In the Forests of Serre

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She nodded, gesturing to her attendants. When the watching eyes were all beyond the threshold, and the prince as far from views of water and trees as possible, she sat down beside him. He watched her fingers tighten, twist slightly before she spoke. The callouses were softening, he saw. She had given away her bow, he remembered; caged, she could have only shot at reflections in the water.

  “My lord,” she said quietly, “do you remember me?”

  “I do.” Even his voice was not his own, the wizard thought ruefully; it was deeper, husky, tentative. “You told me your name when we met in the forest.”

  “I know that you have—that you are still in mourning. I am sorry.” She hesitated, loosed a breath, and held his eyes. “I only want to say that you don’t have to run from me. I won’t ask you for things you cannot give. I only hope that we can become friends. If such a thing is possible in this place.”

  The wizard hesitated. It does not matter, he told himself, which of us she loves as long as she marries me. A name, a kingdom, the possibility of an heir to his powers and the vast, astonishing powers of Serre, would be his before nightfall, if the wizard himself only relinquished the possibility of love. The true prince, whom he had left without a voice in the deadly house of the witch, would likely be safe enough for a day or two. If he chose, Gyre could rescue him after the wedding, set him free to wear his life to the bone in pursuit of the firebird. He would die or go mad before he found his way beyond the magic and back into the world. Gyre could wear his face forever. If he chose.

  At that moment, as he watched the familiar face of the princess with its unfamiliar expressions, as he heard the shift and catch of threads of lace at her uneven breath, forever seemed just long enough.

  He heard himself whisper, “You must give me time.”

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “Oh, yes.”

  “I remember that—you were kind to me in the forest.”

  A line quivered above her brows. “I threatened to shoot you.”

  “You gave me your bow.”

  “I thought you were an ogre.”

  “And now?”

  She hesitated. Her voice grew very soft. “I was as terrified of you as of any ogre before I met you. I am still a little afraid. You are, after all, the ogre’s son. But if we can continue to be kind to one another, maybe I will learn to see past your father’s face, and you will see past—your past.”

  He nodded, wordless again, and reached out to touch a strand of tiny pearls circling the sleeve on the underside of her wrist. He heard her breath gather and stop. They both watched his fingers slide from pearl to glistening pearl. “How beautiful you have suddenly grown,” he said in wonder, and raised his head confusedly as the breath came too swiftly out of her. “I mean, since I saw you in the forest.”

  “But you never saw me there,” she said, giving him the beginnings of a smile. “You could only see the firebird.”

  “My lord,” someone said stiffly from beyond the threshold. “The king.”

  The princess’s face emptied itself of expression and much of its color. Sighing noiselessly, the wizard braced himself for an explosion because the prince had left his guards in the hall to enter a room singing with water and light. But the single eye seemed placated by what it saw in the prince’s face.

  Ferus said brusquely, “The queen asked to speak to you alone in her chamber. The princess will come with me.” He held out an arm to her on his blind side, riveting her with his puckered, peering eye-socket. “Bring your mother to join us in the hall. Tell her to be brief. We have waited long enough for this moment.”

  He bowed his head, trying to remember where in the palace he might find the queen. But the guards did not let him wonder beyond a step through the door; they gathered around him, led him to a small chamber overlooking the crux of separating waters.

  The chamber was so full of tapestries, stories covering every stone, in fire and bone and gold, that the wizard felt he had stepped into one of the queen’s tales. There was even an unfinished tale at her loom: something with three burly, crowned figures galloping after three bright foxes, who were also crowned. The queen, wearing delicate shades of lavender and grey, said the prince’s name as he entered, and took his face between her hands. Startled, the wizard stood very still while she searched his eyes.

  Her hands slid finally to his shoulders, tightened. “She freed you, then. You have truly returned.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? Brume never gives anything freely.”

  He hesitated, then decided to tell the tale he knew. He let his eyes slip away from hers, and said bitterly, “I paid her price.”

