In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I wish I had known,” he said more clearly, “what I would be coming back to.” He glanced around at the tower walls, searching blindly for some way out, some way around; memory struck him again, and he gave a faint, bitter laugh. “I have to give the witch her due; she does know a bad day when she sees one coming.”

  “Witch?”

  “Brume. I met her in the forest this morning. You used to tell me tales of her; that’s how I recognized her.”

  The queen raised a slender hand, pushed a knuckle and her wedding ring against her mouth. The mingling of fear and wonder in her eyes startled Ronan; he had never seen that expression before. She whispered, “Brume.”

  “I ran down her hen. Does she really see the future?”

  “Her white hen?”

  He blinked. “Yes. Why? Does it matter?”

  The door opened again; the captain of the guards stood on the threshold. He said, bowing low to the queen, “Your pardon, my lady. The king commands your presence in his chambers.”

  Her mouth tightened; the bleak sky descended once again. “I will ask him,” she murmured to Ronan, “if we can talk privately later.” She kissed his cheek quickly, took her leave. The guard stood aside for her, then returned to the threshold where he caught Ronan’s attention with his silent, stubborn waiting.

  Ronan sighed. “A moment.”

  A moment for what? the man’s eyes asked. The door stayed open. Ronan’s attendants scattered quietly through the room, began to carry his belongings away.

  He wandered to the casement, causing a stir within the chamber. But it was only to stare out the window, blind again with grief and memory. Across the grey-white water, within the trees blurred together beyond his tears, an odd banner of fire rippled and soared, spiraled sinuously into itself, then bloomed again, casting ribbons of crimson everywhere within the green. He blinked, felt tears fall. He saw it clearly then: a bird made of fire, its eyes and claws of golden fire, drifting plumes of fire down from the branch where it perched, so long they nearly touched the water.

  He swallowed, stunned. It was, he thought, the second most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.

  Then it changed, became the most beautiful thing. The bird’s long feathers swirled about it, hiding its long, graceful neck, its proud flowing crest, its eyes. Then the flames parted again, revealing amber eyes, fiery hair tumbling down toward the water, a face carved of ivory, with cheekbones like crescent moons, a smile like a bird’s wings angling upward, taking on the wind. The woman who was a bird who was fire seemed to see him. Her enchanting smile vanished. Feathers of gold and fire hid her face. Wings unfurled; their reflection flowed across the glassy water like outstretched hands.

  Ronan moved. He left by the door, not out the window, which caused the guard leaning against the walls, waiting for him, to follow his quick steps at a more leisurely pace. He spiralled down the tower stairs, glancing out at every narrow window for a glimpse of the magic within the trees. He saw the bird; he saw the road beyond the gate; he saw the inner courtyard; he saw the woman, beginning to reappear now that she felt no longer seen. The door at the foot of the tower opened directly into the outer yard. Walls and towers rose around him there; he could not see the trees beyond it, nor the water, gathering such power into its calm, smooth flow that it echoed across the valley as it fell.

  But it was the sun Ronan saw first, not the forest, as he walked impatiently across the drawbridge to the road. It hung just above the distant mountains, red as a hen’s crest, and round as the lens over a watching eye.

  He stopped dead, heard the pebbles settle under his boot.

  Behind him, the yard was eerily silent. No steps followed across the bridge; he heard no voices. Wind blew a light spray from the falling water across his face. He stood, uncertain and unprepared, not daring to look behind him, and finally, not needing to look, knowing that the road began where he stood and ended at the bone that marked the threshold of the witch.

  TWO

  Earlier that summer in Dacia the scribe Euan Ash, translating a poem out of a long-dead language, was lulled by bees and the scent of sun-warmed roses into a dream of the poem. His eyes closed. The ragged breathings and scratchings from dozens of noses and pens, the occasional curse let loose as gently as a filament of spiderweb, faded around him. He walked down a dusty road in a strange dry landscape, eating a handful of stones. In that land, stones turned to words in the mouth. Words tasted like honey, like blood; they vibrated with insect wings between the teeth. He spat them out after he had chewed them. Bees flew out of his mouth, birds circled him, bushes took root in the parched ground and flowered; he was speaking a landscape to life… Then something he spat out took shape in the distance where the road narrowed to a point. A dark, rectangular object, like a column or a book, travelled swiftly to meet him, casting a shadow over the dream. It had no face or mouth, but it towered over him and spoke a word like a book slamming shut.

