ilex, and the entire circle of mages, everyone but Meguet, who had closed her eyes at the thought of the Cygnet’s heir running headlong into a dragon’s lair. “You? You found my father?”

“I didn’t know,” she whispered.

His attention moved to Brand. He seemed uncertain, suddenly, as if, not seeing the firebird, he did not recognize his son. “Brand?” he said. The hard, set face with Draken’s hair, his eyes, gave him nothing.

“You wanted paths to find us,” the dragon said. “You woke us, brought us out to use us. To burn, to annihilate. There are those among us who crave such work. Like you, they do not discriminate. They may begin here.”

Draken moved a little, as if a wind had pushed him lightly, “hi Saphier.”

“You have brought us into your land.” His slow, burning gaze swept the mages again. “They could not begin to fight us.”

Draken whispered, “You would not destroy Saphier.” Something besides the memories of his dead and blackened past touched Brand’s face, altered the white, stiff lines of it. His eyes glittered faintly, with a shock of hope or horror, Nyx could not tell.

“It is a place,” the dragon said indifferently, “to begin.”

“No.” The wind pushed harder, moved Draken back a pace. The mages’ voices murmured around him, shaken, protesting.

“You’ll find another country. Take Ro Holding instead. What does it matter where you rule, if you have conquered time?”

“It matters.”

“Why?”

“Saphier is the dragon’s face. The Luxour is its heart. Saphier’s history is my past, my future. The Luxour is my heart.”

“You have no heart,” the dragon said contemptuously. “This stone has more heart. I should kill you now, let them burn Saphier to ash and rubble. Shall I?” he asked Brand, who started under his sudden gaze. “Shall I? Answer.”

Brand’s hands clenched. His mouth tightened; his silence wore at Nyx as she sat tensely, neither moving nor breathing, listening. It wore at Draken, who seemed to hear in it, or in himself, something of the firebird’s endless, anguished cry. “He is your son,” Brand said finally. His voice shook. “How do dragons treat their children?”

Lines that were not bitter shifted unexpectedly across the ancient face. “Who taught you to riddle with dragons? Your father? Does he know the answer to that riddle? Tell us the answer, Ragah’s son. Guess if you do not know. How do dragons treat their children? Answer.”

Draken, his eyes on Brand’s rigid face, started to answer, stopped. He lifted one hand, hid his eyes from what he saw. “With lies,” he said. “With ruthless cruelty. They make their children love them, and then twist their love into hate, their trust into fury, their innocence into despair and grief. So dragons treat their children.”

“No,” the dragon said softly. “You are wrong. So humans treat their children.”

The mages’ voices fluttered like leaves in a treeless place. In the distance, the great, grey dragon rose on its rock pile, sent a flash of deadly light at whatever had annoyed it. The ground shook as the dragon-fire scarred the Luxour; stones whirled into the air. Draken watched them fall; they struck the earth like random heartbeats. He said, his voice sounding weary, almost as ancient as his father’s, “I have nothing to give you for Saphier but my life.”

“A poor price.”

“All I have. Spare Saphier. I beg you.”

“It made you. You are its past, its future.”

“It made Rad Ilex. Something good must dream its way out of the minds of dragons into the Luxour, into the air of Saphier to shape the likes of Rad Ilex, who of all my mages defied me. And Saphier made my son. In spite of me.”

“There is a price,” the dragon said, “for Saphier.”

“And all in it?”

“All.”

“Take it,” Draken said harshly, and bowed his head.

The air ignited with silver. Paths tangled with paths, melted, converged, tore, until it seemed to Nyx that they were all trapped in Chrysom’s impossible black box, where all the threads of time led into one another, and no path opened beyond the chaos. The image of melted, burning threads of silver imprinted itself on the air for moments after the time-paths had vanished from every wrist.

“There are no more such paths anywhere in Saphier,” the dragon said. “Except one.” He held out his hand; the gold and ivory key lay in it. Again the hard lines of his face eased; he looked at Nyx. “The mage—what was his name? Chrysom. He was a gentle man. I dislike burning books.”

Nyx’s face shook. She put her hands over her mouth; the burning tears slid down between her fingers. Meguet, tearless, stunned, turned to her as at a touch, seeing what she saw: Time, nearly ended on the Luxour, was shaping its path again toward home.

