In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “There’s a difference,” the wizard said, holding his hands together and open, as though he were about to receive something, “between giving up something you cannot bear to live with any longer, and giving something you will love for the rest of your life.”

  A shimmering of gold and jewelled fires began to form in his hands. Ronan watched breathlessly, wondering how such beauty could come out of anyone human, let alone the wizard who had lied to him, and caged him, and threatened to steal his life. Then he realized what he was seeing and he felt his own heart try to break again.

  “No!” he cried, stumbling between wizard and witch, trying to reach the egg before she did. But she only nudged him out of the way with a thump of her shoulder, sent him sprawling among the roosts. “Take it,” he pleaded to Sidonie. “Don’t let him give it to Brume!”

  She was moving to help him, though she could not take her eyes from the glowing thing passing from Gyre to Brume. “Why?” she breathed, tugging at his arm. “What is it?”

  “It is the firebird’s egg!”

  She let go of Ronan, straightening incredulously, but the witch had already taken the egg.

  Brume turned away from them immediately; they could only see the reflection of its fires leaping and glittering all around them on the walls. Ronan, his breath catching harshly, pulled himself up painfully, took a step, and caught his balance again on Gyre, gripping the wizard with both hands.

  “Why?” he whispered, holding the bruised, haunted, incomprehensible eyes. “Why have you given the most beautiful thing in the world to the most hideous thing in the world? You have perverted all the magic in Serre.”

  He heard an answer then, but not from the wizard. It was as though one of the sweet, brilliant shafts of light from the jewelled egg had found its way into his heart. The firebird answered, her song falling through him like a bright, private shower of fire. The stark walls of bone, the rank, rustling shadows, the foetid cauldron, even the wizard’s face faded around him as he found his way into a timeless place where the firebird and the woman and the egg all sang to one another peacefully, endlessly, weaving a magic around them that nothing could ever destroy.

  How long he listened, he had no idea. When he saw the wizard again, Gyre was holding him. In those moments, Ronan realized dazedly, the wizard might have done anything at all, taken anything, everything. He had only waited until the prince could hear him again. And then he said simply, “I had no choice.”

  Ronan shifted out of his hold, looked bewilderedly for the witch. She was fading into her shadows, nearly invisible now. He could only see the faintest glimmer of her hair, the suggestion, as an ember popped out of the grate and tumbled after her, of what might have been a drift of stray pin-feathers illumined red by the fading ember, or a glimpse of a fiery plume.

  He closed his eyes, and saw his life, like one of his mother’s tapestries, patterned with the busy, colorful magic of Serre, the witch in her bones, the firebird in her tree, wearing one another’s faces, both taking the fragments of his broken heart and making a trail for him to follow of song and bone until he pieced it back together again, and their faces became indistinguishable in his heart’s eye.

  “I want one more thing before I set you all free,” said the witch in the shadows. “Promise me this, Ronan: You will tell your father that he will only recognize his true heir when he brings me a white hen to replace the one that you killed.” He stared wordlessly into the shadows, trying to see her face. He heard the smile in her voice, and wondered if it was the witch’s twisted smile or the firebird’s magic. “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” he whispered.

  “If he doesn’t come to me, I’ll find him. It’s high time he met me. Now all of you: go away. Go home.”

  The door of bone opened to the roar of water. They saw the road up the cliff unwinding just ahead of them, a spill of gold at the end of it that was the rising sun.

  Ronan turned as they stood once again among the trees, to watch the astonishing sight of the witch picking up her cottage and running back into the magic of Serre. But the little house had already vanished. He stood dazed a moment by the familiar, prosaic world. Birds chattered in the sunlight; the tree boughs swayed gently in a passing breeze. His horse stood drinking placidly at the river’s edge.

  Ronan looked at the wizard, who was looking at Sidonie, who was facing the breeze and tying her hair back with the cloth full of tales. Go home, the witch had said. But where was home for Gyre? Ronan glimpsed something then of the wandering, questing, boundariless life that wizardry demanded, and felt the beginnings of an understanding of the man who had relinquished all claim to history, and then found himself perilously drawn to it. Gyre felt his eyes, turned swiftly.

  Ronan held his gaze without flinching, said after moment, “You wouldn’t have liked my life. You would have been convincing maybe for a year or two. But then what? You would have found Serre, as vast as it is, too small a world, and even ruling it, having to hide your powers, would have been a very tiresome task. You could never just go off on your own and learn something. Or whatever it is that wizards do.”

