FOUR

The princess’s first glimpse of Serre was an eagle’s dizzying view from the highest point of a pass through the mountains. Their stony pinnacles vanished into cloud so far above the slowly moving entourage that, Sidonie thought, to a mountain’s eye it must resemble the long, bulky, furry insect she had found inching its way across her cot one morning. By the time she saw Serre, she had become resigned to the wildlife that crept and fluttered and fell into her food. Only farmers lived in the high, rocky meadows between Dacia and Serre, above their animals in small cottages that stank and whistled in the howling winds. Not suitable, she was told, and had to make do with a gaudy pavilion slanting down the slopes that strained against its pegs and threatened to fly away at night. Appalled by the endless expanses of granite and wind, her attendants hid themselves in the evenings behind their own rippling walls, braiding one another’s hair against stray insects and whispering stories. Sidonie, faced with the wasteland of an empty marriage, longed for a cottage full of bellowing cows in the crook of a peak so high that its shadow ran like a dark river through the valley floor below.

The wizard Gyre, who had a startling ability to change shape, had found their way through the mountains with an eagle’s eyes. One midsummer evening, while the guards and servants pitched pavilions and cut wood, and the cooks put their heads together over what the hunters had brought them that day, the wizard dipped on outspread wings down an angle of sweet twilight breeze, landed at Sidonie’s feet, and turned into himself.

“Come and see,” he said. He was a brisk, lean young man with calm dark blue eyes. As far as Sidonie could tell, he viewed the world with a great deal of curiosity and no fear whatsoever. He gave the princess a rare smile as she hesitated. “It’s just over those rocks.”

What was? Sidonie wondered as she followed him to the edge of the meadow where they camped. Something wild, she guessed dourly, with teeth. Peering over a boulder beside the silent wizard, she did not understand at first what she saw. It lay beneath the pale sky like night; it ran everywhere, up distant mountains, to the edge of the far horizon; it tried to climb the slope they stood on. Then the vision named itself and she swallowed dryly.

“The forests of Serre,” the wizard said softly. He leaned over the boulder, his face turned away from her toward the silent, murky blur below. He pointed across it where, on the other side of the world, something the size and shape of a child’s tooth rose above the trees. “That’s where we’re going. The summer palace of the Kings of Serre sits on that cliff.”

She felt suddenly dazed, sick with terror at the sight of it: the place where her life would stop, all she knew would vanish, an unknown woman would wear her face like a mask. She straightened suddenly, fumbling at the clasp of the chain she wore around her neck. “I’ll pay you,” she said wildly.

“What?”

The clasp broke in her shaking grip; she dropped gold and its pendant into her palm, and offered it to him. “Just let me go. I’ll find my way back. You take my shape so they won’t search for me—”

He stared at her incredulously, then looked at what lay in her palm. He stirred it with one finger. “What is this?”

She blinked at it: a nut, a red feather, and a black snail shell, strung together and tied to her gold chain. “Oh.”

“It looks like a charm.”

She sighed. “It is.” Her voice stopped trembling. “Auri—one of my attendants—made it for me. Her mother was born in Serre, and told her stories. It’s supposed to protect me from witches.”

He snorted. “The witches of Serre would eat it, shells and all. Are you really so afraid of marrying Ronan of Serre?”

“Yes,” she said tightly. “I am used to being loved.”

She felt his attention, cast hither and yon, pull itself out of the vastness of Serre, the camp noises behind them, the scents on the wind, and the rising moon, to focus entirely on her. His face was absolutely still. Startled, she felt as though he were seeing her for the first time; she wondered what, during the past weeks, he thought he had been looking at.

He told her. “When Ronan inherits, you will be Queen of Serre. Your children—”

“I know,” she said impatiently. “I know. Meanwhile I will live with a man who will expect me to occupy his bed but not his thoughts. All to keep his father from attacking Dacia and killing my father.”

She turned away from him abruptly before he could answer. “Where are you going?” he asked, beside her suddenly as she strode back across the meadow.

“To shoot something.”

