In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  In the morning, as she stared out of an open window in search of possibilities of freedom while her attendants huddled and whispered together behind her, Sidonie watched a golden hawk swoop above the lip of the falls and disappear overhead. She saw its reflection in the water as it lighted on the wall, then vanished again. Gyre, she said silently, without hope. The reflection of his face, pale, bruised, hollowed with weariness, appeared in answer on the water below her window.

  He sent for her in the afternoon. The king’s guards escorted her to his chamber in the back of the palace. She said nothing to him until he spoke to the guards and closed the door. His voice sounded calm as ever, but there was an odd, haunted look in his eyes that she had never seen before. He cradled one forearm as though it pained him; there was a bruise on his forehead that his hair did not quite hide.

  “We can speak freely,” he said to her. “I wove such a thunder of water into the stones around us that even Ferus could not hear his own name.”

  “What happened to you?” She felt her eyes swell and burn with unshed tears. “Where were you when I needed you?”

  “I was—I could not come. I was caught like a fish by the peculiar magic of Serre; it took all night for me to break free.”

  He had that look, she saw, as though he had been played like a mouse and barely escaped with his life. “Was it Brume?”

  “No. More like one of those ogres in Auri’s tales. They are more clever than I thought.”

  “I told you so,” she whispered. “I warned you not to laugh at them.”

  “I’m not laughing,” he said somberly. “The king told me what happened while I was gone. He is furious and desperate—”

  “Take me home. You have the power.”

  He hesitated, gestured at himself. “Look at me. I have the power to rescue you from Ferus, but how can I get you safely out of Serre?”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care. Just get me out of the palace and I will walk all the way to Dacia. The prince has most likely been eaten by Brume, and the queen told me that Ferus will use me to cause war between Serre and Dacia. I’m very certain my father never intended me to marry a man who could possibly, under any circumstances, get eaten by a witch. If you take me home, my father will have no reason to attack Serre.”

  “And King Ferus will have no reason to attack Dacia. But he will. And if you don’t live with him here, you will live with him on the throne in Dacia.”

  “But at least I will—”

  He held up his hand. “Please,” he begged her. “Please. I need to ask you something. I need to know exactly how much trouble we are in.”

  She felt her face grow tight with apprehension. “Now what?”

  “What did you tell Ferus about your magical powers? He said they were locked up in a box somewhere and demanded that I bring them here so that you could use them to search for Ronan.”

  She opened her mouth; nothing came out. She brought one hand up to cover it and stared at him, appalled. “It was a story,” she whispered.

  “So I gathered.” His own face was suddenly colorless, the bruise vivid on his brow.

  “I just—I told him that because I was terrified of what he might do to me—and to Dacia—if I told him I have no powers at all to bring to Serre. I never thought—I thought that Ronan would be found, and then I would be married, and our children might inherit such powers, and so Ferus would never have to know that I—that I lied.”

  “I see.” He didn’t seem to; he stared very blankly at nothing for a breath before he asked her, “And did you tell him where this box full of your powers might be found?”

  “No. I said that Unciel had advised me to tell no one.”

  He winced, as at a sudden flare of pain. “Unciel.”

  “But that you would get it for me when you returned.”

  “Do I know where it is?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  He drew breath, sat down on a casement ledge. Beyond him she saw the broad expanse of granite narrowing to the point where the river separated into its twin strands. There, she realized dazedly, where stone parted water, Ronan had built his funeral pyre.

  “Then I’ll have to find it,” he said simply.

  “Take me with you.”

  “No. It is too dangerous.” He thought a moment, his eyes wide, contemplating possibilities. “Then I must find Ronan, too,” he added slowly, “whether he is alive or spellbound or dead. And bring him back with a convincing tale about the box full of your magic. What does it look like?”

  “I didn’t say. The powers themselves are hidden in a jewel in the box. My voice,” she added, remembering, “is the key to the box. It will open only for me.”