  Euan woke with a start and saw the wizard.

  Sightings of him were quite rare, and the sleepy scriptorium, a curve like a question mark at the end of a long hallway in the king’s library, was the last place Euan would have expected to see him. He stared, still drugged with dreaming. The wizard who called himself Unciel spoke softly to Proctor Verel, who was nodding vigorously, looking, to Euan’s dazed eyes, like one small ball rolling on top of a much larger ball. The wizard, around whom legends swarmed and clung, each more fabulous than the last, seemed worn by the burden of them. He was tall and spare, his lined face honed to its essence of muscle and bone, his cropped hair dead white. He was the son and the grandson and the great-grandson of a long line of powerful sorcerers, and he had become the most powerful of them all. That was one rumor Euan had heard. Another had him born in a land so old all but its name had been forgotten; he had tutored the first King of Dacia in the magical arts. He had wandered everywhere into the known and the unknown. According to most recent tales, he had overcome some great evil, some fierce, deadly monstrosity that had challenged his strength and power beyond endurance. But he had endured, and had returned to peaceful Dacia to recover. He did not look injured, but the weariness that emanated from him seemed almost visible to Euan; it must have come out of his heart’s marrow.

  The wizard stopped talking and turned his head. Every pen had stilled, Euan realized; everyone was staring at the wizard, whose light eyes, cloudy with fatigue, were gazing back at Euan. The scribe woke completely then, with a jerk that shook his high, slanted desk and tipped the inkstand over onto the poem he had been transcribing. Black welled across the parchment, eating words as swiftly and irrevocably as fire.

  Euan righted the ink hastily, tried to dam the flood with his sleeve. He heard snickers, a sharp, impatient breath from the proctor. Then a hand touched the paper. Ink seeping into Euan’s sleeve vanished. Words reappeared, lay across the dry landscape of paper as neatly and clearly as footprints down a dusty road.

  He froze, his eyes on the parchment, not daring to look up. “This one,” he heard the wizard beside him say. “What is your name?”

  Still rigid, he managed to remember. “Euan.” How, he wondered wildly, were wizards addressed? He cleared his throat, gave up. “Euan Ash.”

  “My name is Unciel. Come to me when you are finished here.”

  The scribe glanced up finally, incredulously. But the wizard had gone. Everyone stared at Euan now, even Proctor Verel. If he could, Euan would have stared at himself. He scratched his head instead. So did the proctor, riffling at his bald head and looking mystified.

  “To work,” he said briskly, then wandered among the desks to see the paper touched by magic.

  Euan, still stunned, asked warily, “What does he want with me, Proctor?”

  Proctor Verel shrugged his plump shoulders and shifted Euan’s inkstand farther from his elbow. “He needs a scribe.” He studied the scribe’s neat, graceful writing, no more or less neat and graceful than that of a dozen others. “Why you, I have no idea.
Especially since you chose that moment to spill ink all over everything.” He tapped the paper where Euan’s last word trailed down the page. “And you fell asleep,” he added reproachfully. “In the middle of one of Laidley’s poems.”

  “It was not the poem,” Euan assured him. “My head was full of bees.”

  The young man at the next desk snorted. The proctor said dourly, “Start over.”

  “How did he do that?” Euan wondered suddenly, intently. “How did he separate the spilled ink from the words? How did the ink recognize the words?”

  “One was liquid; one was dry,” the scribe beside him suggested, too intrigued by the question to observe the rule of silence. “One had form; the other was chaos.”

  “But how,” Euan persisted, “did he speak to the ink? What language did he use to make it listen?”

  Proctor Verel raised his voice irritably. “Another word in any language, and you’ll all be seeing midnight in the scriptorium.” He added to Euan as he returned to his desk, “Ask him.”

