The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (61 page)

“It's just a bruise,” she said, but she had to explain about how she had been hurled across the room when Dorneng's spell exploded.

“Oh, yes, we felt the spell over here,” Nansis Abora said, chirping to his mules. “Just a bump, though. Not enough to knock over a mouse.” He nodded when Nora described the formula she had used; evidently he knew more math than Aruendiel. “Yes, the surface of a ball increases as the square of its radius,” he said. “So, the bigger it grew, the weaker the spell.”

“I was hoping it would break the Faitoren into little pieces, like the ice demon,” Nora said. But Nansis Abora said that at some point the spell would be stretched so thin that it would dissipate entirely.

When they reached the hospital tent—Nora vaguely recognized the dog-faced figure painted on the outside, one of the healer gods—the magician made her lie down, despite her protests that she was fine, absolutely fine. From her corner, Nora watched Nansis Abora treat the wounded. First he had to determine whether their injuries were real or illusory. The white-faced soldier on the stretcher clutching his shattered knee was soon dealt with: Nansis Abora stripped away the Faitoren spell, and the man walked out of the tent looking as though he could hardly believe his good luck. The next soldier, an abdominal wound, was in a graver state, and Nansis Abora clucked as he examined him. Nora averted her eyes as the magician threaded a needle.

She must have slept all afternoon. When she opened her eyes, it was dark outside. Nansis Abora was occupied with another groaning soldier. His apron was completely red now.

Feeling a strong, urgent need for fresh air, Nora walked out of the tent. The lanes between the tents were full of soldiers and horses returning from the battlefield. She scanned them, looking for news. Had they won the battle? The men's faces seemed to hold nothing but weariness. Someone in the ranks burst into slightly hysterical laughter, then stopped just as abruptly.

One figure caught her attention as it passed from shadow into torchlight. A tall, dark-haired man, striding through the crowd, who drew her eye because he looked so positively
dashing
—there was no other word.

It was Aruendiel. The light had caught the unscarred side of his face. Nora got a quick glimpse of the rakish young man he had once been—his fine, aquiline features so handsome she almost felt shy. But that was only part of it. Aruendiel looked fresh, almost electric with vitality. His limp was invisible. Where was the decrepit old man of the morning? Aruendiel had been working enough magic for an army, that was obvious.

Nora had just formed this thought when Aruendiel looked in her direction. If he appeared startlingly young, she was equally shocked by the look of absolute desolation in his pale eyes.

“Lady Nora!” Perin's voice beside her. So he had survived the battle. She felt some tension disappear that she had not previously been aware of. She looked around again; Aruendiel was gone.

In her confusion, it took her a moment to notice the dirty bandage wrapped around Perin's right elbow.

“You're hurt!” she said.

He smiled. “A Faitoren tore my sleeve. Nothing to be concerned about. What about your head?”

She could not help smiling back. “Oh, that. Nothing to be concerned about. But the battle—what happened? Did we win?”

He looked more serious. “Well, the Faitoren are in retreat. We took about a hundred prisoners, a dozen dozen killed or wounded. Most of the rest are penned up on their own lands.” There was no exultation in his voice, though.

“And the losses on our side?” Nora asked apprehensively.

“We lost about the same.” Perin drew a breath as though to continue, then hesitated.

“Who?” At least Aruendiel was all right, she thought frantically. Or was he?

Perin's eyes were kind. “That witch Hiri—Hiris—the one we saw this morning. I'm sorry to bring you this news. You knew her.”

“What happened?” Nora grabbed his hand in agitation.

“That dragon we saw, and the monster leopard—” he began. Nora listened with a sinking heart. Raclin had attacked a line of troops, and Hirizjahkinis had loosed the Kavareen on him. Raclin once again took to the air, but not before clawing the Kavareen across its flank.

The leopard recoiled. Whether from pain or confusion or sheer viciousness, it pivoted and pounced on the nearest living thing: its master, Hirizjahkinis.

“I was not close enough to see,” Perin said, “but they say that the leopard's mouth was like a cave. She was gone in an instant.” Then the Kavareen rampaged up and down the lines, gulping down soldier after soldier, human and Faitoren alike—and growing even larger.

