The Book of Atrix Wolfe

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “What are you? Are you only what I made that night on Hunter’s Field? What I made out of the wood, and out of that bloody field? Or are you something that was never made and never dies?” The Hunter did not move, did not answer, but waited, his eyes as mute and alien as the moon, as if for a different question. Atrix added, gambling without hope, “I can’t let you kill me. I promised the Queen of the Wood that I would find Saro.”

  The world seemed to explode around him. He fled back beneath the mist. As fast as he moved, the wild, baying hounds moved, and no matter what shape he took, the dark moon saw him, until the true moon finally hid itself behind the mountain, and the Shadow of the Wolf around the broken peak turned colorless and silent.

  He dreamed again: the fleet white deer, the unarmed hunters, the Queen calling a word that constantly changed, yet always sounded the same. The deer leaped across a stream and someone touched him.

  He vanished as he woke. From somewhere in the air, he saw Talis, kneeling on the stones where Atrix had been, looking around him perplexedly. The prince started at the sudden flash of fear and anger that streaked the air just before Atrix reappeared.

  “Talis!” He gripped the prince, drew him to his feet. “What are you doing back here? I left you safe in Pelucir.”

  “I came through the Queen’s wood,” Talis said. “Atrix, she needs you—”

  “What are you doing there? Even she sent you back home. Can’t you stay with Burne at least until I’m finished here?”

  “Atrix, I found Saro.” The words made no sense to Atrix for a moment: Saro was a dream, a mystery, a problem for the future, if he had one. Talis said again, “I found Saro. And your spellbook. She’s been in the kitchen all these years, cleaning pots, until one day she took your book out of the keep and began learning magic. I don’t know why, or how she knew it was there—she can’t talk. She needs your help. She barely remembers the wood, she doesn’t seem to understand the Queen, she’s under a spell. Your spell. Your magic changed her, somehow, that night on Hunter’s Field.”

  Atrix loosed him, sat down slowly on a stone. For once the winds brought him neither strength nor comfort; he hunched his frayed human shape against them, shivering. “She found my book?” he said, amazed. “First you, then she—”

  “She had it hidden in the kitchen.” The prince paused, studying Atrix. “You look terrible,” he said shortly, and slid a pack from his shoulder. “The Queen thought you might be hungry.”

  Atrix shook his head, too weary to eat. Talis opened the pack, drew out bread and meat and wine. The wine, when he uncorked it, smelled like spring air, full of pitch and strawberry. Atrix reached for it wordlessly, drank. He glanced at the sun; it was mid-afternoon.

  “I can’t leave,” he said. Talis wrapped bread around roast boar and handed it to him. He waited, until Atrix had eaten half of it, before he spoke.

  “If you die here,” he said, not entirely dispassionately, “no one will be able to help Saro. You must come now, she says. You can return here before moonrise.”

  Atrix ate another bite. There seemed no argument besides the angle of the sun, and that was high enough yet for him to abandon the peak for a while. He nodded, chewing. Talis, his eyes caught by unexpected emptiness around him, said slowly,

  “I thought—I remembered more crags up here.”

  “They broke.” Atrix reached for the wine again, found Talis staring at him, his face shocked, stripped of color. He handed Atrix the rest of the bread and meat. “Atrix. Are you going to die here?”

  “I don’t know.” Atrix was silent a moment, staring at nothing, then asked, “What does she look like? Saro?”

  “Like someone who has scrubbed pots in a kitchen for twenty years.” Talis smiled a little, tightly. “You don’t see her. No one ever noticed her. But that was part of your magic, I think—that you could look straight at her and not see the color of her eyes. And her face changes constantly, as if winds are always reshaping it. She has never spoken. But her eyes are beginning to speak. She can put her thoughts into my head. When I led her out of the kitchen, she let me take her hand. And then—for some reason, perhaps I frightened her—she let a flash of power flow between us that nearly set the woodpile on fire.” He paused, and got around to Atrix’s question. “Her hair is the color of wax. I think. Underneath the wood smoke. Her eyes—I still can’t remember.” He paused again, flicked a pebble into nowhere. “She barely comes up to my shoulder. I thought that knowing about Ilyos would make the battle simpler.”

