Twelve

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Atrix fought the Hunter until he vanished with the moon. The Hunter pursued the White Wolf through the wood into the open field; the Wolf hid among the ghosts of Hunter's Field. Now he was a sword in the hand of a warrior, until the warrior fell, and the sword dropped to the ground, and the moonstruck blade reflected the Hunter's searching eyes. The mage became fire clinging to the bloody rag wrapped around an arrow flying toward the highest window in the keep. The window became an eye; the eye blinked, shifted. The arrow struck solid stone, dropped into the snow. The ghostly flame went out; the mage fled. Remembering the living, he lured the Hunter again and again away from the castle. As raven, he tried to fly toward Chaumenard, draw the Hunter after him. The Hunter's hounds became ravens, drove Atrix back onto the field, back toward the wood.

The Hunter refused to be driven from the field, and Atrix refused to leave without him. He harried the Hunter constantly out of shape, so that those within the castle would not see him. When Burne Pelucir's hunt rode slowly out of the wood near midnight and blew a weary fanfare to the gate, the Hunter and his horse and hounds were night-shadows, pinned motionless and paper-thin, on the ground the hunters rode across.

Talis was not with them.

The Hunter would not speak, nor would he let Atrix past his raven's eyes into his mind. When the moon grew small and cold among the stars, his hounds fanned the field, hurried the mage across it. Atrix, trying to see into his making, find a name for it behind the Hunter's eyes, saw only the most bitter of memories: the King of Pelucir, the shaft of the banner of Pelucir driven through his heart, dragged down among the hounds.

"What are you?" he cried, losing his hold of the Hunter, who seemed to have no substance but power. But the Hunter did not speak until the moon set.

Then his dead moon-eyes held Atrix's and he said, "Sorrow," and vanished.

Atrix, driven uphill to the edge of the wood, took his own shape, trembling with exhaustion. His own shape refused to do anything for a while but lie on the oak leaves. He waited, but the Hunter did not return. He listened for Talis, scented the wood like a wolf, searched it with his mind.

The wood was empty.

He closed his eyes and saw Talis' father fall, the dark hounds gather over him. "Sorrow," he whispered, and rose wearily, and carried that word with him to Burne Pelucir.

He found Burne sitting alone in the empty hall. Guards stood at every door. Guests looking as haggard as the King murmured in the corridors beyond, red-eyed, drinking wine, casting fretful glances into the silent hall. Servants hovered in doorways, waiting to be summoned. Atrix appeared out of torch smoke, as dishevelled and worn as the hunters. The guards shouted sorcery; the hunters raised what came to hand, but without conviction, since Burne, sitting hunched at a table with his chin on his fist, only stared at Atrix dourly.

"Who are you?"

"Atrix Wolfe."

Burne's brows rose in amazement. He stood after a moment, quelled the noise behind him with a shout. He added another shout to the hall-servants. "Wine! Sit down," he added to Atrix. "We may be suspicious of sorcery in Pelucir, but you have a name as ancient as gold. Did you just come from Chaumenard? Or are you the mage who blew into the keep to help Talis?"

"Both," Atrix said. A servant brought wine, cups; behind him the doorways and corridors were soundless. Atrix touched the cup poured for him, did not pick it up. "I came to tell you something. I told Talis last night. He-"

"Did you find him?" Burne interrupted.

"I sent him to find you, after I took him out of the keep. We heard your hunting horns in the wood. You never saw him?"

"I saw him," Burne said, "but only for a moment." He lifted his cup, drank deeply. Atrix stared at his own dark reflection in the polished wood, waiting, motionless, unblinking, until he heard the metal hit wood, and then he closed his eyes.

"And then what happened to him?"

"I almost reached him." Burne sighed. "Almost. He was running toward me, down a shaft of moonlight. But he fell, and the light closed over him, and he disappeared." Atrix opened his eyes. "She took him," Burne finished grimly, and drank again.

"She," Atrix said blankly.

"The woman he saw in the wood."

Atrix moved his gaze from his shadow to the King's weary face. "What woman?"

"Beautiful, he said she was. Beautiful," Burne repeated sourly. "Nameless, coming out of the trees, she cast a spell on him and nearly got him killed."

"Last night?" Atrix asked, his thoughts tangling suddenly in moonlit paths, nameless woodland enchantments, dangers that had nothing to do with him.

"No-days ago. He's been dazed ever since. And now she has him."

"Who has him? Has him where?"

"How would I know? I hoped he had hit his head when he fell off his horse and imagined her. But no." He brooded at his wine a moment, then at Atrix. "You," he said hopefully. "You know all the paths and ways of magic. You could find him."

"I don't understand," Atrix said. He had grown tense, struggling to envision ways and paths of magic that did not end in horror on Hunter's Field, but went beyond it to unnamed realms, into which a prince of Pelucir had vanished. Light and shadow shifted within the hall; an unlit torch flamed suddenly; tapestries on the walls stirred and settled. Beside him, Burne had stopped breathing. "Talis wasn't running from a woman, last night. He was running-"

"He ran from her," Burne said. "And she took him." He spoke carefully, his eyes on the unpredictable shadows around him. "That's all I know. The winter siege of Hunter's Field did not leave me much besides Talis. If I lose him, I lose-I will not lose him. I cannot. You came out of nowhere to rescue him last night from his own sorcery. I'll give whatever you ask, if you'll rescue him again."

