SIXTEEN

Sleepless in her chamber, Sidonie contemplated the astonishing transformation of the wizard Gyre. Her thoughts, whirling and chattering like the water beneath her window, swerved wildly between memories. Prince Ronan stood fixed at the point of her arrow, talking about witches and firebirds while somewhere, invisible, Gyre listened; Gyre watched as her bowstring loosened, little by little, until finally she had crossed the distance between them herself instead of her arrow to put the bow into Ronan’s hands. Gyre sat beside her in the shape of the prince, gently touching the pearls at her wrist, touching her heart with his husky, uncertain words. Barely an hour later, she watched the wizard blown out the window like a burning cinder, only to reappear a day later, slightly worse for the wear, and leave again just as suddenly to find Ronan and bring him home, one way or another, alive or dead.

She lay so still in her bed she might have been entranced Her fists were clenched at her sides, her skin cold with fear. When she had a coherent thought, it was to hope that Gyre, wherever he had taken himself, was too busy to cast attention her direction. She could hide nothing from him. He could take what he wanted from her; she did not know how to fight such intricate deception. He must have deluded even Unciel.

Escape, the water whispered, demanded, shouted ceaselessly, but it did not tell her how. Her door was always guarded; every door, stairway, passageway around her was watched. She had not seen her own company of guards since she had entered the palace. She could leave either by the door or through the window. She could not take two steps across her threshold before she would be stopped. If she left by the window, the powerful, churning water beneath it would drag her like a twig over the falls and crush her before she hit the stones at the bottom. If only she had learned some magic from her grandfather; if only she truly possessed a casket full of power…

She was conjuring up an image of herself disguised as one of her attendants, sent on an errand—what?—slipping down a side-passage, finding a door warped with disuse at the bottom of a stairway everyone had forgotten but the spiders, a strangely empty yard beyond the door, the gates wide open, guards busy watching a hawk or a cloud or something trapped in the relentless grip of water when Ferus’s voice, a full-throated rumble that swelled and broke into a roar, seemed to come out of every stone around her. for a moment she thought the falls had poured through the casements. She clung to the bed as though it were about to float. And then she heard the answering shouts through the halls, the running boots, the chaos beyond her door.

She rose shakily and opened it, peered through a crack. Darkly dressed figures were running everywhere, bumping into each other, pointing, brandishing swords at shadows, and yelling at one another. In the next moment they had all spilled up and down various stairs and passageways. A door slammed. The hallway was suddenly empty.

Sidonie stepped out cautiously, her bare feet soundless on the stones. She closed the door softly behind her and ran.

She bumped hither and yon among the walls like a moth, ducking from one shadow to another, taking the darkest stairwell, slipping behind tapestries when noises came her way. She passed clusters of frightened faces, heard their whispers. The startled, conjecturing eyes did not recognize the barefoot girl in her nightgown, her hair loose and disheveled, flitting along the edge of torchlight like a stray dream. The princess never walked unattended, and certainly not without her shoes. Even though she had spent only a scant handful of days in the palace, she would know enough by now to huddle in her chambers with her attendants when Ferus let loose with a cataract like that in his voice.

Sidonie found the abandoned stairway by accident, pushing through the nearest door when she heard steps. She felt her way down in darkness. The stairs and walls spiralled; the old stones were worn smooth, hollowed underfoot. The tower smelled of damp and mice. Now and then, a long narrow window suitable for shooting arrows into the woods across the river loosed a shaft of moonlight to illumine her path. At the bottom of the stairs, she felt at a grainy, pocked door until she found the latch. It dragged across dirt and pebbles when she opened it. But there was no one in the yard to hear. And there ahead of her, she saw the open gates through which she had ridden a lifetime ago. The guards were standing outside the gates at the far edge of the road, their backs to her, looking down at the forest as though they expected the peaceful, moonlit trees to start marching suddenly up the cliff road. That close to the water, they heard nothing but it and their own voices. Sidonie, little more than a smudge of moonlight in her pale nightgown and her skin shocked colorless with terror, ran noiselessly down the road behind them to where it turned its first abrupt angle and disappeared behind the falls. There, in a wet, pounding dark so loud that she seemed to breathe sound like air, she stopped for a moment, feeling safe for the first time since she had left Dacia.

But she wasn’t, she knew. At any moment the king and his guards might take it into their heads to come riding down the road; at any moment Gyre might appear in front of her. The guards watching the forest might notice the movement along the cliff and come after her. They would drag her back to Ferus, who would drown her in his torrential bellow and then lock her back in her chamber. She would rather take her chances with the ogres in the forest, who might at least be more careless and stupider than Ferus. Wet from hair to hem, she emerged on the other side of the falls, and clung to the moon-shadows the cliff cast along one side of the road. The moon, drifting across the sky, peeled away shadow as it moved, illumined the entire face of the cliff, until it seemed that she ran down a waterfall of light.

