She said softly, “I thought so.”
Meguet felt the last, familiar layer of time slide into place; she stood again in her own present. “You know what I am.”
“I know,” the Holder said. “The powers that protect the Cygnet do not keep the Holders ignorant of its guardian. For some time now I have wondered about you.” She paused. There was not a pin left in her hair; it flowed wildly down her back. Her eyes looked weary, bruised by conjecture. She added, “You would not have come down here, the Gatekeeper would not have left the gate, unless there was dire need.”
Meguet put the back of her hand to her mouth. “The Blind Lady has entered.” Her voice trembled. “We looked for her. They were both here, in the maze. Blind Lady and tinker.”
The Holder stepped closer; firelight ran over Meguet’s dishevelled hair, her singed skirt. “You found them,” she said harshly.
“The Gate—Hew—I left him. He was hurt. Dead, maybe.” She swallowed, calmed her voice from habit, though she had begun to shake. “I must find him. I had to run—”
“Yes.”
“I ran—beyond time, I think. Into the heart of the maze.”
“Here.”
“Yes, only—within. Within this place. I must go back and find Hew. He fell on his knife.”
The Holder closed her eyes. “Moro’s name. You cannot go back there.”
“I must find him.”
“No. I’ll send the guard.”
“They won’t get far enough. They won’t get past the periphery. No one does. Except you.”
“I came another way,” the Holder said obscurely. “Gatekeepers don’t kill themselves without regard for the gate.”
“He didn’t—I knocked him down.”
“Oh.”
“He was walking into the tinker’s house. I—he might have been dead then, I don’t know. I tried to kill the tinker.”
“It does seem futile.” She touched her eyes delicately with her fingers. “The powers you have inherited are formidable, but I don’t think you are able to use them to rescue a Gatekeeper. They rouse to protect the Cygnet.”
“I know, but—”
“Those two may be waiting for you.”
Meguet felt a familiar stillness settle through her, as when she had chosen a path or an action and choice lay in the past, in another time. “Then,” she said, “I will meet them.”
“Meguet Vervaine, I forbid you to do this!”
“Will you let me take the torch, anyway?” She added, under the Holder’s outraged stare, “I am overly fond of your Gatekeeper.”
“So you would leave me in the dark.”
“I’ll light your way back first. It’s not far, is it? The way you came in?” She looked around, at the strange menacing figures surrounding them, wearing their bright masks of paint. She had seen them many times, she knew, through many centuries. “It’s quite close. . . .” she said surprisedly. The Holder watched her, face impassive. Her fingers lifted, worried her hair for a phantom pin. She gave up, tossing her hand in the air.
“I dislike changing Gatekeepers.” She gave Meguet the torch. “Lead.”
Meguet bowed her head; the torch shook in her hand, then finally steadied. She turned, and, stepping forward, flung a circle of light around the Gatekeeper.
She stopped, catching breath. He kept moving, slowly, with a weary, dragging persistence, until he was close enough to reach out, gather her against him with one arm. She whispered, “Hew.” She put her free arm around him tightly and felt him wince.
She drew back, still holding him lightly. He carried his singed cloak under one arm; there was blood in his hair, a streak of blood along one torn side of his tunic. He smiled a little, then started as the Holder stepped into the light.
They looked at each other for a long time. Then the Gatekeeper let go of Meguet, bent his head respectfully, and the Holder said, “Hew, what are you doing here? This place is for mages and Holders, not Gatekeepers.”
“I heard Meguet’s voice, my lady. I followed it. Hours, it seems I followed.”
“Are you badly hurt?”
“I’ve been worse, my lady.”
“I thought you were dead,” Meguet said numbly. “I saw you walking into the tinker’s house.”
He looked at her wearily. “It’s not a tinker you were fighting, my lady Meguet. It’s not a tinker lives in that dark house. Down here, there’s no one to keep secrets from, unless this cheerful crowd around us.”
“That may well be,” the Holder said grimly, “but until I know better what danger we’re in, I prefer to have only a tinker under my house.”
