Corleu opened his eyes.
His face was in a puddle, one foot was in a stream, and the water in both places was freezing—that much he realized before several hands heaved him up and tossed him like a hay bale into the bottom of a boat. His head cracked against an oar; the breath was knocked out of him. Stunned, he could not move. The boat rocked under him; a pair of boots settled next to his ear.
“That’s it. That’s the last of it.” The boat wallowed away from the bank. Current caught it. The oarlocks rattled and creaked.
“Petrified blood-fox spoor, she said,” a younger voice objected. “She wanted that, she said.”
“She may want what she wants, but nothing petrifies here. Things molder or get eaten here.” The boot near Corleu’s ear lifted, tapped his cheek. “This one is fresh dead. His skin is still on his bones.”
“He never came out of the bog,” the second voice protested. “Bones buried in the bog, she said.”
“Where’d he come from, then? Fallen out of the sky?”
“We could toss him over, let a bog-hole chew on him, then pull him out again. He’d be authentic then. A true bog man.”
Corleu caught his breath at the idea. There was a sudden silence; even the oarlocks were silent. “He’s alive.” A hand pulled his hair, tugged his head up. “He’s breathing. He’s bleeding quick blood.”
“Well, how were we to know? What was he doing lying alive in this sour mire?”
“Throw me rope. Quick!”
Corleu moved dizzily, futilely. His hands were caught, knotted behind his back. When he opened his mouth to protest, a cloth smelling of old fish was jammed between his teeth. He was rolled onto his back. He blinked the faces above him clear against the misty dawn.
“He’s not a bog man,” a heavy-set, one-eyed man pronounced finally. “Nor marsh bones. Nor even dead.”
“Toss him down the next sinkhole,” a skinny young man with a wispy beard suggested. “Then we’d have it: dead bones out of the marsh.”
The one-eyed man considered Corleu dispassionately. He shifted a twig from one side of his teeth to the other. “She won’t pay for murder. I’m not climbing those stairs for nothing.”
“She’ll never know!”
“She’ll know. I gave her murdered bones once, and she said they did nothing in her fire but weep and complain at her until she stopped and buried them. None of my fault, they never complained to me, so how was I to know? But she knew. Things talk to her.”
“Then what will we do with this one? Heave him back on shore?”
“He’ll be annoyed by now, likely. I’m too old for dealing with him if we untie him, and you’re too puny. If we leave him here tied in this wild, that will be murder. Turtles would eat him if blood fox didn’t.”
Corleu chewed ineffectually at the cloth in his mouth. A grey-brown world slid past him. Tall trees with pale trunks rose out of the water, their long scythe-like leaves long fallen; the boat tacked unhurriedly around them. Carpets of rotting lily pads sent a bitter smell along the breeze. The dawn world rustled and cried with hunger. A snake, draped in deep blue scallops along a branch, straightened like a whip and dropped into the water, narrowly missing the boat. An oar slapped at it. Water flecked Corleu’s face. A thought was reeling crazily into his head: that this was the true Delta, of snakes and slow cold murky water and trees that had not only left summer behind but autumn as well. The boat passed vines cascading down from a rotten bough into the water. They hung limply, leafless, shrivelled with cold. He had a sudden vision of Tiel sitting under them, growing pale, drawn with despair, fading away like a ghost in a fading dream world. He pulled at the rope, gave a muffled groan of such fear and frustration and bewilderment that the eyes above him became almost human.
“Should we let him talk? Ask him what left him here?”
“No,” the one-eyed man said. “Let her ask. She might find a use.”
The boat meandered endlessly under the colorless sky. Great white birds cried hoarsely overhead, their wings rattling like old bones as they flew. Now and then a blood fox barked in the distance. They were travelling south, Corleu saw, with an eye on the current. Deeper into the Delta. Shivering with cold, he dreamed the sun, a fuming, hot-eyed, petal-haired face busy eating day and stars, the world, time. It fixed its furious gaze on him, said his name: Corleu. He jerked himself awake, heard a bird cry mournfully: Corleu.
