One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (32 page)

The snow had stopped. It was colder than ever.

“
I do not love my child,” I said, “and I should. I remember enough of who I used to be to know that. I need my heart back.”

“
Then ask your wizard.”

“
He died. People around me are prone to it.”

“
So when you say you have lost your heart,” Forsythian said, “what you mean is … you can’t find it.”

“
I never thought I would need it again.”

“
You were wrong,” said the sorcerer.

“
Can you find it?” I asked. “I can pay you. I have gold, jewels—”

“
I don’t do things for gold,” Forsythian said, as though the very idea of it offended him. “I do them because they are interesting enough to make the doing worth my while.”

“
Am I sufficiently interesting?”

He was silent for a long time. I had no way of knowing whether he was still there, but I remained, drawing on six months of patience. I had not waited so long to abandon my request now.

“
You want to love your son,” he said at last. “What if you can’t?”

“
With my heart—”

“
Women with hearts that have never left their chests don’t always love what’s theirs. Perhaps you can’t care about him now, but neither will you grow angry with him, or resentful. Hearts are dangerous. You knew that. What might you do with yours?” Forsythian’s tone was cool, dispassionate. Heartless. “I could make you a new heart, I suppose. It is a thing I have done once before. But I can’t say what that heart might make you desire once it was pressed into your chest. It might worship your son. It might loathe him. Which risk would you choose?”

I had not anticipated a choice. “I don’t know.”

“
Think on it,” he said, and I knew that he was gone. The courtyard felt suddenly empty, when before it had been occupied. I stood stiffly, my legs numb from the cold, and went inside to find my son dandled in Alabast’s arms, balanced on a pile of leather-bound tomes. The sorcerer’s student looked up at my face with a crooked smile.

“
You’ve met him, then,” he guessed. “Could he tell you what you wanted?”

“
No.” I sat in the chair beside them and held my frozen hands to the fire. “Or if he could, he wouldn’t.”

“
Don’t fret,” Alabast said, petting my shoulder awkwardly. It was the first time he had tried to touch me and the gesture was in itself a surprise — people were wary of me as a rule, though they didn’t know why. “He knows you’re here. He might change his mind.”

“
I think,” I said, so softly he did not hear me, “he wants me to change mine.”

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It was Alabast who named my son.

Winter had unexpected effects — there were few fireplaces in the rambling fortress, so on cold nights everyone was likely to congregate where there was a good blaze. The night after my unsuccessful interview with the sorcerer, the motley assortment of his house guests assembled in the study Alabast had claimed as his own for an impromptu supper. The girl in jester’s clothing appeared first, her hair a riot of red streaked darker here and there where it had been dampened with snow. She introduced herself as Cianda and folded her long limbs on the hearth, toasting pieces of cheese impaled on a silver letter opener. I left to feed and change the baby, and when I returned the stony matron was in a shadowy corner near the fireplace. She was so difficult to see that she might have been there all along and I would not have known. The boy arrived last, lugging a wicker basket of stale bread, which the jester girl toasted over the fire with the cheese.

No one was inclined to be talkative, but the atmosphere was quite convivial all the same. The boy perched on a low bookcase, cracking walnuts; Alabast read aloud a little poetry from his book of the moment and Cianda came to play with the baby, leaning her elbows against the back of my chair to dangle a beaded charm just out of his reach.

“
What’s his name?” she asked, without looking at me.

“
I haven’t named him yet,” I said. It was an obvious thing to overlook, I suppose, but it hadn’t seemed obvious before that moment. It was strange enough to draw even Alabast’s attention from the spiky foreign script he had been reading.

“
Are you waiting for a proper ceremony?” he enquired. “The bathing in wine and cedar water, the lighting of the nine candles? I didn’t think anyone did that these days.”

“
I had not decided on a name.”

Alabast nodded approvingly. “Ah, it’s a serious business. I am a traditionalist, myself, I like the old names. What is your husband?”

