In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I don’t know, Ronan. How far did you get?” The odd impatience in her voice, verging on exasperation, puzzled him. He opened his mouth; she did not give him a chance to answer. “You have grown as blind as your father, seeing the world out of one eye and missing it entirely with the other. What exactly do you think she has gone to look for? And why do you think she cannot live without it?”

  “She has gone looking for my heart,” he said, for that much was clear. “I have no idea why she can’t live without it. I can.”

  “She may die, and all you can do is sit there wondering who in the palace to punish for the fact that she is gone. Perhaps—I know this is a foolish thought and I am equally foolish to consider it—you are to blame?”

  He studied her, trying to understand. She did not look foolish. She looked furious, grim and formidable, ready to bellow herself, if he could not make himself immediately comprehend what he had done wrong.

  “But I’ve done nothing,” he told her, and forced himself to stand. “Neither have you. You should have told us as soon as you received this.”

  “I tried.”

  “You sent for me. You didn’t tell the king. It’s late now; we’d have to ride with torches, search the forest in the dark. My father will be—”

  “Ronan.” Again her voice stopped him. It seemed gentler now, as though she spoke to someone else, another Ronan she once had known. “Do you trust me with matters of Serre? Its tales, its history?”

  The matter of Serre was all around them, in her lively tapestries, her books. “Of course I do,” he told her, for it was true. Even his father trusted her in such matters, usually without question.

  “Then go.” She held his eyes. “Just go and find her. Alone. Now. Because all I can tell your father, if you don’t, is that you belong to Brume, you have never truly left her, and the King of Serre’s only son and heir is still imprisoned in one of the witch’s spells, still doing her bidding in spite of all your protests that you are free. Go and find that princess before Brume does. And don’t come back without your heart, because if you do I will not recognize you as my son.”

  She left him, he realized, with not a word to say. So he said nothing, simply bowed his head before he turned, limping unsteadily, feeling oddly bruised again as though, like his father, she had tested him, only she had seen what the one-eyed king had missed.

  So he rode back down into the forests of Serre, carrying a torch to see the road and well aware that the fire which might draw the princess to him could also attract the monster even his father feared. It might also catch the king’s eye as he watched his mirrors. But Ronan was fairly certain that his father, worn with long days, longer nights, and constant worry over his son, was sleeping for once. Gyre crossed the prince’s mind. He reined, nearly turned back at the memory of the wizard who had waited for him at the bottom of the road. But even if the wizard had escaped from Brume, which seemed more than likely, he couldn’t take much more from Ronan than Ronan’s mother would if the prince returned without whatever it was he had left with Brume. If the queen refused to recognize Ronan, neither would the king, and Ferus would show no more mercy to his true son than he had to the false bridegroom.

  The prince reached the forest without drawing the attention of anything beyond the eyes of a few night-hunters, who kept well out of his torchlight. He stopped among the trees to think. If he found Brume first, then he could retrieve his heart as well as rescue the princess if she managed to find Brume’s cottage before him. If the princess had not yet found the witch, so much the better. From what Ronan remembered of Brume, he might have to leave an eye or a hand behind in return for Sidonie’s life. If he chanced across the princess first, he could send her back to the palace on his horse, along with a solemn promise not to come home without his heart. That should satisfy her. And his mother. He could remind Brume that she held his heart hostage in return for the wizard Gyre, and she had already captured him. She had no further use for it; in all fairness she should give it back to Ronan. He had no idea if Brume had ever been fair about anything in her very long life. But that heart was worth a kingdom now, instead of nothing, and he would do what he had to, if not what she demanded, to get it back.

  He rode into the heart of night. The moon grew distant and cold, and even the hunters slept. In the barren clearing where he had first crossed the witch’s path, he saw her cottage. Its round window was dark. The hens were silent. He dismounted wearily, as the cottage loosed a breath of rotting bone over him. Armed now with sword and fire, and prepared to kill if he had to, he drew his blade and pounded with the hilt against the door.

