In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Did you see it again?” he asked the king.

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to go—”

  “No,” Ferus said tersely. “You will stay here under the queen’s eye. She was first to recognize the imposter, and first to be certain of you, despite her confusing ways. I’ll take a company into the forests. If the wizard wants to wear the ruling face of Serre, let him look out of mine. Let him try.” He paused, his single eye dubious, as though he were studying the face of Serre himself. “The witch,” he said abruptly. “How powerful is she? Can she keep the wizard in her cottage?”

  Ronan, considering the witch, dipped a hand into the pitcher, dragged wet fingers through his dusty hair. “She said she wanted to boil his bones for broth and drink the magic in them.”

  The smoldering eye contemplated that with interest. “Can she do that?”

  “I don’t know. At times she seems almost stupid, at others…” He remembered the astonishing sight of the firebird singing the wizard through the open door of the cottage made of bone, its round green window, silvered with moonlight, flashing like an eye as it watched. “In the end she got them both. At such times, she seems almost subtle. But subtle enough to deal with Gyre? I don’t know. Don’t ride down any white hens while you’re in the forest.”

  “I’ll give her all the white hens in my kingdom if she kills that wizard,” the king said grimly. “I wanted Gyre to help us fight that monster. Now we may be faced with fighting both of them at once.”

  “Maybe my mother can remember some way in a tale to outwit the monster.”

  “She doesn’t think such a thing belongs to Serre.”

  “Dacia, then?”

  “The princess did not seem to recognize it. And why would the King of Dacia send that for a wedding gift? He might have sent it instead of his daughter. But not with her.”

  “He sent the wizard,” Ronan said evenly. “Perhaps that was the king’s plan all along: to marry his daughter to Gyre and take Serre for himself.”

  Ferus’s empty eye swung toward the casements, contemplated the invisible land beyond the distant mountains. “You’ll marry her,” he said tersely, “if I have to drink the wizard’s marrow myself to defeat him. What possessed you to go chasing after firebirds and letting Gyre into your place, and your face, and nearly into your bed?”

  Ronan lifted a shoulder. “I was possessed,” he said simply. “Now I hardly remember why.”

  “You were possessed by ghosts,” the king reminded him harshly. “Past as well as magic.”

  He remembered the funeral fire burning all night long, illumining the dark, swirling water, eating at his heart until there was nothing left at dawn but ash. It seemed something that had happened to another man, a sad tale his mother might have told him long ago. “Yes,” he said, and pulled himself painfully to his feet. “But past is past. The Princess from Dacia is the future of Serre. The sooner we can safely marry, the better. I need a bath.”

  The king seemed to be gazing at him out of both eyes, then, the blind eye trying to see what the seeing eye missed.

  “What,” he wondered, “did that witch do to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I never saw myself in you before.”

  He sent Ronan to wash and dress, accompanied by a dozen guards and as many servants. When the prince returned to the tower, he found his breakfast and the queen. He stood beside her, eating bread and cold meat, while they watched Ferus lead a heavily armed company out of the gate. When the riders disappeared behind the falls, the queen turned to Ronan.

  “I have sent for the princess,” she said. “I thought that this might be a good time for you to talk.”

  Ronan settled himself to watch the mirrors. In one a bluebird flew through a brilliant shaft of light to a high bough. In another, the king’s standard-bearer appeared from behind the falls, the standard limp with spray. “About what?”

  “About—” Her voice faltered. “About yourselves. About your marriage.”

  “What—” He paused as the door opened. The princess entered, more sedately dressed than he had seen her last, her eyes oddly swollen and wincing at the light. She greeted them courteously and expressionlessly, then stood gazing blankly at a mirror.

  “Sit down, my lady Sidonie,” Ronan said as politely. “My mother thinks we should talk.”

  She brushed a few dried moth wings and an old bone off a stool and sat without taking her eyes from the mirrors. “What is there to talk about?”

  “Exactly,” he began with relief, “what I—”

  “I am a prisoner in this palace, my guards and servants stand outside your walls as bait for that monster, and as your wife I will have no choice but to do what you want. What do you want me to say?”

