Page 75 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry. I made myself speak. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“Farrin, don’t,” Ryder muttered under his breath.

The firebird’s form shifted every time I blinked: a woman, tall and alien, bright as snow gleaming under the sun. Then, a bird, or somethinglikea bird—beaked and winged, with long, slender arms ending in talons of crackling fire. Whether it couldn’t maintain a single form or simply chose not to, the effect was mesmerizing. My eyes glazed over, like I’d been staring too long at a hearth fire. I started moving toward the creature without meaning to.

Ryder snapped at me—“Farrin,don’t”—but he didn’t dare lower his crossbow and arrow, so I kept going, even as he roared at me with increasing panic. Only a few steps more and I would reach the firebird’s tree. I put out my hand, palm up. I crouched a little, as if approaching Osmund when he’d gotten spooked by something.

The firebird cocked its head, considering me. A spray of scarlet plumage burst from its head, shedding embers that scattered across the mossy ground. It let out a soft cry—the jangle of gold coins, the trickle of water down smooth black rocks—and reached for me with a long arm of fire. Somehow, even with the memory of that long-ago fire etched into my every bone, I was not afraid of the creature’s flames. Soon those flames became feathers, a thousand shades of gold and orange, scarlet and violet, and each one gleamed as if silkspun. I reached for its brilliant talons, every curved tip glowing like a tiny blazing sun. Heat gathered under my hand; a distant, distracted part of my mind screamed at me in warning, but that was easy to ignore in the face of such beauty.

A crash, a curse, and suddenly Ryder’s arm was around me, pulling me back against him, out of the firebird’s reach. We stumbled back together, as if a cord connecting me with this fiery creature had suddenly snapped. The force of it was so strong that I felt Ryder lose his grip on me, and I fell to my hands and knees in the dirt.

And then, with a sharp, angry cry that stabbed my skull, the firebird lunged, a column of fire so quick and hot that the gale of it blowing past me pulled tears from my eyes. I turned to follow it with a scream in my throat, but it was too fast for me, too brilliant, its wings and talons outstretched, and before I could warn Ryder, before he could move out of its path, the firebird’s flames engulfed him.

Immediately, his screams filled the crackling hot air.

The sound of his agony made me wild. I shot to my feet and ran for the fire without thinking. What would I do with it? Spray it withwater I didn’t have? Would the firebird even respond to such things as normal flames would have? I didn’t know, I couldn’t think. Ryder’s screams were awful, each animal cry shattering my heart. Suddenly I was back at Ivyhill, trapped in smoke and flame, but this time Ryder was the one trapped in the firestorm, and I was my parents—powerless to stop disaster from unfolding right before my eyes.

“Stop it!” I cried, uselessly. I could barely hear my own voice over the roar of the firebird, and if it heard what I said, it gave no sign of it. It simply stared at me from within its sea of flames: two brilliant blue eyes, unblinking, unfeeling.

I tried once more to run straight at it. In the Ravenswood forest, the creature had seemed skittish, fearful. At the mere sight of me, it had flown as if in terror. Maybe, I thought, I could frighten it away, spook it, like a horse that would bolt at the slightest strange sound. But the sheer heat of the firebird threw me back before I could take three strides, and I landed hard on my backside. I thought wildly of Gemma, of Talan, of Philippa—or Kerezen, or whoever she was,whatevershe was—but by the time I fetched them, it would be too late. Already, it was too late. I could no longer hear Ryder screaming.

I crawled as close to the fire as the heat would allow, great heaving sobs tearing out of me. The ground was wet, steaming. My hands sank into black mud.

“Please let him go,” I whispered, a pathetic heap in the dirt, but the firebird remained unmoved, the only sign it had heard me a slight ripple of light that raced across its face like the flit of a stray sunbeam.

It was the first time I’d seen anything like an expression on its inhuman face, and some instinct told that expression was…annoyance.

The realization snapped me out of my frantic fear, clearing my desperate mind just enough to think,Oh.

Of course.

In my panic for Ryder, I’d forgotten all about the greatest weapon I possessed: my voice.

An avalanche of despair crashed down on me. If I had acted faster, if I had remembered sooner the power of my music, perhaps I could have saved him.

So when I began to sing, it was with bright, sharp anger, hot enough to rival the flames that had taken Ryder from me. From the huge library of music that lived in my mind, I pulled a chant of battle written decades ago, when for a brief time the continents of Gallinor and Vauzanne had been at war over a newly discovered chain of fertile islands. I hardly registered the words as they formed on my tongue; I knew only my grief, my desolate fury, which grew with each ragged note, each spat syllable. But the firebird seemed unaffected by me. It observed me with those blaze-bright eyes for such a long moment that I began to feel truly afraid. I had fought specters with my voice, I had fought Kilraith, but it seemed this creature was impervious to whatever power I held.

Then, suddenly, it shot up into the canopy with a stifled cry of pain. And where it had stood, within a charred ring of earth, was Ryder, dazed but unburnt.

He stared at me, and then his knees buckled and he fell, and I was there beside him in an instant, moving faster than I ever had in my life. He was nearly unconscious, and the bulk of his body was too heavy for me to hold up properly, but I tried with all my might. I pressed my face against his hair and swallowed hard against the sobs bursting to escape me. Then I inspected him—his hair, his arms, his dear face. I touched his beard, held his cheeks.

“Ryder,” I choked out, “say something, please.”

“I’m all right,” he rasped. He raised his sweaty, scorching-hot hand to touch mine and let out a rough cough. “It was just…very hot in there.”

I laughed through my tears and grabbed on to him, kissed hiswonderful unhurt fingers. Then my wits returned, and I looked up with a jolt to find the firebird, smaller and paler than it had been, hovering a few paces from us.

Fiercely I drew Ryder to me and glared at the horrible thing. But before I could even consider what to do next, a fist-sized spot of pale light began to glow on what I thought must be the firebird’s face, beneath its lapis eyes.

“You understand now,” it croaked, in the same common tongue I used. The sound was a strange one, a combination of a shrill avian cry and a broken human voice, neither male nor female. Bizarrely, the creature seemed to wince as it spoke, as if offended by the tone of its own voice.

“You understand,” it continued, falteringly, “what must be done.”

My shock rendered me mute for a moment. I felt Ryder shifting slightly beside me; I knew with certainty that he was reaching for his crossbow.

“I understand nothing of what just happened,” I managed to say, “except that you attacked my friend without provocation.”

“And you were frightened of her, and cowed by her fire,” the creature continued, cocking its head—a human head crowned with flames, tresses snapping like ropes of molten gold, then a bird’s head, sleek with shining feathers. The shape of it was always shifting, always transforming. “At first you did not remember the weapon you carry. At first you knew only grief and terror. In war, there is no room for grief or terror. You understand now. You must practice this. You have let it sit idle for too long. She had to remind you.”

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