Free The Cygnet and the Firebird by Patricia A. McKillip Page B

mage is not only looking for the key you are carrying around in your pocket, but for the firebird, both of which are in the place he will obviously return to, unless you spun him into thread so thoroughly he is still trying to untangle himself.” There was a tap at the door; she nearly jumped, then rose with more dignity. “That will be Brand’s supper. The Holder requested your presence in the hall.”
    “I can’t go now,” Nyx said absently. “I’m thinking.” She sat down, slipped her shoes off and propped her feet up. Arms folded, she frowned at midair. A wide-eyed page set the supper tray on a table, seemed inclined to linger to watch the firebird eat, and encountered Nyx’s eye. Meguet, left between the pensive sorceress and the ravenous man, sat tensely,watching for a thread of white dragon-wing, a dust-gold face in the shadows, and wondering what raw deed the firebird’s jewelled enchantments hid. She murmured,
    “There are too many mages.”
    Nyx’s eyes rose, fixed on Brand. She nodded, still frowning. “He could have ensorcelled himself.”
    “And the other mage is following to free him?”
    “It’s possible. There is a way to find out.”
    “How?” Then she leaned forward, gripping the sword hilt. “No.”
    Nyx shrugged. “I don’t see how we are to get closer to the truth this way. The man retreats constantly into the firebird. If we let the mage find him, Brand might remember himself along with the mage.”
    “Not here. Not in this tower, in the middle of the Holding Council. They may be bitter enemies. The entire house would be in danger. I think you should hide the firebird—”
    “Where?” Nyx asked. “In the maze beneath the tower?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Then where?”
    “In the thousand-year-old wood. Not even the mage would find him among the shifting trees.”
    “I could find him easily there. What I can do, I must assume the mage can do.”
    “Then somewhere in the city, or in the swamp—”
    Nyx’s mouth crooked. “I can’t disappear into theswamp with a bird. My mother would spit lightning. I would prefer to face the mage.”
    “I’ll leave,” Brand said abruptly. They both looked at him, startled, as if they had forgotten he could speak. Disturbed, he pushed away his food. He came to stand before Nyx. “I didn’t know the bird would endanger you.”
    Nyx checked her immediate response, said patiently, “You might walk out of here, but the bird would return. It’s you who must learn to cry jewels. To cry sorrow. Or the bird will never set you free.”
    He shook his head at her obtuseness. “All I know,” he said, “is that the bird came to you, sorcery to sorceress. First you must deal with the sorcery. Then I will be able to remember.”
    She drew breath. His eyes held some of the bird’s fierceness, but it was the fierceness of desire, of determination. “All right,” she said at last, wondering that he had guided her so skillfully out of one maze, only to be so blind in another. “I will work with the spell awhile, instead of your human memory. One can’t be more difficult than the other. But I have already tried to find my way into the spell, and gotten nowhere.”
    “Try again,” he pleaded and sat down on the window ledge where the bird had waited for the rising moon.
    She found the bird’s face within his thoughts; its spellbound mind yielded nothing to her of memory or enchantment. When the bird itself reappeared, Nyx slipped within its mind, as easily as she had droppedinto Chrysom’s tiny box. For a time, she wandered among the bird’s enchantments that bloomed ceaselessly behind its eyes, and faded again without the fire that fashioned them. They formed like dreams around her, thoughtless, intangible, with nothing of either mage or Brand in them. She found her way out again, and said, studying the bird with some perplexity,
    “This is exasperating. The bird won’t give me a path into the man; the man won’t give me a path into the