Nineteen
Talis walked into a hall full of weary, bedraggled hunters. Moving with a mage’s ways, out of habit, he had avoided the gate and the guards; it must have seemed, he realized, that he had formed out of shadow and torch fire, for the pale faces and bloodshot eyes around him were as immobile as if he had cast a spell over them. He said to the statue that was Burne,
“I’m back.”
Burne stood up; his chair fell over. Behind him, a mound of fish skeletons carried by a startled servant tilted on the tray and slid like leaves to the floor. Other servants leaped to life, righted the King’s chair, settled Talis into the empty chair beside the King, poured wine. Burne, staring at Talis, sat down again slowly.
“You’re all right?”
Talis nodded, staring into his cup. Fingers glided like silk across his cheek; the corner of his mouth still burned. He felt her kiss again, brief and sweet, her lips the secret, closed petals of a rose. Fire shivered across the dark wine; he picked up the cup and drank. “I’m all right,” he said to Burne. Servants laid things on his plate; he gazed at them without interest. Around him, people came to life again, murmuring, but softly, so they could listen.
“Well, where were you?” Burne demanded.
“In the wood. In her wood.”
“We hunted for you, we searched everywhere, every day. The mage—” He stopped, his face tightening. “That mage said you were in a dream.”
“It was him she wanted.” He lifted the cup again. “She needed me to find him. That was all.”
“So you found him.”
“Yes.”
“So he’s with her now.”
“Yes.” He put the cup down again without drinking. “No. She needs him to find her child. I don’t know where he is. In Chaumenard, I think.”
“Do you know that Atrix Wolfe—”
“Yes.” His hands locked around the cup; he sat silently, trying to be patient with the cold grey stones, the unshaven, untidy hunters, the flickering candles, the tapestries that, if lifted, would only reveal more stone. If he did not look at the walls, he could see the green wood, leaves trembling around him as if a hand had just brushed them. If he did not look, she would be among them…
“Talis.”
He looked up, saw massive grey squares of stone, unkempt faces, jewelled hands that moved among fire and gold without grace. Burne’s face, haggard and furrowed with sleeplessness, looked oddly unfamiliar. “What?”
“What is wrong with you? You’ve been gone for days, trapped in another world; you’ve found the mage responsible for the death of our father and the horror on Hunter’s Field; we’ve ridden ourselves into wraiths looking for you, and now you’re back and you can’t seem to speak in words longer than one syllable—Are you under some spell?”
“Yes.” He was on his feet before he thought, cup in his hands, wanting to throw it for no good reason except that stones were not leaves, and shadow was not light. “Yes,” he said again. “I am under some spell.” Around him, faces had turned immobile again. “No. I’m not under some spell. I wish I were. I would give anything to be spellbound.”
Burne set his own cup down slowly. If he said one word, Talis knew, it would be the wrong word, and any word would be too many. He waited, tense, unable to leave for there was no place to go, unable to stay and keep looking at Burne’s tired, human face.
“We need you, too,” Burne said, and then he was sitting again, his heart battered and rent, but somehow still alive. He drank more wine, ate something, unable to speak, aware of Burne’s silence, his unusual patience.
Talis said finally, wearily, when some of the faces had turned away from him, and random conversations disguised the attention on him, “What do you want me to do?”
“Be here,” Burne pleaded, “for a start. You’re the only one here who knows anything at all about sorcery, and you must know by now what rose with the moon to ride again on Hunter’s Field.”
“Atrix Wolfe is still fighting it. Him.” He ate another tasteless bite, and heard her voice again: His name is Ilyos. He swallowed, forced himself to speak. “In Chaumenard. Atrix drove him there.”
“Will it stay there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe they’ll kill each other,” Burne said without hope. “Another thing: We can’t find that book.”
“What book?”
“Atrix Wolfe’s book. He said we had to get it out of the castle: It is connected to the Hunter, somehow. I don’t understand, but the mage thought it was important.”
“It’s in the keep.”
“It’s not in the keep. I looked.”
