“Well, how am I to know? It’s not a cooking word.”
“You mind what you’re doing,” the tray-mistress said tartly, “or you’ll have her turning us into beetles.”
“Well, what is meditation,” the apprentice on the floor asked aggrievedly, “when it’s not in a sauce?”
“Contemplation,” an undercook said.
“What?”
“Thinking!” the grey-eyed boner said, and whacked a fowl in two with her cleaver. “Now get on with it! She’s doing it already, anyway. Look at her. Like she was born knowing how.”
“Then what am I doing sitting here reading?”
“Shut up and read,” the spit-boy said.
“Meditation on the desired object. I guess that would be Prince Talis.”
“Right,” the tray-mistress said approvingly, sorting napkins for the morning. “She looks into fire and water and thinks of him.”
“The object—or subject—will be seen in the mingling of elmenents. Elements. That’s all.” He shoved the book away and rose to his knees, to look over the side of the cauldron. The spit-boy loosed his stiff, attentive stance to bend forward an inch. The tray-mistress peered, saw her reflection mingling with the curious faces.
“Out of there,” she snapped. “How can she see anything with your great cloudy faces floating around?” She patted Saro’s shoulder gently. “That’s it, then, girl. Think of Prince Talis.” She raised her voice. “Pots! No, not you,” she said hastily as Saro started. “You’re not pots anymore. You’re—I don’t know what you are. But not pots.”
Saro drifted back into the fire. She heard dripping-pans scrape along the floor, and her bones, used to jumping at an unwashed pot, settled down. Talis, she thought, as if she heard his name for the first time. She saw his face, grave, thoughtful, his eyes hidden under circles of light. Then his head turned slightly; she saw his eyes clearly, dark blue, beginning to smile.
She saw him walk into a mist. A white owl flew out of the mist toward the castle. An eye in the keep watched it, shifting as the owl passed it, above the heads of guards on the walls watching the bright cloud that had dropped out of the clear night sky to cover the field. The owl left the castle behind. Its swift, smooth flight faltered then; it began to change shape in midair. The bird caught itself, spun down a little, caught itself again, wings laboring. It dropped finally among some trees. Touching the ground, it became Talis. He leaned wearily against a tree, catching his breath, looking back at the stars of fire in the dark rise of stone he had left behind. He turned his back to it finally and began to walk.
“What?” Saro heard all around her, as the prince walked through fire and water and disappeared. “She saw something. She did. Look at her eyes. Round as owl’s eyes. What did you see? Saro, what did you see?”
They surrounded her, all the waiting eyes. The spit-boy holding the torch broke the silence. “How can she say? She can’t talk.”
Later, after the hall servants had carried back the bones and cold broken fragments of salmon wrapped in pie crust, roast venison seared over flames and simmered in wine, garlic and rosemary, carrots and onions fried in butter and ale, baked apples stuffed with cabbage and cream, baskets of fruit woven out of egg white and drizzled with chocolate flavored with brandy, the undercooks pored over the spellbook, looking for a recipe that would make Saro talk. The mincers, boners, pluckers, spit-boys and peelers fell on the leftovers like mice, then scattered again under tables, to the hearths, out of the way of the bakers and washers and the disgusted plucker who had to do pots, and who left trails of ash and grease behind her as she hauled dirty pots across the kitchen. They had taken a cauldron from the tallow-makers for her to wash in; Saro had refused to leave her cauldron.
“It’s what she knows best,” the tray-mistress decided. But they gave her a sheepskin to sleep on, and moved the cauldron to a warm place beside the ovens.
The kitchen quieted, but for the rhythmic shaking of bakers’ tables as they kneaded butter into rich dough for the morning pastries. The plate-washers dried the last plates, put them gently away. Then, with the smoky-eyed boner, they came to look at Saro as she sat in the shadow of the cauldron.
“She’s fey,” the boner said, twirling a strand of dark hair around a bitten forefinger. “Some witch was her mother, not a milker at all.”
“No, a mage,” the washer said. Her eyes caught Saro’s, pale brown, like nuts. Saro stared at them a moment, then looked away, wrapping her arms nervously around her knees. The boner touched her.
