He bowed his head to the king. Others had crowded into the outer room; he heard murmuring, floorboards creaking. They had come for Unciel, he guessed, and felt a numb despair that things had gone so terribly awry.
“In here, my lord,” he said to Arnou. He ducked his head again, shyly at the king’s companion.
“Euan Ashe. Lady Tassel,” the king said briefly. “My father’s sister. She inherited some of the powers of Sailles’s line. She may be able to help the wizard.”
Lady Tassel was a tiny woman with great, sunken lavender eyes and a pale, pointed face full of constantly shifting lines. They rearranged themselves as she cast a veiled glance at the king, who seemed, even to Euan’s distracted attention, to be tense as an unsprung trap and inwardly fuming.
“My lord,” Euan began, hesitated, then took a blundering step toward the truth. “Unciel did not want to tell you, but—”
He felt flingers slide around his arm; Lady Tassel interrupted gravely. “He was far weaker than he let us know. True? And so he had some difficulty speaking to the young wizard in Serre.”
“Well. That, too, but—”
“One thing at a time. Let me see if I can wake him. Maybe then I will be able to help him.”
“Maybe,” Euan sighed, evading the king’s suspicious eye. But none of them wanted to bring the unspoken tangle into the wizard’s chamber. They stood silently while Lady Tassel, her eyes hooded again, saying nothing, studied the wizard. Something of the tale must have lingered in the room, or in the wizard’s mind, Euan guessed; he saw her eyes widen suddenly. She dropped down into the chair, the lines suddenly harsh on her blanched face.
“What is it?” the king asked sharply.
“I don’t know,” she answered vaguely. “I’ve never known the like…” She glanced at Euan. “Where is the tale he has been telling you?”
“What good will that do?” Arnou demanded. “He must be moved immediately, he must be watched by a physician—”
“My lord.” She patted his hand. “If you cannot be quiet, go away. You promised that you would let me do as I see fit.”
“Yes, but—”
“I don’t think he is dying.”
“You don’t?” Euan breathed.
“I think he has summoned a memory or fashioned a dream and gone into it. You’ll have to wait until he returns to ask him anything.” She turned again to Euan, holding out her hand insistently. “The tale?”
He gave her the little leatherbound book full of gardening notes and an unfinished battle. “Be careful,” he warned. “The tale has a life of its own.”
“So I see.”
“What does that mean?” the king asked edgily. Euan shook his head wordlessly, chilled at the memories. Lady Tassel, glancing with interest through the wizard’s sketches, answered gently.
“Perhaps, my lord, you should leave us for a while. I will call you the instant we need you. Whatever danger Unciel might be in, it’s nothing a physician can remedy. When he can speak again, of course I will ask him first about Sidonie.”
“It might be faster,” the king said impatiently, “if I just send an army into Serre to ask Ferus.”
“It would certainly make most other matters irrelevant,” she murmured, and found the beginning of the tale. She added to Euan, without looking up, “Go and eat something. Take a nap. Wash. I will watch him very carefully, I promise.” Euan, hovering, reluctant to leave her, found the old eyes on his face again, cool and startlingly perceptive. “Don’t worry. I’ll call you if it comes to an end.”
He left her. Arnou, after a word or two, followed; he found Euan in the kitchen, pouring water into a kettle over the fire.
“What,” the king asked explosively, “is going on in Serre? Has there been any word at all from Gyre since he told Unciel that all was well?”
Euan opened his mouth to answer, saw again the monstrous face in the bowl that was Gyre, and closed his eyes. “No, my lord. Not a word.”
A voice drifted out of a half-open drawer. “Arnou. Go home.”
The king tossed his hands. “You’d think that my daughter could pick up a pen and write.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The king, still simmering, finally took most of his men out of the wizard’s house, back to the palace with him. Euan washed himself in the kitchen, put on clean clothes, listening tensely all the while for sounds from the wizard’s chamber. It was very quiet. He made a cup of something hot to keep himself awake. Half-way through it, he laid his head down on the kitchen table and went to sleep.
