In The Forests Of Serre Part 1

In the Forests of Serre.

Patricia A. McKillip.

With a cauldron full of love.

ONE.

In the forests of Serre, Prince Ronan crossed paths with the Mother of All Witches when he rode down her white hen in a desolate stretch of land near his father's summer palace. He did not recognize her immediately. He only saw a barefoot woman of indeterminate age with an ap.r.o.n full of grain, feeding her chickens in the middle of a blasted waste full of dead trees and ground as hard as the face of the moon. It was the last place Ronan expected chickens. He did not notice the cottage at all until after the hen pecked its way under his horse's nose. It flapped its futile wings and emitted a screech as a hoof flattened it. Startled, Ronan reined in his mount, blinking at something unrecognizable even as suitable for a stew pot. The prince's following pulled up raggedly behind him. A few feathers flurried gently through the air. The woman, one hand still outflung, golden husks clinging to her fingers, stared a moment at her hen. Then she looked up at the prince.

His following, a scarred, weary company of warriors, guards, servants, standard-bearers, a trumpeter or two, seemed suddenly far away and very quiet. The young prince felt the same stillness gather in his own heart, for with her in front of him, he had nothing else to fear. As in all the tales he had heard of her, there was the ox-bone pipe in her ap.r.o.n pocket, the green circular lenses over her eyes, the k.n.o.bby, calloused feet that broadened to an inhuman size when she picked up her cottage and carried it. There, behind her, stood the cottage made of bones, some recent and still bleeding marrow, others of a disturbing size and indeterminate origin. A single circular window, its pane as green as her lenses, seemed to stare at Ronan like a third eye among the bones. The door stood open. Never, all the tales warned, never go into the witch's house, whatever you doa Who, he wondered incredulously, would choose to enter that filthy pile of bones?

She smiled at him, showing teeth as pointed as an animal's. Her face, which could be sometimes so lovely it broke the heart, and sometimes so hideous that warriors fainted at the sight of it, looked, at that moment, ancient and clever and only humanly ugly.

"Prince Ronan." Her voice was the hollow sough of windblown reeds.

"Brume, " he whispered, feeling a twinge of fear at last.

"You killed my white hen."

"I am very sorry."

"My favorite hen."

"I wasn't watching for chickens in this part of the forest. What can I do to repay you?"

"Bring the white hen into my house, " she answered, "and pluck it for me. I will boil it in a pot for supper, and you and all your company will drink a cup of broth with me around my fire."

He swallowed. Never, nevera Those strong pointed teeth had sucked the boiled bones of warriors, so the tales said. "I will do anything for you," he said carefully, "but I will not do that."

Her eyes seemed to grow larger than the lenses, and disturbingly dark. "You will not pluck my hen?"

"I will do anything for you, but I will not do that."

"You will not bring your company into my house to drink a cup of broth with me?"

"I will do anything for you, but I will not do that," he repeated, for the third time was the charm.

She raised her lenses then, propped them on her wild hair, and looked at him with naked eyes. In that moment, her face nearly broke his heart. He would have melted off his horse, followed that face on his knees, but now it was too late.

"Then," she said softly, "you will have a very bad day. And when you leave your father's palace at the end of it, you will not find your way back to it until you find me."

She dropped the lenses back on her nose, scooped the b.l.o.o.d.y mess of feather and bone into her arms, and walked into her house. The chickens, clucking in agitated disapproval, followed her. The door slammed shut behind them.

The house levitated suddenly. Ronan saw the powerful calves and huge, splayed feet below it as the witch, carrying her cottage from within, began to run. Motionless, mesmerized, he watched the little house of bone zig-zag like a hen chasing an ant through the stark bones of trees until the silvery shadows drew it in.

"My lord," someone said tremulously. He looked around to find his entourage in chaos. She had shown the men all her faces, Ronan guessed. Wounded warriors, white and sickened by the loathsome sight, slumped toward servants and guards who were no longer beside them; they had already dismounted to trail, mindless with vision, after the woman who had, for an instant, reached into the prince to hold his own heart in her hand like a sweet, ripe pear.