  Atrix shook his head, gazing through his mist at the trees flowing down the mountain. High on the edge, he could see a thumbprint of crumpled trunks, like a bruise, where he had said Saro’s name. “He—what there is of him—is furious with me, too. But there’s something else…”

  “What?” the prince asked warily.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try. Try to tell me.” He added, his eyes opaque behind his lenses, “Who else have you got to listen to you up here?”

  “Why do you want to listen to me?”

  “Because I don’t want to make your mistake.”

  Atrix flinched. He felt the winds again, hard, bright, painfully cold. “No,” he said hollowly. “That’s what Hedrix said to me, the night he told me that you had my book. That what I should have written was the truth of Hunter’s Field, so that other mages could learn from it. Instead, as you saw, I lied.”

  Talis was silent. He rose suddenly, took his cloak off, and settled it, fighting the wind, onto Atrix’s shoulders. “It’s frightening,” he said finally, so softly that Atrix strained to hear, “knowing that someone as powerful and experienced and wise as you, could make such a mockery of everything we were taught.”

  “Drawkcab,” Atrix whispered. “The other face of power. And yet, that’s not all…If that were all…”

  “All what?”

  “All I’m fighting. There seems to be a force beyond the war and the wood, that I awoke…I don’t know what it is. Something ancient, immutable, that I do not recognize and cannot name…”

  Talis swallowed dryly, touching his lenses. “Death.”

  “No.”

  “Then it is not death.”

  “No,” Atrix said again.

  “Drawkcab,” Talis said. His voice shook; his hands fell suddenly on Atrix’s shoulders; Atrix felt him trembling. “It’s your spell. Your word. If it is not death, then it is life. Maybe that’s what you are fighting, Atrix Wolfe. Life.”

  Atrix rose. He was shaking again, not with cold but with a sudden, haunting vision: the figure hidden beneath the ravens’ wings, blind, motionless, but still alive. What lay beneath the ravens’ wings? An unknown warrior on Hunter’s Field?

  Or himself?

  He said softly, not seeing Talis, or the mountain, or anything in Chaumenard, but only night on a field in Pelucir, where the merciless winter winds blew out of memory to shake him now, “I cannot see past or future, beyond that night. Time stopped, that night. The White Wolf ceased to exist, that night. I cannot see beyond the Hunter’s face. He is the shape of my power; I cannot change that.”

  “Why,” Talis whispered, “did you make him?”

  “I was trying to end the siege. Trying to make Riven of Kardeth retreat. To keep Pelucir and Chaumenard safe. That’s all. And I did all of those things. But I turned myself into something even more terrible than the army of Kardeth. And that’s what I fight now, and what I cannot seem to change.” He paused, looking at Talis, wondering how much he understood. “I took the shapes of what I saw on Hunter’s Field. I don’t know how to change the shape of death.”

  Talis drew breath; Atrix could not read the expression behind his lenses. “You must find a way,” the prince said. His voice shook. “Atrix Wolfe. You can’t die here and leave us with the Hunter. You can’t die at Burne’s hands in Pelucir. Kings of Pelucir don’t kill great mages of Chaumenard. Your shadow would fall across Pelucir as long as the name exists. Your death would haunt Burne all his life. You
must find another way.” Talis’ eyes glittered behind his lenses, struck by the cold edge of wind, or by an edge of sorrow. He reached out, touched Atrix gently. “You must find a way to live.”

  Atrix followed Talis through his own mist, though he could not see what the prince saw that led him unfalteringly through Atrix’s blank enchantment to the place where mist frayed into memory and the green wood rose about them. Perhaps, he thought, the enchantment lay in Talis; his heart’s need found the wood when the Queen’s need summoned him.

  The Queen waited for them. Her daughter stood beside her. Atrix swallowed sound when he saw her, appalled, for no spell he might have imagined could have been so thorough or so cruel.

  She was slight, as Talis had said, and very thin, barefoot, and dressed in something shapeless, colorless. Her eyes narrowed on his face, as if she saw him dimly through a harsh, snow-flecked wind. They did not lack color, but it was nothing that the eye retained long enough to name. Nothing about her held the attention long, for as soon as attention focused, her face would alter, slide away, begin to disappear.

