CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
After a time, his eyes adjusted to the star dappled dark. He pulled out his notes, the alphabet of glyphs on Anya’s arrow. He found a pointed stick, practiced scrawling in the dirt. Arranged, rearranged, interpreted, guessed.
But not alone. There, said a spider who crawled in his stick’s path, redirecting it, making a jagged line.
And there, said a worm who poked its pink head from the ground, then back under, creating a looping smudge in another glyph, changing its meaning.
The shape of a millipede scuttling crookedly across a broken stump reminded him of a paraglyph he’d seen before in a book but couldn’t quite recall.
Sleep, he thought it was, as he added it.
By the time the sky turned from white gold to blue, he had composed a new spell.
There was no one word for it. Some of the glyphs he knew by heart; some he’d never seen before, so he made their meanings. Some were new – his creation, and the forest’s. Heart, will, flight, bind. Palingenesis. Transmigrate. One soul into another vessel.
The first impediment was also the largest: a spellscribe’s magic did not work on animals.
But magic did not look the same below the open sky, below this canopy of leaves, as it did in storied institutions. Above the moss-drenched humus and endless roots, magic did not require glyphs; and glyphs, when used, could have meanings previously unimagined.
It looked like Perrine’s; straightforward, a freely given exchange. It looked like David’s sleeping spell opening Sy to a realm where the forest could reach out its tendrils and tap into his dreams.
It looked like the witch’s curse turning Anya into a creature of the moon. She was other than human, now, and the magic still changed her.
A spellscribe’s magic may not work. But the forest’s magic? Now, that was another story.
Magic, soul, vessel, earth. The longer he lingered, the longer he listened, the less the distinctions mattered.
He suspected whatever magic the phoenix possessed was but a concentrated, more powerful iteration of the magic he had felt since stepping into the trees; the magic he felt entwining with his body, his spirit. The forest’s very heart.
Entwining, or consuming. He couldn’t say.
Perhaps this was but another, slower version of what the forest had done to Terrence, had tried to do to Sabina.
Less an eagle tearing carrion skin to shreds, more a fig slowly digesting the still living wasp, lured by the fruit’s scent into its warm, eclipsing cavity.
If he was the wasp, he sensed he was running out of room, of will, to escape. But once digested, the wasp became a part of the fruit. Of the tree. Of the forest.
With the rising sun igniting his bones, he climbed the warming outcrop and found a large, smooth, flat stone to sit on, giving him a bird’s eye view of the paraglyph he’d made in the dirt.
Carefully, he removed his kit. He copied the spell a dozen times with his pencil, each time perfect, each time precise.
For breakfast, he ate one of the apples, but only after checking it for blemishes.
Satisfied by its nicks and bruises, he choked it down, then fed the core and the rest of the apples to a nearby stream.
In return, he sought a test subject. Two. Two vessels. Two souls.
A toad he heard croaking and dug from the mud by the stream. A beetle the size of his curled fist, plucked from the bark of a fallen maple.
He corralled his test subjects into haphazard enclosures made from gathered sticks, clumsily catching the toad when it tried to hop over and away.
Using his pen, he wrote the spell for still. There was enough of the dust for both his subjects; he doled it out accordingly.
“Don’t move an inch,” he said to them as he sprinkled the dust over their heads, “until I’m done with you.”
Neither did. It was only by the toad’s breathing he was sure he hadn’t killed them both. Then...it worked. He allowed himself a moment to savor the small victory.
But the next bit was the bit that mattered.
He used his own blood and wrote the new spell with his pen.
Slow, careful, deliberate; not pressing too hard, or too light.
Frightened, all the while, that merely writing it out would backfire, turn him and everything around him to some horrid creature, to dirt, to ash.
But it didn’t. He cupped the paper in his palms; he blew. It made the same ruby dust as ever; he still had all his bones, all his organs.
A fair bit less blood, though. Ignoring the way the forest floor swam, he applied the spell to both the toad and the beetle.
It had no visible effect; although, he wasn’t exactly sure what he thought he should be seeing.
Wincing with a whispered apology, he killed the beetle, cutting open its soft underbelly with the skinning knife. He wrote the spell again, this time in the beetle’s blood and using his sharp stick instead of his pen. He applied that spell to the toad.
