In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I don’t know. Perhaps in the waste where I first saw her. She warned me then that I would have to find her to return home. But she did not foresee the firebird.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of the witch? She sounds very dangerous.”

  Ronan shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I have been trying to die for some time now.”

  Again Gyre was silent. He leaned forward abruptly, stirred the fuming cinders with his bare hand, and flames danced between his fingers. Ronan blinked, struggling with the image. Mage? he thought. Magic? He heard a hollow, desperate plea for hope, a night-bird’s cry; was it in himself or within the trees? But Gyre was still again, so still he could not have moved; Ronan could not have seen what he saw.

  He had a single, coherent thought before he saw the firebird again. “You must not let the princess enter my father’s house.”

  He did not hear Gyre’s reply. The bird hovering above the meadow, trying to catch stars in its beak, turned its head and looked at him out of one melting, golden eye. It caught his heart in its beak and he followed it thoughtlessly, helplessly, forgetting burned bones and princesses, the mysterious Gyre, the possibility of magic.

  Dawn stranded him, bone-weary and empty, somewhere within the forest. He slept curled like an animal in the hollow trunk of one of the ancient trees. At noon, he stirred, brushed the bracken from his hair, and went in search of the witch.

  He found her a night or three later, under a shrivelled moon, in the barren patch of forest where they had first crossed paths. The bones of her cottage glowed eerily, brighter than the moon. The round green window watched him like an eye. He had no fear left. He walked up to her door, pounded on it with his fist. The cottage seemed to shift, startled out of sleep; what sounded like her entire flock of chickens began to squawk. If she invited him in, he thought, he would go in. If she invited him to drink a broth made of his heart’s blood, he would. Anything to end the endless confusion of worlds, of longing and loss, anything to rest.

  He pounded again, heard her voice like wind blowing hollowly through a bone. “Go away!”

  Fist cocked, he stared incredulously at the door. “You brought me here. Now tell me how to find my way home.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “What night?” he demanded bitterly. “In what world? And why do you care? You would open your door to anything with a beating heart.”

  “You’re dead,” she said succinctly. He brought both fists down against the door, and then his face, pushing it against the hard, dry bones.

  “Please,” he whispered, terrified at last. “Don’t leave me out here. Tell me how to find my way home.”

  “It’s late and you have wakened all my chickens. Come back another day.”

  “No!” He pried at the bones of her door with his fingers, then threw himself against them. It was, he thought, like trying to batter at his father’s implacable will. He sank down finally, leaned against the door. “I will sit on your steps outside the door until you open it. I’ll ride your house if you run. I’ll wake your hens every hour with my shouting. You won’t be able to leave your cottage without tripping over me. I will cling to these stinking bones like a carbuncle until you answer me. Tell me how to find my way home.”

  The third time was the charm. The door opened abruptly; he tumbled backward into a darkness smelling of hens and rotting marrow. A thin, plain, knobby woman with her grey hair in a bun and her sparse brows arching adjusted her lenses and peered down at him.

  “Why,” she asked distantly, “are you suddenly so eager to return home? You hate it.”

  “I don’t intend to stay.” He was reluctant to bring up the matter of the princess. But the witch already knew what questions to ask. He had no idea what else she might know, and he dared not lie to those wide, unblinking eyes behind the fly-green lenses. “I must go back to help someone.”

  “Who?”

  “A young—a princess, a stranger. She should never have come to Serre. I fear for her, in my father’s house.”

  The witch sniffed, wiped her long nose on her sleeve. “A princess.” Ronan, chilled by a tone in her voice, gazed up at her silently, wondering which of the two Sidonie might find most incomprehensible: the witch or his father. But Brume only commented, “You can’t expect me to bother myself with all this.”

  “I warned you,” he answered recklessly, “what a bother I will be if you don’t. You warned me that having left my father’s palace, I would not find my way back until I found you. I have found you.”

  “Indeed.” Her lenses slipped down her nose; she studied him over them, groping with one hand in a pocket for her ox-bone pipe. She lit it with a flick of nail, puffed something that reeked worse than the house. “You’re a clever and troublesome young man. Such a clever man would know to bring me something worth your trouble.”

