Gyre drew breath, loosed it noiselessly, his eyes on the reflection of the ruthless, harried king. One eye, one heir, he thought. Lose either now, and Serre would be adrift like a leaf on that water… He saw the single eye begin to narrow at his silence, and he turned. “It would help me to outwit the witch if I knew something about her. She might find me before I find your son.”
The king opened the door and shouted for a servant, then poured himself more wine, “Ask my wife,” he said, and emptied the cup again. “She knows all the tales.”
Later, Gyre wrote on parchment in letters so ancient only a wizard as knowledgeable as Unciel or a scribe trained in abandoned languages would have been able to decipher his thoughts: “I have opened the casket… I have not yet touched the heart.” He paused, his cool eyes unblinking, reflecting candle light as he remembered the cave in Fyriol. When the silence and the terrible, unrelenting blackness became unbearable, he would ignite the air, and then see the ring of bones around him, his own blood slowly pooling on the crystallized remains of dragon-heart. The memory of the wizard appearing out of the bleak, empty northlands of Fyriol to help him could still melt his heart. But Unciel was far away in Dacia now, digging in his flower beds. “And I,” Gyre wrote, “am beyond help. I have fallen in love with a land. Its magic is extraordinary, unpredictable, so beautiful it can destroy past and future, so terrible you must reach beyond language to describe it. The king has some crude understanding of sorcery; his heart sees less than his missing eye. His son and only heir is lost. His queen is a ghost of what she must once have been. A pale woman with a perpetual twilight in her eyes, who rarely speaks. But within her silence, she carries like a rich treasure the tales of Serre. She told me all she knew of the peculiar witch Brume, and warned me of this and that: bridges, lonely mountain paths, deep, still pools. There, she said, stories begin. She was the third, between dusk and night, to beg me to find Prince Ronan.
“And so tomorrow, I will go looking, for a suitable time, until I can return without him and persuade them all that he is irretrievably lost within the magic of Serre.”
EIGHT
Sidonie heard the mad King of Serre shouting at her all night long. Some time near dawn words changed to water, flowing endlessly past the summer palace, flinging itself to freedom in the valley below. Sleepless in the silvery light, she contemplated what she had left behind when she had ridden through the gates of the palace. On one side of the gates she had been free; riding under stone and shadow, she had—No. She tossed restlessly. She had left freedom behind in Dacia on a bright summer’s day when she had stopped running away from what her father had told her. No. Her father and the King of Serre had signed away her freedom long before that. No. History had consumed her freedom as greedily and mindlessly as the hounds in the king’s hall had gnawed at their bones. King Ferus was swallowing the world; her father had not inherited the weapons he needed to fight the threat to Dacia. She had lost her freedom even before she had been born.
She rose, looked out at the quiet trees in the wood across the river. If she leaned out of the casement, she could see the place where the water vanished, turned into sky, space, nothing. A high crook of road emerged from behind the falls, angled sharply and disappeared from view. Perhaps Gyre was walking down it at that moment. He had told her the night before that he would leave at dawn to search for the prince. But why would a wizard walk or ride when he could fly? She looked up, saw a bird wheeling through the vast emptiness beyond the palace. A blazing finger of light illumined it, colored its red-gold feathers. Gyre? she asked silently, with wonder.
It answered, or it seemed to, or her own wishes answered her: If you need me, I will know. I will return as soon as I can.
As soon as you can, she thought dourly. As soon as you find the witch, the bird, the prince. And here I am, trapped like a bird in a cage in the house of the King of Trolls. On what should have been my wedding day, she remembered ruefully. Her life was held in abeyance by creatures out of Auri’s tales. Such things never happened in Dacia.
At mid-morning, she watched the king and a dozen guards file around the steep elbow of road visible from her window. Then they disappeared completely. Ferus would badger the forest to give him back his son, she guessed; he would scar the trees with his huge sword, scare the crows with his roaring. Her attendants crowded around her, not wanting to be separated, mending torn lace and hems, and speaking wistfully of Dacia. Her wedding dress hung over a mirror, a billow of gold cloth and pearls. Empty shoes stood beneath it. Going nowhere, she noted morosely. The chamber door opened abruptly; Sidonie, looking up with apprehension, found the Queen of Serre in her doorway.
There was a flutter; needles fell, tugging floating lace behind them, as heads bowed, skirts wafted into deep curtseys. Sidonie, raising her head again and taking a second look at the still, colorless face, felt as though she were looking into a mirror. Fear, sorrow, loss, the mirror said, and she swallowed a sudden burning in her throat.
“Leave us,” she said impulsively and her attendants filed out reluctantly abandoning her to the empty wedding shoes, the incessant noise of water, the silent queen.
Calandra slid her fingers together, clenched them, and said stiffly, haltingly, “I came to tell you that my—that Ronan is nothing like his father—”
“I know.” Sidonie’s own hands had found themselves, fretting around one another anxiously as she studied the tall, somber woman. Expression touched the frozen eyes.
“How do you know?”
“He spoke to me when I saw him in the forest. He didn’t tell me his name. But I recognized the color of his hair—his face—in—in the king.” She stopped, swallowed drily at the memory of the indescribable supper.
