In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  But Gyre had taken its heart. Gyre must have been there when Unciel had fought his nightmare. The young wizard had escaped unscathed; he must have run—

  “No.”

  Euan had not heard the wizard enter. Unciel stood beside him without speaking again tor a moment. He touched the paper gently, the blank inches beneath its final line. Euan saw his hand tremble.

  Then he continued, “Gyre never saw whose heart he had stolen. I began to hear terrifying tales that haunted me, that roused memories of what I had glimpsed so briefly in the cave. I knew that whoever had lost its heart had begun to search for it. I found Gyre and took the heart from him without telling him. Nothing I could do would destroy the heart, and I felt its owner’s power focussing on me, searching now for me. So I took the heart far north, to lure the danger away from all the worlds I knew. I thought such an ancient thing would be easy to destroy. If I had known, I would never have gone alone…”

  “Does Gyre know what you fought? And that you rescued him?”

  “I never told him. We spoke only of Dacia and Serre when I sent him with the princess. He knows that I fought something deadly, and he might have guessed what, but I refused to let him question me. It exhausts me to remember.”

  “I’m sorry,” Euan said shakily. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I could have stopped you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I wanted to test my own strength,” the wizard answered slowly. “And because that was the tale that found its way out of the chest into your hands. Like water, tales find their own paths; they go where they are needed. Perhaps I need to remember.”

  Euan gathered the sheets of parchment, put them in order: two tales in two different hands, one hasty, careless, nearly illegible, the other neat, clear, nothing in its straight lines and even words indicating that the scribe had been moved by anything beyond the shape and flow of letters. He tapped the two piles straight, said tentatively without looking at the wizard, “Maybe you should finish it. Tell it to me. I’ll write it as you speak.”

  He waited, but the wizard did not answer. Turning, he found himself alone.

  The next morning, having begun a less harrowing account of the mishaps of a ruler’s son attempting to study magic with Unciel, the scribe was startled by the sudden cry of the raven in the quiet house. Unciel was among the tidy rows in the garden, picking beans. The visitor, too impatient to wait, pushed open the back door and went out to him. Euan, watching, saw the king’s livery among the bean rows. A paper passed from messenger to wizard. Unciel read it, folded it again slowly. Euan couldn’t see the expression beneath the shadow of his hat. He said something. The messenger nodded briefly, came back in as quickly as he had gone out; Euan heard the front door close behind him. Unciel came in far more slowly. Euan was back at work, with a prince under his pen who had just set a carpet on fire, when he heard the wizard behind him.

  He turned. Unciel, untying the apron full of pockets he wore to harvest, said, “I’ll need your help.”

  Euan put his pen down and rose. Unciel, he saw with some apprehension, did not look pleased. His face, set, colorless, did not look anything at all. If the messenger from the king had come with news of Sidonie, Euan guessed, it was not to report word of a marriage accomplished, happily or unhappily, after all those weeks.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “That is what we must find out. The king wanted to know if I had heard from Gyre. He has had no word from anyone since the princess and her entourage reached the forests of Serre. Gyre was to have passed me word of any trouble, which he could do quickly, by various ways—water, crystal, even thought, if he felt strongly enough. I heard nothing, so I thought that all was well. Gyre was also to have sent word to me when Sidonie finally reached the summer palace safely.”

  “Maybe,” Euan suggested, “it took longer—”

  “Maybe. But the king’s patience will not stretch longer. He asked me to speak to Gyre.”

  Euan scratched a brow with his thumbnail, gazing doubtfully at the wizard. “Will it be difficult?”

  “Anything,” Unciel sighed, “beyond chopping cucumbers is difficult. Some ways are easier than others. I will start with the simplest, but even for that I’ll need you.”

  Euan nodded. He glanced vaguely at his work, dipped the pen nib in water to clean it. Then he heard his own voice again, bringing to light unexpectedly what had been lurking beneath the threshold of his thoughts. “Why did you send Gyre with the princess? He was careless of you after you helped him—he should have known what happens when you steal a heart.”

