In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Well?”

  “Because he doesn’t want it—”

  “I’ll keep it, then. It’s worth something to me.”

  “But I need it! He needs it, I mean. He doesn’t know that he needs it. And anyway,” she added, inspired, “if he doesn’t want it, there’s no reason you shouldn’t give it to me. For a price. A small price. Since it’s worth nothing to him.”

  The witch sniffed again, drew the length of her forearm under her nose. “A princess, are you? You’re not dressed like one. You’ve nothing worth it to me—no jewels, no hairpins of gold, not even a satin ribbon in your hair, just that ugly scarf. Take it off.” Sidonie pushed it back wordlessly. The tilted eyes, sunk like old nails in a post, swam with fire again. “Let down your hair.”

  Sidonie unknotted Auri’s plain dark ribbon; the untidy bundle of hair fell loosely; the heavy strands uncoiling like honey in the firelight.

  “Oh, yes,” the witch muttered. “Oh, yes. I’ll have that from you before you go into the pot.”

  Sidonie felt her heart lurch, toad-like, into her throat. She pinched her lips, swallowed it, and whispered, “There must be something I can—”

  “Stop that!” the witch bellowed, and Sidonie froze. Then she heard the faint shouts mingling with the annoying thumping. It seemed to be coming from behind her, and had gotten louder.

  “Who—what is that noise?” Sidonie asked tremulously.

  “Nothing. The wind,” said the witch. “You were saying?”

  “I’ll do—Ronan said that you asked him for things, in exchange for—”

  The lenses sparked again. “Ronan. He killed my white hen.”

  “I could get you another white hen. In exchange for his heart.”

  “His heart?” The witch’s sparse brows went up. “That’s a different matter entirely now. Now you are bargaining for your life. What’s that worth?”

  “My—” Words dried up; she closed her mouth, staring at Brume. In the sudden silence, the din behind her took on a frantic tone. Why are you so desperate to come in? she wondered numbly. Go home. Stay indoors. Never, never come looking for the witch… She cleared her throat. “You can’t—you can’t seriously want to—”

  “Put you in a pot, boil you to a stew over my fire, and have you for supper? What else did you think I would do when you came here? Put Ronan’s heart in a box for you and send you on your way? A young, well-fed princess with that hair? Which reminds me.” She turned, glancing here and there. “Where did I put those scissors?”

  “But don’t you want—Can’t we bargain—”

  “You haven’t offered me anything.” She waited, bony hands on her enormous thighs. “Come, girl. Make me an offer. What’s your life worth to you?”

  Sidonie considered her brief life bewilderedly. “My father is King of Dacia. He could give you—”

  “The moon and the stars and the firebird? He could, couldn’t he? But would he, once you’re out my door and down the steps?” She bent, scrabbled through a jumble of cooking utensils and hearth tools. “Where could they be? How about your firstborn child?” Sidonie gaped at her. “Now that would be something for the pot.”

  The princess heard words she had never said before suddenly spilling out of her mouth. “You wicked—you evil, despicable, curdle-faced—”

  “Ha!” the witch said, brandishing shears so big they might have bitten an ox-bone in two.

  “You can’t just kill me! My father would go to war with Serre!”

  “What’s that to me? I’ve seen wars come into the forest, and I’ve seen them go.” She snicked the giant shears open and shut a few times. “Give me your hair and your life, or give me something worth your life. One or the other. Surely you must know what your life is worth by now.”

  “I’m thinking!”

  “Don’t take all night about it. It can’t be a very long life.”

  “It’s not,” Sidonie said tightly. “That’s what makes it difficult. How do I know what I’m worth? I know what I’m worth to my father, and to King Ferus, and to Ronan, but how do I know what I’m worth to me? What would you be worth to you?”

  The tiny, skewed eyes behind the lenses peered at her, black and bright as a hen’s eyes taken aback by a peculiar insect. “I’d be worth what I could get,” Brume said pithily. She plucked a few of her ashen hairs and tested the scissors’ blades on them. “Which is rapidly becoming a moot point where you’re concerned.”

