The Book of Atrix Wolfe

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You did well today; you found all the hidden magics, even Talis.”

  “He wasn’t exactly hidden,” she said tartly, but without her usual bite. “He was standing here reading a book.”

  The mage looked at Talis, then at the book in Talis’ hands. His eyes seemed to grow paler, filmy with thought. “And we could not find you…” He took the book, opened it; Lares looked over his shoulder.

  “It’s nothing,” she said surprisedly. “Just a beginner’s spellbook. Am I finished, Hedrix? Are there any more lost things you want me to find?”

  “Only your temper,” he said mildly. She smiled. Talis watched her face change again, and thought ruefully, She would smile like that for me if…His eyes followed her down the hall, her long, lithe stride, her hair, straight and thick and of a red darker than fire, with mysterious shadows in it. Hedrix made a noise.

  “What is it?” Talis asked.

  “I don’t know whose work it is. Atrix Wolfe wrote something here years ago, when he came down from the mountain to teach a while.”

  “When?” The name, Talis thought, was like a spell, something enchanted.

  “Years ago. Not long after you were born, it would be…But he didn’t stay long, and I don’t believe he finished his writings, for he never showed them to anyone. I doubt he would have been writing anything this elementary. Perhaps a student wrote it.” He handed the book back to Talis. “Take it to the library when you are finished with it. You chose an awkward time to vanish,” he added, his tufted brows ascending, descending again. Talis settled his lenses with one finger.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Messengers came from Pelucir this afternoon. They were already uneasy at being among mages, and became very alarmed when we couldn’t find you. They seemed afraid—”

  Talis nodded. “Yes,” he said softly. “I know those fears. What does my brother want?”

  “The King wants you to return home.” He touched Talis’ shoulder; Talis looked at him silently, guessing. “He says he needs you now in Pelucir, since he has no other heir.”

  Talis drew breath noiselessly, loosed it, his eyes hidden behind the lenses. He pushed himself away from the wall. “Another legacy of Hunter’s Field,” he said briefly. “He was badly scarred by his wounds.” He stared at the mountains, saw only night beyond the stones. His eyes dropped, found leather, parchment, a book without a name. “May I take this with me?” he asked impulsively.

  “Only,” Hedrix said, “if you explain to me some day why it fascinates you so.”

  “I will,” Talis promised. “When I know.”

  He made one last journey up the mountain at dawn. A brief one, he promised the uneasy messengers. But something drew him, more than love of the sun-struck peaks, where light poured from stone to stone like water, and the wind roaring up the mountain smelled of wildflowers and pitch turning to amber and the plowed earth in the fields far below. He forgot time. As he climbed up the bare face of the mountain, he saw the mages’ school, blocks of stone built on stone, looking small and fragile above the vast green forest that spilled away from it. Sometimes mist obscured the mountain’s face: The Shadow of the Wolf, the students called the mist. They climbed the mountain to look for the White Wolf, impelled by legends of him, tales the mages told. Perhaps he is there among the wolves, the mages said, perhaps he is dead: He has not been seen for many years.

  Look for the white wolf who casts a white shadow.

  He leaves no footprints in the snow.

  He vanishes like mist when you chance upon him.

  His name followed Talis like his misty shadow, for no reason that Talis could discern, except that the mountain seemed to belong to the mage. The winds sang with wolves’ voices; the higher he climbed, the stronger they grew, until he felt surrounded by invisible wolves. He stopped before he reached the top. The crown of crags, massive upthrusts of stone through which the sun flashed, looked airy and magical at a distance; closer, they became impossible. He had already gone higher than he had ever climbed. He turned, breathless, sweating; the world below reeled with him. He sat for a moment, watching hawks below, chips of gold fixed in the air an instant before they plummeted toward the shadowy green. His lenses were steaming with his sweat. He took them off, cleaned them on his shirt. Then he pulled himself up against the dizzying angle of stone, and turned again toward the mountaintop.

