Rook stood in fire.
He burned in it; he watched it burn; it had already burned the charred, blackened heart of the wood around him. The dead, twisted and melted by flame, were unrecognizable.
Trapped in memory, he could not move. He was what the fire had left behind it: the ashes in the hearth. He felt sound growing in him, but he could not make a sound, not in the wood, not in the hearth, not with the Basilisk with his golden face and his deadly eyes saying again and again: Is this your son? His father had only one eye to weep sorrow for the faceless child on the floor with its arm around the dog. The other eye wept blood. The child hidden in the vast marble hearth, covered in ash, breathing ash, stared at the mangled ember of the child on the floor, clutching the jeweled collar of the dog in its brittle fingers. Yes, said his father’s tears. Yes, said the dog. Yes, said the dead. I am your son.
The dead child watched.
The palace, the wood, had finished screaming; there was only this to finish, that. His sisters had stopped, and his brother. His mother had screamed at the Basilisk; she screamed at the dead child, gave him his name. Then she stopped, and there was only that to finish, because the child was already dead. His father had no more words; he had nothing left to see. The Basilisk finished finally, left the dead in their silence.
He still could not move. He felt a breeze like silk, like the hands of the dead, on his face, on his wrists. He felt his fists clenched, his body shaking in the sunlit wood, as if he stood in all the fury of winter. He could not move, he could not make a sound. The child still hid in the hearth, breathing ash, swallowing it, the bitter taste of being dead. He stared at the child on the floor, himself, and knew he was the child’s dream; he was only a dream of being alive. The dead had taken his name.
They had understood, those who had found the dead on the floor. When he came out, covered in ash, unable to speak, they knew that he was the child on the floor. He was ash; he was no one; he had no name. They had given him another. He stared at the eyeless raven on the floor and could not weep, because he was dead. The white-haired man made a circle out of lamp oil around all the dead, himself and his dog, his mother and father. The other men, guards wearing dark cloaks over the torn and filthy griffins on their tunics, led him out of the room. He turned at the threshold and looked back. The white-haired man, his father’s uncle, set a torch to the circle.
Fire swarmed over the dead. His father moved, turned blindly to look at him. Something rose from him—a dark flame, a word, his name—flew upward out of the fire. Then flames hid him, hid them all, hid everything, the house, the city, the world. He turned away from the fire, walked a step or two before he stumbled.
Someone picked him up. He could not see, he could not hear. He was dead. They took him out of the world to the kingdom of the dead.
The raven in the fire.
Raven Tormalyne.
He heard himself make a sound, a rook’s harsh cry. Blinking, he saw the dead among the trees, faceless and silent, as if they had appeared out of his dream. But they were not his dead: a beaded leather shoe told him that, a cooking pot, a piece of striped cloth, an odd painted drum. He wept then, still shaking, unable to move. Tears broke out of him like rain; he wept blood, he wept ash. Ravens circled him among the trees, cried his cries, dropped feathers like black tears. The dead waited, but he had nothing to play for them: the picochet meant life.
The drum, as silent as the dead, played itself in his head.
It stood oddly in the midst of the dead, for no reason, dropped like an egg on the floor of the wood. It was made of glazed pottery and painted with eyes. The eyes spoke, as he stared at it. The dead were wordless; their eyes spoke. The ravens spoke.
He moved then. There was nothing to play it with, so he played it with bone, bringing a charred thighbone high up over his head and then down, and down again, and again down until the drum broke like an egg and the dead flew out of it like wind, poured among the shivering trees, and passed away, followed by a black wind of ravens. He watched them, his eyes as black, his breath still full of ravens’ cries, with ash from the fire, from the hearth.
He dropped the bone after a while, and sat with the husks of the dead.
Hours later, in the night, he remembered the picochet and played it in memory of their lives.
Near dawn, he tasted his name like ash in his throat and swallowed it. I am alive, he realized, amazed. All this time I have been dead.
He fell asleep finally among the dead.
In his dreams, he went north.
He knew the tale his dreams told then: he was both the teller and the bard in the tale. His heart eaten by fires that would not die, he had left Luly and walked through the hinterlands until he found the place at the top of the world where winter was born. There, he thought, would be the cold fires to spawn the instrument to play the ceaseless raging in his heart. In the tale, the bard carried a twisted knot of love and betrayal in his throat; he could not swallow it; he could not sing. In the dream, there was no love, only hatred, and the torn, empty eyes of death. He could make that cold sing for him; he could freeze his own bones and play fire out of ice. He moved into the barren, deadly land without feeling the killing wind: his own fires kept him alive.
Out of mist and burning cold came the monstrous beast that the powers of his rage had summoned. It was white as winter, red as blood, black as night. Its eyes and breath were fire. It had wings and talons like the raven, and spurs as sharp as knives along the bone from neck to tail. Even dead, it could kill: its skin was venomous; its teeth and scales were sharp as swords. The fire in the marrow of its bones never died.