Again, nothing.
With the beetle now deceased, he needed another subject.
Remembering the guests he had attracted when he had been dead weight in his enchanted sleep, he set out his stolen seed bread, the linen peeled back enticingly toward the undergrowth beyond his small camp.
He crept behind a tree, and sat silent and still, watching.
And watching. Not silent and still enough.
Wary of spending too much blood, he promised himself he would only attempt it once.
He wrote the spell for still, and, after ensuring he was in a comfortable position, and had the empty apple sack nearby, rubbed the dust on the back of his neck.
A shudder ran through him before his limbs went weak but rigid, stiff as a stone cut from the earth.
Once more, he waited, now as part of the landscape as the tree at his back.
It was not long before a wood mouse shuffled out of the low grass, sniffing around his bag of food.
He waited impatiently for the spell to wear off, testing his muscles so he would be ready the instant it did.
The mouse was happily chewing through the molding bread when he lunged forward, trapping it in the empty sack.
It struggled against the cloth as he crafted another stunning spell.
When he opened the bag, it peered up at him, frozen, terrified.
“Feel no fear,” he entreated as he stunned it. He lifted it in his palm. Its scampering heartbeat slowed. “Feel no pain.”
Cupping it gently in his fingers, he nicked the mouse’s back with the skinning knife, then used its blood to write the spell. There was barely enough.
The frozen toad waited in its enclosure. Sy sprinkled the glittering dust over it.
The instant the spell touched it, the toad burst into tufts of bloody fur.
One sopping bit landed on Sy’s shirt, another in his hair. After scraping them off, he rushed into the brush to expel what remained of the apple in his stomach.
When he returned, panting, the mouse lay on its back, paws curled. Not even its tiny lungs moved. What remained of the toad was a rusty sludge of fur and whiskers. He bit back more vomit.
A gruesome failure – but a kind of success. The spell had transferred some essence of the mouse, as he had hoped.
Now the trick was in not blowing anything up.
By this time, it was midday. Anya had gained ground on him last night, but she could not travel in the daylight. He must move on. He did, trudging through the undergrowth, thoughts a swirl of fear and feathers.
After a time, he noticed a steady, hopping presence in the branches in front of him. The robin again. He must have been following it without realizing it, the way he had unconsciously landed in a rabbit run before he got caught in the snare.
A thought struck him. A toad was not a mouse, was not a bird. And none of them were human.
He rummaged around his bag until he found the rope. He unwound it, then took the knife to it, tearing and tying until he had a long, thin string.
Cruel to keep a bird caged, he thought, crumbling a bit of bread into his palm. To take away its choice.
Even so, he held the crumbs in his hand, willing the bird to come to him.
He had its attention. It leapt from one branch to another, closer, slowly closer. It landed on the ground in front of him, turning its head from side to side, suspicious, but hungry, tempted by the rare feast. Finally, it lifted, and fluttered into his open, waiting fingers.
He closed his hands around it. Carefully, trying his best not to hurt it, or to let it scratch his already injured hand, he tied the makeshift string around the robin’s ankle.
It fluttered, lifted, strained to get away – but it was caught.
He wrapped the string around his wrist, tethering it to him.
It yanked and pulled, flew in every direction.
It never quite gave up, settling on his shoulder for moments at a time before attempting another escape.
But it was caught.
Now he needed a human.
The sun sank lower and lower. The ache in his head, compounded by hunger and the strain of pressing onward when he desperately needed sleep, threatened to split his skull.
He grew increasingly desperate. He couldn’t test it on himself; if it worked the way he hoped, there would be no coming back from it. Not alone.
But he shouldn’t test it on anyone, on any animal.
Not after what happened to the toad. Not even if it were a success.
The fact he could consider it at all – was it blood loss?
Hunger? Desperation? Fear? Perhaps he had always been this way – had only needed the right environment to lure out the vicious thing he’d always already been becoming.
He was contemplating this complete degradation of his ethics with startling indifference when he heard a gunshot. The robin startled off his shoulder, then, denied the sky, came back.
The sound made him uneasy; the last thing he wanted to do was rush toward it. But it might be the phoenix. He had to see.