“You went up there?” Talis said sharply.
“I didn’t trust anyone else to look. There are bindings and pages scattered everywhere; nothing is left whole. He said it would be unharmed. Either he was wrong, or it wasn’t there. He.” He sat silently, his brows knit, brooding over the mage. “Atrix Wolfe,” he said softly, to the candlelight; Talis could not read the expression in his eyes.
Talis said, hunched over his cup, scattering words so that he didn’t have to think: “The book is a lie, words in it are untrue, the spells go awry. He was writing one spell and thinking always of another. That’s why the book is so dangerous. He wrote down ‘mirror,’ but thought ‘Hunter.’ He wrote ‘water’ and thought ‘Hunter.’ The words twisted in his thoughts, in his writing of them. Because he is so powerful, each act must be unambiguous. And he hasn’t had a thought without the Hunter in it since that night.”
“Why?” Burne asked the candle as if it were the mage. The flame stilled, reflected in his eyes. Talis shook his head silently, seeing the wood on the hill, the winter wood the mage saw, the green, timeless wood he had torn into. A mistake, an accident, a thoughtless impulse—there seemed no word for it.
“Ask him,” he said finally. “He was there. I wasn’t. You don’t want an answer from me.”
He stayed away from the keep until morning. In his dreams, he wandered through a leafless wood searching for something: for green, for a white deer, a tree full of autumn leaves. The only deer he saw were brown, thin in the bitter cold. Go home, they said. It is always winter now. When he woke, he rose and went to a window. He felt his heart leap toward that secret cloud of green on the hill. He could go there, he could wait among the trees, asking nothing but a little water, a nut now and then, simply wait among her trees, hoping she might notice him, lay a hand of light upon his cheek, a rose against his mouth.
He went into the keep instead.
He searched awhile among the torn, damp pages. He recognized them all, and none of them were Atrix’s. Perplexed and uneasy, he found the guards who had been with him in the keep when the Hunter had returned. They had taken nothing, they had seen no one, for there was no one in the castle who would venture up there after that, except the King, who had looked also and found nothing.
He stayed away from the wood until noon. Then he rode without thought and without hope through the trees, heard them whisper around him, the birds sing a language she understood. She seemed to stand just beyond eyesight in every fall of light; her reflection had just vanished out of every stream he crossed. He returned to the castle at sunset. Trumpeters at the gate told of his return; he was told three times, before he even set foot on the ground, that the King wanted him.
He found Burne pacing on the parapet walk overlooking Hunter’s Field. “What is it?” Talis asked. “What happened?”
Burne stopped pacing and looked at him. “Nothing, apparently,” he said tersely. “But how am I to know that when you vanish?”
“Oh.” He leaned into a crenellation, losing whatever fleeting interest he had in Burne’s worries. He watched the fiery green of the wood at sunset fade into a cool, shadowed green as the light drained out of it. Saro, he thought without hope. If I could find Saro before Atrix Wolfe does, perhaps she would love me, then…Burne had said something, he realized, and turned reluctantly from the wood.
“
Book?”
“Atrix Wolfe’s book.”
“Oh. No. I went up and looked this morning.” He felt wind at his cheek and closed his eyes. “I didn’t find it.”
“Talis.”
“What?”
“She knows where to find you, if she wanted you.”
He opened his eyes, touched his lenses straight with a trembling hand. “I know,” he breathed. “Of course I know. Why do you think that makes any difference?”
“I suppose it wouldn’t. What was it like, there? What do you see, when you ride in the wood? Is it so different, there?”
Talis shook his head, unable to say, having no words for the taste of light, for the intensity in the air where she might appear. “She doesn’t want me,” he said at last, his face turned to the wood again. “She won’t take me, like she did before. You don’t have to fear that.”
Burne’s hand fell heavily onto his shoulder, closed. “Is she that cruel?” he asked incredulously. “To leave you like this?”
“Cruel things were done to her.” He watched the wood a moment longer, a still, twilight world growing opaque with shadow, his own face haunted, drained of light. Then he sighed, and looked at Burne.
