“Yes,” Ronan promised between his teeth, not knowing how or where or when, only feeling in the marrow of his own bones the insidious threat to Serre. “But you must let me find my way home if you want him. That’s where he’s going with my face.”
The witch gave an untoad-like snort. “You won’t come back.”
“I swear—”
“Words. Give me something you’ll bother to come back for.” She added, her voice thin as thread as he checked his hands for stray rings, and slapped his torn pockets for anything valuable that might have wandered into them, “Your voice. Your memory. Your eyes.” His head rose abruptly; he stared at her, suddenly breathless. “You’d come back for such as those.”
He was silent for what seemed a very long time in the soundless hour between dark and dawn. Then he offered her what of all such things he valued least, and would not miss if he did not return for it. “Take my heart. I’ll bring you the wizard. Make what you will of his bones.”
TEN
Euan Ash sat at his desk in the wizard’s house, hunched over a blank sheet of parchment and staring as blankly at it. Now and then he would bring the dry nib to hover over it, as though to form a letter out of air instead of ink. Then the end of the pen would find its way to his lips, and his eyes would lose interest in the paper, wander towards the garden where the wizard knelt among his herbs, harvesting some of this, a little of that, more slowly than the insects chewed. It was the first morning Unciel had been able to leave the house after he had sent his magic into Serre to get Gyre’s attention. The memory of that magic kept distracting Euan; gazing at the gardener bending unsteadily over the herbs, he did not see the wizard’s frailty but his power.
“If I cannot go to Serre,” Unciel had said obscurely, “I will bring Serre to Dacia.”
They had spent a day and a half of a night in a windowless room. Things appeared and disappeared at random. Unciel sent Euan for water, for candles, for a book on a shelf beside the raven. Each time Euan returned, the room had changed. Shadows beyond the single candle stretched, it seemed, across the entire city. The wizard was making wind, stars. The air smelled of pitch, of earth, of water. Euan heard rivers in the black beyond the candle. He heard a hawk’s cries, a wolf howl. The room had vanished, it seemed; Dacia itself must have vanished beneath the wizard’s night. Yet when Euan was sent for something, he found the door latch always where he had left it, as though the door stood waiting on a boulder, or between two trees in some vast, wild land of the wizard’s making. The house, the raven, Dacia itself were a step or two away across the threshold of a world.
Finally a restless night wind blew the candle out, stranded them in the soughing dark. Euan, blinder than he had ever been in the lamplit city nights, jumped when Unciel spoke.
“Gyre.”
“I am here,” the younger wizard’s calm, even voice answered, and Euan’s skin prickled. “You should have waited for me to send to you.”
“The king could not wait any longer.”
“Tell him that the princess is safe and well. The wedding will take place soon.”
“You were to tell me when you reached the summer palace.”
“We have only just arrived,” Gyre explained. “I am sorry if the king was worried. There was nothing to worry him about. I will tell you when they are married.”
“Did anything—was there trouble—”
“No. No trouble. Unciel, you are taxing your strength over nothing.”
“Perhaps.”
“I will send word to you very soon. Let go of the dark. Are you alone?”
“No.”
“Good. Let go of me. Rest.”
Unciel’s breathing had become louder than the wind. For a moment longer he held the dark land around them. Euan heard him struggling to speak. Then the winds escaped, and the stars scattered, and Euan heard the candle fall over. He rose quickly, opened the door for light, and found the true night filling the house. The candle flared again. The light shook badly in the wizard’s hand. Euan heard him groan.
He caught the sagging wizard before he fell, and took the candle. Unciel, trembling, could barely stay on his feet. Euan slid an arm firmly around him, still hearing the singing winds among the trees, still expecting a wilderness as he guided Unciel through the door.
He said inanely, to keep the wizard awake on his feet, “Then all is well. The princess is safe and the king will be relieved.”
He had to listen for a long time before a rustle of leaf, of raven’s feathers, answered him. “A no and a no and a nothing equals something. Especially in Serre.”