“I will take the key,” the dragon said. He added an afterthought, “And you, my twisted son. For seven years. And I will take the dragons back. But who,” he wondered of the mages, “will watch these human dragons for me?” The mages, under his eye again, turned to stone. He lifted a finger, spun a thread of fire. It streaked through the air and caught Rad Ilex.

Rad, white, silent, ringed by fire, stared into the dragon’s eyes. The winds died; time stilled on the Luxour. In an hour. or in the next breath, Rad moved again, turned to the mages of Saphier. The dragonfire parted, looped around his wrist, burning gold and red and all hues between. He said nothing- He didn’t have to, Nyx thought. Only he and the dragon knew what power had passed between them, and no one seemed likely to test him.

“In seven years,” the dragon said, “Rad Ilex will come to me for Draken Saphier. Do not force him, by any intention or act, to find me sooner than that.”

In the motionless ring of mages, someone moved:

Magior stepped forward. “And who, my lord,” she asked humbly, “will rule Saphier? It is best for Saphier if you choose.”

“Who will rule in your place for seven years?” the dragon asked Draken Saphier. “Answer.”

Draken was silent. An errant wind scattered a handful of dust at his feet; briefly, his noon shadow shaped the firebird. He swallowed something bitter, painful, the lines on his face running deep, before he lifted his head, held Brand’s eyes.

“Brand Saphier will rule,” he said. “Now and for the rest of his life. I know Saphier. I will not have it tear itself apart choosing between the dragon and the firebird.” He added, so softly that even the Luxour stilled itself to hear, “If in seven years you have any desire at all to find me, look for me here. The Luxour seems the only thing that I have ever loved.”

Brand’s expression blurred, as if the magical winds had reshaped it briefly, and then shaped again the warrior’s mask. The dragon said to him, “Is human justice served between father and son? Are you content? Answer.”

“No,” Brand said huskily. His own hands clenched; expression shook again into his face, and, unexpectedly, into Draken’s. “There is no justice for this. Nothing will ever quiet the firebird’s cry.”

Draken nodded wearily. “I hear it now,” he said. He turned away from Brand, to his father.

“Come,” the dragon said, and Draken vanished. A black dragon with eyes of cobalt and gold lifted itself into the winds above Brand. From the jumbled stones and palaces the dragons rose, soared into the air, shapes of fire and shadow, a progression across the bright sky as strange and gorgeous as the firebird’s enchantments. As the dragon-mage led them back into their secret worlds, the Luxour sent a shadow after them, a memory in the wind: the Cygnet, with its wings of night, its starry eye, following dragons across an unfamiliar sky.

Eighteen

Nyx saw the face of the firebird one last time as the dragons disappeared: The cry filled Brand’s eyes, then left them empty, searching the barren desert for something he had forgotten. She took a step toward him. His eyes found her then. He waited, drained, motionless, for her to come to him, the terrible emptiness in his eyes slowly filling again with memories, dragons, the magic of the Luxour. She put her arms around him, heard nothing for a long time but his breathing, his heartbeat. Finally she heard his voice.

“Can you stay?”

She shook her head against him, her own face colorless, expressionless. “I must go home.”

“Then how will I see you again?”

“There is a way,” she said, but for once she doubted herself. “There is always a way.” She shifted to see his face; it was set, but more in determination than despair. He even smiled a little, crookedly.

“I have never made things easy for you.”

“I never liked things easy.” She held him again, tightly, aware this time of all the silent, watching mages. “Will you be safe?” she asked him.

“The dragon rules Saphier,” he said softly. “For seven years. Even the most powerful of the warriormages will be wary of that. I trust Magior. And Rad. They will help me- Saphier’s future has always been its past. I don’t know how to change that. Perhaps only the threat of dragons can change Saphier’s ways. The threat of something more dangerous than itself.” He dropped his face against her lank, dusty hair, kissed it. “Some day,” he whispered, “we will find that cave full of waterfalls and dragon-mist again.”

“I’ll find a way,” she promised. Her throat ached. “Chrysom did it. I can do it.”

“I can’t. This time you will have to come to me.”

She looked at him, saw his face, his father’s face, even something of the dragon’s hard, powerful face. “If Saphier’s heart is the Luxour, and the Luxour is the dragon’s heart, perhaps it is more your grandfather’s heart. He found something of Ro Holding to value. Something of Ro Holding’s peace.”