“And a blind weaver, my lady. She got past my sleeping eye.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“How did you escape from them?” Meguet asked. He shook his head.
“I didn’t. I woke up and it was dark and they were gone. So were you. I thought they had you. Then I began to hear your voice. Here, around this corner, there around that, words I couldn’t quite hear . . . I was circling you, I think, forever it felt. You never sounded frightened. Never troubled. You were safe, I thought, but I could never find you. It helped me, hearing you, kept me from sitting down and falling asleep.” He was holding his arm tightly against his side. Meguet saw him blink away sweat. The Holder said abruptly:
“The house must be in a turmoil by now. Meguet, lead us back up.”
Meguet raised the torch above her head, illumined the tall, still, half-human figures ringing them. A horned face, its human part blue, its horns gold, gazed back at her out of blue and gold eyes. She reached out impulsively, touched its clawed, jewelled hand.
It swung gently aside, revealing steps. The Gatekeeper made a sudden noise, of recognition and wonder. “We came down those,” he breathed. “My lady Meguet, is there a maze or is there not? Or is this all in the mage’s mind?”
“You should know; you walked as much of it as any of us.”
“While you spoke, who were you speaking to all that time?”
The lie came easily to her, she found, as they must come, she realized, for the rest of her life. “Only myself,” she said, “guiding myself, feeling my way . . .” She opened the small door at the top of the stairs, pushed the heavy, dark banner aside. Through the open doors of the tower, the Gatekeeper’s empty turret hung like a delicate carving against a blue-grey dusk.
With the Holder’s permission, Meguet helped him back to his cottage. He sat stiffly on the hearth bench, the jagged tear in his side cleaned and dressed, watching her gaze dubiously at his pots.
“I can cook what I have hunted,” she confessed finally. “But I’m no good in a kitchen.”
“Never mind,” he said. He stretched out his good arm. “Sit with me a little, Meguet.” She dropped beside him on the bench. Her skirt was torn at the knee where she had fallen; her braid was coming apart; there were, she was certain, smudges of sweat and dust on her face. He kissed her for a long time. Night laid dark wings against the windows; the world was oddly silent.
“No wind,” she said at last, surprised. “No rain.”
“Stars, maybe. Entire constellations . . .” But neither of them moved to look. “Spring, soon.”
She leaned against him, watching the fire, thinking of the tinker’s fire. “What happened to you,” she asked, “in that gold ring of fire? I saw you walking toward the Gold King’s house. Do you remember the open door of his house? It was full of night and stars.”
“All I remember is falling.”
“That was after, when I pushed you away from the house.”
“No, before. When I threw you away from the fire. You hit me with something.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did. That sword you carried. I saw its pommel coming at me. That was that for me until I woke alone in the dark.”
“Then you walked in your sleep. Or maybe it was an illusion of you, walking. Or a sending through time, like the Hunter Hold witches. The Blind Lady pulled a thread between her hands while you walked. . . .”
“They didn’t harm me.” He looked down at her wryly. “You did most of it.”
“I did,” she said, startled.
“They didn’t hurt you?”
“No. I threw your knife at the Gold King. He was armed in gold, then, and crowned, and laughing at me. I hit him.”
“Did he drop dead?”
“Not noticeably.”
“Then what?”
“Then I ran.”
“Did they follow you?”
“I don’t—I don’t think so.”
He grunted. “They were in hiding. Waiting, it seems like. We disturbed them, they showed us a trick or two and then hid themselves again.”
“Waiting.”
“So it seems.”
She was silent. A finger of fire caught color from sap and turned gold. She started. She turned abruptly, caught his arms so tightly he winced. “Hew. When is spring? When is the last day of winter?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“How soon?” She shook him a little, when he didn’t answer. “That’s what they’re waiting for! The Dancer, the Blood Fox’s human shadow, the Warlock—”
“The Warlock?”
“The other Hold Signs!” She loosed him, sprang up to pace, thinking furiously. “How many weeks of winter left?”
