In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

“I’m caught in a snare. Please help me. Set me free.”

  A desperate impatience filled him. He did not dare move; he had no time for owls, and this one had a voice like the rasp of a handsaw. “Hush!” he told it, but it would not; it muttered and shook its wings and tried to bend double to pick at the snare. Above it, the firebird was beginning to shift shape again; he could tell by the husky, human overtones. He closed his eyes, clenching his jaw tightly, and got to his knees, feeling along the branch for the snare.

  It had taken the owl by both claws. He snapped the loop of rotting leather easily and slid back down, holding his breath. She still sang above him, her voice unfaltering, undisturbed.

  The owl fluttered, caught its balance in mid-air, and came to perch on Ronan’s knee. “Ronan.”

  “What?” he demanded in a whisper. “Must you talk now?”

  “I only wanted to thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “And to give you this morsel of advice, in gratitude.”

  “Please,” he breathed. “There’s no need—”

  “Don’t put your trust in wizards.”

  The owl flew off, a silent glide of silver in the night. The firebird sang of inhuman beauty and incomprehensible desire to the blank face of the moon. For one moment, between notes, Ronan thought he understood what the owl said. In another note, he had forgotten even that he was human.

  He remembered that much when he woke in daylight, a sprawl of bones among the hard roots, the sun trying to pry open his eyes with a blade. Before he opened them, he had a sudden, stark vision of himself: Prince Ronan of Serre, heir to the kingdom and a princess waiting to marry him, ragged and starving and talking to owls, spellbound by a witch, in love with a bird, and no idea how to get home except by capturing the thing he loved above all else and giving it to the witch for supper.

  He loosed a small, helpless croak of a sob, struggling to separate his body from the bones of the tree. To his surprise, something croaked back at him. He rolled up painfully, settled himself against the tree trunk, letting the dazzling light in little by little. He saw nothing for a moment but a glare of sun and hot green shadow. He was hungry enough to eat the next thing he laid eyes on. Luckily for it, when his raw eyes finally cleared, the thing was speaking to him.

  “Prince Ronan.”

  He blinked wordlessly at a lump beside his hand. Shadows rippled over it like water. He squinted, wondering incredulously how something no bigger than his fist could possibly see the prince in the tattered, exhausted man slumped like a broken puppet under a tree.

  Then he wondered how a toad could talk.

  “Prince Ronan,” it said again, creeping a little closer to his hand. It was diffident and ugly, with a voice as rough as its nubbled back. “Please take pity on me.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I recognized you. Something swooped down on me last night and carried me away from my pool. I struggled and barely escaped with my life, but in falling, I injured myself. I can barely move. Will you carry me back to my home? I can smell it, my long mosses and water lilies and the still green water, but I cannot get there. Please take me home.”

  Ronan sighed. He saw no reason not to help the toad when he saw no reason in anything, and besides that he was thirsty. He turned his hand on the ground and opened it. He felt the flaccid, trembling thing climb over his fingers, its webs spreading and clinging at every slow step, until it spilled across his palm and squatted there.

  “Thank you,” it said humbly. “Now, if you’ll rise and turn your back to the sun.”

  Ronan, speechless, managed to get himself up without squashing the toad. Limping and hollow, he moved through the forest not much faster than a toad. He had long since parted company with the princess’s bow and arrow, but perhaps the toad’s pond would have a fish in it. He closed his eyes, laughing silently, glimpsing himself again and appalled.

  “It’s just ahead,” he heard the toad tell him. “Just past those briars.”

  “A month ago I was in a battle trying to give away my life.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Now I’m wandering around the forests of Serre wearing one boot and carrying a frog.”

  “Toad,” the toad corrected, but politely. “And I’m very grateful for the help.”

  Ronan felt it shift as the dank smells of damp earth, slick waterborn creatures, moss trailing eggs like bubbles, wafted over them on the breeze. He set the toad down on the bank and lowered himself wearily to drink. He saw his worn, harrowed face in the still water: shaggy-haired, crowned with twigs and water lilies, his eyes haunted and beginning to be afraid. Then he dropped his face into his reflection. Small fish darted away through the ripples. He breathed again, scooped water over his face and hair. As it dripped back into the pool, he heard the toad speak.