The trees thinned; water shunted into a slow side channel and from there bled into a wide lagoon. They passed a great, dark tangled cave of tree roots where a huge tortoise older than Ro Holding, it looked, slowly blinked at them as it turned itself into stone. Its neck protruded from a shell ruffled with white agate; its jaws could have enclosed Corleu’s face. Its eyes, velvety with age, pondered him and narrowed into slits of night.
The boat slipped through lazy shallows, among a grove of statues: old, worn, silvery stumps still rooted in the water, that some passing artist had whittled into shapes. A huge, long-legged egret gazed upward, its beak open as if to nibble at the sun. A squat toad sat on the water, its rolled tongue about to snap and snag the boat. A child, pulling her skirt above her knees, waded through dead lily pads; a lily trailed from her long hair. A naked man with the bunched, bulky shoulders and pointed teeth of a blood fox smiled at Corleu. He started; human blood fox became tree again, its shoulders molded of broken boughs, one eye a dark stain of pitch.
“Blood fox,” the young man said, and Corleu turned his head. A huge one gazed at them from the shore; the young man stared back at it, an odd mix of hate and wonder in his eyes. “Big. Look at its eyes. Evil. Beware the blood fox casts a human shadow.”
“That’s a worn old tale. Blood fox isn’t evil.”
“It kills. I saw it kill a hunter once.”
“What was hunter hunting?”
“Blood fox.”
“So, then. Bad luck to kill a blood fox.”
“They’re bad luck. Look at its eyes. Blood fire in them. Look at it. How it’s watching. How it’s watching.”
“Delta belongs to the blood fox,” the one-eyed man said. “It laid claim long before us. Long before any Ro held Ro Holding.”
“It hates us. We took the Delta from it. We kill it, with long knives and nets for sport.”
“It doesn’t hate us, any more than the little-boned animals it eats hate it. Things are killed. Things kill.”
Corleu shifted, trying to make himself smaller against the cold. Shadow darkened over his closed eyes. He smelled damp earth, roots that snaked over the banks to slide deep into the water, weaving, in their ancient courses, doors, windows, pathways for the small animals. He smelled water everywhere. He opened his eyes. Moss hung like women’s hair from the tree boughs, the only color to be seen; the sky seemed very far away. Something swam after the oars, grabbed one; there was a tussle between rower and water before whatever it was sank away.
“One of hers?”
“No. Old stone-back tortoise.”
“Did you see its eyes? Old as Ro Holding.”
“Older.”
Hours later, the boat eased toward a dock. For an eye-blink, Corleu saw a luminous woman, all in weedy white lace, sitting in the prow of a long, graceful boat; the woman she spoke to, all in black, lifted a pale face toward the passing boat. Then the bright ghost vanished. A lamp hung on a mooring stump spilled light across the dark; moths as big as birds flickered around it. The men made for the light. On the hillside above the water, Corleu saw a house; one thick, smoky window burned red as a fox’s eye. The men pulled him to his feet. He stumbled onto the dock and fell, half frozen and dizzy with hunger. They hauled him up again, pushed him toward the rickety wooden stairway that curved up to the house. Before they could begin the climb, the woman, still sitting shadowlike in the long boat, spoke.
“You’re late,” she said coldly. “You took all day.”
They all started. The one-eyed man said breathlessly, “Thought you were the ghost herself—”
“We’ve been talking.” She stepped forward into the moth-stippled light. Her face, it seemed to Corleu—spare, proud, untamed—might have been the face of the dark, secretive woodfox, perhaps, or the beautiful, imperious wild swan. Her eyes, so pale they seemed to hold no color, went to Corleu’s face. “What’s this?” she said sharply.
The one-eyed man sighed hopelessly and was silent. The young one said brashly, “Bones, ma’am.”
“Bones.”
“You said bones out of the swamp. We found them lying, so we took them.”
She gave an exasperated hiss, like an old swamp tortoise that just missed its prey. “You bubble-fish, I told you bones!”
“Yes, ma’am. We—”
“He’s not even dead! Or is it just my eyesight going, too? Is he a ghost over his bones?”
“No, ma’am. He—”
“Are you?” She reached out, pulled the cloth from Corleu’s mouth. He took a deep breath that did not smell of fish. Her eyes caught at him again; he kept looking for color in them. “Are you dead?”
