“Come with me?” he pleaded. She reached across the table for his hand,
gripped it tightly.
“I can’t travel with you,” she said gently. “Not openly. None of us can.
It would attract attention, especially from the king and his magus, who have
their eyes on you already. Lord Skelton might begin to think too much and
discover us. We must have that cauldron back first.” She raised his fingers
to her cheek, her brows crooked. “But don’t worry. We will never be far from
you. No farther than it takes for you to find me now. Do this for me?”
Reluctantly, later, he nerved himself to enter the vast, dusty, overwhelmingly
packed rooms of the Royal Library to look for maps. The older the better, he
decided, since no modern map would have anything to do with Ravenhold. He
needed one map to pinpoint Chimera Bay, which he was not entirely sure how to
spell, and another, the oldest he could find, to look for words, place names,
that, like fossil footprints, might indicate the values of a forgotten realm.
He got vague directions from a librarian and wandered through collisions of
architectural styles, as rooms expanded through the centuries to admit new
collections. A map framed on a far wall beckoned; he followed its summons and
found himself in a room so cluttered with moldering tomes that it made him
sneeze.
Near him, an elbow slid off the page of a tome and hit the table hard. A head,
haloed with sunlight from stained glass, turned toward him as the elbow’s
owner rubbed it. They gazed at one another with surprise.
Then the knight hastily pushed back her heavy, ornate chair, and Daimon said
as quickly, “Dame Scotia. I didn’t mean to startle you. Don’t tell me you
read as well?”
She subsided, showing him the enormous, gaudily illustrated work. “I’m
researching my ancestor, Tavis Malory, to find out if he was truly as dreadful
as his contemporaries said. I do intend to go questing. I keep intending to
go. But I can’t seem to find my way past all the books, these and Lord
Skelton’s.”
“Tavis—” Past surfaced unexpectedly; a title came to mind. “The Life and
Death—of course.”
“Have you read it?”
“Hasn’t everybody? That’s what made me want to run around in armor swinging
a broadsword at people. I remember now.” He glanced at her curiously,
wondering what it was about her that seemed to clear his head, convince him,
for just a moment, that he belonged back in the mundane world. “Where will
you quest, when you do?”
“I haven’t decided yet, Prince Daimon. It seems such a complex notion:
finding a vessel belonging to a god, lost for who knows how long except in
tales. I’m at a loss trying to find a beginning point. If you don’t mind my
asking, how did you make the decision?”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Like you, I’m still here. But I have decided to look at a map. A very old
map. Like this one.”
He crossed the room to study the map on the wall that had lured him in. It was
large, studded with wyverns’ nests, a realm with borders puffed and vague as
clouds, mountains like inverted V’s, forests of what looked like brown
chimneys billowing green smoke, abounding with animals extinct, and imaginary,
and occasionally, like the spouting whales frolicking off the coast, still
existent. Wyvernhold, in huge gold-leaf letters, spanned the landmass. “Later
than I thought,” he commented, studying it closely, and came nose to nose
with a peculiar creature. It appeared so suddenly that it took his breath
away. “And there it is. So that’s what a chimera looks like . . .”
He heard the chair scrape stone again. “May I?”
“Of course.”
She came to stand beside him, silent for a moment, until she gave a sudden
chuckle. “There.” She tapped the glass over the northeastern, mountainous
portion of Wyvernhold. “The Triple-Horned Mountain Sheep. My family crest.
Not lovely, but fearless and quite strong. They would even attack wyverns who
were after their young.”
“Everyone fought the wyvern, once, it seems.”
“Where is the chimera?”
He pointed to the fire-breathing lion with the body of a goat, and a writhing
serpent for a tail, hovering over a bay in the northern coast of Wyvernhold.
“Chimera Bay. That’s where I would look. If I were questing.”
“Why there?” she murmured, studying the strange beast. “Is a chimera
particularly dedicated to Severen?”
“I don’t know.”
“The goat part looks female.”
“So it does,” he said, recognizing the very full udder. “I need an older
map. A map older than Wyvernhold, to know.”
“To know what, Prince Daimon?”
“If the bay had other names. Older names. What early beings might still be
living, forgotten, in the chimera’s shadow.” He glanced at her; she still
studied the map, fascinated, it seemed, by the variety of beasts.
“So you are?” she asked. “Questing? That’s why you need the map?”