“I could never cry,” she whispered. “I envy you.”
He felt his throat burn again, this time with wonder, with pity. “Why? What have you lost?”
“Love,” she said simply. “Sorrow.”
He was mute, staring at her. The tear hung like a cut jewel below her eye. He lifted his hand, touched it, and it fell, glittering, to the grass. “No one cries for sorrow.”
“I know.” She closed her eyes, her face upraised, fierce and desperate, pale as ivory in her autumn hair. He touched her cheek again, his lips parted, not daring to breathe. He touched her mouth. She opened her eyes then, as if waking. Her lips grazed his fingertips. Then she took his hand in her hands, and held it still. “No one cries for her. I cannot cry, and I think that where she is, no one would care to cry for her. That’s why I need the mage. And you. I cannot cross into your world to look for her. You can cross boundaries; you can show the mage the way to me. He could break the spell on her, and bring her back to me.”
“Who?” Again his voice held no sound.
“My daughter. My Saro. My only child.” She paused, searching his face. “You said her name.”
He whispered, “I said ‘sorrow.’”
“Sorrow,” she said. Then: “Saro.”
“Saro.” He was silent again, watching the shadows and golden lights in her eyes, how expression breathed across her face like wind across water, changing a curve of bone here, a hollow there. He could, he realized slowly, stand there for a season or three and watch her, while leaves the color of her hair drifted down, and the tall birch rose out of snow whiter than the snow. He forced himself to speak. “How did you lose her to the human world?”
Her eyes narrowed; he glimpsed the night in them, the queen who rode without a face through the mage’s dream. “She vanished out of this world. Years ago, by mortal reckoning. I have been searching for her that long. I cannot find her here; therefore she must be there. Yet I hear no tales of her from your world; no one dreams of her. She is disguised, hidden in some way. My bright, sweet Saro. I dream of her, trying to speak to me, but I cannot hear what she is saying; her words make no sound…”
“Sometimes—” He stopped, started again. “Sometimes I see a woman in my dreams. With my eyes. I can’t hear what she is saying, either.”
“Saro is not dead. We change, when we are very old. You see us all around you in the wood. But death is for humans.”
“My mother is dead. She died the night my father was killed. The night I was born. They told me…it was as if she knew. As if she saw him fall. And so she died.” His eyes dropped, hidden from her; he waited, while she considered that argument. But she only said,
“Such matters you must take up with the mage when I am done with him. But first you must find him. You bridge worlds. You saw what he only dreams. If you can find me, you can find him. I want his mage’s mind, his mage’s eyes, to find my child in your world.”
“Have you seen,” he asked evenly, “what he made? What came alive and hunted him last night?”
“Yes.” There was no pity in her face, no expression at all.
“If he is hiding from that, what makes you think I can find him?”
“I saw him enter my wood, carrying you in his arms. If you don’t find him, he will find you.”
He slid a hand beneath his lenses, over his eyes. “If I put myself in enough danger, you mean.”
“You will find him and persuade him to help me,” she said. “It is your only hope of escape from this world. Your only path to Pelucir.”
He shifted a little, felt her hold on his hand tighten. His mouth tightened. “He has no reason to care.”
“Then,” she said softly, “you must find him a reason to care. You have odd powers: You walk between worlds, you see what the White Wolf only dreams. You must remember, though, that if you try to return to your world, you will only wander like a ghost among those you love. Like the shadow I became when I followed you. A reflection. A dream. Until the mage is found, you are hostage in my world.”
He caught his breath to protest. Burne, he wanted to say to her. The childless King of Pelucir. “How,” he asked reasonably, his voice shaking, “do you expect me to survive what the mage made to destroy us?”
He saw no mercy in her eyes; for a moment she did not, or could not, speak. Her hands were gripping his hand; he waited, feeling her tremble.