  Ronan opened his mouth, paused, and scratched one brow with a thumbnail. “My father isn’t using them as bait,” he said reasonably, tackling the easiest argument. “Only as a kind of warning signal. Someone must do it.”

  “He makes them stand unarmed! They’ll be killed! I travelled for weeks with them—they are not only guards but my hunters, my cooks and drivers—they brought me here safely and now they must die? Because the king is afraid to give them weapons?”

  “Well. It’s likely that weapons would be all but useless anyway. So why—” He stopped as the princess flung herself off the stool to stand at the window, her eyes reddening as she stared across the forests to the high, jagged peaks awash with light. Ronan said patiently to her back, “I am trying to be fair. You’ll get used to my father’s ways.”

  “Ronan.” The queen’s voice cut sharply at him, cold and edged with astonishment. “What is the matter with you? You came out of that forest as heartless as your father.”

  Ronan looked at her. He drew a long breath as her eyes held his. It seemed as though that wintry light in them unburied memory like something lost amid a shower of leaves. “Yes,” he said slowly, seeing it finally, clearly. “I remember. I had to leave something with the witch, so that she would show me the road home, and I could find Gyre for her. It must be something, she said, that I would find worth returning for.”

  “What did you leave with her?”

  “My heart.”

  The princess turned, stared at him. The queen closed her eyes.

  “No,” she whispered. “You are not free. But you cannot go back into the forests—you can’t! I will not lose you again!”

  “But you see I tricked the witch,” he said, surprised that he had to explain. “She really believed that I might return for it. I could not, at that moment, think of anything I wanted less.” He saw the women, their faces stunned, give one another an incomprehensible look. “It’s not important,” he told them. “Let the witch keep it. I can live without it.”

  He heard the princess make a small mouse’s squeak in the back of her throat. But she said nothing; neither did the queen. In silence they watched the tranquil, deadly forests within the mirrors.

  EIGHTEEN

  Euan stood beside Unciel’s bed, watching the wizard watch his shadow in a bowl of water. The bowl, a plain, serviceable wash-basin, was balanced on a tray across the wizard’s knees. Euan, more experienced now with the vagaries of magic and with Unciel’s frailty, flicked a dubious eye at the water. It did not so much as tremble. Unciel was as motionless, gazing without a blink at his sunlit reflection. Such simple magic, he had explained to Euan, required light. They would not be able to hear Gyre, but they would see him. He would move across the face of the water as easily as a dream across the eye of night. They would at least know where he was, if not why.

  Why might easily prove self-explanatory, if Gyre happened to be standing in a palace talking to Ferus or Sidonie. Things might be that simple, Euan thought, daring for the moment to hope. All might be peaceful in Serre: so they could tell the king, and then all would be peaceful in Dacia. He blinked as color seeped across the water, staining it with sudden swirls and clouds. Colors massed themselves into the greens and
browns of enormous trees, the forest floor, gilded here and there with a sudden splash of light that had slipped past the massive boughs. Euan glanced at Unciel. The wizard, his eyes wide, blind to Dacia, seemed undisturbed at the sight of trees instead of palace.

  Perhaps, Euan conjectured with wild abandon, Gyre had finished what he had been asked to do and was on his way back to Dacia.

  Unciel moved.

  The movement was little more than expression trembling across his face, a line or two deepening. He seemed to be gazing at the water now instead of into his private vision of Gyre. He made a soft sound. Euan shifted weight from one foot to the other, disturbed without knowing why. The water, images still drifting across it, had begun to quiver slightly, as at the wizard’s heartbeat. A flock of yellow birds swarmed suddenly out of shadow, burned into light, then swooped away beyond the rim of the bowl. A wolf, shoulders sunken inward, tail down, slunk like smoke around a trunk and vanished.

  Someone moved through the shadows into light, turned to glance out of the water at Euan.

  He found himself sitting on the floor, clinging to it as though for an instant the world had rocked like a boat. He had to grope for breath. His face felt wintry, bloodless and scoured. For some reason, he was dripping. He wiped at water on his face bewilderedly, before he realized where it must have come from. Then he felt his heart, which had stopped for a moment, leap painfully to life, and he pushed himself to his knees to see the wizard.

