The Book of Atrix Wolfe Read online

  Once, Atrix Wolfe was a great and powerful mage. Then the invaders descended upon his kingdom. Defending his people through magic, Atrix Wolfe brought to life a legendary Hunter—a savage, uncontrollable force that destroyed both armies and killed his beloved king.

  Now, after twenty haunted years among the wolves, Atrix Wolfe has been summoned to the timeless realm of the Queen of the Wood. She asks him to find her daughter, who vanished into the human world during the massacre he caused. No one has seen the princess—but deep in the kitchens of the Castle of Pelucir, there is a scullery maid who appeared out of nowhere one night. She cannot speak and her eyes are full of sadness. But there are those who call her beautiful…

  Ace Books by Patricia A. McKillip

  THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD

  THE SORCERESS AND THE CYGNET

  THE CYGNET AND THE FIREBIRD

  THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLFE

  WINTER ROSE

  SONG FOR THE BASILISK

  RIDDLE-MASTER: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY

  THE TOWER AT STONY WOOD

  OMBRIA IN SHADOW

  IN THE FORESTS OF SERRE

  ALPHABET OF THORN

  OD MAGIC

  HARROWING THE DRAGON

  SOLSTICE WOOD

  Collected Works

  CYGNET

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 1995 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  Cover art by Kinuko Y. Craft.

  Cover design by Judith Murello.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace hardcover edition / July 1995

  Ace mass-market edition / September 1996

  Ace trade paperback edition / February 2008

  Ace trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-441-01565-8

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Ace hardcover edition as follows:

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  The book of Atrix Wolfe / Patricia A. McKillip.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-441-00211-0 (hardcover): $18.95

  I. Title.

  PS3563.C38B66 1995 94-33999

  813'.54—dc20 CIP

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Prologue

  The White Wolf followed the ravens down the crags of Chaumenard to the wintry fields of Pelucir.

  In wolf shape, among the wolves, he had scented danger sweeping toward the mountains he loved. His dreams turned dark with the coming of winter, chaotic, disturbed by fire, blood, the sharp, hoarse cries of ravens calling to one another, the cries of humans. Darkness rode a dark horse into the heart of Pelucir, wielding a sword of fire and bone that pierced the Wolf’s dreams. He would wake suddenly in human shape, in a close tangle of fur and smells, trying to see beyond stone, beyond night, into the fire that burned toward Chaumenard. Finally, harrowed by dreams and unable to rest content in wolf shape, he ran to meet the dark rider in Pelucir. He would stop it there, somehow, in the broad fields and gentle hills of the kingdom bordering Chaumenard, before the rider cast its blank, hungry eye into the land of mages and scholars and farmers who raised goats in the high peaks, and plowed a furrow from light into shadow down their sharply sloping sides.

  The mage was old, and lingered, every year, longer and longer in the mountains among the wolves. That year, he had forgotten it was winter and that he was human. Pulled so abruptly back into the world, he had not stopped to tell anyone where he was going. Nor did he know who fought in Pelucir. He ran, in wolf shape, faster than any wolf; he was a shimmer of icy wind blowing down the mountain’s flank, the white shadow of his own legend, barely perceptible, moving swiftly, silently, under the staring winter moon, toward the eye of the terrible storm: the castle of the Kings of Pelucir.

  He had seen Pelucir in fairer days, when the massive, bulky castle stood surrounded by flowering fields, the slow river running under its bridge reflecting such green that drinking it would be drinking summer itself. The ancient keep, a dark, square tower beginning to drop a stone here and there, like old teeth, faced lush fields and meadows that rolled to a rounded hill where an endless wood of oak and birch began. Now the trees stood stark and silvery with moonlight, and on the fields a hundred fires burned in the burning cold, ringed around the castle.

  The mage, still little more than a glitter of windblown snow, paused under the moon shadow of a parapet wall. Tents billowed and sagged in the wind; sentries shivered at the fires, watching the castle, listening. Wings rustled in deep shadow; a sentry threw a stone suddenly, breathing a curse, and a ragged tumble of black leaves swirled up in the wind, then dropped again. Another sentry spoke sharply to him; they were both silent, watching, listening.

  The mage drifted past them, searching; dreams and random nightmares blew against him and clung. Within the castle, children wrapped in ancient tapestries wept in their sleep; someone screamed incessantly and would not be comforted; young sentries whispered of fowl browning on a spit, of hot game pie; old men trembling in the ramparts longed for the fires below, the sturdy oak on the hill. On the field, men feverish with wounds dreamed of feet made of ice instead of flesh and bone, of the sharp end of bone where a hand should be, of a mass of black feathers shifting, softly rustling in the shadows, waiting. The mage saw finally what he searched for: a flame held in a mailed fist on a purple field, the banner of the ruling house of Kardeth.

