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You thought you'd be free of it, didn't you: the old oak tree, the ink, the pen-shaped scar on your hand where you stabbed yourself. You thought the old fairytale had found its proper ending, tick-tock, that the clocktower's machinery of narrative had come to a halt. Maybe you were even right, for a little while. The raven had been slain, the prince's heart restored. The raven's dark daughter had found her happily ever after with the prince.
You returned to your ballet lessons, remembering the cat, the anteater, the parade of animals with their own half-written stories and longings. In the evenings you picnicked beside a lake and talked to a duck who had once been a girl, a brave, clumsy, determined girl. And at night, at night you dreamed.
Your dreams were full of marionettes and ravens with eyes of red malice; of heartbroken nightingales in gilt cages and wind-up cockerels with jewels for eyes and trumpets for voices. In your dreams the sword at your side rose on swan wings to battle an enemy who wore your own face. Then you'd wake, and drink your coffee with shaking hands, and tell yourself that the stories we tell in our sleep don't count. You have seen how ruinous storytelling can be in its power. You would rather let others make their own choices.
Tonight, though, the dream is different. You are in a wood where every tree grasps after dregs of sunlight and every path is a tangled maze. You follow a trail of shining pebbles, or maybe they are candy eggs, the kind that taste of sugar and cream and fruit from the summer's first harvest, the kind that witches tempt children with. Even in a dream you know better than to stop and taste one, just to see. But you are hungry and the day is dimming, so you keep walking.
At the end of the trail you find a cottage, firelight shining from its windows. In the way of dreams, you know the cottage isn't safe. In the way of dreams, you knock on the door anyway. After all, you have a sword at your hip, and you are so very hungry.
"Come in," says a low, sweet voice, a woman's voice. You open the door. For a second you stand there, blinking. There is smoke in the room. It smells of roast duck and marjoram and sage.
A woman stands before the fireplace. She has long, dark hair caught up in braids, and she wears a hunter's fur-lined coat, a hunter's breeches patched at the knee. On the wall behind her is a great recurve bow, unstrung, and a horn-rimmed quiver with twelve arrows fletched with black feathers. Her hands are large for a woman's, and callused.
You try to introduce yourself, but no words come out. Instead, iridescent soap bubbles fly from your mouth. As each one pops, it releases a ticklish sensation at the back of your throat, and the cry of a bird: the plaint of a loon, the shriek of a barn owl, the whistling notes of a canary.
"I am only a hunter," the woman says, "but I can give you a hunter's hospitality. Won't you share my dinner?"
You sit. The sword at your side feels cold. You are the woman's guest, however, and you are not so discourteous as to challenge her at her own table.
The woman sets down a platter heaped with boiled carrots and tender steamed shoots of wild asparagus and slices of roast duck. "I've been wanting to thank you," she says.
It is not difficult for her to read the question in your eyes. "Why?" she says, smiling secretively. "I am a hunter of birds, and you have felled not one, but two, for me."
You stumble away from the table, as you should have done earlier. And you wake at your desk, pen in hand. When you light a lamp, you discover that there are words on the sheet of paper.
Even before you read the words you know what they say: Once upon a bird, and then the story you have been dreaming, the story you cannot escape.
"Ahiru," you breathe into the candlelit darkness. You think of the smell of roast duck, the birds' cries, the hunter's twelve arrows like the hours of a terrible clock. Ahiru is in danger.
You dress quickly. You do not forget Lohengrin's sword; this story needs a knight, and a knight needs a sword. You glance over at the empty bed where Mytho once slept. Does he ever dream of birds now?
The way to the wood is not long, but the night is chilly. As you enter the tangle of trees, it begins to snow. You are no hunter, accustomed to moving silently. You leave a trail of trampled foliage and footprints filing up with snow, rustling leaves and steaming breath.
If there are any eggs on the ground, candied or otherwise, the moonlight does not reveal them to you.
The lake has become a road of ice, lined with arches glittering white and blue. As you draw closer, you see that the shadows within the arches are the frozen bodies of birds. They look as though they were trapped in flight, wings fully extended.
Your heart grows still within you. You batter against the arches. They only leave your hands numb inside their gloves. None of the pitiful bird-shapes is that of a small yellow duck. But Ahiru does not come to greet you, either.
Straightening your shoulders, you step out over the lake. If not for the birds, the dead birds, it would be beautiful. Normally you would not walk on the ice, but the threat you face is different. The trap awaits you at the end of the road.
So you walk, and above you the stars wheel in strange, uncertain constellations, as though time were winding itself forward faster than usual. The wind tugs at your coat; the snow settles on your hair. Several times you slip and fall. You remember falling into the illusionary underground lake, the sensation of drowning in unfulfilled promises. You get up each time, stung by the cold, knees bruised.
At the lake-road's end, there rises a castle. Of course, it's always a castle or a maze, some grand arena for the heart's permutations. The castle is white and grey, and dark banners fly from its towers. As you approach, the gates silently swing themselves open.
You enter the castle's great hall. Trophies line the walls: the stuffed and mounted heads of wolves and bears and stags, their eyes glittering like stolen jewels. It is no warmer here than it was outside. At the far end, past the silent heads, is a dais. Upon the dais there is a throne of alabaster and tarnished silver. Upon the throne is a woman, the same dark-haired woman you met in your dream.