  “Ferus would probably give you gold for me,” Sidonie suggested desperately. “We could send him a message.”

  “What if he won’t?” The witch’s head cocked suddenly, at a thought. “You know what I’ve always wanted, though? I’ve always wanted one of those hens that lays golden eggs. Do you have one?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” She gave a meditative grunt. “Well. I guess that’s that, then.” She started to heave herself up, then sat back down again, panting. “Look at me. I’m weak with hunger. You’ll have to come to me so I can cut your hair off.”

  Sidonie’s eyes flickered down to the scarf hanging loosely around her neck. A scene from one of Auri’s tales had been embroidered on it: a young girl, who had tricked the witch, watching Brume climb into her own stew pot. Sidonie had outfaced Ferus with a tale once; perhaps she could do it again.

  She said carefully, “Those scissors are enormous. They must be very heavy in your small hands.”

  “They are, but I’m used to them.”

  “My hands are very strong. I can cut my own hair off for you if you’ll show me how.”

  “That’s easy enough. You just snip,” the witch said, shearing a lock from her balding head.

  “I’m a princess. I’ve never cut my own hair. Show me again. I’ll watch carefully this time.”

  “You take,” Brume said with exaggerated patience. “A lock.” She held one out, on one side of her skinny throat. “Then you open the shears. So.” They gaped wide in her other hand. “And then you. Snip!”

  She finished in a strangled squeal as Sidonie, leaping at her, gripped the witch’s matchstick wrists and pushed her backward off her stool. The witch hit the floor. The scissors in her hand, still open wide, split the floorboards on either side of her throat, pinning her within the broad angle of the blades.

  The witch screeched. So did the chickens. Sidonie, having no wish to upset Serre by doing away with its oldest witch, scrambled to her feet and ran to the door. She flung it wide. A burly figure, pulled off-balance by the impetus of the opening door, reeled toward her, blocking her way. It was faceless against the stars. Sidonie shrieked. The figure toppled and went down, dragging her with it. The scissors shot over her head as she fell, and smacked against the door. It slammed shut again, bones rattling. Then it vanished.

  The witch, pulling herself out of the shadows, gave a sudden cackle. “Welcome back.”

  Sidonie, scrambling in terror away from whatever it was that had fallen over her, made a desperate grab for the scissors along the way. She put her back to the wall, and opened them menacingly, one long blade pointed at the witch, the other at the sprawling figure on the floor. “Stay away from me,” she warned tersely. “I’ll cut you both into very small pieces and boil you in the pot.”

  The witch snorted. The figure on the floor shifted, raising a fire-streaked, coppery head. Sidonie, staring, slid down to the floor again; the shears slipping from her lax grip clattered beside her.

  “Ronan?”

  He sat up, wincing as he uncrooked one leg from around a hen’s roost. “I saw you come in,” he said. His voice sounded strained, raw as though from shouting.

  “Was that you making all that noise?”

  “I was trying to get back in.”

  “What for?” she asked incredulously.

  He eyed her wordlessly, pulling himself up the roost. “To rescue you,” he explained finally. “It’s what I had in mind, anyway. You wear the strangest things to escape in.”

  “Do you expect me to run down that
cliff road in my wedding gown?”

  “I would have expected you to run all the way back to Dacia in your wedding gown,” he said grimly. He draped himself over the roost, ignoring the hen pecking indignantly at him, and looked at Brume. “Well? What have I got left to offer you for the Princess from Dacia?”

  Sidonie closed her eyes, banged her head against the bone wall. “I was nearly out the door! You got in my way.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We both would have been free!”

  “Yes. I didn’t know you would deal so easily with Brume. I couldn’t.”

  “She wanted my hair,” Sidonie explained. “She showed me those huge shears and I remembered a tale.” She remembered the witch then, and turned her head hastily. Brume was sitting on her stool again, applying a burning broom-straw to the bowl of her pipe.

  She puffed a few times, then said quizzically around her pipe, “Go on. Don’t mind me.”

