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.