  “Inspired,” he commented. There was an unfamiliar edge to his voice, but she could hardly blame him.

  “What happens—what happens when you don’t bring the box?”

  “I am hoping that the king will be so overjoyed or so grieved to see his son that he’ll forget about your magical powers.”

  She swallowed dryly. “If he doesn’t? Or if you don’t find Ronan?”

  His jaw tightened, his hand sliding along his arm to ease it. “Someone will have to chance along and steal the box… Such things happen.”

  “What happened to your arm?”

  “I came too close to the ogre’s fire. Sorcery burns deeper and is harder to heal than fire.” He stood up again, and came to her, took her hand gently. “I will find your bridegroom and a tale to explain away your magic. Be patient, and try to stay out from under Ferus’s eye.” He paused a little, as though waiting for some word from her, something more inspiring than the tale she had told.

  But she only slid her free hand tightly over his and said, “Be careful. Please. This time find him.”

  The wizard was gone by twilight. She watched the hawk spiral into the purple sky, dropping lower and lower above the darkening trees until she could not separate him from the shadows. Much later, in the dead of night and maybe far too late, she woke herself out of a dream of the hawk and remembered that the wizard had watched her give her bow to Ronan; he had heard every word between them; he had been there, silent and unnoticed, from the moment they had met.

  I came too close to the ogre’s fire, he had said. Sorcery burns deep…

  “Gyre,” she said without sound, and felt as though the entire palace, rock-island and all, were on the verge of breaking loose in the relentless grip of wizardry to follow all that Ronan had loved over the edge of the falls.

  THIRTEEN

  Heartless, Ronan could not feel the firebird’s song. He noticed that absently as he left the witch’s house and began his search for the wizard Gyre. As he walked among the sleeping trees, he saw the firebird in all its beauty, a melting of feather and flame, sitting high atop a tree in the distance. It sang to a setting star. The pure, unearthly voice that had transfixed Ronan, stunned his heart and left him thoughtless, now sounded like any other rarest noise: mysterious yet familiar, belonging to the predictable patterns of life within the trees. It made no more impression on him than an owl hooting. The firebird fell silent as he walked beneath it without stopping. He did glance up at it, as though in the hollow where his heart had been, he heard an echo. Its long neck curved; a golden eye peered down, watching him pass.

  He had no idea where he was going or how far he was from his father’s palace. For his path, he trusted the witch. If she wanted the wizard, she must show Ronan the way home. He walked until the long night bore down on him even as the sun rose. His eyes flickered; he hurtled to meet the dark as it swept toward him. He slept where he fell.

  He woke sometime later, his body drenched in hot, late summer noon, his face in shadow. He lay baking on a sheet of dry, prickling needles, a seed cone under one cheek. He lifted his head with an effort, remembering piecemeal: the wizard, the witch, the firebird’s cage, what he said, what she said… He was on his way home… A trickle of liquid fire snagged his eye. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and saw the
firebird.

  His face had rested in its shadow. Perched on the ground, it loomed over him; its molten eyes, burning like the sun, seemed as alien and remote. He could have reached out and touched that rich tangle of iridescent plumes and what looked like windblown feathers of fire. Its long neck arched like a swan’s over its back. Its wings pooled around it in drifting ripples of plumes.

  He made a small sound, the beginning of a question. To his utter astonishment, it answered.

  “Prince Ronan.” Its voice was quite pleasing, he thought; it was as though a flute had spoken. “I have heard tales of your kindness to the owl, the toad, and the wolf. Will you help me?”

  They seemed like dreams now, all the speaking animals. He sat up groggily, brushed dust and needles out of his hair. “Perhaps,” he said guardedly, for he owed the firebird nothing, and already his eyes were searching above the trees for the familiar face of the cliff. Then he remembered that the firebird had shaded his face as he slept. A small thing, but the forest animals seemed to place great value on such small things. So he brought his attention back to the firebird. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “The firebird lays one egg and has one hatchling every seven years. The wind tossed my egg out of the nest. I am afraid that it will slip out of my claws if I try to carry it. Will you put my egg back into the nest for me?”

