In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The firebird sang. Ronan heard it from very far away, as he might have heard a star sing. He recognized it as he would have recognized a star, something incomprehensible but familiar. The distant flame, the distant song, would be all he could ever know about either star or firebird. But for an instant his thoughts, mingling with the wizard’s, revolved around that sweet fire; it turned his breath into song, his blood into fire, all of Serre in the firebird’s night into poetry.

  Then he saw moonlight again on the road ahead of him. Gyre’s face was finally visible as he stepped away from Ronan. Ronan stared at him, bewildered, beginning to shake. The wizard, his face taut, dreaming, seemed to have forgotten him. He walked around Ronan and down the road. Ronan turned and saw the firebird.

  She stood at the road’s end, in all her wild beauty of fire and ivory, bird and human. Her golden eyes, warm and beguiling with light, fixed on the wizard as she sang to him. Gyre went toward her without a word, without a faltering step. As he drew close, she withdrew, slowly, note by note, into the forest. The trees seemed to shift around her. Gyre stepped off the road; they opened to take him in.

  Ronan stood alone, stunned. All that the wizard had wanted, he had given away for a song. The prince had heard it once, he knew, but he remembered it only vaguely as he remembered love and loss, something that had happened to him once, but that now seemed as remote as someone else’s dream.

  He stirred finally, realizing that no distance he put between himself and the wizard would be far enough. The moon would set; the firebird would sleep; the wizard would awaken. All the warriors in the summer palace, all the king’s sorcery, would not be enough to keep Ronan safe from the wizard who wanted his face, his name, his heritage, his life Now, while Gyre was spellbound, lost to the world, was the time to rid Serre of the unscrupulous wizard and drag his bones to Brume to whistle in the wind on her roof.

  Ronan picked up the nearest likely stone and moved soundlessly toward the wizard, who was barely more than a shadow again, trailing after the singing woman. Before Ronan could step off the road, something pale and bulky, with a single round eye reflecting moonlight the color of bone, ran up behind the woman. Ronan caught a trenchant whiff of it and stopped. The cottage squatted there. Its door opened.

  The firebird, swaying dreamily backward as she lured the wizard forward, stepped across the threshold. Ronan saw her white hand beckoning from within. The wizard followed, bending his head as he walked into the little house of bone. The door closed. The moon, the stars, the wordless prince, stared as the great, splayed feet and burly calves of the witch hoisted the cottage off the ground and ran it back into the forests of Serre.

  After what seemed a very long time, Ronan dropped the rock and discovered a coherent thought.

  He whispered, “I am free.”

  No one lured him, trapped him, requested his help, made impossible demands. No one, at the moment, paid any attention to him at all. He could sleep in his own bed that night, if he got himself to the top of the cliff without falling off. He turned, began the climb.

  He stopped, after a step or two. There was something he had left to do, something he had forgotten… He couldn’t remember. Nothing seemed to be missing except his boots. Nothing, then, that was important. He began to walk again, up the road the moonlight carved for him across the stone.

  FOURTEEN

  Euan tended the wizard for days before Unciel spoke again.

  By then, the scribe had gotten used to ideas and images forming in his mind with the random inconsistency of dreams. He interpreted them as best he could, finding odd potions for the wizard, letting the raven out at dawn to feed, letting the cat in and out and in again, trying to keep up with the overladen bushes and vines and roots when Unciel began to fret about them and Euan found a monstrous garden growing in his head. The kitchen became crowded with beans, squashes, cabbages. Euan, kneeling to rummage through cupboards for elixirs and oils, dodged potatoes rambling overhead and fought for space among the beets and carrots piled on the floor. He barely knew how to boil water, which was moot since the wizard refused to eat. He would not let Euan send for a physician. He preferred his own noxiously hued remedies which smelled, Euan thought, acrid enough to dissolve bone. When he was not sleeping, he stared, his eyes feverish and distant, at the milky crystal with the jagged bolt of black suspended in its heart.

  One morning, Euan, sleeping on musty furs on the floor beside the wizard’s bed, woke with a vivid image of mushrooms sprouting in his head.