He followed the direction he believed he heard the sound. Nearly an hour passed, and he found nothing. He was on the verge of giving up when he nearly tripped over Claude’s corpse.
The other man was leaned against a tree, pale as a grub. A gunshot wound leaked what looked like fresh blood from his thigh. His pistol was dropped in the dirt a few yards away. Sy remembered how careless he had been, waving it around as if it were a dry paintbrush.
Don’t point at anything you don’t want dead.
All at once, the picture filled out. Claude had been carrying his pistol, loaded and haphazard.
Perhaps he had been frightened; perhaps he had merely slipped his finger.
Regardless, he shot himself in the thigh, shredding his femoral artery.
He’d made it to this tree to try to patch himself up and promptly gone into shock as he bled to death.
But – Sy leaned closer. Claude’s chest was moving. The man was unconscious, not yet dead. By the state of him, he would be soon. Nearly bloodless himself, there was nothing Sy could do.
No – no. Not nothing.
He didn’t have much time.
Swallowing the bile that slicked his throat, he withdrew his pen. He needed to plan this carefully. He wouldn’t get another chance.
He beheld the robin, took it in his shaking hands. Stroked its head with his thumb.
“Forgive me,” he said softly, choking down more bile. “But I do hope this is only temporary.”
With more violence than he knew he possessed, he snapped the robin’s neck.
Gingerly, he set the fragile corpse upon a bed of moss.
In the halls of Sangfeder, it was said – and since it was said, believed – that to use another’s blood would render a spell inert. Drunken dormitory tests proved the claim substantially enough.
But Sy knew it was not entirely true; for it was not with his blood, nor the blood of the Master Scribe who wrote it, that the mark on his palm was inscribed.
With a deep breath, he clicked free the needle of his pen. He pricked the needle into the dying man’s heart, where the blood still ran bright and wet, and filled the chamber. Claude’s shallow breath quickened, sounding wet; but he did not awaken or stir.
Once Sy had the dust, he mixed it with pure water from his kit, then rubbed the spell all over the robin’s cold breast. He watched the mixture sink and disappear into the unmoving red feathers.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, Claude’s wet breath rattled, then stopped completely.
Sy fell back, sinking into the dirt. He put his head in his hands. He rubbed his aching forehead, trying not to think about what he had just done; and worse, that it had been for nothing.
But then, he heard a strange sound. Like scratching, but wet. At the base of the tree.
Alarmed, he peered through his fingers at Claude’s corpse.
Then, heart racing, dropped his hands. Claude’s chest was moving, but not with breath.
With – clawing. Sy shuffled backward, away from the corpse.
As he watched, the movement shifted, a bulging that crept up Claude’s esophagus, then into his throat.
Into his mouth, his cheeks ready to burst. His clenched jaw creaked as his teeth parted.
A bird, red and dripping, crawled out of his mouth. A robin.
Sy watched it stretch its bloody wings, splattering drops of congealing blood upon the grass. It flew away.
As he watched it disappear into the darkening sky, he knew, with certainty, what he must do.
He spent the remainder of the evening cleaning his pen. Water from a clear, mossy stream; the last of the alcohol from his kit; water again. He needed it to be spotless. He had one chance to get this right.
Once the sun had set, he gathered his things. He turned to the midsummer night sky. The solstice was approaching.
He pulled the feather from his pocket, held it aloft.
“You want me to have it, don’t you?” he asked the feather; then the leaves. “You’ve been guiding me to it all along.”
The leaves did not answer, as he knew they wouldn’t.
“I don’t know why,” he said. Then, with a pang, “I think I know why.”
The forest would not take him the last step, would not show him that path. But he didn’t need it to; he knew how to find it. By following the one person who could.
Though it pained him, he summoned that feeling, that connection – the communion – they had shared. Not only in the grotto, but from the moment he’d met her; the moment, after all the years training himself not to reach for it, to not even look, he’d let himself seize onto hope.
He plucked the feeling; pummeled it like a crushed fruit in his hand. He must crush it, every last drop, down to the stone pit, or it would hold him back. He could not let it hold him back.
Something flickered in the corner of his eye. A color tattooed on his heart. Green as the sea. Crescent moons, darting, daring.
He stuck the feather, crushed, back into his pocket.
He followed her.