CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
All things considered, being a bird was not so terribly bad.
For one thing, he wasn’t really a bird. He wasn’t a man, either, quite. As he’d hoped – as he’d willed, made happen, with his spell – he had plucked the phoenix’s soul, its magic, from its body, and now held it in his.
What he hadn’t accounted for was what, exactly, this would make of him.
And what was he? He knelt still as a stone among the flowers in his mistress’s moon garden, considering.
Gardenia, moonflower, angel’s trumpet, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley.
Their velvety silver leaves and fragrant white petals cascaded around him.
They would bloom year-round, day or night, through him, just as the rest of the estate would flourish with his magic.
They may as well be made of glass. Perfect, pristine, undying. Like him.
Now, his blood would regenerate as quickly as he could spend it, but there was no longer any need. It was more a psychic drain, a continuous pull on what animated him.
Continuous, as Bosquet Mire and its mistress required quite a bit of maintenance.
The manor was enormous, taking up an acre of the sinking land on its own.
It glowed silver white in the night air.
Around it, a wrought iron fence easily eight feet high, coated in moss and tipped with vicious iron spikes.
Bosquet Mire was built upon an ancient wetland, a beautiful and expensive exercise in futility.
Rain and watershed from the nearby rivers and streams flowed naturally to the mire, a porous lowland, where it longed to soak the soil.
But if it flowed where it wanted to rest, it would rot the foundations of the manor house; and the imported grass lawn, not to mention the exotic flowers and hedges, could not withstand such moisture.
All that unseen water must be diverted to keep it from ruining the lawns. In addition, something must keep the pristine grass a trim and verdant green, the white flowers in consistent bloom, the round, emerald hedges expertly shaped with no course blade taken to their gleaming leaves.
That something, now, was him.
He felt the magic – his magic, though not his to use – as a constant, dull pressure, a subterranean river nourishing the emerald lawns, feeding the impossible flowers, firming the very soil itself. He supposed this made him a part of the estate. Infrastructure.
Someone might mourn him if they came to Bosquet Mire and saw what he had made of himself – but no one would brave the witch in her mire, not even for the phoenix. No one. He had been sure of that when he took the magic into himself. When he’d arrived at his new home, he’d assured Mira of the same.
Behind the iron fence was the safest place for the phoenix’s magic, which was the forest’s. Doubly safe, a prison twice over: trapped in his body; his body trapped.
But Bosquet Mire was hardly a prison. The room he was given, a tower in the west wing, was the picture of comfort and luxury, kept clean and tidy by Mira’s myriad servants.
Larger than his apartment in ?bender, round and full of windows, he had a perfect view of the manor’s orderly front lawn, of the stolid front gate, of the straight stone path leading into the sea of dark pines that shrouded the estate.
His room had a full wardrobe, a soft bed, a silver perch, a writing table, a slight but sturdy silver chain fastened to the floor.
He should be grateful. Wasn’t he clothed, wasn’t he fed, wasn’t he safe under a roof after all?
This did not seem like a thought he would once have held.
Many of his thoughts, in fact, did not seem like his own.
They hadn’t since his first night with Mira, when she had informed him that his thoughts were now hers, then interrogated him about how he had come to find himself in her possession.
He could not lie to her; he told her everything.
When she learned of his acquaintance with the huntress who had killed her first familiar, a cruel, delighted smile lit her face.
“Forget her,” she whispered in his ear, beside him in her bed, and he did.
“And know that if ever I see her face near here, I will make you punish her until she breathes her last breath, but not before you wish neither one of you had ever breathed your first.”
Since then, pinpointing which thoughts were his was as futile as locating a single gold piece within an immense swamp. It was much better, much quieter, less painful, to let himself be swallowed in the murk. To focus on his duties.
Keeping the estate was a bit like irrigating a desert to create farmland. Brilliant, arduous, and doomed to fail.
But with enough strength and determination, the natural world could be bent to humankind’s infallible will. He was proof.
He wondered what he could do with the phoenix’s magic if left to his own devices.