He shook his head, though not with absolute certainty. “I’m Wayfolk.”
“With that hair?”
Then he knew he was among the living. “With this hair.”
“What would Wayfolk be doing in the Delta swamp in midwinter? Catching butterflies?”
He was silent. Her strange eyes were pulling his thoughts off balance, and suddenly he realized why. “They’re like the mist we travelled in,” he breathed. “As if you looked in at us.”
“What?”
“It was never winter there. I thought it should have come, but it was always warm. It wasn’t Delta, where I was.”
“Well, then, where was it?”
“I don’t know. I kept falling. Sky, maybe.”
“You fell out of the sky.”
“Swamp gas ate his brain,” the young man suggested, grinning. The woman ignored him.
“And what,” she asked softly, “were you doing in the sky?”
“Talking to the sun.”
She pulled her eyes from him abruptly; he swayed as if the world had shifted. “Bring him. He is obviously a lunatic, a runaway, most likely. No one will miss him. I might as well keep him to clean my hearth. Did you get everything else? Blind-fish? The roots of bog lilies? Canaries?”
“There was the blood-fox spoor,” the one-eyed man said heavily, and she glared at him. “Petrified. Things don’t linger here to petrify.”
“Tortoises do,” she snapped, and he sighed. “Get the spoor. And bones. Old bones. I need old eyes to see out of. Do you understand?”
His head ducked turtle-like into his thick neck. They followed the woman up steps that hung together on a promise. The porch slanted crazily over the water; the windows sagged in their frames, looking neither in nor out, curiously opaque. The men deposited Corleu and the squirming sacks at the open door, then retreated to the top of the stairs. The woman heaved the sacks over the threshold herself. She turned to the men, who were eyeing Corleu with a morbid, fascinated speculation.
“Go,” she said sharply, and they did so, old rails groaning under their feet. She touched Corleu gently. “What’s your name?”
“Corleu Ross.”
“Corleu. Come in. You didn’t fall out of the sky dressed for winter, did you? Did they give you anything to eat?”
“Only that fish-blown cloth.” He felt an odd resistance at her threshold, shadows dragging at him like water, and he stopped, finding the same resistance in his thoughts. But she put her fingers lightly on his wrist, coaxing him forward.
“Never mind them.”
“I have trouble with houses, is all. What are they?”
“Just my doorkeepers. My house wards.” Dragging sacks behind her, she led him through a short hallway, into a dark room that smelled, he thought, like cider gone bad. She snapped her fingers. Fat candles in fantastic holders lit themselves. Chairs, small tables, books, seemed to arrange themselves hastily, as if in the dark they had been wandering around. Corleu stopped again, not knowing if his head or the room were shifting. Walls had been torn away to make one huge room of oddly vague dimensions. In the middle of the room was a fire pit, open on all sides, with an enormous chimney straddling it. Several large tables stood around the fire pit, cluttered with stones, knives, glass pipes, crystals, nuggets of silver and gold, books, feathers, clothes, jewels cut and uncut, small bones, bottles full of tinted liquids and salts, jars with things floating in them—shadowy, withered and half-formed things that brought Corleu out of weariness and hunger and memory to stand prickling with horror, wondering what trouble he had just carelessly walked into.
The woman watched him silently. She was younger than Corleu had guessed, a scant handful of years older than he. Her hair, bound hastily at her neck with a gold clip, was long and fine and so dark it reminded him of another such night he had buried his face in. He whirled, to escape into the Delta night again. But instead of the hallway between workroom and porch, he found only a musty room full of doves sleeping in the rafters.
He turned back, bewildered, beginning to panic. The young woman gazed down at the sack by her feet, ignoring him. The string untangled itself, fell to the floor. Corleu, his heart pounding sluggishly, watched the sack crawl like something living. Birds fluttered out of the opening: yellow canaries, and tiny, iridescent hummingbirds beating eerie, frantic, silent circles around the room. They made no noise.
“Their tongues are in here somewhere,” the woman said. “I also need their wings. You will see to that.”
Corleu flung a side door open. The room beyond it had no windows, no other doors; it held a small black boat with a broken mast and the constellation forming another improbable house painted on its bow.