 
He had known rulers of Kardeth in his long life: fierce and brilliant warrior-princes who grew restless easily and found the choice between acquiring knowledge and acquiring someone else’s land an arbitrary one. Scholars, they spoke with equal passion of the ancient books and arts of Chaumenard, and of its rich valleys and wild, harsh peaks. This ruler, whose name escaped the mage, must have regarded Pelucir as a minor obstruction between Kardeth and Chaumenard. But while his army ringed the castle, laying a bitter winter siege, winter had laid siege to him. He had the wood on the hill for game and firewood; he had only to sit and wait, starving the castle into surrender. But there was nothing yielding about the massive gates, the great keep with its single upper window red with fire, the torchlit battlements spilling light and the shadows of armed warriors onto the snow. In the wood, the game would be growing scarce, and what remained of it, thin and desperate in the harsh season.

  So the chilled, hungry, exhausted dreamers around the mage told him in their dreams. He took his own shape slowly in front of the prince’s tent: a tall man with hair as white as fish bone and a face weathered and hard as the crags he loved. He wore next to nothing and carried nothing. Still the guards clamored around him awhile, shouting of sorcery and warding invisible things away with their arrows. The prince pushed apart the hangings and walked barefoot into the snow, a sword in one hand.

  The mage, noting how the prince resembled his red-haired grandfather, finally remembered his name. The prince blinked, his grim, weary face loosening slightly in wonder. Around him the guard quieted.

  “Let him go,” Riven of Kardeth said. “He is a mage of Chaumenard.” He opened the tent hangings. “Come in.” He nodded at a pallet where a man, white and dizzy with fever, struggled with his boots. “My uncle Marnye. He was wounded last night.” He took the boots out of his uncle’s hands and pushed him gently down. His mouth tightened again. “They come out at night—the warriors of Pelucir. I don’t know how. They have a secret passageway. Gates open noiselessly for them. Or they slip under walls, through stone. At dawn I find sentries frozen in the snow, dark birds picking at them. My uncle heard something and was struck down as he raised an alarm. We could find no one. That’s why my sentries are so wary of sorcery.”

  “There is no magic in that house,” the mage said. “Only hunger. And rage.”

  He knelt by the pallet, slid his hand beneath Marnye’s head and looked into his blurred, glittering eyes. For an instant, his own head throbbed, his lips dried, his body ached with fever. “Sleep,” he breathed, and drew the word into a gentle, formless darkness easing through the restless, shivering body. Marnye’s eyes closed. “Sleep,” he murmured, and the mage’s eyes grew heavy, closed. Sleep bound them like a spell. Then the mage opened his eyes and rose, stepping away from the pallet. He said, his voice changing, no louder, but taut and intense with passion, “This must stop.”

  The prince, feeling the whip of power behind the words, watched the mage silently a moment. He said finally, carefully, “Thank you for helping my uncle. The ancient mages of Chaumenard do not involve themselves with war.”

  “You are threatening Chaumenard itself. I know Kardeth. You will crack Pelucir like a nut, take what you want. But you will not stop here. You will not stop until you have laid claim to every mountain pass and goatherder’s hut in Chaumenard.”

  “And every rich valley and every ancient book.” Still Riven watched the mage; he spoke courteously, but inflexibly. “Chaumenard is ungoverned. It is full of isolated farmers and wealthy schools where rulers send their children, and villagers who carry their villages around on their backs in the high plateaus.”

  “They will fight you.”

  “That will be as they choose.”

  “If you survive this place.”

  The prince’s eyes flickered. He drew breath noiselessly and moved, letting the weariness show in his face, in his sagging shoulders. He unfolded a leather stool for the mage, and sat down himself. He said, surprising the mage, “Atrix Wolfe.”

  “Yes. How—”

  “I saw you, when my grandfather ruled Kardeth. I was very young. But I never forgot you. The White Wolf of Chaumenard, my grandfather called you, and told us tales of your power when you had gone. He said you were—are—the greatest living mage.”

  “I am nearly the oldest,” Atrix murmured, feeling it as he sat.

  “I questioned him, for such power seemed invaluable to Kardeth.”

  “As a weapon.”

  The prince shrugged slightly. “I am what I am. He said that such power among the greatest mages has its clearly formulated restrictions.”

  “Experience teaches us restrictions,” the mage reminded him. “They are not dreamed up in some peaceful tower on a mountaintop. If we involved ourselves with war, we would end up fighting each other, and create far more disaster than even you could imagine. Power is not peaceful. But we try to be. The rulers of Pelucir are not peaceful, either,” he added, sliding away from the dream he saw glittering in the prince’s eyes. “This one will turn himself and his household into ghosts before he will surrender to you. I know the Kings of Pelucir. Go home.”