“Days, more like.” He watched her, nursing his side, his face hard, expressionless as always when he was disturbed. “I must watch for a Warlock now, at the gate. And all the Hold Councils themselves beginning to come soon. What do you see in all this, Meguet?”
She whirled, her face white. “I have to stop him.”
“Who?”
“The Wayfolk man with Nyx. He’s going to Berg Hold, to wake the Dancer. On the last day of winter.”
“He’d be gone by now,” Hew said, and brought her to a halt in front of him. “Unless he can fly across Ro Holding. Wayfolk don’t fly. But they’re not afraid to travel.”
She swung to the hearth, brought her fist down on the stones. Then she dropped her face against her arm. “I’ll leave now. Tonight.”
“You’ll never make it. Never to Berg Hold by winter’s end. You might make it past the Delta.”
“Then what?” she said bitterly. “Will we stop the Dancer coming in the way we stopped the Blind Lady? I can’t do anything right. I try and try and only make things worse.”
“Why is it you who should be trying? You, more than the Holder or Nyx or Rush Yarr? Why, Meguet? Why is it you must stop the Wayfolk man in Berg Hold?”
Because I can! she said fiercely, but only to herself, her eyes still hidden in the crook of her arm. She felt him pull at her gently.
“Don’t. Not twice in one day. I’ll watch, this time. I swear. Day and night.”
She turned her head, gazed down at him, dry-eyed. “I must get to Berg Hold.”
“But how?”
“Rush. Maybe he learned something useful from Nyx. Or the witches of Hunter Hold. Maybe they know a way I could walk through time. I could get to Hunter Hold before winter’s end.”
“Rush Yarr’s sorcery might land you in the middle of Wolfe Sea.”
“I have to risk something! It’s because of the Wayfolk man these things are happening. I don’t know how or why, but he is dangerous, and I must stop him.”
“With what?” he demanded. “With what power? Moro Ro’s sword that you have to hold steady with both hands? Why you? Why you that must fling yourself across Ro Holding into the endless snows of Berg Hold to keep the Dancer from dancing?”
“For the same reason that you watch the gate, night and day, summer and winter. Because you must. I have old eyes in me, Hew. Old voices. They make me see, they make me do what I can. I was born rooted to the past in this house.” She added, “The Wayfolk man needs no power to be stopped. I could threaten him with Moro Ro’s sword and he would take it seriously. All I need to do is get there. . . .”
“Take the house,” he suggested. “It used to fly for Moro Ro.” She stared at him. “That way I wouldn’t have to fret about you.”
“Chrysom moved it.”
“Did he?”
“During the Hold Wars.”
“Well,” he said, “from the sound of it, that’s what we may be heading toward. Did he take that power with him when he died? Or did he leave something to the next Holder, in case of trouble in the Delta?”
“I don’t—I don’t know.”
“Who would know?”
“I don’t know.” She pushed her hands against her eyes.
“Rush Yarr?”
Her hands dropped. She gazed down at him, then she bent swiftly and kissed him. “Calyx.”
“You want to move my house where?” the Holder said incredulously.
“The highest peak in Berg Hold,” Calyx said. She was at a table in Chrysom’s library, walling herself up with books.
“It would fall off,” Iris said practically.
“Well, then as close as possible to the top. Meguet could climb the rest of the way. If people are meant to consult the Dancer, there must be a way for them to get up.”
“I’m coming with Meguet,” Rush said. “To protect her from the Fire Bear.”
“This house hasn’t moved in centuries!”
“Does everything go?” Iris wondered. “Barns, hen coops, the thousand-year-old wood?”
“Tinker and Blind Lady?” Rush asked. The Holder, gazing at Meguet, toying with the amber around her neck, shook her head.
“It’s no longer possible. Is it?”
“The house was made to move.”
“Across Ro Holding?”
“Legend,” Calyx murmured with satisfaction, “says so. Legend says that during a siege by the Delta armies, the house moved to the northern fields of Withy Hold.”
