The Book of Atrix Wolfe

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The tray-mistress rose, grabbed a tray and banged it with a wooden spoon. The undercooks, sprawled wearily among wine bottles, lifted pale faces; apprentices and wood-boys, called by the trumpets at the gate, slipped in from the night. The head cook followed them, tight-faced and alert, as though he never needed sleep. Apprentices kicked the mincers and choppers under the table; reluctantly they emerged, blinking at the sudden leap of fire as spit-boys heaved logs onto the drowsing embers.

  A cold supper, the head cook said, for the returning hunters. Hams were sliced, and cold roast fowl, and long loaves of bread; a simmering soup of shredded beets was ladled out of cauldrons to cool. Lettuces and boiled potatoes and scallions were chopped and mixed with vinegar, pepper, rosemary and dill. Dark, dense cakes heavy with nuts and dried cherries, redolent with brandy, were pulled from the cooling ovens. Whipped cream and flaked, toasted hazelnuts frosted the cakes.

  The hall-servants began to gather in the kitchen. Undercooks funnelled rosettes of minced pear onto the soup. Musicians, returning from the hall, picked at ham and fowl, and shook their heads groggily at the head-cook’s questions.

  No, the King did not want music at this supper.

  No, Prince Talis had not been found.

  The tray-mistress, arranging parsley around the ham, and wreaths of rosemary around the roast fowl, bade the servants grimly to find out what they could. Bewildered, disturbed, they piled news onto their trays along with dirty plates.

  There was magic in the wood, that night. A ghostly hunt had ridden with the King’s hunt, invisible, but calling with sweet and melancholy horns. A white stag with burning horns had fled through the trees ahead of the hunt. There was no sign of the mage. But the King had seen Prince Talis running toward him down a long shaft of moonlight.

  And then he disappeared.

  “Taken,” the head cook grunted when he heard this. The tray-mistress sat down slowly, fanning herself with a tray. Saro, scrubbing the heavy soup cauldrons, scrubbed as noiselessly as possible.

  “Taken!” the tray-mistress breathed. “By what?”

  “The wood,” the head cook said. The hall-servants glanced at one another. Trees, the shadows of trees, seemed to flicker on the kitchen walls.

  “He was hunted down and taken,” a servant said softly. “The King says by the woman in the wood. He says little else, except to curse her and the wood. All he can do now is wait for help from Chaumenard.”

  “And the mage?” the head cook demanded. “The one who rescued Prince Talis in the keep?”

  The servant shook his head. “Gone. Or fighting in the wood, still. Some say they heard a strange howling, and saw flashing lights and other things among the trees. The King said it was not to the woman Prince Talis ran, but toward the King. She took the prince in spite of himself.”

  “And no one saw her?”

  “Only moonlight, when he disappeared, and the wood.”

  “Where,” the tray-mistress asked in bewilderment, “would she have taken him?”

  The question lingered in a sudden silence. The head cook gazed at the tray-mistress speculatively. The spit-boys glanced at one another, sharing an unspoken thought. Everyone else looked in all directions: at the gleam in a copper pot, at fire, at dried herbs and cheeses strung across the rafters. Eyes smoldered, or grew vague. Saro’s hands slowed; a kingdom of light and airy bubbles and undulating shadow seemed to shape itself in her water.

  “There,” the head cook said softly, “you have it.”

  “Have what?”

  “The question. In a nutshell.”

  “Is that where she took him? Into an acorn? Into moonlight? How will the King or the mage find him to bring him home?”

  “I don’t know. The mage will know.” The head cook got to his feet restively, compelled by the King finishing roast meats and potatoes in oil and rosemary above them. “Send up the cakes and cheese. And more brandy,” he said to the servants. “Not that he’ll sleep tonight, the King.” His mouth roiled suddenly over a word; he looked ready to spit it. “His father dead early, his brother lost, and him childless—sorcery is nibbling away at Pelucir.”

  “Prince Talis will return,” the tray-mistress said in horror. “He must!”

  The head cook, studying the cakes, did not answer. “Lay them in brandy and light it,” he said to the apprentices. “Take the ham bones and simmer them overnight in cloves and bay for soup.”

