A castle stood in a meadow. Its lower walls were fashioned of thick, entwined vines of ivy and rose; roses bloomed here and there among the leaves. Its upper walls were white as the marble cutting boards; its towers, round and crowned with peaked caps of gold, seemed as delicate as what the cooks fashioned from meringue. Rooms flowed through the dreaming cauldron, rooms where roses pushed through the inner walls to bloom, where fountains flung arcs of diamond into deep pools, where groves of pale trees grew beside colored windows jewelled with light.
The cauldron’s random dreams shifted, showed Saro a room within a tower. Candlelight from a tier of deer horn and gold flowed across a dark, polished table. A book lay open on the table, its pages tidier than the cooks’ stained, torn pages, and as incomprehensible.
The dreams always ended just as she knew she could no longer kneel upright; she had to seek out the warm place along the oven wall. Just before her eyes closed, a face formed in the water. She never saw it clearly. She caught a ribbon of pearls tangled in leaf-gold hair, a prong of deer horn and gold in the crown above the face, a glimpse of skin paler than the slender trees. She closed her eyes on that vision, hardly seeing it, but always keeping it in memory a moment, the last thing she saw before sleep, black and changeless as the bottom of the empty cauldron, transformed her into nothing.
Three
The White Wolf dreamed.
He stood surrounded by leaves touching his face, his hair, his eyes, as if he were somehow part of a tree. Then he detached himself from the tree and began to walk through a wood flushed with the first, vivid, light-filled green of spring. He wore a long, simple robe of rough-spun wool, ample enough to span his long stride. He carried nothing, not even, he knew in the way that dreamers know, in its deep pockets. He moved noiselessly through light and shadow, through the tangle of oak and birch, white and gold and tender green, and patches of impenetrable shadow. In the way of dreams, he knew and did not know that he had crossed some boundary between worlds. He knew and did not know that the dead leaves lying beneath the oak might also have been flakes of gold, that in the spider webs strung across his path each drop of dew reflected his face, that he left no disturbed ground behind him, and no shadow.
As he walked in the lovely, soundless wood, three deer as white as snow, with eyes of gold and shadows of gold, ran through a sunlit clearing in front of him.
Light streaked across his eyes and he woke.
“Healer!” Someone’s grubby brat had opened his door, and was pounding on it; the voice was high, at once desperate and fearful. “Healer! You must come and see about our cow!”
He grunted, and rolled up from his pallet.
Scents followed him up: honeysuckle and lavender, and mint, mixed with the pine needles in the pallet. He ran his fingers through his fishbone hair, dislodging a pine needle, and ducked easily through the drying herbs and wildflowers hanging from the low beams of his cottage. It was more cave than cottage: wood built against an overhang of granite. Two walls were solid stone; he could not stand straight in parts of it. The child clinging to the door observed his movement and was off, like a startled rabbit, through the trees. The Healer’s voice, deep and hale for an old man, hauled her to a stop.
“Whose cow?” A pale face turned; he glimpsed yellow hair and wide grey eyes among the ferns, and grunted again in recognition. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s all bloated and she’s drooling!”
The Healer turned back into his cottage, put a mixture of mallow, meadowsweet, mistletoe and rue boiled in water and wine, into a pouch. The child was gone when he came out again, but he followed her path easily through the broken ferns.
The sun had barely risen; through the dark trees he saw the cold, jagged peaks high above, and the bright, cold light above them. Even in spring, the forest took its time warming, but still he walked barefoot through it, wearing an old, frayed tunic without sleeves; he had torn them out long ago to make bandages. It was his habits of sleeping within stone, wearing little, and appearing unexpectedly up a tree or on a high crag looking for plants, that gave him his reputation. “Healer,” they called him to his face; behind his back, he was “the Wild Man.” He answered to either, and gave them no other name. He healed their animals—he had a magic way with plants, they said—but he refused to extend his healing to humans.
He found the child and the cow in a tidy barn on the edge of a plowed field that sloped, as all fields that high did, down the mountain. The farmer and his wife and their cowherd looked at him anxiously.
