Twenty- three
Atrix stood on Hunter's Field.
The Queen's vanishing wood had left him there, the green mist of leaves and the lovely light fading around him, then showing him a startling reflection of them: the wide green field across which his shadow stretched endlessly, and the dazzling late-afternoon light which drew the shadow of the King's castle across half the field. He looked around a little dazedly, expecting the crags and harsh winds of Chaumenard. Then he settled Talis more securely in his arms, to take one last step into the castle, where he could finally see how much damage his twisted making had done to Pelucir's heir.
He could barely see to take the step. Sun streaked across his eyes, burned painfully; his heart, too, seemed scored with fire. He wanted to turn to stone where he stood, a dark monument to the dead on Hunter's Field. He wanted to return to the Queen's wood, bury himself in the ground over which the Queen walked, and never speak or think again. But he could not turn to stone with the prince of Pelucir unconscious in his arms, and he had to seek, not the Queen of the Wood, but Burne Pelucir. The burden in his arms was a shadow's weight; it was his heart, carrying all the memories of the field, the sorrows of the wood, that made any movement he might make futile, any direction wrong.
He blinked his vision clear of tears or weariness or light, whatever blinded him, and saw the Hunter.
The Hunter stood in the light as if he had just been made, forged out of night and fire and the raven's eye, his horns holding not only the dark moon, but reaching out to swallow the setting sun in the sky. He seemed, in daylight, an impossible spell for Atrix to have cast, or for any mage; he belonged to no one, and all of Atrix's battles meant no more to him than the upraised swords of warriors he had left splintered in the grass around them. He did not even look at Atrix. His dark gaze and the eyes of all his hounds were on the prince in Atrix's arms.
Atrix felt all the fierce and icy winds of Chaumenard sweep through him at once. His shout, so loud it was at first soundless and then shattered windows in the castle, drew faces to the walls and turrets. He heard answering shouts, as guards saw what stood in daylight on Hunter's Field: the Hunter and his maker and the heir of Pelucir, motionless in the mage's arms. Atrix turned away from the sun, hid Talis within his shadow on the grass. Then he pulled apart his making.
He drew the fire out of the horns and scattered it across the field. He sent the dark moon spinning into the sky, where it hung like a dark eye, watching, expressionless. He felt the ghosts of Hunter's Field rousing around him then, and loosed the hounds among them. Pulling at an arm or dragging down a horse and rider, they snapped at memory, at air. He drew ravens out of the Hunter's mind and sent them swirling around the Hunter, so that when Atrix grasped his horns, there was only a mass of feathers beneath them, jabbing heads and dark wings beginning to fleck with blood. He held the Hunter's horns and shaped a starving deer beneath them: They dwindled to carry time and famine instead of the hidden moon.
He swept away the ravens and looked into the Hunter's eyes.
The Hunter stood again in light, carrying the new moon and the ancient fires in his horns, his hounds at his knees, his horse as black as night beside him. All of Atrix's power had troubled him little more than dead leaves blowing against him. Atrix, staring at him, trembling, asked helplessly, "Who are you? Out of what battlefield of the heart did I summon you?"
"Xirta Eflow."
The battle trumpets of Pelucir sounded from the castle. The gates swung wide; Burne Pelucir led an army of household guards and guests and scarred, seasoned warriors onto Hunter's Field. They flowed into a single line spanning the field behind the King. Atrix heard their secret fury and dread clamor across the silence. The Hunter, scenting it, turned and mounted his dark horse. He paused, his dead moon-eyes holding Atrix's eyes. "Drawkcab," he said. "I am what you see when you see Atrix Wolfe."
His hounds streaking like shadows across the windblown grass, he rode to meet the King.
Atrix, stunned for a breath, felt his own name shock through him, in a heartbeat so powerful and painful, he thought his heart had broken.
Then he reached into his dreams to shape a making that would stop the Hunter on Hunter's Field.
He made it out of leaves and light, and warm, scented air so still that time seemed to end within it. He made it of the golden shadows of white deer, and the gold in their eyes, and in the leaves lying in a pool of sunlit gold around the oak. He took the paths of sun and moon, wound them together, ivory and gold, and braided into them the dreaming noonday shadows, the misty shadows of the moon. He took the fierce beauty in the owl's eye, the flight of white doves soaring into light, the leap of hare beneath the moon, the lightning tangled in the golden oak.
He reached backward into memory, beyond the endless winter night, and found, buried behind the Hunter's eyes, all he had loved in Chaumenard.