“You warned me,” he said. “But how did you know?”
Burne shrugged. “I don’t know. How does anyone learn these things.” He was, Talis realized with a touch of interest, avoiding Talis’ eyes. “Let’s go in. We’re still under siege, at night, until the mage tells us otherwise. I don’t understand how even he can be in danger from his own spell. It makes no sense to me.”
“That is the other reason the Queen wanted Atrix Wolfe.”
He told Burne the tale during supper, made him see the winter night again, the cold wind blowing between worlds, snow falling in the green wood, into the burning horns of the Queen’s consort, the snow-streaked wind hiding the Queen’s daughter, carrying her away into a world of chaos, death and dark enchantments. Burne, grim and astonished, pushed the venison on his plate away, as if it might have had magical origins. “What a nightmare,” he said. “A single night’s work. Where will he even begin to look for the child?”
“Here, I suppose. In Pelucir. And then wherever he goes for the rest of his life.” He paused, watching Burne’s face, his eyes still, unreadable behind his lenses. “Atrix Wolfe cast the spell,” he said. “But we gave him the words for it.”
For an instant, Burne saw what he saw. Then the King’s face closed, and he said harshly, “War is war. It’s as old as breathing, and he made himself part of it. He forged the best weapon and he took the field. If he was too innocent to know what he was doing, that’s his fault. And he’s paying for it.”
Talis drank. “He is paying for our father’s death,” he said somberly. “Let’s hope he doesn’t pay with his life, or we’ll be under siege for the rest of ours.”
He rode out to the wood again the next day, and the next. The wood in his dreams was empty, barren; the wood of his waking hours was hardly less empty, except for the hunters in it, for none of the guests wanted to risk the fate of Burne’s messengers, and they needed to be fed. He rode with them a time or two, hoping to be struck from his horse by Oak, and hobble out of water to see the Queen of the Wood. The noise, the arrows slicing randomly into trees, birds, deer, the excited, triumphant fanfares for death, only made him impatient and despondent. He wandered back up into the keep, one morning, and began to clean up the litter of ripped parchment and broken wood. He was, he told Burne, searching for the mage’s book: Since it could be nowhere else, it must be there. But he knew it was no longer in the keep. It had opened itself, its grim power had escaped, and looking for it seemed pointless. A book that could find its way out of solid granite into a mop closet, and then into Pelucir to summon a mage and his making, would not reveal itself at some human whim. He himself, wary of sorcery, summoned a broom and a hammer to the keep; he swept up glass and nailed the table back together, burned the broken buckets and the fragments of spells. The ghosts on the walls seemed to pause sometimes, to watch him; they turned away from his eyes, but he felt theirs, as if they saw into him, knowing that the light that fell into the keep was not the light that filled his eyes, knowing that the memory he looked for on the walls had nothing to do with theirs.
Burne, suspicious, came up to see him. “You’re not,” he said succinctly, “beginning that again.”
“The book is gone,” Talis sighed. “Nothing else I can do is dangerous. And I promise: no sorcery in here until the Hunter is dead.”
“You’re not staying up here!” Burne shouted. “You nearly lost your life here! I want you down where I can see you, surrounded by the living instead of by ghosts. If you’re not in the wood hunting a dream, you’re up here courting disaster—Can’t you take an interest in anything human?”
Talis, startled by his vehemence, heard his own voice, unexpectedly raised, almost unfamiliar. “How?” he demanded. “When I have been surrounded all my life by ghosts? I grew up knowing how these ghosts died! This war has never ended—Atrix kept it alive, and you, and everyone in this house, blaming sorcery, blaming Kardeth—Can you blame me for taking what peace I can in the only place where I recognize the word?”
“You might as well be pining after a ghost,” Burne snapped. “You’re in love with your own memories. Nothing else. She’ll give you nothing now but pain. And there will be little more of you up here than what haunts these walls.”