“We won’t hurt you, girl. Look.” She unwrapped a slice of crusted salmon from her apron, untouched but for a bite at one corner. She put it on Saro’s knees. “Eat it. You need your strength.”
Saro unwound herself after a moment, took a bite. On stools above her, the undercooks turned the pages of the spellbook, entranced.
“Look at this one. To Leave a Message in Water. And this: To Sound a Bell at a Distance. To Open a Latched Door…Wasn’t that the one—”
“Wasn’t the prince trying to open a door that day—”
“When he made lightning and nearly killed the King.”
They glanced doubtfully at Saro, eating cold salmon with her fingers. “She wouldn’t have accidents, would she? She’s born with it, the prince wasn’t.”
“Anyway, you have to speak with this spell. So she couldn’t do it, anyway. Must be something in here can help her talk.”
“Some are just born mute.”
“Mages aren’t.”
“Saro,” said the boner, when Saro had swallowed the last of the salmon. She put her hand on Saro’s clasped, tense hands. “Listen to me. We want to teach you to talk. Say words. You need it, to do magic.”
“She hasn’t so far,” the blue-eyed washer murmured.
“Well, we need her to talk. Listen. Saro. Can you say your name? Like this. First a hiss. Then open wide. Say ah. Then ro. Do this with your lips. Like a growl. Then O. It’s easy. Try it. Saro.” She opened one of Saro’s hands, laid it against her throat. “Can you feel my voice?” Saro, feeling wings under her hand, water moving, stirred with surprise. She felt her own throat with her other hand: Nothing moved.
“Maybe she hasn’t got a voice.”
“Should have a spit-boy scare her,” the nut-eyed washer mused. “See if she screams.”
“She never has. She has never made a sound.”
They gazed at her, baffled. “Just try,” the boner coaxed. “Just move your lips. Sa. Ro.”
“We should tell the King,” the tray-mistress said to the head cook as he stood for a rare, idle moment beside the cluster of undercooks, looking over their shoulders at the spellbook. “There’s a mage in his kitchen who has seen Prince Talis.”
The head cook snorted. “Or that there is a mute pot-scrubber whom we asked to look for the prince in the bottom of a wash-cauldron.”
“Well, if you put it that way—”
“No matter how it is put, that’s what the King will see.”
“But he’s desperate for any word of Prince Talis!”
“I know. So are we all. Leave her to it. She must find her way to tell him—he’d never listen to us. He’d just start throwing.”
“Maybe,” the tray-mistress said dubiously. “She did look as surprised as any of us by what she did to the fire. I don’t think she knows what she is. How could she, and still be happy scrubbing pots all those years? I think she’s feeling her way to something. She doesn’t go by that book. She doesn’t know if the words are on their heads or on their heels. She’s just doing. And even she doesn’t know what she’ll do next.”
“But she knew enough to find the spellbook. She knows something.”
“Yes,” the tray-mistress agreed. “So we should tell the King.”
Saro touched her mouth, felt her lips move, as she watched the boner’s mouth. Sa. Ro. The wings in her throat refused to fly. Words could not get out that way. Yet that’s what they all wanted from her: words. She had to say what she
had seen, make a picture into words. She dropped her face against her knees abruptly, blinding herself to hear the sounds around her.
“She’s tired,” the tray-mistress said. “She’s confused, poor thing.”
The wings must fly in her throat, fly out of her mouth, carrying words with them. Her lips moved again, shaping her name. Sa. Ro. She lifted her head abruptly, stared at the boner, feeling that she had been given something of her own, something she would never lose.
Saro, her lips said, with no sound, no wings. But the boner smiled suddenly.
“Good. That’s a place to begin, anyway. Your name.”
In the next few days, Saro watched Prince Talis fly through fire and water as a hawk, an owl, a wild goose, each time staying a little longer in the air before his magic began to wear away and he reached for earth again. She watched him walk dark roads and rocky fields; she watched him run with wild horses through craggy hills. She watched him drift among humans in small, crowded, smoky rooms, listening to them. They never looked at him, or spoke to him; he might have been a pot-scrubber, the way their eyes passed over him without seeing. Yet she saw him, in her magic cauldron, and she felt an odd tumult in her, as if she had swallowed a thundercloud, its rumbles and flashes of illumination like words trying to form.