“Legend,” Iris said sharply and poked her needle through cloth. “It’s a thousand-year-old tale.”
“So,” Rush said grimly, “is what we’ve got living beneath this tower.”
“Either this house goes to Berg Hold,” Meguet said, “or Rush must find a way to send me there.”
“If you want to get there, you’d better take the house,” Calyx said.
“I think it’s safer to guard the gate against the Dancer,” Iris said. “What will people think if Ro House vanishes?”
“We’ll bring it back,” Calyx said, flipping pages. “The question is: Who actually moved it, during Moro Ro’s time?”
“Chrysom must have,” the Holder said.
“Maybe he left a spell,” Rush suggested.
“I’m looking,” Calyx said. She added, “You could help, instead of pacing around and shaking Chrysom’s things up.” Rush, tossing something iridescent in his hand, moved to her side. Meguet watched them turning pages in rhythm, their heads bowed over books, absorbed. She saw Iris watching also, a curious smile in her eyes. She threaded her needle through cloth and put it down.
“If the witches warned of the Blind Lady, why didn’t they warn of the Dancer?”
“The Blind Lady weaves time,” Meguet said. “The witches explore it. They consider the Blind Lady nothing more than a childish tale of life and death. Until she walked down one of their paths, and they saw the Lady’s face.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Iris sighed. “I don’t see how you could make any sense at all of a tinker in Chrysom’s maze.”
“The house,” Calyx said suddenly, “was moved two hundred years after the Hold Wars.” Her face was suffused with a delicate rose; finding a footprint on the trail of some historical mystery gave her pleasure.
“By Chrysom?” the Holder asked.
“No. He had been dead for fifty years. By Brigen Ro’s oldest son. He moved it from the Delta to the black desert of Hunter Hold.”
“Why?”
“It’s not clear. . . . Brigen Ro was upset and made him bring it back immediately. There is a reference by Brigen’s son to one of Chrysom’s books.”
“Nyx probably has it,” Iris said, picking up her needlework again.
“No, it’s here. Brigen’s son, apparently, just moved the house to see if he could. He sounds like you, Rush.”
“Thank you.”
“But what,” Meguet asked, “made him think he could?”
“Let’s find out,” Calyx said, picking up a small, frail book with letters on the cover in faded silver, “what Crysom has to say.”
They watched her, while she turned pages silently. Meguet, too restless to sit, moved next to the Holder beside the fire, and wished that, when she had changed out of her torn skirt, she had put on a string of beads to worry. But she stood with her usual calm, back against the hearth, hiding a terrible impatience.
Calyx made a satisfied noise. “Here we are. According to Chrysom, the power to move Ro House is passed from generation to generation of Holders’ children, who are born with an innate ability, for the Holders instinctively seek out as mates those who may inspire the power within the child conceived.”
The Holder looked startled. Iris murmured, “Really, Calyx.”
“So Chrysom says.”
The Holder cleared her throat. “All children? Or one, specifically?”
“Nyx,” Rush said shortly.
“No.” Calyx looked solemnly at her mother. “Always and inevitably the first.”
They all gazed at Iris. She put down her needlework uncertainly, flushing. The Holder’s brows had risen. She pulled a pin out of her hair absently, her mind running down the past; a smile, reminiscent, wondering, touched her eyes.
“Mother,” Iris said accusingly.
“Well, I didn’t know,” the Holder said. “He seemed a very practical man.”
“I can’t move this house.”
“Chrysom says you can.”
“He’s been dead for nine hundred years!”
“Eight hundred and fifty,” Rush corrected.
“I don’t have any gifts for magic! I never had any.”
“You have one,” Calyx said. She sat back in her chair, smoothing a strand of hair back into place. She narrowed her eyes at her sister. “Iris Ro, you are not going to sit there and tell us you won’t even try! You must. For the sake of this House. It is your duty.”
Iris stared back at her, mouth pinched. Then she looked at Meguet, standing motionless at the fire, her eyes enormous, dark with urgency in her pale face. She flung her needlework down and got to her feet.