“You see,” the farmer said, indicating the cow.
“She ate something,” the cowherd offered. The Healer said nothing, went to work, with his wet mixture of herbs and his hands. He patted the cow and prodded her, looked into her eyes, smelled her breath, then fed her. She bellowed, after a few moments, and they all stepped back.
“She’ll be all right,” the Healer said briefly, studying the reeking mass she had produced. “She’ll feed now. She found some trevilbane in the pasture—that’s the purple.”
She was already picking at hay. The farmer and the child followed the Healer out. He did not stop for payment; the farmer’s raised voice pursued him,
“I’ll send the child back to you with something…”
The Wild Man, loping among the ferns, remembered his dream then, and did not answer.
Three white deer with eyes of gold and shadows of gold…
Fierce, sweet wind leaped at him down the mountain; he smelled wolves, hare, wild strawberry, stone. Wind and longing threatened to pull him out of human shape; he clung grimly to his humanity, refusing to remember the few brief moments, days or weeks before, when after twenty years he had taken the White Wolf’s shape. Someone from the school had climbed far too high alone, looking for a legend. He had watched students and young mages many times, as they sought a glimpse of the elusive White Wolf. Always before, winds and loneliness and the relentless stone turned them back before they wandered into danger. This one had fought the wind and would not be convinced by the emptiness ahead of him. So the man became the mage again, and then the Wolf. It was that, he thought, or watch another life in peril because of him. From the pinnacle, the Wolf watched the young man stop, wind-shaken, exhausted, stunned by the immensity of stone, his lenses sliding from his grasp, dropping among the rocks. The mage found his lenses for him, and then gave him what he had so stubbornly sought, so that he would finally turn and go back down the mountain.
It was the first magic the mage had worked in twenty years. The ease with which he had slipped out of human shape amazed him. Since then, winds lured him, stone, running water, wild things running, hawks in flight: His body yearned to melt into whatever shape his eyes touched. Wind, touching his bare skin, gave him the boundaries of his human shape; with it came memory, stark and terrible, which had bound him in that shape since he had walked through winter from Hunter’s Field to Chaumenard.
He pushed memory away, and searched under ferns as he ran, and at the roots of trees, for the shade-loving violets and shepherd’s moss. His hands were full of fern buds and wild garlic by the time he reached the cottage.
Someone was waiting for him: the stabler from the inn down the road a few turns in the deep forest. He went past the stabler without a word, to put the plants down, then came back out. The stabler, a muscular young man with dung on his boots, blinked at the Healer, as if he had just realized all the peculiar tales of him were true.
He lives in a cave.
He runs barefoot, summer and winter, like an animal.
He barely speaks, but he knows the name of everything that grows.
“The innkeeper down the road sent me. There’s a lady going up to visit her daughter at the school. But her horse won’t budge from the stable; he’s down and won’t get up, though none of us can find why.”
The Healer stood thinking a moment, still as stone, his eyes, streaked and cloudy, like tarnished silver, remote and unblinking on the stabler’s face, un
til the young man shifted uneasily, glancing down at himself as if he felt invisible. Then the Healer nodded briefly and disappeared back into his cave.
Returning with pouches of varying sizes slung over his shoulders, he followed the young man to the inn.
He came back late, having left the horse on its feet and looking vaguely surprised. He found a sack of new potatoes and some purple foxglove beside his door: payment for the cow. The woman at the inn had given him silver, which he tossed into a cracked crockery pot on the window ledge. He built a fire and steeped herbs in water, and hung others to dry. After a time, he found himself pacing through wood smoke and shadows, listening to the winds, listening for wolves singing in the winds to the moon rising above the mountaintop.
Three white hounds with eyes and shadows as red as fire ran through his dreams that night, pursuing the white deer. They made no noise. Their grim silence alarmed the mage in the wood. He wanted to find his way out of the trees then, but in the way of dreams he seemed fixed, earthbound as a tree. He had no choice but to see what followed the hounds.