  It seemed a small thing, so he said, “Yes.”

  He followed the firebird for a long time through constantly changing shadow and light. It waited while he drank from a stream; he could hear it rustling fretfully on a branch above his head. He quelled his own impatience, for one direction seemed as good as another to him; they all looked alike. Finally the firebird stopped beneath a great tree that looked no different from any other tree, and brushed at needles and dry leaves beneath it. Hidden in a cradle of roots lay the most beautiful egg that Ronan had ever seen.

  It held all the shimmering hues of fire, webbed with a delicate overlay of gold. He picked it up. It covered his broad palm, and was as heavy as though the shell were carved of fiery jewels and threaded with true gold. The firebird laid her head on it, and he felt, through the warm, glowing shell, the quick fluttering of the heartbeat within.

  “It is still alive,” the firebird said, and sang something to the dream of itself within the egg.

  “Where is the nest?” Ronan asked, glancing through the branches above him. He had whiled away much of the day following the firebird. The slant of shadows began to wear at him; he wanted to find his way out of the forest before dark.

  “Climb,” the firebird said. “I’ll wait for you beside my nest.”

  It flew away before he could speak again. The nest could not be very high, he thought; the egg would have broken if it had fallen far. After a moment’s thought, he pulled off his remaining boot, put the egg gently into it, and tucked the boot into his tunic above the belt. Then he began to climb.

  He expected to see the firebird at every branch. But it was always higher; he would glimpse a drifting plume above the next branch, and then above the next. He climbed until, looking down, he could not see the ground through the thick green fans of branches. Looking up, he could not see the sun, only the firebird’s eye, blazing down at him. It was just above him, just a little farther. He raised a foot to the next branch, reached high and caught another with his hand, lifted his other foot, reached again, and again, until, half-blind with sweat and locked into the rhythms of the growing tree, he felt that he had been climbing most of his life. The firebird’s nest was on top of the world, somewhere in the clouds; at night stars had to veer around it as they wheeled across the sky. He climbed so high that he left everything behind except his name and the egg trembling with life against his breast.

  Finally he heard the firebird’s voice. “Here.”

  It perched next to his hand beside its nest. It was a palace of a nest, he saw as he leaned into the amber-scented bark and panted. The nest balanced between two strong boughs, an enormous, broad-brimmed hat fashioned out of spider-web, dried flowers, mosses, and vines. When he had caught his breath, he freed the boot from his tunic and tipped the egg gently into the nest. The firebird nuzzled it with its face, then shifted its body onto the nest, delicately uncoiling plumes and arranging feathers as it sat. Ronan dropped the boot tiredly, looked down to watch it fall.

  He saw the whole of the forest laid out like a tapestry beneath him: a background of green in which strange bright figures moved busily through their tales. Witches and hermits, ogres, foxes and languorous water sprites went their mysterious ways, stirring cauldrons, speaking to animals, cudgeling one another. Magic spiralled in scarlet and blue threads from their fingers; song unwound in gold from the throats of birds. Ronan, so high above it that the figures seemed no bigger than stitches in the tapestry, clung like an insect to the great tree, his mouth dry, his blood pounding against the wood. He scarcely knew what he saw, or where he was now, except above it all. He closed his eyes against the terrifying, overwhelming vision of Serre and heard the firebird again.

  “Look how far you have come. Don’t be afraid. Open your eyes.”

  He dragged them open to stare incredulously at the firebird and saw his father’s palace.

  It rose just across from him, its dark towers and flanks burnished with afternoon light. What he had thought must be his own blood thundering in his ears was the churning rail of water hollowing out the stones below and trying to leap back up the cliff. If he had not left his heart with Brume, he might have wept with relief at the sight of it, Or felt his heart grow shriveled and hard with memory and despair. As it was, he only felt his fear go the way of his boot. He was gazing at the palace, wondering how far away it might be on foot, when the wall of windows across the great hall blew apart like a thousand glass birds startled into flight. A ball of fire followed them. It swallowed all the luminous birds, then began to unravel, revealing its heart. Ronan glimpsed the helpless, plummeting body of a man among the flames just before he vanished.

