Three white horses with eyes of bone and shadows of hoarfrost galloped after the hounds. Behind them rode three roan, and behind them three black, and behind them a great gathering of hunters that seemed to have fashioned themselves out of roots, tree bark and leaves, as if the wood itself were hunting. Through the empty frame of his lenses Talis saw a moving blur of green, trees riding a hard wind. Through the unbroken lens he saw the faces of leaf and tree-bole, the slender woven branches of willow, of pale, papery birch bark. Only the riders turning their white mounts toward him had no faces.
He swayed, caught his balance against the spear, watching the one with slender, jewelled hands ride forward, a bright white swirl of long skirt and mantle, flowing ribbons of silk and pearl, and crowned with gold and bone above long hair streaked with autumn fire and a dark oval that was no face. Frozen, Talis watched her notch the arrow in her hand, lift her bow. Just before she shot, he whispered, “At least, before you kill me, let me see your face. And then tell me why.”
He saw her face.
He swayed again, trembling, wordless. Her eyes were gold and dark, troubled, in a face at once imperious and vulnerable and so beautiful there seemed no word, in human language, for what he saw.
She lowered her bow. She said, her voice like the horn he had heard, pure, regal, haunting, “I am the mother of sorrow.”
“Oh,” he breathed, his voice gone, the world gone, except for what existed in the circle of his unbroken lens. “How can I help you?”
“You can see me. You have crossed into my world. You are not dreaming.”
“No.”
“Tell me your name.”
He drew a long, shaking breath to give her that and his bones and anything else she might want of him. “My name is—”
Someone shouted it behind him and the world within the lens shattered.
He turned, bewildered, stunned by the frenzied barking of hounds, not remembering where he had been, what world he had walked out of to see her. Hunters rode out of the trees, shouting; trumpets sounded; dogs swarmed into the stream, belling and harrying a boar that in its maddened panic was charging straight across the water at Talis.
He did not remember moving. He remembered blood on the boar’s tusk after it tore open a hound with the toss of its head, and its rank smell as it came close, and then its small, furious and terrified eye. And then the spear shuddered in his hands, tried to wrench itself free. Something splashed across his eyes. He saw the world through a bloody haze.
Talis, he heard then, from another world, a secret within the wood.
And then he heard the King’s voice. “Talis!”
He knelt on the ground holding a spear with a dead boar impaled on it that had pushed itself in its dying frenzy all the way up to the cross-guard. That much he could see through his broken lens. The hounds were swarming around him, barking with wild excitement in his face, trying to tell him what he had done. He opened his hands finally, let the spear fall. He stumbled, rising. Burne caught him, dragged him away from the hounds.
The King pounded him, saying something, his face still patchy with fear. Talis winced, aching suddenly in every bone. He pulled his lenses off, cleaned the blood from the unbroken glass, his hands trembling. His hearing seemed to return with his sight; as he put the lenses back on, his brother’s voice penetrated.
“I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead, when it came at your back and you just stood there not listening, not turning, with enough racket behind you to make the trees jump. And then you turned, and brought the spear down and the boar ran up it as cleanly as if it were spitting itself for supper. One stroke, straight through the heart.” He pounded Talis between the shoulder blades again, then took a closer look at him. “You’re all wet. You have slime in your hair.”
“I fell in the stream,” Talis said dazedly. “Riding too fast after you. I broke a lens and maybe a rib. I was using the spear as a crutch. That’s why I had it in my hands at all.”
Burne eyed him wordlessly a moment, his face taut again. “Why didn’t you use some magic or something? You could have been killed!”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“You must have stunned yourself. That’s why you didn’t hear us.”
“Yes.” He touched his lenses and saw a face within the light and windblown leaves. “I was stunned. Burne, I’m sorry I nearly killed you this morning.”
“Never mind.” Burne sighed. “It’s been tried before.”
“About the keep—”
“Never mind about the keep. Keep it. You’d only find another place to have your accidents in, anyway.”