“So have I,” Brand whispered. He bent his head, found her lips, coaxed peace from them until the winds of the Luxour, hot and fuming and enchanted, swirling around them, seemed to her the winds of home. He raised his head finally; she felt him draw in air as if he would swallow all the magic in the winds.

She loosed him reluctantly. “Come to me,” he said, and she nodded. He cast an eye over his mages then. Some were watching him, astonished; others dreamed across the distances, searching for a glint of dragon-wing. Most had clustered in small groups, to unravel the events that had so abruptly changed the path of Saphier’s future. Nyx looked for Meguet. She stood beside Rad Ilex as he spoke with Magior; Nyx saw him lift one hand, draw it lightly down Meguet’s hair. She stiffened slightly, then met Nyx’s eyes. She looked too tired to stand; her face pleaded silently:

Home.

“We must go,” Nyx said to Rad Hex as she joined them. Magior, her face seamed with fine, troubled lines, said to Nyx, “Draken Saphier cast a spell, it seems, over his entire house, as well as his son. We were all ensorcelled by his vision. The dragon was wise to destroy the time-paths. It is still a very powerful vision.”

“There are other visions,” Nyx said wearily. “Perhaps the dragons of the Luxour will dream up something for the mages of Saphier to do besides war.”

“Yes,” Magior agreed, but doubtfully. “It will take some time to change. Saphier has always been”—she gestured toward a sudden feathery sweep of distant steam—“volatile.”

“Saphier,” Rad said grimly, “has a choice between inventing peace or ceasing to exist. A more merciful choice than you would have allowed Ro Holding.”

“Yes.” Magior cleared her throat. “I know. Force is its own justification. It exists primarily because it is capable of existing. Now that we are made powerless, I can find no justification for what we had contemplated. I thought I was too old to change. Too old to see Saphier in the light of anything but its own history. We will need help. Your ideas, Rad, and Brand’s. Even Draken’s. Perhaps, in seven years, he will be alive to advise us.”

“You would trust him?” Rad asked sharply.

“I would trust his father,” Magior said simply. “If he permits Draken to live, he will have changed the heart of Saphier itself.” She paused, her eyes on Nyx. “Perhaps, with Brand, it is already changing.”

“So will Ro Holding,” Meguet murmured, “if you manage to find each other again.”

“Across mountains and seas and endless wastes,” Nyx said, seeing them spread across the distance between Ro Holding and Saphier, each mountain, each ocean, pushing them farther apart. “And worlds,” she added speculatively. “And time.” She put a hand to her eyes against the vision, felt Meguet’s hand on her shoulder.

“There is always—“

“A way,” Nyx finished. She looked at Rad, wondering how anyone so haggard and spent that he could scarcely cast his own shadow, could possibly be standing upright, “Is there a way home?” she asked him. “Will the dragon permit you to use Chrysom’s lime-path back to Ro Holding?”

He nodded, and held out his hand: What he had sought in Ro Holding lay in his palm. “One last time,” he said with an effort. “Then I must return the key to him. Or he will come back to Saphier looking for it, and he will not be pleased. You’ll have to help me open the paths. I can hardly open the book itself.”

Nyx was silent, thinking of the key holding all the mysteries of the Luxour, all Chrysom’s innocent, secret journeys. So was Rad; their minds touched inadvertently, holding the same key. They pulled back; their eyes met. Nyx said ruefully, “Now I would be content for either one of us to keep it.”

“Yes.” He reached out to Meguet, held her wrist as he had when she had been pulled so precipitously into Saphier’s history. “So,” he said without looking at her, “I must return you to your Gatekeeper.” She said nothing, did not move, until he finally raised his eyes. She said softly, “I will never forget the dragons. Or the Luxour.”

“Or the rose?”

She started to speak, then stopped. She smiled suddenly, and a little color came back into his drawn face. “Or the rose that got us into all this trouble.”

“Now you know why I dropped it there.”

“Now,” she said, “I know why I picked it up.”

