The front door flew open. The raven rattled feathers and squawked. Euan’s head snapped up; his jerking hand invented an unknown letter. He caught a glimpse of a disturbance crossing the quiet cottage and banging out the garden door. Euan went to the casement, leaned out, squinting at the brightness. Unciel, digging down to the end of an apparently endless root, had no time to rise before the whirlwind was upon him.
It was a young woman. She seemed, in the drenching light, to be made of gold, honey, cornsilk; bees, drawn to her scent, clung to the fat braid down her back. She covered her face with her hands, shook her head violently. Drops of gold fell between her fingers. The wizard started to rise, became unbalanced between a pair of prickly rose trees. The young woman dropped her hands abruptly and stooped, catching his elbows and guiding him carefully to his feet. Then she resumed weeping, noisily and passionately. The wizard turned her gently toward the house, gesturing, and Euan felt as though a passing sprite had snatched the breath out of his mouth.
He had glimpsed the youngest daughter of the King of Dacia only twice. The last time she had been two feet shorter and placid, riding with the royal entourage through the city after her oldest sister’s wedding. Now she was nearly as tall as Unciel, and trying to wring a storm out of the clear summer sky, and she was coming into the house. Euan, panicked after weeks of solitude, moved piles of separated tales from the carpet onto the one-eyed cat on the table. Its eye startled open. It yowled a protest and poured itself onto the floor and out. Euan, following, shut the door and leaned against it, trying to hear. The wizard opened the door abruptly, pulling the scribe, still clinging to the latch, into the hallway under the princess’s swollen gaze.
She stared at him; he stared back at her. A great peace seemed to float through him. He felt his mind open like one of the wizard’s peonies. Her tears hung suspended on her flushed golden face, clung to her eyelashes; fair tendrils of hair curled like petals around her face. In all that gold, her violet eyes seemed astonishing. Within the silent, elongated moment, Euan felt all the poems that he had never written welling up in him, trying to find their way into words.
Her eyes loosed him, flicked to the wizard. Euan let go of the door handle and bowed his head awkwardly.
“Euan Ash,” he heard Unciel say. “A scribe I borrowed from your father’s library to help me. Euan, the princess Sidonie needs details about my travels in Serre. It seems she will be journeying there herself, to marry the king’s son. Will you search my papers and copy what you find?” Euan, remembering Brume, threw him an appalled glance. “Whatever,” the wizard amended, “seems appropriate.”
Euan heard vague, disturbed sounds from the princess. A tear flashed through the bright air; he would have sworn it reflected a prism as it fell. “I’m not going,” she told them fiercely. “I am not leaving Dacia to marry some stranger in a barbaric country whose king does nothing but make war. How can my father do this to me? He let all my sisters marry in Dacia. He let my sister Cythera marry for love. What can he do to me if I refuse? Roll me up in a carpet and bundle me off to Serre in the back of a cart?”
“You will be Queen of Serre one day,” Unciel reminded her. “Your children will rule it.”
“I don’t want to be Queen of Serre! I would rather marry a humble—a humble—” She glanced around distractedly; her eye fell on Euan. “—scribe and live in a cottage in Dacia than be forced to leave everyone I have ever—”
“I will,” Euan said breathlessly. She only burst into tears again. He felt the wizard’s hand on his shoulder.
“There is wine,” the wizard said a trifle shakily, “in the kitchen.”
“I don’t want wine. Do you know what the King of Serre wrote?”
“I cannot imagine.”
“He wrote that his beloved son Ronan had become melancholy from his grievous double loss of wife and heir, and that the king judged it both expedient and merciful that he should marry again as soon as possible. Expedient! It’s not as though he had fallen off a horse! And merciful to whom? You must come and talk to my father. You’ve been to Serre; you must make him see that this is impossible. I would rather stay unwed for the rest of my life than leave Dacia to marry a melancholy prince still in love with his dead wife!”
The wizard was silent. She gazed at him desperately, her hands, long-fingered and oddly calloused, winding around one another, flashing tears and gold. Marry me, Euan thought wildly. Here. Now. No one could send you away then. He opened his mouth, heard a trumpet cry out of it, and closed it, confused. Someone flung the front door open and announced as sonorously as the trumpet,
“The King of Dacia.”
Euan felt the wizard’s hand grow heavy on his shoulder. Unciel’s other hand rose with underwater slowness, pulled at his gardening hat, and dropped it on the floor. Euan heard his unsteady breath. Arnou King of Dacia entered, looking grim, harried. His eyes went to his daughter, who folded her arms and matched his gaze. The king was shorter than she, so she could not raise her chin far in defiance; instead, she stepped to the other side of the wizard.
“I will not go. Unciel will speak for me.”
The king’s eyes went to the wizard, whose face had grown milky in the light. “Get him to a chair,” he said sharply to Euan, “before he falls.”
The princess put a hand to her mouth, watching them. “What is it?” she breathed.
“He has been badly—” the king began.
“I tire easily.”
