The Book of Atrix Wolfe Read online

  “I hear hounds,” Saro said suddenly. Hounds, she knew: her mother’s were gold as sun, red as fire, white as bone. “And I hear someone crying. Or dreaming about crying.” She listened, picked out the snow’s voice, rustling dryly across the field, a raven’s voice, a muttering that turned into a sudden shout, then subsided into muttering again, whispers, more weeping, some talking. She picked out a word. “A wolf. A wolf is talking.”

  “Wolves don’t talk,” her father said.

  “Yes—”

  “Not in that world.”

  “Listen.”

  He listened. “Saro, come,” the Queen said, putting a hand on her daughter’s reins; the tiny silver bells sang. But Saro, immersed in the strange, unpredictable place, tried to see more clearly, pouncing, like a wild thing, on scents, movements, sounds. The sweet spring air grew misty; a wind tumbled over them, carrying hints of smoke, snow, into the Queen’s wood. “Saro,” the Queen repeated, alarmed. “Ilyos.” But her consort only watched, as entranced as his daughter, while, with her powerful, focused attention, she drew the dark world closer to them.

  “A mage,” she said suddenly, and looked at her father without seeing him. “Like you. A mage is talking.”

  “I hear,” he said. The Queen twitched her reins restively; sapphires sparked along the leather. Around them oak, flurried in the strange wind, moaned. The birds had already fled. But she could not leave them; she watched them worriedly. Both their faces, child and father, wore the same spellbound expression.

  “And now someone is answering the mage.”

  “Hush,” her father breathed. “Listen.”

  The Wolf was on his feet, pacing back and forth in the prince’s tent, agitated but unable to leave. The prince watched him.

  “I cannot help you.”

  “Then we will all die here,” the prince answered, “eating our pride and stubbornness at the end, when we have nothing else to eat.”

  “You know I cannot use sorcery for Kardeth against Pelucir.”

  “Not if it will save our lives?”

  The Wolf turned, his shadow splayed, looming across the tent walls. “You don’t need my help to stop this. Put down your arms. Pack your tents and go. I will help you with the wounded.”

  “I will not stop.” The prince’s eyes followed the prowling mage; his face remained impassive. “The warriors of Kardeth die before they retreat. Even from winter.”

  “This is between Kardeth and Pelucir—”

  “And will be between Kardeth and Chaumenard, when Pelucir falls.”

  “And still you expect me to help you!”

  “I will exercise so much restraint in Chaumenard, you will hardly recognize the army of Kardeth. I swear this.” He held up a hand as the mage whirled. “I swear it,” he repeated softly. “You will save lives here and in Chaumenard.”

  “No.”

  “Then the King of Pelucir and his heir and his unborn child will die here, and I will show even less mercy to the goatherders and wanderers of Chaumenard.”

  The mage stood still, his eyes, the color of tarnished silver, suddenly expressionless, holding the prince’s gaze. Around them, shadows cast by nothing visible trembled in the air. “I could force you to leave,” the mage said.

  “You would have to kill me.”

  “Don’t tempt me.” The mage was shaking, he realized, with a fury the wolf might have felt, caught in the iron teeth of a trap. The prince was very still, as if he feared a movement, an eyeblink, might spark the charged shadows around them.

  He said, again softly, very carefully, “This is as close as I can come to begging. Please. Help me put an end to this. I cannot.”

  The mage walked out into the snow.

  He moved blindly through the field, appalled by the landscape of war: the hunger and the nightmares, the bloody snow, the unburied, frozen dead, the terror, the pain, the howling, maddened hounds. The formless fury took shape in his mind then, into a vision more terrible than war or winter: something that both armies would end their war to flee from.

  He fashioned his making out of the black, endless winter night, the fire from burning arrows, the last words of the dying, the cries of dreamers, the images in their nightmares. He made it out of the bloody claw-print of a raven in the snow, out of the reflection in the eye of a warrior staring into the raven’s eye, out of the hunger and cold and hopeless fury of those trapped within the castle walls, the cries of children wearing themselves to sleep, their dreams when they finally slept.