  An hour or two later the scribe found the wizard, not in a tower as he had expected, nor in a secret chamber beneath the palace, but down a busy side street beyond the palace gates. COME IN, said a wooden sign hanging on the door. The cottage looked much larger within than it should have. Worn flagstones led to more closed doors than seemed possible. Herbs and flowers hung drying on smoke-blackened rafters. A one-eyed cat slunk around a corner and disappeared at the sight of Euan. A raven perched on a small, cluttered table near the door. Stuffed, Euan thought, until it fluttered abruptly, raggedly, like black flame to a stand in front of a line of open casements. The windows, diamonds of thick glass framed in brass, overlooked a garden. Like the house, the garden seemed to wander beyond possibility; the far wall might have crossed the next street. The wizard’s gardener knelt in the late light, a torn straw hat on his head, picking seeds slowly, painstakingly out of one trembling hand with the other, and dropping them into a crumbled patch of earth. Some ancient, beloved retainer, Euan thought. Then the raven squawked hoarsely beside him, and the gardener straightened, glancing toward the windows. Euan, recognizing that seared gaze, gave a hiccup of surprise.

  The wizard gestured, and Euan found the door leading into the garden.

  Unciel stood with an effort, one hand closed around the seeds. He took the hat off, dropped the seeds into it, then wiped at sweat, his movements slow, precise. He studied Euan silently a moment, like the raven had. Even the color seemed to have been drained from his eyes, along with his strength. Euan saw only the faintest shade of blue beneath what must have been the paler ash of memory. The scribe, who was lanky as a scarecrow, pallid from working indoors, and habitually terse, wanted to melt into a shell like a snail and politely close the door behind him. He still wore the long black robe that absorbed stray ink. In the hot light he felt sweat trickling through his dark, untidy hair. His lean, somber face grew rigid beneath the scrutiny; his eyes, green as cats’ eyes and as reserved, widened and slid away finally, dropped to study the wizard’s bare, calloused feet.

  Unciel said gently, “I need a scribe to copy my papers. My writing grew illegible years ago. The librarians will give you leave for a time, and I will pay you twice what they do now, to compensate for the amount of work and the lack of company. Do you mind?”

  Surprised, Euan stammered. “No. I don’t—I dislike most company, anyway.”

  “Then we will suit each other. In return for borrowing you, I have promised the librarians a portion of what you copy for me. Come into the house. I’ll show you what needs to be done.”

  Inside, he opened one of the closed doors along a hallway like a stalk that sprouted short passages and doors at random. The room was empty except for a dark wooden chest, whose arched lid was filigreed with delicate patterns of paler wood. Unciel murmured something and the lid sprang open. Euan stared at brimming piles of unbound sheets and scrolls that must have held countless decades of spells, notes, tales of travels to distant places that perhaps no longer existed, recollections of a long life governed by rules and forces beyond most human comprehension and experience.

  He asked impulsively, “Why can’t you copy them with magic? You found the poetry within the ink.”

  “That was a simple spell of undoing. This would be far more complex, and I am very tired. I would rather garden.” He closed the lid, held a hand over it. “Go,” he said, and the chest vanished.

  “Where did it go?”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to work in this windowless place. Come.”

  Euan didn’t move. Caught in a sudden tangle of curiosity and longing, he saw himself as an ornate wooden chest full of papers. It could not comprehend or appreciate being touched by magic, and yet it had been filled and moved by the wizard’s power. Move me, he thought confusedly, urgently, and expression, swift, nebulous, slid through the wizard’s eyes.

  His fingers closed lightly on Euan’s arm. “Now,” he said after a moment, “you can see out.”

  They had not taken a step, yet the room was suddenly full of light. The sun was lowering beyond the casements, igniting rainbows in the small prisms set here and there among the panes. This room held a vast table, a chair, a carpet, and the chest, open again, crammed with words and waiting. Euan, blinking at a rainbow in his eyes, said blankly, “I didn’t feel—”

  “You did feel.” The wizard’s breath had grown ragged; his hand gripped Euan’s arm as if for balance. “So here we are.”

  Euan looked at him, saw his bloodless face, the sag of his shoulders, as though he had borne the scribe on his back and run. Euan pushed the chair around, eased Unciel into it.

  “Why,” he asked incredulously as the wizard caught his breath, “was it so difficult? I thought I would be as simple for you to move as that chest.”

  “I already carry,” the wizard said haltingly, “all the words in that chest in my head. That makes it easier. I don’t know you.”

  “Then why did you do that for me?”

  “Because you are so full of wonder. After what I—After—” He gestured, his eyes hidden; deep lines ran down his cheeks like claw-marks. “That seems very precious to me now. How could I not give you such a small thing?”

