“How long?” she heard herself ask again, though she did not want the answer. “Until we get there?”
“I don’t know. I’ll fly ahead tomorrow and count the days.”
Days, she thought, chilled. Once it had been half a season. She rose reluctantly. One pavilion was dark; in hers, the young women sat slumped and yawning on the cots. Seeing her move, they rose and opened the doors for her. One left with a pitcher to fetch warm water; others helped her undress.
“Tell me,” she said to distract herself from her thoughts, “the story Auri was telling you.”
Auri, barely more than a girl, with a thin, pointed face and constantly disheveled hair, looked at Sidonie out of the corners of her eyes. She was busy tipping a candle into the shadows, searching for wildlife.
“My lady,” another protested. “It’s not suitable.”
“I’m going to be married,” Sidonie said wryly, remembering what her sisters had told her, “to a total stranger. Surely nothing could be more unsuitable than that.”
In the dark, they whispered a tale involving a poor widow, a beautiful daughter, and the King of Trolls. Serre, she thought, seemed to be full of ravening nightmares who killed what they loved and ate what they didn’t. But it was the faceless prince in her dreams, not the troll, who woke her abruptly in the night to stare sleeplessly at the dark until dawn.
She did not see the wizard at all the next day until sunset, when a crimson light spilled through the trees, and the weary entourage gathered to a ragged halt beside the grassy banks of a slow, deep river. They could bathe, she saw with relief. Guards were already marking pools with their pointing fingers, deciding where to hang rugs for the princess, while the horses were led downstream to drink. She heard a splash downriver; someone, dusty and sweating, could not wait.
Beware, she warned him silently, the water-woman in the reeds.
Then an eagle plummeted through the stained light at her feet, and Gyre appeared. She waited, watching as the fierce thoughtless scrutiny melted out of his eyes; gold and black became a familiar shadowy blue. Like everyone else, he looked exhausted, though his voice held its usual briskness.
“Five days,” he told her. “At the most.”
“Five days?” Her heart was in her throat suddenly, fluttering like something trapped. “Only five?”
“We’ve been travelling half the summer,” he reminded her gently. “I will send messengers ahead to tell the king that we are nearly at his doorstep. They will travel a day or so faster alone.” He paused, touched her for the first time, his fingers linked lightly around her wrist. Her face felt icy, drained of all expression. “You are saving your father’s kingdom,” she heard him say. “Perhaps his life. If you can’t find any other reason for being in Serre, remember that.”
She swallowed dryly, not seeing him, not speaking. His fingers tightened and she lifted her head. His gaze, in that moment, seemed to contain all the wild things of land and air that he had ever shaped, as well as all the powers that controlled them.
“I won’t leave Serre,” he said softly, “until you tell me to go.”
She blinked, oddly shaken. He loosed her wrist, his eyes changing again, familiar, imperturbable, at once clear and secret. He waited silently until she found her voice.
“Five days, then. Thank you.” She raised her skirts and walked blindly, carefully past him, as though she had already entered the stone walls of the summer palace.
They had camped within a day of the palace when she finally saw something of the magic of Serre.
She had wandered away from the noise and confusion of the camp being set up in an unexpected clearing along the river, which had decided to accompany them east. She took her bow with her, in case there were ogres, and walked into the clearing, a little meadow rich with late summer grasses and wildflowers. In the middle of it she stopped, staring upward at what the parting trees had made visible. On a crag, a dark, blocky mass of walls and towers rose between two slender ribbons of water that fell a long way from the top of the cliff to vanish into the tops of the trees. The water burned like light on a blade. The setting sun illumined a brief nick of road pared out of stone, impossibly high and slanted, leading into the massive fortress. Summer palace, Gyre had called it. It had as much to do with summer, Sidonie thought incredulously, as a mausoleum.
She bent her head, feeling visible, and moved across the meadow beyond sight of the dark palace. Within trees again, she shot a few arrows in desultory fashion at tree boles and cones until the sunlight faded. She stood uncertainly, bow cocked, looking for one more target before she was forced to yield to the fact that one more day had inevitably passed and tomorrow there would be none left.
