Kingfisher Read Free

alive or dead. Nothing, anywhere in the vast house, including his mother, indicated that he even had a name. Pierce asked the housekeepers and gardeners, many of whom had grown up in Desolation Point, what theyknew; he flung questions at random through the rest of the town. Everyone, wearing the same slightly uneasy expression, gave him the same answer.
    â€œAsk your mother.”
    He veered his small, weathered Metro away from the rutted, overgrown drive to the house, parked instead on a paved overlook at the cliff’s edge. Crenellated stonework marked the edge of safety. Beyond it, waves heaved and hammered at gigantic slabs of stone that had been, at some lost point in time, determined to burrow beneath the edge of the earth. The cliff bore signs of that ancient struggle. Layered and veined with changing eons, it had been twisted upward by the power of the collision. Jagged, broken edges of land reared out of the water like the prows of a ghostly fleet of ships. Time had laid a thin layer of dirt and decaying things on the top of the cliff. The house, the trees, stood on that fragile ground while the battle, frozen but not forgotten, bided its time beneath.
    Pierce got out of the car and wandered to his favorite corner of the wall, where tides in their raging broke high above the land, where the cliff swallows nested, gulls rode the wind below him, sea lions and whales slid through the waves as easily as he moved through air. That afternoon sea was calm, idling between tides. Waves gathered around the rocks, broke indolently against them, creating brief, lovely waterfalls of foamy white that flowed over the dark, wet stone and drained back into the sea.
    His thoughts were anything but calm. Old questions surfaced urgently, obsessively, along with new. Who was his father? What was he like? What had he done? Had heever left Cape Mistbegotten to follow the long road south to Severluna? Had he known such as those formidably trained, confident, trusted young knights?
    Had he been one?
    Was he alive or dead? If dead, how had he died?
    If not, where was he?
    There were no answers, Pierce realized finally, in this place where he had been born. Wind, sea, the ancient house, even his mother all told him nothing. Sitting on the wall, staring at the fog bank rolling across the horizon told him nothing either. He stood, backed a step or two away from the land’s edge, perplexed by an impulse growing in him, as mindless and undefined as the forces under his feet. It was not until he finally turned, got back into the car and started it, that he understood what he would do.
    He went as far, then, as the end of the drive. He turned the engine off again and was gazing at the closed door of the garage when his mother stepped into view through the driver’s side window. She bent to look at him as he jumped. Her eyes were wide, her red-gold hair loose and roiling in the wind. It dawned on him, as they both fumbled to open the door, that she had been waiting for him. She had known what he was thinking before he did.
    â€œPierce?” she said, as he got out. Her husky voice, oddly tremulous, the pallor in the lovely face, the green rainbow of letters spelling Haricot arching over the embroidered bean vine on the apron she had neglected to take off, amazed him. He had never seen her afraid before. He was going to do this thing, he realized, astonished anew. He was actually going to leave home.
    â€œIt’s okay,” he told her. “Mom. Really.”
    â€œIt was those knights,” she said bitterly. She was trembling, her hands tucked under her arms as though she were cold. “Their fault.”
    â€œThey just got lost.” He put an arm over her shoulder, turned her toward the house. “Let’s go inside. Don’t worry. It’s just something I have to do.”
    â€œNo. I need you to stay here, help me at Haricot. You can’t leave. You need to know so much more than you do. So much that I