  But she had her father’s power. He said to her, “Saro. My name is Atrix Wolfe.” He felt the sudden riveting response to his name, the inner eye of power. He looked at the Queen then. Her hands were linked hard around Saro’s hand; her face, unlike her daughter’s, was unforgettable, and, at the moment, as unchangeable as stone.

  She said, “She does not know me.”

  “She will,” Atrix said softly. “She remembers me.” He added, with care, “She has a very strong power which may become uncontrolled when she remembers that night. It will be focused at me. You may be hurt, if you hold her.”

  The Queen’s mouth thinned; her eyes were cold as winter stars. “I will not part from her again. Do what you came to do.”

  He bowed his head. Then he put his hands very gently on Saro’s shoulders, to channel the flow of her wild power, and found her eyes. They saw and did not see; color seemed always to recede. Her lips moved, soundlessly; they shaped her name.

  “Yes,” he said. “Saro—”

  And then the mountain winds of Chaumenard seemed to pour through the wood, stripping leaves from the trees, tearing away limbs. Birds beat against the winds, calling; the Queen cried out, and pulled Saro close to her, staring at what had ridden down the winds into her wood.

  “Saro,” said the Hunter, and around him the ancient oak trees kindled lightning in their boughs.

  Twenty-two

  Saro slipped free of the Queen and ran into the Hunter’s path.

  For an instant, facing him, she stood in snow. Winds snarled like wolves around them, the flame in his horns streamed wildly behind him, the black moon rose above the fire, hung in a mist of white. A word filled her mouth; it meant him, she knew, but she could not find it to say it, and she could not find him, in that masked, feral face crowned with fire and horn. Voices cried at her beyond the snow-streaked winds as he rode toward her; they were the cries of startled, fleeing birds.

  Saro.

  Found, she thought, transfixed in the Hunter’s eye. Found. And as the snows of memory melted away and light fell over them both, she felt bewildered and impatient with both their mute faces, as if neither belonged in that falling light, in that wood.

  Saro, a bird cried. And then again, in the prince’s voice, “Saro!”

  She whirled. Talis stood beneath one of the fuming oak trees. Light ran like a live thing behind him, through every branch, every leaf; even its roots, beneath the ground, sent up an eerie web of light. His lenses were flashing in that brilliance, at Saro, at the Hunter; at Atrix, who vanished suddenly under a whip of light; at the Queen, who stood spellbound, her eyes on the Hunter, tears like hard cut jewels glittering down her face.

  “Saro!” Talis called desperately, as the dark hounds flowed toward her and she felt their hot breath on her skin. His lenses flashed again, and she caught her breath in horror.

  The hounds reached her, milling through the soft air like thunderbolts, silent yet, dangerous, about to explode after the lightning struck. But she had no time for their coal eyes. Talis moved, with a strange, underwater slowness, snagged a strand of light from the oak between his fingers. His eyes went to the Hunter; his hand began to rise.

  Something flashed through Saro, as if she were oak, struck and burning with power. Her throat moved; sounds and shapes tangled together, fighting to get out. Something struggled free, dropped out of her mouth, but it was only a hard jewel of light. Talis’ hand arched high, stopped. Light wove through his fingers. A small, dark bird pushed its way out of Saro’s mouth, and flew, panicked, crying her word in its own language. Tears dropped, cold and diamond-hard, from her eyes. The light flared in Talis’ hand. Then an arrow of white fire streaked from the Hunter toward Talis, and Saro felt something that was not bird or jewel, but torn out of her breath and blood and heart, shaping the one word she knew.

  “Saro!” she cried, and Talis’ face swung toward her. The Hunter’s fire struck the edge of his lens and shattered it.

  The power flung him back against the oak. He slid limply; its light wove a gleaming web around him. Its roots lifted long, swollen fingers to grip him as he fell, hold him fast to earth. He shuddered once, his face turning blindly toward the Hunter, and then lay still.