  He sat up stiffly and cast a bleary eye at Unciel, who looked asleep with his eyes open. Or dead, Euan thought with sudden horror. Then the pale eyes flicked to him, intense, unblinking. Unciel wanted something. Euan waited. But his head was still full of mushrooms; he couldn’t see around them. He hadn’t been out of his robe in days; his eyes felt as prickly as his chin; he had barely washed. No wonder, he thought mordantly, he was growing fungus. Then he realized what the wizard wanted and blinked.

  “Mushrooms?”

  Unciel sighed faintly. That shape, he informed Euan silently. That shade of yellow. No other. Along the wall at the back of the garden a patch had finally appeared. Not the ones with specks of white on their caps. Those were poisonous.

  “I’m not picking mushrooms for you,” Euan said flatly.

  Please.

  “No.”

  Euan.

  “No.”

  He felt the wizard’s despair then, sharp and sudden as a blade; the image frayed in his head. Appalled, Euan stumbled to the bedside, looked down at the frail, exhausted figure. “I’m afraid,” he whispered, “that I’ll kill you.”

  The mushrooms filled his mind again. Look, they insisted. Look.

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for!”

  Then he saw how long and straight their stems were, how their caps fit close, an even, bright, liquid yellow, like a buttercup. He put his fingers to his eyes, rubbed them wearily. “I never liked that shade of yellow,” he said between his teeth.

  He turned, trying to empty his head of everything but mushrooms and the sudden resolution to find a physician before he killed Unciel with his own remedies. Euan went to the kitchen, flung the wizard’s harvest apron over his head and headed for the back door. The front door opened abruptly. The raven squawked. Euan stopped, blinking incredulously at the king walking alone through the cottage toward the barefoot scribe with his hair in elf-knots, a filthy apron dangling from his neck and mushrooms in his eyes everywhere he looked.

  “My lord,” he breathed.

  “Where is Unciel?” the king demanded.

  “He’s in—he’s—”

  “In his garden?”

  “In his bed. He’s very ill.”

  The king’s brown face lost a shade or two of color. His voice rose. “Why wasn’t I told? Why haven’t you sent for someone?”

  “He won’t let me. He said—”

  “Take me to him.”

  “My lord,” Euan babbled desperately, finding words suddenly as elusive and exasperating as the fruit flies in the kitchen. “He is extremely weak. He was trying to summon Gyre when something happened—he overtaxed himself.”

  The king gave an explosive exclamation. He whirled then stood looking bewilderedly down a long hall, far too long by Euan’s estimation, and full of closed doors, ranked like guards on both sides and all exactly alike.

  “Which is it?” Arnou stepped forward, flung one open in exasperation to reveal an empty room. “Show me!”

  “Stop!” Euan cried in terror, and the king turned, dumbfounded, staring at the scribe who dared command him. The scribe swallowed until words unstuck themselves and said, his voice trembling, “You’re forcing him to use magic. He’s not strong enough. Please. Let him rest.” Arnou turned an interesting shade of plum; Euan braced himself. Then he heard himself speak again, so steadily that he was certain the wizard must have turned him into someone else. “What he needs is mushrooms.”

  The king’s mouth tightened, opened
again to expel the word. “Mushrooms.”

  “Yellow ones. In the garden.”

  “I came to hear about my daughter in Serre and you are talking to me about mushrooms?”

  “They are connected,” Euan said, shaken but inflexible. Arnou glanced once more at the impossibly long hallway. Then he dropped his head in one hand.

  “You sound like my father.”

  “Please, my lord, come into the garden,” Euan begged.

  With an eye on the unyielding doors. “He has been straining his powers to the utmost to help you. He thinks the mushrooms will heal him. I’m afraid that I will poison him.”

  “Why didn’t he—Why didn’t you—”

  “Because he says no to everything. No and no and no. To everything except what he wants.”

  The king loosed a breath, stood silently a moment as though he were pleading with the doors. No and no and no, said one shut door after another, and he turned his baffled, troubled gaze to the garden. “I used to know something about mushrooms,” he said after a moment. “You shouldn’t poison Unciel by yourself.”

  Euan closed his eyes. “Thank you.”

