The Book of Atrix Wolfe

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Saro,” the tray-mistress had said earlier. Saro saw the heavy silver tray in her hands: onion soup with a melting crust of cheese over it, a loaf of dark bread, a flagon of wine, a tart of oranges sliced into thin bright circles glistening under a glaze that smelled of ginger. “Nobody will go up there but you.”

  So she left her cauldron to take the tray to the prince in the keep.

  Nobody questioned her when the tray came back down intact, nor when, still wide-eyed, she shut the book under the spit-boys’ watching eyes, and hurried out with it. “He wants his book back,” the tray-mistress guessed. One of the undercooks muttered, “Never worked, anyway.”

  Now the prince walked out of the keep into the yard. Light floated across the water, angles of cloudy blue above harsh angles of stone. He did not enter the house again; he came along the outer wall, as she had gone, the narrow neglected stretch where the wildflowers grew between the house and the wall. Guards and pages, hurrying past, looked astonished at the sight of him. The strip of ground widened at the corner of the house, into the kitchen garden, with its long, tidy rows of herbs and vegetables, its vast woodpile, its moldering midden. Wood-boys splitting logs snagged their upraised axes on air, staring at the prince. He rounded the woodpile; ahead of him, the garden rows ended in a high stone wall that hid its unseemly sprawling squash vines and lettuces from the formal gardens beyond it. He turned onto the worn path that ended at the open kitchen door.

  Saro lifted her head, blinking. Noises and movement in the kitchen behind her stopped dead. She turned, saw everyone, cooks, mincers, spit-boys, frozen over pots, knives, fires, staring at the kitchen door. She shifted, saw the shadow falling through the doorway, and blinked again, feeling some word trying to come alive in her throat. She stood up slowly, and met the prince’s eyes.

  The tray-mistress, raising her apron to her mouth, made a muffled exclamation into it. The prince’s eyes moved to her.

  “I don’t know her name,” he said.

  The tray-mistress moved her apron and wobbled a curtsy. “Saro, my lord,” she said.

  For a moment, staring at Saro, he seemed as frozen as everyone staring at him. Then he lifted a hand, touched his lenses. A word tried to come out of him and failed, Saro saw with wonder. His eyes went back to the tray-mistress.

  “She doesn’t speak?”

  “She never has, my lord,” the tray-mistress said faintly. She rallied herself, apron to her heart, and added, “Never since she was found.”

  “Where?”

  “Out there beside the woodpile.”

  “When?”

  The tray-mistress shook her head, speechless again. “Years ago, my lord,” she said finally. “Just after the winter siege, we found her, just a scrap of a child, barely alive in the cold, and mute as a mop. My lord.”

  He touched his lenses again; they turned back to Saro. “Then how,” he asked huskily, “did you know her name?”

  “She was someone’s sorrow,” the tray-mistress said simply. “So we called her that.”

  She saw her name in his face, then, in his eyes, glittering suddenly behind the lenses. He pulled them off, brushed the back of his sleeve across his face. A spit-boy made a soft noise, then went frozen again, staring. Everyone else seemed to unfreeze, as if the prince’s tears had broken some spell. The head cook asked, amazed,

  “Who is she, my lord? Can you tell us? She’s been down here scrubbing pots all of your life. And then she got your book somehow. She’s something magical—”

  “Yes.” He looked at the head cook. “No one thought to tell the King?”

  “We were thinking, yes,” the tray-mistress said hastily. “But you weren’t here to tell, then, and she—”

  “We knew she watched you,” the head cook interrupted, “in that cauldron. We found the spell in your book, and we asked her to find you. We could see her watching you, see the magic in her eyes. But none of us could see you, and she couldn’t speak, and all the King would have seen was a pot of water and a mute pot-scrubber and a kitchen full of mad fools.”

  “Still we’ve been thinking of how to tell him,” the tray-mistress said, “but he’s been so—so fraught. Scalding, you might say, if you’ll forgive me, my lord. When he wasn’t boiling over.”

  The prince stepped into the kitchen, gazing at Saro again. She watched him out of habit, relieved that he was out of the cauldron and under her eyes, but uneasy, too, since what would come seemed oddly imminent, and she was as far as ever from being able to warn him.

