The White Wolf watched him from the top of the mountain. There was something disturbing in the young man’s presence, though he had done nothing more than climb and stop and lose his lenses. He still looked up, his face bare, his eyes searching, though the stones must be only a blur against the sky. The mage sparked light in the lenses; the young man ignored them. He moved again; his next step shattered the lenses underfoot. Still he climbed, changing again into the white wolf, leaving the world behind to reach the top of the mountain.
Atrix felt the icy flash of fear snap out of him even before he woke.
“Talis,” he heard himself say, pulling himself out of the stones to stand blinking at the light, groggy with exhaustion. On the face of the mountain, nothing moved. But he was there, the prince of Pelucir, still searching for the mage. He had seen the mist on Hunter’s Field for what it was, and had followed Atrix into Chaumenard.
He dared not pull Talis into that world, even if he could: What he could see, so could the Hunter. He dared not let Talis stay on the mountain, in any world: What he knew, the Hunter would know, and Atrix could not guess what he might do. There was only one thing to do, and he had no idea how to do it. He sat down in the shadow of a boulder, and closed his eyes, trying to see into the dream again. “Talis,” he whispered helplessly. “Where are you? I can’t see you. Tell me how to reach you…”
The shadow of the stone he leaned against lay like stone across his eyes. He struggled against it a moment, lying vulnerable, exposed to wind and light and any passing life in his human shape. Then he felt himself fall a long way into blackness.
He stood in the green wood, where the small birds sang and invisible roses scented the air. The Queen walked toward him through her trees. They swayed, bowing as she passed; their leaves trailed through her hair, touched her face. She wore green the color of the leaves; it drifted around her, behind her, like cloud, mingling with her fiery-hair, so that she seemed always a little blurred, as if she were just stepping out of wind.
“Atrix Wolfe.” Her voice was as he remembered, low, sweet, touched with passion and sorrow. “Where are you?”
“I am here,” he said, standing in her wood. “In Chaumenard.”
“You must come to me.”
“I am here.”
“You are not here. I need you. Talis is searching for you.”
“I know,” he said helplessly. “He looks for me in my dreams; awake, I look for him. We cannot find each other that way. You must help me.”
“How can I? I know nothing of your ways, or your world.”
“But you know my name,” he said perplexedly, and watched her eyes grow dark, luminous with secret pain.
“I know you,” she said. Leaves whirled around her suddenly, a great storm of green, as if they had been torn away by a season out of time. Through them he glimpsed her face, her hair, her hand. When the leaves finally fell, the trees were bare around her, and above them the sky was black.
He tasted snow, smelled burning wood. The blowing leaves were raven-black; they cried in hoarse ragged voices as they spun away. He could not see the Queen’s face; it was a black, empty oval.
“Talis will bring you to me,” she said. “He has found you for me. I will give him back to you.”
“Not here—” he said, terrified again. “Not now—”
“You wanted him,” she reminded him. “You could not find him in my wood. Now find him in Chaumenard.”
“No!” he shouted, and woke himself.
The sun had shifted; he lay in light, sprawled across the stones. He moved stiffly, drawing back into shadow, and scanned the mountainside with a hawk’s eye. Nothing moved. He let his thoughts drift among the trees, found their webbed, windblown boughs busy with life. No white wolves prowled among their shadows. None waited hidden among the crags around him. It was only a dream, he thought. Still, dread clung to him, formed a vision in his mind: the prince of Pelucir caught on that strange battlefield between the Hunter and the Wolf.
The sun still hung above the mountain; it was late afternoon. Hungry, he changed shape and hunted the lower meadows, forgetting, for a brief hour, everything except what the wind told him, or the earth underfoot, or the small movements among the wildflowers. He took his own shape again and stepped through memory and time, back up to the mountaintop.
The white wolf moved out of the shadows to meet him.
Atrix stopped; the fear flared through him again, coloring his shadow. The wolf changed shape. Talis stood on the high, barren peak, trembling a little, wind-shaken, as if he had been pulled too abruptly out of a dream. He said, confused, “Atrix Wolfe. Can you see me?”