“They watched him,” she said finally, her face colorless as mist. “From within the wood, when he cast that spell. Saro and my beloved consort. He and she had some human blood; they could see and hear what I could not. Saro seemed open to your world with the intensity of her curiosity. My consort watched with her. And so.” Her breath rose and fell. “And so. When the greatest human mage worked his spell on your battlefield, he shattered the weakened boundary between our worlds and pulled my Saro into yours. In what shape, I do not know. I can only guess. By what he did to my consort, who was, himself, among the most powerful in my world. I saw him changed. Warped out of shape and trapped in the mage’s terrible spell. I watched him ride away from me onto your battlefield.”
Talis felt the blood drain out of his face. Cold shook him; even her hands on his could not warm him. He opened his mouth to speak, could make no sound.
She nodded. “That is what the mage is fighting. His own power. And my consort’s enormous power, twisted beyond any recognition.”
“Oh,” he said without sound. His hands moved, drew at her, slender wrist, elbow, shoulder, until he had gathered all of her into his arms, and held her, feeling sorrow with all its thorns bloom in his heart. He felt her face drop finally against his shoulder.
“So you see—”
“Yes,” he whispered, seeing the Hunter in the keep destroying spells, seeing the full moon rising in a tangle of oak, the mage standing under the oak, looking across Hunter’s Field, watching his past and his future ride toward him in the dark. “Yes.”
Fourteen
The White Wolf prowled the wood in Pelucir.
He followed paths of light until the sun shifted and they faded. He immersed himself in shadow as in water; he found no other land but shadow. He placed his heart into the hearts of trees, listened to their secret murmurings; they told him nothing he did not know. He tried to dream, beneath the oak; the only face he saw in the twilight between waking and sleeping was the face of the black moon rising in a cloud of fire, and then the Hunter’s feral, moon-eyed face.
He called Talis in a mage’s silent way; he flew with hawks and mourning doves, called him with their voices; he ran with boar and hare and even with Burne’s hunting hounds, and used their voices. He slipped into running streams, murmured Talis’ name with the voice of water; he called him with the toads among the reeds. He shaped the trumpet’s fanfare into Talis’ name. He looked out of ravens’ eyes, hunting-horses’ eyes, deer’s eyes, the hunters and the hunted. But the Queen had taken Talis beyond the world, and Atrix could find no sense, no instinct, no eyes, no sorcery, and no dream that could change the wood into another world.
At twilight, he changed himself into a drift of leaves at the edge of the wood, and waited.
The moon rose and set. On Hunter’s Field nothing moved.
For three days, he searched the wood for Talis, for three nights he waited for the Hunter. Both had vanished. When he fell, at odd moments, into an exhausted sleep, he dreamed of the wood around him.
The dream had changed, he realized even while dreaming. Three white deer, three white hounds, three white horses, and the Queen of the Wood, with her face made of all the wild beauty in her wood: white birch, owl’s eyes, the rich, yellow-gold light of early autumn, the alert, elegant faces of hunting animals. She cried a word; it was the same word, but it meant something else, he felt in his dream. She cried “Sorrow,” but it did not mean sorrow…She held her bow, but did not shoot.
He dreamed of Talis.
In his dream, the prince was made of air and light. He drifted like old leaves drifted, w
andering through the wood. Sometimes he called to Atrix. His callings were complex and surprising. An oak tree opened a mouth in a seam of bark and said, Atrix Wolfe. The name formed out of silken rustlings of birch leaves. A pool of light in which the drifting prince had a shadow as pale as cobweb shaped the letters of his name in brighter gold. Atrix Wolfe, the air whispered. Atrix Wolfe, said the small birds from within the wild roses. Atrix, still hidden in a thick layer of dead leaves that would not crumble underfoot, or move for any wind, knew even in his sleep that while the imagery of the dream might be nebulous, truth lay in it like a nut in a nutshell: Talis had not left the wood, and, with mages’ ways, he searched for Atrix Wolfe.
But, waking, Atrix could sense him nowhere; like the woodland queen, Talis called to Atrix in a dream. Atrix, searching for him in the true world, could not hear his voice.
Weary, hungry and bewildered, he rose with the morning sun, and moved with the light across Hunter’s Field to talk to the King.