  He felt the utter weariness seep through him, as though the barren land around him were leaching him of life. “Such as?” he asked without hope, knowing that whatever she wanted, it would be innocent and alive.

  “You killed my white hen.”

  “Yes. You have already punished me for that.”

  “You refused to pluck it, or to bring even one of your warriors into my house to drink a cup of broth with me.”

  “Even one was one too many.”

  “Then bring me this, to replace my white hen. Bring me the firebird in a golden cage, and I will set you free.”

  He stared at her wordlessly. She puffed a billow of foul smoke, levered him off her threshold with a broad foot under his shoulder, and slammed the door. The cottage, rising under him, shook him off the steps and onto the moon-parched ground before it stalked away to find a quieter corner of night.

  SIX

  Euan Ash’s pen encountered Gyre’s name for the first time toward the end of an endless summer day. The pen stopped on the curve of the first letter. Gyre, the scribe thought curiously, and then remembered the name spoken on the day he had seen the princess. He saw her again, vividly, as he sat with his pen poised to begin the name: standing in the wizard’s garden with her hair like coils of braided gold, and the bees braiding their erratic golden paths through the light as they followed her scent. Now Unciel’s seedlings had grown tall, vines and stalks offering a confusion of color and scents that caused other flashes of color to hover and dart through the corners of Euan’s attention. He shifted the pen just before the bead of ink in its nib welled and dropped. How long had she been gone? he wondered, and then realized, with surprise, how much of the summer had passed. She would have reached Serre, begun the long journey through its forests weeks ago. She might, beginning a longer and even more hazardous journey, have already married.

  He frowned down at his paper, ruthlessly pulling his attention out of memories, colors, the intimate, throbbing voices of the mourning doves on the garden wall. He could hear the wizard Unciel working in the kitchen, tying herbs to dry, cooking up odd ointments for bunions and spider bites. Euan dipped his pen again, finished the name finally: Gyre.

  “In Fyriol, a harsh land south of Dacia, I met a young mage called Gyre…”

  He heard the wizard’s breathing then, and turned. Unciel, his fingers green from tearing herb leaves, leaned against the doorway, panting slightly. He had used magic to move, Euan guessed, recognizing the pallor, the weary slump of shoulders. He made a questioning noise, wondering if the wizard needed help with some disaster in the kitchen. But Unciel, his breath calming, only looked at Euan quizzically a moment before he spoke.

  “Why now?” he asked, then made himself clearer. “Why that tale now?”

  Euan shrugged slightly, baffled. “It came next out of the chest.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can copy it later,” Euan offered, stifling interest. “Or not at all. I haven’t read it.”

  “I know.” He explained, as Euan blinked at him, “What you write wakens memories. They are, after all, my words.”

  Euan put the pen down, gathered pap
ers. “Then you tell me when to do it.”

  But the wizard lingered in the doorway, gazing, it seemed, at the wall at the back of the garden. Even in the warm light, his eyes looked the color of ash. He said finally, mildly, not seeing Euan at all as he made his decision, “As you said. It came next.” He drew himself slowly off the doorpost to walk back to the kitchen, and added, “I had forgotten that I wrote about it.”

  Euan listened until he heard a murmured greeting; the raven, answering, spoke the wizard’s name. Moments later, a lid clattered in the kitchen. Euan, unable to quell a curiosity that must have made itself palpable even in the steamy air above the boiling pots, dipped his pen and went on with the tale.