He brushed a pinfeather off his knee and managed to turn them all toward home.

The prince was a tall, burly young man with troubled, watchful grey eyes and long coppery hair. Scars underlined one eye, limned one jaw; a fresh wound along his forearm was trying to seam itself together as he rode. He had gone impulsively to war with the army his father had sent to quell a rebellion in the southern plains of Serre. Returning bruised but victorious, they had met the king's messenger half-way across Serre. The message was accompanied by a troop of guards to make sure that Ronan did not disregard it. Come home, it said tersely. Now. Ronan was impressed with its restraint. He had not consulted his father before he joined the army; some part of him had not intended to return. Having failed to die, and too weary to fend for himself, he let fortune, in the shape of the king's guards, bring him back.

Fortune, appearing suddenly under his nose in the shape of the depraved witch Brume, baffled him. He tried to remember childhood tales. Did her predictions come true? Or were they only random curses that she tossed out according to her mood, and would forget as soon as she had added the white hen's bones to her roof? His mother would know. Maye would have known. But Maye was dead. He felt his heart swell and ache unbearably at the memory of his young wife lying so still among rumpled, b.l.o.o.d.y linens, with their child, impossibly tiny, the size of Ronan's hand, too delicate even to take in air, a soap-bubble child, a moment's worth of wonder and then gone, vanished like hope. Ronan had burned his heart with them. Then he went to court death as he had courted love, ignoring the fact that he was his father's only heir. The queen had failed, even with the aide of common lore and folk witchery, to conceive others. Ronan, understanding his father better as he got older, sympathized with her. Who would want to bear the ogre's children?

He pushed the terrible memories from his mind, and found again the Mother of All Witches, staring at him behind her fly-green lenses. The idea that she might have been waiting there for him was disturbing. But n.o.body took their chickens to feed in that benighted place. Even the insects had abandoned it. Long ago, tales said, some lovelorn maiden had drowned it with her tears and then cursed it barren as her heart. With some effort, he pushed aside the witch on the waste, too. If, he reasoned, he was to get lost after leaving his father's palace at the end of the day, then once he got home, he would simply not leave. As for having a bad day, he doubted that the witch herself knew how bad a day could get.

"My lord." A guard had quickened pace to catch up with him. "Lord Karsh has fallen."

Ronan's mouth tightened. The warrior had been dangerously wounded, but he had refused to stay on the plains. "Dead?"

"It seems so, my lord."

So it proved, when Ronan investigated. But his death was not unexpected. The surprise was that he had endured the journey so long. His body was wrapped in blankets and placed in a supply cart. Later, when the cart lost a wheel, the stiffened body had to be taken back out and balanced precariously over his horse's saddle. They left the cart there in the forest with the driver trying to reset the wheel. Not a good day, Ronan thought. But not impossible, and nothing out of the ordinary. Except the witch.

There was not much day left by the time the endless trees parted around them and they saw at last the ancient palace of the rulers of Serre. Part fortress, it seemed carved out of the crags on which it stood. Ribbons of water on both sides of it caught fire from the lowering sun, poured down steep walls of granite to the broad valley below. The riders quickened their pace. Even Ronan, who had no doubt that his father was furious with him, breathed more easily when they reached the road carved into the stone face of the cliff. Ronan, gazing up at the thick walls and high towers, saw a minute scratch of light across the dark, like the path of a falling star. From very far away, he heard the trumpet speak, announcing their return. Within the formidable walls would be food and wine, hot water and fire, aid and comfort for those who had ridden in constant pain from unhealed wounds. It seemed, at that moment, a fair exchange for what awaited him.

An hour later, he was home.

