The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (45 page)

Dorneng looked up, biting his lip. “Would you like me to try to remove it?”

“Please,” Nora said, with a shrug that she hoped did not convey too eloquently her total lack of any expectation of success.

Dorneng reached into his tunic and pulled out a small, oblong silver object, looking much like the pen that a man in Nora's world might take from inside his jacket. He rolled the cylinder between his palms with some care, then held it in front of his face. The top portion slowly lengthened, thinning in the process, and bent itself into a hook.

“What is that?” Nora asked.

“It's called an Eafroinios key,” Dorneng said with some pride. “It's for removing spells.”

Dorneng got some points for originality: This would be a new way of failing to remove the ring. “Well, no one has tried one of those before.”

“They're very rare.”

Dorneng leaned forward and tried to hook the ring with the key, with the evident aim of pulling it off Nora's finger. Immediately it was clear that the hooked end was too narrow. With a little scowl, Dorneng drew the key back and squinted at the bent tip for half a minute, until the metal widened into a shallower curve. Then he went back to the ring. This time, the mouth of the hook slid loosely around the gold band. Dorneng looked up at Nora and smiled hopefully. She gave him a mechanical smile in return, as the tip of the Eafroinios key dug painfully into her skin.

Dorneng tugged on the key, trying to guide the ring over the first joint of Nora's finger. The ring did not budge. He pulled harder.

“Well,” Nora said. “Nice try.”

“I'm sure this will work, though,” Dorneng said quickly. “This is a—a very powerful tool. Let me try here.” He inserted the hook at another spot on the ring's curved edge and yanked again, but with no better results. Changing the angle at which he held the key did not help, either. When Dorneng resorted to using the hook as a sort of lever, jamming it through the ring and twisting it as though he could snap the gold band, Nora finally protested.

“That
hurts.
Look, this isn't working.”

“It has to work, though,” Dorneng said, looking flushed, with an edge of troubled excitement in his voice. For a moment, she was afraid he might burst into tears.

“I told you, no one has been able to get this damned ring off.” Pulling her hand away, Nora was relieved to see, over Dorneng's shoulder, Aruendiel's dark-clad figure slice though the tower wall. “Don't worry about it.”

“Let me try again,” Dorneng said, snatching for Nora's hand. She tucked it behind her back.

“Aruendiel,” Nora said loudly, “Dorneng has, very kindly, tried to remove the Faitoren ring for me.”

Aruendiel's footsteps quickened by a fraction. When he reached them, he looked down at Dorneng for a moment, and then at the hand that Nora was replacing in her lap. The pause before he spoke was just a beat too long to be absolutely polite. “I don't recall giving you permission to practice magic on Mistress Nora,” he said to Dorneng.

Dorneng began to say something about wishing to be of service to the lady and hoping to repay Lord Aruendiel's hospitality. A perfectly fine sentiment but Dorneng could not seem to find a way to express it succinctly. “I told him he could,” Nora said abruptly, interrupting. “He has something called an Eafroinios key. He was trying it out.”

Aruendiel's dark eyebrows angled sharply. To Dorneng, he said: “And where did you get an Eafroinios key?”

Dorneng at first seemed inclined to equivocate, but then said: “From the wizard Kelerus Ruenc. He is selling off his collection.”

“I never heard he had an Eafroinios key.”

“He kept it quiet, mostly. I found out about it by a lucky chance.” An element of boastfulness came back into Dorneng's voice.

“Anyway, it didn't work on the ring,” Nora said.

Aruendiel seemed both unsurprised and—Nora thought—somewhat amused at the news of Dorneng's failure. He sat down with an unhurried air and extended his hand to Dorneng. “Let me see it.” After a second's hesitation, Dorneng handed him the key. Aruendiel weighed the small silver tool in his hand for a moment, then held it up to inspect the hook that Dorneng had fashioned. He turned it back and forth, looking at it from different angles, and ran an exploratory finger over the curved metal. His face brightened slightly with an expression of pleased concentration.