The raven woke him again, crying as it floated down the hall in front of Lady Tassel, who seemed to be lighting candles with her fingers as she walked. She disappeared. Euan heard her speak to the men who had remained in the house. She sent them away, apparently; the door opened and closed again. Euan, his head and mouth full of wool, took a sip of cold, bitter tea, then rose as the lady and the raven joined him. Candle stubs sparked on the table. Lady Tassel sat down slowly, very carefully, as though her bones were made of glass. Her face under its lacework of lines seemed also to be made of glass, too brittle for expression.
Euan asked huskily, apprehensively, “Is he—”
“As he was.”
“Did you see?”
The old eyes shifted to him, still stunned. “I was able to go a little way into his thoughts. My brother, Arnou’s father, had a great gift for that. It’s an enormously valuable skill for a ruler to possess, and we are fortunate that Arnou inherited nothing of it, or Dacia would have been at war with Serre by sunset today. That would be his only possible response to the danger in Serre: that it must be Ferus’s fault.”
“What is Unciel doing?”
She put a slender, bony hand over her mouth a moment, her eyes filling with what she had seen. Then she reached for Euan’s cup and swallowed the dregs. “He seems to be fighting again. But whether he is battling memories or something real, I can’t tell. It seems to have a name, though. The other one—the one he killed—he didn’t name, when he told you the tale.”
“No.”
“Don’t you have anything stronger than tea?”
“I think there’s some old wine.”
But he did not move; neither did she. “This wizard,” she said finally, “whom Unciel sent to guard Sidonie through Serre.”
“Gyre.”
“What possessed Unciel?”
“I don’t know.” Euan’s voice caught. “I have never understood that. It’s as though he sent them off to Serre together, but to different places and with different expectations. I can love him and care for him and write whatever it is he wants to tell me, but don’t expect me to understand him. All I know is that if he dies and that monster still lives, no matter what its name is, we are all in trouble.”
“Its name is Gyre.”
“And its name is Unciel,” he told her, and rose to get the wine.
TWENTY-THREE
“You’re dead,” Gyre whispered to the flat-faced, slab-muscled monster standing where the hermit’s threshold had been. The front wall of the hovel looked as though it had been slashed away by some inhuman claw. A broken slat swung crazily from the ceiling overhead. One side of the rough stone hearth had crumpled to the ground. The hermit, collapsed in his chair, seemed to retreat farther and farther into himself. Gyre heard the breath trickle out of him, and then silence; even the waterfall seemed to be frozen within that suspended breath of time.
“Gyre,” said the face of his heart, and the hut exploded. Stones, boards, cupboard doors, hermit, book, and raven bones spun upward in a wind so cold that Gyre felt his body fray into it rather than endure it. All around him a terrible winter seemed to be stretching across the forest. Trees groaned and buckled; panicked deer bounded past wolves running in the opposite direction. Birds wheeled together and scattered, windblown and helpless. Gyre heard a distant, fiery cry, like a splash of liquid gold, as if, far away, the firebird had been finally touched by cold.
“What have I d
one?” he wondered, too incredulous even yet to be terrified. A faint, sweet voice echoed the firebird; it seemed to come out of Gyre’s own thoughts. Then he remembered the egg encased in magic and hidden in the secret place over his heart. He had time for nothing more than that moment’s worth of memory. Then the monster, which had faded behind the howling, biting wind, shaped itself out of it, skin pallid as winter and impervious as stone, eyes that stripped the name out of everything they saw, until nothing recognized only itself. Gyre felt the stunning blankness of its gaze, the power that might have renamed him nothing because nothing was all it understood.
But it knew him. Its voice was deep and raw, a roar more like storm than wild beast. “Give me my heart,” it demanded. Gyre, confused by the sweet murmuring of the firebird disturbed within its shell, wondered for an instant exactly what he had stolen out of the nest.
Then he remembered the dark cave in Fyriol, the dragon within the dark, the casket within the dragon’s heart, the heart within the casket… He felt his face grow slick with horror before the cold sweat froze into that expression.