“
Dead,” I said briefly, before realising what he meant. “His name was Joram, but I don’t want my son named after him.”

“
Sage is a nice name,” Cianda said, and flushed when I looked at her.

“
Onyx,” said the walnut-cracking boy from his eyrie. “His eyes are so dark.”

“
Calabry,” suggested Alabast. “Farrant, perhaps. Or Torren.”

“
What does that mean?” I asked. “The last one.”

“
It means ‘white bough’. No particular relevance there, I will admit.”

“
I like it,” I said. “That is all the meaning it needs to have.”

Cianda lifted the baby from my arms. Kneeling beside the fire, she laid him down on the warm hearthstones. She took a discarded walnut shell and laid it hollow side up on his forehead, like a small boat, into which she dropped a crumb of bread and a corner of yellowed paper. We watched her without speaking, sensing ritual even though we didn’t understand what it meant. Torren flailed irritably and Cianda took the walnut boat away, floating it in a shallow bowl of ink. Flames were reflected in the dark liquid, fleetingly bright. For a long moment Cianda kneeled, watching the reflections dance, then she sighed and rocked back on her heels.

“
He’s too young,” she said, obscurely.

“
A seer,” Alabast whispered to me. “She sees the future in reflections.”

This entire evening had felt dreamlike, unreal, with me playing along as a woman who celebrated her baby like she should. Watching Cianda, however, I was gripped with a sudden conviction. It was not alarm. I could not feel anything so strong. All I knew was that if I looked into that ink, I would see my reflection. My shadow over Torren’s boat.

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“
You decided, then.”

I had been looking for the sorcerer all day, prowling along galleries and stairways, always circling back to the courtyard where I had heard his voice in the hope he might once again be there. He was not. By evening I had given up and returned inside to the empty study, rocking the fretful baby mechanically while I stared into the embers. At the sound of Forsythian’s voice, I half turned before remembering it was no use and made myself look back at the fire.

“
Yes,” I said.

“
He’s quite pretty, your son.” Something soft brushed across my cheek and Torren suddenly stopped crying, staring wide-eyed into space. He snatched at something I couldn’t see and the sorcerer laughed softly. “I’d forgotten how peculiar babies are.”

“
I want to love him,” I said quietly. “I try. And all I have is emptiness.”

Forsythian sighed. “Very well,” he said. “You’d best come with me, then.”

I stood quickly, looking around for a clue. “How?” I demanded. “How can I follow you when I don’t know where you are?” There was only silence. “Forsythian?” I called. “Are you there?”

In my haste I had unsettled the strata of books around my chair. They tumbled to the ground, sending papers floating through the air like ink-pattered snowflakes, and when one page drifted to the ground it landed on a foot that had not been there before. I looked up.

The sorcerer looked back at me.

I thought at first he wore a feathered cloak. Wizards often do, at least in stories. It was only when he moved, a restless shuffle of his feet, that I realised the fall of feathers down both sides of his body were in fact wings; great dark wings where his arms should have been. His hair was the same black, a wild crown of it that spiked and streaked across his tawny eyes. His chest was bare despite the cold, almost gaunt in its thinness, his legs encased in tattered grey and his feet bootless. He looked feral.

“
You can stop staring now,” he said.

“
You were supposed to be old,” I said. It sounded more critical than I had intended, as though he had failed a personal test.

“
I am,” he said, without inflection, and left the room without waiting to see if I was behind. His wings trailed their feathered tips in the dust, but his bare feet left no prints. I gathered Torren more securely against my chest and followed.

I had spent two and a half seasons in this place, searching its many rooms and passages, but I had never before seen the door Forsythian opened. Had the stacks of books concealed it all this time, or had it simply not been there until the sorcerer wanted it to be? Inside was a short flight of steps into a large tower room, which overlooked the apple tree courtyard from an unlatched window on one side and the forest road on which I had arrived from the other. The arrangement should not have been architecturally possible and bothered me more than it should.