  “Yes,” Unciel said, and left the matter there. “He’ll never hear me with all this light,” he added incomprehensibly, and took Euan’s arm. “Come.”

  SEVEN

  It was not until supper, that first evening in the summer palace, that the princess noticed a lack of bridegroom. The wizard Gyre, who had last seen the prince haggard and half-mad, crouched over a fire in the night-forests of Serre and tearing into a spitted hare with his hands, did not expect him to appear among the curious, whispering courtiers in their flowing silks. Sidonie, seated beside the silent queen, seemed too dazed by what she saw to remember what she had not. The massive hall, with its low dark ceiling and dizzying view of the valley below, might have been hewn out of raw stone like a cave. Pelts covered the cold floor; the horned skulls of animals hung everywhere on the walls, between long narrow ribbons of tapestry that depicted, from what Gyre could recognize, witches and trolls and birds whose singing came out of them in spiralling threads of gold. Gyre, seated to King Ferus’s left, watched him take the ragged bone of a haunch of beef off a platter and toss it over the dais table to the hounds below. It seemed a calculated gesture; the cold black visible eye of the king’s profile challenged the wizard to blink.

  But Gyre, who had blinked at many things in his life, had already sensed the dangerous intelligence in the King of Serre. It was the princess, on the king’s blind side, whose mouth slipped open and hung indecorously, as the hounds tore at the bone and quarrelled over it, their deep rumbling voices sounding akin to the king’s. Her attendants, seated by rank among the courtiers below, seemed as astonished. Sidonie, recalling some childhood admonition, closed her mouth and straightened her spine. Ferus, who had gotten his teeth around the bone of wizardry in Dacia and was worrying it, to the neglect of queen and guest, asked Gyre, “And the present King of Dacia, Arnou, of course has inherited his father’s great gifts for sorcery?”

  Gyre had no idea. “Of course,” he answered smoothly. His knowledge of Dacia was still perfunctory; it had not interested him until now.

  The row of arches along the far wall of thick, unpolished stone opened their casements to endless forests smoky with twilight, and across them to the jagged, very distant peaks between Dacia and Serre, still visible in the lingering flush of light from the wake of the sun. What a princess could cross, so could an army, Gyre mused. Ferus could see that even out of his blind eye. His fear of sorcery must have stopped him; his fascination with it must have inspired the alliance and marriage. Well and good, Gyre thought as Ferus stopped his questions long enough to finish a quail stewed in cream and honey. Even then there was no such thing as true silence in that place; water weltered and shouted through it constantly, as though the king’s summer court floated. Well and good. But how could there be a wedding without a bridegroom?

  He felt the shock in her mind as Sidonie finally noticed the prince’s absence. He understood: they had been travelling together for so long that she had grown used to Gyre’s company. Struggling with the sudden foreignness of her world after the calm, predictable forests, she had forgotten to question his presence in the place of the man she was to marry. He watched her bend her head toward the pale, still queen.

  “But where is Prince Ronan?” She might have thought the falling water would cover her words. But her voice, sweet and passionate, did not know how to hide anything. “Does he care so little about who he is t
o marry that he does not even want to meet me before the wedding?”

  She might have stood up and shouted for the moon. Courtiers’ voices faded; their faces turned to her, some calculating, others uneasy, no one perplexed, Gyre saw, but she. The king’s profile, blunt and craggy, lifted above his plate, but he refused to turn anything more toward her than a blind eye. Beside him, the queen, her own head lowered, seemed to be searching for answers among the patterns of a few bird bones and some scattered leaves.

  “You will meet my son when you marry,” the king said. “Meeting him now will change nothing. The documents are sealed; you are here; you will wed.”

  “I would like to meet him now,” Sidonie persisted, despite the seamed eye staring at her. “I have come so far—”

  “You have come so far that another day cannot possibly matter,” the king muttered testily, and turned his seeing eye to the proffered dish of a huge fish crusted in scales of orange and lime.

  Gyre saw the queen shift, felt the princess’s surprise as a hand touched hers. In warning? he wondered. In sympathy? “Please—” Sidonie began.