“I am sorry,” Sidonie said, her eyes filling again. Dew, Euan thought dazedly as he settled the wizard. Dew on violets. No, rain. The king, who was square and brown beside his daughter’s wheatstalk grace and coloring, went to her, took her hands. Her face crumpled.
“How,” she demanded, “can you send me so far away from you? What have I done wrong?”
“Nothing.” He put his arms around her neck; she had to stoop a little into his embrace. “Nothing. I will miss you more than any of your sisters. But I need you for this. Dacia needs you.”
“But why?”
The king was silent a moment, his face set, struggling. Unciel raised his head, watched the king expressionlessly, the lines furrowing deeply into his face. “It is,” the king said finally, softly, “the last thing I want. Have you seen a map of Serre recently?”
“No. Why should I have? It meant nothing before today.”
“There are no recent maps of Serre. Since King Ferus has extended his boundaries to the north and the south, no one is certain anymore how large it has grown. His most recent battle gave him claim to a swathe of desert twice the size of Dacia.”
“Desert.” She straightened, her brow creased. “That’s far south of us.”
“There is a single mountain range between Dacia and Serre.”
She opened her mouth, closed it. Then she whispered, “A very high mountain range.”
“Very high. But for a man who conquered ice palaces in the north and princes who follow the sun in the south, no mountain border is too high. He will marry Dacia or he will conquer it. I would guess that only rumors of Dacia’s gift for magical arts gave him a second thought about attacking us.”
He turned questioningly to the wizard, his brows raised. Unciel answered slowly, “From what I have seen of Serre, you may be right. I have not been there in years, but the Kings of Serre throughout their history have had little knowledge of sorcery and a great awe of it.”
“So you see,” the king said to his daughter. “You must understand. I have no choice. If you do not go to Serre, the King of Serre will come here. And I do not know which of us would wear the crown of Dacia after that battle.”
Euan saw the princess swallow, muscles in her long throat sliding beneath her skin. He felt his hand fill with that smooth, shifting warmth and closed his eyes.
He heard her say, after a long silence, “Will you come with me?”
Euan opened his eyes. But it was Unciel she asked, her eyes dry now, and distant, seeing beyond the wizard’s house and int
o a troubled future.
The wizard shook his head wearily. “I cannot. I am very sorry, because there are things about Serre that I loved, and I could protect you from those that are dangerous. But I can barely—As you see, I cannot bear anything much more strenuous than breathing.”
“What dangers?” the king asked, his brows pulled harshly together. “Beyond Ferus himself?”
“The land has its own sorcery. It conjures unexpected things, like dreams do. Unlike dreams, you cannot wake from them; if you are challenged, you must act.”
The princess’s face lost some of its burnished color. “I thought you said there was little sorcery.”
“In its rulers. The land itself has peculiar powers; they are unpredictable and not always safe. You never know, in Serre, when and where a tale will become true.”
“Please come with me,” she pleaded hollowly. “Please try—”
“I would not survive the mountain passes,” he said simply. “I would not be with you in Serre, where you would begin to need me.”
“No,” the king said abruptly. “Of course you can’t go. But there must be someone. Some mage or wizard you know who can guard her.”
Unciel did not answer immediately. The wizard’s eyes grew very distant, as though he were gazing at the world through all his memories, and the ashes of his deep weariness, his lost powers. His face did not change before he spoke, and Euan knew that the name must have already been at the surface of his thoughts, perhaps for a very long time, until the moment came to say it, like the beginning of a spell.
“Gyre. A young wizard I met on my travels a few years ago. He is formidable and clever; he should enjoy matching wits with Serre. The princess will be safe with him.” He dropped his head against the chair back, murmured as his eyes closed, “I will send for him. He owes me a favor.”
“Thank you,” said the King of Dacia, and took his daughter’s hand. Euan gazed helplessly at the straight back, the golden braid framed in the open door against the street. Then the king’s guard closed the door behind her and the warm light faded into twilight, and the scribe thought with wonder and rue, I will never see you again except in poetry.
THREE
The wizard Gyre was sitting in a tavern in the back streets of the ancient city Thuse beside the Yellow Sea negotiating a price for his services when he received the summons from Unciel. The tavern was noisy, flea-bitten, not a suitable place in which to meet a messenger from Prince Frewan. But the messenger was in disguise. They always were, Gyre knew, and they chose such places in order to disguise the message. Which was always the same, Gyre knew, in those lands along that part of the sea. A loose scattering of constantly bickering princedoms lined the coast; the princes were always in need of this or that, something made or done in secret, about which Gyre must pledge not to breathe a word.
Patiently, he ran through the list of things he would not do for anyone, for any amount of gold, as much as he could have used it. He was a dark-haired, sinewy young man, with calm eyes that hid an edge of restlessness as he spoke. Invisible weapons, this prince would want, or the walls around his palace made impregnable before he goaded a neighbor into attack. A secret tunnel built before dawn; a spy in the shape of a falcon to listen to conspiracies plotted on horseback in the middle of a meadow where no one could possibly hear. The wizard was more than familiar with such requests.