He held her eyes, using her, Nyx realized, as his calm focal point of concentration. She turned abruptly, for one last glimpse of Brand standing in the Luxour, stones towering behind him in a tumbled jagged disorder that seemed to be always on the verge of order. In the next moment, in the next... Surrounded by mages, ail their thoughts and ideas pulling at his attention, he detached himself for a moment, stood alone, saw only her. The Luxour slowly misted from gold to cobalt-blue to black, until the only clear thing in the world was the silver path to Ro Holding forming beneath their feet.

Chrysom’s tower, building around them out of the mist, seemed, for a moment, another rising of stone at the moment of change. It did change into a palace and remained changed, though Nyx noted, with an instant of surprise, without the firebird. Her throat tightened. Rad’s white dragon waited for him still; she freed it. It leaped gracefully to its place across Rad’s heart. Together she and Rad fashioned a path back to the Luxour while he still had strength to think. Meguet had not even that left; Nyx found her a moment or two later, sunk deep into a leather chair and fast asleep.

She paced a step aimlessly, bewildered by the silence, some part of her still expecting to see the firebird. Her bones ached with exhaustion, but she could not bring herself to leave the tower. It seemed the only bridge between two worlds, and a broken one at that, but alt she had. Memories crowded into her mind, far too many for the tower to hold; she had no other place to keep them. She touched her face, and still moving, found a tear on her fingers. Her hand shook, her whole body trembled. She looked at Meguet, who had escaped the world somehow; not even Nyx’s tears brought her back. She was trapped, it seemed, like the firebird, by memory: impossible to go back, yet equally impossible to open the tower door, leave the past behind her. She forced herself still finally, stood in a drift of sunlight, her arms tightly folded to stop her trembling. Still she could shape no path, not even into the next moment.

The door opened abruptly. She caught a glimpse of her mother’s face, chalk-white and delicately lined, before the Holder gripped her, shook her a little, and finally pulled her into an embrace that took her breath away. She blinked, vaguely aware mat her mother was holding her upright; her bones preferred to spill onto the floor.

“What happened?” the Holder was demanding, her attention divided between Nyx’s frozen face, her torn, dusty clothes, and Meguet, dressed in the same peculiar fashion, with blood on her sleeve and her face as pale and still as ivory. “What happened?”

“I fell in love,” Nyx said.

Meguet woke out of a dream of dragons. A black dragon had been trying to tell her something: not the red-eyed dragon of war, nor the dragon with the human eyes that had been Draken Saphier, but one with a gentle voice, and eyes as cold and pure as stars. Or had it been a dragon? she wondered, in the moment between sleeping and waking. Something dark as night that flew... She opened her eyes then and found the night.

Memory returned slowly: She had fallen asleep in a chair in Chrysom’s tower, not, as her bones felt, on the stone floor of a cave in the Luxour. Nyx was safe, Ro Holding was safe, time had been breached and sealed again. She gathered herself wearily, piecemeal, and stood. Nyx had left a candle lit for her. In the dark yard beyond the south window, she saw another flame. She moved toward it thoughtlessly, as if to walk to it on air, before her mind woke and told her what it was.

She turned and took the stairs instead.

She wondered, as she crossed the quiet yard, what time it was, what day it was. Midnight might have come and gone; there was no firebird to cry against it. There was still a Gatekeeper; she saw a taper flame, trembling in the sea air, rise to light his pipe. The flame vanished suddenly, as if he had dropped pipe and taper to stand, a dark figure against the torchlight at the top of the turret steps.

She did not see him come down. He was just there, with her in the yard, holding her face between his hands.

“Meguet,” he said, and she felt his swift, fierce embrace, as if he could not bear even a shadow of night between them. She held him as tightly, feeling for the bone beneath his face, the bone beneath her hands, feeling for his heartbeat against hers. “I thought I lost you,” he whispered.

She shook her head. “I came back.” He said no more, turning his face, bone by bone, against hers to find her mouth. For a moment she wandered with him beyond time, beyond memory, beyond weariness and terror. A stray touch made her wince; she dropped back into time.

“You’re hurt,” he said, his hands sliding lightly down her arms, loosing her.

“Only a little.” Draken’s relentless eye tracked her suddenly as she ran down the secret paths in her mind; she hid her face against Hew’s shoulder, added numbly, “I should be dead. And you should be trying to bar the gate against a hundred mages, and dragons of air and night and stone that could tear this house apart with a breath and toss it into the swamp. And the dragon-lord of Saphier, Brand’s father, who caused all this trouble.”