There was a fireplace here, left unlit. It seemed Forsythian did not feel the cold. A long, scarred artisan’s workbench was positioned underneath the courtyard window, scattered with open books and unrolled maps, brightly coloured bottles and squat beeswax candles in small glass bowls. In the midst of it all was a large clay dish of ink.

“
I will need blood,” Forsythian said.

I nodded, laying Torren down on a nearby chair and crossed the feather-scattered floor to the bench. There was an ivory handled lady’s hunting knife laid out beside the bowl of ink. “Where do I cut?” I asked practically.

Forsythian’s eyebrows might have risen then, although it was difficult to tell beneath his crows-nest of hair. “I’ll do it,” he said, and raised a wing. Fingers emerged from the feathers like a hand pushed from a sleeve, but the grimace of pain on the sorcerer’s face told me it was nowhere near as easy. He snatched the knife from my hand and slit a line at the base of my earlobe. His thin cold fingers thrust my head downward so that the welling blood dripped into the ink, and then it wasn’t fingers holding me there, but the awkward pressure of a wing.

“
Remember your heart,” he whispered in my bleeding ear. “What did you love? What hurt so badly you couldn’t bear its weight any longer?”

Logically enough, I started with small things. The tart sweetness of the first apples of the year. Blankets warmed by the fire in my childhood bedroom, scented with sprigs of dried lavender to help me sleep. But small pleasures, I knew instinctively, would not be enough. I remembered my mother’s face as she was lain out for her funeral, waxen pale and unapproachably beautiful, as though she had already metamorphosised into her own stone memorial. My first love, clear blue eyes and a teasing smile that would turn as quickly to a scowl or a kiss. It had been I who left him and he’d tried so hard to hide his tears. I remembered the face I had chosen instead, lit gold with lantern light in an autumn night. Seeing it wax pale the day my betrothal to the king was announced and we had looked at one another, desperate to forget, knowing I never would.

My reflection melted in the still ink, ripples of light drifting into a new shape. There was a lake, an island, a stone chest shrouded by five years of encroaching thorns.

The weight on my neck was withdrawn and I staggered stiffly backward.

“
Is that where it is?” I asked. Torren was crying behind me. The sound was distracting. I put my thumb in his mouth to quiet him and he sucked the salt from my skin, small teeth biting fretfully. If the sound of his distress had not interfered with my thoughts, I wondered if I would have gone to him at all. It was hard to manage a conscience with only the phantom of remembered emotions to guide me.

Forsythian had his back to me, bending his head so low over the dish that when he looked up his hair dripped black as though his own colours were leaching away. There was ink on his lips and his eyes were half-closed, unfocused. I said his name and he looked at me as if he could not imagine who I was, or why I was there. It was as though he had gone somewhere else, become someone else. I knew I should be afraid then. I backed towards the door and was almost there when I remembered Torren, still swaddled on the chair only a few feet from the empty-eyed wizard, and I knew I should go back. I stopped where I stood in a moment’s indecision.

And Forsythian blinked. He recognised me. The moment of danger passed.

“
Come on, then,” he said, flinging open the window.

I stared. “What do you mean?”

“
The lake,” he said. “Do you want to find the lake or not?”

“
What has that to do with the window?”

In response, he spread his wings. His thin nose narrowed further, hooked, darkened to a wickedly sharp beak. The whites of his tawny eyes were swallowed by predatory yellow. Feathers sprouted from the bare skin of his chest, until I was not looking at a man any more, but a bird — a bird large enough to carry me on its back.

“
My son,” I began.

The bird tossed its head impatiently. A feather flew into the air and trailed downwards onto Torren’s face, into his open mouth. He went instantly limp in my arms, the warm weight of deep sleep. The feather had disintegrated on his tongue like ash. It did not seem hygienic or responsible, and the duty I had built to replace my conscience warned me of the wrongness of what I was about to do. Babies should not be left untended. I should go to Alabast or Cianda, but there was no time.