  He made it out of the wood on the hill.

  He found fearful memories there, among the lean, exhausted animals, of gaunt hunters stalking them. Green, or a wish for green, colored the winter trees in their minds, or in his scenting mind. He scarcely noticed it, in his great anger and despair. Nor did he notice any faces that were not memories, or cries that were not quite human, nor recognize any power not his own. His power snagged a hunter out of a dream, turned his acorn eyes as black as ravens’ eyes, crowned him with an immense tangle of horn. Among the horns the mage set the moon that warriors most feared: the black moon that cast no shadows, under which anything might move. He took the fierce, starving hounds out of the field, turned them huge and black as night. He did not notice, as he took the memory of a white horse and turned it black, and set sparks of flame between its teeth, the reflection of green in its eyes. He made a warrior with no allegiance but to death, and when his own passion had exhausted itself, he saw it at the edge of the wood: the dark rider he had come to Pelucir to stop.

  He bade it come.

  In the Queen’s wood, seasons fought: Snow swirled across the torn boundaries of the worlds, clung to grass, oak boughs, the Queen’s bright hair. Saro, wraith-pale in the snow, watched streaks of light change the color of her father’s hair, change his shape, the expression in his eyes. He fought it until he could no longer move, until the strange power held him motionless. “Saro!” she heard the Queen cry, somewhere beyond the raging storm of snow and magic. “Saro!” Terror and wonder shaped and reshaped Saro’s face; the cold winds of power snatched away her voice, changed the position of her bones. She seemed to grow small in the chill world, hunched and helpless, like the animals she glimpsed in that frozen wood. Her mother’s voice seemed very far away. Her father had vanished. A rider with the black moon rising among his burning horns looked at her without recognition. She tried to scream; no sound came. He turned away from her, rode out of the timeless wood into the human world.

  Opening gates spilled torchlight across the snow as the King of Pelucir led his warriors among the sleeping army of Kardeth for one final, desperate battle to end the siege.

  The dark rider met him on the field.

  One

  “The great mage moves,” the mage Danicet said twenty years later at the mages’ school in Chaumenard, “from moment to moment, from shape to shape, to meet the constant, ever-changing needs of life. From stone, to eagle, to healer, when stillness, flight, life are required. Those mages of greatest power must involve themselves in a continuing flow of power, for power unused, power neglected or refused, will find its own shape, its own destructive path in the world. So the greatest of mages, such as Atrix Wolfe, have written, out of their own vast and varied experiences. Each moment must concern itself with life, for the renegade mage who chooses to deal in death, will wear the face of death, and, in the end, become the motionless, powerless shape of death.”

  She paused, searching the dozen faces in front of her for questions. Her calm eyes, Talis Pelucir noted, were the exact shade of blue framed by the broad window behind her. A question moved in his mind, and, somehow, into his face. She said, “Talis?”

  All the faces turned toward the prince of Pelucir, who had been born in the midst of a curious and deadly whim of a renegade mage. But his eyes, behind lenses reflecting the brilliant light above the mountain peaks, were opaque; his question was mild.

  “What of Atrix Wolfe among the wolves?” he asked, fascinated with the legen
dary mage. “Is he neglecting his powers?”

  “The White Wolf is very old,” Danicet said. Her face had changed, assuming the gentle, wondering expression the mage’s name evoked; the tone of her voice had softened. “I believe that he is choosing his final shape among the wolves. Wind, stone—Who knows, on the mountain he loves, what he will become in the end?”

  “I think,” Riven of Kardeth’s youngest daughter, Lares, said abruptly, causing all the faces to swing toward her, “that since war is part of life, that mages should concern themselves with that. Then the forces of the last battle between Pelucir and Kardeth would have been equal.”

  The faces swung again, not toward Danicet, but toward Talis, who still studied the color of the sky. He and Lares had been at the mages’ school for two years, but the siege that Lares had laid to bitter memory seemed endless. He sat silently, unmoved, listening to Danicet’s answer.