  “Enough!” The fish was flying suddenly; the muttering had become a full-fledged roar that brought the hounds leaping nervously to their feet. The fish landed in the flickering shadows behind Sidonie’s attendants, who had loosed a bevy of cries and ducked. The hounds took off after it. Ferus turned both eyes, visible and invisible, at the princess. “You will see him when you see him! Until then you will begin to learn to wait in silence, without question, as he has learned—”

  His voice seemed to pour over her stiff, shocked face with all the force of the water plunging over the cliff, with all the ceaseless, relentless noise of it. Still, something of him triggered the sudden recognition Gyre saw in her eyes: the broad, high bones of his face, perhaps, his long, still-bright hair, his single-minded intensity. She caught her breath in a deep, audible suck of wonder, as though for a moment she had been drowning.

  “Oh,” she whispered and rose, her hands to her mouth, staring back at the one-eyed king. “You don’t know where he is.”

  Ferus stopped shouting. It was as though one of the falls had run dry. She had riveted even Gyre; he had no idea what she might say. She dropped her hands and said it, “Well, I do. Your son is running wild in the forests below, searching for a bird made of fire. It seemed to me, when I saw him, that marriage was the last thing on his mind.” What Gyre could see of the king’s face had flushed purple. Sidonie’s voice shook badly, but she continued, “You have no bridegroom; there can be no wedding. I am going home.”

  She gestured to her attendants and turned. Flocking around her, they stunned the court with the sight of their backs turned firmly away from Serre. The princess and her entourage, resolutely following a startled servant with an empty platter, nearly found their way to the kitchen stairs before the king began to bellow.

  The guards from Dacia were nowhere to be seen; they had been neatly buried between water and rock in the lower chambers of the palace. Gyre, beside the princess in an instant, made Ferus blink when the king caught up with her. His own guards were crowding through doors, ringing the frightened group. Some of the young women had begun to weep with terror. One or two, getting a close look at Ferus’s seamed, snarling face, had fainted.

  Sidonie flung a look like a cry at Gyre. He said quickly to the king, “If you will permit me to speak to the princess alone—”

  The black eye rolled at him, acute and fuming. “You do not need to ask,” the king said flatly.

  “No,” Gyre answered softly, after a heartbeat. “I do not need to ask. But I am in the service of the King of Dacia, and what he wants for his daughter, I must want.”

  Ferus considered him silently, a vein in the scarred eye-socket swollen and throbbing. “Then you must help me,” he said tautly. “Go with her. I will send for you shortly. If I don’t find you both still here, I will march across the face of Dacia until the magic it takes to defeat me hammers it flat and barren as the southern deserts of Serre.”

  He strode back to the hall. Sidonie stared after him, her own face moon-white. Gyre turned to her. She closed her eyes, bowed her head until it came to rest, lightly and very briefly, against the wizard’s shoulder.

  He took her to his own chamber, a quiet room in the back of the palace, overlooking the point where the broad river separated into the twin strands of silver that had carved the rocky island on which the palace stood. He expected a certain amount of crying and pleading before she could be persuaded to listen to him. But she surprised him again. She walked across the room, stumbling a little over the broad, fanged head of some skinned animal, and stood at an open window, gazing out until she finally stopped trembling. Then she drew a deep breath and turned.

  “I can’t let him war against Dacia. My grandfather, Ursal, was the last great sorcerer-king of Dacia. He might have sent Ferus running back over the mountains. My great-aunt Tassel, Ursal’s sister, is still alive, but she inherited only a portion of the family powers. Unciel is so weak that he can barely battle the weeds in his garden.”

  “And your father?”

  “My father has tried very hard to make magic, but he only makes messes. What the King of Serre fears is truly not much more than a legend. My great-aunt Tassel might toss a few obstacles in his path, but she could never stop an entire army.”

  “And you?”

  She paused, gazing at him out of eyes the color of the twilight above her shoulder. “I have no idea,” she said, surprised. “No one ever asked. But I doubt it. My older sisters have no talent for sorcery; why should I?”