Something crashed out of the trees behind her. She whirled, heart pounding, bringing the bow up and aimed at whatever troll or witch had crackled into shape out of the underbrush. But it was only one of the guards, she thought confusedly. No. One of the hunters. He stood with his arms raised, showing her his empty hands; he was panting, as she was, and just as startled. Not a hunter, she amended; they slept and bathed with their knives, and there was not a weapon to be seen on this man. An ogre, maybe, in disguise. He looked strong enough, broad-shouldered and muscular. His long copper hair was tangled and matted with bracken; there was an otherworldly look in his grey eyes. His clothes were torn; so was the skin on his face and wrists, as though he had run through brambles.
Her bowstring had slackened a little, she realized. She tightened her grip, pointed the arrowhead at his heart. “Show me your teeth,” she demanded. If they were pointed like an animal’s, she would know what he truly was.
He ignored that. “Did you see it?” he pleaded. “Did it fly this way?”
“Did what fly this way?”
“The bird made of fire.”
She lowered the bow after a moment, aimed cautiously at his foot. He must be one of the forests eccentrics, she decided. Newly eccentric, for his tunic, though torn in places, was of fine dark silk, embroidered at the sleeves and hem. His boots were scratched, but neither worn nor cracked.
“Auri,” she said coldly, “never mentioned a bird made of fire. Neither did Unciel.”
He drew breath, loosed it in a weary shudder. He glanced around them into the still trees, his shoulders slumped. When he looked at her again, his eyes seemed less fay-ridden.
“Who is Unciel?” he asked.
“A great wizard.”
He took a step; her bow came up. “Can he help me?” he asked, his face taut, desperate. “I must find the bird. And the witch.”
She swallowed. “Unciel might help you,” she said carefully, in case he grew mad again, and attracted the witch. “But he is far away in a cottage in Dacia, and too weak to do much besides garden.”
“Dacia?” He stood very still, not breathing, looking at her so strangely that she backed a step. So did he, abruptly, reeling away from her, it seemed. “Who are you?”
“I am Sidonie of Dacia,” she said very clearly, indicating dire consequences if she were eaten by magic in Serre. “I have crossed two lands to marry Prince Ronan of Serre. My guards are setting up camp behind you; my hunters are close around us, armed and—and hunting.”
She heard his quick breath. “They must not shoot the bird!”
“We cannot eat fire for supper,” she reminded him reasonably. “Anyway, we never see the red birds. Only their feathers, now and then. They must be very beautiful.”
“They are,” he whispered. And then something pulled his face awry; he clenched his teeth. She saw the blood flush around his eyes, and the terrible, stark expression in them, as though he were about to weep. She let the bow go slack in her hands.
“What is it?” she breathed. “What’s wrong?”
He saw her again, beyond the frozen sheen in his eyes. His hands clenched; he fought for air, struggling against whatever sorrow held him in its terrible grip. “I must find the witch,” he told her finally, and she felt her own hands grow cold.
> The witch and the bird had driven him mad, she thought. But if he grieved, then he had lost, and loss she understood. She went to him impulsively, pushed the bow and arrow into his hands. “Take these, if you’re going witch-hunting. You have nothing to help you in this place, and I have an entire village to take care of me.”
He gazed at them a little incredulously. Witches, she realized then, must use arrows for toothpicks in Serre. But he didn’t hand them back. He studied her again, his expression calmer now, and unfathomable. She felt suddenly like a pampered child who had handed a starving beggar her gold shoe-buckle.
“I’ll come home as soon as I have found the witch,” he said incomprehensibly. And then she saw his face shed grief and confusion, along with all memory of her. Wonder and longing filled his eyes, blinded him, so that he did not even see her as he stumbled past her into the trees.
She turned and saw the firebird.