But no one rode after her. She must have been the last thing on Ferus’s mind. What, she wondered starkly, had been on his mind when he had shouted like that? Ronan, she guessed, and put both hands to her mouth as she ran. Ronan’s death would tear a cry like that out of Ferus’s granite heart. And if he were dead, Sidonie would mean nothing any longer to the king except an excuse to goad her father into war. He would bury her in the depths of the stone palace and throw away the key. And if she was of no value to Serre, she would mean nothing to Gyre, who would not bother to rescue her. Perhaps, decades later, someone would chance upon the white-haired crone in the dungeons, and remember the lost Princess of Dacia, daughter of a vanquished king. Only then might she be permitted to live her final days in unfamiliar light, bewildered by freedom, among strangers who did not know her name.

She was so convinced that Ronan had died that she did not recognize him when she ran into him.

He did not recognize her at first either. Careening headlong in her frantic flight down the cliff road, she smacked into something tall, sturdy, and breathing audibly. She took him for a troll. He grunted when she hit him, and caught at her. She flailed at him; he lost his balance and pulled her down with him. They slid a little along the steep road and separated. She sat up, at once frightened and incensed. Her damp hair was tangled over her eyes; she could not see the troll. She brushed at it wildly, trying to drag herself away from him even before she could get to her feet. He did not touch her again. She pushed strands of hair back and saw him finally, clearly in the moonlight.

She stared, astonished. It was not a troll. It was the missing prince, walking barefoot up the cliff road, his lank copper hair littered with bracken, his grey eyes no longer haunted, but very tired, and beginning to blink at her incredulously.

She whispered, “I thought you were dead.”

He tried to speak, cleared his throat. “Is it—It is the Princess from Dacia?”

She got to her feet then, backed a step warily. “Are you Ronan? Or Not-Ronan?”

His mouth tightened a moment before he answered. “Ronan. Despite that wizard you had travelling with you.”

She closed her eyes, felt a long breath ease out of her, and realized then how much knowledge could weigh until it was shared. She looked at him again. “I almost married him two days ago. Your father threw him down the cliff.” She stopped, bewildered suddenly by their twin faces. One had made her feel his longing, his trust of her. This Ronan’s eyes saw nothing when they looked at her; they did not know her at all.

But they had glimpsed something familiar, in memory. “So that’s who it was. I saw him fall. How did my father recognize him?”

“He didn’t. It was your mother who recognized him as a spell. He said something to her about graves, she said, when he should have known—he thought you had buried your wife and child. Instead of—Instead.” She finished with a gesture, appalled at the sudden turn of their talk. But Ronan’s eyes remained cool. She added quickly, dropping down beside him again, “They thought it was some spell of Brume’s that your father’s fire had blown out the windows. They don’t know that it was Gyre. I only guessed it myself.”

“How?”

“I could not figure out how the spell I nearly married knew things that you and I had said and done when we met in the forest. Then, earlier tonight, I woke myself up suddenly remembering that Gyre had been there with us in secret; he saw and heard everything.”

Ronan was silent. He glanced behind him down the road to the deep shadows around the foot of the falls which the moon had not yet touched. Sidonie felt her skin prickle again, as though the invisible wizard had trailed a finger down her arm.

She shifted more closely to the prince and asked softly, “Is he down there?”

“The last I saw of him, the firebird had enticed him into the witch’s cottage. She told me that she wanted his bones for the magic in them.”

Sidonie blinked at the idea. “Gyre’s bones? Can she really do that? Surely he wouldn’t let her have them.”

“I think not.” The prince’s head was still turned away; she couldn’t see his face. But she heard the sudden tautness in his voice. “He told me he would take my face. My name. My memories, my heritage. And you.” He turned to look at her finally, his eyes clear as glass and as expressionless.

“Did you plot this together, you and the wizard? To take Serre for yourselves?”

Stunned, she sat down hard on the road again. She felt the blood streak back into her face. “No.” Her voice shook badly. “I came here in good faith to marry you. You were the one who ran from me.”

He shrugged slightly. “I was bewitched. I had to ask you.”

“No. My lord Ronan, you did not.” She stood up, brushed her nightgown straight around her, and started down the road again, so furious she could barely see.

He called after her, “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“We are betrothed. This is your home.”

“I find, my lord, that I do not wish to marry you. I’m going back to Dacia.”

He caught up with her. “In your nightgown? In the middle of the night? Why,” he added, when she only strode down the road without answering, “were you running down the road in the middle of the night in your nightgown?”