She sent an attendant running for her bow and arrows. In the darkening meadow, away from horses and people, she shot furiously at the face of the moon, at implacable slabs of granite, at a raven that watched her silently from a distant tree. She almost hit the raven; it leaped off the branch with a squawk, dropping a feather as it flew away. Spent finally, hungry, she wandered toward the fire outside her pavilion. Someone took her bow; someone else slipped a mantle over her shoulders against the evening chill and unfolded a leather stool for her. She ate what she was handed. Hare, she realized when she began to taste what she was eating. Again.

The next day they began their descent into Serre.

The forest, closing around them as they left the mountains, became another season: something warm but capable of harsh shadows that seemed to burn on the sunlit ground. The trees were huge, ancient; they smelled like some rare incense. The hard ground, the constant slope of the mountains had changed to a soft, spicy pallet of dried needles, on land that rarely varied. Trees were all Sidonie saw. Far above, a hawk, and trees. A thrust of rock, a tumble of boulders, and trees. A silvery web of streams. Trees. Their branches grew so high up the trunks, seeking light, that riders could pass beneath them without bending their heads. Seed pods of gold, like fingers, grew among the broad, lacy boughs. They fell occasionally, making a noise like a comment as the entourage passed.

They had chanced into a timeless place, Sidonie felt as she sat at her fire one night. Into a place that would never change and never end. The trees hid even the changing moon. Gyre sat with her, or his shape did; his thoughts were far from her, prowling, she guessed, through the dark, quiet forest around them. She watched the bright, flickering wings of the fire trying to illumine the night within the forest. It did little more than burnish a tangle of roots, a couple of massive trunks, the gilt-edged doors of her pavilion. Water in a shallow stream flowed endlessly through the dark, out of nowhere, into nowhere. Wild things crept past them to drink from it; now and then she heard a stray panting, a thump or a scurry. Around other fires, wash-water simmered; water slopped and echoed hollowly as pots were scoured. Servants tossed dice, mended harness; guards oiled weapons; hunters whittled arrows and fletched them with black and gold, and the rare flame-red feathers dropped from birds that were never seen. As always, Sidonie’s attendants had hidden themselves. The pavilion beside hers was tightly closed. She could see their silhouettes flung by lanterns on the walls; they sat as closely massed as flowers in a bouquet, mending torn seams and speaking nervously, breathlessly. Others waited for the princess in her pavilion; three heads bent closely together while a fourth, most likely Auri, told a story.

“Brume,” Sidonie murmured thoughtfully, remembering one of the stories. The wizard did not move so much as an eyelash at her voice. But she felt his attention gather out of the forest around them, come to her. It was as though he had suddenly become visible.

“Brume?”

“She haunts these forests. She entices people into her cottage and boils them in her cauldron for stew.”

He stirred slightly and did not smile, which made her vaguely uneasy. But he only asked, “Who is telling you these tales?”

“Auri. Her mother told them to her and says they are all true. Her mother’s brother lost his heart to a woman who lived in a deep pool beneath a waterfall in a forest just like this. The woman came to him among the reeds, and lured him into her watery cave and he drowned.”

The wizard grunted. “Auri’s mother probably floats flowers in bowls of milk and leaves them outside her door in Dacia to placate the goblins of Serre.”

“She does. I also read accounts of the wizard Unciel’s travels through Serre, before I left. He mentions the milk and the flowers. But nothing with teeth. I suspect he left out a few things.” She tossed a seed cone at a squirrel eyeing the fluttering doors of her pavilion. It changed its mind, bounded away. Unciel’s bright cottage with its brilliant garden, the shy, awkward scribe seemed a dream, a lifetime past.

Gyre did not comment. She glanced at him, found an odd open, rueful expression on his face, as if he were looking inside and found himself lacking. It was unusual, she thought; his confidence seemed always unassailable.

“No one is unassailable,” he said, shifting a branch in the fire with his bare hand. Then he turned his head quickly to meet her cold eye. “I’m sorry. My thoughts were drifting; they floated into yours.”

“Anchor them,” she suggested drily.

“I will try.”