  Saro finished the last of the cake pans, from which the sweeper had picked cherries clinging to the bottom. Her hands felt cold, even in the hot water; her heart pounded raggedly, trying to say something. Prince Talis, lost in the wood…The prince with the oak behind him, in her vision, the tangle of boughs, the tangle of horns…Now, her heart said urgently. Now. Now. Now. Her hands sped through pots; she moved to the cries of her name so swiftly that undercooks, finding her suddenly beside them, blinked in surprise and almost saw her. The King sent down for more brandy. Servants brought back half-eaten cake. Mincers, pluckers, boners, choppers, stood around the tables, eating scraps with their eyes shut. Servants brought down the last of the plates, the last of the news.

  The King, they said, will hunt again. Tomorrow, and the next day and the next, and every day after that until the prince is found.

  Slowly the kitchen quieted. The head cook sat up late with the tray-mistress and the head servant, sharing a bottle of brandy in which a pear, like some great golden pearl, hung suspended. The spit-boys slept at the hearths, waking only as the flames dwindled under the soup stock, and the simmering in their dreams began to fade. The small children had disappeared with the dogs under the tables. Saro, scrubbing the spits clean, and the sweetbread pans, worked quietly, listening to murmurings behind her as the brandy bottle tilted, and the brandy’s slow rich ooze spoke of pears and liquid gold.

  “Terrible,” the tray-mistress breathed. “Terrible. It brings to mind that dreadful winter. The tales that came into the kitchen then…”

  “That’s what they say up there.” The head servant sipped his brandy. “That’s what they thought attacked the prince.”

  “But the mage killed it,” the tray-mistress said anxiously. “Didn’t he? So it can’t have been.”

  “It was a spell of the prince’s that caused him trouble. And they say the wind that rescued him leaped and howled like a wolf. Like the wolf the hunters heard in the wood.”

  “Atrix Wolfe,” the head cook said abruptly. Then he shook his head. “No. Not in Pelucir.”

  “They say that’s what the King saw in his cup before the hunt. The monster of the winter siege. But it came out of the prince’s misbegotten spellbook. And a woman taking Talis is far different. Trouble, yes, but not the nightmare the King feared.”

  “A terrible winter,” the tray-mistress repeated. Her elbows thumped on the table; a joint in her stool shrilled. “That head cook left at the end of the siege. He was a broken man, having to cook up feasts of beans and roots, and boil soups out of bird bones so empty they whistled. I washed plates, then. I did everything—the kitchen-brats fell ill with hunger and did nothing but cry. The spit-boys all left to fight. There was little for them to spit, and little more than that to burn. And then to win, and lose so much at once…It was a bitter victory. Bitter as the winter, but for the new prince, who only cried once, they said, and then grew calm and sweet, with his mother’s eyes, watching everything in wonder. To lose Prince Talis would be—He’s all the King has, now.”

  “There’s two,” the head cook said precisely, pouring more brandy. “You’ve got to keep that in mind.”

  “Two what?”

  “Sides. Two tales. Two to keep track of.”

  The head servant nodded solemnly, his eyes wide, bloodshot. “The mage may already have dispatched the prince’s spell. Leaving us with the prince and the lady in the wood. Which—”

  “Which is a different thing to look at than a deadly spell,” the head cook said. “There’s the mage and the prince’s spell. And there’s the prince
and the lady of the wood. Mage and spell will take care of themselves: We don’t need to worry about that anymore.”

  Water, heaving onto stone, whirling into the drain, pulled their eyes to it, and then to Saro.

  “She’s like a…” the tray-mistress said; her voice trailed away. The head cook nodded.

  “Not quite…” He yawned. The head servant finished looking at Saro and stared down at the table.

  “Like a thing made, not born. Made to scrub pots.”

  The tray-mistress tapped her temple significantly. “Pots,” she said, “are what she understands. Not feelings. Or words. Not dreams and restlessness and hankerings, like the other girls. Not rising above the kitchen. She barely knows where she is. Nor does she care.”