He slammed the door again, leaned against it. His heart seemed to be circling above him with the desperate birds. The woman was watching him expressionlessly.
“You can’t leave,” she said. “This house has a hundred doors into itself. If you do what I tell you, I’ll feed you and give you a bed. In the morning you can tell me what you were doing in the sky talking to the sun. Or if you are simply demented. If you don’t do as I bid, you can starve. Suit yourself. They’re only birds.”
Corleu ran down the hallway again. A door rose before him; he threw it open and ran on, one arm raised to ward off whatever might come at him. He came to another door, opened it, ran down a longer hallway. Another door rose before him; he passed through it, found himself back in the workroom.
He sagged against a table, spilling things, sobbing for breath, and found that all the birds had come to perch on his hair, his shoulders. He shook them into the air.
“Tear them apart yourself,” he said furiously. “I’ll starve.”
She rummaged in the sack. Somewhere in the shadows a clock ticked. The small birds fluttered down to rest in his hair again.
She did not feed him for two days; he did not speak to her for three. By then she had her bones and spoor and had taken the bird wings herself. Slumped on her floor, growing numb to both hunger and horror, Corleu watched her build her spell step by step. She made a fire of dogwood and willow and hard black gallwood. Tiny gold suns snapped toward the ceiling, gold lintels, a sun-king’s golden face. . . . The fire turned strange colors and shapes as it ate her gleanings from the swamp. The shadows in the room were tinted blue and purple; curtains and paintings shifted uneasily. When she had fed the fire the last bone from the marsh, it turned grey-white and shaped a skull without eyes. The skull said one word and collapsed. The woman left Corleu lying in the haunted dark and went to bed.
The next evening, tired of walking around him, she relented and fed him. She guided him out of the workroom, deeper into the rambling house and gave him a bed. The next day, while she sat reading beside a normal fire, Corleu searched the house for the one door that would undo. Rooms opened into rooms in her house, none holding anything predictable. In one, all the chairs in the house had gathered except the one the woman was sitting in. Another room, with white walls and white curtains, held nothing but a stuffed white peacock. One room seemed blown out of glass. Frozen flowers tumbled around Corleu as he stood in it. Delicate green ivy grew up the walls, soft purple lilac hung overhead. He could smell lilac. Wondering, he closed the door, then opened it again. Old tapestries hung from the walls now; a glass vase the color of lilac held a faded branch of lilac. He walked on, down silent carpeted hallways, opened another door at random. This room, for some reason, was filled from top to bottom with goose feathers. He sneezed. Pinfeathers startled into the air, drifted down like snow. He found a staircase and mounted it. At the top of the stairs he found a door with a sign on it that said “Do Not Enter.”
He opened a door into memory. The tinker sat in the waning light, cooking something small over his fire. . . . Falling, falling through endless stars, he came up against another door. But which was this? In? Or out? He touched it, hands flat against the wood, as if he could feel a secret, trembling heartbeat within it. He was shaking at what might be within: the gold, armored king pacing the length of his chain, the smell of fish cooking . . . worse than either, what he had to find. But there was no undoing without doing. His hand slid to the latch; he opened the door.
Inside, the woman sat in her chair, reading. Her feet were bare; she nibbled a strand of hair as she read. She looked at Corleu; her pale eyes were as expressionless as water.
He spoke to her, for the first time in three days. “What are you?”
She shrugged a little. “I have been called everything from sorceress to bog hag. I know a great many things but never enough. Never enough. I know the great swamp of night, and sometimes I do things for pay if it interests me.”
“And if—and if they can’t pay?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Are you bargaining with me?”
He swallowed. “Sorry. It’s Wayfolk habit.”
“But for what? You loathe what I do. What could you want from me?”
“It’s—you know things. You have so many books. You must know other than burning owl bones. My grandfather knew a little. Country magic. But all I know is stories, and all they’ve done is get me into trouble.”