Barren crags and ancient forests, winds scented with honey, wolf, wildflowers, swift water so pure it tasted like the wind, deep snow lying tranquilly beneath moonlight, summer light cascading down warm stone under sky so bright it held no color: These he put into his making. Tranquil nights he spent within stone, listening to parchment pages rustle around him while the stars turned overhead, the magic in young mages' eyes, quick and lucent as flame, he spun out of memory into magic. He took the Healer's powerless past and turned it into power: the newborn animals in his hands, trembling with their first breaths; the faces of children who roamed with him, their eyes alive to every color, every shadowy movement in the underbrush, their voices, calling him Healer; his healing hands. Shapes he had taken in his long life mingled together as swiftly as his body remembered them: the white owl in winter, the golden hawk, ferret and weasel and mink, stone, wind, the tree smelling of sun-soaked pitch, water thundering over stone, endlessly falling, the stag that drank the water, the White Wolf. He remembered faces he had loved, of friend and lover, teacher and ruler, their eyes speaking his name, Atrix Wolfe, beginning to smile; he worked that name in their eyes into his making. He fashioned with what came to him, what had freed itself out of his heart, so quickly he did not know what he shaped. He only knew that something grew out of him, blazed brighter and brighter in his eyes, until, trying to see his making, to set it free on Hunter's Field, he could see only light.
He turned blindly, standing, it seemed, in the eye of the sun. Then he heard the odd silence on the field, as if, around him, no one moved, no one even thought. The light faded at his sudden fear; he began to see again, a rippling corner of Talis' cloak, his hand lying in the grass. Color returned to the world: green, the black of his shadow, the prince's face staring up at him out of one unbroken lens, and one lens splintered and flecked with blood.
Talis swallowed, but he could not seem to speak. Then he smiled, and Atrix saw the magic, quick and lucent as flame in his face, and the name his eyes gave back to the mage.
Burne's army, still lining the field, was spellbound, it seemed; they stared at him, unharmed but unable to move or speak. Then Burne Pelucir broke free of the spell, rode across the field alone. Atrix glanced swiftly around: The only shadows he found were human, stretched long by the setting sun across the blazing grass.
He said to Talis, "Where is the Hunter?"
"Where shadows go," the prince said elliptically. He pushed himself up slowly, clung dizzily to the ground, trying to steady it under his hands as he sat. Burne reached them. Like Talis, he seemed stunned by something; staring at Atrix, he could not speak. Then he looked at Talis, and found words.
"Where's your other eye?"
"It saw too much in the wood."
"Did you leave it there?"
He touched it, and winced. "No."
"I can heal him," Atrix promised. Burne dismounted, knelt next to Talis. The mage drew their eyes; in their silence, again he heard the stillness that had fallen over the field. He searched it with his thoughts, wary, perplexed. "Where is my making?"
"Gone," Burne said. "When we could see again, there were a few shadows on the ground. Horse, a hunter, hounds. Then they became shadows of deer and ravens and a tree. And then they burned away."
"But I made something else-the making that destroyed the Hunter. Where is it?"
They looked at him, wordless again. Burne spoke at last. "There was nothing else," he said. "There was only you."
Talis dreamed.
He was in the keep, opening a spellbook that had no maker's name on it. The spells were simple, precise, written for beginning mages. On each page was a single word, the name of an object for contemplation. Wood, he said, and became wood. He turned a page. Stone, he said, and became stone. Fire, he said, and became fire. He turned pages, spoke words, each clear and unambiguous: water, light, leaf, and became water, light, leaf. He felt the morning sun on his hands between words. The door to the room stood open, unguarded; no ghosts moved along the walls. He felt each word in his mouth, listened to it as he spoke, melted into it easily, and then became himself again. He turned a page. Saro, he said, the first ambiguous word, and woke.
He opened his eyes, saw noon light sliding down the silken hangings at his chamber windows. Then he saw the mage, seated beside the window, his head in his arms on the casement, asleep. He wore a long, loose robe that Burne had given him, a shade paler than the warm light falling over him. Talis lay still, watching him, seeing the mage in the field shaping himself into all the magic in the world at once, each shape strange and wild, and more beautiful, more haunting, than the last, until there was no room anywhere, on the field or in memory, for the Hunter or the ghosts of Hunter's Field.
Talis stirred finally, groped on the table beside the bed where he kept his lenses.
The broken lens was whole again. He put them on, remembering Atrix's hands lightly touching his bloody eye, the back of his head, drawing pain out of him, spinning memory into a dream, and dream into sleep. His healing, apparently, had extended itself to Talis' lenses. He stood up too quickly, grabbed for the table and clung to it until the dark receded. Then he walked carefully to the window.