  “What was it?” she breathed.

  “The firebird.” The prince’s voice shook slightly. “She wanted it in a cage to sing at her hearth while she boiled her bones.”

  “The firebird.” She stared at him, astonished. “You caught it for her?”

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “No, it can’t have been—But how could you possibly—”

  “I had no choice,” he answered wearily. “There was no other way home.”

  She was silent, holding him lightly now, a fine line between her brows. “But what made you want to come back that badly?”

  “I was so tired… I thought—I thought anything must be better than running like a wild thing through the forests after a dream. So I did what the witch demanded. I don’t like to think about it.”

  “No.” Her eyes seemed still puzzled, but she brushed his cheek with her fingers. “The firebird will not stay with her any longer than it chooses. Some day, when you can, tell me everything.”

  He nodded, catching her hand in his. “I will. We must go. The king is waiting for us.”

  “In a moment.” She hesitated, her fingers tight around his, her pale eyes studying him again, trying to see into his heart. “I wanted to tell you that the princess seems to have a kind and loving disposition. How long she can keep it in this crazed household, I do not know. But don’t—don’t be afraid—”

  “I’ve spoken with her,” he said as indifferently as possible. “There’s nothing to fear. I’ll do all that my father wishes. The sooner the better, for all our sakes.”

  She loosed a breath. “I never imagined that the witch would lay your ghosts for you. But then Brume has always been unpredictable.”

  He was silent, trying to imagine Ronan’s ghosts. “No one,” he said evenly, “will ever lay them. They will stay in my heart until I die.”

  “I know.”

  “After my wedding, before the sun sets, I will lay flowers on their graves. Candles will burn on them all night long in their memory.”

  He felt her hands slacken, then tighten again quickly. She bowed her head; he could not see her eyes. Her voice shook a little when she spoke.

  “We must go. The king will be impatient.”

  “Will you come with me,” he asked, wanting to see her eyes. “To light the candles?”

  She raised her head; he saw the sheen of grief across them again, the stark grey of winter. She could not speak, but she nodded quickly, and took his arm, clinging to him as he opened the door.

  In the great hall overlooking half of Serre, the courtiers had gathered; the princess waited with her attendants. The queen drew the prince to his place in the light. Then she joined the king among his guards. She said something; frowning, Ferus bent his head to listen. The prince waited alone, framed by the sky and the brilliant flare of sun beyond the broad wall of casements. His eyes moved to the golden figure across the hall. Who would marry them? he wondered. Some hermit steeped in lore, so old his body had begun to twist like the roots of trees he lived among? Some good witch, who knew the name of every moss and mushroom in the forests?

  No one joined him, he realized, surprised, a moment before the queen spoke again. Then he heard her voice, high and piercing, furious enough, he thought, to shatter glass.

  “My son did not bury them!” she cried. “He burned them, and sent
their ashes down the falls! That’s why we fear for him near water. You are some spell of Brume’s—you are not my son!”

  And then the fire came at him, the crude sorcery of the king’s, which would never have touched him except that the queen’s voice, so unexpectedly powerful in its anguish, held him stunned a moment too long. The wall of glass exploded around him. Every broken shard seemed to call his name as it fell, a rain of glass and Gyre. Stunned again, moving far too slowly, he felt the impetus of fire sweep him through the shattered casements. Fire-blown over an airy expanse of nothing, he heard his name again, a distant and astonishing voice out of the past, it seemed, and calling someone he no longer knew.

  Then he began to feel the fire. He changed shape and dropped away from it, translucent as air, mirroring sky. He angled toward the water and fell with it a long, long way before he changed shape again. He crept on four legs behind the thundering water, and hid within the hollow of stone behind the falls until the moon rose. Then the king and the guards searching for the broken pieces of the witch’s spell decided that it must have been a powerless thing of twigs and earth, and wended their way back up the cliff.