She wished, immediately, that she had that ability to pry into his thoughts without bothering to question him. She tilted her head back and saw, beyond the pinnacles of trees taller than the towers of Dacia, stars as cold and beautiful and incomprehensible as Serre itself poured across the black. “Have you known Unciel long?” she asked, suddenly curious. He had opened a door, with that expression. “He said you owed him a favor.”

“He helped me once, when I was in trouble in a land south of Dacia. He did not know me at all, but he rescued me.”

“From what? A monster?”

“Something like that.” He did not look at her.

“Something like what? An ogre?”

He smiled a tight, spare smile, asked in her direction, “What do you know about ogres?”

“Nothing. What exactly are they?”

“An ogre is a grotesque monster, hideous in appearance, with a taste for human flesh.”

“Does everything eat people in Serre?” she wondered, fascinated and appalled.

“You should stop listening to Auri’s tales. Anyway, ogres are very stupid, and terrified of princesses.”

“You laugh now,” she said darkly. She shifted closer to the fire and spread her hands to it. She wished suddenly for an ogre, a witch, a goblin, anything out of Serre’s unpredictable heart, to loom at them out of the dark, send them fleeing for their lives. She would find an abandoned hermit’s hut, live like one of the skittish, unwashed recluses of the forests, eat nuts and berries, keep a pet crow for company.

“I will not,” she heard from within the crackling, fuming flames, “let anyone harm you.”

She lifted her eyes to the wizard. But his own eyes were lowered; he seemed to be listening again to the trees, the animals, the wind, perhaps the stars. His lashes were black as embers against his fire-flushed skin. His dark hair, neatly trimmed at the beginning of the journey, hung loosely to his shoulders. He sat so still he scarcely seemed to breathe; she wondered what he heard.

“How long,” she asked him abruptly, drawing comfort from his familiarity, “will you stay in Serre?”

He looked at her. Again she had the sense of thoughts hidden, words unspoken. But he answered simply enough. “Your father told me to use my own judgment. You should go in. I’ll send your guards to you.”

“I’d rather watch with you.”

“I can see the dark better in the dark,” he told her, and leaned down to sculpt the fire with his hands until it burrowed into itself, pulsing instead of flaming. He would climb a tree, she guessed, and watch with the owls.

“How long?” she heard herself ask again, though she did not want the answer. “Until we get there?”

“I don’t know. I’ll fly ahead tomorrow and count the days.”

Days, she thought, chilled. Once it had been half a season. She rose reluctantly. One pavilion was dark; in hers, the young women sat slumped and yawning on the cots. Seeing her move, they rose and opened the doors for her. One left with a pitcher to fetch warm water; others helped her undress.

“Tell me,” she said to distract herself from her thoughts, “the story Auri was telling you.”

Auri, barely more than a girl, with a thin, pointed face and constantly disheveled hair, looked at Sidonie out of the corners of her eyes. She was busy tipping a candle into the shadows, searching for wildlife.

“My lady,” another protested. “It’s not suitable.”

“I’m going to be married,” Sidonie said wryly, remembering what her sisters had told her, “to a total stranger. Surely nothing could be more unsuitable than that.”

In the dark, they whispered a tale involving a poor widow, a beautiful daughter, and the King of Trolls. Serre, she thought, seemed to be full of ravening nightmares who killed what they loved and ate what they didn’t. But it was the faceless prince in her dreams, not the troll, who woke her abruptly in the night to stare sleeplessly at the dark until dawn.

She did not see the wizard at all the next day until sunset, when a crimson light spilled through the trees, and the weary entourage gathered to a ragged halt beside the grassy banks of a slow, deep river. They could bathe, she saw with relief. Guards were already marking pools with their pointing fingers, deciding where to hang rugs for the princess, while the horses were led downstream to drink. She heard a splash downriver; someone, dusty and sweating, could not wait.

Beware, she warned him silently, the water-woman in the reeds.

Then an eagle plummeted through the stained light at her feet, and Gyre appeared. She waited, watching as the fierce thoughtless scrutiny melted out of his eyes; gold and black became a familiar shadowy blue. Like everyone else, he looked exhausted, though his voice held its usual briskness.