  “I know,” Gyre answered, his bruised face rueful. “I haven’t been thinking very clearly.”

  “What happened with the monster? I didn’t understand. Can I tell my father that we don’t need to fear it any longer?”

  “Yes. You can tell him that.”

  Sidonie drifted closer to hear. Her eyes were on Gyre, Ronan saw, but whatever inner compass she was following drew her to a stop beside Ronan. For some reason he thought of the owl and the little toad who had come to him for help. And the firebird. And now the princess, the stranger in his land, homing into his burly morning shadow as though she felt most comfortable there. For the first time in a very long time, he remembered what peace was, in that brief moment before they started back up the road.

  The wizard seemed to sense his thoughts. Some of the strain, the grimness of whatever he had gone through, eased in his face.

  “Brume was right,” he answered Ronan. “I did take that monster’s shape, a time or two. I came far too close to the power it had over every living thing. It was a useful disguise in the forest. I just never expected that it would come alive again and confront me, demand that I give back its heart because I had stolen it, and it saw itself in me.”

  “Is that true?” Sidonie demanded. “Did you steal it?”

  “Some time ago. I thought it had been dead for centuries. I finally recognized it, as I battled it, as the monster that Unciel had fought, which nearly drained him of all his powers and his life.”

  Sidonie’s face turned the color of cream. For some reason she moved even closer to Ronan, who had no conception of such powers and no more defense against them than a water ouzel might have had.

  He said, appalled, “That was the monster running loose in Serre?”

  “I thought,” Sidonie whispered, “it was dead. Unciel killed it.”

  “It was. He did.”

  “It was what?” Ronan demanded. “Here? Or dead?”

  “Both.” Ronan stared at Gyre silently. The wizard rubbed his face wearily, and gave them a hint, when he dropped his hands, of the ruthless, relentless fury in his memories. Then his face quieted; he gazed over Ronan’s shoulder, as though he could see through the trees, across the high western peaks, into the peaceful land beyond them. “Unciel killed it. But the only way he could have done that was by knowing it better than it knew itself. He became that monster and more, to kill it. I was not fighting the dead. I was fighting Unciel.”

  Sidonie put her hands to her mouth. “He was too ill—Gyre, how could he—”

  “How could he not,” the wizard said evenly, “when he guessed what harm I might do in Serre? I think he sent his memories into Serre and let me battle them.”

  Ronan asked confusedly, trying to fit the odd assortment of pieces together, “Is Unciel dead, then? Did you kill him?”

  “I don’t know,” Gyre said tightly. �
�I may have, forcing that battle on him. All I know is that he seemed alive when he freed me.”

  Ronan groped for another piece to the puzzle. “But the firebird’s egg—what were you doing with it?”

  “I stole it. As I tried to steal Serre itself. Because it was so beautiful, and held such ancient and innocent powers. I loved it. So I—” He stopped to draw breath, looking past them again into the heart of the battle. “When the monster found it and began to destroy it, I offered my life in exchange for the firebird’s life. Because I could not bear to be the death of it.”

  Ronan stared at him. “What is it,” he cried suddenly, incredulously, “you have been looking for in Serre?”

  The wizard gave him a brief, tight smile. “What have you found, pursuing the firebird and contending with Brume? You are not the same man who crept into my firelight, starving, half-mad with love and grief, who would have relinquished his own name to any passing stranger. I was the passing stranger. We both got ourselves tangled in the magic of Serre. So Unciel must have done once, long ago, because he knew to tell me to give the firebird’s egg back to Brume.”

  “Back to Brume.” Sidonie’s brows crooked. “Back—Gyre. What are you saying? That that filthy old witch who talked about making a stew out of my firstborn child could have anything at all to do with the firebird?”

  “It’s possible,” Ronan said, hearing an echo of the magic that had burned through his heart in the witch’s stinking cottage. “Anything is possible.”

  “Does your mother know this?”

  “I doubt that Brume herself would encourage such speculation. She has a reputation to uphold.” He looked at Gyre, the renegade wizard in his tattered clothes, with his battle-worn face and scarred heart. “What will you do?” he asked softly.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Ronan raised his head, his eyes on the dark palace at the end of the road, and considered the matter. “Do what the witch said,” he suggested finally. “If you can find a home. My father would never understand any of this.”

  “I could return to the palace with you first,” Gyre offered, “to convince him that you are yourself and not me.”