The king did not waste time sending for him. In his chamber, Ronan splashed water over his dusty face and hair, and stood dripping while a servant unb.u.t.toned his travel-stained tunic and drew another over his shoulders. The door flew open suddenly. The King of Serre said, "Get out." Ronan's servants abandoned him hastily. His father swung a hand hard and scarred with battle and slammed the heavy door shut behind them; turning, still swinging, he slapped Ronan. The prince, surprised, stumbled against the washstand. The basin careened, spilled water over his boots. He caught his balance, his head ringing like the bra.s.s on the stones. The king waited until the basin was still, until the only sounds in the room were the endless thunder of water over the sheer cliff just beneath the open cas.e.m.e.nt, and Ronan's quickened breathing.

Then the king said, "She will be here in three days. Her messengers arrived this morning."

Ronan let go of the washstand cautiously, touched his bruised mouth with the back of his hand. "Who?" he asked wanly, mystified.

"The woman you will marry."

Ronan stared at him. He and his father were much alike in their height and strong build, though the king, ma.s.sively boned like an ox, stood nearly a head taller. Ronan had also inherited his coppery hair. The king let his grow in a fox's pelt over his mouth and jaws. He had lost one eye and one front tooth in battle long ago. The scar seaming his face from his brow had pulled his upper lip open in a perpetual snarl. But it was the puckered, empty skin where his eye should have been that was more chilling. It seemed, Ronan had decided long ago, as though he had a hidden eye there, that could see into secrets, thoughts, invisible worlds. His visible eye was a deep, fuming black. He had been born on a battlefield, tales said, and had spent his life there, in antic.i.p.ation when not in deed. In the last few years he had been attempting sorcery to make himself and his kingdom even stronger. Occasionally, to strengthen his son's defenses or to let Ronan know he was displeased, the king would conjure an explosion out of the air and fling it at Ronan. This time the explosion was silent, and Ronan, dazed, thought he must have swallowed it. He felt the shock of it finally all through his body, as something jagged and drenched with color burst where his heart had been.

"Marry." He was shaking suddenly with rage, with pain, with grief. "I can't marry."

"You will marry." His father's powerful voice had a deep, feral resonance; it drove the words into Ronan like an ax into wood. "In four days. The youngest daughter of the King of Dacia has been travelling toward you through much of the summera""

"I will not marry!" The force of the shout tearing out of Ronan startled him; he did not recognize his own voice. But the king only matched it with a shout of his own.

"How dare you?" He was suddenly too close to Ronan, dangerously close, turning the puckered eye socket toward his son; it seemed to search mercilessly into his most private thoughts. Ronan stood still, too furious even to blink. The king did not touch him, but his voice roared over Ronan like wind or water, held him in the grip of some elemental storm. "How dare you pretend to fight battles for me while you try to kill yourself? Your life is mine. How dare you even dream of stealing it from me? I made you; you belong to me and to Serre." He moved abruptly again, crossing the room to fling the window wide. Ronan had chosen the chamber, in a tower flanking one of the foremost corners of the outer wall, after his wife and child had died. It overlooked the exact place where water as clear and silent as blown gla.s.s fell off earth into air and roared down a thousand feet to the ground below. Ronan had cast himself over the falls countless times in thought. His father's words seemed to bellow at him out of the surging water. "I will call up your drowned ghost and curse it every hour if you leave me with no one to inherit my kingdom when I am dead. The princess from Dacia will be here in three days; you will marry in four. The negotiations were completed, the doc.u.ments signed and sealed even before you began your journey home from the south. Her name is Sidonie. Love her or hate her, you will give me heirs for Serre. Dacia is tiny, nothing. It would be lost within the forests of Serre. But it is wealthy, and its kings have been renowned for their sorcery. Your children will inherit the vastness of Serre and the powers of Dacia. My kingdom will be invincible. " He reached out, in another swift, unpredictable move, and closed the cas.e.m.e.nt; the wild, urgent voice of the water receded. "Get dressed. You will not spend another night listening to this. You will be under guard until your wedding." He came very close to Ronan again, laid a hand on his shoulder. What might have seemed a gesture of reconciliation weighed like stone on Ronan's shoulder, weighed like the rough, ma.s.sive walls of the tower itself, as the king summoned his private strength. Ronan yielded finally, loosing a cry of despair as he fell to his knees. Hands clenched, head bowed to hide tears of fury and humiliation, he heard his father cross the room, open the door, then stop.