  They found the mushrooms near the back wall, a broad patch behind a few squash vines. “No white speckles,” Euan said tersely, as they searched through them. “Tight-fitting caps.”

  “I once thought gold should be this color,” Arnou said, picking at them more carelessly than Euan could bear to watch. “Has he heard anything at all from Gyre?”

  “Yes. Gyre said that all was well.”

  The king stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Unciel didn’t believe Gyre.”

  “Why not?”

  “My lord, that one is speckled.”

  The king tossed it into the squash vines, still staring at Euan. “Why not?” he demanded again. “Why shouldn’t he believe the man he chose to guard my daughter?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Euan answered as vaguely as he dared. “He only said that nothing is ever all well in Serre.”

  “It’s a simple matter of marriage. People marry as often as the sun rises. What could be difficult about that?”

  “I don’t know. You can put them in here,” he added, proffering an apron pocket.

  “I wondered why you were wearing that. Show them to Unciel before you cook them; he should be able to see what he shouldn’t eat.” His face had cleared somewhat; the storm went rolling and grumbling elsewhere. He had found what Gyre had said consoling, to Euan’s relief, and the scribe refrained, as they knelt together culling the patch for the brightest yellows, from mentioning blackened crystals or sorcery or anything else remotely ambiguous. The king glanced at the sun after a few moments and rose, brushing at dirt.

  “Send for me when Unciel is strong enough to speak to me. I won’t be patient long. And send a message to my aunt, Lady Tassel, if you poison him. She’s the only one left in the family who can do anything at all with magic.” He stopped, his face growing taut again, as he contemplated the princess in Serre. “I hope,” he said slowly, “that’s not what Ferus was looking for in Sidonie.”

  Euan felt his own skin chill. “He’ll have all of Dacia for magic,” he protested, and found himself unconvinced by his own argument.

  “He’ll have Dacia one way or another,” Arnou said pithily. “You must get Unciel on his feet again. If something is amiss and Ferus has betrayed me, he’ll face in Serre whatever magic there is left in Dacia. Tell Unciel that he may not have fought his last battle yet.”

  Euan showed the mushrooms to Unciel, who gave them a weary, cursory glance and showed the scribe what to do with them. Euan chopped them into tiny pieces and boiled them to a garish stew. Terrified, he held a cupful to Unciel’s lips and watched him swallow it. The wizard slept for hours afterward without moving, hardly breathing, it seemed to Euan, who sat up with him for hours. But his cooking did not kill the wizard. When Euan started out of nightmares the next morning, as stiff as the chair he had slept in, he found Unciel awake and gazing into the flawed crystal in his hand.

  “What is that?” Euan asked. Unciel looked at him. No and no and nothing, Euan expected to hear again; the wizard’s eyes looked veiled, secretive. But to his surprise, Unciel spoke.

  “A haphazard way to speak to someone across distances.” He paused, resting between sentences. “I was calling Gyre. Something happened.” He paused again; his eyes filmed with memory and pain. The crystal slid out of his hand; Euan caught it as it rolled. “The black,” Unciel added with effort, “is sorcery.”

  Euan peered at the jagged bolt frozen within the crystal. “Whose?” he asked incredulously. “Gyre’s?”

  “No. Someone was attacking Gyre at the moment I touched his mind. I felt the fire.”

  Euan swallowed. No and no and nothing… “Then you were right,” he said, his skin prickling. “Something went wrong in Serre. Is Gyre dead?”

  “He shouldn’t be. Not from this.” Unciel stirred a little, restively. “But now we know even less than we did before we knew anything at all. Help me up.”

  Now what? Euan wondered warily. But the wizard only performed a few ablutions and then crawled back into bed. He fell asleep again. Euan wandered out to the kitchen and surveyed the disorderly profusion of vegetables laying siege to cupboards and chairs and floor. A cabbage fell off the table under the weight of his gaze.

  He took up a knife and went to work.