  Unciel was still sitting upright, though the tray was askew on his knees, and the bowl of water had flung itself over the side of the bed. He was frowning deeply. His breathing sounded like a bird trapped in a wall, flurried, erratic. Euan touched him after a moment. The eyes that turned to him belonged to a stranger, no one he knew, or ever wanted to know, in any world.

  Then they changed, became Unciel’s again, grim and very troubled.

  Euan whispered, because that seemed safest, “Who was that?”

  Unciel drew a deep breath, calmed the frantic wings in his chest. He pushed the tray off his knees wearily and dropped back. “It was Gyre.”

  “Gyre.” The name came out in a sheep’s bleat. The wizard looked at him again, seemed to see him this time.

  “You’re all wet. I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll dry,” Euan said tersely. “That wasn’t Gyre. That wasn’t what you sent to guard the princess in Serre.”

  “No. The thing itself is dead. I killed it. Gyre is wearing its face.”

  “Gyre,” Euan said. His voice had vanished again; he had to push it out in dry pebbles, in hollow reeds. “Is wearing the face of the monster you killed. The one whose heart he stole.”

  “Yes.”

  “The thing that came so close to killing you, that turned you into a crippled recluse in Dacia. Gyre is wandering around in the forests of Serre scaring birds with its face.” Water was runnelling into his eyes; he pushed trembling fingers through his sodden hair, drew it back. “Could we venture a guess why? Perhaps he’s lost his mind?”

  “Perhaps,” Unciel said faintly, “he’s lost his heart.”

  Euan swallowed drily, his eyes clinging to the wizard’s frail face, with his skin like old parchment and the lines running like scars down the sides of his mouth. “Now,” he heard himself say abruptly. “Now would be the time to tell it. What exactly is that thing? It looked at me across Serre, out of water, and I knew I was dead.”

  “It is Gyre,” Unciel insisted. “Not some nameless thing.”

  “If you die in this bed, it will be some nameless thing alive again in the world, and none of us knowing what to call it. What if it forgets that it is Gyre? What do we do with it then?” Unciel was silent. Euan turned, slid down to lean against the bed, staring numbly at the overturned bowl, waiting. After a moment or five, he closed his eyes. “Please,” he begged. “If you want me to help you with this, then help me to understand. What is ghost and what is Gyre and what about him makes you care so?”

  He heard the wizard draw a cobweb breath, and opened his eyes. Unciel spoke finally, his voice even, distant. “Write it down.”

  “Yes.” He looked around quickly, before the wizard changed his mind; his eyes fell on the little leatherbound book on the table with the quill marking a page. He reached for it, his hands shaking again. “In this?”

  “Anything. That will do. It is my garden record.”

  Euan fumbled for a blank page among the lists of herbs and sketches of vegetable plots. He pulled himself back on the chair, opened the ink jar.

  “You’re still wet,” the wizard said suddenly. “You should—”

  “Later,” Euan said tersely. He wiped a stray drop of water from his cheekbone, sucked the quill nib clean, and dipped it. “Tell me.”

  “I went north,” Unciel began, “after I stole the heart back from Gyre. I felt it follow me, even when I flew in bird shape, or travelled for days as invisibly as cold. It knew me always. It recognized its heart.”

  Hours later, Euan still sat in the chair beside Unciel’s bed. The light had faded; he could barely see the words he was writing in the wizard’s book. His hands were cold; his nose was cold; he kept expecting his breath to come out in a mist above the pages. The wizard, hidden beneath bedclothes, was little more than a ragged, halting, unfamiliar voice, and a vague face in the dusk. Deep in his tale, he scarcely noticed the difference between day and night. Euan dipped his pen; it shivered in his fingers, dropped a pearl of ink on the paper. He left it there, scrawling past it, hunched and miserable, and wishing with every word he wrote that it might be the last.

  “The way to destroy a heart,” the voice said, “is to make it unrecognizable to the one possessing it. I know that now. The creature who fought me so furiously for its heart nearly destroyed mine.”