“Yes. They look alike.”
“The prince seemed very sad. But not—but not unkind.”
“Cruel.”
“Cruel,” Sidonie whispered.
The queen’s eyes flickered past her to the window as though Ferus might have heard the word falling with the water half-way down the cliff. “It is difficult to speak in this place,” she said wearily. “I never know how much he can hear. Did my son give any reason for pursuing the firebird?”
“Only that it was beautiful.” She saw it again as she spoke, opening in her mind like a flower of fire, blinding her to time, sound, the stones around her.
“You saw it too,” someone said and Sidonie blinked. “Your eyes are full of it.”
“What is it?”
The queen shook her head a little, her mouth tight. “Many things, I think. To Ronan, it must have been what he followed to flee from his life.”
Sidonie looked at her wordlessly. The queen’s hair was a braided crown of chestnut and gold and silver; her eyes were the cold color of dawn at the end of a sleepless night. Her son had inherited those grey eyes, Sidonie realized. And that heart.
“I know,” she said with difficulty, “that your son still grieves for his first wife and their dead child. Was it his wedding he fled from?”
“It was life,” the queen said simply. “He keeps trying to leave it.”
Sidonie’s hands slid over her arms. She started to answer. Then the gold of her useless wedding dress filled her eyes and she found herself crying instead, noiselessly, mutely, staring at the queen and shaking, holding herself tightly so that what was trying to come out of her would not overwhelm them both.
The queen’s face changed, expression melting through the set, icy cast of it. She touched Sidonie’s wet cheek. “I can’t remember,” she murmured, “the last time I cried.” She eased Sidonie onto the cushions and furs in the window seat. Then she stood beside the weeping princess, gazing at the world beyond the stones, one hand resting on a trembling shoulder. Her voice ran in and out of the sound of tears and water; now and then an image surfaced, flashed alive. “The firebird is what you follow to change your life, and every tale of it is different. But in every tale it is inevitably the heart’s desire. Once there was a great king who heard i
t singing in his garden by moonlight, and he fell so in love with its beauty that he promised to marry his youngest, fairest daughter to any man who could capture it for him… The young man who pursued it left everything he knew behind and entered a world where animals gave advice, where horses flew, where not even death was the end of the story, for the singing of the firebird could wake the dead. He won his heart’s desire. The firebird, which in the end eludes all capture, escaped from the king and flew away into another tale…”
Sidonie, quieting so that she could hear past her own sorrow, said hollowly, “That is not very comforting, when the heart’s desire of the man you are to marry is his dead wife and their child.”
“No.” The queen sat down beside her, took her hand. “His heart’s desire is the firebird now; he goes where it takes him.”
“I wish I could.”
“The king will never let you go,” Calandra said softly. “Even if Ronan does not return. Ferus will force your father to come for you, force the powers to Dacia to challenge the magic of Serre. He wants Dacia; he thought it would be easy.”
“It should have been. It should have been as simple a matter as putting on that dress. Not a matter of warring sorceries.” She fell silent, gazing again at the confection of gold and lace, with its overlay of tiny pearls like a web whose threads ran everywhere. Her eyes followed a single strand along a sleeve; in her mind she held the strand in one hand, following it while it led her down a hallway, down stairs, into shadowy, unwatched places within the palace. Surely there was a way…
“There is no escape,” the queen said, reading her thoughts. “I have tried.”
Sidonie, her eyes dry now and seeing more clearly than ever where the vagaries of history had stranded her, answered simply, “Your son escaped.”
At dusk, she watched the dark, powerful figure of the king, in black leather and chain mail, appear again at the sharp angle of the road, and disappear behind the falls as he rode toward the gates. His guards followed. Sidonie studied each figure carefully before it vanished. The bright-haired prince was not among them.
She braced herself for another unnerving supper, full of flying fish and bones. But the king did not appear, and the summer court, suspended between a wedding and a funeral, not knowing whether to celebrate or mourn, spoke in subdued voices of an uncertain future. Sidonie retired as soon as she could with her attendants, relieved at the absence of the obstreperous king. As soon as she reached her chamber, he sent for her.
His guards took her to a high tower room above the falls. They left her alone there, hanging between air and stars, breathless at the bird’s eye view of the darkening fields and forests a thousand feet below her. The river, barely wider than a knife blade, caught light from the rising moon, turned a liquid silver as she stared down. She closed her eyes, backed away from the casements, and nearly bumped into the king as he entered the room behind her.
She smelled leather and sweat as she veered hastily away. Still lightly armed, dusty from the road, with a twig or two caught in his hair, he eyed her dourly, chewing on something that, she guessed, had once had a hoof or a claw attached to it.
He swallowed and said, “Your father must have a room like this.”
“My father,” she answered dizzily while the king stuck his head out a window to spit, “is not a mountain goat.” Then she took a closer look at it.