  He stood silently, looking at her for a long time, without moving or speaking; the kitchen hushed again around him. Nothing about him spoke, not even his eyes, which seemed dark and secret, suddenly, like her cauldron when the dreams in it were about to well up from the bottom and glide across the water. Then he moved, murmuring something, and slid one hand under his lenses to rub his eyes.

  “She’s under a very powerful spell,” he said, and enchanted the entire kitchen. The tray-mistress sat down on a stool, waving her apron at her face. Boner and plate-washer nudged each other and whispered. Mincers and pluckers emerged from under the tables to see what he did. The spit-boys grinned, their fiery eyes clinging to him. Cooks and undercooks forgot their bubbling sauces. The head cook forgot supper.

  “But who is she?” he asked again. “If you can tell us, my lord?”

  The prince did not answer. He took Saro’s hand. Unused to being touched, she started to pull away, not knowing what he wanted. He kept his hand out, open; her fingers, sliding away from it, edged back slowly across hollows and lines and skin that was not her own. She heard a sigh from a plate-washer. The prince smiled a little, his face opening again, briefly, before the thoughts slid back across it. “I wonder…”he whispered, gazing at her without seeing her, as everyone had all her life. “I wonder…” Now they saw her, she realized with surprise. As if she had enchanted herself into being, with her own magic. He was seeing her again, and then not, thoughts coming and going in his eyes, expressions changing. “No,” he decided finally, aloud, “I can’t tell Burne.” He looked at the head cook. “You tell him.”

  “Tell the King what, my lord?” the head cook asked, bewildered.

  “Where I’ve gone.”

  “And that would be—?”

  “Back into the wood.”

  “The wood.” The head cook rubbed a lifted eyebrow with his thumbnail and added without hope, “Hunting, my lord?”

  “Not that wood,” Talis said evenly.

  The head cook closed his eyes briefly. “My lord Talis,” he breathed, “show some mercy to him—you just came back. He’ll throw a table at me and have me cook it for his supper, nails and all.”

  “I know.” Talis’ voice was soft, but inflexible. “But magic has laid siege to this house again, and I can’t fight it locked inside.”

  “Atrix Wolfe,” the head cook said, then stopped abruptly, his face a pale, hard mask of itself. “What has the wood got to do with what Atrix Wolfe made? Or with Saro?”

  “It’s all his magic,” the prince said. Saro looked at him, hearing things in his voice, like something searing too long in a pan, or a sauce boiling too quickly instead of simmering. Her fingers tightened on his hand. He looked at her, surprised, as if she had spoken. His voice cleared. “You don’t have to tell him that. Or about Saro. Just tell him I have gone back to the Queen’s wood. He’ll believe I’m safe, there.”

  “But, my lord,” the head cook exclaimed. “If you’re not, then you must not—”

  “Tell him I’ll return as soon as I can.”

  “But, my lord—”

  “What queen?” the tray-mistress asked quickly, gazing at Talis, the apron bunched between her clasped hands. All around him, mouths were open again, eyes round, some watching him, some Saro. Talis’ face changed, as if torchlight or a hand had brushed it.

  “The Queen of the Wood.” He paused, then added very gently, “This is her Saro.”

  As he led her out, she stopped in the k
itchen doorway, to cast a glance back at her cauldron, wanting it to come with her, as if its hard plain shell in which she had washed every pot in the world, and all its wordless inner mysteries, were a part of her she dared not leave behind. But she had no way to say “cauldron” to the prince. She tried to lift it with her thoughts, but, perversely, it refused to budge. Talis seemed to feel her loss; he looked back quickly, and then at her.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Show me.”

  She looked at him. His eyes narrowed slightly, surprised, perhaps, at what they saw in his mind. Then she felt the cauldron’s iron, strong, heavy, solid, just beneath her skin, within her bones, and knew she carried its strange visions with her; its dark eye was her eye, seeing. But like her, it was silent, and she needed to make words for Talis, who waited patiently, catching stray arrows of sunlight in his lenses.