“It won’t work.”
Calyx smiled.
Iris was still protesting on the night before the last day of winter, but with less conviction. Midnight was the preferred time, Chrysom suggested, if possible, since people and animals would be less disturbed than by leaping in broad daylight from one Hold to another. Meguet and Rush spent the day finding merchants, guests and other assorted visitors, and persuading them to shelter somewhere in the city. At dusk, when the household was sorted out, and the last visitor had departed, she had climbed wearily to the Gatekeeper’s turret, sat with him silently, watching the sun go down over the grey, crumpled sea. She could smell spring now, from the swamps: a hint of perfume over the layered scents of still water and mold, all overlaid with the wash of brine from the outgoing tide. A single swan rose high above the lake; the Gatekeeper said drily, watching it, “This’ll save them a flight north.”
Near midnight she stood on top of Chrysom’s tower, with Rush and the Holder and her children. The wind-whipped Cygnet flew above them on its black pennant. Above it the constellation itself flew in and out of thin, bright clouds. The full moon that had blinded the Lady of Withy Hold hung white as bone in the sky.
Iris stood silently, apart from them. She must, Calyx instructed her endlessly, root herself as fast as Chrysom’s rose vines to every stone, mouse, dirty pot, child and chick, sleeping peacock, weed, swan and thousand-year-old tree within the rambling walls of Ro House. Iris had explained as endlessly that she couldn’t, no one could, it was not possible. . . . But she said nothing now; her profile, under flickering light, looked unfamiliar in its calm. She was gazing down at the yard, one hand on the stones, as if she were watching a horse race, or children playing. She had stood like that for an hour.
Clouds swarmed over the moon, swallowed it. Meguet, watching a fleet of night fishers on the sea, saw them vanish suddenly, as if they had all slid down into the black water. Her lips parted; she held the parapet stones, waiting for the wind to hit. She heard Rush’s sudden breath. But no wind came: There was only a dark like the darkness in dreams through which they floated, a quick scratch of light across the ground below now and then, and all the constellations shifting in a stately dance above. She smelled a hint of green from Withy Hold, no more than a thought of leaves in the quickening trees. In the charmed silence no one spoke. Meguet sensed stirrings behind her, a gathering that she dared not turn to see, as if the ghosts that frequented Chrysom’s tower—mages, guardians, the odd son or daughter drawn to sorcery—had come up to watch the stars. If she turned, she knew, she would see nothing: They might have been there, in the endlessly folded tissue of time, or they had never been there.
She smelled snow. In a moment or two the wind struck: a blast as bare and merciless as frozen stone. A white peak loomed over Ro House like a jagged tooth. The stars had disappeared. Snow, torn like spindrift off the crest of the mountain, scattered over them. Calyx reached out to Iris, gripped her hand, and she lifted her head, startled. They all ran for the stairs.
They huddled next to the fire, shivering, drinking wine. The shadowed, vulnerable expression in Iris’s eyes caused the Holder to say fretfully, “You will only have to do this once more. Then never again, I hope.”
Iris, crouched close to the flames, looked at her. She said softly, “I carried everyone’s dreams . . . it was like moving the world in a bubble. I even saw my child’s dream. I know where that ring you lost is, Calyx. I know where all the mice live, in every crevice. I know what the peacocks see in the dark. I sensed those in the house that do not belong here. Only they were hidden. Only they . . . And the Gatekeeper. I had trouble keeping track of the Gatekeeper. I kept mistaking him for other things.”
“The gate, most likely,” Meguet suggested. “Sometimes I think he himself gets lost in it.”
“And you, Meguet. I kept mistaking you for ghosts.”
“Ghosts,” Rush repeated. The wild winds fluting through the tower seemed to echo the word. Iris smiled at him tranquilly.
“Oh, yes. They all came, too.”
