FIFTEEN

Following the firebird, Gyre lost himself in the house of the witch.

One moment, a moment as endless as time, as sweet as anticipation, he saw the warm, golden eyes, the enchanting smile; he heard the wordless song of passion and promise. Come, said the outstretched hand, the slender bare feet taking their slow backward steps toward him and away from him. Come to me.

The next moment, he stood in the stinking, cloying shadows of what looked like the bastard offspring of a hen-coop and a hovel, with smudged, oily flames licking sullenly at a cauldron full of bones, and a monstrous woman making a noise like a chicken being plucked alive. Laughing, he realized sourly. She was laughing at him.

She wasn’t a toad-woman this time. She seemed, in what tatters of light the fire loosed, a perversion of the firebird mockery of the heart-rending beauty that had stripped every thought from his head. The witch sprouted bright floating plumes and feathers on her head instead of hair; her long, bony, crooked fingers tapered sharply into golden talons. Her round gold eyes seemed larger than her lenses and turned a peculiar shade of umber behind the green, as though her perverse fires burned within the gold.

Gyre, feeling like the cold, charred lump of something not even fire could burn, turned abruptly away from her demented jeering. He remembered then what he had left standing on the cliff-road: a mask, a destiny, an entire kingdom. All for a face, he thought incredulously, wanting to weep with laughter himself. For a song.

But it had been sorcery, he reminded himself. And sorcery he understood. “I have no time for this,” he told the witch, and stepped through shadows and fowl-droppings toward where he expected to find the door. The prince would hardly have begun the climb up the road. He would not expect Gyre to return so quickly, and would never see him when he did. Ronan would yield his past, his memories and experiences to the wizard as easily as he relinquished them every night to sleep.

The door had vanished. Gyre gave the grisly jumble of bones standing in his way a cursory glance, then became invisible and melted through them.

They rose like trees everywhere around him, stark, weather-bleached bones as thick as the forests of Serre and, as he felt his way through them, seemingly as endless. There, they told him, he would become bone, nothing more, forever. His ribs would frame the witch’s window; his thighbones would blacken with her chimney smoke. For the first time since he had trapped himself in the lonely cave in Fyriol, he felt a branch-chattering, wind-howl of panic surging over his thoughts. The bones faded around him. He saw the witch again, with her red feathery head and her enormous, dried-leaf eyes catching fire behind the lenses.

He looked at her silently, this time with more interest. She was, after all, a part of the magic of Serre, the same magic that had created the firebird out of itself and, for better or worse, ignited his heart. It was a language whose rules and logic he did not yet fully grasp. Understanding the witch, he would come closer to mastering the magic.

“I suppose,” he said finally, “you want something from me.”

She smiled, a beaky smile with corn-yellow teeth. “I want your magic. I’ll boil your bones and drink down your marrow. You’re that travelling wizard who gave me the prince instead of the firebird. You tricked me. But you paid for it. I heard your heart wailing like a baby among my bones.”

“You tricked me,” he agreed, glancing around the murky dark for a glimpse of fiery hair. “What have you done with the firebird? You could not possibly have conjured her out of moldering bones and chicken feathers. She was not sorcery but true magic. You tricked her, too, into entering your house. How did she escape?”

“Maybe the firebird flew out the window,” the witch answered. “Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe these are its bones bubbling over my fire.”

“You wanted the firebird badly enough the night I brought it to you in a golden cage.”

The witch shrugged. “I have you now. You conjure fire birds out of your head. I’ll have your magic out of you and then I’ll change all my hens into firebirds.”

“It won’t be enough,” Gyre told her softly. “It will never be enough. Not once you have heard its true voice and seen the face it hides. All the power I possess could not make out of all the white hens in the world a single feather of the firebird.”

The bird-woman snorted. “So you say. Your bones will sing a different song.”

Again he was silent, studying her, wondering how far she could go with her smelly cottage sorcery. She had been deluded by the firebird he had made out of the prince. She had deluded him with her forest of bones. But perhaps that had only been a matter of an unfamiliar structure of sorcery, the differing languages of their magic. Perhaps her powers resided in her reputation; she was more fearful in tales than in truth. Ronan had believed her dangerous and so, to him, she was. She had trapped him in the forest, he said. But home and marriage seemed the last things he wanted to return to. Perhaps, in some peculiar way, he had used her to trap himself. He had been walking freely enough up the palace road when Gyre had found him.