  Sidonie looked uncertainly at the prince. Out of tales for the moment, she took hold of the scissors again. He had been armed, apparently, but his sheath was empty, and he was using the roost for balance, letting his weight fall on one leg. A brawl, she guessed, with one of the forest-dwellers.

  Then she thought twice, and asked in sudden horror, “Did Gyre do that to you?”

  “No. My father.”

  “Why? He recognized you—he trusted you—”

  “That was yesterday,” he said, so dryly that even she barely recognized him. His eyes went back to Brume, who was stirring her cauldron, and puffing sparks into it at the same time.

  The witch said as though she felt Ronan’s gaze, “Leave the princess here and I’ll let you go free.”

  “No,” he answered without surprise or hesitation. “Let her go free and I will stay.”

  Sidonie hesitated, tempted for an instant to leave the ogre’s obnoxious son to Brume. “No,” she sighed, getting to her feet again. “We are trapped here together. We will find a way out together. I will not leave without you. Unless,” she added, desperately, remembering what she had come for, “you try to leave without your heart. Then you can leave without me.”

  He looked at her silently, his eyes heavy, but oddly clear. He listened, she thought with astonishment. He heard me. He gave a nod that might have been, to a watching eye, only the shift of light across his face.

  Then his attention went back to Brume, who remarked querulously, “Well, by yourself you couldn’t find me the firebird, or give me any recompense at all for my white hen. I got nothing out of the wizard, and nothing from you either but what you thought you didn’t want in the first place, and was worth nothing to me anyway—”

  “Oh—” Sidonie gasped, shocked by the lie. “You would have made me pay for his heart.”

  “What did you offer for it?” Ronan asked curiously.

  “I—She didn’t give me time to offer, before she started asking me what I was worth to myself.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I couldn’t think of anything. I’m worth heirs to you, and power to Ferus, and peace to my father, but I couldn’t think of anything else. So I attacked her with the scissors instead.”

  “You’re worth my heart,” Ronan said simply. “That’s what you risked your life to get.”

  She stared at him. For the first time, she saw him smile. In the face of the witch, she thought dazedly. In the house of bone without a door, he could smile.

  “Ronan,” she said, feeling that she had met four of him by now, and the fourth Ronan was by far the most bewildering. “What are you doing here? Surely the king didn’t let you come alone. Would we be right in telling Brume that your father and his warriors are outside waiting for us, and that if we don’t come out, he will come in and rescue us?”

  “We could try,” he said, and Brume laughed, an unpleasant noise like a hen with a grain caught up its beak.

  “Try,” she suggested, and rapped her pipe suddenly, sharply against the side of the cauldron, spilling her foul leaves onto the flames. “Enough. You both either go out the door together, or into the pot together. Which is up to you. You have just time enough for me to rekindle a fresh pipe to persuade me to set you free. After that, I’ll use those bone-shears on you. Choose.”

  Someone knocked on the door, which suddenly became visible.

  Brume flung her spoon and the pipe furiously into the pot, splashing her noxious brew into the fire. “There is no such thing as a quiet night in the forest anymore!” She pushed between them, wresting the scissors from Sidonie as she passed. She threw open the door. Sidonie, gathering her breath to scream for help above the shrill, startled clamor of the chickens, felt the sound vanish in a wordless rush of air. Gyre entered the witch’s house.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Not even Brume wanted to see him.

  “You!” she snapped and tried to slam the door in his face. But he threw up a hand and left Brume wrestling with a door that refused to budge as the wizard passed her. Ronan’s reclaimed heart leaped like a startled hare at the sight of Gyre. He backed a step, glancing around swiftly. Nothing in the house to fight with, it seemed, but pot hooks and scissors. He felt the princess shift close to him as he angled toward the hearth. Her face looked waxen in the sparse light. The prince wondered if his last experience of life as Ronan of Serre would be trying to limp surreptitiously across the crazed cottage of bone under the wizard’s eye while disturbed chickens screeched around him and the witch snarled futilely at her door.