But of course, he wasn’t and would never be – so he stopped wondering.
Mira would use it to keep herself and the Mire pristine until the rest of the world had crumbled to dust around them.
And there they would stand, past the iron gate in the deep of the wood, in the bone white house.
The witch and her familiar. The green lawns.
The white flowers. Had there ever been anything else?
He pressed his nose into a wide gardenia, inhaling slowly and deeply.
No. And there never would be.
And he would never be more than what he was now: infrastructure. Thrall.
Two halves, cleaved.
One half, a not-quite-man who, in taking the forest’s magic inside himself, now knew – had seen – things for which there were no words, no glyphs, no symbols. How to explain? How to describe? Ancient things, impossible things, reality itself made inexplicable.
Incomprehensible. Not meaningless, but the meaning was always just beyond his grasp, a feather caught in an unbending breeze, a breeze he couldn’t feel.
He was the feather, and the hand, and neither, or both.
The world he knew – or had thought he knew – was made duller.
Colors, faded. Not shades of gray. As if each color was missing a touch of its own hue.
As if that touch ceased to exist, had never existed at all, but somehow he had seen it and alone knew it was gone.
The weight of this, the loneliness, crushed him. As if he had been buried alive.
The other half saw no color at all.
Not color as he knew it. Not as poetry, not as a joy or a soul-stirring.
As nothing but a sign, one to indicate what was safe and what was not.
Nothing but the difference between survival and death, feast or famine, have or lack.
This world made perfect, utter sense. Hostile sense.
Was nothing but striving, and he was only a thing to consume, to be consumed.
In this state, his sense of himself – of his other, not-quite-human half – was as undefined as a dream.
A dream of having once been able to dream.
This was the half he had been when he came to his mistress.
Lost, frightened. Prey. She could have kept him that way.
It would have been easier. She did not need him human.
She did not need anyone human. She made that abundantly clear by transfiguring her servants, sculpting their flesh into weird, inhuman shapes according to her whims.
Instead, she had saved him. She found his human shape more pleasing.
For now.
He couldn’t regret his decision – absolutely couldn’t, though he had tried. The buried part of him had tried to muster the desire to escape, to rage against the condition in which he was kept. But his desires were no longer his own. His rage was a limpid thing. Try as he might.
So he stopped trying. The garden needed his attention.
It was then he noticed all the moths. Had they been there all along?
They weren’t pests; they could stay. They flitted through the air, resting upon their fragrant feasts, coating their furry bodies in pollen.
Brown and fluttering. White and small as a pea.
Gray and speckled and the size of a fist. They were quite charming.
One, furry and white, landed on his shoulder.
A thought began to form. Something gleaming in the muck.
It vanished as a cold chill shot through his spine. Mira. She could tug on their bond and draw him to her like a hummingbird to nectar, but this was not a command. She wanted him to come to her himself. A warning. She was irritated.
Inching away from the flowers, he watched the moth flutter away. Behind it, one of Mira’s servants approached. An escort.
She was very irritated.
Another, unrelated chill ran through him. He had grown accustomed to the others’ ghastly appearances. But the constant reminder of what could be made of him – of what had been done to them, of how he could not, ever, help them – was enough to freeze his undying blood.
Some were human enough, though pale as the white walls, frozen in time, mouths sealed with lichen and crystallized honey.
Many were less fortunate. One night in bed, while washing the blood from his already healed back, Mira had proudly recounted how she had collected them.
A maiden caught trying to steal one of her beautiful flowers.
A sundry deliveryman skimming off the top.
A handsome merchant she had found on the brink of death in the wood, and after saving his life, offered a position as her bookkeeper.
He claimed he would rather return to his family. So Mira changed his mind.
The footman – the unfortunate soul with the giant snail for a head – stopped on the path. Their still-human hands, dripping with mucus, beckoned to Sy, leading him inside.
A second footman, whose entire body had been transformed into the fiddleheads of ferns, met them at the door. One of the footman’s tentacle-like arms unfurled in greeting, accompanied by the faint smell of rotting vegetation.