THIRTEEN

Heartless, Ronan could not feel the firebird’s song. He noticed that absently as he left the witch’s house and began his search for the wizard Gyre. As he walked among the sleeping trees, he saw the firebird in all its beauty, a melting of feather and flame, sitting high atop a tree in the distance. It sang to a setting star. The pure, unearthly voice that had transfixed Ronan, stunned his heart and left him thoughtless, now sounded like any other rarest noise: mysterious yet familiar, belonging to the predictable patterns of life within the trees. It made no more impression on him than an owl hooting. The firebird fell silent as he walked beneath it without stopping. He did glance up at it, as though in the hollow where his heart had been, he heard an echo. Its long neck curved; a golden eye peered down, watching him pass.

He had no idea where he was going or how far he was from his father’s palace. For his path, he trusted the witch. If she wanted the wizard, she must show Ronan the way home. He walked until the long night bore down on him even as the sun rose. His eyes flickered; he hurtled to meet the dark as it swept toward him. He slept where he fell.

He woke sometime later, his body drenched in hot, late summer noon, his face in shadow. He lay baking on a sheet of dry, prickling needles, a seed cone under one cheek. He lifted his head with an effort, remembering piecemeal: the wizard, the witch, the firebird’s cage, what he said, what she said… He was on his way home… A trickle of liquid fire snagged his eye. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and saw the firebird.

His face had rested in its shadow. Perched on the ground, it loomed over him; its molten eyes, burning like the sun, seemed as alien and remote. He could have reached out and touched that rich tangle of iridescent plumes and what looked like windblown feathers of fire. Its long neck arched like a swan’s over its back. Its wings pooled around it in drifting ripples of plumes.

He made a small sound, the beginning of a question. To his utter astonishment, it answered.

“Prince Ronan.” Its voice was quite pleasing, he thought; it was as though a flute had spoken. “I have heard tales of your kindness to the owl, the toad, and the wolf. Will you help me?”

They seemed like dreams now, all the speaking animals. He sat up groggily, brushed dust and needles out of his hair. “Perhaps,” he said guardedly, for he owed the firebird nothing, and already his eyes were searching above the trees for the familiar face of the cliff. Then he remembered that the firebird had shaded his face as he slept. A small thing, but the forest animals seemed to place great value on such small things. So he brought his attention back to the firebird. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“The firebird lays one egg and has one hatchling every seven years. The wind tossed my egg out of the nest. I am afraid that it will slip out of my claws if I try to carry it. Will you put my egg back into the nest for me?”

It seemed a small thing, so he said, “Yes.”

He followed the firebird for a long time through constantly changing shadow and light. It waited while he drank from a stream; he could hear it rustling fretfully on a branch above his head. He quelled his own impatience, for one direction seemed as good as another to him; they all looked alike. Finally the firebird stopped beneath a great tree that looked no different from any other tree, and brushed at needles and dry leaves beneath it. Hidden in a cradle of roots lay the most beautiful egg that Ronan had ever seen.

It held all the shimmering hues of fire, webbed with a delicate overlay of gold. He picked it up. It covered his broad palm, and was as heavy as though the shell were carved of fiery jewels and threaded with true gold. The firebird laid her head on it, and he felt, through the warm, glowing shell, the quick fluttering of the heartbeat within.

“It is still alive,” the firebird said, and sang something to the dream of itself within the egg.

“Where is the nest?” Ronan asked, glancing through the branches above him. He had whiled away much of the day following the firebird. The slant of shadows began to wear at him; he wanted to find his way out of the forest before dark.

“Climb,” the firebird said. “I’ll wait for you beside my nest.”

It flew away before he could speak again. The nest could not be very high, he thought; the egg would have broken if it had fallen far. After a moment’s thought, he pulled off his remaining boot, put the egg gently into it, and tucked the boot into his tunic above the belt. Then he began to climb.

He expected to see the firebird at every branch. But it was always higher; he would glimpse a drifting plume above the next branch, and then above the next. He climbed until, looking down, he could not see the ground through the thick green fans of branches. Looking up, he could not see the sun, only the firebird’s eye, blazing down at him. It was just above him, just a little farther. He raised a foot to the next branch, reached high and caught another with his hand, lifted his other foot, reached again, and again, until, half-blind with sweat and locked into the rhythms of the growing tree, he felt that he had been climbing most of his life. The firebird’s nest was on top of the world, somewhere in the clouds; at night stars had to veer around it as they wheeled across the sky. He climbed so high that he left everything behind except his name and the egg trembling with life against his breast.