Someone spoke a word or two. Ronan raised his head slightly, recognizing the soft, mourning dove voice. The door closed again; his mother, Calandra, crossed the room quickly, knelt in front of Ronan.

He felt her hands frame his face, coax him gently until he lifted it finally, showed her his angry, defeated eyes. He saw the stark relief in hers, and realized that she had not expected him to return.

But, he thought, getting wearily to his feet, he did not seem to be good at dying. He had offered himself in battle and, beyond a scratch or two, had been rejected; a witch had invited him to become her next meal and he had refused. He began, clumsily, to push b.u.t.tons into loops down the front of his tunic. His hands shook. The queen drew them into hers, kissed them as though he were still a child.

"Let me," she said, eyeing the haphazard hang of hem. "You started wrong."

He watched the braids of chestnut and gold crowning her head drop lower, b.u.t.ton by b.u.t.ton. Her hair had begun to lighten since he had seen her last, lose its rich l.u.s.tre. But the ghost of her fine, delicate beauty still haunted her: the memory of what she had been before she realized what, in marrying Ferus of Serre, she would become. When Ronan was very young, she had still known how to laugh. He remembered her fury more easily, her tears, her cries of outrage and pain. Those, like her laughter, had become less frequent in later years, when Ronan grew old enough and strong enough to decide for himself what he could bear. In his early years, after his father had driven them both to tears, she would hold him in her arms and tell him stories.

He remembered that now. She turned her face briefly, to look at him, working at the last of the b.u.t.tons. He whispered numbly, "He wants me to marry."

"I know."

Still his voice would not sound. "He can't see a" he can't see that it is impossible. "

"No." She reached the hem and straightened. She was quite tall; her gaze was almost level, grey and still like an autumn sky. "He can't see." She touched his face again. "You came back. I didn't think you would."

"I wish I had known," he said more clearly, "what I would be coming back to." He glanced around at the tower walls, searching blindly for some way out, some way around; memory struck him again, and he gave a faint, bitter laugh. "I have to give the witch her due; she does know a bad day when she sees one coming."

"Witch?"

"Brume. I met her in the forest this morning. You used to tell me tales of her; that's how I recognized her."

The queen raised a slender hand, pushed a knuckle and her wedding ring against her mouth. The mingling of fear and wonder in her eyes startled Ronan; he had never seen that expression before. She whispered, "Brume."

"I ran down her hen. Does she really see the future?"

"Her white hen?"

He blinked. "Yes. Why? Does it matter?"

The door opened again; the captain of the guards stood on the threshold. He said, bowing low to the queen, "Your pardon, my lady. The king commands your presence in his chambers."

Her mouth tightened; the bleak sky descended once again. "I will ask him," she murmured to Ronan, "if we can talk privately later." She kissed his cheek quickly, took her leave. The guard stood aside for her, then returned to the threshold where he caught Ronan's attention with his silent, stubborn waiting.

Ronan sighed. "A moment."

A moment for what? the man's eyes asked. The door stayed open. Ronan's attendants scattered quietly through the room, began to carry his belongings away.

He wandered to the cas.e.m.e.nt, causing a stir within the chamber. But it was only to stare out the window, blind again with grief and memory. Across the grey-white water, within the trees blurred together beyond his tears, an odd banner of fire rippled and soared, spiraled sinuously into itself, then bloomed again, casting ribbons of crimson everywhere within the green. He blinked, felt tears fall. He saw it clearly then: a bird made of fire, its eyes and claws of golden fire, drifting plumes of fire down from the branch where it perched, so long they nearly touched the water.

He swallowed, stunned. It was, he thought, the second most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.

Then it changed, became the most beautiful thing. The bird's long feathers swirled about it, hiding its long, graceful neck, its proud flowing crest, its eyes. Then the flames parted again, revealing amber eyes, fiery hair tumbling down toward the water, a face carved of ivory, with cheekbones like crescent moons, a smile like a bird's wings angling upward, taking on the wind. The woman who was a bird who was fire seemed to see him. Her enchanting smile vanished. Feathers of gold and fire hid her face. Wings unfurled; their reflection flowed across the gla.s.sy water like outstretched hands.

