Then, he remembered something she had told him.You’ll feel strange. You might…hear things. Stick close to me, and you won’t get lost.
He should go back.
He did, following the trail he had left, counting steps and blossoms. The numbers had not changed; in the stillness of the day, none of the flowers had stirred. Even if he didn’t have the blossoms as proof, heknewhe had come from this way as he knew the weight of his own hands. The sun, finally revealed, had barely moved. He couldn’t have possibly walked that far. It was impossible.
The rowan tree was nowhere in sight.
“Alright,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice anchored him. Never mind Anya’s ghost stories, or uncanny premonitions, or strange sensations he wanted nothing to do with. It wasn’t that the forest had rearranged itself around him – he had simply lost his way. Nothing unusual about that. It could happen in any forest. In the city, even. Whatever had held Anya back was no longer his concern. Out of his hands. She would find his note, anyway. She had her bow, her strange arrow. Her cunning, her courage.
He had a map, and a gun. Food. Some of his blood. Most of his wits.
There was nothing else to do but find the meadow.
He found the cleanest looking log he could, perched delicately upon it, and reached into his rucksack.
Gnats circled his sweating face, incessant as the guilt he felt unfolding Anya’s map.She didn’t really need it, he reassured himself, swatting the bugs away. She had led them as far as she had without consulting it once. The thing had been buried under piles of junk in her cabin. She knew these woods like the back of her hand.
But another voice nagged him:You can count every step, and know every stone, every path, every tree with a lover’s attention…
He ignored it, the same way he had ignored her directive to stay behind. How her open eyes went glassy when his words, carved precise as a glyph to insult her, did. How he’d said them in what seemed an increasingly futile effort to steel himself against those very eyes.
How badly he wanted a cigarette.
Instead, he ate again, turning back to the map as he spread some of the liverwurst over a dry slice of rye. He still had nothing resembling an appetite, but knowing how much blood he had lost, how close he teetered on the edge of blacking out, he forced it.
He had no idea where he was and barely knew how to read a map, even one professionally drawn. This map, filled in over years and scrawled in an unsteady hand with a goose feather and blackberry ink, was not crafted with a stranger’s eye in mind, full of landmarks only someone already familiar with the forest would know.Rook Hollow, Bramble Slake, Bosquet Mire. All meaningless to him.
Except the Wryneck River. The Wryneck, he knew. He could not tell direction without a compass, but knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Marked east on the map was the Warbler River, the Wryneck’s source. It cut a straight path from the northern mountains, winding south and serpentine through the forest, at one point running straight alongside Augur Meadow. If he could find the Warbler, he could follow it, refill his pen-cleaning bottles, and drink of it; he was parched, and he had left Anya’s water skin at their resting place. It gave him some comfort he hadn’t been beast enough to steal that from her. If she ever went back. She had been gone awfully long. With the prize, she could easily replace her ancient gun. His note suddenly felt pathetically foolish, as did leaving any of her supplies.
Finishing his meal, he looked up, squinting at the dim sunlight shining through the leaves. The morning sun slowly heated the forest. With trees instead of brick buildings as a buffer, with damp earth as a floor instead of stone and tarred gravel, it was fathoms cooler than even the mildest summer morning in Äbender. Despite the circumstances, he found the forest air restored him almost as much as the food.
Morning – the sun was in the east. It took him a moment to find it through the leaves. When he did, he turned his face to its light. So long as he kept it there, at least until midday, he would meet the river eventually. He hoped.
As he walked, cheered by the returned (and interminable) trilling of the songbirds high above him, he pulled free a scrap of paper from his kit, along with his drawing board and a pencil. It was better to practice with an ink pen, but he could hardly do that and walk at the same time. Managing a pencil was challenge enough. But catching the phoenix was only the start; the hunt would not end until Edgard was satisfied, and only a spellscribe could do that.
Until the correct spell was found – or made – whoever held the phoenix would become as much a target as the phoenix itself. He still wasn’t sure he even needed the bird; only that he mustn’t let anyone else get hold of it until he was. Until he had both, he couldn’t be sure of his freedom. He had no time to waste.
An old habit, one long abandoned, rekindled by something Anya had said.What’s inside you can betray you without youeven noticing. Her words had pierced him, more than she could have possibly intended. Or had she? Was it a cloaked admission of her own deception? He hadn’t thought so, at first. But hisfirstimpression had been rather profoundly mistaken.
It didn’t matter. She was gone, and one constant remained. Something inside him, betraying him for years. The glyphs on his palm.
He traced them, tried differentiating them, picking them apart. But it was as impossible as it had ever been. The glyphs were none he knew – he could make no sense of them. There was the phantom ofhearthe had always imagined; if he squinted, he could almost see an altered form of the glyph forblood, and, combining this line here with that circle there, he could make the glyph forred.
He was not sure what he was even looking for. A glyph fortransform, forbird, forlife everlasting?
There were none, not on his palm and not anywhere. Nor forbind.Nor forfree.
He nearly threw his pencil aside in frustration.
Instead, he dropped it as he stumbled over an antlered skull wrapped in a thick tangle of vines, landing on his knees, scraping his hands on the forest floor. The pencil disappeared in the growth. Sighing, he sat up, picked bits of bark from his palms, ignoring the empty stare of the skull beside him. The spell on his palm was a dead end, for now. Better to pay attention where he stepped.
If he lived through this, if he managed to find the bird and concoct this harebrained spell and not kill Edgard in the process, his indenture would be ended and the spell on his palm would be negated, severing the bond. He would demand to keep his eyes open. He would never witness its making – but witnessing its unmaking would tell him more than he’d ever been able to grasp on his own.
If he could make any sense at all of this thing that bound him, the source of all his woe, it seemed to him he could make better sense of the person he was. The person he let himself become. Who did everything in spite, who knew nothing but clawing, who would smother any light for a chance to escape the shadows.
Who played a game he despised for a prize far more easily lost than won.
Freedom. A prize he, everyone, was owed, without condition or games.