  It pulled at him, the stark edge of the world, beyond which he could step into pure light. He knew he should turn back; he had climbed for hours. But he had left the world behind, it seemed; he had shrugged it off like the stones that climbed toward the nothingness above the trees. Still he climbed, trembling with weariness, driven by nothing, the white light, the mist of light around the stones. He fell once, slid down a small avalanche of stone; he pushed the lenses back up his nose and climbed again. The winds pulled at him, wailed at him, pushed past him; they seemed to strip him of magic, their voices too loud; he could no longer hear himself think.

  He stopped again, vaguely aware that above him the stones had begun to separate one from another, jutting out in cliffs and overhangs at impossible angles. Light and shadow streaked through them, working illusions among the stones. He swallowed, bone-dry, and took off his lenses again to clear the mists away. There was blood on his shirt, he noticed, from his scraped hands. He lifted his lenses again. His hand shook; the lenses slipped from his fingers, dropped.

  The stones blurred; light and stone and shadow became indistinct, flowing into one another. He swayed, pushed by the wind, then heard his own breath, raw and exhausted, in his throat. He could not take his eyes off the stark white line of light beyond the mountain. But he could not move; his body refused to take one more step away from the world. Nor could he turn, spellbound by the mountain’s magic. He stood motionless, feeling scarcely human, understanding why a mage, drawn to such high places above the human world, would relinquish his own form.

  He took one more step upward, even while every muscle and every threadbare shred of sense protested. Something was wrong; he had forgotten one small detail. A white mist crossed the stones above him, and, falling suddenly back into himself, he remembered his lenses.

  He blinked. The mist had stopped: a blur of white against the crumbled granite. He could not see it clearly. Do you cast a white shadow? he wanted to say. Do you leave no path to follow?

  He said, “Atrix Wolfe?”

  His lenses sparked suddenly, a star of white fire near his feet. He bent, reached for them. He put them on and saw the wolf.

  It watched him from the edge of the overhanging stones, ready to melt into their shadows: the White Wolf of Chaumenard. He looked for its shadow.

  “It’s true,” he whispered, trembling with weariness and wonder. The wolf became a streak of white in the air, and then a memory.

  Go home, the mountain said. He nodded.

  “Yes,” he told it. “Now I can return to Pelucir.”

  Two

  Saro dumped a bucket of steaming water into a cauldron, plunged chapped, cracked hands into it, and began to scrub. Scorched strips of onion and potato peelings floated to the surface. She flicked them out onto the flagstones, where a wizened old man hunched over a gnarled broom swept them up in his ceaseless path around the kitchen. She washed pots in a corner, near the drains. A line of them, copper and cast iron, waited. She never looked or counted; pots appeared and disappeared, reappeared according to the great tidal forces of consumption that ruled the castle kitchen. She dealt with the pot or the leftover scraps or the cry of her name, whatever was under her nose, in her hands, in her ears, at the moment, never looking ahead or back, for both past and future were an unbroken, unending string of pots, distinguishable only by the present, when under her busy hands a dirty pot became a clean one.

  Someone cried, “Saro!”

  She jerked herself out of the cauldron, wiped her hands on the skirt of her coarse woolen dress, which was too long and too big, a castoff from one of the plate-washers. T
he plate-washer had pulled it up impulsively one day, and now was too big herself to wear it.

  “You must never make that mistake,” she’d said to Saro. Her eyes were big, her belly was big; the bones beneath her skin were sharp. She touched Saro’s cheek with one finger, as Saro gazed at her. “You don’t understand, do you? Then it’s just as well you are so plain. Never let them touch you and you’ll be safe. Poor child,” she murmured, looking down at herself. Saro never saw her again.

  Saro was, one of the spit-boys said one day, as she emerged unexpectedly from the depths of a cauldron splashed with water, fish bones and grease, hardly human. Pale as candle wax, with a face as unremarkable as the underside of a saucepan. She was dependable, like fire; if she was fed, she worked. She never cried, she rarely smiled. She never spoke. “Sorrow’s child,” they said, when they found her crouched naked and trembling beside the woodpile. No other name occurred to anyone. She slept and fed with the kitchen cats until she was strong enough to work, a knobby, spindly girl who grew taller through the years, but still retained a curious blankness in her features. There seemed nothing to snag the eye, nothing for the memory to preserve, as if her face induced forgetfulness, and only her name and her constantly busy hands were remembered.

  “Saro!”

