Kingfisher(5)
Pierce, motionless, staring at her, felt the world change shape under his feet. No longer bounded by the sea, by the little, ancient town, the dark, endless forest, the narrow road that circled the cape, it expanded to immeasurable lengths, grew complex, noisy, mysterious, shocking.
He opened his mouth, realized with wonder, as no hand came up, that she was waiting now for him to ask.
“Who is he?”
Her eyes grew luminous under tears she would not let fall; in that moment, he thought she would answer. Then she stood up so fast she pulled the next breath he drew into her wake. “Enough!” she told him fiercely, pacing in front of the roaring fire, rumpling the hearthrug. Her hand, searching for something to worry—beads, the restaurant key on a chain—found the apron front. She glanced down at it with surprise, then untied it impatiently and tossed it on the floor. Pierce, watching her, had a sudden, wrenching glimpse of the young woman she had been in Severluna, married to an illusion and fleeing in pain and fury to this difficult place, where memories rooted themselves more implacably than anything she could coax out of the miserly soil.
“Who?” he pleaded again, his voice grating; she only shook her head.
“Find your own answers,” she said harshly. “I’ve been trying since I came here to forget all this.” Then she halted, midwhirl in her pacing, to stare at him. “No. Don’t. Don’t leave me, Pierce. There’s nothing you need in Severluna. Your father does not even know you exist, and even if you find him or your brother, what can they do for you? You’re not trained to the ways of the court. I have no family there to take you in. You’ll be alone in a city full of strangers—what will you do with yourself?”
He gazed at her, wondering that she could show him such things—a father, a brother, a world not governed by wind and tide and how many crabs came up in the net, but by wealth, power, knowledge, and the sources of the strange magic she knew—and expect him not to want what she herself had wanted.
He stirred, beginning to think. “What I do here,” he answered slowly. “I work for you. I’ll find another restaurant.”
“But how will you find your way? You can barely read a map.”
He shrugged. “People do. Find their ways. Even people as ignorant as I am of anything beyond Cape Mistbegotten. I’ll put one mile behind me, then another, until I get where I’m going.”
“And what,” she asked helplessly, “will I do without you? Without the sound of your voice in this rambling old house? Without the sweet face I’ve known all of your life? Here everyone knows your name. You have a place here, everything you need. How will you know even how to look for a bed in Severluna?”
“Mom.” He leaned forward, caught one of the long, graceful hands working anxiously around the other. He tugged at her gently until she dropped beside him again on the couch. “What I don’t know by now, it’s time I learned. Stop worrying. The road runs both ways. If I get into trouble over my head, I can find my way back. Anyway. When in my life have you not known where I am?”
She was silent at that; she sat tensely looking into the fire, fingers kneading the sofa cushions. “Yes,” she said finally. Her grip loosened slowly; she met his eyes again, her own no longer angry, grieving, but calmer and beginning to calculate. “Yes. Come and work with me for one more evening. Please,” she begged, as he stirred in protest. “I’ll be understaffed without you. And I need you under this roof one last time, while I get used to the idea that you are leaving me. At Haricot tonight, I can teach you a little sorcery, some arcane methods that will be useful to know in a strange kitchen. All right?”
He nodded absently, hearing only every other word of kitchens, sorcery, cooking, as he conjured up the knights again in memory. They might remember him, he thought: the young man who had seen the legendary shadows of their ancestors.
“In the morning, if you still want to leave, we can make proper plans. Yes?”
“Yes,” he said absently, and realized then that he was already gone, on his way, the roof over his head, his bed, now only his first temporary stop, and her advice among the possessions he might take or leave behind when he continued his journey.
2
Merle was chanting again. Carrie heard his voice coming out of the old rowboat hauled to dry dock under a hemlock. Keys in hand, she paused beside the pickup door, listening. She couldn’t make out a word of it. The old crow perched on the wind-bowed crown of the hemlock burst into sudden, raucous song. Carrie wondered if Merle and bird understood each other. It seemed as likely as anything else about her impossible father.
She tossed the keys onto the driver’s seat, walked into the long grasses under the shadow of the forest. She and Merle lived at the southern edge of Proffit Slough, high and back far enough so that the daily ebb and flow of tidewater pushing into sweet water didn’t find its way into their house even in the most violent weather. Several other houses, old, patched, painted long ago in muted colors, stood peacefully among the silent pines. They were relics of a past when farmers had drained the land and built the only road that ran between the fields and up to the highway. Farmers and crops and cows were long gone; the land had been repossessed by streams and tidal channels, the labyrinthine sea nursery regulated by tides and seasons and the ancient rhythms of the moon. Only farmhouses remained, inhabited by the artistic, the eccentric, the reclusive.