In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “So are you,” he breathed. “Nearly dead.”

  Unciel did not answer, only gestured at a chair, and Gyre sat. He was silent, waiting for Unciel to speak, keeping his own thoughts as tranquil as the twilight garden, with its stakes and lattices rising like peculiar growths among the patches of seedlings. At least he tried for tranquility. Horror and curiosity bubbled beneath it, throwing up shapes, intimations of power that he could only guess at. Again and again, questions tried to form; against Unciel’s stubborn silence, they scattered into unfinished words, left question marks hanging in the air between them.

  Unciel said slowly, forming each word as painstakingly as a spell, “I will tell you what I need. And then I will make supper.”

  “Don’t—” Gyre began, but Unciel raised a palm.

  “I like to cook. It is like making magic, and far easier for me these days.” He paused as though hearing another unspoken question; they both let it die unremarked. “The King of Dacia has pledged his youngest daughter, Sidonie, to the son of King Ferus of Serre. Serre being what it is, and as immense as it is, she will need a guardian and a guide. She must leave as soon as possible. It will take a few weeks of human travelling, perhaps most of the summer. The king will pay you well for guarding his daughter. Have you been to Serre?”

  Gyre shook his head. “I have heard that its magic is primitive and it is full of trees.”

  Lines deepened along the sides of Unciel’s mouth; it was, Gyre realized after a moment, the haunting memory of a smile. “All magic is primitive. It is the oldest language of the heart. Serre’s heart is ancient, wild, and very lively. I would go myself if I could. I cannot, so I thought of you. I think that such a journey will test and broaden your abilities, and add a dimension to your understanding of what it is you want most.” This time he took note of Gyre’s silent response; the seared, veiled eyes meeting Gyre’s seemed to look at him from very far away. “Which is what we all want, of course, for it is the nature of a wizard to want power.”

  Gyre felt his answer before it became the word. “Yes.”

  “The scribe I borrowed from the king’s scriptorium has gathered together my writings about Serre. Some, which are toothless, we will send to the king, to reassure him. The rest you should read. If you can get through my handwriting.” He separated himself from the chair slowly, bone by bone. “The cat is sleeping on them. Read a little before you decide.”

  Gyre followed the flickering thread of cat-dreams, and found the scribe’s desk. He read for a long time, incredulous but intrigued, while in the kitchen knife debated with chopping block, and pot-lids commented. The magic of Serre seemed patched together out of children’s tales, Gyre decided. Its king was by all accounts a force greater than all its magic. He had forged an immense, formidable kingdom, and the princess Sidonie would one day become its queen. A young woman useful to know, and certainly in need of a wizard, to whom she might have cause, if Gyre kept her safe, to be grateful. The rest—witches, ogres, trolls—he consigned to a streak of eccentricity in Unciel, who seemed interested in anything, even cooking. Gyre had dealt with such small magics before, mostly witches’ spells, which frayed like spiderweb under a word of wizardry.

  It seemed a simple matter, this journey across Serre with the princess. He owed Unciel far more than that. So he said, when the smells of hot bread and lamb stew drew him into the kitchen, “Of course I will go.”

  “Good.”

  Unciel ladled stew into bowls with mesmerizing slowness, the ladle shaking constantly. Gyre watched him, guessing that he would refuse help. Little enough he could do, now… Again the intimations of something powerful and terrible, beyond all Gyre’s imagination, swept through him. If he could have envisioned it, it might have forced itself into shape then and there between them in the wizard’s tidy kitchen. Unciel let drop a final mushroom from the lip of the ladle, and put it back into the pot. “Tomorrow,” he said, trying to pick up both bowls at once, “I will take you to meet the king and Sidonie.”

  “Let me—” Gyre murmured hastily, taking the bowls from him. “I prefer not to eat off the floor.”

  Again he glimpsed the forgotten ghost of a smile. Unciel found a couple of goblets in a cupboard, and a dusty crock of wine. He blew at the cobwebs on the label. “Pear? Or could it be pea?”

  “No.”