  “I am very grateful. There is a wizard looking for you. He will tell you that he can help you but beware.”

  Ronan lifted his head above the water, got a toad’s eye view of the toad sitting on a stone among the lily pads.

  “What wizard? Beware what?”

  But the toad only stared back at him, its senseless eye and mute, clamped mouth asking only what made him dream that toads could speak?

  He wandered on, scavenging with the birds and the deer for food and searching through his mother’s tales for a wizard. He stood for a while with his feet in a stream, trying to catch a fish with his hands, and to imagine what worse a wizard could do to him. Fish slipped through his fingers again and again until he was soaked with his own flailing and too weak to stand. Then, as his sight grew strange, water and sky merging into one flat grey plane, he felt a great fish brush through his hands and linger there. He fell over with surprise. The fish came with him, flying out of the water and landing on the bank, panting beside him. He turned his head cautiously, waited for it to call him by name and plead for its life. It said nothing. Its eye dimmed. He got up, grateful to it for simply dying, and began to gather wood.

  He had finally found a stone to spark fire, twigs had finally sparked, the spitted, steaming fish had finally flaked into a bite which he was about to put into his mouth when he saw the wolf watching him silently on the other side of the fire.

  She was lean and mangy; her hollowed sides showed ribs. Her muzzle and ears were grey with age; her eyes had grown cloudy. She did not speak. She did not need to. Ronan stared at her, his own belly whimpering with hunger. He yielded finally to the exigencies of his peculiar fortune, and broke the fish in two.

  “Thank you,” she said, and swallowed her half in a gulp, coughing a moment to settle a bone. She turned to leave as silently as she had come. Her muzzle swung toward him before she took a step.

  “I know,” he said, his mouth full of fish. “The wizard.”

  “No,” she said, her voice slow and husky with age. “The firebird. I hear it singing just across the river among the trees.”

  She padded away, her sunken shoulders and haunches sagging on the bone. He dropped what was left of the fish and splashed into the water, his eyes already filling with fire, his heart emptying itself of all memory but the firebird’s song.

  Sometime in the night, long after the sun had set and the stars crowded out of the dark to hear the firebird, another voice troubled Ronan for his attention. It refused to be still.

  It tugged at him as he sat entranced beneath the singing bird. It poked at him annoyingly like a stone; it whined like an insect in his ear. He seemed to fall through unimaginable distances, past stars pulsing with the firebird’s music, down past the moon, through the massive, silent trees, down to earth. He felt his body shift. He saw the firebird far above him, luminous against the moon. Then he heard the voice again, and turned to see what forest creature needed him now.

  He recognized the lean, composed face, the dark hair. The still eyes caught moonlight this time instead of camp-fire. It was the man who had drawn Ronan to his fire with the smell of spitted hare. He was very quiet, his
eyes on the firebird. If it was not his voice that had dragged Ronan to earth, he was back anyway, in the confused, weary, constantly hungry body, half-prince, half-forest creature, and both halves utterly lost.

  He whispered, “Can you help me?”

  The man, who was leaning against the truck of the tree Ronan sat under, dragged his eyes away from moon and bird to look down at Ronan. With a murmur of surprise, he dropped down beside the prince. “I remember you,” he said. “The first time I saw the firebird, you were there.”

  Ronan nodded. “You fed me at your fire.”

  “Yes.” He paused, studying Ronan, then added slowly, “You look half-starved. And half-wild. Is it the firebird that torments you so?”

  “It haunts me, yes. She.” He put out a hand, gripped the man’s arm as though one of them might vanish; he was not sure which. “Help me—”

  “Yes,” the man said quickly. “Of course. Tell me what I can do for you.”

