The Golden Swan Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NANCY SPRINGER

  “Wonderful.” —Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “The finest fantasy writer of this or any decade.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Ms. Springer’s work is outstanding in the field.” —Andre Norton

  “Nancy Springer writes like a dream.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Nancy Springer’s kind of writing is the kind that makes you want to run out, grab people on the street, and tell them to go find her books immediately and read them, all of them.” —Arkansas News

  “[Nancy Springer is] someone special in the fantasy field.” —Anne McCaffrey

  Larque on the Wing

  Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award

  “Satisfying and illuminating … uproariously funny … an off-the-wall contemporary fantasy that refuses to fit any of the normal boxes.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Irresistible … charming, eccentric … a winning, precisely rendered foray into magic realism.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Best known for her traditional fantasy novels, Springer here offers an offbeat contemporary tale that owes much to magical realism. … An engrossing novel about gender and self-formation that should appeal to readers both in and outside the SF/fantasy audience.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Springer’s best book yet … A beautiful/rough/raunchy dose of magic.” —Locus

  Fair Peril

  “Rollicking, outrageous … eccentric, charming … Springer has created a hilarious blend of feminism and fantasy in this heartfelt story of the power of a mother’s love.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Witty, whimsical, and enormously appealing.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “A delightful romp of a book … an exuberant and funny feminist fairy tale.” —Lambda Book Report

  “Moving, eloquent … often hilarious, but … beneath the laughter, Springer has utterly serious insights into life, and her own art … Fair Peril is modern/timeless storytelling at its best, both enchanting and very down-to-earth. Once again, brava!” —Locus

  Chains of Gold

  “Fantasy as its finest.” —Romantic Times

  “[Springer’s] fantastic images are telling, sharp and impressive; her poetic imagination unparalleled.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Nancy Springer is a writer possessed of a uniquely individual vision. The story in Chains of Gold is borrowed from no one. It has a small, neat scope rare in a book of this genre, and it is a little jewel.” —Mansfield News Journal

  “Springer writes with depth and subtlety; her characters have failings as well as strengths, and the topography is as vivid as the lands of dreams and nightmares. Cerilla is a worthy heroine, her story richly mythic.” —Publishers Weekly

  The Hex Witch of Seldom

  “Springer has turned her considerable talents to contemporary fantasy with a large degree of success.” —Booklist

  “Nimble and quite charming … with lots of appeal.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “I’m not usually a witchcraft and fantasy fan, but I met the author at a convention and started her book to see how she writes. Next thing I knew, it was morning.” —Jerry Pournelle, coauthor of Footfall

  Apocalypse

  “This offbeat fantasy’s mixture of liberating eccentricity and small-town prejudice makes for some lively passages.” —Publishers Weekly

  Plumage

  “With a touch of Alice Hoffmanesque magic, a colorfully painted avian world and a winning heroine, this is pure fun.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A writer’s writer, an extraordinarily gifted craftsman.” —Jennifer Roberson

  Godbond

  “A cast of well-drawn characters, a solidly realized imaginary world, and graceful writing.” —Booklist

  The Golden Swan

  The Book of Isle, Book Five

  Nancy Springer

  The loom, and on the loom

  The vatic colors woven,

  The prophecies within the web.

  The lake, and in the lake

  The mirroring reflection,

  The shadowshining face of fate.

  The grove, and in the grove

  The riddle of the goddess,

  The dwelling of the guessing god.

  Prologue

  In her secluded valley in the midlands of Isle lived Ylim, the weaving seeress, and thither rode young King Trevyn with Dair, his small son. Dair was a wolf. Leggy, half grown, he bounded along by the horse, his paws huge and playful, his slate gray fur unruly. Sometimes Trevyn smiled and slapped the saddle, and the yearling wolf would leap up to ride with him for a while. Dair was a wolf because his mother had been one at the time of his birth. She had since taken back her human form and returned across the sea to Tokar, Trevyn surmised. He was a Very King and a sorcerer in the truest sense; the kiss of the goddess was on him. But he did not know what to do for Dair. Destiny is a personal matter.