  The head cook grunted, losing interest. Saro let the cauldron stand upright, her eyes on the shadow under the cupboard where the book lay hidden. She sat down near it, tilted her head back, watching fire under her eyelids. The voices soothed her; as long as she heard them, she would not see the night-hunter stalking the kitchen. But as long as she heard them, she could not open the book. It was not a pot, it did not belong in her hands, it belonged to the prince in his keep. They would take it from her, she understood clearly, for it was not a pot. Not what they were used to. She sat quite still behind the cauldron until voices finally ceased. Chairs spoke to stone; shod feet to stone and stairs. The door opened; night stood a moment at the doorway, dark and crowned with stars. Then the door closed.

  She drew the book from the shadows.

  The fire spoke; wood snapped, pitch hissed. A spit-boy snored. Someone under the table whimpered with dreams. A dog barked in the yard. The soup bones simmered; the candle in the sconce over Saro’s head fluttered in a stray breeze. Everything spoke, it seemed, except the book, which remained, under her searching eyes, completely silent. Still she studied it, turning its pages as gently and carefully as the washers handled the King’s gold-edged plate. Some of the paper crumbled under her fingers, so thin and delicate were the broad pages that survived the windstorm in the keep. But none of the writing crumbled. It was dark and clear, in neat rows on every page, and what it said she could not imagine. She held the writing up to her ear and listened; she stroked it with her fingertips. It remained as mute as she.

  Fire guttered, drew shadows around her. A spit-boy woke, murmuring to the fire, shifted to drop a piece of wood on it, his eyes still closed. Still the shadows remained; night gathered itself in corners, in pools of darkness. Saro swallowed dryly. Something pricked behind her eyes. A word she could not say burned in her throat. What pricked in her eyes rolled down her face suddenly. She caught it, startled. Mincers did this, when spit-boys batted at them with scarred knuckles for coming too close to their fires. Plate-washers did it sometimes, silently dropping pearls of water from their eyes into the wash water. Another drop fell, to her horror, on the page; a word blurred under it. She blotted it carefully with her hair, everything else being, as always, slightly damp. The word had not changed shape.

  She wiped her eyes. There was a task at hand, and this was the task: to learn to speak the silent language of the prince’s book. If its words were spells, and she, Saro, was a spell, then maybe she would find herself within these neat lines. She must learn to say magic in magic ways, since she had no other voice. Or perhaps, in those incomprehensible pages, she would find a voice.

  She might find anything at all. She felt another odd thing inside her, as if she had swallowed the light from the candle, and it shone for a moment through her: For that moment she saw beyond the pots. Then she bent over the book again, felt it slowly become familiar, as all the ceaseless random voices in the kitchen. It became simply one more voice that called her name.

  She sat with it until the moon set beyond the high kitchen windows and the candle guttered out. Then she slid the book back among the shadows. With one hand stretched out toward it, like the spit-boys slept beside their fires, she curled on the stones behind the cauldron full of odd whispers and visions, and fell asleep.

  Twelve

  Atrix fought the Hunter until he vanished with the moon. The Hunter pursued the White Wolf through the wood into the open field; the Wolf hid among the ghosts of Hunter’s Field. Now he was a sword in the hand of a warrior, until the warrior fell, and the sword dropped to the ground, and the moonstruck blade reflected the Hunter’s searching eyes. The mage became fire clinging to the bloody rag wrapped around an arrow flying toward the highest window in the keep. The window became an eye; the eye blinked, shifted. The arrow struck solid stone, dropped into the snow. The ghostly flame went out; the mage fled. Remembering the living, he lured the Hunter again and again away from the castle. As raven, he tried to fly toward Chaumenard, draw the Hunter after him. The Hunter’s hounds became ravens, drove Atrix back onto the field, back toward the wood.

  The Hunter refused to be driven from the field, and Atrix refused to leave without him. He harried the Hunter constantly out of shape, so that those within the castle would not see him. When Burne Pelucir’s hunt rode slowly out of the wood near midnight and blew a weary fanfare to the gate, the Hunter and his horse and hounds were night-shadows, pinned motionless and paper-thin, on the ground the hunters rode across.

  Talis was not with them.

  The Hunter would not speak, nor would he let Atrix past his raven’s eyes into his mind. When the moon grew small and cold among the stars, his hounds fanned the field, hurried the mage across it. Atrix, trying to see into his making, find a name for it behind the Hunter’s eyes, saw only the most bitter of memories: the King of Pelucir, the shaft of the banner of Pelucir driven through his heart, dragged down among the hounds.