  “And you know the warriors of Kardeth.” There was an edge to the prince’s voice. “We do not retreat.”

  “Your warriors are battling inhuman things. Pain. Hunger. Madness. Winter itself. Things without faces and without mercy.”

  “So is Pelucir.”

  “I know.”

  “They loosed their hunting hounds two days ago. The hounds howled with hunger all night long within the walls. So.” His hands closed, tightened. “Now they roam at night in my camp; they scavenge with the carrion crows. Among my dead. I will outwait winter itself to outwait the King of Pelucir. And then, in spring, I will march through the greening mountains of Chaumenard.”

  “Spring,” Atrix warned, “is another time, another world. In this world, you are trapped in the iron heart of winter, as surely as you have trapped the King of Pelucir, and unless you want to turn into an army of wraiths haunting this field, you must go back to Kardeth. There is no honor for you here. And therefore no dishonor in retreat.”

  “I will see spring in Chaumenard.” The prince seemed to see it then: the green world lying in memory, in wait, just beyond eyesight. His eyes focused again on Atrix Wolfe, the fierce and desperate dream still in them. “And the King of Pelucir will live to see it here. And so will his wife, and his heir and his unborn child. If.”

  “If.”

  “If you help me.”

  In the green wood on the hill, within the endless dream of spring, the Queen of the Wood’s daughter paused to look across worlds, hearing the thin, wolf-whine of bitter winds, scraps of human words in a darkness she found both perplexing and tantalizing. There was a drop of human blood in her, and in her father, the Queen’s consort; it brought both of them visions at times, living dreams of the world beyond the wood. Her father had learned to ignore them, for they meant nothing to him. She, still learning words for her own world, did not make such distinctions: Everything was new, everything spoke to her and had a name; she had not yet learned that something could mean nothing.

  Her mother, disconcerted by their visions, reined beside her. They sat, three riders on three white horses, two watching a distant world, the third watching their faces. “What is it?” her child heard her murmur. “What do you see, Saro? Ilyos, what does she see?”

  They did not answer immediately, lost in the peculiar vision of a white-streaked dark, trees as barren as bone under moonlight, fires blossoming everywhere on the white field. They were alike, the Queen’s consort and her daughter: both with pale, gleaming, pearly hair and eyes as dusty gold as acorns. The child spoke first.

  “Ravens.” Her small body, supple and restless, tautened like a scenting animal. She shook her head a little, bewildered, and produced a human word. “Sorrow.”

  The Queen looked at her consort. Her long hair held all the reds and bright golds and yellows of autumn leaves; her eyes were da
rk and gold, owl’s eyes. Even in her wood, they could be troubled. “You taught her that word,” she said. “I didn’t. Ilyos.”

  “I am teaching her the language of power,” he said absently. Her voice, sharpened, drew him back into the wood.

  “Sorrow is a word that means nothing until it means everything.”

  “That,” he said softly, “is what makes it powerful.” He looked at her then, and touched her slender, jewelled hand. “Don’t be afraid. Humans learn many words they never learn to use.”

  “But what is it?” Saro asked, hearing voices now, more clearly, glimpsing dreams and nightmares, images that appeared and drifted apart like windblown clouds. She turned her head and saw the word in her father’s eyes. So did the Queen; she turned her mount abruptly. “You explain it,” she said, and rode away from them to a silver stream into which Oak, during one of the wood’s arbitrary seasons, had dropped gold leaves to lie like coins at the bottom of the clear water. Downstream, a white deer lifted its head, jewels of water falling from its muzzle, and looked at her fearlessly.

  Saro’s eyes followed her mother, watched her thoughtlessly a moment: how her long hair flowed like a fiery mantle down the deep green silk she wore; how the white deer and the white horse mirrored one another, their heads dropped to the silvery water to drink; how the oak beside her mother lowered a leafy hand to touch her hair.

  “Death,” said her father, and she turned her head, looked at him out of his own eyes.

  “What is death?”

  He could not seem to say; he tried, and then smiled a little, brushing her cheek gently with his fingers. “Come,” he said. “We are troubling your mother.” But the dark dream caught at her again, mysterious and urgent as it was. Her father did not move, either. She felt his mind, which flowed between them more easily than language, absorb itself in her curiosity, sensing what compelled her attention in the grim and dangerous human chaos.

  The Queen rode back to them, a disturbance of fretful thought. “Why must she watch?” she asked. “Why do you let her? What fascinates you so?”

  “It is my heritage,” Ilyos said apologetically. “There is a force at work here; terrible as it is, it will do her no harm to recognize it now, so that she will not be troubled by it later.”