Ronan moved. He left by the door, not out the window, which caused the guard leaning against the walls, waiting for him, to follow his quick steps at a more leisurely pace. He spiralled down the tower stairs, glancing out at every narrow window for a glimpse of the magic within the trees. He saw the bird; he saw the road beyond the gate; he saw the inner courtyard; he saw the woman, beginning to reappear now that she felt no longer seen. The door at the foot of the tower opened directly into the outer yard. Walls and towers rose around him there; he could not see the trees beyond it, nor the water, gathering such power into its calm, smooth flow that it echoed across the valley as it fell.

But it was the sun Ronan saw first, not the forest, as he walked impatiently across the drawbridge to the road. It hung just above the distant mountains, red as a hen's crest, and round as the lens over a watching eye.

He stopped dead, heard the pebbles settle under his boot.

Behind him, the yard was eerily silent. No steps followed across the bridge; he heard no voices. Wind blew a light spray from the falling water across his face. He stood, uncertain and unprepared, not daring to look behind him, and finally, not needing to look, knowing that the road began where he stood and ended at the bone that marked the threshold of the witch.

TWO.

Earlier that summer in Dacia the scribe Euan Ash, translating a poem out of a long-dead language, was lulled by bees and the scent of sun-warmed roses into a dream of the poem. His eyes closed. The ragged breathings and scratchings from dozens of noses and pens, the occasional curse let loose as gently as a filament of spiderweb, faded around him. He walked down a dusty road in a strange dry landscape, eating a handful of stones. In that land, stones turned to words in the mouth. Words tasted like honey, like blood; they vibrated with insect wings between the teeth. He spat them out after he had chewed them. Bees flew out of his mouth, birds circled him, bushes took root in the parched ground and flowered; he was speaking a landscape to lifea Then something he spat out took shape in the distance where the road narrowed to a point. A dark, rectangular object, like a column or a book, travelled swiftly to meet him, casting a shadow over the dream. It had no face or mouth, but it towered over him and spoke a word like a book slamming shut.

Euan woke with a start and saw the wizard.

Sightings of him were quite rare, and the sleepy scriptorium, a curve like a question mark at the end of a long hallway in the king's library, was the last place Euan would have expected to see him. He stared, still drugged with dreaming. The wizard who called himself Unciel spoke softly to Proctor Verel, who was nodding vigorously, looking, to Euan's dazed eyes, like one small ball rolling on top of a much larger ball. The wizard, around whom legends swarmed and clung, each more fabulous than the last, seemed worn by the burden of them. He was tall and spare, his lined face honed to its essence of muscle and bone, his cropped hair dead white. He was the son and the grandson and the great-grandson of a long line of powerful sorcerers, and he had become the most powerful of them all. That was one rumor Euan had heard. Another had him born in a land so old all but its name had been forgotten; he had tutored the first King of Dacia in the magical arts. He had wandered everywhere into the known and the unknown. According to most recent tales, he had overcome some great evil, some fierce, deadly monstrosity that had challenged his strength and power beyond endurance. But he had endured, and had returned to peaceful Dacia to recover. He did not look injured, but the weariness that emanated from him seemed almost visible to Euan; it must have come out of his heart's marrow.

The wizard stopped talking and turned his head. Every pen had stilled, Euan realized; everyone was staring at the wizard, whose light eyes, cloudy with fatigue, were gazing back at Euan. The scribe woke completely then, with a jerk that shook his high, slanted desk and tipped the inkstand over onto the poem he had been transcribing. Black welled across the parchment, eating words as swiftly and irrevocably as fire.

Euan righted the ink hastily, tried to dam the flood with his sleeve. He heard snickers, a sharp, impatient breath from the proctor. Then a hand touched the paper. Ink seeping into Euan's sleeve vanished. Words reappeared, lay across the dry landscape of paper as neatly and clearly as footprints down a dusty road.