If you did not trust him, Euan asked silently for the hundredth time since that night, why did you send him with her?
He finally had a chance to ask when he and Unciel ate together at mid-day.
Unciel, eating very little as slowly as possible, seemed to bring his thoughts back from another country before he answered. “I trust him with the princess,” he said absently. “He would defend her with all his powers. I don’t trust him with himself.”
Euan brought a thumb up, scratched at his forehead. “What does that mean?”
Unciel gave him an oddly searching look. “Do you know yourself?”
Euan considered himself. “I think so. I always find my shoes in the same place. I always clean my pens.”
“You fell in love with the princess.”
Euan opened his mouth, closed it. He felt the blood flare into his face, as he remembered the hot, sweet, motionless light, the princess’s hair the color of light, jewelled at the hair-line with little beads of sweat. “I didn’t—That was unexpected.”
“Do you remember how you felt?”
“Of course.” He had to swallow before he continued, a trifle stiffly, “Are you expecting Gyre to fall in love with her?”
“Not exactly,” Unciel said, “but if such an unexpected thing could happen even in this quiet cottage, then imagine what might happen to you in Serre, where nothing is predictable. How could you know what you might do until you do it?”
“How could anyone know?”
“And yet you say you know yourself.”
Euan was silent. There was an answer to the riddle the wizard had presented to him, but it eluded him. He chewed a bite of stewed kale, asked tentatively, “But you can never know what will happen, so how can you know how you will react?”
“You act,” Unciel said simply. “And then you know. Which is what Serre might ask you to do in as many different ways as it can dream up.”
Euan sighed. “I don’t understand anything.”
“Then you understand something very important.”
Euan shook his head to clear it. “But what has all this to do with Gyre? Why do you not trust what he told you? That there is nothing to worry about?”
“Because,” the wizard said grimly, “I know Serre too well. It may be that Gyre simply could not speak freely at that moment. I will have to ask him again.”
Euan swallowed a bite or two more before that sank in. He stared at the wizard, aghast. “You’ll kill yourself. The king didn’t ask you to do that. Why did you send Gyre? I’ve copied enough of your writings to know how many others you could have asked to guard the princess.”
The wizard’s face, after his recent weakness, seemed barely more than a mask over bone. Something of that night’s power lingered in his eyes. They seemed clearer, Euan thought; the wizard might have been looking out of his kitchen window at the incomprehensible land of Serre. Or at Gyre.
“Gyre owes me,” he answered and got up, his carrots and parsley calling him from the garden. Euan watched him helplessly. Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all. Later, seated at his desk again, he contemplated them bewilderedly. Where did the truth in them lie? If every word he spoke meant nothing more than itself, then how could that add up to a lie?
He whispered, “No and no and nothing equals something.” He propped his ch
in on his fist, gazed morosely out at the wizard, who was dropping peas into an apron pocket. “What,” Euan asked aloud, “if it simply equals nothing? Then you could go on gardening and forget about magic.”
The wizard seemed to, for a few days. Once it rained from morning till night. Unciel sat in the house with the raven on his shoulder and the cat on his knee. He lifted his hand to stroke it now and then. Beyond that, Euan did not see him move; he barely blinked. He might have been napping with his eyes open. More likely, Euan thought uneasily, he was thinking. At least he was resting.
The next day Euan finished an account of Unciel’s travels in a northern land, where he learned some peculiar sorcery involving fishbones, amber, and water pulled to its highest by the full moon. He took another tale out of the chest, sorted through the papers for a beginning, a middle, and an end. The hurried scrawl was difficult, the adventures absorbing. Euan wrote for hours before he realized that he had not seen Unciel at all that morning. The late summer day was cloudy; already leaves in the old vines were beginning to turn. But the rain had stopped, and Euan expected to find the wizard in the garden when he finally looked at midday. Hungry, he checked the kitchen. It was silent, tidy. One plate, one cup, and a cold meal of bread and beef and tomatoes lay on the table. Euan frowned at it, perplexed. Unciel rarely left the house; he could barely keep his balance among his quiet plants, let alone on the lively city streets. Most likely, Euan decided, the king had sent for him. He ate his solitary meal, still wondering, and went back to work.
