It was a piecemeal process: he never knew what he would see, or when it
might have happened; as in dreams, there was no past, only now.
He parked his bike at a crossroad, took a step, and Severluna vanished. The
broad meadow where the Calluna River found its way into light surrounded him.
What he thought was the sun flashed on the horizon. But his shadow lay in
front of him; a twin sun above him illumined the vast flow of green around
him. The second star on the horizon was rich bronze-gold; it pulsed with a
clamor of hammering that echoed across the plain. Great black flocks of ravens
swirled up and out of the glow, as though somehow they had been forged within
its fires. Everything—the genial sky, the flowering grass, the earth itself—
seemed to emit a low, sweet hum he could feel reverberating through the
ground, up into his veins and sinews. He stood rapt, a note the earth sang.
At the corner of another street, he stepped into night, and saw the source of
the second sun. It was the cauldron he had seen before, under the familiar
tree. The woman he remembered stirred the shining liquid within it with her
great wooden spoon; this time she sang that pure, constant hum. So bright the
cauldron was that it blotted out the stars. The moon, awash with its light,
was a faint, thin pair of bronze horns tilted above the tree.
A procession made its way from night into light: four women carrying a long
bronze shield with a dead man lying upon it. He had no eyes; there was a
bloody hole where his heart should have been. Following him, a man carried a
spear that wept blood; another held a knife, its blade curved like the moon in
the tree.
The woman stirring the pot raised the bowl of her spoon, poured the molten
liquid over the blind face. Then she gestured.
The women raised the shield, tilted it, and the body of the fallen warrior
slid, disappeared into the cauldron.
“That’s what you want me to find?” Daimon asked Vivien, who was suddenly on
the sidewalk beside him, surrounded by endlessly moving bodies dodging around
them.
“Yes,” she said. “But after being in time all these—well, however long—we
don’t know exactly what it will look like. You’ll recognize it as we would.
” She smiled; her palm rested briefly on his heart. “Here.”
“Did the warrior come back to life? Or did he get eaten?”
Her mouth crooked; she answered patiently, “He was drinking beer and toasting
the moon an hour later.”
“Are you certain my heart is big enough for this?”
“I’m certain that your heart will grow large enough to take that great power
when it reveals itself to you. As it will. You are the raven’s son.”
He rode in a daze, found himself back on the palace grounds. He got off his
bike, walked it behind the sanctum tower to the royal garages, where he found
a woman crouched on the floor beside her bike and wielding a wrench.
She rose swiftly when she recognized him.
“Prince Daimon.”
She looked familiar: those long bones, the honey-colored hair, that height.
Standing, they were eye to eye, and suddenly he remembered.
“Dame Scotia. You were the black knight who forced me to yield to you.”
She smiled; that, too, he remembered.
“It is strange,” she commented, “not knowing who you’re fighting. In
tales, it seems romantic: the nameless, invisible knights, the shining armor,
the great swords. That’s why I took to it. In truth, it’s stifling and
awkward, lumbering around wearing all that weight and trying to see out of a
slit in your helm.”
“You made yourself good at it.”
She shrugged lightly. “I had several older cousins to practice on. You made
yourself good at it, as well.”
He was silent, trying to recall exactly why. His own past blurred into
another; he could scarcely envision a time before he had known Vivien. Who had
he been, he wondered with a strange, quick tremor of panic, before he was the
raven’s child?
He heard a clink, blinked, and saw Dame Scotia bending to pick up the wrench
she had dropped. He saw her, he realized, as he saw no one else those days.
Perhaps only because she was a stranger, and therefore not tediously
predictable.
He shook his head a little, settling a bewildering stir of thought.
“Anything I can help with?” he asked.
“Just tightening this and that, Prince Daimon. Making sure things don’t fall
apart. Thank you.” She smiled again, left an imprint on his mind of calm,
violet eyes, an expression absurdly free of complications. “That’s another
thing I accidentally became good at.”
In the middle of the night he woke himself up thinking: Chimera Bay.