  Words collided with wonder in Euan’s throat. He swallowed, watching Unciel, his set expression quelling amazement, curiosity, horror, anything that might disturb the infinitely frail and powerful wizard. The sun slipped behind the garden wall. The prisms on Euan’s sleeve, in the wizard’s hair, vanished. Unciel’s face took on a healthier shade of pale; his breathing steadied. He stirred finally, glancing out at the dusk.

  “I must finish planting my seeds. Come back tomorrow. The proctors will not expect to see you for some time.”

  For a lifetime, Euan thought the next day as he drew papers out of the chest and began to sort through them. The wizard had provided him with pens, ink, and a stack of vellum as high as the casement. Euan scanned the prickly lines, picked out what he could. “Forest” he recognized, and “interminable.” Then what looked improbably like “chicken.”

  “Brume” he found. Broom? And then “Serre” and the trees in his head multiplied immeasurably, climbed towering, frozen peaks, spilled toward bright plains. He wandered to his chair, engrossed now, beginning to make his way more easily through the cramped, spiky letters. The wizard had once come across a formidable witch in the forests of Serre…

  He grew quickly content, watching the wizard’s astonishing life form out of his pen. Days flowed past, each greener than the last. The one-eyed cat began to nap among the papers on Euan’s table; the raven greeted him by name each morning. He and the wizard met at midday to eat together. Unciel, preoccupied with his garden, spoke of little else. Euan did not question him, unwilling to tax his strength or trouble him. But the wizard changed shape daily in his head. The fragile gardener in his tattered hat had counseled kings, matched wits and powers with monsters. He had lived in lands Euan knew only as names on dry parchment in the scriptorium. The ra
nge of his powers and experience became disturbing; it was a measure, Euan realized starkly, of the terrible power that had drained and nearly destroyed him. The scribe sensed that the living things which the wizard coaxed daily out of the ground and into bloom shielded him from memory. Gazing into fiery petals, picking grazing beetles off leaves, he looked neither forward nor backward; he was trying to bury his past under the roses.

  Finally the wizard, who read Euan’s face, or his mind, or heard the questions piling up behind his back teeth, said briefly as they ate, “Ask me. If I can, I’ll answer.”

  Euan felt his face warm with more than light. He said haltingly to his bowl of vegetable stew, “If there are—If you wrote about your last battle, I don’t have to ask.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Do you—Can you tell me—”

  “No.”

  Euan nodded, lifted his spoon, and swallowed a lump of something. “Then you can’t. I won’t ask again.”

  The taut, strained note left the wizard’s voice; he repeated more easily, “I will answer what I can. 1 know you must be curious.”

  Euan, struggling to pick through a lifetime of marvels, managed only the simplest. “That witch—Brume. Does she really eat people?”

  Unciel’s face smoothed; he gazed back, unblinking, at something beyond pain. “Brume,” he murmured. “Never underestimate the power of a tale. What you put aside as fantasy in one land can kill you in the next. As far as I know, she eats anything. Like death, she is always hungry and too much is never enough. Like love.”

  Euan blinked, startled. But that tale, he told himself, would likely be among the wizard’s papers, and so he did not ask.

  The afternoon seemed hot enough for the sunlight burning in the prisms to ignite the parchment on Euan’s desk. All the windows were open. In the garden he could see Unciel digging so slowly to unearth the roots of weeds that they probably expired naturally before he got them out of the ground. For the hundredth time, Euan tried to imagine the fearsome evil Unciel had faced that had left him too shattered even to wither a thistle by magic. The evils he had written about seemed nasty enough, ranging from the bloodthirsty Brume, who could be baffled by a charm, to the subtle and devious mage Ziel, who had counseled a king nearly to his death so that the mage could seduce his queen and rule his kingdom. Strand by strand he wove his invisible web toward that end, with no one seeing except one young wizard who had no reputation then, and little experience, and who was a stranger in that land… Engrossed in the tale, Euan scarcely noticed a blast of trumpets from the street. The sound seemed to come from the battlefield on which the king fought his most loyal and completely bewildered knight, who would be the unwilling weapon Ziel would temper with his magic to murder the king. But the mage found himself thwarted, again and again, by the bumbling and exasperating stranger who kept getting in his way…