She studied him curiously, as if he were a rare kind of tree frog that maybe she could use in her fire. She had a fine lady’s sunless skin and slender fingers, though hers had chipped nails and blisters from the fire. Swathed in some black shapeless dress, all her thoughts hidden away in her lovely, cold face, she gave him again an illusion of someone who prowled or flew by day, and only walked, wept, spoke, in the darkest hour of night. She said finally, “You fell out of the sky. You talked to the sun. You ran all the way out of the world, it sounds like.”
“Yes.” His hands clenched, opened again. “I went into the wrong door.”
“In this house?”
“Likely here, too. But even before they found me in the swamp. It was another house that said ‘Do Not Enter,’ plain as if it had shouted at me.”
“Do you always open doors that say that?”
“I’m getting in the habit of it. So I went in, and now I must find something.”
“What? Where?”
“I don’t know where. It could be anywhere. So if a door like this one bothers to talk at all, even to warn, that’s a door I need to open, to see if what it warns of can help me at all. Even you.”
Her brows went up. She said drily, “Even the likes of me.”
“I didn’t mean—” He held his breath a moment, under that colorless, speculative gaze. “I’m used to a harmless magic. You know some terrible things. But you do know, and I’m short of knowing anything besides my name. I’ll sweep for you, I’ll clean your hearth, I’ll do anything but kill for you, except for what you need to live. I’ll cut wood, I know herbs and flowers, I can even mend your stairs. If you’ll only help me, even only tell me where to begin—”
She shook her head, her fine hair sliding laxly over one shoulder. “I like my stairs that way,” she said shortly. “They discourage company. I don’t understand you. Begin what?”
“To look for what I have to find.”
“And what might that be?”
“It’s—just a small thing.” His hands had clenched again; his eyes flicked past her as if shadows of his memories moved on the wall behind her. “A small thing. He said to ask the Blind Lady.”
“What blind lady?”
“The Blind Lady of Withy Hold. He said to give her a gift.”
She shifted, impatient, bewildered. “What gift? What small thing? What ‘he’ said you must find it?”
“The sun.”
She made an unladylike noise. “You,” she said, “may be too demented to be useful.”
“No—”
“Demented people talk to suns.”
“And to old burned bones that answer back.” His retort left her wordless; he pleaded quickly, “You brought me in here. Likely you thought you could stand a few lunatic ravings.”
“Or likely not—”
“I have no place to go, no one else to ask. Please. If you could only listen. Only that. Please.” Her face promised him no indulgence. But she didn’t stop him. “We travelled south this year from Withy Hold, instead of going to Hunter Hold, like always. We were bound for Delta, but somewhere we took a wrong turn.”
“We.”
“My Wayfolk company. Except my true kin—they went on to Hunter Hold.”
“Get on with it,” she said with some asperity. “I don’t want details about all your barefoot siblings.”
“I—my parents went to Hunter Hold instead, because my mother saw something in her petals, something falling out of the sky, and all our paths twisting and turning and going nowhere—”
“Like your tale,” she muttered.
“It was a beautiful place we came to,” he said, skipping over the endless roads. “Nothing like the true Delta. Nothing. It was like the days in spring when you find everything has flowered and nothing has begun to die, so it seems that’s the way the world must go on: always just breaking into blossom, and the air full of soft, sweet smells, and colors to wring your heart, after all the white and grey of winter. That’s what this place was. Day after day after day. Nothing ever died. But once we left Withy Hold, we never saw sky, nor star, nor sun . . . just those colorless mists.” His face was blanched beneath its color; he was sweating lightly, as if the warm, sultry air clung to him again. “We kept driving, driving, never counting days, never seeing sunlight except when it turned red at sundown, and then one day I saw it—how we must have driven past autumn into the dead of winter, and still we never reached city or sea, and still nothing in that land died. . . . I tried to tell them, but they were content there, they saw no harm. . . . Then I found a way out and I took it. Alone. They’re still all there. I can free them, he said. If I find the thing he wants.”
“How did you escape?” she asked, groping for a thread in the tangled skein. “The color of your hair?”
“Something like,” he whispered, so deep in the memory he scarcely saw her. “There’s a song.”
“I might have guessed.”
“One of those you’re born knowing, you never remember learning. The little dark house that falls out of the sky.”
She nodded, impatient again and mystified. “I know it.”
“You must not enter it.”
