This declaration hung between them. After he won the king’s contest, though it would be difficult, he had planned on returning to some semblance of his life – to whatever he could scavenge. With each passing day in the forest, it seemed the scraps he had left further dwindled.
“Try to light the fire,” Perrine said to Sabina, perhaps sensing the tension. “Like I showed you.”
Dutifully, Sabina obeyed, taking the tinderbox Perrine handed her. After several diligent attempts, the wood remained unburnt.
“Come on now, fire,” Perrine scolded. “If you don’t light you’ll never get any of this delicious rabbit fat.”
At that, the fire burst into roaring life, startling Sy and Sabina back from its floating embers. They exchanged glances. No fire should light that quickly. She hadn’t even struck the box.
“You speak,” Sy realized. “You spoke to the fire, and your falcon. And they listen.”
Perrine pursed her lips. “Never thought of it that way. It’s true, I suppose.”
“How do you know what to say?”
She thought about it. “The words sort of…come to me.” She thought harder. “It’s an offering. The words. The fat.”
“Like Anya, with the tree,” Sabina said. “She left it food, and bones. Her hair.”
“Exactly. We all have our ways of doing it.”
“Sy?” Sabina was watching him, brow furrowed.
“It’s magic, isn’t it?” he said, feeling excited and not knowing why. “Not like ours, but…magic.”
Perrine looked between them. “Was it magic that saved Anya? I still don’t understand how she survived the buzzard beetles. When they swarm like that, they never leave anything warm-blooded intact.”
Sy swallowed. “Do they eat anything…else?”
“No,” said Perrine, stilling her knife. “Only mammals.” Then, after several moments, “Oh.”
“…Oh,” echoed Sabina, placing her chin in her hands. “That is…unfortunate.”
“Foul, beastly, wretched woman,” Perrine bit out. She rose from her seat, stared at her rifle. “I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her for this.”
Sy tried, and failed, to keep his leaping heart in check. “Can you? Kill her?”
“No,” she replied, crestfallen, dashing his hope to the ground as quickly as it had risen. “Not me. Not anyone. She never leaves her manor. It’s a fortress, impossible to get inside unless she wants you in, and never with weapons. There’s many hereabouts who would gladly do the job if it could be done.”
“She’s from the city, originally, we think,” provided Sabina. “Mirabelle Corveau.”
“She’s been haunting this forest for decades, then.” Sy remembered the name from their history lessons in the first term at Sangfeder. Turned away from the academy because King Edgard at that time would accept no women in his service, she had used her influence to break into the academy and steal several of Sangfeder’s most ancient texts. Sy suspected the incident might be in part to thank for the academy’s brutal enforcement of secrecy. Instilling fear of punishment was certainly why it was taught at all, along with a petty capitulation to the historic injustice of denying women the opportunity to study. She hadn’t been captured, but banishment to the forest was supposed to be punishment enough – though the history books had never implied it was a self-imposed exile. Nor that she was still alive.
Perhaps she would know a way to fulfill the king’s desire. Perhaps there was a bargain to be struck.
But no; he refused to enter another contract, to be lured by enchanting promises, ever again. Not for any reason. Besides, he had nothing with which to bargain.
“Perhaps another magician could stop her,” Perrine put forward. She looked him over, as if sizing him up. She appeared dissatisfied. “Well, it hardly matters. It’s a curse, not an enchantment. Killing her wouldn’t save Anya. Nothing will but the condition she set.”
“And what might that be?” Sabina wondered.
Sy knew. And he was less sure than ever how to meet it.
With a flutter, Perrine’s falcon launched from her perch on the hollow log.
“Funny,” Perrine said, unconcerned. At the others’ alarmed expressions, she shrugged. “She does that sometimes.”
“It isn’t danger?” Sabina said, an uncertain waver in her voice.
