CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The mystery of Anya Degen had been further unveiled, the shadow more illuminated.
The glyphs on her enchanted arrow were all on his hand.
While Anya slept, after he’d made them a fire, he’d copied them down and compared each of them to the mark on his palm. Every one had a place. In fact, if he arranged them in just such a way, he could remake the mark completely.
He did not know all of them; he’d never seen them before, but he felt a strange feeling, like in his dream, the knowing, the vast. Felt it in his heart; in his gut.
He let it fill him. The shapes came naturally, grew from his mind to his hand, from his pencil to the paper, sprouting and curling like the form of a budding leaf.
He didn’t like to leap to conclusions. Time being of the essence – three days, by his count – a leap of faith was the only way forward.
He had to assume the arrow was meant to bind the phoenix to the witch. A familiar, Anya had said. If he recalled correctly, some kind of psychic as well as physical link. One which could only be broken by magic or death. Thought to be pure superstition.
A psychic and physical link, like the one binding him to his debt. To the king.
Superstition, indeed.
If one’s soul could be bound to another’s in such a way; why not their soul to another’s body? Say, Edgard’s to the phoenix’s?
Now there was only the question of the phoenix itself.
The phoenix, and Anya.
He refused to believe he couldn’t help her. If he got the phoenix before her, he could. Somehow. Probably.
Certainly, more impossible tasks had been accomplished. Such as Anya somehow managing to leave him, despite what she had said the night before.
That absolutely won’t do, he chided himself as he pulled his clothes back over his aching, scale-dusted limbs.
He had known this would happen. They both had.
It was better she had left without saying goodbye.
Easier. And anyway, he certainly wasn’t one to complain that his bed was empty by the time he woke up, whether that bed was a third-hand mattress in a closet of an apartment, or a bed of flowers in an enchanted grotto.
So he ignored the pain like a dozen arrows in his chest, and he set to work. He had three days; he best make the most of them.
The Warbler River, as far as he knew, was still to the east, and the morning was clear and bright.
After clambering out of the cavern, marking his way by the morning sun, and determining the vague sense of it, he set in that direction.
He tried to embody Anya’s ease of navigation, marking the trees by their leaves, the ground by any odd-shaped stones he could identify, checking for signs and trails.
To his subdued delight, he noticed he was barely stumbling.
It was because of this careful attention, less than an hour later, he knew had he ended up back exactly where he had started.
“Shit,” he hissed under his breath.
As if in response – or mockery – a robin chirped bright as sunshine on a branch to his left.
“And which way would you go?” he asked it testily.
The robin lifted from its branch. It landed on another, a little further ahead. On a nagging hunch, Sy followed it. Again, it lifted and landed further away.
“This way, I suppose,” he muttered, following it.
He followed the robin in this manner for several hours and seemed to make actual progress.
It was windy, the kind of wind that signaled a coming storm.
Under the trees, it felt wilder, more dangerous than it did in the city.
The wind seemed to shift with every gust, sending branches creaking, the leaves shuddering and chattering, making the pines whisper and sigh. The forest was alive with anticipation.
Around midday, the robin left him. It seemed as good a time as any to stop and eat.
He settled under the leaves of a beech, surrounded by exuberant ferns.
As he forced the last of his salted mackerel down his throat, he listened to the rustling of the leaves.
He had never truly stopped to listen to the wind, to register the different notes it made through grass, through leaves, through twigs on the ground.
The wind was calmer, but still strong. As it slipped through the ferns, it almost seemed to speak.
Even a stagnant stone, given time in the ground, may grow, it said. Even a worm has the spark of life.
The voice was silent, but resounding, clarifying.
It filled him with – not with peace, exactly; it was too stimulating to be peace.
A sort of communion. Like the unexpected feeling that filled him when he saw a painting, or heard a song, and thought, There, like that.
That’s how I feel. Just exactly like that.
Or one even stronger. In the comforting dark; in the vibrant underground. In the steady glow of fireflies and the bewitching scent of hundreds of impossible flowers. In the touch of soft skin, the taste of tongue, of stolen time.
Everything, everything felt more vivid, more colorful.