And must be still walking, alone, unarmed and vulnerable, with no one in the palace aware that he was coming home. Gyre felt his thoughts veer like a compass needle toward that unguarded treasure. But first he had to deal with the witch, who seemed to want to make him into some kind of grotesque supper.

He said to her, “Let me go. I don’t want to fight you.”

“Then don’t,” she suggested unhelpfully, unhooking the steaming cauldron to replace it with another, larger and empty. “You might fit in this one.”

“I’ll make you another firebird.”

“The last you made wouldn’t even sing. And it bit me,” she added darkly. “Just get in here for a moment and let me see how you fit.”

“I’ve never climbed into a cauldron,” he answered, remembering some tale of the queen’s. “Show me how.”

She gave him a long, opaque look out of her lenses. Then she loosed a burble of exasperation and bundled her skirt around her knees. Her broad feet, splayed like bird claws, seemed almost too big to clear the rim. Somehow, heaving her unwieldy body off the floor, clinging to the pot-hooks for balance, she got both feet into the cauldron.

“There,” she said, squatting on the rim. “Now you do it.”

“I sit on the edge with my feet in the pot.”

Her eyes rolled behind her lenses. “No, you sit all the way in.”

“You don’t fit all the way in. How could I?”

“I fit.”

“You don’t fit.”

Her tongue smacked off the roof of her mouth; spittle flew. Muttering about wizards from foreign realms who couldn’t find their brains with a map, she hunkered herself down into the cauldron, then crowed at him, “I fit!”

Gyre woke the sluggish fire under the cauldron with thought, sending a curtain of flames so high around the witch that she disappeared within it. He did not bother looking for the door, or trying to melt again through the walls. He turned himself into a gnat and flew to the wall beside the hearth. A speck among the bones, he began to crawl through the chinks between them.

Tiny as he was, he felt the sudden, hot breath that nearly shrivelled his wings. He turned. Something huge loomed over him: a great black circle rimmed with yellow and white, overlaid with a smaller film of green. Above it a jagged red crest shimmered like fire. Beneath it was the beaky profile on which the green lenses rested. The witch had turned herself into an enormous white hen, he realized, even as her beak opened wide. Judging from the noise that made the bone under him tremble, the hen was furious. Her head drew back, then snaked forward, beak plunging toward the gnat, which promptly turned into a flea and leaped from bone to bone deeper into the wall.

As swiftly as it jumped, the hen came after it, tearing bones loose with one twist of its beak. The wizard heard what sounded like an entire skeleton clattering onto the floor. He stopped dead. The ravening beak overshot the flea. In that instant the flea grew pale and melted into bone. The beak stabbed wildly here and there at nothing, then paused. The wizard considered his position in life at that moment. That and the thought of the prince on the palace road sparked a sudden flare of impatience that illumined the bone like white fire.

The hen gave an ear-splitting shriek and tore the bone loose. Exasperated, Gyre searched his imagination for the most fearsome monster he could remember, the only one that had ever frightened him, and turned into it.

The hen, feeling the bone come alive, dropped it hastily and turned back into Brume. She wore her most hideous, most devastating face, Gyre guessed by the look of it: the one that caused knights riding to battle to faint in their armor and wake up without their wits rather than remember her. He wore the face he had glimpsed on Unciel in his kitchen. Then, it had been little more than an expression, a deadliness in the eyes, a hint, in the flat, scarred planes of the face, of a mercilessness and ruthlessness more savage even than the frozen northern barrens.

He saw himself reflected for an instant in the witch’s lenses. Then the floor dropped out from under him. He was dumped, along with stray bones and chicken feathers, onto the forest floor. He sat there, startled, watching the witch, her cottage of bone balanced above her massive legs and feet, running away from him into the moonlit trees, accompanied by the mad screeches of distraught chickens.

He got up slowly, wondering. He touched his face, found it still alien, and shuddered slightly. But he paused before he let the mask fray. It might be useful again, he thought. No one would recognize him, and it would most likely stun even Ferus.

But what had the witch recognized when she looked at it? In Unciel’s kitchen, he had seen only the memory of it in the wizard’s face, and it had terrified him instantly, though he had no idea what it was. Something in his heart had recognized it. But he had seen it through human eyes. The witch was as old as Serre; what did she need to fear? He puzzled over that, then began to hear the covert steps of animals slinking away from him, others slipping under leaves and brush to evade his eye. Even the trees were silent, not a branch stirring, not a seed-cone dropping. Even the wind was still.

Marvelling at such power, he went to find Ronan.