  “Mages do concern themselves with war,” Danicet said simply, “as was evidenced in Pelucir. I am only explaining the conclusions the greatest and most experienced mages have reached. You, of course, will make your own choices. Now. To continue practicing your shapechanging abilities, I want you each to hide somewhere within this part of the school. Lares will search for you.”

  Lares, Talis thought wearily, watching her stiff shoulders beneath the fall of her heavy hair; as if she sensed him, her shoulders drew even straighter. He rose, left the chamber with the other students to fan through the corridors. A closet beckoned immediately; Lares would never look for him among mops.

  A clutter on a shelf caught his eye as he opened the door. Closing it, he smelled a mingling of beeswax, lamp oil, dusty cloths, old leather. While his eyes adjusted to a mage’s vision in the dark, he let his mind roam among the shapes on the shelf. He felt supple leather, fine parchment. Curious, he let his mind linger, and, following his curiosity, turned himself into a page within the book.

  Some time later he emerged, blinking in the dark, with a sense of having dreamed some very odd dreams. He pulled the book off the shelf and opened the door. The line of windows along the stone corridor arched across a view of the highest peak in Chaumenard, where the trees fell away and the thrust of barren rock began. The windows were black now; the hanging lamps lit. He noted it absently, still chasing an image in his head, or perhaps a word, left by a dream. It eluded him. He leaned against the stone wall and opened the book.

  The spells in it seemed very clear, precise, fundamental, as if written by some great mage for beginning students. Their simplicity masked a broad experience and a powerful sense of order. Intrigued, he searched: There was no name anywhere in the book. He continued reading. The feeling grew stronger in him of some mystery, some ambiguity in the book, or perhaps in the writing of it, or perhaps that it was not a book at all, but something entirely different. So he felt, and turned pages, still caught in the odd sense of timelessness he had carried out of the closet, as if part of him still dreamed within the book.

  Talis Pelucir.

  In the distance, someone called someone. He pushed one hand beneath the circular lenses and rubbed his eyes. Then, still spellbound, he continued reading. He had his father’s height and raven’s wing hair, his mother’s cheekbones and her smile. This his older brother, Burne, among others, had told him; both their parents had died the night he was born.

  Talis.

  His attention wandered suddenly up the mountainside; he glanced up. But the windows were black; night hid whatever he had sought: a puzzle-piece of dream, perhaps an eagle’s swift flight up the granite face of the mountain, so swift that stones and trees blurred…Talis…He closed his eyes, trying to remember the strange, elusive dreams that seemed like someone else’s memories…

  “Talis!”

  Something loomed at him. Startled, he vanished and moved, then reappeared as quickly to catch the book before it hit the floor, ducking at the same time to avoid a darkness streaking through the air. He settled the lenses on his nose and eyed Lares warily, wondering what else she had in mind.

  She smiled tightly, with little pleasure and less humor; her eyes were chilly. “Very nice.”

  “Thank you,” he said politely.

  “I’ve been searching for you for hours.”

  “I’ve been here.”

  “Why didn’t you answer when I called?”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  Her eyes darkened. He took a firmer grip on the book, prepared to jump into it again, flea-like, if she lost her temper. She had a precarious hold on it at best; just the sight of Talis caused it to flare sometimes in unexpected ways. She had been raised, as he had, listening to tales of Hunter’s Field, the only field which the entire army of Kardeth had ever fled. She bore her father’s shame, and blamed Pelucir for the sorcery, despite the fact, as Talis reminded her, that the sorcery had killed the King of Pelucir. Bitterness only fed her temper; courtesy and alacrity seemed the best defense against it.

  She said, “You hid from me.”

  “We were instructed—”

  “I mean deliberately. After I gave up searching for you. You must have heard me call.”

  “I didn’t—” He stopped abruptly, his brows puckered, hearing the echo of a name in his head. “I did hear you call,” he said slowly, his gaze directed into some nebulous realm of memory between them. “It was as if I didn’t recognize my name.”