"So you came," the woman says, rising. She lopes down the dais to stand before you.
Never one for extended conversation, you ask, "Where is Ahiru?"
"The duck?" The woman gestures upwards. A cage swings from the ceiling. In it is the huddled form of a duck.
Ahiru makes a fluttering motion. You hear a muffled quack. A single bright feather drifts down to your feet.
"Let her go," you say.
"As if anything is ever that simple," the woman says. She sounds weary and amused all at once. "Let me tell you a story--"
You want to say that you are tired of being trapped inside others' stories, of being a puppet. For Ahiru's sake, you hold your tongue.
"Once there was a hunter lost in a wood," the woman says. "She was hunting birds when a storm blew out of the north, white and wailing, and the hunter would have died of the chill. Instead she froze her heart, so that the cold would harm her no longer.
"As the years passed, however, the hunter's home never knew spring or summer, and her realm became as icy as her heart. So she set about making a cloak of feathers from every bird she could slay. When it was finished, it would thaw her heart. And when she heard of a dancing duck, she resolved to add the duck's feathers to the cloak."
As the hunter speaks, the cloak appears around her shoulders. It has peacock's tailfeathers and swan's down and hawk's primaries, canary's yellow and cardinal's red and raven's black.
The cage above them rattles. Ahiru beats her wings against the bars.
"Why isn't she dead already?" you ask.
The woman paces back and forth, back and forth. In the rustling of the feather-cloak you hear the stifled death-cries of birds great and small. "She told me it wouldn't finish my story," she says. Her gaze is dark and direct. "Is this true? You are a teller of stories, are you not? Write me my ending, and I will free your Ahiru."
She isn't your Ahiru, any more than she belongs to this hunter. "What, so you can hunt more birds?" It's not that you haven't feasted on goose or chicken yourself, although never duck, not since learning what Ahiru really is. It's the manner of their death that troubles you.
The hunter snaps her fingers, and the cage breaks into shining fragments. Ahiru flaps her wings frantically and lands on your shoulder. She buries her head in your hair.
"I am tired of winter," the hunter says reasonably. "What other choice do I have?"
Ahiru unhides herself and cocks her head at the woman. "Quack," she says, clearly wishing she could still speak as humans do.
You and Ahiru both know that speech is not the only way to communicate. And so she flutters down to the cold, cold floor, and begins to dance, wings arched, head held high.
There is another way, Ahiru says in the language of dance. Free the birds.
The hunter bows. "What is dead cannot return," she says gravely. "How will freeing the birds help me?"
"There's more to hearts than heat," you say. "If you truly want your heart unfrozen, then act as though it already is." Already you are tired, so tired. You wish the castle were bright with fire. And this is after only one night of this unnatural winter. How must it feel to live through it year after year?
She wavers. "Yes," she says softly, "perhaps that's the only way. I have cheated death for so long, who am I to hold on still longer?" She unhooks her great curved bow from its place on the wall between a boar's head and a bear's paw. Frost spreads across the wood at her touch. "Fire--" she says. She strikes one match, two, and drops them into the great hall's fireplace. Reluctantly, the tinder catches on fire. She tossed the bow in and watches it burn with a steady orange light. The shadows flung across the hall are bird-shaped.
Across the lake, you know, the arches are melting, and the bodies of birds are freed from their prisons of ice.
Ahiru dances an elegy for the lost birds, the dead birds, the birds stripped of their feathers. Death, she mimes, and heart, and forgiveness. In the firelight, she is a small, bright shape, and at that moment you think she is more beautiful than she ever was as a girl, even a girl who danced in dainty pink slippers.
Slowly, you lay down your sword to dance with Ahiru. Your steps are uncertain, for even the fire does not drive away the chill. But Ahiru is an accommodating partner. And the hunter, the hunter takes off the cloak.
Then the gates open, and the birds come. Birds of every kind, sparrows and vultures and soft-breasted doves, swans and eagles and long-tailed pheasants. The birds come to mourn their dead. They pause at the dance, and crowd around the hunter, nestling against her legs, perching on her shoulders, warming her with their living bodies: forgiveness.
Ahiru finishes her dance and curtsies to you. You pick her up in your hands and press her to your chest. She nuzzles you. The hunter is crying; the hunter's heart has thawed.
For the first time, fire warms the castle. "It's time to go," you say to Ahiru. You pick up your sword. Even if you didn't need it this time, you never know what will come next year, or the year after that.
"Quack," she agrees.
The hunter lifts her head. "Thank you," she says. She is speaking to all the birds, not just you, which is as it should be.
You leave the castle. The frozen lake shines in the dawn's pale light. You hurry, carrying Ahiru, not wanting to be trapped when the ice melts, as surely it must. Ahiru's rapid heartbeat is the most comforting clock you have ever known.
As you reach the far shore, the ice cracks. Perhaps the hunter in her castle did you this last favor so you could return home safely. You like to think so.
You bring Ahiru to your room so she can nap in a warm place after her ordeal. For your part, you pick up a pen, thinking of the story you have just witnessed, the story whose ending the hunter chose for herself, the story that has become part of your own, and begin to write it down.