She felt him shudder. “There’s been nothing at the gate lately but what’s expected, familiar. All the odd enchantments went with you and Nyx. We had a warning. And then nothing, not even a lost swampbird. Blue sky and tranquil seas. And a Gatekeeper going blind trying to shape you out of thin air. You vanished out of the world with a mage who gave you a rose.”

She lifted her head, blinking. “I was dragged.” She could see vague lines and shadows on his face in the torchlight; she could not see an expression. “Into a desert. Like no place I have ever been, not even in dreams. Dressed for supper in a hot, barren, nameless wasteland where there were dragons or maybe not, with a dying mage on my hands.”

He made a sound, touched her again, gently. “Let’s go up,” he said, “where I can see your face.”

They sat in the turret, a dragon’s eye of a moon watching them from over the swamps while she told him where the rose had led her. She could see him clearly then, in the taper-light, the shadows beneath his eyes, the ghosts of worry and care still haunting his face as he listened, one hand linked in hers, so still she scarcely heard him breathe. When she had wakened herself again in the chair in Chrysom’s tower, he moved finally. His lips parted; he didn’t speak. One hand reached toward a taper, dropped- She said very softly,

“You opened the gate between Ro Holding and Saphier.”

He met her eyes; still he didn’t speak. Then she heard his breath, long and slow like tide.

“I am Gatekeeper,” he said finally. “In the light of day or in me dark, in the end ifs me, standing here, making a choice to open or not.”

“Nyx said she was warned, just as she left with the firebird, that there would be danger to the Cygnet. You let her go.”

He picked the taper out of its sconce then, lit his pipe. “I promised her I would.”

“Even when—“

“She gave me a name. The place where you were lost, where she would go to find you if she found a way. I never saw the dragon’s shadow behind the firebird, only me strange mage, and the firebird, who cried questions without answers here in Ro Holding. And only you. vanishing like that, dragged to anywhere by a mage who got past my eye.”

“Did he? Or did you let him in, too?”

He shifted, putting the pipe down, and turned to her. grasping both her hands in his. “He found his own way in. As he had, you said yourself, many times before. Chrysom made this house, and its gate, and maybe left a door open somewhere, for the mage he liked. If I had stopped Nyx from going, then what? We would have had at least one dragon at our gate, and maybe we can move the house across Ro Holding. but not Ro Holding itself to a safe place. The Cygnet flies alone among the dangers of the night. It doesn’t live quietly in some safe place. And neither, as you of all of us know best, does Nyx.”

She opened her mouth, found herself wordless. The house, she decided, in that tangled moment, had its mysteries, and she was one of them and so was he. Mysteries, by their nature, behaved in mysterious ways. She settled back, calmer now. “Sometimes,” she said, “I know you as well as yesterday. And sometimes not at all.”

He watched her, his own face calmer, still holding her hands. He leaned toward her; she met him halfway. The moon disappeared between their faces, reappeared now and then, in various phases, until a step disturbed them, and as they drew apart, the full moon grew again between them.

Nyx stood at the top of the steps, looking tired but composed. “My mother sent me to find you,” she said to Meguet. She held out a hand as Meguet straightened. “She doesn’t need you yet. She only wanted to make sure you hadn’t vanished again.” Meguet eyed her narrowly. Nyx had dressed for supper in familiar fashion, but supper was long past, and small jewels flashed askew in her hair, and a button dangled by a thread.

“What have you been doing?”

“Trying to find Saphier.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “What else?”

“How?”

“In books. And other places.”

“What other places?”

“Odd places.” Her eyes went to the Gatekeeper. “How—“

“What other places? That box of Chrysom’s?”

Nyx drew breath, loosed it. She folded her arms, leaned against the stones. “Don’t worry. I’m being careful. I’ve figured out how to come and go; I don’t get lost inside the box and I don’t go far down any of the paths. None of them,” she added wearily, “are at all familiar. How—“

He was shaking his head, his brows crooked. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “You found your own path there before; I can’t do that for you. All I do is open and close.”

“Well.” She pondered, her eyes on the stars, while the Gatekeeper shifted past Meguet in the tiny turret, came out to stand beside Nyx. He lit his pipe again. “Assuming it’s on the same world, in Ro Holding’s present, and not its past or future—which I can’t entirely rule out—it must be somewhere. Not even Calyx can find it, and she’s been searching records as old as the house.”