  Euan huffed a breath at his chilled fingers and wrote grimly. He tried not to think about what he wrote. Words were words, he told them: patterns in ink on a page; as such they were powerless, they meant nothing to him. They could not heal, they could not harm, they could not live or die. If he stared them down until all meaning wore away, then he could keep writing.

  He had thought the wizard’s last battle would be a tale of terror and courage, feats of unimaginable magic performed with heart-stopping skill and passion, good and evil as clearly defined as midnight and noon, a heroic battle for life and hope against the howling monster that left death in every footprint and ate life to fill the unfillable void where its heart had been.

  Instead he was trapped in the middle of something grisly, ugly, dreary, that ate into his own heart word by word until he could scarcely stand to look at himself. He could not bear looking at Unciel. So he left the candles unlit for as long as possible, preferring a twilight world where he did not have to watch the terrifying changes in the wizard’s face.

  “How can I describe what it did? Think of the known monsters in the world. The dragons with their fierce and deadly beauty. Their fires destroy the body but not the mind. The ogre who has torn his children apart does not become you when you fight him. He may tear at your body, but he can only kill you, he cannot change you. The renegade wizard is a subtle, dangerous force whom you must outwit to stay alive. Your heart is challenged, but not corrupted. A cherished innocence might be lost, but knowledge and experience which might be of far more value take its place. The knight battling the seven-headed serpent or the army of trolls may have to face his own cowardice as well. He changes the way he sees himself; the serpent does not change him, nor the trolls. Do you understand that?”

  Euan grunted. I’ve never fought a troll, he wanted to say to the wizard. I’ve never faced a dragon. But mostly he wanted the wizard to get on with it; he wanted to understand as little as possible. Unciel took his noise for assent and got on.

  “This monster, when it could not kill me, reached into me and broke my heart.

  “We had been battling one another in the coldest, northernmost parts of the world for days. Years. I had drawn it even deeper into those rem
ote realms where there was not much alive for it to kill. Someone watching would have seen us as little more than wind-whipped snow and the wake of bloody, frozen animals. I kept the stolen heart close to me, as close as bone, as my own heart. I had to kill the heart before the monster would die. It was like trying to kill stone, or dark. How can you kill something that has never been alive?

  “It gave me a clue when it tore my own heart in two. Why don’t you light the candles?”

  Why don’t you light, Euan wrote, then stopped reluctantly. He was hunched over the book, seeing little more than straight dark lines of words. “I can see,” he said shortly.

  “So can I,” Unciel said. “You’re trembling.”

  “It’s cold. I mean, your tale is.”

  “You’re afraid of me.”

  Euan was silent, gazing down at the pages. He raised his head finally, hesitantly, and saw with relief how dark it had grown. The wizard’s face was as formless as cobweb in the shadows. The cobweb spoke when he did not.

  “Do you want to stop? Should I leave it unfinished?”

  Yes, I want it to stop, Euan pleaded. Then he heard himself say, horrified, “No, you can’t leave me here.”

  “Where are you?”

  Lost, he thought, in some bloody, frozen waste. The last thing alive, watching a pair of monsters battle each other and hoping that neither one looks in my direction.

  The wizard made a soft sound, as though he had heard. Euan put the book and pen down, stood up stiffly. “You should eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Neither am I. But you need your strength for this.”

  “When it’s finished, I’ll eat.”

  “Is there an end to it?” Euan breathed.

  “Soon,” the wizard said, as he had each time Euan had asked. “You can’t write in the dark.”

  Twin flames sprang from the brace of candles on the table. Euan sat down again, trying not to look at the wizard. But the face on the bed, divided raggedly between flickering light and shadow, haunted his thoughts. What could be worse, he asked himself, than what he imagined? He let his eyes be drawn. He felt his skin grow icy, his blood run cold, as though the raging winter winds were suddenly in the room, and he was something pale and small in the snow, transfixed and utterly helpless. The stranger in the bed looked as if it ate snow-bears whole. The bones of its face were broad and flat like slabs of stone; its eye-sockets were empty pools of dark. It moved restlessly beneath the covers, struggling against its shape. If it breaks free, Euan thought numbly, I’m dead. A scribe from the king’s scriptorium, frozen to death by a tale.