Nothing followed that night. He woke, disturbed and restless, wondering what message in the language of dreams his mind was sending him. Hunting, the dream said. Hunter. But that dark rider had ridden into legend twenty years before, never to be seen again except in memory. The mage needed no dream to remind him: The Hunter, the final shape of his magic, rode through all his waking hours.
The culmination of all he had ever learned…
He spent the day high on the mountain, searching for a tiny wildflower that lived, it seemed, on stone and air; it made a soothing poultice for torn flesh. Stoneflower, the goatherds called it, and showed him places they had seen it. They kept watch for it; sometimes their goats ate too much of it and became intoxicated. The Healer climbed beyond the goats, trying to outclimb his dreams, the odd shadow over his thoughts, as if a black moon had risen out of nowhere and cast its black light across his heart.
Near dusk, he slipped off a ledge, reaching too high for one last plant. He fell in a rattling cascade of shards, astonished by pain, and resisting all his impulses to melt into stone, or soar from stone into air. For a moment, he wondered at the fragile shape he had taken, and how recklessly he had used it through the years; it would be a great relief, he felt, to leave it finally. Then he slid to a stop among a litter of stones, on the edge of a high meadow. He lifted his face out of grass and wildflowers and looked into a goat’s yellow, slitted eye.
The goatherd helped him sit; she was a slender, tiny woman as agile as her goats, with a face so weathered she might have been born with the mountains.
“Never go where the goats don’t,” she advised him. “Where do you think you can jump that they can’t, even as wild as you are?”
She boiled stoneflowers and made him a tea, which he had never tried before. It numbed his bruises and brought the stars far closer than he had ever seen them. He fell asleep on the meadow and heard, just before he dreamed, the bell from the school far below, warning the students and mages of the night.
Three white horses with eyes of bone and shadows of hoarfrost galloped after the hounds. Their invisible riders cast pale, glittering shadows of ribbons and mantles and windblown hair. Unlike deer and hound, they saw the mage. They turned their great mounts toward him and stopped. He woke just before they became visible.
The goatherd and her goats were gone; he could hear her voice bouncing here and there among the stones, calling one of the goats out of a ravine. She had left him some dark bread and cold lentils; he ate them, sitting on the meadow, his eyes on the tiny stone buildings at the edge of the forest. All that he had learned as mage seemed as remote and incongruous, something the mountain or the forest would engulf and render meaningless.
Then, just before he rose, he saw himself from a distance, out of a hawk’s eye, or the eye of the moon: neither human nor inhuman, belonging nowhere, the powerless mage, the man trapped in time, haunted by the memory of power. Sorrow shot a barbed point into his heart, for that brief moment, tore it open to reveal all that he had lost.
He stood up, with mountain winds and the winds of memory pushing at him, coaxing him out of shape. He walked stubbornly, painfully, down the mountain, his eyes fixed firmly on the path he chose, his hands remaining empty, until he reached his cottage, and, in its silent shadows, he could finally rest.
In his dreams, the invisible riders became visible.
Three riders with no faces sat staring at the mage in the wood. He cried out in terror, then, but in the way of dreams, he knew he had made no sound. One rider was a man with pale bright hair; the second a child with his pearly hair, flowing long and unbound on the wind. The third rider had hair the colors of autumn leaves, with ribbons and strands of pearls braided into it. She wore a crown of deer horn and gold. There was a black oval where her face should have been. Behind them rode hunters with faces of leaves, of twisted willow boughs, or smooth white birch bark. As the mage’s eyes slid across them in wonder and bewilderment, finding eyes within leaves, a mouth shaped of bark, the crowned rider fixed an arrow into her bow.
Sorrow, a voice cried, as she loosed the arrow, and he knew, in the way of dreams, that the voice, wild and sweet as running water, belonged to the dark, empty oval of the face beneath the crown. The air shattered into hoarfrost and light in front of the mage, white, glittering, cold as death. She cried again, Sorrow, and the arrow struck him.
