TWENTY-TWO

Euan sat at the wizard’s bedside, watching Unciel while Unciel watched nothing at all. His eyes were open; he still breathed. By that, Euan concluded that he was still alive, though the wizard had not moved or spoken for hours. The last word he had said was “finally.” Euan had written it down with a silent groan of relief. Finally the wizard did whatever it was he had to do to kill the monster. Finally the bleak, endless tale was coming to an end. He waited, pen hovering impatiently. But that, it seemed, had been the wizard’s final word on the subject. He simply stopped, left his frail, weary, helpless body behind, and went elsewhere in his mind. Euan called to him, pleaded with him, read the gardening records aloud until his voice was hoarse. Not even his garden could coax the wizard back.

The scribe slumped sleeplessly in his chair, his eyes gritty, burning candles through the night while the wizard lay in his strange trance. The tale had drained his strength, Euan guessed. The harrowing memories, the unpredictable shifts the wizard’s body made between man and monster had worn him down to little more than a heartbeat weak as a moth’s flutter and just enough strength to take the next breath. He had fought the monster again in his telling; this time, Euan thought starkly, it might be the wizard who lost his life.

He replaced a guttering candle. The monster still haunted the shadows around him, but the thought of the wizard’s death was beginning to out-loom the unfinished tale. It would be a hideous mockery of fate for Unciel to be slain by the story of his own victory. And, Euan thought miserably, it will be my fault. He leaned over the wizard, spoke gently, clearly, around the tightness in his throat.

“If you don’t wake by dawn, I must tell the king that you need help.”

But not even that roused the wizard. The raven, perched on the carved wooden bed frame above the wizard’s head and gazing darkly down at Unciel, did not make matters easier. The one-eyed cat watched as well, sometimes on Euan’s knee. Euan, wrapped in a blanket against a cold that seemed to have taken up residence in his bones, waited and wondered how much to tell the king.

Slowly the long night frayed, turned silvery beyond the windows. Euan blew out the candles, stood up stiffly. The wizard did not move an eyelash. The broken thread in the blanket near his face, which Euan had been staring at for the last hour, still quivered under the wizard’s faint breath.

“I’m going now,” Euan told him, “to the king. I’ll be back very soon. Wait for me.”

He fed the raven and the cat in the kitchen before he left, and closed the door to Unciel’s room so that the raven’s plunging beak would not be the last thing the wizard saw. The raven gave a cry at that, but only flew to its perch and ruffled its feathers, regarding Euan dourly as he left.

He had flung his scribe’s robe over his disheveled clothing. But his limp hair and blood-shot eyes, he realized, would not charm those guarding the palace gates. They would recognize the robe, however, so he went into the gate nearest the king’s library. It was early for the usual stream of scribes into the scriptorium. A proctor might be there, though; they seemed to live among the worm-eaten scrolls. He drifted, dazed and forlorn, into the scriptorium, feeling that years had passed since he had left it to find the wizard’s house.

To his relief, Proctor Verel was there, sitting at his desk and rubbing his bald pate absently as he read. He blinked at Euan.

“I have to see the king,” the apparition said. “I think Unciel is dying.”

“Dying!” The proctor bounced to his feet, eyes narrowing with bemusement as they took in the unwashed, exhausted scribe. “Of what?”

“I was writing down the story of his last battle. He couldn’t finish it. Now he won’t speak or move—he only breathes. It was my fault—I persuaded him—”

“You persuaded him to let you write that tale?” The proctor navigated his circular body around his desk, staring at the scribe. “The king himself asked him to tell it and he refused.”

“It’s a horrible tale,” Euan said bleakly.

“Of course it would be. Look what it did to him. Were you expecting poetry?”

“I suppose I was.”

“It’ll get turned into that soon enough.”

“He hasn’t finished it.”

“Then we cannot let him die, can we? I’ll get a message to the king. Wait here.”

But Euan, feeling lonely among the empty desks, like something dark, unrecognizable with portent in the bright, tranquil room, did not wait. He walked blindly back through the streets, worried that Unciel might wake suddenly to no one, and decide to die alone. The raven gave its usual cry as he entered and fluttered toward him, a confusion of claw and beak and rattling feathers, before it settled itself on Euan’s shoulder. The one-eyed cat ran ahead. Euan opened the door, holding his breath. Then he breathed again. So did the wizard. Euan sank down in the chair and closed his eyes.

He was asleep when the raven cried again. The sound seemed to come from Euan’s heart, as though it had split itself in two and hatched the raven’s child. He jerked himself awake, heard footsteps in the hall. He cast a bleary eye at the wizard as he stumbled to his feet. The little fiber still quivered; Unciel still gazed expressionlessly at nothing. Euan opened the door, found the King of Dacia pushing doors open at random down the hall.

There was a woman with him. She did not bother to glance in the rooms the king searched. Her eyes were on Unciel’s chamber door when Euan opened it. Intent, somber, they melted into a smile at the sight of the scribe. Heliotrope, he thought, remembering the pale purple wash of color and scent from Unciel’s garden. It seemed a very long time since anyone had smiled in that house.

He bowed his head to the king. Others had crowded into the outer room; he heard murmuring, floorboards creaking. They had come for Unciel, he guessed, and felt a numb despair that things had gone so terribly awry.

“In here, my lord,” he said to Arnou. He ducked his head again, shyly at the king’s companion.

“Euan Ashe. Lady Tassel,” the king said briefly. “My father’s sister. She inherited some of the powers of Sailles’s line. She may be able to help the wizard.”