"Atrix?" He touched Atrix's shoulder. The mage woke slowly, pulling himself out of some bottomless well of sleep. Straightening, he blurred a little into stone and light, as if his human body were an arbitrary shape, and too stiff, now, for comfort.
"I fell asleep," he said, surprised.
"There's no need for you to sleep on stone."
"I got used to it."
"I had a dream about your spellbook," Talis said, and Atrix looked at him silently, his eyes streaking silver in the light. "That the words in it simply meant what they said, nothing more. That it was no longer dangerous."
"It's not," Atrix said. He rose, dropped his hand gently on Talis' shoulder. "I was looking through it just before I came in here to see you. You were dreaming of the mage in the keep, as I dreamed about you once, using that book."
"Strange," Talis breathed. "It seems so simple, for something so powerful…"
"There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language." He turned Talis' face toward the light with his fingers and studied his work. "You came within one word of losing that eye," he said grimly. "If not your life."
"Saro," Talis said softly, thinking of her within the ring of fire. "I woke up and found a tree trying to bury me, and Saro talking, making bargains for my life with an oak root. Even now, it seems like some very peculiar nightmare."
"It was just that," Atrix said with feeling. "I couldn't free you. The oak refused to give you to me-I was the enemy within the wood." He stopped abruptly; Talis saw the memories well into his eyes, stark and terrible, before he turned away, looked out over Hunter's Field.
The bone beside his eye began to ache, the first touch of pain. Talis rested his brow against the cool stones, watching the wood above the field. "I wonder…"
"What?" Atrix said after a moment.
"About Saro. There are so many things I wish I could ask her. But I don't think the Queen will permit anyone human into her wood again, and Saro would never come back here."
"I will never see that wood," Atrix said softly, "except in dreams. But you found the Queen's child for her, and you found me, and your heart found its way into her wood."
Talis was silent, feeling the dry lick of fire again behind his eye. "Not always," he said. He turned away from the wood, touching his lenses straight. 'Thank you for fixing these."
"I was curious," Atrix said, "why you wore them, how much you could see…" His face, no longer haunted, looked gentler, but something of all the shapes he had taken, of hawk and wolf and wind, seemed very close to the surface. Talis, looking at him, caught a dizzying glimpse of power and freedom that he would never find in Pelucir.
"Where will you go?" he asked, not wanting to hear, filled with a sudden, hopeless longing to follow the mage into all his wild magic. "Back to the wolves?"
"I'll return to Chaumenard eventually. But not to the wolves." He touched Talis again, lightly, as if he had heard, beneath the question, all that Talis did not say. "I find I like to heal. It's what I've done, in some fashion, for twenty years. But first I promised Burne something."
"The last time you promised him something it was your life."
"I know," Atrix said. "I reminded him." He seemed to sense the sudden, jarring tangle of Talis' thoughts; he added dispassionately, "I did not want to run from anything again."
"Yes, but-"
"Burne said that the mage who cast that spell on Hunter's Field twenty years ago vanished with the Hunter." His head bowed slightly, turned away from the light to meet Talis' gaze. "Burne is wrong. But he is far more interested in my life. He told me that he had never imagined what could be done with magic, since all he had ever seen were your uncontrollable spells and my deadly sorcery. He asked me to stay and teach you."
"He did." Talis gripped stone as they floated suddenly and settled again. The bone beside his eye was pounding. "You're staying."
"Yes."
"Thank you." He loosed stone to grip the mage. "Thank you."
"It might lay a few ghosts to rest… Those in the keep are gone," he added. "The walls were quiet around me when I worked."
"You left no room for shadows."
"Except in the heart." Atrix's eyes strayed again to the green field. "Burne asked me why I didn't do that twenty years ago. He said even Riven of Kardeth would have been stunned into submission. If I could have done it, I would have. I wonder when in the past twenty years I learned…"
"You used the words we gave you on that battlefield."
"I should have used a different language." He drew Talis away from the light, took off his lenses. Fires receded under his gaze; his calm face grew slowly distant, a memory, an ancient stone, the face of the wind, the Wolf. "Sleep now."
Talis dreamed, this time, of a still wood, oak trees standing in the rich light, remembering, and dropping their memories one by one, a leaf here, there, to the ground. He woke again at evening, and remembered the Hunter, the sharp edge of night, the bone-white scythe of the moon.
But when he went to the window, the field lay peacefully in his blurred vision, and the moon was full. A square of light from a high tower fell onto the grass. The keep window, he realized: Atrix was up there, for no one else would go there.
No one ever goes there…
There was a tap on his door; supper, he assumed, and called, but no one came. He rose, blind in the darkened room, and opened the door.