“You. I took your heart.” Wind ripped the words out of him before they sounded. But he was telling the waiting monster nothing it did not know; it was he who had not known. “And then it vanished. I thought it vanished. I thought it had faded away, something long dead, too ancient to live any longer in light. But all that time you were alive. You had begun to search for your heart. It didn’t vanish—Unciel must have taken it from me. And then he fought you alone on the edge of the world. But he killed you.” He felt himself trembling badly, from horror as much as from the raging winds. “You’re dead.”
It did not seem to realize that. It took a step toward Gyre, reaching for him to pull its heart out of wherever Gyre had hidden it. But there is no heart, Gyre thought confusedly as he put the grove of oldest trees between himself and the monster. There is only the firebird’s egg. The trees were suddenly flying around him like a handful of wildflowers uprooted and tossed into the wind. Gyre, making something very small and very fast out of himself, ducked into the cave behind the frozen waterfall.
He remembered then that the King of Serre was riding through his forests, hunting that monster.
Another roil of comprehension and dread surged through him. The one-eyed king, with all his careless, obstreperous magic and his fierce love of Serre, would not survive one glance from that bleak-eyed death that had followed Gyre into Serre. His men would meet the fate of the forest dwellers, hermit and fox and bird, whose distant cries the wizard’s heart picked like threads out of the howling wind.
What have I done? he asked himself bewilderedly. I borrowed a face. I opened a book. Unciel thought it had died but he couldn’t kill it. If he could not kill it, with all his immense powers, how can I?
“Where is my heart?”
The ribbons of ice shielding Gyre snapped, rained in pieces around him. Gyre made himself even smaller, hid within a cracked stone. He was pulled ruthlessly out and into his own shape by winds that cut like knives across his skin, whittling the living, breathing, shuddering human thing out of themselves.
“Give me my heart.”
“I don’t have your heart!”
“I saw it in you.”
The wind with the face of the monster and fingers of ice seemed to rifle through him, flinging thoughts, powers, memories along with torn pieces of clothes and shoe leather and buttons piecemeal into the storm. Gyre felt himself begin to disappear; a sound tore out of him. Then he was running again, maybe a snow hare, maybe a silver fox, trying desperately to hide from the winds within the wind.
Something was falling. He saw its pale shadow on the white ground, looming larger and larger as it came down, seeming to come down forever because it had so far to fall. He gave one desperate surge of speed, leaped from under it just before it pounded down across his last footprints. The earth shuddered. Branches whipped across him, throwing him down. Something collapsed on top of him, buried him in light, rustling fragments.
He felt the earth thud again, and pulled himself out of the tangle. He glimpsed, just before he changed shape again, an odd jumble of vine and wildflowers, cobwebs and twigs, that the relentless winds were busy picking to pieces. He recognized it as he flew.
The firebird’s tree had fallen.
Too stunned for coherent thought, his mind crowded with images: trolls and magic stags, ogres, water-sprites, hermits, wood-witches, the firebird itself, all fleeing the incomprehensible killing storm. As though his fears had summoned her, Gyre saw the cottage of bone running through the forest ahead of him. Trees broke like broom-straws around Brume as she passed, their ancient hearts groaning, streaking the wild winds with the scent of resin as they died.
Then he was dragged out of flight, pulled again into the shrieking snarl of wind to stare into the empty eyes of the monster that saw nothing everywhere it looked, except when it looked at itself.
“Give me my heart.”
Gyre was silent. He was still alive, he guessed, for no other reason than that the monster had recognized something of itself in him. He was allowed to contemplate that bitter thought for an instant. Then he felt a bone twist as the monster probed for the marrow. The wind tore away what might have been a scream. He saw the palace then, through the flurrying winter the monster seemed to carry with it. The twin falls had frozen. The dark palace seemed to float on a river of ice, high above the ravaged forest. He could no longer see the helpless company from Dacia ringing it. They had fallen where they froze, or had fled across the ice into the wood whose pale, slender trees, stripped of leaf and bird and bent nearly double, streamed bare boughs like hair in the wind.