“It is the real thing,” Aruendiel said. “I congratulate you on your acquisition, Dorneng. There have been many, many false Eafroinios keys circulated. The magician Eafroinios the Fearful finished fewer than a dozen,” he said, glancing at Nora. “Silver has some limited antimagical properties to begin with, and then he literally trained the metal, day and night for years, to intensify those qualities.” Delicately, Aruendiel continued to stroke the hooked end, pausing every so often as though to admire the instrument. “Eafroinios was almost certainly mad. No one else has ever had the patience to replicate his effort. But the amulets he made can counter a wide range of spells. They require some skill to use properly, of course.

“Mistress Nora, your hand, please. The one with the ring.”

Feeling mild curiosity, Nora laid her left hand on the tabletop, fingers fanned, and leaned her chin on her right hand to watch what developed.

Deftly, as easily as he might skewer a piece of meat at dinner, Aruendiel hooked the tip of the Eafroinios key around the ring. The curved tip fit perfectly, pinching the gold band so tightly that hook and ring almost seemed welded together. He gave the key a long, steady pull.

Something was different this time—Nora could tell before the ring slid over the first joint of her finger. Whatever had been holding the ring in place had suddenly, finally let go. Still, she watched the ring bump along the length of her finger with a sense of unreality. It looked like any ordinary gold ring as it came off her fingertip, still held in the grip of the Eafroinios key.

“It's gone,” she said wonderingly. “It's
gone.
”

Aruendiel put key and ring carefully on the table and then looked at Nora, his smile lifting like a kite tossed by the wind. He looked happier than solving a difficult magical problem—even succeeding where Dorneng had failed—could account for. “Yes, it's gone,” he repeated.

Dorneng uttered an uncertain sound, but when she glanced at him, he was beaming. “Good work, my lord!” he said. “Beautiful work!” He clapped Nora awkwardly on the shoulder.

“After all this time,” Nora said. She clenched her hand into a fist, then spread her fingers again, admiring their splendid nakedness. “Thank you—
thank you,
” she said to Aruendiel, who looked a shade more gratified. He bowed slightly in acknowledgment. “And thank you for bringing the Eafroinios key,” she added politely, for Dorneng's benefit. “It was your idea to try it.”

“Well, I'll have to practice more with it,” Dorneng said, with some ruefulness. “His lordship got it to work on the first try.”

“That's the only way it will work,” Aruendiel said. “You can never force it.”

“What will you do with the ring now?” Dorneng asked.

“Destroy it,” Aruendiel said, and Nora felt no inclination to argue.

Her finger felt strange without the gold band. She had gotten so used to the minor irritation of its presence, its subtle weight—now that the ring was gone, her hand felt oddly numb, sensationless.

Nora raised her hand for closer examination, a faint question in her mind. The flesh didn't look healthy, she thought. It didn't look right. Skin and nails had turned the same slightly yellowish white. She tried to flex her fingers, but they were frozen in place.

“My hand—” she started to say, and then discovered that she could not move her arm, either.

Panicked, she jumped up from the bench. On the other side of the table, Aruendiel leaped up, too. He lunged toward her. “Something's wr—” Nora started to say.

She couldn't finish the sentence. Aruendiel's fingers were wrapped around her throat, digging into her windpipe. She goggled at him, unable to breathe. Why was he trying to kill her? She twisted away, trying to free herself, but her body felt stiff and unresponsive. Aruendiel grabbed her right arm, as though to restrain her, and hauled her across the table toward him. Her hip banged the wood. Crockery shattered. But then his grip on her throat loosened slightly, and she found her breath again.

“What the hell are you doing?” Nora screamed. Aruendiel, breathing hard, did not seem to hear her. He held her facing him, his fingers tightening again on her throat, his other hand still squeezing her arm.

“Can you move your legs, Nora?” Aruendiel asked levelly.

The big muscles of her thighs tensed. But they did not move at her command. She could not sense the floor under her feet.

“No,” she said. “It's like I'm buried in cement. Let me go!” Nora made as if to pull away from him, and discovered that her hips, waist, torso, were all immobile. She could not even shift her weight.

She lifted her eyes and stared into Aruendiel's eyes. “You broke my neck. I'm paralyzed.”

“Your hands, Nora. Look at your hands.”

She looked down. Past the edge of her sleeve, her left hand was no longer recognizably hers. That is, it was a copy of her hand in cream-colored stone. Marble, maybe.