He woke, astonished.
Four
In the King’s castle in Pelucir, Talis, trying to Extinguish a Candle Flame by Will, shattered every mirror around him.
It was barely dawn. Awakening early, out of habit, he had forgotten for a moment where he was. He saw, from the window of his chambers, not the bare, harsh peaks of Chaumenard, but the misty green wood on the hill, the sky colored pearl around it. The habits of sorcery stirred restively in him, pulled him out of bed; he remembered, with relief, the book he had taken from the school. He opened it, began a spell at random. The only sounds, until the moment he spoke the final word of the spell, came from the kitchens and the kennels: wood chopped, hounds barking to be fed. Then the round, heavy mirror hanging above his clothes chest splintered as neatly as if he had thrown a stone into it, and spilled its pieces out of the carved oak frame all over the floor. He stared at the shards, puzzled. Then he heard the pounding on his door, and other doors opening, and the cries, astonished, fearful and furious, of sorcery.
He opened his door quickly, and found a dozen guards and the King, naked under a mantle, his hair awry, his mistress, Genia, behind him, blinking sleepily, her pale brows lifted in wonder.
“I’m sorry,” Talis said quickly, assuming responsibility for having gotten them out of bed, but hazy yet, about exactly what had happened. “What did I do?”
“I woke up picking pieces of Genia’s mirror out of my beard,” his brother Burne said incredulously. “Did you do that?”
“I was trying to extinguish a candle.”
Burne stared at him. He was a burly, energetic man with golden hair and a greying beard; a fleck of mirror glinted in it, Talis saw with horror. When Burne was younger than Talis, he had ridden onto Hunter’s Field and watched their father die; he had buried both their parents and raised Talis like the son he would never have. Talis, familiar with the mingling of loathing and fascination which sorcery inspired in Pelucir, heard his brother’s voice tighten. “You broke mirrors all over the house trying to blow out a candle? What did they spend two years teaching you in that place?”
“I think,” Talis said, perplexed, “it must be the spellbook.”
“Then find another book,” Burne said irritably. “Or go out in the woods to practice. You’re supposed to learn to defend the castle, not demolish it. Our great-uncle is probably armed and mounted and out the gate by now, trying to fight ravens with a broadsword.” He turned, left a bloody footprint behind him, and cursed pithily.
“I’m sorry,” Talis said again, to his back. He w
andered into his chambers again, where servants were sweeping up the glass. He stood at the window, musing at the wood, watching the sun rise behind the trees, spilling gold and shadow across Hunter’s Field.
A corner of the massive keep, thrusting a dark angle of stone into his vision, caught his attention. Its roof sagged open in places; one beam was charred from a flaming arrow that had eaten through the roof slats before the warriors within had put the fire out. The keep was said to be haunted by all the maimed, hungry, bitter ghosts of warriors who had died during the siege. It was possessed, household legend ran, of a dark magic woven of the blood and fire, anger and fear, that had filled it during the siege. No one went into it.
“You want to what?” Burne asked, during breakfast in the hall. Talis, ruthlessly breaking mirrors so early, had deprived himself of the sight of younger, fairer guests, as if, he thought ruefully, they had vanished along with their reflections.
“I want to use the keep. I won’t disturb anyone there, except the ghosts.”
“It’s not a laughing matter,” Burne said testily.
“I’m not laughing,” Talis said gently. “But I’m not afraid of ghosts. I grew up with them. They have haunted this house all my life.”
Burne was silent. He chose a salmon bone from his plate, and leaned back, sighing. “I know. And they have haunted you. No. It’s grim in there. I won’t have you lost among that keep’s memories.”
I already am, Talis thought, putting the currant eyes out of bread shaped like a swan. He broke its neck and said patiently, “The book I brought back with me is unusual. Words don’t seem to mean themselves.” Burne, picking his teeth with the salmon bone, was looking askance at him. “They don’t mean what they should. Mean. What we expect them to.”
The Book of Atrix Wolfe Page 4