“It’s the house you’ll never leave.”
“Everyone knows it. But no one pays mind to it. I never did either, until it fell.” Her fingernail, ticking at the chair arm, missed a beat. “There was no other door I could see. No other way out of the dream world. Only that black house, with the roof of gold and the lintel of gold. So”—he drew breath raggedly—“I went into it.”
She was motionless, in a way he associated with animals fading into their surroundings at a scent, at something barely glimpsed. “You did.” Her voice was devoid of expression. “And what did you find, in that little dark house that falls from the sky?”
“The Gold King.”
He had closed his eyes at the memory. He could not hear her breathing, and he wondered suddenly if, exasperated, she had taken her book and walked through a wall. But she was still there, gazing at him without blinking, spellbound, it seemed to him, sculpted out of air and painted.
“The Gold King is a Hold Sign.” She picked words carefully, as she might have picked a path across a marsh.
“Yes.”
“The yellow star its lintel, the yellow star its roof, the four stars of red and pale marking its walls, the blue star marking its doorlatch . . . The Hold Sign of Hunter Hold.”
“Yes.”
“It is a banner, a constellation, an ancient war sign. A song. How could you walk into it?”
“Who am I to know that?” he asked her. “The likes of me? How did the Cygnet get into the sky? How did the Gold King’s house get into a song? Maybe it was us put them there. Or maybe they’re the ones whispered to us that they were there. Or something was there, hiding behind Cygnet, behind sun’s face. Something dark and powerful and terrible, that we hung faces on to make them less terrible. The house fell. I went into it. How is what I could break my mind over till I die. What matters is that, standing here in front of you, I’m still in that house. What I need is how to get out of it.”
Her face was so pale it reminded him of the waxen dreamlilies. Her eyes were wide on his face; he saw color in them finally, the palest trace of lavender. “That house,” she whispered. “Here. In the Delta.”
“In a dream.”
“Why you? Why would the Gold King fall out of the sky into your life?”
He swallowed, his throat burning. “I asked him. He said no one else in Ro Holding would have been muckerhead enough to enter his house.”
She drew breath, moving finally. Shadows moved and melted on the walls around them; he wondered, eerily, if they were her suddenly busy thoughts.
“The Gold King wants you to find something for him. In return for your people. What? Some treasure?”
“A small thing, he said. Being trapped, he can’t look for it.”
“A small thing.”
“Something only he still values, after all this time, he said.”
“The Gold King did.” She slammed her heavy book suddenly, so hard he started. She caught his eyes in her unsettling way. “A small thing. Corleu Ross, you may be a muckerhead, but what kind of idiot do you think I am? The Gold King would not tumble out of the sky in his ancient house to send you on a goose chase for some bauble of sentimental value. I would guess that what he wants you to find is powerful enough to rattle Ro Holding like a weathercock in a storm. Tell me what it is or I will not help you.”
“I cannot,” he whispered. “I cannot. I will never see them again, he said. Never in the true world.”
“But you do know what it is.”
“Yes. I know.”
She held him still under her scrutiny, as if she were trying to see the mystery inside his head. But not even she could do that, or wanted to; the intensity of her gaze lessened; he could move again. She nibbled a thumbnail; shadows shifted like smoke behind her. “This thing,” she said. “Would you want it for yourself if you could find a way to keep it?”
His face twisted, as if he smelled smoke again from the tinker’s spattering fire. He shook his head.
“Then, if I take it from the Gold King after he frees your people, you wouldn’t fight me for it? Think. You might change your mind once it’s in your hand.”
“No,” he said, brusque with horror. “It’s a terrible thing. Likely even you won’t want it.”
She smiled a little, thinly. “Likely I will, if it’s anything of power. In return for you finding this thing for me, I will help you with all my power. Which,” she added, “is considerable, and not confined to this moldering backwater. I have taken it from all over Ro Holding.”
“Are you Wayfolk?” he asked bewilderedly, for lords’ daughters seldom rambled the length and breadth of Ro Holding, or took to living like a cuckoo in an untidy, haunted nest in a swamp.
She shook her head absently, already conjecturing. Her answer took his breath away. “Of course not. I am Nyx Ro.”