  “There’s a difference,” he said, “between sorcery and magic. Magic is inherent everywhere, in everything; it cannot lie and it cannot be deceived. Sorcery can lie, can twist, can delude. It may be that you have a gift for one but not the other.”

  “I hope,” she answered grimly, not really understanding him, “that you have gifts for both. For whatever you need to rescue the king’s son from the magic in Serre, and bring him home.” She held his eyes with her own magic that the twisted forces in Serre would soon enough turn to sorcery. “You saw the prince when I did. He looks very much like his father. You didn’t recognize him?”

  “No,” he said, feeling his own way into sorcery, and let her see his surprise. “Of course I do now. So that was Prince Ronan. Out chasing birds when he should have been here to welcome you.”

  Her wheat-gold brows pulled together a little. “I told him my name.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose—I suppose he might have been running from me as well. Though he seemed obsessed with the bird.” She sat down on the casement ledge, pondering. “He said,” she added, inspired, “something about a witch. Do you remember? He had to find the witch as well as the bird. He would come home, he said, as soon as he found the witch. It surprised me then that he seemed to think it was important for me to know. Now I understand why.” Her voice trailed away. She studied the dusty, indifferent eyes of the white pelt splayed at her feet. Gyre touched candles to light with a thought, watched the firelight glide down her slender, golden throat. She was looking at him again suddenly, as though she had read his mind. But she only said, “He doesn’t seem anything like his father. I think—I think I might be able to marry him without fear. Even though he is in love with a bird. Will you find him?”

  Which was, as Gyre had anticipated, exactly what the King of Serre said to him a little later when he sent for the wizard. Guards escorted the princess back to her chamber, and Gyre to a room in a tower. It hung dizzyingly between valley and sky, just above the smooth curve of river dropping over the cliff. Torch fire on the walls above rippled on water that flowed like black silk under the night sky. As he waited for the king, Gyre watched the fiery reflection move with the water, try to fall, pull itself whole again. Weapons of every description hung on the walls around him: massive seed-pods of iron dangling from chains, ancient blades worn nearly transparent with age, long bows talle
r than the king, ornately decorated with painted, inlaid wood. The weapons of giants, the walls intimated, skilled and invincible. The king entered finally, pulled the circle of gold off his head, and hung it on the handle of a crudely whittled club that might have come out of a giant’s den.

  He poured wine and drank it, eyeing the wizard somberly over the cup. He put it down empty, and said, “Find my son. Bring him home.”

  Gyre nodded. “It seems the only thing to do.” He turned to watch the water again, and the reflection of the king’s face in the little panes of bevelled glass. “I sat late around a watch fire last night, in the forest below. A young man came out of the trees to my fire. His fine clothes were torn and dirty; his hair, the color of yours, was tangled and full of bracken, as though, if he slept at all, he had crawled under a bush. He took the hare off my spit with his bare hands, as though he were starving. He would not tell me his name.”

  The king, staring at him, swallowed. “Is it true?” he demanded hoarsely. “What the princess said? He is pursuing the firebird?”

  “Yes,” Gyre said steadily. “And he mentioned a witch as well, someone who lives in a cottage made of bones.”

  The king’s face turned the color of one of his skulls. “Brume.” He looked, to Gyre’s amazement, almost helpless for a moment. “The queen told me that he said he had met her, on his way home from battle a few days ago. He killed her white hen.”

  Gyre asked tentatively, “Is that—”

  “Yes. Very bad. So my wife seemed to think. A thing for which the witch exacts the most dangerous payment before she forgives. If.” His mouth tightened. “But she is an ancient hag who lives with her chickens and eats the unwary. You are a wizard trained in all the arts of sorcery and magic. You could break her like a bone between your fingers, free my son from her snares. Find him first and drag him home before he finds her; then you can deal with her. He’ll marry the Princess from Dacia with bracken in his hair and his eyes full of firebirds if I have to chain him to a pillar for his wedding. You must break that spell as well. Witch and firebird, so that he’ll sleep in a bed at night and give me heirs, instead of under a bush dreaming of a bird.”