She saw nothing else, heard nothing, as it flew silently through the twilight, its wings trailing plumes and ribbons of flame, its tail covered with jewels of fire. Its claws and beak and eyes seemed of hammered gold that melted into fire and then hardened again into gold. It sang a note. She felt the sound fall through her heart like a pearl falling slowly, with infinite beauty, through liquid gold.
After a time, she felt the hand above her elbow, holding her to earth, she guessed, keeping her from running after the dream of the bird when the bird itself had vanished. She felt the wizard’s presence before she looked at him; they had been together that long.
“Did you see that?” she whispered, still searching for it within the darkening forest.
“Yes.”
“No wonder he follows it… I never asked his name. Did you see him?”
“I saw everything,” he answered simply. He was gazing into the trees as though he could still see, with his magical eye, the luminous bird and the man with his heart outstretched to follow it. “I was here watching even before you finished turning and saw clearly what you were aiming at.”
“How—”
“I felt your terror. You moved me in a breath.” His light grip opened; he moved her with the suggestion of a touch. “Supper is ready and you are missed. Come back to the world.”
The next afternoon, beyond all possibility, she found herself riding up that final paring of road so high above the valley floor that she did not dare look down. She kept her eyes on the road until it passed behind one of the falls and out again. Then she raised her eyes to the dark palace. There were airy, glinting banners along the walls, she saw with surprise, and trumpeters to greet them. The road ran up to the drawbridge and ended; the gates stood open. Guards in black leather and silk lined the road, the sides of the bridge, the inner courtyard. Sidonie, riding numbly between Gyre and the captain of her guard, watched a man detach himself from the stiff, silent gathering, and walk across the yard toward her.
Gyre reached over, pulled gently at the reins in her lax hand. Her horse stopped. The stranger held one blunt hand up to her. She looked down into a broad, scarred face, with its hairy upper lip lifted and snarling over a missing tooth, the eye above it lost behind crumpled, puckered skin. The other eye was the iron-black of the walls around them, and as hard.
“I am Ferus King of Serre,” he said. His lost eye seemed to move behind its scars, still trying to see. She felt herself freeze like an animal under the hunter’s eye. “Welcome to your home.”
FIVE
It was after midnight before Ronan remembered the Princess from Dacia. He had followed the firebird to the moon. He had run across luminous, barren plains, over empty crystal mountains, down ancient river beds, dry and white as bone, where the pale stones reflecting passing fire ahead of him flushed the color of garnets. The bird sang as it flew. It patterned the black sky and the moon with a star-burst of sounds, each more brilliant, more haunting than the last. It drew farther and farther from Ronan, finally no bigger than a shining tear across the face of the moon. When it had vanished and he fell, choking on glittering shards of moondust, he heard it sing again with a woman’s voice that should have melted mountains, drawn water out of the harsh landscape. She would not show him her face; the bird would not change while he was watching. He crawled to his feet after a while, and followed her singing, trying to come upon her unexpectedly. But he fell to earth before he saw her.
In the forests of Serre, he leaned against a tree and stared up at the moon, transfixed, waiting for that tear of fire, of blood, to cross its face again. The moon only grew cold, distant, gathering its stars about it, wandering away into some darker realm, leaving the forest black around him. A burning star within the trees brought him to his feet again. But he smelled it before he moved: charred trees bleeding pitch. Human fire, he thought, and remembered the princess.