  “I can’t find my way back home. The witch has me trapped in a terrible spell because I killed her white hen. I can’t see past this forest; most of the time I can barely see beyond myself. At first she said—she said I would not find my way home until I found her again. And so I found her again, in her cottage of bones. But she still will not set me free. Now the price for my freedom is the firebird. Bring it to her, the witch said, in a golden cage. Tell me how. Even if I stumble across a cage of gold big enough for the firebird lying under a bush, tell me how I could bear to capture all that beauty and give it to Brume? My heart would break even as she freed me. Please. Help me think. Tell me what I should do.”

  The man, whom Ronan held with both hands now, gazed at him out of dark, unblinking eyes for a long time without speaking, while above them the woman sang in her sweet, tender, unfathomable language. Some time during that endless moment, Ronan realized that his hands had fallen limply at his sides; it was the man who held him now.

  Finally he spoke. Do nothing, it sounded like to Ronan, or perhaps just: Nothing.

  Then Ronan was moving. Being moved. Trees were passing him. They tossed and pitched oddly, and were as oddly streaked with bars of gold. He tried to touch the gold, brush it away. He had no hands. His arms were feathers. Were fire. He opened his mouth to cry out; he could not make a sound. It was he who moved, he saw then, not the trees. The bars of gold were just that. He touched one; his fingers were claws of gold. A terrible sound welled through him. He tried to batter himself against the bars; he tried to eat through one with a beak of gold. But though feathers and plumes of fire melted out between the bars around him, he could scarcely move. He was caged in gold, within a body that made no sense. It was a dream, he thought desperately. He had been so obsessed with the firebird that he dreamed he had become the thing he loved.

  Then he saw the hand above him, carrying the cage by a sturdy loop of gold. He stretched his long neck, pushed his head through the curved upper bars to bite at the human fingers, make them drop the cage. He drew blood; he heard a sudden exclamation. The world stopped swaying back and forth a moment, but the cage did not fall. The loop simply grew larger, the hand unreachable. A face turned briefly down to look at him. It was his own.

  If he had been the firebird, he would have shaken stars loose with the sound of his voice. A crack would have marred the face of the moon. Beware, beware, the man who wore his face and body told him with the sound of every step. Beware. He could not find a single note within himself to cry terror, to cry rage, to cry his total bewilderment. He felt the gold beak open wide. Cries flooded through him, drained away into silence. After a long time, he slumped, numb and exhausted, against the bars of his cage. Plumes dragged in the bracken behind him, gathered needles and dust. He watched the moon set, the silent stars grow faint and cold.

  In that dark hour, they came to the witch’s house.

  The man’s steps faltered; his breathing stopped as he stared at the bones. The bird stirred itself, tried once more to cry out. The man with the prince’s haggard face, his torn clothing, his unsteady movements, let the cage drop to the ground and dragged it the last few steps to the witch’s door.

  He pounded on it. With horror, the bird heard his own voice.

  “Witch.” It was hoarse and trembling with weariness. “I have brought you the firebird.”

  The door sprang open. Man and bird gazed speechlessly at the toad-woman who appeared. She was massive, damp, and slightly green. Her long hair clung to her back like wet moss. She lifted the green lenses from her squat nose, propped them on her head, and stared with bulbous, hooded eyes at the motionless bird in the golden cage. Her mouth opened slightly; an impossibly long and narrow tongue flickered out as if to snag a fiery pinfeather.

  Then she turned her dark toad’s eyes to the man holding the cage. “It’s very quiet.”

  “It’s terrified,” he answered heavily. “And most likely furious. I broke my heart to get it for you.” The bird moved at that; a claw swiped through the bars, but missed. “Please. Let me go home now.”

  The toad-witch, neckless and hideously humped, could not bend, but she hunkered slightly to brush a wood chip out of a misty plume. “How beautiful it is. And how clever of you to find a golden cage in the forest.”

  “I did a favor for a fox. It told me where to find one.”

  “It pays to be kind to animals.” She poked a fat, webbed finger through the bars, tried to stroke the bird’s head. It ducked wildly away. “I’ll hang the cage beside my fire, let it sing to me while I boil my bones for stock. I suppose you have earned your freedom, Prince. And I have no more use for you, now that I have a bird to replace my white hen. Go home. And let this be a lesson to you: stay away from my chickens.”