“Five days,” he told her. “At the most.”

“Five days?” Her heart was in her throat suddenly, fluttering like something trapped. “Only five?”

“We’ve been travelling half the summer,” he reminded her gently. “I will send messengers ahead to tell the king that we are nearly at his doorstep. They will travel a day or so faster alone.” He paused, touched her for the first time, his fingers linked lightly around her wrist. Her face felt icy, drained of all expression. “You are saving your father’s kingdom,” she heard him say. “Perhaps his life. If you can’t find any other reason for being in Serre, remember that.”

She swallowed dryly, not seeing him, not speaking. His fingers tightened and she lifted her head. His gaze, in that moment, seemed to contain all the wild things of land and air that he had ever shaped, as well as all the powers that controlled them.

“I won’t leave Serre,” he said softly, “until you tell me to go.”

She blinked, oddly shaken. He loosed her wrist, his eyes changing again, familiar, imperturbable, at once clear and secret. He waited silently until she found her voice.

“Five days, then. Thank you.” She raised her skirts and walked blindly, carefully past him, as though she had already entered the stone walls of the summer palace.

They had camped within a day of the palace when she finally saw something of the magic of Serre.

She had wandered away from the noise and confusion of the camp being set up in an unexpected clearing along the river, which had decided to accompany them east. She took her bow with her, in case there were ogres, and walked into the clearing, a little meadow rich with late summer grasses and wildflowers. In the middle of it she stopped, staring upward at what the parting trees had made visible. On a crag, a dark, blocky mass of walls and towers rose between two slender ribbons of water that fell a long way from the top of the cliff to vanish into the tops of the trees. The water burned like light on a blade. The setting sun illumined a brief nick of road pared out of stone, impossibly high and slanted, leading into the massive fortress. Summer palace, Gyre had called it. It had as much to do with summer, Sidonie thought incredulously, as a mausoleum.

She bent her head, feeling visible, and moved across the meadow beyond sight of the dark palace. Within trees again, she shot a few arrows in desultory fashion at tree boles and cones until the sunlight faded. She stood uncertainly, bow cocked, looking for one more target before she was forced to yield to the fact that one more day had inevitably passed and tomorrow there would be none left.

Something crashed out of the trees behind her. She whirled, heart pounding, bringing the bow up and aimed at whatever troll or witch had crackled into shape out of the underbrush. But it was only one of the guards, she thought confusedly. No. One of the hunters. He stood with his arms raised, showing her his empty hands; he was panting, as she was, and just as startled. Not a hunter, she amended; they slept and bathed with their knives, and there was not a weapon to be seen on this man. An ogre, maybe, in disguise. He looked strong enough, broad-shouldered and muscular. His long copper hair was tangled and matted with bracken; there was an otherworldly look in his grey eyes. His clothes were torn; so was the skin on his face and wrists, as though he had run through brambles.

Her bowstring had slackened a little, she realized. She tightened her grip, pointed the arrowhead at his heart. “Show me your teeth,” she demanded. If they were pointed like an animal’s, she would know what he truly was.

He ignored that. “Did you see it?” he pleaded. “Did it fly this way?”

“Did what fly this way?”

“The bird made of fire.”

She lowered the bow after a moment, aimed cautiously at his foot. He must be one of the forests eccentrics, she decided. Newly eccentric, for his tunic, though torn in places, was of fine dark silk, embroidered at the sleeves and hem. His boots were scratched, but neither worn nor cracked.

“Auri,” she said coldly, “never mentioned a bird made of fire. Neither did Unciel.”

He drew breath, loosed it in a weary shudder. He glanced around them into the still trees, his shoulders slumped. When he looked at her again, his eyes seemed less fay-ridden.

“Who is Unciel?” he asked.

“A great wizard.”

He took a step; her bow came up. “Can he help me?” he asked, his face taut, desperate. “I must find the bird. And the witch.”

She swallowed. “Unciel might help you,” she said carefully, in case he grew mad again, and attracted the witch. “But he is far away in a cottage in Dacia, and too weak to do much besides garden.”