  “Then it must be pear.” He left it for Gyre to uncork, and carried a couple of spoons to the table. “I haven’t been here long; this place still has surprises for me. The widow who owns it told me that her son liked to experiment with different—”

  “What happened to you?” Gyre demanded, standing with the wine in one hand, gazing at Unciel, while the dark pushed against the window behind him and tapped at it with urgent, invisible wings. Gyre felt his own bones willing to shape themselves into an answer, to reveal the deadly, perilous face of what must have been the opposite of Unciel. “What did this to you? And why did you fight it alone?”

  For a moment, he saw Unciel’s face shift, its stark, rigid lines flow into the reflection of what he had fought. The vision was gone in an instant, but it took Gyre’s breath with it; he felt the hoarfrost form, cold and heavy, on his bones. Unciel took the crock as it began to slide, and set it with some effort on the table.

  He said gently to Gyre, “It seemed a simple matter at first. I was mistaken.” He touched the young wizard’s shoulder, and Gyre could move again. He drew his hands over his face, caught a shuddering breath, feeling the ice still in his fingers. “It was very old,” he heard Unciel say. “And now it’s dead. Some day when I’m stronger, I will be able to speak of it. But not now. Not now. Let it leave us in peace for now.”

  “You became what you fought.”

  It was a moment before he realized he had spoken aloud. But it didn’t matter, he thought dazedly; Unciel would have heard the thought in his heartbeat, in his marrow. Unciel set bread on the table silently, a knife. Then he wandered into the middle of the floor, stood looking vaguely for something, and Gyre saw his eyes, stunned and bright with pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Gyre whispered, shaken again, and reached out to grasp a trembling hand, guide the wizard out of his memories to the table. “I am sorry. I wish I had been there with you.”

  “You were,” Unciel said, so quietly that Gyre made nothing of the words themselves, only of their echo, which he heard some hours later when a nightmare without a face loomed across his dreams and spoke his name.

  FOUR

  The princess’s first glimpse of Serre was an eagle’s dizzying view from the highest point of a pass through the mountains. Their stony pinnacles vanished into cloud so far above the slowly moving entourage that, Sidonie thought, to a mountain’s eye it must resemble the long, bulky, furry insect she had found inching its way across her cot one morning. By the time she saw Serre, she had become resigned to the wildlife that crept and fluttered and fell into her food. Only farmers lived in the high, rocky meadows between Dacia and Serre, above their animals in small cottages that stank and whistled in the howling winds. Not suitable, she was told, and had to make do with a gaudy pavilion slanting down the slopes that strained against its pegs and threatened to fly away at night. Appalled by the endless expanses of granite and wind, her attendants hid themselves in the evenings behind their own rippling walls, braiding one another’s hair against stray insects and whispering stories. Sidonie, faced with the wasteland of an empty marriage, longed for a cottage full of bellowing cows in the crook of a peak so high that its shadow ran like a dark river through the valley floor below.

  The wizard Gyre, who had a startling ability to change shape, had found their way through the mountains with an eagle’s eyes. One midsummer evening, while the guards and servants pitched pavilions and cut wood, and the cooks put their heads together over what the hunters had brought them that day, the wizard dipped on outspread wings down an angle of sweet twilight breeze, landed at Sidonie’s feet, and turned into himself.

  “Come and see,” he said
. He was a brisk, lean young man with calm dark blue eyes. As far as Sidonie could tell, he viewed the world with a great deal of curiosity and no fear whatsoever. He gave the princess a rare smile as she hesitated. “It’s just over those rocks.”

  What was? Sidonie wondered as she followed him to the edge of the meadow where they camped. Something wild, she guessed dourly, with teeth. Peering over a boulder beside the silent wizard, she did not understand at first what she saw. It lay beneath the pale sky like night; it ran everywhere, up distant mountains, to the edge of the far horizon; it tried to climb the slope they stood on. Then the vision named itself and she swallowed dryly.

  “The forests of Serre,” the wizard said softly. He leaned over the boulder, his face turned away from her toward the silent, murky blur below. He pointed across it where, on the other side of the world, something the size and shape of a child’s tooth rose above the trees. “That’s where we’re going. The summer palace of the Kings of Serre sits on that cliff.”