Burne took him into a quiet council chamber. The King looked as if he had slept in his clothes, if he had slept at all. His eyes were bloodshot; he wore blood and dirt on his boots from the hunt. He sat on the council table and watched Atrix pace.
“I know where Talis is,” Atrix said, seeing the impossible world as he spoke: the wood where white deer cast shadows of gold, and a queen as ageless as dreams ruled outside of time.
“Where?”
“He is looking for me—I hear him call me. But I only hear him when I sleep, and I can only search for him when I’m awake. He seems to exist only in my dreams.”
Burne opened his mouth, closed it. He poured wine instead of speaking, took a hefty swallow. “That’s preposterous. How can he live in a dream? He’s flesh and blood.”
“She existed for me in my dreams, and for Talis in this world. It’s like night and day—he is there only when I can’t see him. I don’t know the path into my own dreams.”
Burne stared at his cup. He flung it abruptly across the room; wine stained the far wall in jagged peaks. Atrix, blinking tiredly, thought with longing of the mountains of Chaumenard. “He’s all we have.” The King’s hands clenched. “All I have left. You can’t give up.”
Atrix shook his head. “Never.” He moved again, restlessly, sliding fingers through his hair, scattering bits of leaf behind him. “You can stop hunting, though. Not even your hounds could scent him in her wood.”
“Maybe not,” Burne said wearily, “but I can’t do nothing. If I harry her wood enough, maybe she’ll give him back to me.”
“I saw her face,” Atrix said, “in my dreams.” He stopped pacing, dropped into a chair, silent a moment, dreaming of her again. “She is like the wood. Like golden light falling through the golden branches of the oak. The fierce, hot green stillness of midsummer, or the colors blowing everywhere in autumn when the winds are clear and wild as water…”
“She is.”
“In my dream she is.”
“What would she want with Talis, then?” Burne asked perplexedly. “He has our mother’s looks, but he isn’t extraordinary, and he wears those lenses everywhere. Unless she took him just because she could. Or maybe we did something to offend her. But I would be dreaming of her then, instead of you. It’s you she shot her arrows at. It’s you Talis is calling, not me. Nobody is sending me any messages.”
Atrix stirred a little, frowning. “She shoots at me out of her world. Talis calls to me out of her world…”
“It’s you she wants,” the King said, inspired. “Not Talis at all.” He looked at Atrix speculatively, and with relief. “If you go to her, maybe she’ll set him free.”
“But why take him at all?” Atrix wondered. “If she wants me?”
“A hostage,” Burne suggested. “Bait.”
“Why didn’t she just appear to me in the wood, instead? I was there, when she took Talis. It makes no sense. Why would she use a prince of Pelucir as bait for a mage of Chaumenard? It makes—”
“No sense. You’re right. But they’re both trying to get your attention. Maybe she needs a mage, and mistook Talis for one.”
Atrix was silent, seeing the arrow fly through his dreams again, feeling it strike: That is the message, he thought grimly. The heart of the matter. He rose again, compelled by mysteries, though he wondered how long his weary human shape could bear the confusion and strain of them. A breath of air smelling of pitch and stone and wild strawberry would give him back the mountain’s strength, he felt. Pelucir smelled too tamely of slow water and grass and ancient trees…
Burne was speaking “…wear yourself to the bone. Stay and eat with us. Sleep a little.” He paused, asked warily, “Have you seen what Talis made again?”
“No. I’ve watched for him, these past nights; I’ve seen nothing.”
“Him.”
“It. It bore some odd resemblance to its maker. I don’t know where it went.”
“You destroyed it,” Burne suggested. “You sent it back into the pages of the spellbook.”
Atrix shook his head wearily. “I won’t leave Pelucir until I know exactly what happened to it.”
“Thank you,” Burne said. Atrix gazed at him, surprised, then lifted a hand to his eyes, blocking the light, trying to think.
“Be careful,” he advised the King. “Don’t hunt at night. And I want that spellbook out of this castle.”
Burne shrugged. “It’s in the keep. No one will use it. No one goes up there but Talis.”