The right hand was, blessedly, its normal light tan, faded a bit for the winter, the nails pale and a little ragged. This living hand, now warm and capable. She tried to move her fingers. They wiggled at her in a friendly fashion. Her eyes went up the arm to where Aruendiel gripped it so maniacally just above the elbow.

“Stone?” It was all she could bring herself to say.

“Stone,” he said.

“And you're holding it back. Otherwise, my arm—my head. My whole body.”

“I am slowing it as much as I can.” He spoke with a precise, deliberate calm that was itself a kind of urgency. “What feeling do you have in your body, below the neck?”

“It feels tight. All over.” Yes, she could breathe, but pressure corseted her ribs; she tried to take a deep breath and found herself gasping. The import of Aruendiel's words sank in. “You're only slowing it? You can't stop it?”

“The stone is only skin-deep, so far. Dorneng!” Aruendiel's voice suddenly rose to gale force. “Do you perform a counterhex,
now,
or I will spill the curdled filth you call your brains.”

Behind Nora, out of her sight, Dorneng began to babble, something about Manathux petrifaction. “This is not the Manathux curse,” Aruendiel snarled. “This is Faitoren.”

“My hand hurts,” Nora said. Was it her imagination, or was it getting heavier, too? “It hurts
a lot.
” As though she were wearing a too-tight glove that was getting smaller still, surrounding and binding each finger with meticulous, implacable force. She wanted very badly to wring her hands.

“But the stone is crushing the flesh, as it grows,” Dorneng said. “That's Mana—”

“The ring, wormsnatch,” Aruendiel thundered. “Destroy the ring.”

“Oh.” Dorneng sounded apologetic. “Where is it? It's not on the table. She must have knocked it to the floor.”

“
Find
it,” Aruendiel said. Nora started to moan, long, wavering notes that were wholly inadequate to the discomfort she was feeling. She needed to howl, but there was not enough air in her lungs. The small bones in her fingers were splintering, giving way. She could hear them crackle and shatter, even through her rapidly thickening skin of marble.

So that was how it worked—the stone spread from the outside in, and it pulped all the tender, living flesh within. You would think that turning to stone would be a painless process, but you would be mistaken. Was this what Raclin had felt, what Massy felt when she became an apple tree?

The big joint at the base of Nora's thumb popped, and this time she did howl, very briefly. Now the long, delicate bones that ran through the hand were collapsing, one by one. Nothing left of her hand but pain. That would be her whole body in a few minutes, Nora saw. Her rib cage would implode, her pelvis would crack, her skull would crumple—

Aruendiel was speaking to her, she realized. After a moment she understood that he was asking if she wanted an anodyne, a spell for numbness.

“No,” she said despairingly, because the sickening pain in her hand was already gone. She could feel nothing at all, and she could guess what that meant. Stone had conquered flesh, all the last remnants of it. Now the marble was already starting to compress her forearm—her wrist caught in a vise. But at least she could feel something. Her body would be numb and dead, solid stone, soon enough.

Dorneng was scrabbling around on the floor, giving running commentary on his efforts to find the ring, as though to document how hard he was trying to help. Aruendiel's mouth was set, and his eyes seemed to be looking at something very far away. She was suddenly aware of the magic he had unleashed, roaring and tearing at her marble skin, but it was—quite literally—like listening to a hurricane from inside thick stone walls.

“If it's Faitoren magic, is all this an illusion?” she asked him in a whisper. Almost a joke. Aruendiel scowled, twisting his mouth as though determined not to let the words escape, but she knew what he meant anyway: Illusions can kill.

“Found it!” Dorneng said, just as Nora noticed that her right hand was whiter than it had been. Aruendiel saw it, too, and swore. She willed her fingers to move, to play an arpeggio in the air, but only her index finger responded, and then it too froze, pointing upward as though in admonition. Reluctantly, Aruendiel took his hand away from her arm; she could not even feel his touch lifting.

A blue flash, a thunderclap, so close it seemed to swallow her up. The concussion left even her marble hand vibrating. Lesser crashes followed, like tiles falling off a roof. Nora opened her eyes, not remembering when she had closed them. Off to the side, Dorneng looked stupidly at the floor, then stooped to pick something up.