  She felt suddenly dazed, sick with terror at the sight of it: the place where her life would stop, all she knew would vanish, an unknown woman would wear her face like a mask. She straightened suddenly, fumbling at the clasp of the chain she wore around her neck. “I’ll pay you,” she said wildly.

  “What?”

  The clasp broke in her shaking grip; she dropped gold and its pendant into her palm, and offered it to him. “Just let me go. I’ll find my way back. You take my shape so they won’t search for me—”

  He stared at her incredulously, then looked at what lay in her palm. He stirred it with one finger. “What is this?”

  She blinked at it: a nut, a red feather, and a black snail shell, strung together and tied to her gold chain. “Oh.”

  “It looks like a charm.”

  She sighed. “It is.” Her voice stopped trembling. “Auri—one of my attendants—made it for me. Her mother was born in Serre, and told her stories. It’s supposed to protect me from witches.”

  He snorted. “The witches of Serre would eat it, shells and all. Are you really so afraid of marrying Ronan of Serre?”

  “Yes,” she said tightly. “I am used to being loved.”

  She felt his attention, cast hither and yon, pull itself out of the vastness of Serre, the camp noises behind them, the scents on the wind, and the rising moon, to focus entirely on her. His face was absolutely still. Startled, she felt as though he were seeing her for the first time; she wondered what, during the past weeks, he thought he had been looking at.

  He told her. “When Ronan inherits, you will be Queen of Serre. Your children—”

  “I know,” she said impatiently. “I know. Meanwhile I will live with a man who will expect me to occupy his bed but not his thoughts. All to keep his father from attacking Dacia and killing my father.”

  She turned away from him abruptly before he could answer. “Where are you going?” he asked, beside her suddenly as she strode back across the meadow.

  “To shoot something.”

  She sent an attendant running for her bow and arrows. In the darkening meadow, away from horses and people, she shot furiously at the face of the moon, at implacable slabs of granite, at a raven that watched her silently from a distant tree. She almost hit the raven; it leaped off the branch with a squawk, dropping a feather as it flew away. Spent finally, hungry, she wandered toward the fire outside her pavilion. Someone took her bow; someone else slipped a mantle over her shoulders against the evening chill and unfolded a leather stool for her. She ate what she was handed. Hare, she realized when she began to taste what she was eating. Again.

  The next day they began their descent into Serre.

  The forest, closing around them as they left the mountains, became another season: something warm but capable of harsh shadows that seemed to burn on the sunlit ground. The trees were huge, ancient; they smelled like some rare incense. The hard ground, the constant slope of the mountains had changed to a soft, spicy pallet of dried needles, on land that rarely varied. Trees were all Sidonie saw. Far above, a hawk, and trees. A thrust of rock, a tumble of boulders, and trees. A silvery web of streams. Trees. Their branches grew so high up the trunks, seeking light, that riders could pass beneath them without bending their heads. Seed pods of gold, like fingers, grew among the broad, lacy boughs. They fell occasionally, making a noise like a comment as the entourage passed.

  They had chanced into a timeless place, Sidonie felt as she sat at her fire one night. Into a place that would never change and never end. The trees hid even the changing moon. Gyre sat with her, or his shape did; his thoughts were far from her, prowling, she guessed, through the dark, quiet forest around them. She watched the bright, flickering wings of the fire trying to illumine the night within the forest. It did little more than burnish a tangle of roots, a couple of massive trunks, the gilt-edged doors of her pavilion. Water in a shallow stream flowed endlessly through the dark, out of nowhere, into nowhere. Wild things crept past them to drink from it; now and then she heard a stray panting, a thump or a scurry. Around other fires, wash-water simmered; water slopped and echoed hollowly as pots were scoured. Servants tossed dice, mended harness; guards oiled weapons; hunters whittled arrows and fletched them with black and gold, and the rare flame-red feathers dropped from birds that were never seen. As always, Sidonie’s attendants had hidden themselves. The pavilion beside hers was tightly closed. She could see their silhouettes flung by lanterns on the walls; they sat as closely massed as flowers in a bouquet, mending torn seams and speaking nervously, breathlessly. Others waited for the princess in her pavilion; three heads bent closely together while a fourth, most likely Auri, told a story.