Sidonie, he thought. The name sparked a rill of power that the monster batted away like a leaf. He had sworn to protect her from all the unpredictable magic in Serre. Not even Unciel had guessed that the most unpredictable magic of all would be her protector. And now her protector was being probed in mind and marrow for something he had taken that seemed to belong to no one, because of a face he had borrowed, a lie he had told. As the monster tore apart the wizard to find its heart, so it would tear Serre apart around them, until like a book with all its tales and history ripped from it and tossed to the frenzied wind, there would be nothing left of it but a name.
The winds shrieked suddenly as the monster wrenched something out of Gyre. For a moment, feeling suddenly hollowed, empty without pain, he thought he must have lost his life. Then what the monster had found became clear in its hold, as it unravelled Gyre’s careful spell. Gold warmed the merciless wind, colors and shapes of shell like cut jewels glittered wildly at every shift of light as though the egg were trying frantically to make itself more beautiful still, to attract the firebird’s vanished eye.
Gyre heard the cry within the egg, the night-music of the firebird, calling to the magic of Serre.
“No,” he gasped. “No. It is not your heart. It is the heart of Serre and you are breaking it.”
The monster did not answer. The fires within the net of gold, within the jewels, began to fade as the empty eyes gazed at it, seeing nothing. Gyre tried desperately to snatch it, all his powers, his own fires, swirling around him to break the relentless hold over him. All he had left within himself he turned to power: words, knowledge, memory, love, longing. That and whatever he found still alive around him enveloped him in white-hot sheets, swirling plumes, and feathers of fire. He came to the end of it finally, blind, drained; he had nothing left but the cold, charred ember of himself. He felt the winds again, saw the empty eyes. He could not move.
He found a few stray words in him, as all the beauty left of Serre dimmed and frayed before his eyes.
“If you cannot find your heart, take mine,” he whispered. “But let the firebird live.”
The flat, barren eyes held his for a very long time, it seemed, before he received an answer.
“Give this to Brume,” the monster said, handing him the firebird’s egg before it wandered away into th
e green and suddenly peaceful trees.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sidonie, inside the witch’s house, saw nothing at first but chickens: ranked on their roosts, turning a black, glittering eye at her in the sullen light, shifting a feather, loosing a cluck over yet another disturbance. Their acrid smell nearly overpowered the stench of rotting bone. She pushed Auri’s scarf over her face, trying not to choke, her eyes watering as she looked warily around for the witch. A pot of something oily and dark above the fire formed slow bubbles that belched wetly as they broke. A shadow moved above the pot. She saw a hand crooked and skeletal as a hen’s claw pick up a wooden paddle and stir the pot.
Then she saw the eyes above the pot.
They were entirely round, enormous, and shimmering with fire. Sidonie inhaled a bit of scarf in terror. Then the fire slid across the eyes and out, and she realized that they were lenses, perched on the most hideous face she had ever seen in her life. It looked so wizened that all its parts were melting together, eyes lop-sided and sliding toward a jutting, bony beak of a nose that was sagging to push the lipless mouth into the chin, which seemed to be buried half-way down the wrinkled neck. Hens, fuming coals, the green lenses began to eddy gently, as though they were all being stirred in the stinking cottage by another witch, an even bigger paddle.
Sidonie pulled her whirling thoughts together. This was no time to faint; the witch would surely eat her if she did.
She said again, her voice shaking badly, “I have come for the heart of Prince Ronan of Serre.”
The witch took a spoon, filled it with her brew, and raised it to her nose. She sniffed, then spilled it back into the pot. What looked like a fingerbone surfaced, sank again. Sidonie stared dazedly. Surely there had not been a wedding band on it.
The witch spoke finally, her voice like the creak of tree limbs swaying in the wind. “So? It’s his heart. Why should I give it to you?”
A pounding began somewhere, sporadic, muffled, like a shutter banging in a distant room. Sidonie, trying to hold a thought in her head, found the sound perilously distracting. A few hens protested peevishly. The witch, waiting for an answer, ignored the thumping.
In the Forests of Serre Page 20