"I don't-"

"That's what it was, wasn't it?" Burne interrupted. His hands locked suddenly around his cup; he did not look at Atrix, or at what Atrix's thoughts disturbed around them. "In the keep? Just one of his dangerous accidents."

Atrix grew still. He felt the tension in the silence behind him, then; he scarcely heard breath or thought. In the uncertain mingling of light and smoke and shadow, something threw its own shadow across the hall. Atrix watched it form, nebulous and imprecise, out of all the fears that the strange magics and mysteries had aroused. They felt the Hunter's presence, he realized. They knew, and they did not want to know they knew, what they feared. They wanted Atrix to tell them anything but that, anything but legend, terror, mystery, death, anything but that the tales spun out of Hunter's Field had no ending yet. Burne stared into his cup, waiting; his fear lay like a streak of dark between them, cast by nothing visible.

Atrix relinquished truth for the moment; the air grew brighter, calmed itself, shadows attached themselves to visible objects. "Talis brought a book of mine from Chaumenard."

He heard the King's breath again. "Yes."

"It seems simple, but it's very complex, and very dangerous."

"I knew it," Burne said, his voice loosening. "I told him so." His hands loosened around his cup; he drank. Atrix heard movements, murmuring again behind them. "He's had other accidents; he nearly- Never mind." He looked at Atrix finally. "What did he conjure up? They say it tore the room apart."

"Something he could not control."

"But you can. If it's still around."

"Yes," Atrix promised flatly. "I will control it. If it's still around. But the sorcery in the keep has nothing to do with a woman in the wood. I don't know how to rescue him from moonlight."

"It's like him," Burne sighed, "to leap from the bog into the morass. He didn't seem to fear her, though; he seemed-under some enchantment. It was impossible for him to be reasonable. Even to admit she may not be real."

"Real."

Burne shifted, his mouth tightening. "Human," he said reluctantly, as if to say what she was not somehow made her real. He shook his head. "Such things don't happen to princes of Pelucir."

"And yet," Atrix said, watching the King's expression, "you have seen her."

"I have not."

"You don't question her existence, even though she may be living in light."

The King shifted again, uncomfortable with wonder, or with memory. "There are always tales… Besides, I saw him vanish."

"Do you remember anything else he said about her?"

"Other than that she is as beautiful as the sun and the moon and the stars? No. I wouldn't listen to him. I didn't want to hear such things from him. I need him to fall in love with someone human, highborn and healthy, to give Pelucir heirs. Not a woman who wanders around in a wood without a name, who lives in moonlight and is probably as ancient as the moon. Something about deer."

"What?"

"White deer. And three white hounds. She was hunting, too, that day he saw her. And three-" A sound came out of Atrix, and the King stopped.

"Three white-" He stared at Burne, seeing the wood again, not the terrible, leafless wood he knew from the winter siege, but the sweet, secret green wood of his dreams. "Three white deer, three white hounds, three white horses, and the woman-"

"Yes," Burne said sharply. "What is it? A song?"

"A dream." Atrix shivered a little, chilled with wonder, remembering the empty oval of her face, the arrow striking his heart, so that he woke suddenly before he dreamed of pain. "She rides through my dreams. But I have never seen her face."

"Talis did," Burne said grimly. "He wasn't dreaming."

"There's always a shadow where her face should be, though her hair and her voice are beautiful. She raises her bow and cries 'Sorrow,' and shoots me."

"She does what?" Burne stared at him. "She shoots you? Does she kill you?"

"I don't know. It's a dream-I haven't died, yet."

"It's not a dream, and Talis is in it, too." The King's voice was rising. "Did she shoot him, too? What is she? Some nightmare out of the wood?"

Atrix rose restively. "I don't know." He paced a little, aware of men moving out of the path of his shadow, in case he kept his sorcery there. He came back to Burne's side, leaned against the table, trying to find his way back into the dream without dreaming. "She is not a nightmare. No. She is a mystery…" His voice faded; he heard the Hunter again, just before he had vanished at dawn. Sorrow, he had said, and then the moon set.

The hall had grown soundless again around Atrix. He stirred, seeing but not knowing what he saw, and quelling the terrible, urgent impatience he felt at his ignorance.

"What is it?" Burne asked tautly.

"I don't know… I need the prince's lenses."

"He saw her face through them," Burne sighed. "I knew she meant trouble. Help me. Please. He is all that Pelucir has left."

"I will find him," Atrix said. He stood silently again, trying to remember, past one night too full of sorcery and twenty barren years, what nameless shapes of beauty and mystery he had encountered that might point toward an undiscovered land. He saw the wood again in two worlds: one lifeless, dark, blanched with winter, the other drenched with light, green leaves trembling in a sweet, soundless wind, and both on the edge of Hunter's Field.

Burne seemed to glimpse them, too, as if Atrix's dreams and nightmares fashioned themselves just beyond the morning light. "Why," he asked slowly, "would you dream in Chaumenard of a wood in Pelucir?"

Atrix shook his head wordlessly, having no answer Burne wanted to hear. "I will find Talis," he promised again. "But it's her wood, not yours, I must enter, and I do not know the way."

"You'll find it," Burne said. "You can do anything. You are Atrix Wolfe."

He turned in his chair, gestured to the waiting crowd, and they entered, tentatively, uncertainly, to meet the legend of Chaumenard who was, when the King turned back to him, no longer there.