  She was silent, torn between temper and curiosity. Curiosity took precedence, briefly. “Where were you hiding? I found everyone but you.”

  “In here.”

  “In a book?” Her mouth tightened again; she said with irritation, “The mages were beginning to worry. No one could find you. It’s past supper, I’m starving, and we were starting to think you must have climbed the mountain to hide among the wolves.”

  He shook his head. “I was among the mops. I’m sorry,” he added for safety’s sake, seeing her eyes narrow, as if the idea of mops was a personal affront. He said irrepressibly, weary of continuing a battle that had ended twenty years before, “It’s just as well your father failed to take Pelucir; the princes of Pelucir have so little dignity.”

  “And less honor,” she snapped.

  Her words struck; his head went back a little. He felt his habitual patience founder suddenly against all the tales of horror and despair that had been his legacy.

  “Why,” he breathed incredulously, “must we refight that battle every time we meet? I have told you and told you: Pelucir had nothing to do with the sorcery on Hunter’s Field. Your father ran from it, yes, but at least you have a father.”

  “Who would have died himself rather than ask a mage to fight his battles for him.”

  “And mine, of course, would have hired some sorcerer inept enough to kill him.”

  “And shrewd enough to run when he realized what he had done.”

  “Is that what they believe in Kardeth?” he demanded, amazed. “That some fly-by-night sorcerer worked such a deadly and terrible magic that has kept even a prince of Kardeth afraid to fight since then?”

  “My father is not afraid!” she retorted furiously. “His dreams were broken. In Pelucir. By the King of Pelucir, who was losing his land, and should have lost it honorably.”

  “He lost his life instead,” Talis said bleakly, thinking of his brother, Burne, younger than Talis at the time, watching their father die. “Your father lies to you,” he added, reckless and depressed with the argument. “He summoned the mage to the battlefield himself. That’s the shame he bears.”

  He saw the blood flame in her face beneath her flaming hair. What she might have done, he never knew. The mage Hedrix stood with them suddenly, a small man with golden eyes and an owl’s tufted brows, his ancient, fragile voice making soothing noises, his hands patting the air around them, as if to calm the tension in it.

  “No one knows what happened on the last night of the winter siege of Pelucir,” he said gently. “You could argue about it until the crags of Chaumenard crumble into the
ground. No mage or sorcerer has ever claimed the sorcery; the sorcery itself vanished with the dawn.” Lares opened her mouth; he patted her wrist, still talking, and she subsided. “All we know is this: The Kings of Pelucir have been through the centuries so oblivious of the magic around them that it is hard to believe they could summon up even the name of a mage, let alone summon a mage.”

  “So—” Lares began furiously. Hedrix shook his head, his frail fingers closing on her wrist.

  “No. It makes no sense that your father would have been frightened off the field by something he asked for. Rulers of Kardeth are far too intelligent and experienced with various kinds of power.”

  “Then who—”

  “No one knows,” he said simply. “No one knows.” He released her wrist. “But you must stop blaming Talis, who was, after all, not an hour old when the battle ended.”

  “I cannot help it,” she said, not looking at Talis. “It’s all I have heard since the day I was born. The tales of the winter siege. The betrayal and dishonor of the King of Pelucir.”

  “That’s what I heard,” Talis said softly. “The only tales I was told as a child were of the horrors of Hunter’s Field, by those who survived it and could not forget. It’s why Burne sent me here.”

  Lares looked doubtful, but at least she was looking at him. “Because of the siege?”

  He smiled a little, tightly. “To have some sorcery in the house, in case the King of Pelucir finds the rider with his hounds and burning horns and the moon that is no moon at his doorstep again. Burne thinks I could fight it.” He leaned back against the wall, watching the expression change on her face. “I know. Hedrix is right: The Kings of Pelucir have only the vaguest notions of magic.”

  She was silent, her eyes hidden again, uncertain, he sensed, but, being of Kardeth, unwilling to yield a battlefield. The mage touched her lightly.