  He made a great stew of everything he could possibly fit into the wizard’s largest cauldron, including, he suspected, a few beetles and worms. As he chopped, his thoughts kept battering at the door of conjecture. How much danger was the princess in? Who would tell the truth, if not Gyre? And if not Gyre, to whom could the princess turn? His knife slipped off a turnip, stuck in the cutting board. He stared raptly at it, seeing himself riding over the mountains into Serre, seeking the princess himself, finding out exactly what was going on. I could go, he thought, pulling the knife free, then driving it with resolution into the turnip. I will go. The king’s physician could take care of Unciel. Someone would surely lend Euan a horse for such a journey. The king’s library would have a map. He had money in the box beneath his bed; he rarely bought anything but food and ale and books. Like Unciel, he would write his adventures down as he went. He would have adventures. After climbing the highest mountains, crossing the interminable forests, scaling the steepest cliff, battling witches and ogres, he would appear to the princess as marvelous and unexpected as any magic in Serre. Her violet eyes, drenched with the hopeless tears of many weeks, would turn to him as flowers to the sun.

  When the vegetables had simmered themselves beyond identification, he went to see if Unciel was awake. The wizard’s eyes seemed oddly bright. Euan touched his face worriedly, felt the fever still warring through his body.

  “I should take you to the palace,” he said grimly. “Let the king take care of you.”

  “No.” The wizard shifted fretfully at the thought. “You’re doing all that the king’s physician could do for me. And I don’t want to talk to Arnou yet.”

  Euan was silent, caught in a tangle of impulses. The scribe who was at that moment riding so bravely alone over the mountains looked back at the scribe standing at the sickbed of an aged, weakened wizard, wondering dubiously how to interest him in a mouthful of soggy vegetables. “The king wants to see you as soon as you are strong enough to speak to him,” he warned Unciel. “He won’t wait long.”

  “He must wait,” Unciel said inflexibly, “until I find Gyre.”

  “What if Gyre is still in danger? If he can’t protect the princess? If he can’t even tell you that he can’t?” The wizard’s pale eyes slid, glittering, to Euan’s face, more ice than ash now, but still as opaque. Euan heard himself gabble on, apprehensive and scarcely coherent. “If you can’t find him, someone must go. Someone must see exactly what danger the princess is in. The king will go to war to get her back if something has gone wrong. He told me to tell you that. He wants
you strong enough to fight for Dacia.”

  Unciel made a soft, improbable noise, somewhere between laughter and a snort. “Arnou will lose his kingdom along with his daughter if he goes to war with Ferus. And I haven’t the strength to deal even with Ferus’s crude sorcery. As you see.”

  Euan’s mouth hung; nothing emerged. After a moment he transferred his stare from Unciel to the crystal on the table “That,” he whispered. “That was Ferus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Attacking Gyre?”

  “Yes.” Euan sat down abruptly in the chair, sending the one-eyed cat scrambling out from under him. “Every spell,” Unciel continued, “contains a trace of the maker’s heart. If you can look closely enough into it, you can thread it back to the impulse and the mind that conceived it.”

  “Then someone must go,” Euan said, his voice sounding oddly thin, unfamiliar to his ears. “Now. The king can send someone here to care for you if you refuse to go to the palace.”

  “It may be that all is proceeding as planned for the princess,” Unciel said, paying no discernible attention to Euan. “That only Gyre is in trouble. The princess may be happily married by now, for all we know. She may have sent her own messengers back to tell her father.”

  “Then why—” Euan paused, thumbing his brow perplexedly. He watched the scribe fight his way across Serre to rescue a princess, only to find that the princess did not want rescuing at all, and could not imagine what he was doing there. Too many tales, he thought. Too many possibilities. And Unciel explained nothing, only made matters more complicated. “Why would Ferus attack Gyre?”

  “Because Gyre annoyed him, because Gyre has something that Ferus wants, or, just as likely, because Gyre was trying to teach Ferus something and the king was careless. With your help I can find out.” He added gently at Euan’s silence, “You have no idea how grateful I am that you are with me now. I don’t know who else I would be able to trust with such matters. You have been as steadfast and courageous as any great warrior in the face of illness, uncertainty, magic, and even the King of Dacia. And you have taken the time to care for the things that I love as well. Thank you for staying with me. Perhaps, after we have sorted all these matters out, I’ll find some way to repay you.”