“I can see you,” Atrix said grimly. “Far too clearly.”
“How did I—Did you—”
“She sent you here. The Queen of the Wood.”
The prince’s lenses flashed, catching light. He slid them straight, silently, and cast a glance around them, and then down the slope, still searching, it seemed, for a vanished world. “Talis,” Atrix said, and touched him lightly, trying to wake him. The prince looked at him again, still stunned. “She should never have done this. He’ll kill you. You must go—I’ll take you down—”
“No.”
“Talis—Listen—”
“You listen.” Talis reached out suddenly, caught the worn cloth over Atrix’s breast in both hands, shook him. Color streaked the prince’s face; he was not seeing Atrix, the mage realized, or the mountain; his eyes were filled with trees, light, the hushed secret green of the wood. “I told her yes. To whatever she wanted. If this is what she wants, then this is where I stay, on this mountain with you until the moon rises and turns black and falls out of the sky. You made your choice on Hunter’s Field the night I was born. I have made mine. She wants you. She needs me to bring you to her, and between the two of us, we will find a way, or blood of Pelucir will be shed on a mountain in Chaumenard, and that will be on your head, too.” He loosed Atrix, stepped back, breathing quickly. He added, “You lied to the mages of Chaumenard. You lied to Pelucir and to Kardeth. You lied in your writings. Why should you expect me to listen to you?”
For a moment, Atrix could not answer. Then a long finger of light cut between them, the last, dazzling light of day, and he found an answer in it. “I watched your father die on Hunter’s Field,” he said. “I will not watch you die here, not for the sake of any woodland queen. I promised your brother I would bring you back to him, wherever you were. And then I promised him he could kill me. You will leave this place before the sun sets. This is not your battle, and you are not powerful enough to argue the point with me.”
“You promised Burne—” A sudden evening wind rocked Talis a step; he caught his balance, staring at Atrix. “Burne can’t—” He reached out to Atrix again, more gently. “Listen to me. You can’t—”
“I can’t what? What can’t I do? Tell me that: where the limits are to what I can do.”
“You can’t bring my father back to life by letting Burne kill you. You can’t leave your ghost to haunt Pelucir.”
“Argue with Burne—Argue with me, later, but not here, and not now. I’ll take you to the school. Stay there. Tell them, there, what is happening here, under the Shadow of the Wolf—warn them to stay away—”
“Atrix, listen.” Talis’ voice held a sharp, urgent note that snagged Atrix’s attention an instant before he moved. “The Hunter has a name.”
“What?”
“You never knew that. She sent me here to tell you that.”
“She—” Atrix turned, his hands locking on Talis’ arms. “He is my making—he has no other name but mine!”
“Listen. Think back. What did you make the Hunter out of?”
“Night.” Atrix’s voice shook. “Blood. Fire. Fury. Despair. All the terrors and nightmares I found on that field—What could she know of him?”
“What else?”
He no longer saw the prince’s face; he saw snow-streaked winds, a field of fire and snow, trees as
bare as bone crowning a hill buried in winter, a wood through which desperate, weary animals fled the desperate hunters stalking them. “Starving deer. Hunter. Ravens. Warriors. Hunters.”
“You took humans—”
“No. Only their skills. Their desires. The memory of them, in animals’ minds, from the wood.”
“And what else?”
“The new moon.”
“And what else?” The prince held him again, tightly, his voice as implacable as stone hammering stone.
And what else? Atrix demanded of his memories. And what else? Snow, night, wind, fire, the wood on the hill. His breath caught. A green mist flushed across the trees, across the barren field. He entered, again, the wood of his dreams. “Did I take something of hers,” he whispered, “when I worked that spell?” He paused again, remembering the glimpse of the green wood he had caught in the Hunter’s eye. “Someone?”
Light faded between them, left the prince’s face without expression. “His name,” Talis said, “is Ilyos.”