  Atrix appeared beside him suddenly, kneeling, one hand on Talis, the other uplifted toward the Hunter, whose hounds flowed in a dark circle around the oak. The Hunter, his eyes fixed on the fallen prince, rode inexorably as night, his hand rising again, his horse’s hooves beating an unswerving path toward mage and prince as if what stood before him were of no more substance than air or light. Another word struggled out of heart and need, and the memory of a harsh winter night; Saro screamed, “Father!”

  The horse reared above her; she saw a confusion of hooves and sky and glowing trees. Then hooves thudded down like stone beside her, and the horse stood still as stone. She watched her father’s face emerge beneath the Hunter’s face, as it emerged in her memory. His eyes changed color, black fading to the light, dusty gold of ripe acorns. She felt her own face change then, lost expressions and memories surfacing, reshaping her as he found her among his own memories. His eyes loosed her finally, to find the Queen standing among her trees, the tears melting now, burning down her face.

  “Saro,” she said. “Ilyos.”

  He made a sound that might have come out of the split heart of an oak. His gaze swept across the trees; the shimmering webs of lightning withdrew into them. He lifted his hand: Mist the colors of leaf and light gathered around them, so that they stood together in the private wood of memory.

  He bent carefully under the weight of the burning horns. His trembling hand touched Saro’s face.

  He breathed her name. She closed her eyes, felt his touch, in memory, on an endless summer day. “I can say them now,” she whispered. “All the words you taught me before I learned sorrow.”

  He made another sound, a word with no shape that spoke of sorrow. His hand slid away from her to the Queen, who had come to stand beside Saro. He caught her tears in his fingers.

  “You are crying.” His voice shook. “You could never cry before.”

  She caught his hand in hers, held it to her eyes, her mouth. “I learned,” she said into his palm. Still gripping him, she reached out to Saro, held her tightly, wiping her tears in Saro’s hair. Saro twisted her hands into her father’s cloak, clung to it, her eyes moving from face to face, as she saw her strange past unfold from green wood to stone kitchen, to wood again, from their child to no one’s child, and now the Hunter’s child.

  “I saw you,” she told him, feeling the tears on her own face. “In my cauldron. In my dreams. Drawkcab, you said to me. Your eyes found me.”

  He shook his head wordlessly. “Some part of me found you,” he said at last. “Some part of me must always have been trying to return.” He was silent again, struggling with his own past; she saw the shadows of it in his eyes, the Hunter’s face lying
in wait beneath his face. He whispered, “I did not even see you. You were nothing to me. If you were something I did not hate, then you were nothing. And then you spoke, and summoned out of me what you had loved.”

  “You changed, then.” The Queen’s hand loosed Saro, stroked her hair, then held her again. Saro gazed into her eyes, remembering the gold and dark, remembering her voice, her touch, and how she thought she would have those things forever. “One moment you could not speak; you were a small, pale, shadowy wraith; you could not remember me—Then you spoke and broke the mage’s spell yourself.”

  Saro turned suddenly in her hold, looked back; her father’s mist his past and future. Sorrow burned, she learned then, like dry kindling, like scalding water. “I had to,” she said to him. The words ached in her throat. “I saw you kill Prince Talis, long ago, in my wash-cauldron. I tried to learn to speak, to warn him. But I saw what I saw. There were only words for that.”

  “Prince Talis.”

  “He was kind to me.” She swallowed pain again, which seemed to come with language. “His eyes saw me. ‘Death’ was the last word you taught me.”

  His face twisted away from her. “It is the only word I know now.”

  “Ilyos,” the Queen said urgently, and he looked down again, a terrible darkness fading from his eyes. “Ilyos. Stay with us. You have found my wood again. You have found us. Stay.”

  “This is a dream,” he said wearily. “This is only a dream. I am Atrix Wolfe’s making. If I could stay—if somehow I could unweave myself from his spell and stay—I would burn these woods again with memory. I was born that night. These Hunter’s hands are my hands, these hounds and burning horns are mine. I died that night. There is nothing left of Ilyos but memory.” His voice faded; he gazed at her, remembering. Her face grew still then, tearless. Saro sensed something waking in her, a word growing, secret and very powerful.

  “Stay,” the Queen said softly. “If you are nothing but memory, then stay. Here among my memories.”