  She followed the thread of her name through the vast, crowded kitchen. She remembered voices, perhaps because she had no voice. This cry belonged to one of the apprentice cooks. She ducked through a squall of goose feathers the pluckers sent flying through the air, rounded a table full of bread dough being kneaded and pulled apart and shaped into loaves, doves, rings, through clouds of smells: onions spattering in butter over fires, spices and brandy from huge bowls of minced meat, seared flesh from rabbits and game hens roasting on spits slowly turned by sweating spit-boys.

  She dodged a stray dog and the elbow of the head cook as he flung a wooden spoon at one of the undercooks stirring a sauce. “Lumpy!” he growled. “Unthinkable! Impossible.” He was a lean, fiery, pepper-haired man who looked as if he would be happier riding a horse across dangerous lands to deliver a fateful message, than inventing fifty different ways to cook venison. Saro found the apprentice cook dumping a pot of stew in a wooden bowl for the dogs.

  “Scorched,” he muttered. Saro smelled it in the steaming mess. The bottom of the pot was black inside and out, from smoke and charred food. He kicked it over to her. She wrapped her fingers in her skirt against the hot pot handle and heaved it up. On her way back to the soap and bristles and cauldron, she found herself overrun by a proud flock of liveried servants come to bear trays of cold beef, whole poached salmon, loaves of braided bread, salad, fruit dipped in chocolate, cakes of cream and walnuts chopped as fine as flour for the midday gathering in the hall. She eased through them carefully, knowing that a smudge from the pot on their fine purple and grey plumage would set them hissing and trumpeting like swans. Preening with gossip, feathers rustling, they gave her no more notice than their shadows.

  “Prince Talis is due back within the day. A messenger was sent ahead, last night, to tell the King.”

  “He rode all night, the messenger, I heard.”

  “And was rewarded. A fine gold chain, I heard.”

  “I heard a dagger with a haft of gold.”

  “No, it was a gold—”

  “Gold is what we all heard, then. The King is that relieved, that the prince is safely home from Chaumenard, and away from all that sorcery.”

  “It was the King who sent the prince to learn sorcery.”

  “He learned what he learned, and now the King wants him to marry.”

  “He won’t need sorcery for that, with what came to show themselves to him: young ladies as fine and stately as he could wish for in his dreams.”

  Saro shifted the pot away from a scalloped hem, and found a clearing between four tables where one cook laid raspberries as carefully as jewels on an enormous cake festooned with cream; another overlapped thinly sliced carrots and parsnips like fish scales on a school of pâté fish; a third turned radish, celery and parsley into rose trees, and the fourth sculpted a flock of swans out of meringue. Saro crept past them cautiously; they were all of nervous temperament, and inclined to hysteria if their tables were jogged.

  Another ember of gossip flared as she hauled the pot safely past the delicate tables. The head hall-servant was speaking to the tray-mistress, who inspected everything that left the kitchen, and everyone who carried it.

  “I’ve heard the King favors Lady Maralaine of Terine. Some years younger than the prince, and not overly talkative, but a flower, a wild swan—”

  “Maralaine of Terine,” the tray-mistress mused, straightening a border of parsley sprigs on a platter of beef. She was a massive, obstinate woman who wore her black hair in a topknot so rigid it seemed carved, and who could keep even the spit-boys subdued. “She’s of a large family, isn’t she? Every year, it seems, brings another Terine lady or lordling to court for a betrothal feast. Maybe the King hopes it will be hereditary.”

  “What will?”

  “All those heirs.” She polished a corner of a silver tray with her apron, frowning. “It’s been a grim house, without the prince. Sorcery or no, it’s time he came home to enchant some heirs out of somebody.”

  Saro edged between a wood-boy filling the woodbin, and an undercook pulling a tray of bread out of the stone oven. She got the pot back to the huge cauldron standing over the drains. She poured hot water from a kettle simmering over a flame into the wash-cauldron, immersed the dirty pot and, leaning deep into the cauldron, began to scrub.

  “Saro!”

  She straightened, trailing soapy water and charred food, and made the journey again, this time for a frying pan, hot off the fire and full of grease and broken sausage. She had to crawl under a table to avoid the hall-servants, who were moving quickly by then, hefting heavy trays and speeding toward the hall before the food cooled. Back at the drains, she set the pan down to cool while she finished the stewpot. The sweeper paused to nibble the broken bits of meat out of the pan.