  “Brume,” Sidonie murmured thoughtfully, remembering one of the stories. The wizard did not move so much as an eyelash at her voice. But she felt his attention gather out of the forest around them, come to her. It was as though he had suddenly become visible.

  “Brume?”

  “She haunts these forests. She entices people into her cottage and boils them in her cauldron for stew.”

  He stirred slightly and did not smile, which made her vaguely uneasy. But he only asked, “Who is telling you these tales?”

  “Auri. Her mother told them to her and says they are all true. Her mother’s brother lost his heart to a woman who lived in a deep pool beneath a waterfall in a forest just like this. The woman came to him among the reeds, and lured him into her watery cave and he drowned.”

  The wizard grunted. “Auri’s mother probably floats flowers in bowls of milk and leaves them outside her door in Dacia to placate the goblins of Serre.”

  “She does. I also read accounts of the wizard Unciel’s travels through Serre, before I left. He mentions the milk and the flowers. But nothing with teeth. I suspect he left out a few things.” She tossed a seed cone at a squirrel eyeing the fluttering doors of her pavilion. It changed its mind, bounded away. Unciel’s bright cottage with its brilliant garden, the shy, awkward scribe seemed a dream, a lifetime past.

  Gyre did not comment. She glanced at him, found an odd open, rueful expression on his face, as if he were looking inside and found himself lacking. It was unusual, she thought; his confidence seemed always unassailable.

  “No one is unassailable,” he said, shifting a branch in the fire with his bare hand. Then he turned his head quickly to meet her cold eye. “I’m sorry. My thoughts were drifting; they floated into yours.”

  “Anchor them,” she suggested drily.

  “I will try.”

  She wished, immediately, that she had that ability to pry into his thoughts without bothering to question him. She tilted her head back and saw, beyond the pinnacles of trees taller than the towers of Dacia, stars as cold and beautiful and incomprehensible as Serre itself poured across the black. “Have you known Unciel long?” she asked, suddenly curious. He had opened a door, with that expression. “He said you owed him a favor.”

  “He helped me once, when I was in trouble in a land south of Dacia.
He did not know me at all, but he rescued me.”

  “From what? A monster?”

  “Something like that.” He did not look at her.

  “Something like what? An ogre?”

  He smiled a tight, spare smile, asked in her direction, “What do you know about ogres?”

  “Nothing. What exactly are they?”

  “An ogre is a grotesque monster, hideous in appearance, with a taste for human flesh.”

  “Does everything eat people in Serre?” she wondered, fascinated and appalled.

  “You should stop listening to Auri’s tales. Anyway, ogres are very stupid, and terrified of princesses.”

  “You laugh now,” she said darkly. She shifted closer to the fire and spread her hands to it. She wished suddenly for an ogre, a witch, a goblin, anything out of Serre’s unpredictable heart, to loom at them out of the dark, send them fleeing for their lives. She would find an abandoned hermit’s hut, live like one of the skittish, unwashed recluses of the forests, eat nuts and berries, keep a pet crow for company.

  “I will not,” she heard from within the crackling, fuming flames, “let anyone harm you.”

  She lifted her eyes to the wizard. But his own eyes were lowered; he seemed to be listening again to the trees, the animals, the wind, perhaps the stars. His lashes were black as embers against his fire-flushed skin. His dark hair, neatly trimmed at the beginning of the journey, hung loosely to his shoulders. He sat so still he scarcely seemed to breathe; she wondered what he heard.

  “How long,” she asked him abruptly, drawing comfort from his familiarity, “will you stay in Serre?”

  He looked at her. Again she had the sense of thoughts hidden, words unspoken. But he answered simply enough. “Your father told me to use my own judgment. You should go in. I’ll send your guards to you.”

  “I’d rather watch with you.”

  “I can see the dark better in the dark,” he told her, and leaned down to sculpt the fire with his hands until it burrowed into itself, pulsing instead of flaming. He would climb a tree, she guessed, and watch with the owls.