  The young wolf entered the cottage at his heels and sat courteously by his side. “Laifrita thae, Ilderweyn,” said Trevyn to Ylim. “Sweet peace to thee, Grandmother.” It was the Old Language, the language of the Beginning, which only a special few still remembered. She was not his grandmother in fact, though she might have been grandmother of earth and moon.

  “Laifrita thae, Alberic.” She called Trevyn by his elfin name. “Laifrita thae, Dair, how are you?”

  Quite well, Grandmother, thank you. His voice was a murmur or a growl. Only these special ones could understand him, they who conversed with the animals as all men once had.

  “Is it good, being a wolf?”

  It is very good. The smells, and the air in my nostrils, the chase and the warm meat—He stopped with a sidelong look at Trevyn, afraid of being laughed at. He had only recently killed his first rabbit; more often he ate at the king’s table and slept by the king’s bed. But both Ylim and Trevyn listened to him soberly. “He is quite content,” Trevyn said, “and I am glad of it. But I wish I knew what is to become of him, Grandmother.”

  “Look your fill,” she said.

  Dair looked as well. Most folk when they looked on the work of that loom saw nothing. Some who saw could not remember afterward. But Dair saw and remembered well enough. Light, it was all light, not cloth; mauve and lavender light. Then a striking feral face appeared. Broad forehead, brows that darkly met, nostrils that pulsed, wideset amethyst eyes that moved to meet his—that were his. A human face, but unmistakably his connate face, his own.

  “A regal face,” Trevyn said in a hushed voice. Even as he spoke the face shifted form, became a flower such as no one had ever seen before, a blossom made of fire and dew. It blazed and flamed; then as they blinked it dwindled and vanished into the orchid light. The web on the loom went gridelin gray—

  Now what? Dair wondered, puzzled. Shadowy water—

  It was a lake, the most still and waiting of lakes, its smooth surface glinting iron gray, willows on its verge hanging moss gray in breathless, sunless air. On the dim water a swan floated with scarcely a ripple.

  “Strange water,” said Trevyn.

  The swan was black, its image in the water, white. It had been hurt or crippled somehow, for one wing hung limp. But in a moment the wing had healed and it was flying, and it had turned white, pure shining white. It circled and flew nearer, near—the water drew nearer as well. But it was no longer the still lake water. It was purple tinged and restless. The swan vanished or became the whitecaps of that sea.

  Ocean, Dair murmured.

  A vast expanse. He knew that cold, swelling, limitless expanse that surrounded Isle—and amidst all that vastness a speck, a floating cockleshell, a mere bauble of a boat, a coracle—and in it a solitary—

  Who is that?

  “Watch,” said Ylim.


  Closer, always closer. They could see the face now. A youth with russet hair, freckles on the high cheekbones, fine, rugged features and a keen, seeking look about his clear brown eyes. One hand was on a steering oar. The other hung useless from a shriveled arm and shoulder—Dair felt his heart turn over. Without knowing he had moved he found himself standing with his front paws on the frame of the loom, and in a blink the vision vanished. He faced featureless cloth.

  “Who was it?” Ylim asked.

  I—don’t know. But already he felt the mystic bond.

  “You will know him well someday,” Ylim said.

  “Perhaps you will voyage with him out on that sea,” Trevyn mused. Dair turned to him in sharp distress.

  But Father, I never want to leave you.

  Trevyn smiled, a warm, companionable smile. “It is in the nature of human young to leave their parents,” he said.

  But I am a wolf. And it is in the nature of wolves to be loyal.

  “You are more than wolf or human either,” said Ylim. “Whose was the face, the first one?”

  Mine. He did not hesitate to claim it. She nodded.

  “And it is the face of an immortal. You are the son of Maeve the Moon Mother and Trevyn Elfborn, he who brought the magic back from Elwestrand to Isle. That was a turning of the great tide, a greater marvel than you can well imagine, and you were born of that magic.” She eyed him sternly. “Dair, the web does not show its wonders for just anyone, you know. Fate may well take you away from your father and Isle.”