  “Brume! I am Ronan of Serre and I have returned for my heart.”

  He had to pound and shout a few more times before he heard the chickens cluck. Something hit the floorboards hard; an incoherent grumbling followed. The door opened. The witch appeared, scratching an armpit and yawning hugely. She was quite lovely, which caused the sword to falter with a blink of torchlight before Ronan forced it forward to touch the pearly skin in the hollow of her throat. Her hair drifted past her knees, a rich, tangled gold. Above the green lenses sliding down her nose, her eyes were blue as cornflowers. She squinted at him, then pushed the lenses up with a slender finger.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “I have come back for my heart.”

  She seemed oblivious of the sword at her throat, only argued, “You didn’t bring me the wizard.”

  “I was watching,” he said evenly, “when Gyre walked into your house. You shut the door and ran away with him. If I had not been there for him to trap, he would not have been there for you. What did you do with him? Is he dead?”

  She shrugged a little; a lacy sleeve slid off her shoulder. “He was too much trouble,” she answered vaguely. “So now I have neither my white hen, nor the firebird, nor the wizard. I have only your heart, for what it’s worth, to repay me for the hen you killed.”

  “I want my heart back.”

  “I want my hen back.”

  “Enough,” he said between his teeth. A streak of fire ran down the blade as he readied it. “Give me back my heart or I will kill you here and now and burn your house and all your hens when you are dead.”

  She gave him a long look out of the corners of her eyes, down the length of the blade. The steps he stood on vanished suddenly and he fell with a thump that jarred all the drowsing pain awake in his leg. He swallowed a cry, dropped the torch, and caught his balance on the blade, desperately reaching out to catch hold of her threshold with his other hand before the door slammed and the cottage began to run.

  But the door stayed open. The witch spat on the torch to put it out, and turned back into her house, grumbling. “Well, you’ll have to come in and find it. You’re not the only one to leave your heart with me, but you’re the only one who has ever come back for it. I can’t be expected to tell them all apart.”

  She waited expressionlessly, her arms folded, not giving him a step to climb on. He hoisted himself up across her threshold, gritting his teeth and bearing the pain rather than lowering the blade between them and helping himself up with it. The chickens muttered anxiously on their roosts on one side of the tiny cottage; sullen embers in her hearth pulsed and snapped on the other. Beyond the witch, the shadows gathered like folds of heavy, dark fabric.

  On his feet finally, he asked her tensely, “Where is it?”

  She gestured, yawning again. “Back there. In the dark. Go on, choose one so I can go back to bed.”

  He shook his head. “You go. Find it for me.”

  She rolled her eyes and heaved a sigh. Then she faded where she stood. He was turning edgily, his sword cutting a swathe through the rank smells, when she reappeared carrying what looked like an armful of glittering starfire.

  “Here,” she said crossly and tossed it at him. He raised one hand awkwardly to catch it; it melted into him and vanished. He took a breath or two, wondering if it would try to tear him piecemeal, like one of his fathe
r’s spells. Then he found himself thinking about goats.

  There seemed to be an entire herd of them in his head, along with the goatherd, a barefoot, comely boy picking flowers on the slope where the goats fed. The goatherd held the flowers out, smiling, his eyes streaked with summer light, opaque as the golden eyes of the black goat behind him.

  “I don’t think,” Ronan heard himself begin breathlessly, as the heart within him opened like a flower.

  “No?” the witch said, and drew the heart back out of him in a long scarf of sparkling light. She vanished again, returned with another armful, her pipe lit now and adding to the stench. “Try this one.”

  This time, he heard a voice after what seemed an eon or two of some hushed, tranquil darkness, a night without stars, without sound, or deep motionless water in which he lay without thought, without dreams. “I think,” the voice said, far above the water, beyond the night, “I’m dead.”

  “Really?”

  He blinked and saw the witch again, expelling little, rapid clouds from her pipe as she frowned at the gleam in her arms. She tossed the heart into the fire. Ronan watched it burst in a dazzle of stars, then melt into a hard, black lump among the coals.