“It’s not—” Talis stopped himself. “Thank you.”
“Well. Anyway, it makes a good story. Almost as good as you falling off your horse, breaking a lens, and killing a charging boar while you hobbled around using your boar-spear as a crutch.” He slapped Talis’ back again, loosing a grunt of amazed laughter. “You can tell it when we feast on your kill.”
It seemed to Talis, as he stood dripping water and blood, seeing blurred green wood through one eye, and dogs scrapping over offal through the other, a peculiar exchange for magic.
He found his horse, which had gone nowhere but had simply declined to follow him into a dream, and rode home accompanied by various fanfares, with the gutted boar hanging upside-down on the spear behind him. The physician bandaged his ribs and his knee, forbade him to climb the keep stairs and gave him a tonic which, he thought, could have melted drawbridge chain, and which stunned him until evening the next day. It seemed mildly hallucinatory: As he sat through the long boar feast trying to keep his fraying thoughts together, he kept glimpsing the face of the woodland Queen among the guests. It was, he decided, a trick of his broken lenses, making him see double. Now a young girl wore the Queen’s expression of power and vulnerability; now a fall of hair the color of autumn leaves made him catch his breath. Now he saw her face, just before it turned away from him to speak. It was a face full of opposites, he decided: delicate and regal, young and ageless, wild and controlled, fierce and sweet…
Trumpets greeted the boar as it entered on a tray of silver and gold. Talis saw himself on the tray suddenly, blind and still. If he had not turned, if the spear had broken in his fall, if he had lost it in the water…He swallowed dryly, adjusted his lenses, and the odd vision vanished, along with his appetite. Later, the horns bade farewell to the bones and the picked meat and the tusks that lay like quarter moons on the bloody tray. Talis, wandering badly, forced himself to listen to his great-uncle relate a complex incident that had happened last autumn, or the one ten years before, or some autumn before Talis was born. There was One Great Hunt, he decided, that went on perpetually in some never-ending autumn. That was the Hunt out of which all stories came. Even his boar would come charging out of spring into autumn one day, during some drunken feast, when he would remember the leaves being all the colors of her hair…The story involved a broken stirrup, a hedge with a gypsy’s laundry drying on it, and a pig. Talis’ eyes strayed. There she was again, at the far end of the table, holding a hazelnut in her long white fingers, each finger ringed with gold. She laughed suddenly at the hunting story; her face changed, became human. The King said softly to Talis:
“You’re not eating. Are you in pain?”
Talis shook his head. “I doubt that I’d feel pain if you dropped a table on my head. I just keep wandering out of the world.”
Burne grunted. “Go to bed before you fall in your plate.” Servants brought in wet linens scented with rosewater, and tiny, icy bowls of minced fruit. Talis wiped his hands and rose unsteadily; Burne added, “And stay out of the keep. You’re dangerous enough up there when your head is clear.”
“I will,” Talis said absently. Shadows followed him, spun out of the flickering torchlight. Voices, laughter, music, seemed to follow him also, even through the dark night, as if he walked through some invisible hall where the gathering within celebrated yet another
hunt. He climbed the keep steps slowly. There seemed far more of them than usual. He had reached the top and opened the door before he remembered, with some surprise, that he had been on his way to bed.
The room was lighted, he realized slowly, though he had found his way up in the dark. The light seemed not fire but sun, ancient, golden, still, like the wood on a soundless summer afternoon. He made a sound, seeing two worlds again: the bleak, shadow-ridden keep, the light trembling in it as if, in the otherworld, midnight did not exist.
In that light, not even past existed. All the tormented shadows had vanished on the walls. He saw only one shadow: tall, slender, crowned with what looked like a circle of flame or deer horn. He watched it for a long time, until his heart seemed made of that sweet light, and he felt that at any moment she might step out of the faceless shadow on the wall into his world.
He heard her voice, distant, silvery, pure, like her hunting horn. Talis.
