CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR #2
She turned her back on him. Her wings extended, hiding her from him, cloaking her. If he didn’t have that color tattooed on his heart, she could almost vanish into the darkening trees.
“You’re at a clear disadvantage,” she said over her shoulder, “so I’ll give you a head start.”
“How honorable of you.” He tossed her knife to the ground at her feet. “Happy hunting.”
She laughed, a brittle, flaking sound that might have been a sob.
He didn’t stop to determine which.
The phoenix feather was still in his pocket.
Slightly crushed after his jaunt with Aquila and Claude, but still intact.
Like most things he’d seen and felt since he’d entered the Lichtenwald, he couldn’t explain it, but from the moment he’d picked it up, it had seemed to lead him, a dowsing rod for its former owner.
It took him to the meadow; it showed him the bird’s tracks.
The phoenix had been there recently, said the tracks, or the feather, or the leaves; but it had since moved on.
Unfortunately, before he could determine where to find it, Aquila and Claude had found him.
Then Anya had. Again.
Did magic lead her to him, as magic changed her, piece by piece, into something inhuman?
Or perhaps it was as she said of the flowers in the grotto – something not so distinct.
Something both and not quite magic, both skill and intuition, both rational and irrational.
Both, and all. The should, the shouldn’t, the could be. The way of the world.
You ask for too much, she told him.
You do not demand enough, he had wanted to say.
He twirled the feather in between his forefinger and his thumb. Even this, severed, had magic.
There must be a way, he thought. There must.
He stared at his injured hand, at the lines that determined all his past and all his future. He ran a thumb over the cut along the length of his palm. Nasty, and deep.
By his throbbing head and weakened limbs, the faint tingling in his fingertips, he knew drawing the blood to repair it would only hurt him worse.
It needed to be stitched, but that was beyond his capability.
He would simply have to bandage it and move on.
A shudder ran through him as he pictured finishing the job, peeling the spell clean off his palm.
It would surely have the same effect as cutting his hand off at the wrist – endless, maddening pain; pain with only one end.
He had already proven he would do anything to avoid that fate. Aid the king’s sadistic fantasies. Let Terrence die a gruesome, terrifying death. Leave Anya to her curse’s mercy.
Write the spell for Aquila. Had the torture lasted any longer, he would have given in, giving the count the leverage to rally the nobles, to install himself as king – he, who was no better.
And then they would have killed Sy anyway. Or, worse, sent him back where he started, to the life he would do anything to escape.
But it wouldn’t be the same life, would it?
It would be a worse one. Worse because he had seen it could be different, had seen the spectrum of color life could contain; worse because now, if he went back, he would live the rest of his life knowing he had tried to escape, had seen the radiant light ahead, and had failed to reach it.
If before his life had been a duller, flatter picture than what he had once dreamed, now, when he had seen the reality denied to him, it would be a living death. An outline. A shadow.
When Aquila and Claude had captured him, they had confiscated but kept his pen kit – intending, he suspected, to use it as proof of his unfortunate demise at the hands of the Lichtenwald. He found it inside the tent and wrapped his cut hand in a clean bandage.
For provisions, he found a molding loaf of seed bread wrapped in linen and a sack of apples. Apples, he found, now turned his stomach; but food was food. He took a length of slim rope, a water skin, a compass. Parched, he drained the water. He would find more later.
There was a map under a soft pillow. Nothing like Anya’s map.
It was intricate, industrial, printed in expensive ink.
It gave special detail to county and national borders, to elevation and to roads; but none to the contours of the groves of trees, the landmarks that warned of monsters and hidden wonders, the trails that led to safety or to doom.
He left it.
Lastly, he approached Aquila’s corpse. The arrow had pierced straight through his skull. Rotting, he thought, is too good for you. The man’s skinning knife had fallen to the ground. Sy took it and slotted it into his satchel.
After locating a pouch that resembled Anya’s ammunition pouch, he lifted the rifle from the already stiffening corpse, tried holding it as Anya had shown him with her shotgun.
He felt like a child holding a toy. Sighing, he pulled the strap over his shoulder.
At the least, he could keep anyone else – like, say, Claude – from using it.
The sun was setting, which meant it was very late.
He needed rest, but he did not relish the thought of spending the night with Aquila’s corpse – or encountering Claude once more.
Now he knew all the things Claude was capable of – the things he, himself, was capable of – he hoped he never encountered the man again.
He did not know what he would do if he did.
And he did not have time to spare. Two nights and one day. The morning after the next would mark Midsummer’s Day; the summer solstice.
He could not travel by dark, but he could get as far as he could before the light vanished. He held the feather aloft, considering it skeptically. Whatever spell had propelled him forward that day seemed to have dissipated. He remembered the way Perrine spoke to her falcon, to the fire.
He cleared his throat. “Lead the way,” he said. Then, for good measure, added, sheepishly, “Please.”
Nothing happened.
“After me, then,” he muttered.
As he walked through the balmy twilight, each looming tree painted black against a carnivalesque purple and orange, he juggled his thoughts: dropping them, catching them in midair, dropping them again.
The phoenix, the spell, the roots and stones in his path.
The bloody skin rubbed raw on his heels.
The spell again. Curses, contracts, conditions.
A smile. A sigh. Fingertips on his spine.
The distant, lonely sound of a fox crying.
The throbbing pain in his hand. The rustle of leaves behind him in the growing dark.
The dark. Firelight. Skin touching skin.
Breath in sync, sweet as flowers, sweet as sharing sweat.
The spore still had a hold on him, making the balancing act twice as difficult – it would pass in an hour or so, Anya had said, and she couldn’t lie. She wouldn’t, even if she could. Not even to save herself.
But Anya had saved him. Whatever she said – whatever she felt – that was what she had done.
The sky darkened. Frogs sang their gloomy songs; bats darted in and out of his vision. The silence followed him in the spaces between. He found a shallow outcrop of rock to rest under until morning. But he did not rest.
He thought. Not about the future, or the past. Not about beauty, or comfort, and certainly not about love. There was no point. He saw now: such things were not hoarded because they were priceless.
No; like the dragon, they were fantasies.
Safety was an illusion. Knowledge, beyond the barren facts of survival – beyond eat, or be eaten; rule, or be ruled – only a treasured distraction for the pampered and foolish. The future, a fable.
A fantasy might inspire, might enrich the spirit, but only for a time.
When that time passed, when the morning gave way to night, when the hungry things of the world came clawing, beauty could not save anyone’s life.
Beauty could not stop hunger, or cold; could not stop a boot from crushing his throat.
The truth, ugly and pale and relentless, was in the game, in the struggle. Ultimately, trapped within the shell of one’s body, one could only ever struggle alone. The only fate he could effect was his own. Just as it had ever been.
The way of the world. The world had been showing him as much, all his life, and he’d ignored it. Now, he saw.
If he told himself enough times, he might begin to believe it.