TWENTY-THREE

“You’re dead,” Gyre whispered to the flat-faced, slab-muscled monster standing where the hermit’s threshold had been. The front wall of the hovel looked as though it had been slashed away by some inhuman claw. A broken slat swung crazily from the ceiling overhead. One side of the rough stone hearth had crumpled to the ground. The hermit, collapsed in his chair, seemed to retreat farther and farther into himself. Gyre heard the breath trickle out of him, and then silence; even the waterfall seemed to be frozen within that suspended breath of time.

“Gyre,” said the face of his heart, and the hut exploded. Stones, boards, cupboard doors, hermit, book, and raven bones spun upward in a wind so cold that Gyre felt his body fray into it rather than endure it. All around him a terrible winter seemed to be stretching across the forest. Trees groaned and buckled; panicked deer bounded past wolves running in the opposite direction. Birds wheeled together and scattered, windblown and helpless. Gyre heard a distant, fiery cry, like a splash of liquid gold, as if, far away, the firebird had been finally touched by cold.

“What have I done?” he wondered, too incredulous even yet to be terrified. A faint, sweet voice echoed the firebird; it seemed to come out of Gyre’s own thoughts. Then he remembered the egg encased in magic and hidden in the secret place over his heart. He had time for nothing more than that moment’s worth of memory. Then the monster, which had faded behind the howling, biting wind, shaped itself out of it, skin pallid as winter and impervious as stone, eyes that stripped the name out of everything they saw, until nothing recognized only itself. Gyre felt the stunning blankness of its gaze, the power that might have renamed him nothing because nothing was all it understood.

But it knew him. Its voice was deep and raw, a roar more like storm than wild beast. “Give me my heart,” it demanded. Gyre, confused by the sweet murmuring of the firebird disturbed within its shell, wondered for an instant exactly what he had stolen out of the nest.

Then he remembered the dark cave in Fyriol, the dragon within the dark, the casket within the dragon’s heart, the heart within the casket… He felt his face grow slick with horror before the cold sweat froze into that expression.

“You. I took your heart.” Wind ripped the words out of him before they sounded. But he was telling the waiting monster nothing it did not know; it was he who had not known. “And then it vanished. I thought it vanished. I thought it had faded away, something long dead, too ancient to live any longer in light. But all that time you were alive. You had begun to search for your heart. It didn’t vanish—Unciel must have taken it from me. And then he fought you alone on the edge of the world. But he killed you.” He felt himself trembling badly, from horror as much as from the raging winds. “You’re dead.”

It did not seem to realize that. It took a step toward Gyre, reaching for him to pull its heart out of wherever Gyre had hidden it. But there is no heart, Gyre thought confusedly as he put the grove of oldest trees between himself and the monster. There is only the firebird’s egg. The trees were suddenly flying around him like a handful of wildflowers uprooted and tossed into the wind. Gyre, making something very small and very fast out of himself, ducked into the cave behind the frozen waterfall.

He remembered then that the King of Serre was riding through his forests, hunting that monster.

Another roil of comprehension and dread surged through him. The one-eyed king, with all his careless, obstreperous magic and his fierce love of Serre, would not survive one glance from that bleak-eyed death that had followed Gyre into Serre. His men would meet the fate of the forest dwellers, hermit and fox and bird, whose distant cries the wizard’s heart picked like threads out of the howling wind.

What have I done? he asked himself bewilderedly. I borrowed a face. I opened a book. Unciel thought it had died but he couldn’t kill it. If he could not kill it, with all his immense powers, how can I?

“Where is my heart?”

The ribbons of ice shielding Gyre snapped, rained in pieces around him. Gyre made himself even smaller, hid within a cracked stone. He was pulled ruthlessly out and into his own shape by winds that cut like knives across his skin, whittling the living, breathing, shuddering human thing out of themselves.

“Give me my heart.”

“I don’t have your heart!”

“I saw it in you.”