She did things without thinking, as she watched him. She sparked the spit-boy’s dwindling torch with a touch when the cauldron grew dark. She lifted her hand, and an apple fell into it, or a heel of bread, and she ate absently, not moving her eyes from Talis. Once, as she studied him, trying to envision what had made him invisible to humans, she heard a commotion around her, cries and hail of dropped utensils. She looked around and found all their eyes searching in bewilderment for her, passing over her as eyes passed over Talis. Then, in the next moment, their eyes found her again, knew her; she had gone and come back.
“We must tell the King,” the tray-mistress said adamantly. “She’s watching the prince. She knows where he is. He sent for mages who could not come; well, here’s the mage who can find him.”
“He won’t listen,” the head cook warned.
“He must listen.”
The head cook flung up his hands, nearly clipping a mincer with a saucepan lid. “Who’s to tell him Prince Talis is in the bottom of a cauldron of water?”
“You.”
The King still hunted the wood each day for Talis, and each night, doors and gates and windows were locked tight against the strange magic that misted over the field. But the wood was empty of Talis. He had set his path toward a distant blue mist that slowly changed, the closer he came to it, revealing lines, shadows, vast sweeps of green and upthrusts of grey that disappeared into cloud. Saro watched, clinging to the edges of the cauldron as if she might slip headlong into such bewildering land, that towered into the sky instead of lying flat, like the fields Talis had left behind.
She heard the apprentices whispering late one night, as she half-dreamed beside the cauldron. They huddled under a spit-boy’s torch; he watched them narrowly, as if they might somehow take light away from Saro. They turned pages slowly, discussed and discarded spells like recipes for tomorrow’s supper.
“Here’s one. What about this? To Make Small Objects Fall.”
“Too noisy.”
“How to See in the Dark.”
“We’d have to put the fires out. Stock’s simmering, bread rising in the ovens—Anyway, Saro has to see. Here. How to Levitate an Object.”
“We could levitate something quiet.”
“A mincer.”
“They get noisy if they’re dropped.”
“An onion.”
“Boring.”
“This book, then! We’ll levitate the spellbook.”
“Saro,” someone said; their faces, pale under the torch-fire, turned toward her briefly. She felt their eyes.
“She’s busy. Besides, she won’t care; she never looks at it. Besides—”
“It’s just one spell.”
“Just a small one.”
“First: Place the object to be levitated in a place where its upward momentum will be unimpeded.” There was a small silence. “Upward momentum…unimpeded. What’s that? Herbs or something?”
“Must be a special language—mage words. Upward. All right. We know that means up. But what if it doesn’t have a momentum? Most books don’t, do they?”
“The head cook’s do, when he throws them. It means, you wattle-brains, where it won’t bump into something on the way up. Go on.”
“It’ll hit the torch. Shove it to one side. Move your elbow. There. Now go on.”
Their voices slid away from Saro, mingled with the kitchen noises: the crackling pitch in the fires, the slow, patient bubbling of stock in iron pots, the spit-boys’ sleepy, open-mouthed breathing, small invisible pluckers, telling stories under a table, the sweeper, a crooked bundle of bones, snoring beside his broom. Talis was flying toward the jagged end of the world: a massive crown of stone washed by moonlight, that snagged clouds as they sailed by, changed their shapes, then loosed them again. The hard wind tore the bird’s shape away from Talis now and then, caused him to drop wildly, catching at his balance with a wing and an arm for a moment, until he tucked himself away again behind the feathers. There was magic in that wind, Saro sensed; light shimmered in it, odd shapes and shadows spun through it like leaves, disappeared. The bird flew high above a great, dark forest that climbed so far up, and then stopped, leaving bare stone rising upward against the stars. Wind fought the bird as it neared the stones, forced it to drop finally, spin down into the trees. The bird changed as it touched ground. The prince, sagging against one of the trees, rocked with it in the wind as he slid slowly down among its roots. Saro saw his face, white and hollowed with shadows, his eyes half-closed, watching the winds ride like wild hunters through the trees, watching for something within the winds.