He came to them as if summoned. His horse’s hooves sparked fire from the granite they barely touched, his hounds howled beside him. The new moon smoldered through his horns. His eyes held Talis; his hounds swarmed toward the prince, who, transfixed by the sight, seemed incapable of moving. The Hunter lifted a hand, pulled the moon from between his horns and threw it at Talis.
“Drawkcab,” he said. The black moon streaked through the twilight, as if it had fallen out of the sky. Talis, spellbound, raised his hands to catch it.
Atrix shattered it into a shower of burning tears. “Ilyos!” he cried, and the Hunter’s face swung toward him. Atrix felt the shock of his memories, and then of his sudden, overwhelming rage. Atrix caught Talis’ wrist, hid them both within a dream of the green wood, trees rising still and endless around them, spilling light between their leaves.
The Hunter rode through the wood. Every oak branch blazed with fire; a dark moon hung from every oak. The ground shook beneath his horse’s hooves; lightning snapped from his hounds’ teeth. “Xirta Eflow,” he said. “Atrix Wolfe.”
Atrix felt Talis slip from his grip. “Atrix,” Talis called, from very far away, it seemed, from the other side of night. “Talis!” he shouted, and saw a black streak split the burning wood, a dark road leading to the black moon rising above the wood.
Talis ran down the road. “Atrix,” he called, and, as burning oak began to fall across the road between them, he called again, “Drawkcab.”
Fire began to streak down the path behind Talis. Atrix, his heart burning, melted through the fire after the prince, and found himself moving down the pale, cold, glittering path of the rising moon.
Silver turned gold; all around him, in their secret ways, the oak watched. He turned, bewildered; moon and sun spun together above him in the sky.
The Queen of the Wood rode the path of gold through the oak to meet him.
Her following rode with her. He saw faces of layered leaf and pale birch, and woven willow among more human faces which, ageless and secret, held little human expression. As in his dream, the Queen carried a bow. He scarcely noticed it, for as in his dream, her face was like nothing he had ever seen; it seemed to belong in the places he loved most, among the elegant, wild faces of wolf and hawk and snow leopard, the faces in mountains, in amber, in blue running water so cold it burned. She raised the bow; he watched light through the windblown leaves above her pick out a strand of fire in her hair, and then a strand of gold.
He felt Talis beside him then, heard his quick, startled breathing. Then the wind in the oak trees around them roared through leaf and branch. A rider behind the Queen with a face of smooth leaves opened nut-green eyes to stare at Atrix. Lightning leaped out of nowhere, struck the ground at Atrix’s feet.
He melted instinctively into the sudden, violent whip of air and light. Then he heard Talis’ voice and reappeared, in time to feel the next bolt, or perhaps an arrow from the Queen’s upraised bow, bore into his heart.
He heard Talis’ voice again, somewhere above him. He felt oak leaves under his face, his hands; within his heart something burned past bearing. He felt Talis’ hands gripping him, heard words form in the wild, chaotic winds.
“I didn’t bring him to you for this!”
“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered to the leaves, but Talis heard him.
“It matters,” he said sharply. “We need you.” His voice angled away. “Please. You need him, too. You want him to find Saro for you.”
I have found sorrow for her, Atrix told him silently; the prince read his mind.
“It’s her daughter. Saro. You did something to her that night. She vanished out of the wood into the world. That’s why the Queen sent you dreams. To summon you. But you couldn’t come to her, so she called me instead, because I can see her, in the world, and you never could. She used me to bring you here.”
Atrix opened his eyes. Talis knelt over him, shielding him for some reason that Atrix could not fathom. He said blankly, “Saro.” Then he lifted his head, raised himself on one arm to see the Queen’s face. He saw her poised arrow first, and then her fierce and troubled eye. He said incredulously, “I took your daughter, too?”
“Saro,” she said, in the voice out of her dreams, and then grew very still, the bowstring pulled taut, her eye and the arrow’s blind eye fixed on Atrix’s fate. He waited, his own breath stopped. Then she loosed the bow and arrow, let them slide from her hands, drop to the ground. Talis’ hands loosened; he still knelt, supplicant, in the oak leaves, his face as pale as moonlight, until she spoke again.