The wind with the face of the monster and fingers of ice seemed to rifle through him, flinging thoughts, powers, memories along with torn pieces of clothes and shoe leather and buttons piecemeal into the storm. Gyre felt himself begin to disappear; a sound tore out of him. Then he was running again, maybe a snow hare, maybe a silver fox, trying desperately to hide from the winds within the wind.

Something was falling. He saw its pale shadow on the white ground, looming larger and larger as it came down, seeming to come down forever because it had so far to fall. He gave one desperate surge of speed, leaped from under it just before it pounded down across his last footprints. The earth shuddered. Branches whipped across him, throwing him down. Something collapsed on top of him, buried him in light, rustling fragments.

He felt the earth thud again, and pulled himself out of the tangle. He glimpsed, just before he changed shape again, an odd jumble of vine and wildflowers, cobwebs and twigs, that the relentless winds were busy picking to pieces. He recognized it as he flew.

The firebird’s tree had fallen.

Too stunned for coherent thought, his mind crowded with images: trolls and magic stags, ogres, water-sprites, hermits, wood-witches, the firebird itself, all fleeing the incomprehensible killing storm. As though his fears had summoned her, Gyre saw the cottage of bone running through the forest ahead of him. Trees broke like broom-straws around Brume as she passed, their ancient hearts groaning, streaking the wild winds with the scent of resin as they died.

Then he was dragged out of flight, pulled again into the shrieking snarl of wind to stare into the empty eyes of the monster that saw nothing everywhere it looked, except when it looked at itself.

“Give me my heart.”

Gyre was silent. He was still alive, he guessed, for no other reason than that the monster had recognized something of itself in him. He was allowed to contemplate that bitter thought for an instant. Then he felt a bone twist as the monster probed for the marrow. The wind tore away what might have been a scream. He saw the palace then, through the flurrying winter the monster seemed to carry with it. The twin falls had frozen. The dark palace seemed to float on a river of ice, high above the ravaged forest. He could no longer see the helpless company from Dacia ringing it. They had fallen where they froze, or had fled across the ice into the wood whose pale, slender trees, stripped of leaf and bird and bent nearly double, streamed bare boughs like hair in the wind.

Sidonie, he thought. The name sparked a rill of power that the monster batted away like a leaf. He had sworn to protect her from all the unpredictable magic in Serre. Not even Unciel had guessed that the most unpredictable magic of all would be her protector. And now her protector was being probed in mind and marrow for something he had taken that seemed to belong to no one, because of a face he had borrowed, a lie he had told. As the monster tore apart the wizard to find its heart, so it would tear Serre apart around them, until like a book with all its tales and history ripped from it and tossed to the frenzied wind, there would be nothing left of it but a name.

The winds shrieked suddenly as the monster wrenched something out of Gyre. For a moment, feeling suddenly hollowed, empty without pain, he thought he must have lost his life. Then what the monster had found became clear in its hold, as it unravelled Gyre’s careful spell. Gold warmed the merciless wind, colors and shapes of shell like cut jewels glittered wildly at every shift of light as though the egg were trying frantically to make itself more beautiful still, to attract the firebird’s vanished eye.

Gyre heard the cry within the egg, the night-music of the firebird, calling to the magic of Serre.

“No,” he gasped. “No. It is not your heart. It is the heart of Serre and you are breaking it.”

The monster did not answer. The fires within the net of gold, within the jewels, began to fade as the empty eyes gazed at it, seeing nothing. Gyre tried desperately to snatch it, all his powers, his own fires, swirling around him to break the relentless hold over him. All he had left within himself he turned to power: words, knowledge, memory, love, longing. That and whatever he found still alive around him enveloped him in white-hot sheets, swirling plumes, and feathers of fire. He came to the end of it finally, blind, drained; he had nothing left but the cold, charred ember of himself. He felt the winds again, saw the empty eyes. He could not move.

He found a few stray words in him, as all the beauty left of Serre dimmed and frayed before his eyes.

“If you cannot find your heart, take mine,” he whispered. “But let the firebird live.”

The flat, barren eyes held his for a very long time, it seemed, before he received an answer.

“Give this to Brume,” the monster said, handing him the firebird’s egg before it wandered away into the green and suddenly peaceful trees.