  TWELVE

  Sidonie sat in her chamber, surrounded by her attendants. They watched her; she stared numbly at nothing, her face pale and stiff, her hands motionless in her lap. She still wore her wedding-gown. Now and then someone ventured to suggest that she let them undress her, put her to bed. She scarcely heard. Two images kept recurring in her mind whenever she tried to think. One was of the prince with his long copper hair and husky, tentative voice, his big fingers touching the pearls at her wrist as gently as if they might grow wings, take flight if disturbed. The other was of the same prince, his weary, harrowed face finally peaceful, looking at Sidonie across the hall just before the queen cried out and the fire picked him up, carried him through an explosion of glass into nothing, flames engulfing him as he began to fall.

  It was not Ronan, the queen kept telling her. It was not my son.

  Sidonie could not speak. She could not find words. She had never learned words for the sight of the man whom she had been sent endless miles to marry, tossed over a cliff a thousand feet above nothing by his father.

  It was not Ronan, they told her. It was the witch’s spell. Hours later, the queen had come very briefly to Sidonie’s chamber to tell her: they found nothing of him at all. Nothing. Not a scrap of cloth, not even a blackened sword. It was as though the spell had vanished in mid-air.

  The spell.

  Not-Ronan.

  The strange land beyond her windows was black; the moon floated on the swift water, its light rippled, tugged, pulled toward the long straight thundering fall through nothing. So Not-Ronan must have fallen, into water instead of earth; how else could they not find him? That spell that spoke so easily to her of things that Not-Ronan should not have known?

  A chilly breeze slid between the casements; she shivered slightly. Her attendants, waiting silently, casting glances at her, stirred as though the breeze had shaken them. Sidonie’s stiff fingers twitched. A word or two formed; her brows puckered.

  “How,” she whispered, and her attendants leaned toward her, listening breathlessly. She cleared her throat, but it had begun to burn painfully; she was forced to speak through fire. “How could Not-Ronan have known that I gave him my bow?” She was seeing her attendants again, their worried, frightened faces. “Do witches know such things?”

  They could not tell her.

  “My lady,” one said, her own voice trembling. “It is inconceivable that the King of Serre would have killed his son.”

  “So it was Not-Ronan.”

  “So it must be, my lady.”

  So the way the prince had looked at her in that chamber, the way his fingers had so lightly touched the pearls around her wrist, had also been illusion. The things she had said to him, the things he had said: time, forest, ogre, bow, past, friends…

  Illusion.

  Faces blurred; again she had to push words past fire. “I could have loved that Not-Ronan.” Again he turned his head to find her across the hall; again the deadly sorcery swept him out, away. She blinked, saw her attendants again, one or two weeping silently, the others trying to hide their terror. She gripped the arms of the chair, rose stiffly. They had come too far with her for her to leave them so adrift.

  They clustered around her eagerly, unbuttoning, untying, loosening. There was a moment of stillness during which they all looked doubtfully at the wedding dress. The princess quelled an impulse to fling it over the falls. She said wearily, “There must be some place for it out of my sight…”

  Later, as she sat sleeplessly in bed between a brace of candles, she felt another thought, urgent, perplexing, and as troubling as anything else, loom into her head.

  Where, she wondered, was Gyre?

  Death had been a guest at her not-wedding. The wizard should have felt her horror and shock half-way across Serre. Unless he was ensorcelled by the witch, or dead, too. Dead, she amended. The missing Ronan was still a mystery. Now so was the wizard. The peaceful forests she had passed through seemed to have swallowed them both. She slid down beneath the silks and furs, her eyes wide, watching the frail light flutter against the night. Perhaps, she thought in wild hope, the wizard had gone back to Dacia to raise an army to rescue her. If not, what had come so unexpectedly alive within the trees below that could threaten even Gyre?