“No. I did not bring him here for this.” The Queen dismounted. Atrix groped for Talis’ shoulder, pulled himself painfully to his feet, keeping a hand on the prince as Talis stood.
“Tell me,” he said heavily to the Queen, whose eyes, like his, were shadowed with his past. “Tell me what I have done. To Ilyos. To Saro.”
“Ilyos was my consort,” she said, “Saro our daughter. You took them both from me that night; I have never seen them since,” He stared at her, and felt the fading fire in his heart leap through him, burn dryly behind his eyes.
“Sorrow,” he said, shaken by the word. “When you spoke in my dreams, that was always what I heard.”
“Now you know why.”
“Now I know,” he whispered. Her face was colorless, expressionless, within the fall of her hair; she gave him, for the moment, nothing but words.
“I do not expect to see Ilyos again. Not alive, not after what your power forced him to do. But I want Saro. She is in your world. Find her. I don’t know what you care about, except Talis. I will free him now because he did what I asked: He brought you to me. But I will take him and keep him until Pelucir is only a memory in mortals’ minds, if you fail to find Saro. If you ever love again, I will take what you love, if you fail to find Saro. I will take whatever peace you find waking, and there will be no peace, ever, in your dreams, if you fail to find Saro.”
“I will find Saro,” he said softly. “There is no need to threaten me.”
Her face changed then, its icy stiffness trembling a little. Color touched it. “You have so much power,” she said, “and so little regard for your life, you would have let me kill you. I don’t know what you care about enough to threaten you with.”
“I am still alive,” he reminded her. “I seem to care about that. And you have already threatened me with Talis’ life. It seems I care about that, too.”
She was silent, then, studying him, her brows knit, as if he spoke a language she did not expect. She said slowly, “I spoke to you in your dreams. I rode through them. I sent you portents, images. But I never saw your face. I thought you would be different.”
“You thought,” he suggested painfully, “I would resemble what I had made.”
“I thought,” she said, “you would be less human. Arrogant, thoughtless, dangerous with power. Or perhaps I should say more human.”
“I have been all of those things.”
/> Talis stirred under his hand, turned to look at him. “There are rules,” he reminded Atrix tightly, “governing the choices of powerful and dangerous mages.”
“I know,” Atrix said painfully. “Such rules are made by powerful and dangerous mages, who are also more or less human. You will forgive me for that night on Hunter’s Field long before I will ever forgive myself.”
Talis’ lenses flashed away from him. “Perhaps,” he breathed to the ground, then looked at the mage again, still aloof, but curious. “How will you find Saro?”
“I don’t know. First I must deal with what I have made. Tell me,” he said to the Queen, “something about your consort. Anything.”
She was silent again, her hands locked on her arms, her face mist-pale as she gazed into the winter-mists of memory. “He has the power of the wood,” she said finally. “Of oak, and the red deer and the running stream. Time means little to him. He—” She stopped, then stopped Atrix as he began to speak. “He will not die as humans die.” She stopped him again, her hand upraised, her eyes dark. “One thing more. He loved Saro. He must not find you with her. They heard you speaking that night. A wolf, Saro said. Later, when I could think, I had that small piece to wonder about. Names drift into my world, dreams, enchantments. Saro gave me a name before she vanished. So I began to listen for it, Atrix Wolfe.”
He bowed his head. “And you gave me a word. How will I find you if I need you?”
“Talis will guide you here.” Her face softened then, at the name. She turned to the prince, took his hands in hers. “You have been very faithful, and very brave.” She touched his cheek with her fingers, then kissed him. “Thank you. Now I will send you back.”
“Where?” he asked, bewildered, as if he had only dreamed Pelucir.
“To your world.” His hands shifted, locked around her hands as if he were sliding into deep water. “I have kept you long enough.”
“Not long.” His voice shook. “Not long at all. Will I see you again?”
She did not answer. She stepped back from them both, began to fade. Atrix caught Talis moving blindly in her wake. The prince twisted away from him, but found no place to go in the empty, moonlit wood, except to the castle rising across the silent field.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe Page 18