  The wizard seemed astonished at the sight of them. He looked, Ronan realized suddenly, as though he had been battling a whirlwind. His clothes were shredded, his skin bruised and torn, his face harrowed. Something had shattered the opaque calm in his eyes. He had crossed paths with some strange magic, Ronan guessed, and it had left him dazed, cudgeled, vulnerable. Then Ronan, who had thought he was facing the worst when the wizard came through the door, remembered what even worse was roaming the forest, and he felt the blood drain out of his face.

  The princess remembered it, too. She put both hands to her mouth and whispered, “Gyre. Did that monster find you?”

  “Yes.”

  Behind him, Brume gave the door a frustrated kick. It slammed shut abruptly, startling her, and sending chickens flailing into the air. Annoyed, she kicked it again. Then she turned, said crossly to Gyre, “You were the monster. You showed me your face.”

  “You?” the princess said faintly. She took one hand from her mouth, reached out to grip Ronan’s arm. Ronan felt her trembling. “That—that thing was you?”

  The wizard hesitated. “In a way. Not exactly.”

  “You were, too,” Brume argued, going back to the hearth to fish in the pot for her pipe. “You scared all my hens.”

  “I was, then. Yes. But not—” He gave up on words, gestured at his battered self.

  The princess closed her eyes tightly, opened them again. “Then there are two of them? Of you?”

  He shook his head. “It’s gone now,” he answered elliptically. “You will never see it again.” His eyes went to Ronan, who felt himself freeze mid-step, the hare in the fox’s stare. “There is no need to be afraid of me. I won’t harm you.”

  “That’s what they all say,” he answered tersely. “All the foxes. If you didn’t come looking for me, then why are you here in the witch’s house?”

  “I came to see Brume. What are you both doing here? I didn’t expect you to be anywhere but safe in the palace.”

  “Nowhere,” Ronan reminded him bitterly, “is safe from you.”

  “No,” the wizard answered softly. “You were right about that. But why are you here?”

  “I came to get Ronan’s heart back from Brume,” Sidonie said, her fingers still locked on Ronan’s arm. “Ronan came to rescue me. But now we are both trapped in the witch’s house, and I haven’t got so much as a gold hairpin to offer her for his heart, and I am afraid to ask you for help—I don’t know any longer who or what you are, or what you might do to Ronan
.”

  Gyre was silent a moment. “I can’t ask you to trust me,” he said finally. “But maybe I can persuade you to stop fearing me.” He didn’t wait for Ronan to answer. He turned to the witch, who was blowing liquid out of her pipe, and said, “I will give you my heart if you let the princess and the prince go free.”

  Brume dropped her pipe in the pot again, her eyes growing enormous behind the lenses. Ronan, blinking, tried to speak, couldn’t. The princess could.

  She cried, “The last thing we need in the world is you without a heart! Gyre, if you cannot do better than that with Brume, then keep quiet. It’s difficult enough to rescue Ronan’s heart, and if we get out of here alive, I don’t want to be forced to come back for yours.”

  “Oh, you keep quiet,” Brume said. She took a step toward Gyre, her hands clasping. “I’ll take it.”

  “No,” Ronan pleaded. “Sidonie is right. She came here because she could not bear to live with the man who had abandoned his heart to Brume, and I came here because the queen could not bear to live with me, either. She told me not to bother coming back without it or she would refuse to recognize me as her son.”

  The princess was giving him a strangely skewed look. “I’m right?”

  “What?”

  “You said that I was right. You listened to me.”

  He hesitated, feeling off-balance, though she seemed to be holding both of them upright. “Yes?”

  “You have already taken your heart back from Brume,” she said around her knuckles. “That’s why you seem so—You were already free, and you came back in to rescue me.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Explain to my mother that I left you to be eaten by Brume?”

  “But you didn’t tell me!”

  “I was hoping,” the prince admitted, “that you might notice. That it would make a difference.”

  “Never mind,” Brume shouted, startling them, “about your heart!” The lenses swung at Gyre. “What about yours?”