  She felt something simmering in her froth suddenly and begin to rise, wanting to spill over its confines, pour into the fire. She let it pour. Talis pulled away from her suddenly, catching his breath. The kitchen, stunned as he was, by the flash between them, bubbled wildly, crowding to the door.

  “Easy, girl,” the tray-mistress called anxiously. “The prince wants only to help. Go with him quietly. No one will hurt you.”

  Talis held out his hand again. Pale under the warm light, he had grown very still, all his thoughts indrawn except one: She saw herself everywhere in his eyes. She felt the wild stirring in her again; she wanted to see out of his eyes, see what he saw of her, what Saro meant. This time she drew the implacable, cold iron around the wildness, subduing it, and put her hand again into his.

  He led her with him into a dream. Faces turned toward him everywhere he moved, always with the same mute question, as if they saw the prince out of one eye and the pot-scrubber out of the other, and could not tell what they were really looking at. A horse was brought to him. He mounted, and held out his hand to Saro, who took it as she was told, and then was in his arms, amazed and troubled again with visions: The horse had not been this horse, the arms around her, holding her steady, had not been his. The gates opened slowly; green flowed everywhere beyond them, blue flowed to meet it, farther than anyone could go.

  They rode toward the wood on the hill.

  She almost recognized it: These were the pale trees within the cauldron, still and streaked with light; these were only a reflection of the true dream. This water flowed, silver and sweet as honey among ancient roots, but somewhere else the same stream flowed as silver as the moon, and the deer lifting its head at the sound of hooves, water glittering from its mouth, was white instead of brown. She felt words, like leaves, falling endlessly, silently through her. Talis spoke now and then; listening for the voices of trees, she scarcely heard him. Perhaps he spoke to the trees, perhaps they answered him. Their boughs seemed to bend over to listen, and the light pouring from leaf to leaf onto her face seemed to blind her with its brightness.

  A woman moved within the light, walked out of it to meet them. For a breath the prince was motionless behind Saro. Then his hands spoke to her, coaxed her down, where she stood at his stirrup, trying to see clearly through the light. The woman’s face rippled and blurred, as if Saro saw her through the gently moving water in the cauldron.

  “Saro!” the woman cried finally, but her voice, startling birds in the trees, seemed to come from very far away, and the word itself, reaching Saro, meant nothing to her in that wood.

  Twenty-one

  Atrix dreamed.

  The Queen of the Wood and her following pursued a young deer through the wood. The deer was white as milk, with eyes the color of hazelnuts. As fast as the hunters rode, it ran faster, flowing with an impossible grace over fallen trees, through streams, across thickets and patches of wild rose and brambles. The Queen cried one word again and again; sometimes it meant one thing, sometimes another. The deer never faltered, though it did turn its head to look back at the sound of the Queen’s voice. The hunters did not shoot at it, for they carried no bows, and they did not catch it; it was still running when Atrix woke.

  The sun was beginning to set, silvery behind the mist in which Atrix had shrouded the mountain peak. The mist clung day and night to the mountain. The strongest wind could not tear it away. Thunder rolled from it by night, sudden fires snapped through it, turning it gold, purple, blood-red, vivid colors visible even at midnight, Atrix knew, to those living on the mountain, and within the school. It was a warning: the Shadow of the Wolf. The mages would recognize it; he could only hope the students, tales of the Hunter and the Wolf igniting in their imaginations, would not think it worth their lives to penetrate the mist.

  He had been fighting for years, it seemed, for centuries. At times he felt he fought time, or death itself, the granite heart of the mountain, the unchanging heart of the moon, something he would never vanquish, but never cease to battle as long as it existed. At other times he felt that he simply fought his shadow, for it matched his every thought and movement. The glimpse he had caught of the Queen’s consort had been the glimpse of a ghost, a fragment of memory, for the Hunter gave Atrix nothing more of a past than the stark faces on Hunter’s Field. Nor did he speak.

  Night fell beyond the mist. Atrix drew himself within stone, and waited.

  He has the power of the wood, the Queen had said. He will not die as humans die.