Talis stared at him, tight-lipped. He flung down the hammer in his hand, walked to the window. His vision cleared after a moment. The window gave him a view of his thoughts: Hunter’s Field, the Queen’s wood. He turned his face after a moment, pushed it against the stones.
“I can’t help her,” he whispered. “And Atrix Wolfe can. She doesn’t need me. She needs him. There’s nothing left for me to do for her. I can’t even help you. All I can do is wait, and for what? For the emptiness in that wood, in my dreams, to wear away at my heart, until I can no longer feel. And then I can live among the living again. Is that what you want?”
“Atrix Wolfe,” Burne said tightly. “Atrix Wolfe. Why is his name always underfoot?” His voice rose again. “Can you be reasonable! He killed her consort! Or as good as killed him! What makes you think you must be jealous of him?”
Talis lifted his face from the stones, stared at them. Then he turned, to stare at Burne again. “I have to hate him.” Light fell between them; for once it held no imminence of memory. “Otherwise, I might forgive him. And I was raised with too many ghosts to do that.”
“No one,” Burne said, shouting again, “said you had to forgive him! We weren’t arguing about him! How did she turn into him?”
“I don’t know.” His voice shook. “It’s a tangled piece of magic to unravel, what happened on Hunter’s Field. I have to understand what happened to him that night, or it will haunt me and any sorcery I ever do again. How will I ever trust anything I ever do, if his magic could twist itself into such terrible shapes, wear such a terrible face? I have to understand him.”
“I wish,” Burne said between his teeth, “I could understand you.” He turned abruptly, nearly colliding, in the doorway, with the mute ghost of a girl who came up with Talis’ tray. She flinched; he glanced at the tray and fumed again. “Take that back to the kitchen! You can at least eat among the living instead of the dead.” He added, as she pulled herself and her tray aside so he could pass, her eyes wide, unfocused with alarm, “And find that spellbook. If he says it’s dangerous, it’s dangerous; he should know. It will give you something to do besides haunt the keep and the wood.”
“It’s not—All right,” Talis said wearily, to Burne’s back. He moved to retrieve the tray pulled into the King’s wake. But it seemed, in the unpredictable shadows, to have magicked itself away. Catching up with Burne at the bottom of the steps, he glimpsed nothing either of the tray or of its bearer.
“Maybe she’s a ghost,” he mused. Burne caught his arm, but gently.
�
�I’m trying to be patient,” he said. “I’m trying to understand.”
“I know.”
“Who’s a ghost?”
“That girl.”
“What girl?”
He ate with the King, made soothing, meaningless noises to the anxious guests, and went back to the keep afterward, to shut up the room for the sake of some peace with Burne.
He found the spellbook lying on the table.
He did not touch it. He sat down on the window ledge and gazed at it, his eyes wide, still, as he thought. No one comes up here, the guards had said. No one ever comes…
A face appeared in his mind’s eye: pale, silent, utterly insignificant. He watched her walk into the room, carrying his tray, watched her look here, there, and then at him, with her face that kept changing, eyes he could never remember. She had come once at night, he recalled suddenly, to tell him something, but she could not speak. She had come up, alone, in the dark, to tell him something.
No one ever comes here.
“You come here,” he whispered. Nothing that exists is insignificant, Atrix Wolfe had written in the book that had returned to him. He left it there and went to find her.
Twenty
Saro watched him.
She leaned over the edge of the cauldron. The prince moved through the dark water, down through the keep, his face visible as light from the narrow windows flashed over him, then obscured by the sudden, dense shadows. He did not carry the spellbook. She watched him thoughtlessly, out of habit, not knowing at what moment he might turn his head and see what she had seen. In the past, she had watched him ride through a wood that seemed a reflection of the wood the cauldron dreamed: Like him, she searched for things in it she could not find, for faces emerging out of leaves, out of light. She had watched him burn torn pages in the keep, feeding broken spells, one by one, to the hungry flame. She had watched him lean against the moving shadows on the wall, take off his lenses and weep.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe Page 19