  “In Fyriol, a harsh land south of Dacia…”

  Fyriol, he learned that afternoon, was a hot, parched land whose fierce winds laid bare the bones of hills and sculpted them into high, eerie shapes of colored sand and granite. Dragons had once lived there, tales said, and had left the land unfit for human occupation. But the seventh son of a king who was also a seventh son had gone looking for a land of his own to rule, and had claimed Fyriol. As there were only a few nomadic wanderers occupying it at the time who soon drifted north to fairer climes, no one argued with him. Other adventurers, disinherited, dispossessed, and otherwise frustrated, joined him to wrest their fates out of the difficult land. The king, building a palace out of the colored sandstone, unearthed a vein of gold. With that, he paid a wizard to tame the unpredictable and ruthless storms. The wizard died of his work, struck by a recalcitrant claw of lightning—the ghost, some said, of a dragon-king. But the weather did improve. Wanderers stopped there and settled, raised their flocks on hardy grasses and scrub. As years passed, the kingdom grew rich on gold and oil from the fruit of gnarled, twisted trees that thrived on arid ground and light. The aging king, wanting to protect his fledgling kingdom for his own sons, sent word to more civilized lands that he would hire another mage or sorcerer or wizard to pursue any rumors of dragons still living, and to mark the borders of his land with signs of magic to discourage other kings’ sons with nothing else to do from casting an eye toward his domain.

  A fledgling wizard by the name of Gyre, seeking to establish a reputation, responded to his request.

  “I was,” Unciel wrote, “passing through Fyriol out of curiosity, on my way to Dacia, when I heard a silent, desperate cry for help.”

  In his dreams that night, Euan tried to continue the tale. A dragon flowed out of his pen. Many dragons stirred in their stony haunts, forgotten fires smoldering at the interruption of their sleep. A band of brutal thieves posing as nomads found the young wizard alone on the borderlands and forced him to use his magic to draw unwary travellers into trouble. The King of Fyriol himself, furious at some wizardly ineptitude, had locked Gyre in a tower and thrown away the key. Gyre, his throat raw, his voice dead from shouting, had cried out silently for help, pounding at the door. Euan, startled out of his dreams, opened his eyes and still heard the pounding. He tried to cry out in the dark; his voice would not come. Then he recognized the drunken laughter at his door. It was a pair of pretty scribes who had cast their eyes earlier that summer at the lanky, cat-eyed Euan, challenged by his shyness and reserve.

  “Come out with us,” they called, their bangles ringing brightly against his door. “Euan. We haven’t seen you for weeks, and our eyes have grown desolate. Come and play.”

  Someone across the narrow street drew attention to the sinking moon and bellowed for silence. Euan, motionless on his bed, pretended he was not there. The lowering moon, full and milky, shed light on his uncluttered, meticulous life: the water jug there, pens and ink so, manuscripts of favorite poetry stacked neatly here, shoes aligned in suspended motion beneath the window, at the end of a journey, or the beginning of another.

  “Euan,” the door whispered. “We know you’re in there. Summer’s almost over. Come out before the leaves wither and the sun grows pale. Euan.”

  Euan rolled over and dragged his pillow over his ears, wanting to find his way back into the strange, dragon-haunted tale where the mysteriously imperiled wizard cried out wordlessly for help. But he still heard the laughing, coaxing voices, even after the young scribes had gone and he had fallen asleep again.

  “I followed the silent cry to its source,” he wrote the next morning, trying to keep his curiosity from outrunning his pen as he copied. “In a cave along the rocky northern border of Fyriol, I stood in the heart of the cry. There were bones in that cave. I recognized them: the huge triangular jaws, the backbone running the length of the visible cave, stretching back into the utter dark. The teeth were jagged, and blackened with the dying fires of its last breaths. It had been dead a very long time, perhaps centuries. There was no danger from it. And yet the silent cry for help seemed to echo against the walls of the cave as it pulsed out of my heart. It came, I guessed finally, out of the dark deep within the cave.”

  Invisible, soundless, able to see in the dark as easily as day, the wizard Unciel followed the trail of helplessness and terror through the winding corridors of stone.

  “That it was another wizard in trouble I already knew: the power of his cry, reaching so far across the desolate land to find me, told me what he must be. I sensed something else, beyond his power, that I could not define. It seemed at once small and vast, here and elsewhere, vulnerable and yet absolutely implacable. I could find no name for it. And so I came at last to meet Gyre, in the dark under earth and stone, caught with his hand in a gold casket inside the coil of the monstrous backbone of yet another dragon. Its ribs, collapsed under the fallen weight of backbone, spilled in a ring around him. The gold, filigreed casket itself was a small treasure. He could carry it easily out of the cave into the light. It belonged to no one any longer; why should it not belong to him? So he must have thought.”

