While knights from all over Wyvernhold gathered in Severluna, Daimon found
himself spending pearly dawn hours, blue, windy afternoons, flame-streaked
dusks on the Severluna streets. As though his heart had turned to thread and
Vivien held the end of it, he would lose interest, leave whatever he was in
the middle of doing or saying, and find the quickest way through the twists
and turns of byways and alleys to the inelegant, backwater neighborhood where
she waited. Somehow she knew; she was always there, opening her door before he
knocked. He didn’t ask. Her stray powers, like her smile, seemed at once very
old and all her own.
The city changed in his eyes when she tugged at him. It lost its past, its
history; it existed only as the place he traveled through to reach her.
Even the streets transformed themselves when he was with her. The cracked
sidewalks, stunted trees along them guarded by broken iron railings, the hot,
blustering whirlwinds of litter, food-cart smells and old leaves, the groan
and belch of trucks, the constantly clamoring traffic interwoven with stray
snatches of music, sirens, ringtones, shifted focus in his perception. He
glimpsed wonder in the dusty whirlwind, a fierce and ancient energy within the
raucous voices of the road; he overheard, within the passing drift of song
from an open car window, an otherworldly language.
“What is it you do to me?” he asked Vivien, incoherently, he thought, but
she seemed unsurprised.
“Nothing,” she answered. “You’re remembering.”
“Remembering what?” She didn’t answer. He took her arm, held her fast in
the jostling foot traffic streaming along the bumpy sidewalk, the worn
shopfronts. In the scrap of shadow from a sapling whose wind-whipped leaves
flecked her eyes with gold, then shadow, then again gold, he asked,
“Remembering what?”
She gazed at him. He heard the distant voices within the wind, the song
beneath the squeal of tires, the quickening water that flowed, in truth or
memory, down hidden paths beneath his feet to find the sea. The leaves that
played with light above her copper hair seemed suddenly ageless, lovely in
their flick and glitter, both new and older than all he knew.
His fingers opened, slid down her arm; she caught his hand. They walked again
down some path that he had never taken but that he was beginning to remember.
The next afternoon, she took him so far he lost his way.
“There’s a special place we want you to see,” she told him as they walked.
Sun dazzled on the hot streets, angled achingly bright off chrome and spinning
hubcaps. It melted stucco, wood, stone, blurring lines and corners until
buildings shimmered like light-struck water. Had she said we? he wondered.
What happened to I? And how could he see anything at all in this light-
drenched world? A building in front of him, small shops topped by weary
apartments, melted completely under the sun; he glimpsed the green meadow
where it had stood, the long grass freckled with wildflowers. The building
returned raggedly, missing corners, windows. He shook his head to clear it.
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Oh, people I know. I hope you like it. Look!” she exclaimed with delight,
and he turned his head into a splash of gold. He blinked, saw the water
flowing from beneath the meadow, pooling in the grass, carving its bed as it
grew stronger, more defined, feeling its way into the world. “Calluna,” he
heard Vivien say, then the city came back, rising rigidly around him; the rill
of water faded into hot streets smelling of asphalt and exhaust. He stopped,
then realized he had stopped. He was taking quick, sharp breaths, trying to
catch the scent of the spring again, the wet earth. He felt water on his face,
sweat, or maybe tears from the searing glance of the sun.
“Where are we?” His voice shook. “Where were we?”
“Don’t worry.” She kissed away the tear under his eye. “It’s not far now.
”
They turned at a street corner, and the city vanished.
A cobbled street ran silently between a huddle of cottages built of stone and
thatch. At the end of the street, a small bridge arched gracefully across a
reedy, lily-filled brook. Beyond the bridge, a castle rose, its towers tall
and slender, its walls pale as the open lilies massed around it as the brook
turned to embrace the castle. It was a beautiful, colorful affair, its turrets
and corner towers painted blue and green, rose vines climbing its inner walls,
long pennants streaming everywhere. A pair of wild swans flew down, settled
into the moat, glided serenely among the lilies. Like a fairy tale castle, he
thought. And then the words took on power and life, and he closed his eyes,
feeling as though he had stepped off the edge of the world and had no idea how
far he would fall.
“We’re in your photograph,” he heard himself say.