  The power of oak and the red deer and the running stream…the power of the Queen’s wood, which Atrix had barely known existed. He thought, while he waited for the Hunter’s hounds to scent him, for the fire in the Hunter’s horns to draw his shadow out of stone. He knew the shapes of oak and deer and water in the human world. But oak in the Queen’s world was rooted to a different power; it turned a different face to time and memory. The hunter in the Queen’s following, whose face was shaped of oak leaves, had turned his face to Atrix, and Atrix had caught lightning in his heart. He could fashion light out of thought, but he could not snag lightning out of the sky, let it cleave through him, branch and bole and root, and capture it within him, let it sing silently like sap until he needed it.

  Ilyos could, but where, within the Hunter, was he, to use his powers, or to be summoned? The Queen’s consort had been swallowed by the dark moon, it seemed; the fiery horns were his bones. The Hunter had killed all memory of him but his name and a moment of light within the wood.

  Ilyos, Atrix thought, and the rock he hid in shattered.

  He searched when he could find a crack in time, a chink in the Hunter’s mind, for memories of the Queen’s wood. A tangle of oak bough, a flash of green, were all he saw, before the Hunter, furious, flung him into the wind, or halfway down the mountain. Tumbling, shapeless, on a fierce wind, he took the raven’s shape and, turning, saw the Hunter out of an eye black as the moon among his horns. The Hunter watched him. I know you, his silence said. I am you. The raven and the dark moon. I am you. A flock of ravens swarmed up from where he stood, with eyes like white moons and claws of finger bone. Atrix dropped among them like a black flame, into the Hunter’s mind as he shaped his ravens and let them fly.

  Massed, rustling feathers in the dark filled his mind, the vague shape beneath them motionless, but not quite dead. Nothing more: no oak, no green so translucent that leaves seemed made of light. Only ravens in the dark, silent but never still, and the heart’s shadow slowly seeping into the snow. Atrix recognized the memory; he had woven it, this single thread, into his spell. A raven lifted its head, looked at him, as it had on the field.

  This, its glittering eye said. This is all.

  Sickened, despairing, he felt the Hunter’s sudden attention. The ravens scattered, swept away on a furious winter wind. Atrix flew with them, withdrawing his mind from the Hunter’s thoughts, shaping a hair-fine strand of light along the wind’s path. The Hunter’s fire illumined him, a thin streak of gold in the mist. Flame billowed toward him; he dropped into moon-shadows among the broken pillars of stone at the top of the peak, became a shadow among them. A hound leaped out o
f nowhere, its claws tearing the shadows away, shredding scraps of dark into the wind. Atrix faded into stone; the hound smelled the human, or the magic, within granite, and bayed. Its baying, vast and too deep to be heard by humans, shook the pillars and boulders until they broke, fell together and began a thundering slide down the face of the mountain. Atrix, falling with them, fearing for the school, wove a net of thought in their path, and caught the wild current of stone, crazily wheeling pillars colliding and cracking against massive boulders brought abruptly to a halt. He shattered them like glass. A thin flood of shards and pebbles slid down toward the edge of the mist and stopped.

  Thoughtless a moment, exhausted, he shaped more of himself than he realized, lying among the debris of the slide. A dark cloud swarmed over him; he breathed feathers, saw feathers, felt them everywhere, for a split-second, while he heard the thin, wailing winter winds of Hunter’s Field.

  This is all, the ravens said, and a talon of darkness stabbed at one eye and then at his heart.

  He drew himself into a pebble, and then slid down between the broken stones until he felt the earth, and eased down into that like water, deep into it, until he found a secret mountain stream, and dropped into that, flowed with it through the blackness until he smelled pitch and pine and dark, thirsty roots. Then he followed rootwork up into night, and separated himself from the tree at the edge of the forest.

  He found the Hunter waiting for him.

  The massive, dark figure, crowned with horn and fire, the dark, smoldering moon above his head, the dark hounds circling him restively, seemed suddenly to Atrix something ancient and indomitable, something he had not made so much as wakened out of himself, or out of a place beyond day and time and night. He gazed back at the Hunter, shaking, battered, uncomprehending, asking, because he did not know what else to ask,