  “Saro!”

  For a while, dirty pots grew everywhere; she collected and washed, crawled and pulled and carried from every corner of the kitchen and washed, while a tower of gleaming copper and iron grew high beside the wash-cauldron. Then the kitchen grew almost calm. The small mincers and peelers napped under tables with scavenged bits of beef and bread in their fists; cooks and undercooks discussed supper; the tray-mistress counted napkins and gossiped with the head hall-servant; the plate-washers sat beside their vast sinks near Saro’s cauldron, eyed the restless spit-boys and whispered.

  Supper was a prolonged drama of great pies of hare and venison with hunting scenes baked in dough on their crusts, vegetables sculpted into gardens, huge platters layered with roast geese, woodcocks and pigeons, and crowned with tiny hummingbirds made of egg white and sugar. The liveried servants came and went, imparting breathless scraps of gossip. Musicians played fanfares for each sculpture that appeared for consumption; between fanfares they wandered in and out of the kitchen, cooling their throats with wine. One of them, hearing distant music even through the kitchen din, said urgently, “Listen! Someone’s at the gate.” The musicians quieted, picking out the trumpets’ flowing voices amid the chatter, the clash of undercooks fuming over sauces, and the underlying mutter of pots.

  “It’s the fanfare for Prince Talis,” they announced, their haughty faces loosening. “He’s safely home.” The head cook grunted and produced a bottle of cherry brandy. The tray-mistress, pouncing on an idling spit-boy, lost the cutting edge in her voice, and neglected to use the wooden spatula in her hand.

  Saro, wet from head to heel, paused to eat burnt potatoes out of the bottom of a pan, and then a heel of bread tossed aside when the loaf was cut. Trays began to come back down then; everyone picked at the leftovers. Saro immersed herself in water again, building her tower of pots.

  Finally the kitchen quieted. Cooks and undercooks and apprentices
left. The tray-mistress counted trays, napkins and rings for the morning. The sweeper made his last rounds. The plate and cutlery washers wiped delicate porcelain and silver with handles and tines of gold with linen softer than their fingers. They finished and left. Fires were dying down. The peelers and mincers and pluckers found their places under tables, among the kitchen dogs. The wood-boys and spit-boys drifted out into the night, their faces tight, intent, like hunting animals. The cats, too, began to prowl. Saro finished one last pot and set it down on the stones to dry. Then she heaved the cauldron until it rolled off-balance, and splashed its dirty water down the drains. Pulling it upright again, she began to fill it with cold water.

  She did this slowly, carrying bucket after bucket from the stone cistern in the corner. The tray-mistress left, yawning hugely, showing massive, marble teeth. Nothing moved in the kitchen but the cats and the fires settling down into their coals. Saro filled the cauldron partway, leaving room for hot water in the morning. She hung the bucket back over the cistern, then leaned against the cauldron on her knees, her arms folded along the rim, her face resting on her arms. She watched the water.

  It stopped shivering finally, grew still, so still she could see her breath tremble across it. She watched it, eyes drooping wearily, but not closed, for what happened in the cauldron at night gave her the only pleasure she had. She never questioned it, any more than she questioned the hearth fires, or the tray-mistress’s topknot, or the head cook’s temper. The cauldron washed pots by day and dreamed at nights. Saro never dreamed, and so she watched the cauldron’s dreams, coloring the surface of the water, speaking to her in its secret language. She did not understand, but the dreams made no demands. They flowed silently across the water, and she watched, for they soothed her, led her into sleep.

  The dark water turned gold. Golden leaves hung everywhere on slender white trees, on massive, towering trees that had grown a graceful, arching filigree of branches. White hounds ran on a path of gold beneath the trees; now and then a leaf would fall, glittering, through the still air. Riders on white horses followed the hounds; leaves scattering in their wake spun whirlwinds of gold in the air, then fell again. The faces of the riders were sometimes human, sometimes of green leaf or of smooth brown twig. Above them, the trees drew up their branches, or sometimes bent a bough to touch the riders with a leafy hand.