“Dacia?” He stood very still, not breathing, looking at her so strangely that she backed a step. So did he, abruptly, reeling away from her, it seemed. “Who are you?”

“I am Sidonie of Dacia,” she said very clearly, indicating dire consequences if she were eaten by magic in Serre. “I have crossed two lands to marry Prince Ronan of Serre. My guards are setting up camp behind you; my hunters are close around us, armed and—and hunting.”

She heard his quick breath. “They must not shoot the bird!”

“We cannot eat fire for supper,” she reminded him reasonably. “Anyway, we never see the red birds. Only their feathers, now and then. They must be very beautiful.”

“They are,” he whispered. And then something pulled his face awry; he clenched his teeth. She saw the blood flush around his eyes, and the terrible, stark expression in them, as though he were about to weep. She let the bow go slack in her hands.

“What is it?” she breathed. “What’s wrong?”

He saw her again, beyond the frozen sheen in his eyes. His hands clenched; he fought for air, struggling against whatever sorrow held him in its terrible grip. “I must find the witch,” he told her finally, and she felt her own hands grow cold.

The witch and the bird had driven him mad, she thought. But if he grieved, then he had lost, and loss she understood. She went to him impulsively, pushed the bow and arrow into his hands. “Take these, if you’re going witch-hunting. You have nothing to help you in this place, and I have an entire village to take care of me.”

He gazed at them a little incredulously. Witches, she realized then, must use arrows for toothpicks in Serre. But he didn’t hand them back. He studied her again, his expression calmer now, and unfathomable. She felt suddenly like a pampered child who had handed a starving beggar her gold shoe-buckle.

“I’ll come home as soon as I have found the witch,” he said incomprehensibly. And then she saw his face shed grief and confusion, along with all memory of her. Wonder and longing filled his eyes, blinded him, so that he did not even see her as he stumbled past her into the trees.

She turned and saw the firebird.

She saw nothing else, heard nothing, as it flew silently through the twilight, its wings trailing plumes and ribbons of flame, its tail covered with jewels of fire. Its claws and beak and eyes seemed of hammered gold that melted into fire and then hardened again into gold. It sang a note. She felt the sound fall through her heart like a pearl falling slowly, with infinite beauty, through liquid gold.

After a time, she felt the hand above her elbow, holding her to earth, she guessed, keeping her from running after the dream of the bird when the bird itself had vanished. She felt the wizard’s presence before she looked at him; they had been together that long.

“Did you see that?” she whispered, still searching for it within the darkening forest.

“Yes.”

“No wonder he follows it… I never asked his name. Did you see him?”

“I saw everything,” he answered simply. He was gazing into the trees as though he could still see, with his magical eye, the luminous bird and the man with his heart outstretched to follow it. “I was here watching even before you finished turning and saw clearly what you were aiming at.”

“How—”

“I felt your terror. You moved me in a breath.” His light grip opened; he moved her with the suggestion of a touch. “Supper is ready and you are missed. Come back to the world.”

The next afternoon, beyond all possibility, she found herself riding up that final paring of road so high above the valley floor that she did not dare look down. She kept her eyes on the road until it passed behind one of the falls and out again. Then she raised her eyes to the dark palace. There were airy, glinting banners along the walls, she saw with surprise, and trumpeters to greet them. The road ran up to the drawbridge and ended; the gates stood open. Guards in black leather and silk lined the road, the sides of the bridge, the inner courtyard. Sidonie, riding numbly between Gyre and the captain of her guard, watched a man detach himself from the stiff, silent gathering, and walk across the yard toward her.

Gyre reached over, pulled gently at the reins in her lax hand. Her horse stopped. The stranger held one blunt hand up to her. She looked down into a broad, scarred face, with its hairy upper lip lifted and snarling over a missing tooth, the eye above it lost behind crumpled, puckered skin. The other eye was the iron-black of the walls around them, and as hard.

“I am Ferus King of Serre,” he said. His lost eye seemed to move behind its scars, still trying to see. She felt herself freeze like an animal under the hunter’s eye. “Welcome to your home.”