“Yes,” he whispered, and again, “Yes.”
She said nothing more. He watched until her shadow reached out everywhere, pulled him into night.
Five
The boar and the bolt of lightning leaping out of the keep made Talis’ name a kitchen word for a day or two. The hall-servants told the tale of the burrowing, deadly sorcery, the frenzied dogs, the spilled cups, the furious king, each a different way, as if each had seen a different light. The other tale came piecemeal from the hall: Something had happened to the prince. He had fallen off his horse. He had broken a leg, he had broken a rib, he had broken any number of bones. He had been dazed, he hadn’t heard, and then there it was, coming at his back, and he turned, and next thing, they were pulling his silver spear-point out of the boar’s heart. It wasn’t magic; it was all as he had been taught, just as his father had done in his time, and for that instant, with his hair and his shoulders, he had looked just like his father.
Saro, deep in her wash water, heard his name echo around the iron cauldron. It was one more kitchen noise; if he had called her name to fetch a dirty pot, she might have put the name to his voice. Princes were no more real to her than roses or gold or a living boar, or the world beyond the kitchen garden. Anything could exist in that magical “beyond,” except Saro. The prince’s name was simply a word she could ignore, since it had nothing to do with pots. So she scrubbed and did not think, and gradually the dancing flame that was the prince’s name grew still and, unfanned, became an ember of memory. The day Prince Talis…The day when the light…When he almost killed the King, and then was almost killed himself…
And then, unexpectedly, the ember flared again, became an argument, scraps of which Saro heard as she picked up dirty bread pans from beside the ovens. The hall-servants, gathering for the midday meal, flurried around the kitchen, feathers rustling, preparing for flight.
“I’m not going.”
“I’m not going. It’s not our place to be asked to go up there.”
“Up all those steps. Let the guards take it. They’re used to it.”
“It’s not just the steps, it’s—”
“Pitch-black. And ghosts wander. Hungry ghosts. You’d have to be mad to go among them. It’s one thing for Prince Talis; he’s got his magic, and the guards are armed, but—”
“And when you make it past the ghosts and up all those stairs, then where are you? Face to face, so I’ve heard, with a Thing in the door opening its eyes and glaring at you.”
Saro, loaded with trays, set them down beside the cauldron. A mincer darted to her side, grabbed a misshapen dove left on the tray, and vanished under a table. Bending, she began to scrub, and heard little more for a while than the slosh of water, the scrape of metal on iron, her scrub brush on stubborn grease.
“Saro!”
She pulled herself upright, turned to the iron stoves, where an undercook had scorched a sauce. Carrying the hot pan carefully, its long handle wrapped in her skirt, she edged around an argument between the tray-mistress and the head hall-servant.
“It’s not my job,” the tray-mistress said roundly, “to find a tray-bearer for Prince Talis in this muddle. Who should I send?” Her fingers pinched, crablike, caught a peeler’s small, translucent ear. “Him?” He squinched his eyes shut, knife in one hand, potato in the other. He looked as grimy and knobbed as a new potato. “Boy, take a tray to the prince in the great keep.” His mouth gaped; he endeavored to disappear down his shirt. “How far do you think he would get with it? Two steps into the dark and he’d flee, leaving Prince Talis’ meal to the mice.”
“It’s not our job to go among ghosts and cobwebs,” the head servant retorted.
“Well, it’s none of mine, either.” The tray-mistress glanced at the ear in her fingers, as if wondering how it got there, and loosed it distastefully. “If he’s a mage, Prince Talis, why can’t he levitate his meal from here to there?”
“He’s busy with his other sorceries,” the head servant said portentously. “And making a new lens so he can read his spells.”
The tray-mistress breathed heavily through her nose. “It’s your problem,” she said, and turned to add linen in a gold ring to the tray under dispute. Saro heard the head servant’s voice rise as she left them behind and eased around another obstacle: two apprentices coming to a boil over spices in a pudding. She dumped the scorched sauce down the drain and added the pan to her pile.