The bard said: Give me a bone to play.
It said: I will give you one. Your life is mine.
He said: Take my life.
It turned its flat head and sinewy neck, bared its teeth, and snapped off a small bone in one wing. The bone dripped; snow hissed at its blood.
It said: Your heart will take my shape when you play. You will summon me out of your bones. I will do whatever your heart asks. And then you are mine. And then you will live where I live. Your bones will be ice; your blood will be fire. Every song you play will become the song you play out of me.
The bard said: There is no other song.
He woke. Night lay thick and dark as feathers over his eyes; the wood around him was soundless. He felt something in his hand: a twig, or a small bone. He closed his eyes, slept again. In his dreams, the lion rose from the ashes, the eagle flew out of the fire. The blind raven spoke his name.
• • •
He could not find his way out of the hinterlands. East turned into south or north; the moon and sun had changed direction; he had misplaced an ocean. The hills were no longer empty. He kept meeting people living in small villages, who pointed him in one direction or another, and then distracted him. They offered him food, asked him to sing a story, and gave him odd things to play. He told them the tale of the bard in his dream; they knew the tale, and the fire-bone pipe. There was one in the next village, they heard, and told him how to find it. In the next village, he found the same vague rumors of the pipe: in the next valley, there was one, or perhaps beside the lake. “I must get home,” he told them urgently; they pointed him east and he got lost. They all seemed gentle, kindly people; he could find no reason for the dead. He asked them, but they listened as if he told some long-forgotten story, or a dream. He had traveled into the land of the dead and played for them: that, they somehow knew. Now he could play anything. The trees listened to his picochet and opened new leaves. Birds answered bone pipes he made, and he understood their language. He played a whistle made of a raven’s feather and asked the ravens to find his way back to the sea. They led him here and there, to listen to a flute that only women could play, to gourds that hissed and rattled the language of snakes. Home, he told the ravens. But they could not follow his heart’s path, he knew. Luly was no longer home.
Home was south, under a burning sky, in a city of stone ringed by water. Home was a place where his name could not be spoken. Home was a reflection in the Basilisk’s eye, into which he must move without being seen. Beneath the summer sun of the hinterlands, he felt his heart take the griffin’s shape, cry the eagle’s challenge. But he must return to Luly for Hollis; he could not vanish out of his own son’s life. And Griffin, with his dangerous secrets and deadly name, filled him with sharp apprehension. Luly was not far enough from the Basilisk to speak that name. Death itself was not far enough. . . . His fierce desire to find Luly grew more compelling by the day. He walked the sun’s path from morning to night, and still daylight left him in an endless wood, or beside a nameless river, among people who gave him shelter, and taught him tales so old he scarcely recognized the language. In the morning, they pointed toward the sea and told him he would smell it by day’s end. At day’s end, he would smell the smoke of another village, and hear, not the boom of the waves and the echo of the whale’s song, but another instrument he did not recognize, another song.
Finally, when it seemed he had played every instrument made since the beginning of the world, and had begun to learn tales from the birds, he walked out of a wood one afternoon, up a hill, and found himself at the top of the rocky slope where he had found his future.
He stared at it bewilderedly, then turned to look back at the trees, wondering if all the woods had been hidden within that wood, if all his days had been the same day. He found the shallow stream spilling out from beneath the stones, and followed it down the hill. Midway, he saw, beneath a stunted tree, the glint of copper, and a streak of white, windblown hair.
He came to her without surprise, looked at her silently, his face hollowed and gaunt now, with the memories and the sorrow that burned within, eating at him.
She smiled, showing her three teeth. The way the world smiles, he thought wearily. Showing teeth.
He said, “Can you tell me the way back to the sea?”
“You’ll find it,” she answered, slanting her bowl to catch the water.
“I’ve been lost for weeks. I can’t find my way out.”
“You found the dead.”
“Yes.”
“You played for them. I heard.”
“Yes,” he said again, his face tightening. She heard everything, he guessed. Every spoken word, every word left unspoken.
“I have a message for you,” she said. “Bard.” She lifted the bowl out of the water, and he felt his breath catch.
“Is it my son?” he asked, moving closer to her. “Did he come here?”
She only answered, “You’ll find your way now.”
She struck the bowl with her copper hammer. The note melted into him, sweet and pure, not dying but growing in force until he felt it in the stones underfoot, until the twisted tree shook with it.
The water in the bowl burst into flame.
He stared at it. And then terror raked a claw across his heart, before he could find a word for what he feared. He shouted, “Hollis!”
Turning blindly, he smelled the wind from the sea.
• • •
He walked out of the forest accompanied by the croaking of ravens, telling him of fire, of death. In the long summer dusk, the school on the rock seemed to have turned itself back into rock. He could see no light in the windows, no smoke from the kitchens, no movement anywhere. On the shore, boats lay scattered like shells; footprints in the sand fled north, south, into the shadows of the forest. He heaved a boat over, found oars, pulled it grimly into the waves. Tide flowed with him to Luly. As he neared it he saw the thick windows shattered, the stone beneath them streaked black with fire.
