CHAPTER TWELVE #3
Except the Wryneck River. The Wryneck, he knew.
He could not tell direction without a compass, but knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Marked east on the map was the Warbler River, the Wryneck’s source.
It cut a straight path from the northern mountains, winding south and serpentine through the forest, at one point running straight alongside Augur Meadow.
If he could find the Warbler, he could follow it, refill his pen-cleaning bottles, and drink of it; he was parched, and he had left Anya’s water skin at their resting place.
It gave him some comfort he hadn’t been beast enough to steal that from her.
If she ever went back. She had been gone awfully long.
With the prize, she could easily replace her ancient gun.
His note suddenly felt pathetically foolish, as did leaving any of her supplies.
Finishing his meal, he looked up, squinting at the dim sunlight shining through the leaves.
The morning sun slowly heated the forest. With trees instead of brick buildings as a buffer, with damp earth as a floor instead of stone and tarred gravel, it was fathoms cooler than even the mildest summer morning in ?bender.
Despite the circumstances, he found the forest air restored him almost as much as the food.
Morning – the sun was in the east. It took him a moment to find it through the leaves. When he did, he turned his face to its light. So long as he kept it there, at least until midday, he would meet the river eventually. He hoped.
As he walked, cheered by the returned (and interminable) trilling of the songbirds high above him, he pulled free a scrap of paper from his kit, along with his drawing board and a pencil.
It was better to practice with an ink pen, but he could hardly do that and walk at the same time.
Managing a pencil was challenge enough. But catching the phoenix was only the start; the hunt would not end until Edgard was satisfied, and only a spellscribe could do that.
Until the correct spell was found – or made – whoever held the phoenix would become as much a target as the phoenix itself.
He still wasn’t sure he even needed the bird; only that he mustn’t let anyone else get hold of it until he was.
Until he had both, he couldn’t be sure of his freedom. He had no time to waste.
An old habit, one long abandoned, rekindled by something Anya had said.
What’s inside you can betray you without you even noticing.
Her words had pierced him, more than she could have possibly intended.
Or had she? Was it a cloaked admission of her own deception?
He hadn’t thought so, at first. But his first impression had been rather profoundly mistaken.
It didn’t matter. She was gone, and one constant remained. Something inside him, betraying him for years. The glyphs on his palm.
He traced them, tried differentiating them, picking them apart.
But it was as impossible as it had ever been.
The glyphs were none he knew – he could make no sense of them.
There was the phantom of heart he had always imagined; if he squinted, he could almost see an altered form of the glyph for blood, and, combining this line here with that circle there, he could make the glyph for red.
He was not sure what he was even looking for. A glyph for transform, for bird, for life everlasting?
There were none, not on his palm and not anywhere. Nor for bind. Nor for free.
He nearly threw his pencil aside in frustration.
Instead, he dropped it as he stumbled over an antlered skull wrapped in a thick tangle of vines, landing on his knees, scraping his hands on the forest floor.
The pencil disappeared in the growth. Sighing, he sat up, picked bits of bark from his palms, ignoring the empty stare of the skull beside him.
The spell on his palm was a dead end, for now.
Better to pay attention where he stepped.
If he lived through this, if he managed to find the bird and concoct this harebrained spell and not kill Edgard in the process, his indenture would be ended and the spell on his palm would be negated, severing the bond.
He would demand to keep his eyes open. He would never witness its making – but witnessing its unmaking would tell him more than he’d ever been able to grasp on his own.
If he could make any sense at all of this thing that bound him, the source of all his woe, it seemed to him he could make better sense of the person he was.
The person he let himself become. Who did everything in spite, who knew nothing but clawing, who would smother any light for a chance to escape the shadows.
Who played a game he despised for a prize far more easily lost than won.
Freedom. A prize he, everyone, was owed, without condition or games.
Nevertheless, he must play. He would not let it make him a monster.
But, with Anya’s shotgun and map in his possession – with her hurt expression sharp in his mind’s eye, far more hurt than he imagined he could ever make her look – he worried it already had.
“Sylas Cassirer?”
He rose to his feet, turning in the direction of the call, fearing something dreadful and absurd, like a crow the size of a man, or a talking boulder.
Close; but it was only Terrence.