“I want it out of Pelucir. I’ll take it out of the keep for now, hide it somewhere; it may stay put for a while, now that I am here. Perhaps Talis left something in the keep that will help me find him. A hint of a path between worlds.”
“Nothing was left whole, they say. Everything broken, torn, all his books in shreds. Yours too, probably.”
“It’s no ordinary book,” Atrix reminded him. “I made it.”
He sensed the eccentric power as he walked toward the keep. Its high window jumped from one wall to another to stare at him. He listened; it was empty except for its memories; the owls had fled, but not the ghosts. His mind travelled up the stairs; the door hung open, sagging on one hinge. He followed his thoughts.
Standing on the threshold, he studied the room, while the odd face in the door, askew now, studied him. He sensed no danger in the restless window, which gave him a view of the distant wood. Torn pages and paper were scattered everywhere; some books, heavy, leatherbound tomes, had been ripped in two. His eyes flicked over them; he lifted the table, searching, then moved pieces of a bucket, a broken bowl, scattered firewood, blown torches, feeling, even as he searched, the emptiness of the room. Disturbed, perhaps by his own growing unease, the shadows on the walls grew more profuse, telling him their stories: Look, they said. See. This happened to me.
“I know,” he breathed between his teeth, haunted. “I know.” His search became desperate; he looked in the ashes in the grate, into the walls and stones. He stopped himself finally, chilled. Nothing had ended or resolved itself; he was still under siege by his past.
The book had moved again, out of a place where no one came. He stood silently, his mind wandering through rooms and corridors, looking for that piece of himself, and sensing himself nowhere. Perhaps it had found its own way back to Chaumenard, having accomplished its dark and bewildering purpose in Pelucir…
He found Burne again, beginning breakfast with guests and hunters in the hall. He had forgotten how to move unobtrusively among frayed and sleepless humans. He startled even those who recognized him, shaping out of air, with his torn tunic and callused feet, and his eyes like hoarfrost melting over dark water. Cups were overturned, knives cracked against plate. A chair rattled back across the stones next to the King; a man with yellow hair and a scarred face made room for Atrix.
“Did you find it?” Burne asked, as servants poured pale wine scented with spices into Atrix’s cup, filled a plate with pastries stuffed with nuts and cream, cold salmon, a swan carved out of melon with
its wings full of strawberries. He cast a glance at Atrix’s face and answered his own question. “No. It was most likely destroyed in that strange storm. You saw what was left up there.”
“It wasn’t up there. It has a will of its own.”
“It’s your book,” Burne said, bewildered. “Why did you write something so dangerous and unpredictable?”
“I didn’t intend to.” He ate a bite of salmon, some fruit, while Burne wrestled with the problem of the spellbook. In the distance, Atrix sensed another storm, vague yet, but imminent: He tensed, waiting, while Burne argued.
“You saw all those ghosts up there,” he said to Atrix. “You must have.”
“Yes.”
“They are ghosts of the siege of Hunter’s Field. The place is riddled with memories; everyone knows it’s haunted. My guards hate being up there, even armed, especially those who lived through the siege. I can’t believe, after what happened to Talis, that anyone would set foot up there now, especially not for a spellbook. Talis is the only one who knows anything about magic.”
“It’s more than a book,” Atrix said slowly, his mind still on the roil of thoughts and fears moving through the King’s house. “It’s a sign. A message. Something that may tell me what—” The storm moved down the corridor to the hall; he stopped, his breath drawn, listening.
“If it’s that important,” Burne said, “I’ll have the castle searched, dungeon to keep—What?” he asked sharply, turning, as guards pushed into the hall.
“My lord, there is a messenger back from—from—” Words dried in the man’s throat; he shook his head, unable to finish. His face looked frozen, haunted; Atrix saw the ghostly reflection in his eyes.
He stood up; so did the King, his hands coming down hard on the table. “What?” he demanded again; the guard swallowed and found his voice.
“A messenger, my lord, that you sent out to Chaumenard.”
“I sent a dozen messengers,” Burne snapped. Again the hall was soundless. “They can’t have reached the mages so soon—Where is he?”
The Book of Atrix Wolfe Page 14