Finally he heard the firebird’s voice. “Here.”

It perched next to his hand beside its nest. It was a palace of a nest, he saw as he leaned into the amber-scented bark and panted. The nest balanced between two strong boughs, an enormous, broad-brimmed hat fashioned out of spider-web, dried flowers, mosses, and vines. When he had caught his breath, he freed the boot from his tunic and tipped the egg gently into the nest. The firebird nuzzled it with its face, then shifted its body onto the nest, delicately uncoiling plumes and arranging feathers as it sat. Ronan dropped the boot tiredly, looked down to watch it fall.

He saw the whole of the forest laid out like a tapestry beneath him: a background of green in which strange bright figures moved busily through their tales. Witches and hermits, ogres, foxes and languorous water sprites went their mysterious ways, stirring cauldrons, speaking to animals, cudgeling one another. Magic spiralled in scarlet and blue threads from their fingers; song unwound in gold from the throats of birds. Ronan, so high above it that the figures seemed no bigger than stitches in the tapestry, clung like an insect to the great tree, his mouth dry, his blood pounding against the wood. He scarcely knew what he saw, or where he was now, except above it all. He closed his eyes against the terrifying, overwhelming vision of Serre and heard the firebird again.

“Look how far you have come. Don’t be afraid. Open your eyes.”

He dragged them open to stare incredulously at the firebird and saw his father’s palace.

It rose just across from him, its dark towers and flanks burnished with afternoon light. What he had thought must be his own blood thundering in his ears was the churning rail of water hollowing out the stones below and trying to leap back up the cliff. If he had not left his heart with Brume, he might have wept with relief at the sight of it, Or felt his heart grow shriveled and hard with memory and despair. As it was, he only felt his fear go the way of his boot. He was gazing at the palace, wondering how far away it might be on foot, when the wall of windows across the great hall blew apart like a thousand glass birds startled into flight. A ball of fire followed them. It swallowed all the luminous birds, then began to unravel, revealing its heart. Ronan glimpsed the helpless, plummeting body of a man among the flames just before he vanished.

His muscles slackened with shock; he nearly slid out of the tree and fell to earth himself. He gripped the trunk, trembling, trying to make sense of the crazed image in his head. The wizard had killed his father. His father had killed the wizard. His father, deranged with frustration at the loss of his heir, had scoured the hall with his temper and flung some poor innocent out the window. Ronan found himself moving again, still shaken, weak with horror, one bare foot feeling awkwardly for the branch below.

“I have to go home,” he told the firebird.

It did not answer, only began what sounded like a lullaby. Ronan left it nesting and descended with the sun into dark. When he could feel no more branches beneath his feet, he closed his eyes and dropped to the bottom of the night.

He woke sprawled on tree roots, thirsty, starving, with a stark memory in his head of the summer palace belching a fireball that turned into a man streaming fire as he began to fall.

Mystified, he stumbled to his feet to search for water. Later, eating early apples in a clearing with the deer, he saw the cliff rising above the trees with its twin ribbons of water spilling down along the dark walls and towers, and the end of the road turning into its gates.

He began the long walk home.

The wizard found him just as he reached the road at the bottom of the falls. The moon would light his path up the steep, dangerous cliff, he hoped, when it got around to rising. He dared not stop. If he closed his eyes, the road might vanish, along with the falls and the palace; he could easily find himself back in the interminable maze of the witch’s mind. In the deafening pound of water, he would not have heard a dozen bellowing trolls waving cudgels at him, let alone a wizard who made no more sound than the small bats flitting through the twilight. Ronan had barely taken a step or two beyond the forest, up the sheer ascent of stone, when he heard a voice cut with startling clarity through the thunder of the falls.

“Ronan. I expected to find you with the witch.”

He stopped dead, as though the words were a spell. The moon, igniting the water high above, spilled a swathe of light down the cliff, illumining a shadow on the road ahead of Ronan. Gyre, he thought, stunned. But of course the wizard would come to stop him before he showed his true face to his father.

“I expected,” he said thinly, trying to think without words so that the wizard would not hear, “to find you with the princess.”

The wizard was silent a breath; the shadow, under Ronan’s unwavering stare, inched down the road. “How did you get free of Brume?” Gyre wondered. “And you’re free of the firebird, as well. What did you do? What did you promise the witch?”