“It was Lord Aruendiel who stopped the thing. He did something that made it cower for a second, and he got it to vomit up a couple of soldiers.”

But not Hirizjahkinis. The Kavareen leaped over a line of cavalry and went bounding south across the marshes. Aruendiel and some of the other magicians gave chase, to no avail.

“No wonder he looked so terrible,” Nora said. Her heart felt like a wild bird in her chest, trapped and frantic. “Oh, Hirizjahkinis.” The brightness that was Hirizjahkinis consumed by the Kavareen's dark—it seemed baffling, too painful to think of. Perin said something about honoring her grief. Nora was suddenly aware of the gentle pressure of his hand on hers. She squeezed back in distraction, then dropped it. “I have to find Aruendiel. I have to—”

She went running down the line of tents in the half-darkness, straining to glimpse Aruendiel's tall figure. The flickering light from torches and campfires showed soldiers looking back at her with curiosity. Had he gone this way? The farther she went, the more crowded the lane became; she had to dodge and squeeze her way among the soldiers. A man with a lazy, crinkling grin squinted down encouragingly.

“Do you know where I can find the magician Aruendiel?”

“Missy, you don't need a magician when you've got me.”

After a while, she found herself on the other side of the encampment, the noise and hubbub of the tents behind her, nothing but icy night before her. A sentry gave her an odd look. With an empty feeling, her face wet, she turned and slowly found her way to the hospital tent.

It was some comfort talking to Nansis Abora, whose blue eyes clouded when Nora told him the news. “Such a sweet lady, always so lively. What a pity! And a fine magician. Dear me, I must have known her for—how many years?” He puzzled over that, splinting a soldier's wrist. “She came with Aruendiel to Semr when I was still at court. Six dozen years or more. Oh, this is a blow for Aruendiel, I'm sure.”

“He looked miserable just now. Where is he?”

“Oh, he'll be in war council half the night, my dear child. They'll be wanting me, too, even though I don't have much head for strategy. Poor Hirizjahkinis! You know, I used to wonder why Aruendiel didn't marry her, although I never said anything to him about it. He was so obviously fond of her.”

“I don't think she would have had him,” Nora said carefully.

“No, perhaps not. He can be prickly, Aruendiel can. Let me see that leg,” he said to the soldier.

Aruendiel did not appear that night, although Nora hoped he would. She spent the evening helping feed the wounded soldiers, those who were awake and able to eat. Many were sleeping; it seemed that Nansis Abora believed in the liberal use of poppy juice. Afterward, she had trouble sleeping herself, although it was the first time in almost a week that she'd had a bed of any kind and real blankets. Just that morning, she had taken Hirizjahkinis for a ghost. A few hours later, Hirizjahkinis had hugged her for saving Aruendiel. And now she was gone. No matter how many times Nora replayed the events of the day in her head, they never ended any differently.

The camp was beginning to stir when she heard Aruendiel's voice outside the tent. She fumbled at the flap and went out in a rush.

In the clear morning light, he was not the young man with the romantic good looks she'd seen the night before; he was not the dying old man she'd rescued; he was only Aruendiel, and the sight of him made her heart lighter, in spite of her grief. She came close, and impulsively she put her arms up to embrace him, but it was like hugging the trunk of a tree; she realized he was wearing armor under his cloak. With some awkwardness, she stepped away. “I heard about Hirizjahkinis.”

The gray gaze flickered, then steadied. Aruendiel pressed his lips together. “Yes,” he said. “She died bravely. It was a foolish accident, entirely preventable, but she died bravely.”

“Oh—” Did it matter whether Hirizjahkinis died bravely or not? The fact that she was gone was monumental enough. Nora felt the sudden weight of the kiss that she had never given Aruendiel. “I'm so sorry,” she said, clasping her hands. “I miss her, too.”

“She was stubborn, she never listened to any prudent warning about the Kavareen. She treated it like her toy, her pet, her plaything—pure madness!” Aruendiel seemed ready to give full rein to his anger, but he checked himself and said more quietly: “She feared to face the Faitoren without it. Even when I returned to join the battle, she would not give it up.”