It did resemble the room her grandfather had taken her into when she was small, where she watched him float fire in water, and call birds out of the air to perch on her fingers. Later, her father had tried such things in that chamber full of books and beakers, scrolls written in letters resembling twigs and bird-claws, jars and stoppered pots, pet toads, owls, crows, mirrors, cauldrons, precious stones, crystals, flakes of gold, and an endless supply of candles. She had watched the King of Dacia set his boots on fire trying to light a candle, and erase his reflection in a mirror trying to make himself invisible. For several years, the castle rang with his shouts of frustration or sudden cries for help; it trembled now and then with random explosions; swathes of colored air fluttered out of the windows like windblown curtains. Abruptly, he gave up on magic. The last time Sidonie had seen the room, it had grown very dusty and all the animals were gone.
This chamber seemed more the lair of some mad witch. Ogre, she amended, watching the strong teeth tearing at the meat, the single eye above it rolling darkly toward her. This was the ogre’s lair, with animal bones in the fire bed and a grinning human skull with a red, faceted jewel in one eye socket. His basins of water were cloudy with ash or blood; dried mushrooms, dead moths, desiccated birds were strewn across his tables. More lively, lizards flicked in and out of the casements; a poisonous toad, one leg cuffed and chained with a slender strand of gold, swelled and hissed at any movement. The mirrors were opaque, reflecting the ghosts of trees. No, she realized suddenly, the trees were real. High above the forests of Serre, the mirrors searched the night-ridden trees for the prince.
She was drawn to them, the magical eyes of the king. He watched her stand in front of a long oval mirroring the silent forest. She had slept beneath the canopy of those huge branches; she had watched the birds weave their colored threads of flight through them, and the small animals burrow among the massive roots. She stretched out a hand, remembering how time had stopped within those changeless trees, and how she thought she had been free. The king, his mouth closed motionlessly on a bite, seemed to be expecting some unfamiliar display of sorcery. Her hand touched cold glass, dropped.
He said harshly, “You must have inherited the powers of Dacia’s kings. Why else would I have chosen you to marry my son? Show me how you would search for him.”
She looked at him, her face expressionless, very pale. Words failed her. The whole idea was ludicrous, and he might very well toss her out of the nearest window along with his bone if she told him so.
Gyre, she hoped desperately, would catch her if he did.
Somewhere between laughter and terror, she began to babble, giving him the only magic she could remember: the fragment of a tale. “I cannot. I hid my powers in a secret place before I left Dacia, so that the wild powers in Serre would not sense it and seek to challenge it. The wizard Unciel gave me this advice. He is a very powerful wizard and has travelled many times in Serre. Gyre helped me. Unciel told me that I must never, ever, for any reason, tell anyone where my magical powers are hidden. When Gyre returns, he will get them for me.” The king’s eye, flat black and smoldering like a coal, seemed to bore through her, seeking what she hid. Beyond him, on top of a pile of books, the skull’s eye glittered at her as though it laughed. Inspired by it, she added, “My magic is hidden in a jewel, in a locked box without a key. My voice is the key that will open it.”
A guttural confusion of words snarled in the king’s throat. He gave up on them, raising his hand instead. But it was the bone, not the princess, that he pitched out of the window, before he bellowed for guards to remove her from his sight.
NINE
Ronan sat in the dead of night listening to the firebird sing.
It clung to a branch high above him, dropping notes like a shower of fiery cinders that burned toward him, then cooled before they touched him. It sang to the rising moon, he thought, the way other birds greeted the sun. Either it was oblivious of him or had grown used to him, for now and then it showed the moon a woman’s face. From a tangle of tree roots, Ronan watched, enraptured. He was turning without realizing it into some rare forest creature, with a pelt of bracken and tattered silk. Tiny spiders had woven webs across his torn pockets; great luna moths clung to the tarnished brightness of his hair. Mice had nibbled the threads of his buttons; magpies had stolen them. He had used a boot for a pillow one night, and then wandered off without it. He ate when he remembered, foraging for berries and mushrooms; he drank when he chanced across a stream. Now, as intent and thoughtless as a wild thing, he watched the face of the firebird shift slowly, unpredictably, from bird to woman and back again, her
eyes full of moonlight, the song coming out of her like a lullaby. And then its eyes, gold as the sun, its song like flaked fire, falling and melting in Ronan’s heart. And then again her. He was utterly content.
He barely remembered his own name; it had gone the way of his boot, so when the owl first spoke, he didn’t recognize himself.
“Ronan.” He saw a pair of round, bone-white eyes peering down at him from a low branch. The sound the owl made seemed harsh, pitiful through the liquid song of the firebird, and he didn’t understand the word at all. “Ronan. Prince Ronan.”
Above them the bird’s face changed. The woman sitting on the branch smiled at the moon, her fiery hair tumbling down and down, an endless froth of curls in which stars were born. He didn’t hear the owl again for a while. He heard only the woman, her singing gentle, tender, as though she sang a child or a lover to sleep.
Then she melted in the fire, and the bird, its voice a harp strung with gold, sang again to the moon.
“Ronan,” the squat, dark oval of feathers cried, and pitched forward suddenly. It dangled awkwardly from the branch, its great, fierce eyes nearly level with Ronan’s. “Prince Ronan!”
He blinked. An upside-down owl was hanging in his face, trying to get his attention. “What is it?” he asked softly, so not to disturb the firebird.
In the Forests of Serre Page 8
