CHAPTER THIRTY
Sy felt her death – a smothering shroud lifted from his face, cotton pulled from his throat. All his pent-up emotions, dammed by her hold, flooded back. Overwhelmed, he stumbled, clutched his heaving chest.
At the same time, the fiddlehead footman by the fireplace became a tall, dark-haired woman.
After a reaction similar to his, followed by a beaming smile, she reached without hesitation for the iron poker beside her.
Still smiling, hefting the poker like a club, she approached the stone statue on a warpath.
And the emissary was in the crossfire.
Ortolan Gander was oblivious; he only had eyes for Sy, his forehead creased in concern.
As the former footman lifted the poker over her head, Sy gripped the man and pulled him aside, out of the weapon’s way.
The footman brought it down heavy, hard, over and over, sending bits of stone flying over the room.
Sy ducked with Ortolan, shielded him with his arms. Tiny bits of stone pelted his back. Their foreheads touched; their breath mingled, synced. The man’s warmth was comforting. Familiar.
As the smashing abated, they both lifted their heads. Speechless.
This time, Sy broke the spell. “It is you. Isn’t it?”
“Sabina did it,” she said in her altered voice. “She really is very talented, isn’t she? Could scribe circles round the lot of you.”
“Anya,” he breathed. Her face fell, and she pulled him close, burying her nose in his shoulder. He pressed his mouth to her neck, kissed her there ferociously, lost in the feel of her. She shivered and sighed under his touch, exactly as she had that night in the grotto.
“She’ll change me back,” she said, coming up for air. “I must return Bertrand’s suit.” She paused and hummed with pleasure as he smothered her mouth with his. “Tie up a few loose ends,” she mumbled into his lips.
“None of that matters,” he said, taking her face in his hands and kissing her cheek, her eyes. With a soft sigh, she melted into him, nuzzled his cheek with her nose. “Nothing else matters.”
“Sorry,” said the former footman. “Hate to interrupt. Name’s Ingrid, by the way. But, respectfully – what the fuck is happening?”
Reluctantly, they pulled away from each other. Several of the other former enchanted had gathered around them.
“You were enchanted by the witch,” Anya explained. “We all were. She’s dead; her bond on you is broken. She can’t hurt you anymore.” She smiled. “You’re free to go.”
Ingrid’s forehead wrinkled. “Where?”
“Wherever you want,” Anya said, her smile fading.
“I don’t know where I want to go,” said one voice. “I’m not in the habit of wanting.”
“I don’t even remember how long I’ve been here,” said another. “Where I came from.”
“I don’t feel very well,” said yet another, who, Sy noticed with a stab, was barely more than a child. “I think…I think I might be hungry.”
“You know, now you mention it,” said one man, “I don’t think I’ve eaten a crumb since I came here. The last thing I remember is a soggy croquette in the back of my cart.”
“A cart,” encouraged Ingrid. “That’s something.”
“Food always helps; let’s start in the kitchen,” proposed the first voice. “We’ll have tea and toasted rye, and sort some things out.”
This seemed a popular suggestion. Slowly, the others filtered out, leaving Anya and Sy alone in the room.
The fervor of the moment passed. Sy felt self-conscious in her presence. Felt the weight of all he had done. Of all she had done.
Of what would come next.
She read him. “You and I have more yet to do, as well. Another spell. I can’t do it alone.”
Another spell. With Mira’s spell over him lifted, he no longer fed his magic to her, or to the mire.
He felt it coursing through his body – not like blood, but like pure motion, ready to burst forth.
Soon, the land would flood. The manor would crumble; the lawns would die, turn to muck. New life would grow from what remained.
The phoenix’s magic, the forest’s magic, everlasting, was in him. With nothing to filter it, nowhere to put it, it would overwhelm him. It would take him over.
But he was not alone.
“This power…” He clasped her hands, needing her to understand what he could not put to words. “I don’t think I should use it. It doesn’t feel right to use it.”
“That’s why we’re giving it back,” she said, smiling softly. He could see her smile now, in this new face. How in the world had he ever missed it? Impulsively, he reached out to trace the shape of it on her lips.
Her breath caught, and her eyes closed. “You’re hesitating.”
“Remember why I took it,” he said, his fingers falling away. “To save you. And so no one else could have it.”
Her new voice rang with familiar fury. “That wasn’t you. It was the forest using you.”
“No,” he said, knowing its truth as he said it. “It was both.”
“Alright, well you can both put it back now.”
“If we put it back, they’ll come for it again,” he tried.
“Maybe,” she admitted. “But if you keep it, it will kill you. Not your body, but–” Her voice caught as she examined him, how altered he still was. “But you.”
Worse things had happened. A bird with this power was a beauty, a treasure.
A container. A human could use it, but human concerns were corruptible, limiting.
What if he let it obliterate him, as it wanted?
What if he became formless, a force of nature?
The shattering of the sky, the quaking of the earth?
It was both horrible and horribly enticing. “Perhaps that is my fate.”
“The fate of the world is too heavy for one man’s shoulders. Isn’t it?”
A man. He was still a man, wasn’t he? And yet. “It’s the way of the world, I’ve been told. Every man for himself.”
“You’re not every man,” she insisted. “You’re yourself. And I’m mine. And the way of the world isn’t for you and I to determine, any more than it was Mira’s, or Edgard’s, or the fucking forest’s. You’ve done what you can. Now you have to give it back.”
Sensible helplessness seized him. “The fate of the world isn’t for us to determine. What is?”
She cupped his face in her hands. Her hands had not been altered; but even if they had, he would know them by her touch.
“This,” she said. “I have determined I want you to live. To have bread, and beauty, and comfort, and–”
She pressed her lips together, studying him. Though her face was changed, her wide eyes had the same furtive, captured look they’d had when he’d laid her gently in the bed of moss.
“And love,” she finished, flushing. “I want you. I’ll do anything in my power to have you. To give you everything. Everything I can.”
She wrapped one hand in his hair, pulling it loose, brushing it behind his ear. Her lips hovered, millimeters from his.
“So what will you determine, Sylas Cassirer?” she murmured.
He knew. But before he could answer, he let her pull him into a kiss.
They left the manor, winding through the trees until they found a secluded grove.
A storm-made stream ran through it, already slowed to a trickle by the summer heat.
Songbirds warbled a hidden chorus in the leaves above them.
Beneath their feet, their dirty knees, roots stretched and sought and made space for one another.
The phoenix feather, the one given to him by the falcon, made a suitable pen. Their parchment was an oak leaf, long and waxy green.
The blood was Sy’s. The spell was Anya’s. The forest was theirs, and they were the forest’s.
Their intention was shared, and clear.
She dipped the tip of the feather into a small stone cup filled with his blood.
As she wrote, he spoke.
“Take back what was borrowed,” he said to the earth. To the sky, he whispered, “Transform what was taken.”
The paraglyph she drew was a new one; made of glyphs she had memorized, and of swipes of the feather pen guided by something deep in her gut, by the sweat on her fingers, by the direction of the wind.
They blew on it together.
As the leaf disintegrated into dust like dirt, he felt something in his throat. It drew from him, like poison from a wound. Like pollen from a flower.
They could not see it, but they felt it absorb into the earth.
From the place it entered, a small bud grew, tiny, and brown, and vulnerable, and brilliant.