“This house is yours,” his mother had told him years earlier, when he
was too young to understand what she wasn’t telling him. “Your father gave
it to me before he left us. Now I’m giving it to you, so that you’ll have
something from him. So that you’ll always have a home here with me and the
trees and the sea.”
Even then he had felt the twist of bitterness that this place was all he knew
of a father: no voice, no expressions, no touch, only these huge, silent rooms
full of heavy, ornate furniture and paintings of the dead who had lived in
them. There was no picture of his father. As Pierce grew, so did his
questions. But his own mother seemed to know little more than he did about his
father. He was gone, she only told him. He had left the house to her, and now
it was Pierce’s to keep forever. At any request for even the simplest of
answers, she flung up a mist of silence, or sorrow, or absentmindedness, and
disappeared into it. Pierce had no idea if his father was 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 they knew; he flung questions at random
through the rest of the town. Everyone, wearing the same slightly uneasy
expression, gave him the same answer.
“Ask 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 he ever 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.
“Pierce?” 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.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Mom. Really.”
“It was those knights,” she said bitterly. She was trembling, her hands
tucked under her arms as though she were cold. “Their fault.”
“They 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.”
“No. 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 haven’t taught you yet.”