“I’ll just—” Lady Clarice said weakly, taking a step or two
backward. “I’d better see to—”
She turned, plunged into the cave. Perdita looked reproachfully at her
retreating shadow.
“She didn’t give me her ticket.”
Daimon and his half sibling had been born in vastly different circumstances,
but so closely in time they might have been twins. The fair-haired, gray-eyed,
muscular Daimon had entered the world in a busy public hospital on the
outskirts of Severluna. Willowy Perdita, with the king’s black hair and
golden eyes, had been born minutes earlier in a pool of warm water within the
palace, surrounded by midwives and attendants of the goddess Calluna. By some
royal sleight of hand, Daimon, howling in his crib in the hospital nursery,
had been spirited away within an hour to grow up with Perdita.
Daimon had never known his mother. The queen had given him only the most
meager bone of truth at an early age: that his mother had died after giving
birth to him. What Queen Genevra actually thought about the matter, she never
said. Gossip said a great many conflicting things for a few years, as the
court watched Daimon grow. Then it lost interest. When he found the reckless
courage to ask the king, his father said briskly, “You are my son. The rest
is my business.” Daimon guessed from the place where his mother had chosen
for him to be born that she was used to taking care of herself. She was
nobody, or anybody at all, until she had caught the king’s eye. That the king
had not left him nameless and orphaned but had reached out to find him, told
Daimon something. But he was never sure what.
Daimon finished filling cups, put the mop back in a cupboard, and emptied the
dregs in the vessel down the drain in the floor where it was filtered,
cleaned, and piped back into the river downstream. He was aware of Perdita’s
voice—something about an upcoming fete, someone she hoped would be there—as
a light, pleasing counterpoint to his thoughts. When her voice suddenly
invaded his distraction, he was startled.
“Daimon! Where are you? I’ve been talking at you—you might as well be on
the moon for all you’re listening. What are you thinking about?”
He shook his preoccupations away, smiled at her. “Sorry. You were saying?”
“No. Really. What were you thinking? I’ve never seen that expression on your
face. Are you in love?”
He knew the one on hers well enough. He felt that glittering, potent gaze from
the place where, in a different myth, his third eye might have been, down to
the soles of his feet. Witch, he thought. Sorceress. He shifted, dropping his
own eyes, and took a cloth to a nonexistent spill on the bar.
“How should I know? I’ve never been there before.”
“Who is she?”
“You were saying about a fete? Hoping who might come?”
He still felt that intense, ruthless regard, heard her draw breath. Then the
children came spilling out of the cave, running upstairs in anticipation of
ice cream, despite the unreasonable demands to Walk! Walk! Some unfortunate
visitor coming down against the tide stopped and pressed himself against the
wall until the frothing school of bodies vanished into the upper realms. He
descended finally, interrupting Perdita’s single-minded pursuit of her half
brother’s private concerns.
“Gareth!”
She sprang off the stool and flung her arms around the visitor. Daimon’s
mouth crooked. He couldn’t, himself, appreciate the subtle fascinations of
Gareth May that turned the willful Perdita into a boneless butterfly. But he
was grateful for the interruption. The young knight gave him a little, formal
nod over Perdita’s shoulder; Daimon saluted him genially with the bar cloth.
In the little, quiet interim between visitors, while the lovers murmured,
Daimon could hear the voice of the goddess, whispering as the waters quickened
against the stones in the distant underground.
He stepped from behind the water bar and slipped into the cave.