There were no boats at the dock. They had escaped. Or they had been trapped. He refused to let himself think. He tied his boat, his hands trembling, and cursed the hundred stone steps that he could not outrun. He smelled the dead before he saw them.
They had been asleep, he found; the fire had caught them at night. He moved through the charred rooms noiselessly, as if he, too, were dead. Fire had left the school hollow as an old bone, had transformed blood and song into ash. He did not let himself feel, or name, or weep for any of them, until he found Griffin Tormalyne’s blackened, broken harp beneath the open window of his room. Looking out, he saw the bright-haired, tide-washed body on the rocks.
He slid to the floor, sat with his back to the wall, his eyes as black as the acrid stones behind him, and as tearless. He shaped a pipe in his heart made of bone and fire, and played it for the dead. For the boy who had taken his name, he played the stringless harp on the floor beside him. For Hollis, he played nothing: the thought of him dead might make it true.
As the moon rose in the empty window above his head, he heard a step in the hall. Frail wings of firelight brushed through the dark. He lifted his head, feeling the movement of his bones heavy, unwieldy, as if he were slowly turning into stone. He heard more steps, quiet, tentative. The fire burned more brightly along the stones, limned the charred doorway. He pushed himself up, shaken back to life.
He heard Hollis’s voice: “Where are you?”
He tried to speak; a raven spoke. He heard Hollis again, an inarticulate sound, and then the fire found him.
He held his son while Hollis wept, saying brokenly against his shoulder, “I saw the boat from the shore—I didn’t know—I hoped it was you. I saw your picochet when I moored—”
“How many—”
“Over half got out. Some died on the rocks—jumping from the windows, or thrown back onto them by the waves.” He lifted his head, watching them again; Rook saw the horror frozen in his eyes. “Some never woke.”
“I saw. When did it happen?”
“Four nights ago. The bards that were left took the students to the provinces. I waited for you. I couldn’t let you come back alone. Not to this.”
“Who did it?”
Hollis blinked. He pulled back a little to see Rook’s face. His hands closed on Rook’s arms. “It was an accident. What makes you think—” He stopped, his eyes locked on the raven’s eyes. His fingers dug into Rook, feeling for bone. “No one would—” He stopped again; Rook saw him shudder. “Someone,” he whispered, “said he dreamed fire moving across the water early in the morning. Before the moon set.”
“He dreamed it?”
“He—we said he must have dreamed it.”
“No.”
“How do you—who—” His voice rose. “What do you know? What did you find in the hinterlands?”
“I know my name.”
Hollis stared at him. Blood flushed into his face; he shouted incredulously, shaking Rook, “Who are you?”
“My name is Caladrius.” He pulled Hollis to him again, quickly, tightly. “You are still alive,” he breathed, amazed. “And so am I.” He turned then, to pick up the blackened harp beneath the window. He gazed a moment at the dark, moon-laced swirl of tide below, trying to free the stranded dead. “We’ll bury them,” he said, “before we leave.”
“Why?” Hollis whispered. “Why this? Why the bards? It’s like—setting fire to birds.”
“They took in Griffin Tormalyne. And now he is dead again.”
Hollis, quieter now, gazed at Rook silently. He opened his mouth, drew a breath, but did not ask the question that was dawning in his eyes. He said instead, “He never told us his true name.”
“It was in his father’s letter. I remember it. I want you to go to the provinces. Your mother will hear of this; let her know we both survived. Stay there. You’ll be safer, there.”
“I know.” His face, still struggling with grief and shock, was easing into more familiar lines as he began to think. “So will you.”
“I’m going south.”
“Yes. I know what Caladrius means. I want to hear you sing in Berylon.”
He began to hear the song then, wordless yet, formless and powerful as the wind and waves that, grain by grain, had sculpted Luly. “You will,” he breathed, and held Hollis’s shoulders, held his eyes. “I’ll send for you when it’s safe.”
“Safe! You can’t even whisper your name here, to me, among the dead—you can’t even tell me—”
“I can’t,” he said tightly. “Not yet. Please. I need to go alone. The bards were right about the hinterlands; the tales are true. You do not take the same path back out of them, nor do you find the world you knew. I crossed the sea again to Luly, but I have not left the hinterlands. They have become the world.”
“I don’t understand,” Hollis said. He was silent a moment. Rook saw his eyes widen suddenly, as if he had glimpsed his own heritage, his own name. He added reluctantly, “I’ll go to the provinces. For now. Be careful.”
“I’ll be safe. No one knows my name.”
They gave the dead to the waves and the gardens of Luly. As they rowed from rock to land the bard Caladrius heard the singing of the whales accompany them across the sea.