“Aruendiel, I saw her yesterday afternoon, just for a moment. She was so happy that you had come, that you were alive.”

“She saved me once and I could not save her in return.” He shook his head violently, as though he did not want anyone to look too closely into his face. “And now we still have work to do. Your head—Nansis tells me you managed to break it open.”

“It's fine,” she said, but Aruendiel had put his hand on her shoulder to spin her around. Unwinding the bandage, he inspected the back of her head. She winced a little at his touch, but said: “I had a headache yesterday. It's gone now.”

“It would be better for you to rest more,” Aruendiel said, replacing the bandage. She turned and felt his eyes run over her, as though checking for other injuries. “But an army camp is no place to leave a woman alone,” he said, “and perhaps you will be of service where we are going. You shall come with us to look for Ilissa.”

The expedition to the Faitoren domain included some two hundred horsemen and nine magicians, including Aruendiel, Nansis Abora, and the man who she gathered was Euren the Wolf—slight, gray, forgettable except for his yellow eyes. Nora rode a horse bigger and livelier than she would have preferred, but she held on as best she could, a levitation spell ready in case she started to tumble off. They rode past the scene of yesterday's battle, where dead horses and broken weapons lay petrified on dirty red ice, and then south across the snowy marshland toward a line of low, dark hills. Perin rode up beside her a couple of times to exchange a few words. She tried to smile as she clung to the saddle.

After a couple of hours, the marshland gave way to fir-covered hills. A scout galloped ahead, then returned to direct the force through a small pass. Nora looked around curiously, wondering if she would recognize any landmarks. They had almost reached Faitoren land.

Nothing seemed especially familiar, though, until a warm gust of wind touched her face. She caught the dreamy summer scents of roses and fresh-mown grass. Looking up, she saw the red-roofed towers of Ilissa's castle, bathed in sunlight, not half a mile away, on the far side of a snow-covered rise.

“Mind this, Euren,” she heard Aruendiel say, then felt the glancing edge of his spell, a wrench in her gut. The stone towers rippled, quavered, like heat mirages on a highway in August. And vanished. “You see?” Aruendiel said to Euren the Wolf. “You saw how easily it came off, once I had the end of it?” Euren nodded, amber eyes hooded, then grinned suddenly. His teeth were very white.

That was how they entered the Faitoren domain, stopping now and then so that the magicians could strip away a clutch of Faitoren spells. Aruendiel was particularly thorough, undoing every piece of Faitoren magic he could find. A gold-and-ivory sundial became a gorse bush. The cloud of blossoms evaporated from the branches of a cherry tree. The scented breeze died away. Unexpectedly Nora felt a twinge of regret for the charmed, sweet beauty that, piece by piece, was passing away.

On the other hand, that statue of the two lovers that Aruendiel had just destroyed was dreadful, the girl smiling so moonily at the boy, who was just a little too gorgeous to be real. It was like a greeting card in stone. When you got right down to it, Ilissa had terrible taste—drippy, saccharine, juvenile. If she hadn't come up with such a horrible version of me, Nora thought savagely, maybe I wouldn't have minded being enchanted so much.

When they reached the site of the castle, most of the structure was already gone, but Nora thought she saw the balcony from which she had once spied on Raclin with a broken heart. Then it, too, trembled and disappeared.

What remained was a rough circle of snow-capped stones about the size of a tennis court. At the periphery were a collection of miserable huts—stone rings with crude roofs made of willow branches. As they approached, a small figure emerged from one of the huts. Nora recognized him by the tusks and the outsize, misshapen head. So it hadn't been a dream, Vulpin's transfiguration.

Vulpin looked up at the horsemen, his eyes settling on Aruendiel. He bowed.

“Where is your queen?” Aruendiel demanded.

“We have no queen,” Vulpin said. “The one you are looking for—and her son—they are not here.”

“Where are they, then?”

“We don't know. We have not seen either of them since we retreated here yesterday.”

“Are they dead?”

“We don't know. Nor do we care. She is our queen no longer.”

“What do you mean?”

“We served her loyally, but she led us into catastrophe and then abandoned us, so we have determined that we must rule ourselves.”

“Rule yourselves?” Aruendiel exchanged amused glances with Euren and Luklren.