  He closed his mouth. The witch appeared again, threw a third heart to him.

  “Take all night,” she said peevishly. “Don’t choose just any heart. You must want the one badly that you left here with me, thinking you’d get the last laugh at the old witch and her bones.”

  It was true, so he did not answer, just took in the stray heart in dignified silence.

  He saw a face on a bed, so beautiful in its pale, dreaming stillness, that all he could imagine was how much more beautiful it would be awake and smiling into his eyes. He was reaching out to it when he felt the heart without him swell to unbearable dimensions and then break, spilling love and grief, pain and bewilderment everywhere through him. He fell to his knees, half-blind, every breath aching, a sound coming out of him like the keen of wood in the flames.

  Dimly, he heard the witch speak. “I’ll take it back, if you don’t want it. In return for a small favor, of course.”

  “No,” he whispered, between breaths of fire, “I want it.”

  “Why? Why would anyone want such a terrible thing?”

  “I don’t know, but it is mine and I must take it.” He got to his feet somehow; still racked, barely able to walk, he stumbled to the door. He tripped on the bone that was the witch’s threshold, and fell headlong back into night.

  He lay there on the forest floor, dazed and half-dreaming, while his life pieced itself together with a needle as sharp as sorrow drawing threads of every color from gold to blood to bone. He gazed at every memory out of his heart’s eye, relearned all the words he had forgotten, including wonder that such enormities could be contained in such small, brief sounds as love, grief, life, death. Such words grew out of the wordless, wild language of the heart. That, he realized finally, was what he had so carelessly given to the witch: without that wordless language, he had left himself mute.

  He raised his head finally, wearily, and relearned more words: beauty, magic, peace. The firebird had flown soundlessly into the barren clearing. It came to rest, its plumes of fire gathering and settling around it, on the line of bones along the witch’s peaked roof. Transfixed, wordless again, he watched it. Its gold beak opened; it did not sing, but spoke in a clear, tender human voice.

  “Here,” it said to someone entering the clearing. “She will wake when you knock.”

  Ronan brought his gaze down from the roof, stared in astonishment at the young woman trudging up to the witch’s cottage. It had shifted a step or two toward the stranger, and its steps had reappeared. She was simply dressed; her bundled hair was hidden beneath a scarf; her thick soles clumped up the steps. She raised a fist at the door of bone. Ronan heard her breath catch shakily, and he opened his mouth to cry a warning.

  But the witch spoke first, screeching over his voice at the knock on her door. “Now what?”

  “I am Sidonie of Dacia,” the young woman said, “and I have come for Prince Ronan’s heart.”

  The cottage door flew open, snapped up the princess like a pecking beak, and swallowed her.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Euan sat at the wizard’s bedside, watching Unciel while Unciel watched nothing at all. His eyes were open; he still breathed. By that, Euan concluded that he was still alive, though the wizard had not moved or spoken for hours. The last word he had said was “finally.” Euan had written it down with a silent groan of relief. Finally the wizard did whatever it was he had to do to kill the monster. Finally the bleak, endless tale was coming to an end. He waited, pen hovering impatiently. But that, it seemed, had been the wizard’s final word on the subject. He simply stopped, left his frail, weary, helpless body behind, and went elsewhere in his mind. Euan called to him, pleaded with him, read the gardening records aloud until his voice was hoarse. Not even his garden could coax the wizard back.

  The scribe slumped sleeplessly in his chair, his eyes gritty, burning candles through the night while the wizard lay in his strange trance. The tale had drained his strength, Euan guessed. The harrowing memories, the unpredictable shifts the wizard’s body made between man and monster had worn him down to little more than a heartbeat weak as a moth’s flutter and just enough strength to take the next breath. He had fought the monster again in his telling; this time, Euan thought starkly, it might be the wizard who lost his life.