He was making his way toward some dangerous sorcery the wizard had been asked to unravel when he heard a door open within the house. The raven gave a sudden screech that sent Euan’s nib jittering across the page. He got up quickly without knowing why. He saw nothing in the hall. A door that had always been closed had unlatched itself. Nothing more. He went toward it, his breathing suddenly erratic. He heard the wizard’s voice, inarticulate and very faint, from within the room. Euan slammed the door open and fell on his knees beside Unciel.
The wizard lay face down on the floor; Euan put an ear to his back to hear his heartbeat. One outstretched hand clutched something. The scribe took it from him gently, rolled him over. Unciel’s eyes flickered open; he gripped Euan’s arm.
“Bring it,” he whispered. “Help me up.”
“I’ll help you to bed. Then I’ll go for the king’s physician—”
“No. I could never lie well. Just put me to bed.”
“Maybe,” Euan breathed as the wizard half-walked and the scribe half-dragged him, “you can’t lie. But you can raise a fog of obscurity well enough when you want to.” He pushed open the door the wizard indicated, and Unciel dropped onto his bed. Euan piled silk and skins on him, then stood anxiously a moment, listening to his breathing.
The wizard, his eyes closed, whispered, “There is a small amber jar in the kitchen.”
He drank from it, when Euan brought it to him. Foxglove, Euan guessed, and who knew what else? It was only then, as he watched the wizard grow so still that he seemed entranced, that Euan remembered the thing locked in his left hand.
He studied it. It seemed nothing: a common, milky crystal the size and shape of a hen’s egg, with a jagged streak of black through it. He laid it carefully down on the table next to Unciel’s bed, beside the amber bottle and a small book with a pen marking its place. There was a jar of ink beside the book. Euan drew a breath, held it, adding book, pen, ink, and coming up with yet another tale. Perhaps, he thought with sudden, avid curiosity, there in that book was the one tale Unciel had never told anyone. Eyes clinging to it, he let his breath out again slowly. No. The price was too high. The wizard would never trust him again. He brought a pitcher of water and a cup from the kitchen, then drew a chair up to the bed and waited.
Unciel came alive again some time near evening. Euan, who had fallen asleep, felt a hand on his wrist. He pulled himself awake, blinking at the wizard. The one-eyed cat lay at the foot of the bed; the raven perched in a casement, Euan saw the darkening sky beyond it.
His mouth was a desert, he felt suddenly, and poured a cup of water. But he found himself holding it to the wizard’s mouth, which was also a desert, he knew, because. Because, he thought confusedly, then enlightened himself. Because that was the way the wizard had asked for water. Unciel, his face the color of bone, his eyes cloudy, looked at him silently again, and Euan found a candle in his head.
He lit a couple of tapers, brought one to stand on the table between them. “What do you want me to do?” he asked gently. “Do you want a physician?”
No, the still eyes told him.
“Do you want me to stay with you?”
Yes.
“Do you want anything? Wine? Food? One of your potions?”
He found a pale crystal with a black lightning bolt through it in his head, and he picked it up from the table, let the wizard see it. The weary, unblinking eyes gazed into it for a long time, as though it contained worlds, mysteries, the answers to unanswerable riddles. He closed his eyes finally.
Euan, putting the stone down, ventured to ask, “What is it?”
No and no and nothing, he heard. And then, as the wizard slipped off a precipice into sleep, nothing more.