  What Gyre saw becoming suddenly visible in front of him was left unwritten. What Unciel saw was a young, very helpless man lying on the ground within a spill of bones, one hand locked under the lid of a casket, which seemed to have bitten down on it like a live thing. His wrist was bloody; on his free hand the nails were broken and bleeding from tearing at the lid. His lean, dirty face was hollow with hunger and pain. Unciel, accustomed to noting such things, saw that the earth beneath the casket was black, hardened. Something once there had left its shadow of blood and fire, which, hardening through the centuries, had sealed the casket to the ground as though it were gripped in stone. The young wizard opened his mouth at the sight of Unciel and croaked like a raven. He had worn his voice to nothing; only his heart could speak.

  “I told him my name, and felt it reverberate in his thoughts, in recognition and in hope. But I was not so sure of myself. I did not tell him that. I knelt beside him and told him what I saw. ‘The casket has been hidden within stone, in the dark within the stone, in the dragon within the dark, in the heart within the dragon. What, I wonder, is within the casket?’

  “He had wondered, too, his rueful thoughts told me. He had glimpsed something, but the casket had slammed over his hand when he touched the secret it held. His name was Gyre. He had been hired by the King of Fyriol to seek out any dragons left alive in the kingdom. The only life he had found in that cave was the hinged jaws of the little casket.

  “To open the casket, I told him, I would have to persuade it that it recognized me. Gyre had already guessed that. He had lain there in that changeless night saying every name he had ever learned in his life. Even in a young wizard’s life, that is a great many names. I tried a few; the casket refused to open. So I did what I had to do. I reached into the casket with my mind to encompass the power hidden within it. Masked in that power, I would reflect like a mirror whatever lay within, giving the illusion that the casket belonged to me.

  “I brought all my thoughts, all my powers, to focus upon a nightmare.

  “I withdrew as soon as my thoughts had touched it. It was like becoming death. But in that instant, when I became the power within the casket, it
opened to me, freeing Gyre. Its lid dropped back, revealed its secret: a small, faceted ball of black crystal. An odd jewel, it must have seemed to Gyre, looking neither very beautiful nor very valuable. But it must be both for someone to have hidden it so completely.

  “We both knelt there, staring at it. Gyre seemed perplexed, and still curious. I could not speak. My heart had changed shape for only an instant, a sand-grain of time, but I had glimpsed what I did not know had ever existed. Such dark power. Such evil. I recognized the thing for what it was, but not whose…

  “‘Remember the tales you have been taught,’ I said at last, rising. ‘Within a dragon-ridden land there is a cave; within the darkness of the cave there is a dragon; within the dragon’s fiery heart there is a casket. Hidden within the casket…’ There is a heart, he finished silently. ‘Yes. Kept in secret far from its owner, whose body cannot be killed until the heart is found and destroyed.’

  “I heard Gyre’s thoughts again, untangled finally from his wonder: It must be centuries old, as old and dead as these dead bones. I turned away, sickened by the thought that whoever claimed it had existed at all. ‘Leave it,’ I told him. ‘It is well buried here.’

  “I heard the casket close, and then Gyre’s uncertain steps behind me. It never occurred to me that, having been trapped for days in the dark with a casket gnawing at his wrist, he would risk putting a hand back into it. But that was Gyre, and that was his mistake. But I had opened the casket for him; I had persuaded the heart within that it had recognized itself, that it belonged to me.

  “That was my mistake.”

  The tale ended there, at dusk on a summer’s day. Euan sat silently, gazing down at the last word he had written. The kitchen, he realized slowly, had grown as silent, as though Unciel were listening for Euan’s first coherent thought. He felt it before he thought: a chill prickling through him, even in that tranquil warmth. The nightmare that Unciel had glimpsed had been very much alive, and it had come looking for its stolen heart… That was the untold tale, the one left unwritten, only glimpsed between the lines of an earlier tale, where, for an instant, something powerful enough to leave a fragile husk of a wizard in the wake of its death had opened an eye in the dark and looked at him.