His heart saw before he did: the pale, shining hair, long and wild, like her mother's, the skin as pale as birch, the long, elegant bones of her face, that seemed to belong to something that ran free in secret places and spoke a different language.
She carried his supper on a tray. He took it from her wordlessly. When she met his eyes, he wondered how he could have ever forgotten that dusty gold, the color of ripe acorns.
She said simply, "No one in my mother's wood knew if you were still alive. So I came here, to the kitchen, to ask. They knew. They always know."
He still stared at her, holding the tray between them. "You came here. I didn't think you would ever come back here."
"I'm used to this world," she said.
"Come in. Please. Stay and talk to me." He glanced into the darkness; the fire he coaxed from a candle sputtered blue and died. She looked at it as she entered; flame bloomed, under her eyes, in candle after candle, all around the room, until again they were circled in fire. Entranced, he turned slowly, feeling as if she had enclosed his heart within her magic.
"In the kitchen, there was always a fire awake, watching with me. I learned how it speaks before I remembered words." She sat down on the rumpled silk at the foot of the bed; still wordless, he stood watching the candlelight brush an opal's fire into her hair. Then he remembered the tray, and set it between them on the bed. She looked around the room curiously. "Things in this world don't change unless you change them."
"Do they in yours?"
"Colors change. Things appear, then become something else. You know. You were there."
"Not long enough. To know that, I mean."
She looked at him, her eyes as clear and golden as wine in a cup. "Long enough," she said, "to know other things."
He drew a deep breath. "Yes. It was not easy to return here. You helped, giving me a mystery."
Her brows crooked a little; he wondered if, in either world, she had learned what, in both worlds, she had been. "I gave you something?"
"Something to think about. The missing spellbook."
"Oh." She nodded, remembering. "The King was shouting at you. I never used it, so I brought it back."
"You never-"
"I couldn't remember how to read. The undercooks read it to each other like a cookbook. But it didn't work for them."
He stared at her. "Then how did you learn all that magic down there?"
She was silent; he saw a memory shiver through her. "My father. I had visions of him, the Hunter with his burning horns and his dead eyes. He woke the magic in me, that I had learned so long before. I didn't remember him-I was so frightened of him-I only knew the kitchen."
Her voice shook; too many memories were crowding into her eyes. He reached out quickly, took her hand, held it against his lips, and then against his heart. "You saved my life. Even Atrix Wolfe said that. I wanted so much to see you again, to talk to you."
"I hoped you would talk to me," she said, and he saw the long shadow cast across twenty years, of loneliness in her eyes. "So many of the words I know belong in this world, not my mother's. So many things I know, she would not understand. But I thought you might. No one else knows both worlds."
"Yes." He held her hand more tightly, in both of his. "Yes. No one else but you. Though you know more kitchen words than I do."
"Pastry," she said, her face quieting again. "Scrub brush. Mince. Pluck. Spit-boy."
"What?"
"They turn the spits over the fires, and feed the fires, and sleep next to them. Their eyes become fire, and their hearts."
He gazed at her, entranced again. "There are so many things I don't know."
"How you found me in the kitchen," she said.
"How you found the spellbook in the keep."
"How you found your way into my mother's wood."
"How much you saw, in that cauldron of yours. And how you lived, through all the days and years down there. Will you tell me that?"
"And what happened that night, in the human world, when the mage stole my father out of our world. Will you tell me that?"
"I will. Or he will. And why, after all that happened to you and to her, the Queen let you return here."
Her hand slid gently from his hold. "My mother did not want me to come," she said slowly."But she did not stop me. She said that she heard your heart calling out to her sometimes and she began to understand how she gave you something to love, and then took it away again." He looked away from her then; his empty hands wandered over the tray, toyed with bread, broke it. He tried to speak; there seemed no words for what his heart had glimpsed, and no real world to say them in. "She said that if I could find a way to you, I could come." She paused, watching him. "Eyes speak," she said softly. "Hands, pulling swans apart, speak. In all those years I could not speak, I learned so many languages."
His eyes rose again, caught hers, wide, questioning. "How did you find your way here?"
"I needed to," she said simply. "Do you want me to come again?"
He opened his mouth to answer. Then he answered her without words.
She took the tray back down to the kitchen later, knowing that the tray-mistress would be counting scratches, and the plate-washers would still be at the sinks, and the head cook debating tomorrow's meals, and everyone picking at leftovers. She walked down the stairs and watched their faces turn toward her, grow wondering, mute, as if they were all under some enchantment and only she could break the spell.
She said, "Tell me all your names."
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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[ 2004-v1 html proofed by an innocent bystander and formatted by AnneH]