  “What are you?” he cried, losing his hold of the Hunter, who seemed to have no substance but power. But the Hunter did not speak until the moon set.

  Then his dead moon-eyes held Atrix’s and he said, “Sorrow,” and vanished.

  Atrix, driven uphill to the edge of the wood, took his own shape, trembling with exhaustion. His own shape refused to do anything for a while but lie on the oak leaves. He waited, but the Hunter did not return. He listened for Talis, scented the wood like a wolf, searched it with his mind.

  The wood was empty.

  He closed his eyes and saw Talis’ father fall, the dark hounds gather over him. “Sorrow,” he whispered, and rose wearily, and carried that word with him to Burne Pelucir.

  He found Burne sitting alone in the empty hall. Guards stood at every door. Guests looking as haggard as the King murmured in the corridors beyond, red-eyed, drinking wine, casting fretful glances into the silent hall. Servants hovered in doorways, waiting to be summoned. Atrix appeared out of torch smoke, as dishevelled and worn as the hunters. The guards shouted sorcery; the hunters raised what came to hand, but without conviction, since Burne, sitting hunched at a table with his chin on his fist, only stared at Atrix dourly.

  “Who are you?”

  “Atrix Wolfe.”

  Burne’s brows rose in amazement. He stood after a moment, quelled the noise behind him with a shout. He added another shout to the hall-servants. “Wine! Sit down,” he added to Atrix. “We may be suspicious of sorcery in Pelucir, but you have a name as ancient as gold. Did you just come from Chaumenard? Or are you the mage who blew into the keep to help Talis?”

  “Both,” Atrix said. A servant brought wine, cups; behind him the doorways and corridors were soundless. Atrix touched the cup poured for him, did not pick it up. “I came to tell you something. I told Talis last night. He—”

  “Did you find him?” Burne interrupted.

  “I sent him to find you, after I took him out of the keep. We heard your hunting horns in the wood. You never saw him?”

  “I saw him,” Burne said, “but only for a moment.” He lifted his cup, drank deeply. Atrix stared at his own dark reflection in the polished wood, waiting, motionless, unblinking, until he heard the metal hit wood, and then he closed his eyes.

  “And then what happened to him?
”

  “I almost reached him.” Burne sighed. “Almost. He was running toward me, down a shaft of moonlight. But he fell, and the light closed over him, and he disappeared.” Atrix opened his eyes. “She took him,” Burne finished grimly, and drank again.

  “She,” Atrix said blankly.

  “The woman he saw in the wood.”

  Atrix moved his gaze from his shadow to the King’s weary face. “What woman?”

  “Beautiful, he said she was. Beautiful,” Burne repeated sourly. “Nameless, coming out of the trees, she cast a spell on him and nearly got him killed.”

  “Last night?” Atrix asked, his thoughts tangling suddenly in moonlit paths, nameless woodland enchantments, dangers that had nothing to do with him.

  “No—days ago. He’s been dazed ever since. And now she has him.”

  “Who has him? Has him where?”

  “How would I know? I hoped he had hit his head when he fell off his horse and imagined her. But no.” He brooded at his wine a moment, then at Atrix. “You,” he said hopefully. “You know all the paths and ways of magic. You could find him.”

  “I don’t understand,” Atrix said. He had grown tense, struggling to envision ways and paths of magic that did not end in horror on Hunter’s Field, but went beyond it to unnamed realms, into which a prince of Pelucir had vanished. Light and shadow shifted within the hall; an unlit torch flamed suddenly; tapestries on the walls stirred and settled. Beside him, Burne had stopped breathing. “Talis wasn’t running from a woman, last night. He was running—”

  “He ran from her,” Burne said. “And she took him.” He spoke carefully, his eyes on the unpredictable shadows around him. “That’s all I know. The winter siege of Hunter’s Field did not leave me much besides Talis. If I lose him, I lose—I will not lose him. I cannot. You came out of nowhere to rescue him last night from his own sorcery. I’ll give whatever you ask, if you’ll rescue him again.”