Meguet woke before dawn. She could scarcely see the Gatekeeper at the wall, though by the faint red glow of his brazier she knew that Iris had not forgotten him. She dressed swiftly, went down to the armory where she found Rush choosing a sword. Horses were already saddled, waiting for them. The household, considerably startled at finding itself snowbound, had not ceased its smooth operation. The early winds eased as the sun rose. A wave of fire washed down the mountain, splashed around them: the warning of the Fire Bear.
The Gatekeeper opened the gate, his face impassive as Meguet rode through. She looked at him briefly, her own face settled into a stiff, deceptive calm. Neither spoke.
The path up the mountain was narrow, rubble-filled, steep. The edge of the world fell away from them, it seemed, on one side; on the other, bare slabs of rock, the bones of the mountain, pushed upward toward the top of the sky. They rode until the path grew too rough for the horses. A gold, raging face sprang at them as they rounded a turn on foot, breathed fire over the white world below. Meguet, shielding her face from the sun, said breathlessly, “I can smell it. I can almost taste it.”
“What?”
“The end of winter.” A sudden panic seized her; she pulled herself over crumbled boulder, past the solitary, twisted, stunted trees. “Hurry, Rush.”
“We’ll break our necks.”
“Hurry.”
Shadows were peeling off the mountain as the sun climbed higher. Meguet, sun in her face constantly, wondered if the Fire Bear had roared this golden light at the Cygnet. She increased her pace, breath tearing at her, and saw, from the very top of the mountain, a blinding flash of silver.
She cried, “Rush!” He was beside her, then not, as she pulled herself up, clinging to anything solid: rock, icicle, even, she thought, the blinding surface of the snow, light, and shadow.
Something bulky blocked the sun, hissed at her. She nearly slid down the mountain. The Fire Bear was white as snow, with red eyes and red claws; it paced just above her on a flat, bald slab of granite, shaking its shaggy head, trying to hiss fire. Then, fretfully, it turned away, its attention caught, and she pulled herself onto the stones, the breath running in and out of her like fire. She heard Rush call her name, but she could neither move nor speak.
The Fire Bear was busy eating fire. It was a blue-black flame the Wayfolk man had laid on the snow, and it seemed to take its fuel from the snow. Corleu’s back was to her; the Fire Bear was between them. He stood looking down at a smooth ice sculpture that lay like a statue on the top of the peak. He spoke.
Meguet moved forward. The Fire Bear saw her move, but busily ate its fire. Corleu’s eyes were on the beautiful face trapped within the ice at his feet; he said, as Meguet stepped beside him, “Is that all you can tell me?”
He was shivering, lightly clad; his face looked raw in the cold. Meguet wondered suddenly how he had climbed the mountain in those clothes, and what he had done with his footprints.
“Ask the Blood Fox,” the Dancer murmured, her eyes open, but unseeing. “Take him a gift.”
“What gift?” There was no answer; he raised his voice desperately. “What gift?” Then he saw Meguet, a tall, black-clad figure holding with both her hands a sword that hovered near his heart.
He stepped back, his breath scraping in horror. He recognized her; she saw that in his eyes, as well as a reckless despair that made him tense to run, to attack. But there was nowhere to run, and Moro Ro’s sword was dogging his every move.
“In the name of the Holder and the Cygnet, you must come with me.”
The Fire Bear roared.
Black flame washed over them. Blind, Meguet leaped, felt cloth, bone in her grasp. Then she stumbled; they both fell against the ice-statue, who turned under them, murmuring, then turned again. Corleu pulled free; Meguet, finding him again in the dispersing mist, saw him stop mid-pace, stare at the Dancer.
She rose in a fluid, graceful movement. Smiling, she stepped out of the pool of melting ice. Her hair fell to her feet, one side white, the other black. She shook it back, laughing, and raised her hands to the sun.
Corleu shouted, “No!” He backed a step, another. And then a silver circle floated around him, and he vanished into it. The Dancer turned a circle, faster and faster, until her hair whipped around her, black and white. The black and white blurred into snow and shadow.
The Fire Bear blew a final breath of night and shambled over the edge of the world.
Meguet stood alone, on the top of a mountain on the top of the world, listening to the spring wind.