“Saro!”
She threaded her way through the servants and cooks, hurrying now, as they drizzled a latticework of chocolate sauce on a stewed pear, and placed walnut halves on small tarts of egg and cheese and finely chopped mushrooms. She collected the empty tart pans, and then the saucepans, added them to her pile, which was beginning to teeter. Working quickly, she had twin towers, one dirty, one clean, before she heard her name again.
“Saro!”
The voice belonged to the tray-mistress, who, scowling with frustration, dropped a fresh lily on a tray and handed the tray to Saro.
“Take this to Prince Talis in the keep. All she thinks about is pots,” she added to the head servant, who looked battered but victorious. “Nothing else penetrates. She won’t know enough to be afraid. Go,” she added to Saro, who was adjusting the heavy silver tray in her slippery hands. “And quickly, before it cools entirely.”
The head servant wrinkled his nose fastidiously. “But not through the castle. Not looking like that. Go around through the kitchen garden. Is she mute? Or just dense?”
“Both.”
“Then how will we know if she actually makes it to the top of the keep with the tray?”
The tray-mistress rolled an exasperated eye at him. “Follow her,” she snapped, and showed him her back.
Saro, who hadn’t seen the woodpile and had scarcely seen the sky since she was found, ignored both on her way to the keep. She dodged gardeners, dogs, guards, as easily as she dodged elbows, tossed spoons, and mincers waving mincing knives at each other. One world was no more perilous than the other, for there was only the task at hand. All else could be ignored, as long as she herself was. And even the guards who thought to question her forgot the questions as they looked at her blank face, and then forgot her face. It was only when she opened the door to the keep and stood in the thin fingers of light falling from the narrow archers’ windows along the stairs that she stopped, midstep, in the middle of her task. Something was happening inside her head. It seemed as if she saw two things at once: the broken, shadowy, mysterious keep, cloudy with owls in the upper rafters, and another tower, rising through it, at once solid and transparent as a dream. This tower had walls through which roses bloomed, and a broad sweep of ivory stairs that led to…something. Someone? Her pale brows crumpled; her lips moved soundlessly. Who was it at the top? She moved again, slowly, up stairs of white stone and stairs of dark stone, while owls did and did not swivel their heads to look at her through their great golden eyes. The door at the top was of dark, carved wood; the door at the top was painted white and gold. The door was always closed; the door was always
open…She moved through time and memory, scarcely noticing the endless steps, trying to make the picture clear in her head before she reached the door. The door was dark and limned by fire and guarded by a face. The door was always open and someone came to meet her, smiling…
The door opened. Snow swirled out of it, and she glimpsed for one instant the terrible figure who had come to meet her. Something tried to leap out of her mouth. She brought up both hands to hold it back, and the tray crashed to the floor at Talis’ feet.
They stared at one another, the prince and the pot-scrubber. Then they both crouched, picking up goblets, cutlery, broken plate, while the guards and the face in the door watched bemusedly, and Talis examined the remains of his meal.
“What had we here? Salmon swimming in gravy, roast beef on a bed of broken meringue…The bread is only slightly damp. And what was this?” He tasted a finger. “Too sweet. But it was pretty, whatever it was. Now. I only have to wring the salad out. I frightened you, opening the door so quickly after you braved ghosts and owls and endless stairs. You’re not crying, are you?”
He looked at her. Then he touched his lenses and looked again. His eyes widened slightly, lingered on her face. He said softly after a moment, “You have the strangest face. It seems…to shift. Or blur. Something…” His own face did not; it was quite calm under her gaze. There was something odd about it she could not have described, except that it was the only face she had ever seen that made her want to keep looking at it. He asked, “What is your name?”
She averted her face abruptly, touched her mouth with one finger. He made a soft sound. She stood swiftly, her face still turned away, for she was not used to being visible. “Wait,” he said, and she did as she was told.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe Page 6