“He’s breathing,” Pierce told him. “I don’t see anything broken or
bleeding. I think he just fainted.”
“Felled by the basilisk’s breath,” Val muttered hoarsely. “He’ll never
live that down.” He held Leith’s shoulder, shook him gently. “Father? Are
you in there? It’s safe. The beast is gone. Come back. Sir Leith Duresse. We
need you. Please come back.”
Leith showed no signs of doing so. Val gave Pierce another haggard glance,
then looked around helplessly at the still-afflicted fire crew.
A shadow fell over Leith. Pierce raised his head and found the most beautiful
woman he had ever seen in his life standing over them.
She was speaking, he realized belatedly, still half-stunned, as flowers,
pearls, jewels, fell from her full, rose-petal lips.
“My house is just up that drive.” She motioned toward a palatial estate on
the cliff above them. “We’ve been watching the excitement from our deck. My
driver can help you carry him to my car. The drive is clear of traffic, and he
can wait for the paramedics in my guest room. I think it would be much quicker
than waiting for an ambulance trying to get through this. Will you let us help
you?”
Val was trying to tell him something, Pierce sensed. His wide-eyed, insistent
gaze, his two-handed grip on their father, his alert, motionless warrior’s
stance, all spoke, all said the last thing Pierce wanted to hear.
Pierce said, “Yes.”
18
Daimon rode through the streets of Severluna, paying no attention to where he
was going. Where didn’t matter anymore: every street would take him there.
“Our world,” his great-aunt told him, “is always just a step away from
anywhere. Don’t bother looking for it. You are already there in your heart.”
That much was true: he felt the moon-tug of that realm, the tidal pull of it
overwhelming the kingdom of the wyvern, until very little of that world seemed
important any longer. He lost the need of it, except in necessary ways: the
place he went for clothes and food; the place where he was occasionally
expected to appear, talk to faces that he remembered vaguely, in a dreamlike
fashion. As in dreams, they were losing predictability; he was losing hold of
their past. He saw them as from a distance: the queen who had never been his
mother, the king who looked at him through wyvern’s eyes and knew nothing of
the raven, the princess who fretted over him but no longer knew him, anything
about him at all.
He had thought that the fay realm of Ravenhold was a dream; he learned that
Wyvernhold was the unreal world. Its magic had fragmented; few possessed it.
Every moment of its days was time-bound, counted, measured; the end of time
was not forever, but death, and death waited everywhere, in every shadow.
“Silly way to live,” Morrig said. “What’s the point of being so tidy you
can’t see beyond the rules you’ve made for everything? Look at this world
instead.” He could see it now, as she and Vivien and his mother had taught
him: the lovely, timeless place hidden within the noisy, jangling,
quarrelsome, troubled world where even the wyverns were nothing now except a
word. “Once our true realm ran from one horizon to the other, from day to
night; you could move from one end to the other with a wish. A step. What
Sylvester Skelton calls his magic flamed in every blade of grass, every
flowering tree. Now, time gets in the way. It scattered us; we withered in it,
even those of us closest to being human. The world of the wyvern king trampled
us without even knowing we exist. We need our cauldron to remake our world.
Find it.”
“Find it,” his mother pleaded.
“Find it,” Vivien said, always with a kiss, “for us.”
“Where are you these days?” his father asked, startling Daimon on his way
out. No one really knew him anymore, so why would anyone pay attention to what
he did? “You drift in and out like a ghost; your body is here, but your eyes
never are. And then you vanish entirely, and I think you’ve followed the path
of the questing knight. Then you’re back; you’ve gone nowhere at all, except
that you’ve never left the place you think you come home from.” Daimon, his
mind in the wyvern’s world at that moment, saw the wariness in his father’s
eyes. “Who is she?”
“No one,” Daimon told him, feeling the long, powerful flow and drag on his
heart, the summons of the invisible on the verge of becoming visible if he
took that step, that leap. “I’ll get over it,” he added, absently, words
his father wanted to hear. “Just give me time.”
As he learned how to see into that timeless place, he learned more of its
past.