Firebird - Hardcover

R. GARCIA Y ROBERTSON lives in Mt. Vernon, WA.

Chapter One

Prince Sergey and the Witch-Girl
 
Once upon a time, deep in the north woods that circle the world, a witch-girl gathered fungus for the Bone Witch’s supper, when she heard the fire jay call her name. “Ahrr-ee-haa, ahrr-ee-haa, ahrr-ee-haa . . .”
 
Brushing tangled black hair from sea-green eyes, Aria searched for the bird, seeing only tall pine trunks and blue bars of sky. Somewhere in her teens, Aria knew neither her age nor her birthday, but was otherwise quick-witted, as well as lithe and strong from living in the woods. Her strange name was given her by her mother, and it meant “song” in the forbidden language of the opera. Aria called back to the fire jay, “Here I am, silly bird. Come tell what you see.”
 
She listened. Insects hummed in hot pine-scented air. Farther off, Aria heard a woodpecker knocking. Her bright homespun dress had the red-orange firebird embroidered on the bodice, done in silk from Black Cathay and the Barbary cloth called crimson. Aria had stitched it herself on sunless winter days, sitting by the Bone Witch’s cold hearth with just the sleeping rats to warm her bare toes.
 
Now that she was fully grown, Aria never feared the woods by daylight. Leopards, troll-bears, lycanthropes, and forest sprites lurked among the trees, waiting to make a meal of the unwary. But by day, the boreal woods had a hundred eyes alert for any suspicious movement. No lynx or leopard could stir a foot without birds calling and squirrels chattering. All Aria need do was listen.
 
Night was another matter. But the Bone Witch never let Aria out at night. Nor could she leave the hut without her slave collar and protective rune, showing she was valuable property. Each morning, the Bone Witch made Aria repeat her invisibility spell, saying, “I have not raised you to feed a hungry troll-bear. Not when you are finally becoming useful.”
 
Aria did not argue, though she had found every moment of her short life thoroughly useful—no matter what others might think. She began as a girl-child thrown away in time of civil war and famine, but she had lived to become a prized slave of the Bone Witch. Survival taught Aria to make the best of today, for tomorrow was often worse, and not to shit where she meant to sleep, and never to tell the truth unless under duress. Most of all, it taught her to trust to her luck, which had saved her when hundreds of girls like her were taken by the Killer of Children. Lady Death had ample chance to find her, yet Aria was happily gathering fungus in the forest, making her think the Killer of Children had spared her for something special.
 
At puberty she was given to the Bone Witch for two handfuls of salt and a cattle pox cure. Her foster family figured they were doing everyone a favor. “The witch can better provide for you. We are poor,” the father informed her—as if Aria had not noticed, sleeping between the hearth and the hogs, “while you are stubborn and willful.”
 
His wife hastily agreed. “Making you obey is like trying to teach a cat to fetch.” Had Aria been a boy, it would have been different, but she was a girl, naturally wanton, unruly, frivolous, and amoral, a growing threat to their son’s virtue. They were duty-bound to keep her chaste and ignorant, then give her to some man in marriage—a dead loss to the family. Better by far to give her to the Bone Witch.
 
Only their lazy son objected. Not the least threatened, he wanted Aria around. Without her, who would do his chores? Who would he spy on in the bath? He had promised to rape her when they got bigger.
 
Aria herself had said nothing. Raised as a slave to serfs, she retained a stubborn sense of self-worth that regularly got her whipped. People called her changeling and worse, with her pert ways and wicked green eyes—a girl switched at birth for a defiant demon-child. Bundling up her straw doll and wooden spoon, she took a seat in the father’s cart, and they lurched off, crossing the Dys at Byeli Zamak, headed for the Iron Wood. All she could think was that she was to become a witch-girl. And witches were burned.
 
That was years ago, and she had not been burnt—not yet. By now Aria had spent half her life in the woods, and she knew which mushrooms were food, and which were for flights of fancy, what berries were sweet, and which herbs cured, and which ones killed. Having nothing of her own, Aria happily appropriated all of nature. These were her trees, her flowers, her birds and beasts in the branches above. Every screech and cry in the foliage spoke to her. When it was safe, she spoke back.
 
“Aarr-ee-haa, aar-ee-ha, aar-ee-ha . . .” The call came closer. Like her, the fire jay was a curious soul, and could be coaxed with low, soft calls. Nothing could happen in his woods without him telling the world about it.
 
Picking up her bark basket, Aria set out after the sound, fording a shallow stream to enter a fern-choked glade ringed by stands of slim silver birch. Birches loved the light and fought to fill any sort of clearing. At the far end of the glade was a pond frequented by red deer and herons, and on the bare bank Aria saw pugmarks.
 
She knelt amid the bracken, feeling the tracks, finding the claw prints worn and splayed with age. Three nights ago, after the rain when the moon was full, an old female leopard came from the same direction she had, stopped to drink, and then headed up the ridge, aiming for the thickly wooded crest separating the woods from the settled lands beyond. Any leopard with business beyond the ridge could easily be a stock thief or man-eater.
 
Not a cat Aria cared to meet. Stomach tensing, she looked about. Mossy patches shone like polished jade. The protective rune on her armlet shielded Aria from magic—but not from fang or claw. Straightening up, she set out again, keeping the breeze at her back. Leopards did not know humans have no sense of smell, and so they never stalked from upwind—she need only worry about what lay ahead. These were her woods. Let some old leopard scare her, and she would never go out at all.
 
“Arr-ee-ah, arr-ee-ah . . .” She spotted a flash of orange among the pine trunks. The bird awaited her at the crest of the ridge.
 
And not just the fire jay, but a fire as well. Black oily smoke billowed from beyond the ridge crest, smearing the clear blue sky. Hairs rose at the nape of Aria’s neck. She had not smelled the smoke, because the wind was behind her—but she knew where it came from. Byeli Zamak was burning.
 
Topping the ridge, Aria stared in awe. This was as far as the slave collar let her go. Below her the forest ended, and rolling steppe spread out from the foot of the ridge, broken by loops of river, dark patches of fallow, and the onion domes of village churches. Between her and the plowlands, guarding the fords of the Dys, stood a round white-stone tower seven stories tall, with walls twenty feet thick—Byeli Zamak, the White Castle. Smoke poured from the tower. Aria pictured the inferno inside, fed by grain and oil stored in the basement, burning up through the wooden floors, feeding on gilt furniture, Barbary tapestries, Italian paintings, and canopied beds. A cornerstone of Aria’s world was consumed in flames.
 
She came from these settled lands. Somewhere out there, Aria had been born. Somewhere out there, her family was slaughtered—for the black earth beyond the woods was sown with bones and watered by blood. Constant strife consumed her family, and almost made an end to her. She had begged in those villages, and slept in the painted doorways of those...