  His muscles slackened with shock; he nearly slid out of the tree and fell to earth himself. He gripped the trunk, trembling, trying to make sense of the crazed image in his head. The wizard had killed his father. His father had killed the wizard. His father, deranged with frustration at the loss of his heir, had scoured the hall with his temper and flung some poor innocent out the window. Ronan found himself moving again, still shaken, weak with horror, one bare foot feeling awkwardly for the branch below.

  “I have to go home,” he told the firebird.

  It did not answer, only began what sounded like a lullaby. Ronan left it nesting and descended with the sun into dark. When he could feel no more branches beneath his feet, he closed his eyes and dropped to the bottom of the night.

  He woke sprawled on tree roots, thirsty, starving, with a stark memory in his head of the summer palace belching a fireball that turned into a man streaming fire as he began to fall.

  Mystified, he stumbled to his feet to search for water. Later, eating early apples in a clearing with the deer, he saw the cliff rising above the trees with its twin ribbons of water spilling down along the dark walls and towers, and the end of the road turning into its gates.

  He began the long walk home.

  The wizard found him just as he reached the road at the bottom of the falls. The moon would light his path up the steep, dangerous cliff, he hoped, when it got around to rising. He dared not stop. If he closed his eyes, the road might vanish, along with the falls and the palace; he could easily find himself back in the interminable maze of the witch’s mind. In the deafening pound of water, he would not have heard a dozen bellowing trolls waving cudgels at him, let alone a wizard who made no more sound than the small bats flitting through the twilight. Ronan had barely taken a step or two beyond the forest, up the sheer ascent of stone, when he heard a voice cut with startling clarity through the thunder of the falls.

  “Ronan. I expected to find you with the witch.”

  He stopped dead, as
though the words were a spell. The moon, igniting the water high above, spilled a swathe of light down the cliff, illumining a shadow on the road ahead of Ronan. Gyre, he thought, stunned. But of course the wizard would come to stop him before he showed his true face to his father.

  “I expected,” he said thinly, trying to think without words so that the wizard would not hear, “to find you with the princess.”

  The wizard was silent a breath; the shadow, under Ronan’s unwavering stare, inched down the road. “How did you get free of Brume?” Gyre wondered. “And you’re free of the firebird, as well. What did you do? What did you promise the witch?”

  “She flung me out of her cottage when I bit her. The cage broke, and I escaped. I have not seen the firebird.”

  “You have not answered me at all.” The shadow flowed over pebbles, silent and barely perceptible. “She let you see your way home. What did you promise her this time?” He waited; the shadow shrugged slightly at Ronan’s silence. “You’ll tell me. You’ll tell me everything I need to know before I take you back to your father and let him see that I have found you.” Ronan blinked. The shadow gave a soft laugh. “And then we will trade faces, you and I. You will leave Serre and all your memories of it behind you forever.” The shadow held up a hand at Ronan’s sudden movement. The wizard’s voice grew very soft, almost gentle. “You can’t run from me.” His shadow slid closer. Ronan, his eyes wide, unblinking, could only watch it come. Nothing else in the night seemed to move either, as though the world had been caught up in the wizard’s spell. Even the roar of water might have been only an echo of itself. “You simply have the misfortune of being in the way of something I want. Without you here, I can take it. And so you must forget everything you ever were…”

  The shadow flowed over Ronan, hiding even his face from the moon. Staring at the void limned by moonlight into the shape of the wizard’s face, Ronan could not move an eyelash; he could not feel himself breathe. He felt the shadow seep, as steadily and persistently as it had crossed stones, through his eyes, his bones, to lie like night across his thoughts.