Free The Cygnet and the Firebird by Patricia A. McKillip

looking into Chrysom’s eye
, she thought.
Into
his mind, which until now I thought I knew. This is one of the puzzles in the missing book, which is why I cannot solve it. Yet
.
    Later, after she had contemplated the frozen, glowing paths without inspiration, she felt again the feathery touch of fear.
    They will find me
, she thought,
in the library, silent, blind, motionless, holding the box in my hand. Will they have the sense to leave me with it? Rush wouldn’t. He would smash it, to set me free. I could be trapped in its broken shards forever . . . I should have taught Rush more sorcery. But I never had the patience. And he would never stop to think
.
    She quieted her unruly thoughts, focused them again. Nothing to do, it seemed, but pick a path again, see if her thoughts might lead somewhere, if the path wouldn’t. She narrowed her vision, dropped onto the nearest pattern. Instantly she felt it move, dividing, looping, flowing everywhere and nowhere, as it had before, and she was powerless to control it.
    Time
, she thought.
What is it? A word. To endow a word with power, you must understand it
.
    Settling into that one place to begin to understand Chrysom’s spell, she saw a man in the distance ahead of her.
    His head was bent slightly; he did not turn or speak. He simply walked, his eyes on the flow and weave of silver as if, out of the endless twists and turns, he fashioned a solid path and followed it.
    She found the path he left, a stillness in the wild flow, a single strand of silver frozen among the rushingpatterns. Amazed, she followed it, wondering if Chrysom had set a shadow of himself within the paths to guide the unwary mage. The road beyond the guide began to blur into darkness. Nyx quickened her pace; as if he felt her sudden fear, he slowed. Closing the distance between them, she recognized him.
    She caught her breath, stunned at the sight of the long black hair, the warrior’s straight line of shoulder. Turning, he met her eyes, held them. She blinked, and the tower stones formed around them, the moon hanging in the black sky beyond a window. Gazing at her, still caught, perhaps, in some twist of past, for an instant he recognized himself.
    “My name is Brand.”

- Five -
    With the name came memory. He flinched away from it as from fire; for an instant his human face became the firebird’s cry. Then his eyes emptied of expression: the dreamer waking, the dream forgotten. She whispered.
    “You were with me in Chrysom’s box. You led me out.”
    He only gazed at her blankly. “I don’t remember.”
    “Brand.” She added, at his silence, “That is your name. You just told me.”
    “I don’t remember.”
    The door opened. Preoccupied, she did not loose his eyes, just held up a hand for silence. She received it, so completely she wondered if she had thrown a spell across the room. “You remember,” she said. “Your eyes remember. The bird remembers.”
    “The bird—” He paused, bewildered. “The bird is sorcery.”
    “It cries your sorrow.”
    “It cries jewels as well as sorrow. Are those mine also?”
    “Perhaps. If you are a mage.”
    He was silent again, throwing a net into the still black waters of memory. The net came up empty. “Why would I be that?”
    “Only another mage could have rescued me from Chrysom’s spell.” She heard something from the door then, not sound so much as a rearrangement of disturbed air. She asked, because it had to be asked, not because she had much hope of answer, “Do you know the mage who wears a white dragon on his breast?”
    His head lifted slightly; he gazed beyond her, as if dragons were gathering soundlessly in the shadows just beyond the candlelight. For an instant he seemed to see what lay beyond the light: the country where he had been named. The memory faded; he shook his head. “I cannot see that dragon.”
    “The mage?”
    “What?”
    “Do you know the mage?”
    He started to speak, stopped. All color left his face then;