“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.
EPILOGUE
After the spell, Sy was distant. Not like the distance forced upon him by Mira’s spell, nor the imperious, passive distance of ages and forces beyond Anya’s ken, the distance she’d seen using him before they returned the phoenix’s spirit.
A very small, very human one.