Shades he’d never been able to see. He felt the sun on his skin, in his hair, the warmth radiating into his bones.
He smelled the earth beneath him, loam and clay.
He saw a fallen tree, dead, but not static; crawling with beetles, nourishing mosses, sheltering mice and marmots from the sharp claws of hungry birds.
On the tree behind him, he noticed a stack of white mushrooms, long and round with dangling tendrils.
In the ferns around him, smaller orange mushrooms budded like spring dandelions.
He felt compelled to pop one onto his tongue.
Eat nothing you didn’t kill or bring yourself, Anya told him.
But would he not be killing this mushroom, this fruit, by plucking it?
Across a sunny patch of clover, he noted a squirrel clutching one of the orange earth-fruits between its small hands, gnawing on the spongy surface.
He pulled a nearby mushroom from the ferns.
He didn’t bother dusting the dirt from its stem.
It was chewy between his teeth, but pleasantly so.
It tasted good, of spice, like black pepper, of apricot and spring earth.
There, said the silence. There.
The robin returned. “Ah, there you are,” he said to it. “Just in time. I think I’m going mad.”
Madness was the only logical explanation.
Why he kept going in circles. Why he felt as if the forest was a living creature rooting itself inside of him.
Why he kept letting his future slip away from him.
Why he kept thinking of Anya’s eyes on him in the dark when he should instead be thinking of how in all the seven skies he was going to turn Edgard into a bird, to make his mark on history, to free himself.
Behind him, the wind carried the sound of rustling branches. Voices. Not silent, not resounding. Human. After a moment, he recognized Sabina’s.
Heart leaping, he stood and peered around the beech’s trunk.
Her jacket was missing, and her dress and hair had the look of having been soaked and recently sun-dried. The hem of her skirt was torn and coated in mud. She wore flowers in her hair, unpinned and wild with curls, and around her neck. Rowan, he noted.
She was accompanied by a tall woman with close-cropped, feathery hair and a falcon on her shoulder.
Perrine, the huntress from Preule Anya had mentioned.
Anya’s friend. She must be a fine hunter to have Anya’s regard, but both she and Sabina looked as if they’d been dragged by the ankle along the forest floor.
Sabina saw him and immediately looked as if she would burst into tears. “Sylas,” she cried, rushing toward him.
“You’re sure that’s him?” called Perrine. “You said scribes can change faces.”
“Absolutely.” She held him by the shoulders, at arm’s length, examining him. “No one else could capture his aura of refined disdain.”
“Pleasure to see you too, Sabina.”
“See?” She collapsed into his arms. Noting the genuine distress under her mischievous tone, he hugged her back, tightly.
He’d been more worried for her than he’d realized.
“Sy, it’s been terrible. There were these horrid little beetles that eat your skin and bones.
We were with Anya, and she tried to lure them away, but they came after us anyway. We think – we think she–”
“What?” he demanded, alarmed. “What happened? When?”
Perrine’s face was white. She shifted her rifle, startling her bird into the air and onto her other shoulder. “Yesterday. Anya sacrificed herself for us. She stayed behind to lure the buzzard beetles away, but they were on us moments later. They must have…they must have made quick work of her.”
Yesterday. Relief flooded him. “No; she survived. I was with her most of yesterday evening. We ran into the mimic. Anya killed it.”
Perrine’s face phased through several shades at his words; first elation, then suspicion, then relief. Finally, pride.
“The mimic?” She laughed, crouched to her knees, astonished. The falcon lifted its wings to keep its balance. “Unbelievable. They’ll go wild with this at the lodge. What did it look like? Was it big? Did she get a trophy?”
“No. We had…other concerns,” he settled on.
Sabina folded her arms and stared at him.
“The phoenix,” he said, a little defensively. “We followed it into the mimic’s cavern, but it escaped.”
“And what did you do the rest of the night?” Sabina prodded.
“Gathered our bearings,” he said with finality, sensing her course and wanting to put her off.
“And you’re sure she’s alive,” Perrine said, rising. He felt her falcon’s uncanny stare as intensely as hers.
“She was when she left me this morning,” he supplied, and Perrine seemed to accept this as the best answer she could get.