Gyre was simply dressed; nothing about him proclaimed any particular powers. He had been born in those noisome streets to an itinerant tinker from across the sea, who performed magic tricks for his children when he was drunk. The child Gyre, trying to imitate the tricks, realized quickly that they were not. The sodden tinker had a genuine spark of power within him, and Gyre found himself wanting it, with passion and beyond reason. When his father ran out of things to teach him, he looked elsewhere. He nosed magic like a dog in those poor, crowded, colorful streets, where strangers constantly wandered in from the sea. One day he followed a stranger out of the city, beyond the sea, to a place where others like him gathered to be taught the astonishing magic in the color orange, in the shape of an orange, who peeled away the rind to discover the mysteries hidden within the wonder of the visible.
Leaving that place a penniless wizard, he had wandered hither and yon, finding work where he could, until his path led him back to Thuse, perhaps to wait for another stranger to give him direction. He was still hungry; he woke at nights, wanting and not knowing what he wanted. He only had to wait and recognize it when it came. He thought he had found it once before, when he had first met Unciel, in a distant land full of the memory of dragons. He had found, he thought, the dragon’s heart: the power, the fierce strength, the indomitable beauty of it. But it had disappeared, melted away in Thuse. He had been mistaken; it had been nothing alive.
So here he sat, preparing to perform a series of tricks for as little as the prince who hired him could get away with offering him. Still, this prince might lead him to others, wealthier and more powerful, who could challenge his skills, use him for something other than those interminable petty feuds. He was listening with his usual imperturbable expression, treating the request with all the gravity with which it was made, when the image of a folded sheet of parchment slipped among his thoughts. It unfolded, revealing a handful of brightly burning words.
I need you in Dacia. Unciel.
He was on his feet without thinking; so Unciel had helped him once, when he was in dire need.
“I’m sorry,” he told the surprised and aggrieved messenger. “I must go.” The man made an inarticulate protest. “I promise,” Gyre assured him, “that your secret will be safe with me.”
Flying north from the sea in hawk-shape, he had only a map in his head to remind him where Dacia was. He had never been there. Rulers of Dacia were their own sorcerers. Rumors of their power kept the land untroubled; conquering armies tended to veer away from it. The rocky, wrinkled land beneath him flattened, after several days, into broad river valleys, placid and richly green. On a hunch, the hawk dropped straight as a plumb line to a valley floor, where a farmer guided a donkey dragging a harrow across dark, crumbling soil.
The farmer stopped to stare as the hawk landed on a furrow and the young man emerged from its shadow.
“Where am I?”
“In my beet field,” the farmer ventured, still amazed.
“I mean what country?”
“Oh. You’re in Dacia. East of Serre, north of Fyriol, west of—”
“Thank you,” Gyre said. He glanced around vaguely, as though the groves of trees and peaceful fields might conceal a city. He guessed at several things in that moment: that Unciel had sent as much as he could, that he was still weak from his strange ordeal, of which Gyre had heard even as far as Thuse, and that exactly where he was would be so obvious that he would not need to waste effort to send yet another word. Gyre waved a gad-fly away from his face and addressed the farmer again.
“Which way is the king’s city?”
The farmer loosed a rein and pointed. “That would be that way. Saillesgate, it’s called, after the first king. The one who brought magic into Dacia.”
Gyre nodded, remembering the name from his studies. The uneducated warrior Sailles had conquered the land, and then, curious and fiercely determined, had hired a wizard to teach him to read and write. Words sparked magic within the king as they had within the tinker in Thuse. The king’s children inherited his formidable gifts. Beyond that scrap, Gyre knew little of Dacia. It was small, wealthy, and rarely threatened. A good place for a drained, exhausted wizard to rest.
He reached Saillesgate one of several twilights later, in the shape of a ubiquitous pigeon. He changed shape somewhat wearily in a convenient shadow. Rather than send his name silently through the city and force Unciel to use his depleted powers to answer, Gyre questioned a few shopkeepers. The wizard was easily found, the third told him. He had not kept his presence hidden. But there was no use asking him for anything. Something terrible had befallen him;
he had barely the strength to move his bones and breathe; he had nothing left to give…
Gyre found Unciel waiting for him beyond a door that said COME IN.
The wizard might have just opened his eyes after a nap, or he might have been awake and waiting for days. His eyes startled Gyre, who remembered them as the light, burning blue of a high mountain stream. A bleak, impenetrable mist had settled over the blue. His voice was a tendril of itself, frail and slow. There were no visible wounds, nothing unhealed, that Gyre could see. But the wizard who had once helped him so effortlessly seemed barely to exist; there was only this husk closed protectively around the embers of his powers, which he stubbornly refused to let die.
Gyre asked the obvious, suddenly aware in that quiet cottage of what might lie beyond the known. “What happened to you?”
“It’s dead,” Unciel answered, simply and implacably. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
They were alone, Gyre sensed, but for a startlingly observant raven and a cat dreaming somewhere within the cottage.
In the Forests of Serre Page 3