He froze, his eyes on the parchment, not daring to look up. "This one," he heard the wizard beside him say. "What is your name?"

Still rigid, he managed to remember. "Euan." How, he wondered wildly, were wizards addressed? He cleared his throat, gave up. "Euan Ash."

"My name is Unciel. Come to me when you are finished here."

The scribe glanced up finally, incredulously. But the wizard had gone. Everyone stared at Euan now, even Proctor Verel. If he could, Euan would have stared at himself. He scratched his head instead. So did the proctor, riffling at his bald head and looking mystified.

"To work," he said briskly, then wandered among the desks to see the paper touched by magic.

Euan, still stunned, asked warily, "What does he want with me, Proctor?"

Proctor Verel shrugged his plump shoulders and shifted Euan's inkstand farther from his elbow. "He needs a scribe." He studied the scribe's neat, graceful writing, no more or less neat and graceful than that of a dozen others. "Why you, I have no idea. Especially since you chose that moment to spill ink all over everything." He tapped the paper where Euan's last word trailed down the page. "And you fell asleep," he added reproachfully. "In the middle of one of Laidley's poems."

"It was not the poem," Euan a.s.sured him. "My head was full of bees."

The young man at the next desk snorted. The proctor said dourly, "Start over."

"How did he do that?" Euan wondered suddenly, intently. "How did he separate the spilled ink from the words? How did the ink recognize the words?"

"One was liquid; one was dry," the scribe beside him suggested, too intrigued by the question to observe the rule of silence. "One had form; the other was chaos."

"But how," Euan persisted, "did he speak to the ink? What language did he use to make it listen?"

Proctor Verel raised his voice irritably. "Another word in any language, and you'll all be seeing midnight in the scriptorium." He added to Euan as he returned to his desk, "Ask him."

An hour or two later the scribe found the wizard, not in a tower as he had expected, nor in a secret chamber beneath the palace, but down a busy side street beyond the palace gates. COME IN, said a wooden sign hanging on the door. The cottage looked much larger within than it should have. Worn flagstones led to more closed doors than seemed possible. Herbs and flowers hung drying on smoke-blackened rafters. A one-eyed cat slunk around a corner and disappeared at the sight of Euan. A raven perched on a small, cluttered table near the door. Stuffed, Euan thought, until it fluttered abruptly, raggedly, like black flame to a stand in front of a line of open cas.e.m.e.nts. The windows, diamonds of thick gla.s.s framed in bra.s.s, overlooked a garden. Like the house, the garden seemed to wander beyond possibility; the far wall might have crossed the next street. The wizard's gardener knelt in the late light, a torn straw hat on his head, picking seeds slowly, painstakingly out of one trembling hand with the other, and dropping them into a crumbled patch of earth. Some ancient, beloved retainer, Euan thought. Then the raven squawked hoa.r.s.ely beside him, and the gardener straightened, glancing toward the windows. Euan, recognizing that seared gaze, gave a hiccup of surprise.

The wizard gestured, and Euan found the door leading into the garden.

Unciel stood with an effort, one hand closed around the seeds. He took the hat off, dropped the seeds into it, then wiped at sweat, his movements slow, precise. He studied Euan silently a moment, like the raven had. Even the color seemed to have been drained from his eyes, along with his strength. Euan saw only the faintest shade of blue beneath what must have been the paler ash of memory. The scribe, who was lanky as a scarecrow, pallid from working indoors, and habitually terse, wanted to melt into a sh.e.l.l like a snail and politely close the door behind him. He still wore the long black robe that absorbed stray ink. In the hot light he felt sweat trickling through his dark, untidy hair. His lean, somber face grew rigid beneath the scrutiny; his eyes, green as cats' eyes and as reserved, widened and slid away finally, dropped to study the wizard's bare, calloused feet.

Unciel said gently, "I need a scribe to copy my papers. My writing grew illegible years ago. The librarians will give you leave for a time, and I will pay you twice what they do now, to compensate for the amount of work and the lack of company. Do you mind?"