ELEVEN
The face and form of Prince Ronan of Serre returned to his father’s summer palace very early in the morning, just as the moon slipped beyond the western mountains into Dacia. Gyre, who had shaped Ronan’s gaunt, starved, magic-ridden body so completely he carried even the prince’s hunger, had walked on foot up the granite face of the cliff. He had let his powers drain down into the deepest, most secret parts of his mind. He had buried his name where even Ferus’s blind eye, with its intimations of omniscience, would never see it. The misused body, with one bare, blistered foot, was exhausted by the climb up the hard, winding road. He did not notice the guards on the wall staring down at the bedraggled, limping figure with its powerful breadth of shoulder and hair touched to fire by a last finger of moonlight. They raised a shout. The man sank down at the foot of the closed gates and went to sleep.
Later, he woke to find a scarred, snarling, pit-eyed creature looming over him. The wizard started, then remembered the savage face of the King of Serre. The single eye, black and fulminating like a thunderhead about to kindle lightning, studied the prince’s face and grew less ominous.
“It’s about time,” he said roughly. He clamped a thumb and forefinger along the prince’s jaws, turned his head this way and that. “You look sane enough. The queen said you had been bewitched by Brume. Are you free of her? Or is this another of her tricks?”
He loosed the prince, who shook his head slightly and pushed himself up. As though the room spun around him, he dropped his face in his hands. “I am free,” he whispered. “I was—I have been running mad in the forest. It seems like a dream now.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Only hungry.” He let his hands fall, took a cautious glance at the unfamiliar room. There were no windows in it, just stone walls hung with bright ribbons of tapestry. It must be deep within the palace; he would have to open a wizard’s ear to hear the sound of water.
“Good.” The king’s huge hand closed on his neck, one thumb pushing against his throat as if feeling for a vein, or a thread of breath. The single eye came so close to the prince’s that it divided into two, both charred, unblinking. “No more running. You will wed by day’s end or I’ll toss you back to Brume myself and you can take a bath in her cauldron. Which is it?”
He said as clearly as he could around the probing thumb, “I will wed.”
“Well, we can thank the witch for that much,” the king said dourly, and loosed him. He opened the chamber door, said to the hovering servants, “Get him ready for his wedding.”
He was bathed, shorn, fed, dressed without needing to utter a word, let alone assemble an entire sentence that might have been spoken by the prince. He was weakened, it was understood. He had barely escaped death in the shape of the
witch, and madness in the beguiling shape of the firebird. That he had returned at all was a tribute to his strength and an indomitable will to live despite himself. He had come back to wed; he would give his father heirs for Serre. If he spoke strangely now, or produced an opinion not formerly held, or had trouble remembering things he had known all his life, that could be blamed on the vagaries of magic. No one, he suspected, would care what he said that day as long as he said yes.
At last, resplendent in black silk and cloth of gold, a ceremonial sword at his side that looked as ancient as a tree in the forests below and felt about as heavy, he was taken to meet the woman he would marry.
She rose as he entered her chamber. Her attendants clustered around her in pale silks and satins; clouds, his eye told him, in the wake of the rising sun. The tall, slender young woman in a gold gown webbed with pearls startled him. Surely that could not be Sidonie, who had nearly shot him in his raven’s shape, who had tossed a frog out of her pavilion one morning as handily as any stable-boy. Something stirred deep within the hidden wizard. He had, Gyre realized suddenly, acquired a heart. It confused him; he had never had one before. Her courage moved him; so did her grave eyes, which, he suddenly saw, were the color of the hour he loved best, when the last haunting moments of day shifted toward the deepest purples of twilight. They changed now, as she gazed at him, darkened into that secret promise of night. He had touched her heart, he thought with wonder. So he felt, in that magic, timeless moment before he remembered whose face he wore.
The realization made him awkward; he fell short by half a step, which the princess attributed to the exhaustion from his misadventures.
She said quickly, “Please, my lord Ronan, sit.” She took his hand, to his astonishment, and guided him to a chair. Then she glanced at her attendants, the guards at the open door. She asked the prince softly, “May we be alone?”
He tried to think; a guard answered for him. “My lady, we dare not let him out of our sight. But if you leave the door open, we can watch him from the hall. He must not go near the windows.”
In the Forests of Serre Page 10