After a while, he changed shape again.
“It’s hopeless,” an apprentice cook groaned behind her. “We might as well try to levitate a mountain.”
The book shut with a bang. A white wolf moved through the trees toward the barren peak where the winds began.
Eighteen
On the highest peak of the mountains of Chaumenard, Atrix, an illusion of granite among broken slabs and boulders of granite, contemplated his creation. The Hunter, roaming the ledges below, would find him: He seemed linked, Atrix thought wearily, closer than a shadow to his maker. Moonlight cascaded down the peaks and slopes to flood the valley below; the dark hounds moved through it silently, little more than shadows themselves, sliding over the crags. The Hunter’s inexhaustible power astonished the mage.
Drawkcab, he heard when he had a moment to sleep; the Hunter, quiet by day, prowled through the mage’s dreams. Xirta Eflow: the backward face of Atrix’s sorcery, himself transposed into that terrible reflection of power. But even a shadow resembled the one who cast it, in gesture, movement; it could be controlled. This shadow seemed to have no familiar shape, no predictable limits, no gestures that blurred into Atrix’s gestures of power. The Hunter was isolated and stark as the moon. Atrix, seeking himself in the Hunter’s mind, only fanned an endless rage.
You are mine, he reminded himself and the Hunter. You are me. I made you. I am in you. You have hidden my face, the other side of that dark moon, but I am in you. I am you.
Granite exploded next to him, as if the Hunter had heard his musings. Atrix became a shard in the explosion, flying down the face of the cliff toward the Hunter. He aimed himself at the Hunter’s heart. The Hunter, deflecting stones with a sweep of his hand, found the one that did not veer, or drop, but sped even more quickly toward him, changing, as it neared the Hunter, into a wordless question.
What are you?
He caught the Hunter by surprise, slid beneath his defenses and, for a moment, looked into the Hunter’s eyes.
He saw a field of fire and night, on which darkness shaped itself constantly into ravens, hounds, black moons, the hollo
w in the skull’s eye. He felt the Hunter try to break free, block the mage from his mind; for another moment Atrix clung to him, stared into the darkness within the skull’s eye, trying to see the power that insisted on such darkness, trying to find his own face within the bone.
He saw the green wood of his dreams.
Then fire swept through the wood and he heard himself cry out. He spun toward the fire, caught himself and withdrew from the Hunter’s mind. He found himself splayed against the face of a cliff, wind seeking out his hidden shape, relentlessly drawing him into the moonlit world.
He melted deep into the rock, stayed there, hearing the Hunter’s hounds howling in fury, and feeling the wild wind shake the face of the mountain as it searched for him.
I left a dream in the Hunter’s mind, he thought, amazed, remembering the fury out of which he had worked his spell on that grim battlefield. Then he felt a terrible mingling of exhaustion and despair well up in him: He had finally seen himself in his shadow. I am the raven, I am the hounds, I am the black moon rising in the flames, I am the Hunter’s dream…And before I can destroy the Hunter, I must become the Hunter.
Or he must become me.
But which, he wondered, is which? And why, if I am the maker, and he is what I have made, is he so powerful?
Beyond the solid stone, the wind was exhausting its fury. He gathered himself to face the Hunter again, before the moon turned its bloody face toward Pelucir.
At sunrise, he trapped the Hunter deep in the mountain within a great column of limestone; his hounds were frozen around him. The mage felt light touch the cold crags, high above him, and drew himself gratefully toward the warmth. He fell asleep among the scattered shards of granite on the top of the mountain.
In his dream, he watched a white wolf emerge from the edge of the shadowy forest, move along the bare, wind-whipped face of the mountain. He watched the wolf for a long time before it changed, in the way of dreams, into a young man standing on the stones, looking up, his lenses flashing with light, trying to see something that was only a word, a legend in his world. The young man touched his eyes; his lenses dropped suddenly into the rubble at his feet.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe Page 17