  Ronan shook his head. “Leave my father to Brume,” he answered pithily. “Maybe she’ll find his missing eye for him. Or take the other one so that he’ll have to see out of what he’s got left of a heart.” He turned to Sidonie then, who was eyeing him with wonder. “What do you want to do? Gyre could take you back to Dacia, if you want.”

  “And then what?” she asked him steadily. “We wait in Dacia for your father’s armies to come over the mountains and take us by force instead of on paper?”

  “So I take you by force instead?”

  She regarded him silently again, the princess from Dacia in her plain dress and thick-soled boots, and tales knotted around her hair, who had gone alone into the house of the oldest witch in Serre.

  Tall as she was, she had to reach up to lay her hand on his shoulder. “Perhaps now we can get to know one another,” she suggested. “Before the king comes down the cliff road looking for us. I have met the prince in love with the firebird, the prince who was Gyre, the prince who had no heart, and now you. The fourth Ronan. Do you think you might be the last?”

  He smiled, remembering how she had stood beside him against the terrors and confusions of the night. “I hope so,” he answered.

  He went to get his horse, then turned to watch her for a thoughtless, tranquil moment as she bade farewell to the wizard, who vanished, as the witch had, into the light of day.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Euan Ash was standing in a strange little house full of birds, all white hens except for one the color of fire that was laying golden eggs. It sang each time it dropped an egg into its nest. Euan could not hear its voice, but he knew that that was because its song was so beautiful no mortal could imagine it, even in dreams. Each time it laid an egg, the egg would break in two and his name would come out of the gold shell. No yolk, no chick of white or fire, just a word in that unimaginable voice.

  Euan. Euan. “Euan.”

  He woke with a start and found a stranger at Unciel’s bedside.

  Unciel still slept, looking so frail he might have floated away if the blankets weren’t weighing him down. Euan had never met Gyre. The young wizard had come and gone in Unciel’s cottage one evening in early summer after Unciel summoned him. But enough power had loosed itself in that bedchamber in the past days for Euan to recognize it in the lean, haunted face, the still eyes gazing down at Unciel.

  Euan, waking in the chair as usual and feeling molded to it, leaned forward stiffly to study Unciel. He still breathed, apparently. The stranger gave one brief glance at Euan, taking in the unshorn scribe with the reddened eyes, the wrinkled clothes, the gaunt, colorless face.

  “I’m sorry,” the stranger said.

  Euan blinked. “Gyre,” he said after a moment. “You must be.”

  “Yes.”

  “How is—how are things in Serre?”

  “When I left, they seemed unusually peaceful.”

  Euan, remembering his dream, sensed a tale tangled somewhere within the flock of hens and the lovely, secret voice that perhaps told the tale from beginning to end, but which he could not yet hear. He rubbed his eyes wearily.

  “You should tell that to King Arnou.”

  “I spoke to Lady Tassel, who was strangely unsurprised to see me appear in Unciel’s kitchen. She went back to the palace to tell the king that all is well with his daughter.”

  Euan pulled his hair into spikes and slumped back in the chair. “What about Unciel? Will all be well with him?”

  “He’s not dead yet,” the enigmatic Gyre answered. He shifted the blankets a little, pulling them closer to the wizard’s face. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

  “I don’t remember. There’s some limp cabbage soup hanging over the ashes.”

  “I’ll see what I can do with it,” Gyre said. Euan stopped him before he made it through the door.

  “Wait—” He paused, trying to drag his thoughts into some coherent form. “Wait.” Gyre did so. “You just—You and Unciel—You were just roaming around Serre wearing that monster’s face, terrifying every living thing—Now you’re going to warm up some old cabbage soup? Is that how life normally is for a wizard?”

  “Some days you battle yourself and other monsters. Some days you just make soup. You’ll both need to eat, after all that.”

  “After all what?”

  “After all you did for him. After all he dreamed for me.”

  Euan sat back with a sigh. The raven, perched on the chair back behind his head, picked through its feathers in search of something moving. The one-eyed cat on Euan’s knee closed its eye and went back to sleep. So did Euan.

  This time his name was written in elaborate, elegant script in the midst of his dream by what looked like a burning finger. Euan, the fire said, and he woke himself answering.

  “Yes. Where were we?”

  Unciel was looking at Euan, his eyes open for the first time in days, and strangely clear. They had lost that ashen mist of memory; fire had rekindled itself behind the blue.

  “Finally,” he said, and the scribe, still moving out of dreams, reached for his pen.