At the time, she had seemed little more than a daydream, a bit of story, appearing out of nowhere like a talking bird or a crone, to give him something and then vanish again. Now, in a lucid moment, he saw her more clearly: a young woman in a strange land who had no idea, when she entered the walls of the summer palace, what morass she would be walking into. His father, faced with the absence of a marriageable son, would be in no mood to return her to Dacia with a polite apology. Ronan couldn’t just leave her there to fend for herself against the ogre. Wherever “there” was. He couldn’t marry her, any more than he could fly or turn himself into a fish. The idea was preposterous. He had died with Maye and their child; his heart had turned to ash; the dead do not marry. He had to free the princess somehow, persuade her to go back home. Surely she would want nothing else, after a few days with his father. But Ronan had slipped into a sideways world, where the summer palace did not exist. He could not even see the waterfalls. Nothing—no trail of crumbs, or jewels, or drops of blood—marked his path home. The forest was the world; the firebird held all its truths and secrets. Following such beauty, he left all pain behind. Within the bird lay the greatest mystery of all: the woman who made him forget. He would follow her all his days, all his life. But first he had this one small thing to do: he must find Brume and persuade her to show him his way back into the world. And then he would help the princess, who seemed innocent and kind, and who certainly did not deserve to be shut up in the bleak walls of the summer palace with his father. And then he would flee from that barren world, back into the forests of the firebird, follow it until he found her.
A waft of something fallen into a firebed and slowly cooking knotted his belly. He had forgotten about food. He still carried the princess’s bow slung over one shoulder; he had forgotten about that, too. The arrow still rode at a slant in his belt, pushing against his ribs. He stood up slowly, clinging to the tree when the world spun. He was dizzy with hunger suddenly, gnawed with it. He couldn’t see to hunt in the dark. But he could see fire. He would forage for the forgotten morsel searing itself in the coals, if nothing got to it before he did. But the other animals were afraid of fire; he alone was in love with it.
He steadied himself, walked across the little meadow beyond the trees.
The forgotten morsel turned out to be an entire hare skinned, spitted, and charring above the embers. He knelt beside the fire, ate the hare with his hands, tearing pieces off the spit, burning his fingers and his mouth; he did not care. He scarcely saw the horses tethered nearby, or the wagons hung with cooking pots, the silent pavilions lining the river. The man beside the fire seemed to shape himself out of the sudden flames leaping up to lick at the fat dripping between Ronan’s hands. First an eye was illumined, unblinking and remote as a star. Then a tendril of lank, dark hair. A jawline, lean as a fox’s and faintly shadowed. Ronan, putting the pieces together, felt himself go still as a hare under a hawk’s stare.
But the man only said softly, “Go ahead—eat. I cooked it for you. You looked half-starved.”
After a time, Ronan managed a word. “When—”
“I saw you with the princess. I’m travelling with her. My name is Gyre. I guard the camp at nights
; I sensed you out there, awake and hungry. I was curious about you. So I threw a scent in your direction and you followed it.”
Ronan, still scenting it, tore off a few more bites. The man disappeared again, back into the fire, maybe. Ronan dropped the bones of the hare into the fire, reached for the cloth left on an old stump. He wiped his hands, looking at the half-loaf of bread and the cup of wine that seemed to have appeared when he wanted them. Like magic, he thought, reaching for them. So the man appeared again, like magic, when Ronan had turned the bread into crumbs, and swallowed the last of the wine.
Then he wanted to do nothing but sleep, which had not occurred to him before, either. Perhaps, in his dreams, he would see the firebird.
But the man, Gyre, had begun to talk again. “The princess told you her name, and that she is to be married to Prince Ronan.”
“Yes,” he said indifferently. They were characters in another story, the prince and the princess happily wed, not in the life he led.
“Do you know him?”
“No.”
Gyre was silent, his cool eyes remote again, revealing nothing. “I saw the firebird,” he said finally. “It is more beautiful than anything I could imagine.”
Ronan’s hands clenched; above him, star fire blurred and spun. “How could you see her,” he whispered, “and not want to follow?”
The still eyes spoke finally, of wonder, before the man did. “Her?”
“There is a woman hidden within the bird, even more beautiful than it is.”
He heard Gyre’s indrawn breath. “How strange… And the witch? You said that you would return home after you found the witch. Will she help you find the bird?”
“She’ll help me find my way home.”
“Which is where?”
“No where. Nowhere in this world.”
“And the witch? Where is she?”
“In her cottage made of bones.”
Again he heard the man’s breath, and the name that flowed out of him, almost inaudibly, as though to keep her from hearing. “Where will you find her?”
In the Forests of Serre Page 5