“It’s just as well,” the Gatekeeper said, “from the sound of things, that the Dragon hasn’t flown itself into the household records before now.”

“I suppose.” Nyx yawned; her eyes looked colorless and luminous as the moon. ‘Meguet, watching her through the open turret arches, asked with some sympathy,

“What does your mother think of all this?”

“She seems unusually resigned. I suspect she hopes that I’ll never find Saphier and that I’ll forget about Brand. Perhaps. Anything is possible. But expecting me to forget Brand, and the Luxour, and the dragons of the Luxour, and the dragon-mage, and all that wild, unfocused power that shaped even the Cygnet out of our thoughts, is expecting too much. There is, I reminded her, a precedent. Chrysom also loved the Luxour.”

“So did I,” Meguet said softly. “For a few moments. When I saw it through Pad’s eyes.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” the Gatekeeper said. She met his eyes across the torch fire.

“No,” she said, smiling a little. “I felt it was wrong of me, wanting to see dragons. Things that lay beyond the Cygnet’s eye.”

“How do you know they do?” he asked curiously. “Or do you know at all?”

She was silent, gazing back at him. “I don’t,” she said, and got to her feet abruptly. “None of us would have recognized a dragon before now. And perhaps I never saw the Cygnet among the stars only because I didn’t expect it to fly anywhere in Saphier’s sky.”

She stepped outside the turret; Nyx was already searching the night sky. “The Dragon hunts the Cygnet,” Nyx murmured. “Behind the constellation? Or above it? The black war-dragon with blood-red eyes.”

“I saw it,” Meguet said wonderingly. “The constellation in Rad’s doorway. The dragon of night and stars. It never occurred to me it might be—“

“There,” the gatekeeper said, pointing over the sea, “just on the horizon. That red star. Two red stars. And look. One star its breast, one star the tip of its outflung wing, those stars its claws, and those, that faint cloud of stars, its breath of fire. And that star over there, perhaps its tail? Would that be it?”

“I see it,” Nyx breathed. Her fingers, chilled, closed on Meguet’s wrist. “There. South and west above the sea.”

“I see.” Meguet was staring at the Gatekeeper.

“Is that what you saw, Meguet?”

“Yes.”

“So Saphier lies somewhere beneath the dragon’s eye. I can sail there—“

“Please,” Meguet breathed.

“I’ll send explorers,” Nyx conceded. “Messengers- Even my mother would approve of that. As much as she approves of any of this. I’ll take Chrysom’s box to Rad Ilex; perhaps he can help me find a path between Ro Holding and Saphier. A private path ...” Her voice trailed into silence; she contemplated the dragon’s eyes a moment before she asked slowly, “How would a man born in a swamp in the Delta in Ro Holding recognize a dragon?”

“I was wondering that myself,” Meguet said. And then she felt all thought fade away until she was barely air, barely night within the night. She was touched, it seemed, by the light, flickering, changing winds of the Luxour. “Were you there?” she asked die Gatekeeper. His face was in shadow again; she could not see his eyes. “On the Luxour? All those dark swans flying out of my night-shadow, all those winds stealing magic out of me. One of those swans wasn’t wind. One was real.” He didn’t answer. “Tell me,” she pleaded, her voice still spellbound, her bones shaped of stars now, at her elbow and ankle, throat and amazed eye. “Tell me that you saw the dragons. That when I say dragon, that’s what you will see: the flight of dragons across the Luxour under the noon sun.”

He started to speak, stopped. Then he shifted into light, and she saw them in all their terrible grace and power flying through his eyes. He drew her against him tightly, perhaps to hide what he had seen by day, perhaps in memory of what he had fought by night. “Gatekeepers don’t leave the gate,” he said at last into her hair. “But what my heart does, flying out of me in terror or wonder or love, only you can tell me, because it will follow only you.”

She felt his heart fly into her; her mind filled with dreams and memories of the soft touches of wings, the rustlings and night-murmurings of flight- Her hand brushed his wrist; his fingers opened, linked with hers. She whispered, “Then follow.”

She led him down the turret steps. Behind them, Nyx stood in the moonlight, waiting as patiently as stone or time, for the slow dance of constellations to reveal a path by star and water into the Dragon’s dawn.