  Dair only whimpered.

  “He is very young,” Trevyn excused him. “That one on the boat—do you think he is part of Dair’s destiny?”

  “He and the swan, somehow. Ay.”

  “Who is he? Where does he come from?”

  “How can I know?” Ylim grumbled. “I don’t direct my weaving, Alberic, any more than you direct your dreams.” For Trevyn’s dreams were the font of the magic of Isle.

  “And the flower, the lake—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And how Dair’s human form is to come to him—”

  Ylim merely smiled.

  “Answer me just this one question, Ylim,” Trevyn requested. “The large question. What part have you seen in the pattern for Dair?”

  She hesitated. “Dair,” she said to the young wolf at last, “this is not binding. The pattern is ever changing. You may yet change it yourself.”

  I understand, Dair said.

  “The pattern then is this: that you shall continue what your father has begun. That you shall carry magic onward to the mainland.”

  Fern flower, fire flower,

  Burn, burn when the great tide turns.

  Fern flower, show your power.

  The Swan Lord will he there to see,

  To grasp the stem that burns

  And speak with thee,

  learn melody,

  and sing with wind and tree.

  Fern flower, fire flower,

  Bloom, bloom when the true time comes.

  Fern flower, share your power.

  The wandering wolf will bear your seed

  And take you as his doom,

  For all men free

  your harmony.

  The tide has turned indeed.

  book one

  DAIR

  Chapter One

  I am Dair. I am spirit, speaking to you mind to mind, for I know no other way to speak the languages of men. As a man I was a mute because I was born a wolf and stayed so until I was grown—until the day I found Frain.

  I had dreamed of him ever since I had seen him on Ylim’s loom. It is hard to explain how much he meant to me, this bond brother I had never met. There was something in me that could not forget him. Perhaps it was the wolfwit, which forms attachments for life. Or perhaps it was my father’s ardent Laueroc blood. His forebears, the Sun Kings, had been blood brothers and legendary friends, and then there had been his own bond with the god in the grove—or perhaps it was something of the elf in him that would not let me lose sight of the Swan Lord who was coming. Whatever moved me, hardly a day went by that I did not think of the russet-haired youth as I had seen him, afloat on the lonely sea, his destiny somehow mixed in with mine. I wondered and longed for him all that year. I grew restless and took to roaming the downs even as far as the Westwood.

  “Wanderlust,” Trevyn grumbled. “Dair, you young furbrained fool, would you please be careful? I worry about you when you are out alone.” There was still much hard feeling against wolves in Isle. It had been only a few years since the war when evil sorcery had turned them to a horror, and even Trevyn’s good magic could not erase that memory.

  No one can come near me, I bragged. I go like a shadow on the wind. I was well grown, strong and swift as mountain water.

  “Indeed.” Trevyn sat back studying me, and for some reason he sighed. He had a human child now, an infant, his legal heir, but always he greeted me with warmth and joy. Truly, I had not meant to go so far from him. But fate had its finger on me. My second snowy winter came and my unrest deepened as the snow.

  Sometime after the solstice of that winter I left. The dream of the bond brother was on me, I felt the focus of his coming in the east, and I ran that way to meet him.

  I journeyed far faster than any horse. I needed only a coney caught in the snow or a mouse or two and then I was off, padding, night and day, slipping like a slate blue shadow across Isle. For some weeks I went straight as an arrow, straight as arrowflight in silence, until I came to the eastern shore. There on the shingle beach I sat, trying to whiff the smell of destiny in the wind that came across the salt water. Finally I lay down, curling my warm tail over my nose. I lay there for three days.