  She dropped the lenses back on her nose, hoisted the cage off the steps, backed into the cottage, and slammed the door.

  Ronan, trapped in the dark that stank of rotting marrow and cooped hens, threw his bird’s body against the bars; its wings and plumes flailed at the air. Its beak wide, it tried again and again to cry out. The witch hung the cage on a pot hook above the glowing coals in the hearth. She lit a candle or two, peered at the bird, fondled its flowing plumes.

  “What a beauty you are,” she murmured. “Even your eyes are gold. I’ll feed you a bite of something, and then perhaps you’ll sing. What, I wonder, do firebirds eat?” She glanced around her, then dipped into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a fistful of grain. “Try this, my lovely.” She opened her hand enticingly just beyond the bars.

  Ronan slashed at it with claw and beak. Grain spilled; the witch shrieked. She pulled the cage off the hook and, opening the door again, hurled it into the ragged end of night. “And there you’ll stay,” she shouted, as the cage flew, “until you’re in a better temper. Then if I say eat, you eat, and it I say sing, you sing, or I will boil—”

  The cage hit the ground hard. Its floor broke free from the bent bars. The firebird and the witch moved together, both with frantic speed. The bird worked itself free through the bottom of the cage just as the witch flung her enormous body upon it to catch it.

  Ronan, feeling as though he had been hit by a barrel, struggled for air while the witch, on top of him and screeching like a hen in his ear, groped around her for feathers. Her hands locked on his human arms. She pulled back, staring at him. For an instant both their mouths opened; neither could speak.

  Then she heaved to her feet, dragging the prince upright after her. “You!” She peered to one side of him, then the other. Then her face came very close to his, until her eyes were nearly crossed. Her nails dug into his arms like thorns; her hot breath stank of blood. “Where is my firebird?”

  “There is—” He swallowed, still fighting for air. “There was no firebird. Only me.”

  “You.” She searched behind him again. “You just left.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “You aren’t the firebird, and you aren’t yourself,” she ranted in sudden exasperation. “Who are you?”

  �
�I killed your white hen.”

  She peered at him, first out of one lens, and then the other. “Prince Ronan,” she said very softly. “Answer me this. Who was wearing your face?”

  “I don’t—” he began, and then he knew: the owl had told him, and the little toad. “He is a wizard who travelled to Serre with the princess from Dacia…” He felt the caged firebird’s fury and terror again, at the wizard’s inexplicable sorcery. “But why?” he whispered. “Was he hoping you would eat me?” Then he saw himself in the golden cage, along with all of Serre, forest and witch, firebird and king, swinging in the wizard’s grip, powerless to cry for help. He felt his skin constrict with horror.

  “It’s him I’ll eat,” the witch said testily.

  Ronan’s hands clenched. “He’ll wear my face into my father’s court,” he said raggedly, trying to chart the path of the wizard’s sorcery through Serre. “He’ll take my name, my place—he’ll marry the Princess from Dacia himself. My father only has one eye and he only sees what he wants to out of that—Please.” He reached out desperately before he remembered what he almost touched. “You must let me go home. I’ll bring you a hundred white hens.”

  “You have not brought me even one firebird,” she complained. “And why do you care if another man steals your life? You didn’t want it anyway.”

  “I don’t—I didn’t—” His thoughts tangled; he paused, speechless at having to explain himself to a witch who would have boiled his bones for stew. Then, as he looked back at what had led him to that inconceivable moment, words came. “What I wanted,” he said, his voice raw with pain, “was a reason to want it.”

  The witch gazed at him, her toad-eyes unblinking behind the lenses. Her long tongue flicked the air suddenly, as at a passing thought. “You killed my white hen and you’ve given me nothing in recompense.”

  “Let me go and I’ll bring you every white hen in Serre.”

  “I don’t want that. I don’t even want the firebird now.” Her tongue slipped between her lips again, out and in. “What I want is the man who can make a firebird. There is magic in the marrow of his bones. Bring him to me and I will set you free.”