“Because,” she answered between her teeth, “your father keeps me prisoner. It was the only chance I had to escape. I am terrified of Gyre and I thought you were dead. There was no reason for me to stay.”

“But I’m alive.”

“I am not going to marry you just because you’re alive.”

“But you are.” His hand closed above her elbow, but not tightly; it was the certainty in his voice that stopped her, held her motionless, staring back at him. “According to such agreements as our fathers negotiated, that’s all I have to be to marry you: alive.”

She saw every nightmare she had had of him standing in front of her. She pushed her hands against her eyes and cried at him, “I liked that other Ronan so much better. The one who was not you.”

She felt his hold tighten. Her hands slid down; she looked at him again, bewildered at where they had suddenly found themselves, somewhere on a precarious road between love and hate and no clear sign in which direction either lay. His face had shut like a door. Only his eyes, hard and suspicious again, warned her that she did not know this prince at all; he had thrown off all enchantments, even those of memory.

He only said, “You will have to make the best of me. My father wants heirs.” He turned her, not roughly but inflexibly, led her back up the road toward the summer palace.

“I have no powers,” she told him desperately, trying without success to twist free of his big fingers. “No gift for magic. I was born without it.”

He paused only briefly before he answered. “Our children may inherit what you did not. One way or another, all the powers of Dacia will belong to Serre.” He stopped walking when she still struggled, and turned her to face him again. “It could be worse,” he said with chilling simplicity. “Unlike my father, I am not violent. You will be Queen of Serre one day, and all I will ever ask of you in return is that you bear my children. Nothing more.” He sighed a little as her tears ran suddenly, noiselessly in silver streaks across her upturned face. “Most women would be grateful.”

Sidonie felt the cliff road tremble beneath them then, and saw, rounding the higher curve of road, what the shouting falls had hidden: a small army of the palace guards riding too fast for safety down the cliff, led by the one-eyed king.

Ferus reached them in another moment; the guards pulled up raggedly behind them, shouting with surprise, one or two nearly sliding over the cliff. The king drew his sword as he reined in front of the prince. The blade stopped an inch from Ronan’s eye.

“Are you my son? Or are you some trick of the witch’s?”

“He’s yours,” Sidonie said succinctly. The king’s eye rolled at her, startled, then back to the prince.

“The wizard Gyre is with Brume,” Ronan said. “She gave me my freedom in exchange for him.” Sidonie, still in his grip, felt him shaking; he looked too worn suddenly to stand.

Veins surfaced and throbbed in the king’s face; he roared incredulously at Ronan, light shivering down the sword in his hand, “You gave Gyre to the witch?”

The prince’s voice remained remarkably even. “If there is justice in the magic of Serre, he’ll be nothing more than soup stock by now. Who did you think wore my face to that wedding?”

The king, swallowing words, looked as though he might choke on them. He let the sword fall finally and managed, “Then how—Then who will fight for us?”

Ronan, his eyes locked on his father’s, swayed a little on his feet as though some force behind the words had struck him. “Fight what?”

“That thing. That thing out of Dacia.” The sword swung again, this time at Sidonie. “Ask her what she was on her way to meet at the end of the road.”

She felt her mouth go dry; her skin seemed suddenly too small as though it were trying to disappear under the king’s wrath. “I was running from you,” she told him, her voice trembling. “All the guards left me when you shouted like that.”

“What thing?” Ronan asked. His haggard face looked moon-pale, but he still spoke steadily. “What were you shouting about?”

The king began to answer; again his voice failed. The sword moved away from Sidonie, pointed down the side of the cliff to the road below where it began, a hollowed rise carved out of the barren face of the cliff. “I saw it,” Ferus said raggedly, “in my mirrors.”

Something stood there in the moonlight, its face turned toward them. Even from that distance it seemed huge. It did not move, it simply looked up at them. Sidonie felt something sweep through her like the coldest of winter wind, hissing and stinging with snow, that killed everything it touched, and then laid waste to the earth beneath the dead.

She felt Ronan’s fingers slacken, grow cold around her arm. “What is it?” she breathed, her lips numb with the fear she felt all around her, even from the king. Nobody answered. It melted away under their eyes, left a frozen memory behind.

“To the palace,” the king snapped. A guard leaped down to give Ronan his horse, then heaved himself up behind another. Ferus reached down for Sidonie’s wrist, hauled her ungently into his saddle. The king fumed at her all the way up the cliff for trying to run away, for bringing Gyre into his land, for all the useless powers she had carelessly left locked in a casket and hidden even from herself. Still numbed by the terror the nameless stranger had cast about him like a mist, and by Ronan’s even colder heart, she scarcely heard a word he said.