  I was stubbornly waiting. I would not move to hunt for food even though deer ran by within a hundred feet. Snow fell and covered me. Then the clouds drew away and a cold, cold night came. Every star showed, and all the stardark between, and all the warmth of earth seemed to have vanished into that void. There was a looming feeling in the night or in me. I got up and stretched myself for a moment and looked out over the dim ocean, feeling myself tiny in the sight of those twin eyes, sea and sky. There was a steady lapping sound out on the far water that I could not identify. Even my nose told me nothing. All night I sat and watched the dark water and saw nothing. I remembered such dark water from an old woman’s loom.

  In the morning some instinct sent me northward a little way, and there he lay, naked, the salt spray turning to white rime ice on him.

  Frain. The Swan Lord. I did not yet know him by those names, but I knew how important he was to me, and for a horrible moment I thought he was dead. He was lying on the hard, seawashed sand below the high tide ledge, his red hair snarled like wrack, his face far too pale—as pale as sand and snow. But he still breathed, I saw. I lay down right on top of him, trying to warm him with my thick fur, and at that touch a pang of yearning made me howl aloud and the change came on me all in a moment.

  It was not of my doing or deciding. These things are often awkward—I might have been of more use to him as a wolf. But it came on me willy-nilly, amid a welter of emotions, compassion—it is the most human of emotions—and longing—I wanted his smile, I had come all this way to meet him, to be his friend, his human friend, it seemed.… Cold is what I remember first. The day was as bitterly cold as the night had been. Cold air and cold snow and sand—my fur was gone. I was practically hairless. How humans were to be pitied, to be always so naked beneath their clothes, so cold! I pitied myself heartily. My limbs shot out, long, and my heart pounded within great broad ribs. My muzzle disappeared. My vision blurred for a moment, then righted itself, and hands waved foolishly in front of my face. I was terrified, startled beyond telling. I sprang up to run off. But my limbs would no longer serve me wolf fashion, and I fell over on my side, thrashing. One foot struck Frain, and he groaned.

  I had hurt him. I wanted to howl again.

  Instead I quieted myself, gather
ed my wits a moment. Then I struggled up enough to balance on one front paw—hand. I used the other to tug and shake at him. His only reaction was to swallow. I tugged harder, then managed to sit on my haunches and get both hands free. I grasped him under the shoulders, pushed with my feet and sprawled over backwards, pulling him a little farther from the sea. I wanted to get him out of reach of the tide, though it meant dragging him into the snow. But I was barely able to wriggle out from under him. A few more such efforts and I was exhausted.

  I was very weak. I had not eaten in too long a time for a human, it seemed. And I was cold, shivering, a horrible, strange sensation to me. I felt terribly afraid. I would freeze, we would both freeze, unless I found us help—

  I tried to rise on my long hind legs, to walk man fashion. I fell. Again I tried, and again I fell, and again and again. I gave in and tried to go on four legs, but all my speed and grace and strength had left me; I could go no better than a snail. The nearest dwelling might be miles.… Despair washed over me like an incoming tide, and I bowed my head to the ground. This bond brother I had found, I was failing him in every way. I could not carry him to shelter, and I had no longer even any fur to warm him. I had thought that once we were together all things would come to rights, but we were naked, helpless, no better than mewling babes. I whimpered like the babe in its basket back at Laueroc. Then I whined dismally. Finally I raised my head and gave forth with a longdrawn, loud and woebegone howl.

  And from the distance an answering shout came.

  Trevyn. I should have known he would be anxious, that he would be searching for me, babe or no babe—I should have known. Dear Trevyn. I rose to my knees so that he could see me. He came thundering toward me over the wealds at the head of a half dozen men, looking angry and frightened both at once. When he saw me the look changed to one of astonishment. He brought his horse right up to me, pulling it to a plunging halt.

  “Dair?” he cried out. “Dair!”

  Thrown off balance, I fell over again. Hot liquid had started down my face at the sight of him. Tears. I would have known what it was if I had thought, but I was appalled by the feeling and by the spasms that had hold of me, the sobs. Trevyn knelt beside me and put his arms around me, folded me into the shelter of his cloak and of his embrace, trying to comfort me.