“She flung me out of her cottage when I bit her. The cage broke, and I escaped. I have not seen the firebird.”

“You have not answered me at all.” The shadow flowed over pebbles, silent and barely perceptible. “She let you see your way home. What did you promise her this time?” He waited; the shadow shrugged slightly at Ronan’s silence. “You’ll tell me. You’ll tell me everything I need to know before I take you back to your father and let him see that I have found you.” Ronan blinked. The shadow gave a soft laugh. “And then we will trade faces, you and I. You will leave Serre and all your memories of it behind you forever.” The shadow held up a hand at Ronan’s sudden movement. The wizard’s voice grew very soft, almost gentle. “You can’t run from me.” His shadow slid closer. Ronan, his eyes wide, unblinking, could only watch it come. Nothing else in the night seemed to move either, as though the world had been caught up in the wizard’s spell. Even the roar of water might have been only an echo of itself. “You simply have the misfortune of being in the way of something I want. Without you here, I can take it. And so you must forget everything you ever were…”

The shadow flowed over Ronan, hiding even his face from the moon. Staring at the void limned by moonlight into the shape of the wizard’s face, Ronan could not move an eyelash; he could not feel himself breathe. He felt the shadow seep, as steadily and persistently as it had crossed stones, through his eyes, his bones, to lie like night across his thoughts.

The firebird sang. Ronan heard it from very far away, as he might have heard a star sing. He recognized it as he would have recognized a star, something incomprehensible but familiar. The distant flame, the distant song, would be all he could ever know about either star or firebird. But for an instant his thoughts, mingling with the wizard’s, revolved around that sweet fire; it turned his breath into song, his blood into fire, all of Serre in the firebird’s night into poetry.

Then he saw moonlight again on the road ahead of him. Gyre’s face was finally visible as he stepped away from Ronan. Ronan stared at him, bewildered, beginning to shake. The wizard, his face taut, dreaming, seemed to have forgotten him. He walked around Ronan and down the road. Ronan turned and saw the firebird.

She stood at the road’s end, in all her wild beauty of fire and ivory, bird and human. Her golden eyes, warm and beguiling with light, fixed on the wizard as she sang to him. Gyre went toward her without a word, without a faltering step. As he drew close, she withdrew, slowly, note by note, into the forest. The trees seemed to shift around her. Gyre stepped off the road; they opened to take him in.

Ronan stood alone, stunned. All that the wizard had wanted, he had given away for a song. The prince had heard it once, he knew, but he remembered it only vaguely as he remembered love and loss, something that had happened to him once, but that now seemed as remote as someone else’s dream.

He stirred finally, realizing that no distance he put between himself and the wizard would be far enough. The moon would set; the firebird would sleep; the wizard would awaken. All the warriors in the summer palace, all the king’s sorcery, would not be enough to keep Ronan safe from the wizard who wanted his face, his name, his heritage, his life Now, while Gyre was spellbound, lost to the world, was the time to rid Serre of the unscrupulous wizard and drag his bones to Brume to whistle in the wind on her roof.

Ronan picked up the nearest likely stone and moved soundlessly toward the wizard, who was barely more than a shadow again, trailing after the singing woman. Before Ronan could step off the road, something pale and bulky, with a single round eye reflecting moonlight the color of bone, ran up behind the woman. Ronan caught a trenchant whiff of it and stopped. The cottage squatted there. Its door opened.

The firebird, swaying dreamily backward as she lured the wizard forward, stepped across the threshold. Ronan saw her white hand beckoning from within. The wizard followed, bending his head as he walked into the little house of bone. The door closed. The moon, the stars, the wordless prince, stared as the great, splayed feet and burly calves of the witch hoisted the cottage off the ground and ran it back into the forests of Serre.

After what seemed a very long time, Ronan dropped the rock and discovered a coherent thought.

He whispered, “I am free.”

No one lured him, trapped him, requested his help, made impossible demands. No one, at the moment, paid any attention to him at all. He could sleep in his own bed that night, if he got himself to the top of the cliff without falling off. He turned, began the climb.

He stopped, after a step or two. There was something he had left to do, something he had forgotten… He couldn’t remember. Nothing seemed to be missing except his boots. Nothing, then, that was important. He began to walk again, up the road the moonlight carved for him across the stone.