  She caught the noiseless glide of the opening door out of the corner of her eye and went rigid with terror. The queen, still in her lavender silks, the candle in her hand illumining her pale, distant eyes, was not a reassuring sight. Sidonie watched wordlessly as Calandra closed the door softly behind her. She came to the bed, gazed down at Sidonie a moment. Then she put the candle on a table and sat down beside the motionless princess.

  “I thought you might be awake,” she said softly. “I could not come earlier. The king is deep in his sorceries now, searching for our son.” Sidonie, haunted again by the startling image of their son on fire and falling like a star, could not speak. Fine lines of pain and despair appeared and disappeared on the queen’s face. Her eyes lost their frozen sheen, became shadowed with memory. She went on, picking up a thread, it seemed, in the middle of a tale. “My son made a pyre on the rock behind the palace at the point where the water divides. He built it of seasoned wood overlaid with fresh boughs still fragrant with pitch and pine. He covered the wood with all the tapestries in their chamber, all the stories. His wife and the child on her heart were also wrapped in rich cloths and tapestries; their faces were hidden. On them, he laid flowers, all the autumn wildflowers that had been gathered that day along the river up here and the meadows below. He stood with them, silent, alone, from sunset to moonrise. When he raised the torch, we went to stand with him. We watched them burn. At sunrise, he gathered the ashes with his hands and let them fall, handful by handful, into the water. We watched him for days, weeks, afterward, to see that he did not follow them.” She paused, swallowed. “You see. This is not something my son would have forgotten. Yet when the man who wore my son’s face spoke to me alone before the wedding, he asked me to come with him, after you were married, to lay flowers and light candles on the graves of his dead wife and child. There were no graves.” Her voice shook, ragged with sorrow. “He should have known. There were no graves.”

  Sidonie drew what felt like her first breath since the chamber door had opened. She brushed at a cold tear. “He loved her that much.”

  “Yes.”

  Illusion turned its face to look at her across the great hall. “Then who was the man I was about to marry?”

  “The king believes that he was the witch’s spell, sent to torment us. Perhaps he was meant to entice you also into her hands.” But the king’s explanation seemed to perplex her; she added, “All of Serre would have suffered from that. It seems unlike Brume. People chance across her; she does not reach out to them beyond her world.” She hesitated. “What he—the spell—told me
about the firebird troubled me, too, but I let it pass. He was not very coherent about it, and I was too relieved to see that face to question him.”

  “The firebird?”

  “He said that he had caught it in a cage and given it to the witch to gain his freedom. But that is like putting your heart in a cage and leaving it with Brume. Whatever you have gained, it is not freedom.”

  Sidonie was silent, remembering the true prince’s face, spellbound by beauty, turning away from her toward the firebird. She sighed a little, and shifted to sit up. “But how did the man who was the spell know about my bow, and not know about the funeral pyre?”

  “Your bow?”

  “When I met Ronan in the forest, he had nothing, not even a knife to hunt with. I gave him my bow. I thought he could protect himself from witches with an arrow. The man who was the spell recognized me; he said to me: ‘You gave me your bow.’ How could he have known about that if he was not Ronan?” She looked beyond memory into the queen’s eyes, holding them, and whispered, “That was why I thought he must be your son—I could not understand—”

  “I’m sorry.” The queen’s hand covered hers quickly, closed. “What a terrible—”

  “Not-wedding.”

  “I don’t know about your bow. I don’t understand any of this. The wizard is still searching for him; perhaps he will bring us some answers.”

  Sidonie’s mouth tightened over that mystery. The queen, she thought, had found and lost her son again; she did not need to lose all hope. She said finally, bleakly, “Thank you for coming. I may be able to sleep now.”

  The queen rose, looked down at her a moment longer. “At least,” she answered more accurately, “you will not be awake in terror thinking we had killed our son.”

  Sidonie, buried in a cave of bed-clothes and contemplating her fate until the small hours, came to the only possible conclusion before the dark roaring water surged over her and swept her into sleep: Escape.