Lady Tassel was a tiny woman with great, sunken lavender eyes and a pale, pointed face full of constantly shifting lines. They rearranged themselves as she cast a veiled glance at the king, who seemed, even to Euan’s distracted attention, to be tense as an unsprung trap and inwardly fuming.

“My lord,” Euan began, hesitated, then took a blundering step toward the truth. “Unciel did not want to tell you, but—”

He felt flingers slide around his arm; Lady Tassel interrupted gravely. “He was far weaker than he let us know. True? And so he had some difficulty speaking to the young wizard in Serre.”

“Well. That, too, but—”

“One thing at a time. Let me see if I can wake him. Maybe then I will be able to help him.”

“Maybe,” Euan sighed, evading the king’s suspicious eye. But none of them wanted to bring the unspoken tangle into the wizard’s chamber. They stood silently while Lady Tassel, her eyes hooded again, saying nothing, studied the wizard. Something of the tale must have lingered in the room, or in the wizard’s mind, Euan guessed; he saw her eyes widen suddenly. She dropped down into the chair, the lines suddenly harsh on her blanched face.

“What is it?” the king asked sharply.

“I don’t know,” she answered vaguely. “I’ve never known the like…” She glanced at Euan. “Where is the tale he has been telling you?”

“What good will that do?” Arnou demanded. “He must be moved immediately, he must be watched by a physician—”

“My lord.” She patted his hand. “If you cannot be quiet, go away. You promised that you would let me do as I see fit.”

“Yes, but—”

“I don’t think he is dying.”

“You don’t?” Euan breathed.

“I think he has summoned a memory or fashioned a dream and gone into it. You’ll have to wait until he returns to ask him anything.” She turned again to Euan, holding out her hand insistently. “The tale?”

He gave her the little leatherbound book full of gardening notes and an unfinished battle. “Be careful,” he warned. “The tale has a life of its own.”

“So I see.”

“What does that mean?” the king asked edgily. Euan shook his head wordlessly, chilled at the memories. Lady Tassel, glancing with interest through the wizard’s sketches, answered gently.

“Perhaps, my lord, you should leave us for a while. I will call you the instant we need you. Whatever danger Unciel might be in, it’s nothing a physician can remedy. When he can speak again, of course I will ask him first about Sidonie.”

“It might be faster,” the king said impatiently, “if I just send an army into Serre to ask Ferus.”

“It would certainly make most other matters irrelevant,” she murmured, and found the beginning of the tale. She added to Euan, without looking up, “Go and eat something. Take a nap. Wash. I will watch him very carefully, I promise.” Euan, hovering, reluctant to leave her, found the old eyes on his face again, cool and startlingly perceptive. “Don’t worry. I’ll call you if it comes to an end.”

He left her. Arnou, after a word or two, followed; he found Euan in the kitchen, pouring water into a kettle over the fire.

“What,” the king asked explosively, “is going on in Serre? Has there been any word at all from Gyre since he told Unciel that all was well?”

Euan opened his mouth to answer, saw again the monstrous face in the bowl that was Gyre, and closed his eyes. “No, my lord. Not a word.”

A voice drifted out of a half-open drawer. “Arnou. Go home.”

The king tossed his hands. “You’d think that my daughter could pick up a pen and write.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The king, still simmering, finally took most of his men out of the wizard’s house, back to the palace with him. Euan washed himself in the kitchen, put on clean clothes, listening tensely all the while for sounds from the wizard’s chamber. It was very quiet. He made a cup of something hot to keep himself awake. Half-way through it, he laid his head down on the kitchen table and went to sleep.

The raven woke him again, crying as it floated down the hall in front of Lady Tassel, who seemed to be lighting candles with her fingers as she walked. She disappeared. Euan heard her speak to the men who had remained in the house. She sent them away, apparently; the door opened and closed again. Euan, his head and mouth full of wool, took a sip of cold, bitter tea, then rose as the lady and the raven joined him. Candle stubs sparked on the table. Lady Tassel sat down slowly, very carefully, as though her bones were made of glass. Her face under its lacework of lines seemed also to be made of glass, too brittle for expression.

Euan asked huskily, apprehensively, “Is he—”

“As he was.”

“Did you see?”

The old eyes shifted to him, still stunned. “I was able to go a little way into his thoughts. My brother, Arnou’s father, had a great gift for that. It’s an enormously valuable skill for a ruler to possess, and we are fortunate that Arnou inherited nothing of it, or Dacia would have been at war with Serre by sunset today. That would be his only possible response to the danger in Serre: that it must be Ferus’s fault.”

“What is Unciel doing?”

She put a slender, bony hand over her mouth a moment, her eyes filling with what she had seen. Then she reached for Euan’s cup and swallowed the dregs. “He seems to be fighting again. But whether he is battling memories or something real, I can’t tell. It seems to have a name, though. The other one—the one he killed—he didn’t name, when he told you the tale.”

“No.”

“Don’t you have anything stronger than tea?”

“I think there’s some old wine.”

But he did not move; neither did she. “This wizard,” she said finally, “whom Unciel sent to guard Sidonie through Serre.”

“Gyre.”

“What possessed Unciel?”

“I don’t know.” Euan’s voice caught. “I have never understood that. It’s as though he sent them off to Serre together, but to different places and with different expectations. I can love him and care for him and write whatever it is he wants to tell me, but don’t expect me to understand him. All I know is that if he dies and that monster still lives, no matter what its name is, we are all in trouble.”

“Its name is Gyre.”

“And its name is Unciel,” he told her, and rose to get the wine.