“Someone will catch it, soon. And it had better be you, because only by catching the phoenix on my behalf will your life be spared.” She reached behind her back; when her hand reappeared, she clutched an arrow in it. “This arrow will bind the bird to me. Careful not to cut yourself with it,” she added with a smile as sly as her dead companion. “If you succeed – and manage to survive – I will honor your life and reward you with its keeping.”
Anya took the arrow, turned it over in her hand. The head was marked all over with strange symbols that seemed to pulsate with darkness.
Pierce the phoenix with this arrow. Simple enough, if she could find it. Shecouldfind it. But there were others on the hunt, as well. Or would be, soon. City hunters with their high-powered rifles. Wizards, with their magic pens. Not magic like the forest’s, not like Mira’s, but dangerous nonetheless.
And surviving the heart of the Lichtenwald was nearly an impossible task on its own.Isn’t it, old mother?
She shook Johanna’s ghost from her shoulders. “And if I fail?”
“If you fail, I imagine it will be because you’ve died.”
Anya almost let out a sigh of relief. She wouldn’t fail. And if she did, well, death was preferable to having her skull sucked hollow.
But at Anya’s relieved expression, Mira laughed, a charming, practiced laugh. “Oh, Anya! You didn’t think I would let you go unpunished for killing my familiar, did you?”
She rose and approached Anya. A cornered animal, Anya felt the urge to run, but as her muscles tensed, she found she couldn’t move – couldn’t even turn her head.
The witch bent low until their eyes were level. She grabbed Anya by the chin, forcing her to look into the deep blue pools of her own eyes. They caught her, pulled her under, and Anya couldn’t have looked away if she wanted to.
Blue pools turned to fathomless depths, endless oceans, the deepest reaches of the midnight sky in winter. Then thevery earth itself, miles and miles of black, crumbling soil, bits of rock and bone and root. The forest itself lived in her, its wild magic, its ancient, untempered will. This was the magic she drew from. Anya caught the smell of her breath, the breath of the forest. The magic of the rain, of the earth, of aeons.
Her voice sounded strange. “Until my arrow pierces the phoenix, you will change. But not into a clever fox, or a pretty cat. You may find you wish you had accepted my offer.”
Anya thought, as if peering from the murky bottom of a well, she saw Mira smiling.
“Have you seen a moon moth, Anya? They are very beautiful, like you. I think your eyes are almost the same color as their wings.” The witch ran a fingernail along her cheek, studying her. “I have seen one snatched from midair, eaten by a bat. I have seen their wings plucked off by children beguiled by their beauty, their fat, bleeding little bodies left squirming in the dirt. I have seen one fly into an open flame, still straining for the fire even as her velvety wings crisped and burned. A moon moth has no mouth with which to scream. Do you think she would scream if she could?” She leaned closer. “Do you think she knows, if she survives all that, she has only a week, at most, to live? Not to eat, or soar, or sing, but to wait only to be bred, and to die?”
Mira let her go, and Anya came back to herself with a gasp, chest rising and falling rapidly. Frantically, with shaking fingers, she touched her chest, her face, her hair.
The witch laughed. “Give it time, young huntress. I am nothing if not fair. You will change – quicker than you like, but the changes will come slow.” Her smile faded. She stroked the pelt on the table. “They will come costly.”
“You don’t need to do this,” Anya said, close to tears. “I’ll help you.”
“I know you will, Anya.” Mira leaned closer and kissed her, sweetly, on the cheek. “You have until the summer solstice; the transformation will complete with the dawn of Midsummer’s Day. Ten days hence.” She glanced out the open door. “It’s dark, but you may want to leave tonight. You won’t be the only hunter on this trail, and each day for you will grow much harder.”
As she left, she shoved Anya’s basket of eggs onto the floor, shattering every last one. Bits of yolk and shell trailed across the floor with the hem of her dress.
The east wind blew through the open door, filling the room. The fox’s empty eye sockets gazed up at Anya forlornly.
CHAPTER FOUR
One week had passed since he’d posted his ad, and Sy had spent all of it in his bedroom, which was his entire apartment.
He’d left strict instructions, and a gold sovereign, with the building’s superintendent, a solid woman in her late fifties: excepting the grocer’s delivery boy, or anyone responding to his ad, let no one come up to his room.
No one had. No intrepid hunters. No nosy well-wishers. No one.
Perhaps he should have been more specific in his advertisement. No – less. He relied on David’s skepticism about the phoenix’s very existence being endemic to the city. If he was forthright, most who read it would think him mad, but some would intuit he was after it for the king’s contest. Such intuitions may lead them to go after it themselves. Sy did not welcome the competition. But he had hoped he would catch some adventurous huntsman’s attention before they all left the city for the summer. Finding the bird on his own would be… difficult.
Especially in the state he was in now. Though he kept careful estimate of how much blood he used – for billing purposes, of course – it was nearly impossible to predict the toll on his body until he actually felt it. On any given month, one pint of blood could drain him as much as three. Part of a scribe’s training was to test their limits, to get to know them intimately. But that was ten years ago; he was no longer nineteen.
And, ten years of wear aside, there were too many mitigating factors – how much and what he had eaten, if he’d beengetting enough water, enough sleep. How many cigarettes he’d smoked. In the intervening ten years, he’d also learned the mental strain could have much the same effect on his body as plucking out a vein and pinching it dry.
But it was possible to estimate. By his guess, after Abigail and Edgard’s combined efforts, if he rested enough, it would be another two weeks before he could draw more blood and not risk permanent damage; a month before he could return to regular work –charitywork –without feeling the effects at all.
It was a massive inconvenience, but one most spellscribes, who took work far more sparingly, need not worry about. In training at Sangfeder, he’d proposed a paraglyph for detecting how much blood the body contained and had nearly been laughed out of the room.
“What would you do?” his instructor had chortled. “Turn someone’s skin translucent?”