  He replaced a guttering candle. The monster still haunted the shadows around him, but the thought of the wizard’s death was beginning to out-loom the unfinished tale. It would be a hideous mockery of fate for Unciel to be slain by the story of his own victory. And, Euan thought miserably, it will be my fault. He leaned over the wizard, spoke gently, clearly, around the tightness in his throat.

  “If you don’t wake by dawn, I must tell the king that you need help.”

  But not even that roused the wizard. The raven, perched on the carved wooden bed frame above the wizard’s head and gazing darkly down at Unciel, did not make matters easier. The one-eyed cat watched as well, sometimes on Euan’s knee. Euan, wrapped in a blanket against a cold that seemed to have taken up residence in his bones, waited and wondered how much to tell the king.

  Slowly the long night frayed, turned silvery beyond the windows. Euan blew out the candles, stood up stiffly. The wizard did not move an eyelash. The broken thread in the blanket near his face, which Euan had been staring at for the last hour, still quivered under the wizard’s faint breath.

  “I’m going now,” Euan told him, “to the king. I’ll be back very soon. Wait for me.”

  He fed the raven and the cat in the kitchen before he left, and closed the door to Unciel’s room so that the raven’s plunging beak would not be the last thing the wizard saw. The raven gave a cry at that, but only flew to its perch and ruffled its feathers, regarding Euan dourly as he left.

  He had flung his scribe’s robe over his disheveled clothing. But his limp hair and blood-shot eyes, he realized, would not charm those guarding the palace gates. They would recognize the robe, however, so he went into the gate nearest the king’s library. It was early for the usual stream of scribes into the scriptorium. A proctor might be there, though; they seemed to live among the worm-eaten scrolls. He drifted, dazed and forlorn, into the scriptorium, feeling that years had passed since he had left it to find the wizard’s house.

  To his relief, Proctor Verel was there, sitting at his desk and rubbing his bald pate absently as he read. He blinked at Euan.

  “I have to see the king,” the apparition said. “I think Unciel is dying.”

  “Dying!” The proctor bounced to his feet, eyes narrowing with bemusement as they took in the unwashed, exhausted scribe. “Of what?”

  “I was writing down the story of his last battle. He couldn’t finish it. Now he won’t speak or move—he only breathes. It was my fault—I persuaded him—”

  “You persuaded h
im to let you write that tale?” The proctor navigated his circular body around his desk, staring at the scribe. “The king himself asked him to tell it and he refused.”

  “It’s a horrible tale,” Euan said bleakly.

  “Of course it would be. Look what it did to him. Were you expecting poetry?”

  “I suppose I was.”

  “It’ll get turned into that soon enough.”

  “He hasn’t finished it.”

  “Then we cannot let him die, can we? I’ll get a message to the king. Wait here.”

  But Euan, feeling lonely among the empty desks, like something dark, unrecognizable with portent in the bright, tranquil room, did not wait. He walked blindly back through the streets, worried that Unciel might wake suddenly to no one, and decide to die alone. The raven gave its usual cry as he entered and fluttered toward him, a confusion of claw and beak and rattling feathers, before it settled itself on Euan’s shoulder. The one-eyed cat ran ahead. Euan opened the door, holding his breath. Then he breathed again. So did the wizard. Euan sank down in the chair and closed his eyes.

  He was asleep when the raven cried again. The sound seemed to come from Euan’s heart, as though it had split itself in two and hatched the raven’s child. He jerked himself awake, heard footsteps in the hall. He cast a bleary eye at the wizard as he stumbled to his feet. The little fiber still quivered; Unciel still gazed expressionlessly at nothing. Euan opened the door, found the King of Dacia pushing doors open at random down the hall.

  There was a woman with him. She did not bother to glance in the rooms the king searched. Her eyes were on Unciel’s chamber door when Euan opened it. Intent, somber, they melted into a smile at the sight of the scribe. Heliotrope, he thought, remembering the pale purple wash of color and scent from Unciel’s garden. It seemed a very long time since anyone had smiled in that house.