The Shape-Changer's Wife

by Sharon Shinn

  Aubrey was laughing again. “Yes, but a woman may use the same magic on a man—lies and promises and moonlight and perfume,” he said. “And each sex has learned to defend itself against the other’s machinations. But against true magic, who has a defense?”

  “Only another wizard,” Glyrenden said.

  “Exactly! That is why the potions are unfair.”

  Glyrenden raised his mug of beer to his lips. “That,” he said deliberately, “is why I am a magician.”

  BUT INTERMISSIONS LIKE this were rare, and came only after very full, very intense days of concentration. Since Glyrenden had returned, Aubrey had seen very little of the others living in the magician’s house. He and Glyrenden were often at their exercises before everyone else had even risen for breakfast.

  Arachne brought them their lunch daily, and very often carried in their supper as well. During the few meals they ate with the others, Glyrenden was gay and expansive, attentive to his wife, and tolerantly affectionate toward Orion. They said little in response, but kept their eyes upon him almost without wavering, Orion in particular regarding the wizard with a heavy, steady stare. Lilith would look at him, then look away, then look at him again, almost as if she could not help herself. Glyrenden watched her delicate, fastidious movements with an expression of smiling infatuation.

  Aubrey was impatient with the mealtime breaks, ate rapidly and was always finished before anyone else. These alien soups and stews were not the food for which he was starved, and the strange undercurrents that passed between the other men and women in the room made him slightly uncomfortable. He would have forgone the meals altogether, and told Glyrenden so, but the wizard laughed and insisted they eat. And they ate, and the instructions went on.

  Three

  AND SO IT went for three weeks, but as the fourth week began, Glyrenden prepared to leave again for an unspecified period of time. “I warned you, remember?” Glyrenden said, laughing at Aubrey’s blank look. “I said I would be in and out of the house and that you could expect no set schedule from me. But do not worry. I shall hurry back to you as quickly as I can.”

  They were the words of a fond older lover to his impetuous mistress, but Aubrey brushed them aside. “Let me come with you,” he said. “I could watch you work.”

  “You could not.”

  “I could. I wouldn’t get in the way.”

  “I don’t want you with me when I work.” But Glyrenden said it smilingly, so Aubrey was not offended.

  “Next time, then? For there will be a next time, won’t there?”

  “And a next time and a next time. I make no promises, my pet. I have grave doubts. But I will think about it.”

  The next day he was gone, but when Aubrey woke in the morning, that was not the first thing that crossed his mind. Indeed, it took a very long time before he thought anything at all, waking up in that oversized, lumpy, molding bed. Every muscle in his body ached, as if he had been exercising strenuously; his mind was unfocused and unfamiliar to him. The room itself looked disproportionate, asymmetrical. Aubrey sat up and felt dizzy. He dropped his head to his hands to clear his vision, then looked up again, more critically. Yes, this was the room he had been assigned from his first night at this house. Why, then, should it look so odd? It was as if some drug had been administered to his system and had suddenly worn off, leaving him uncertain of the balance between reality and fiction, truth and fabrication. Or perhaps he was coming down with some illness, which had clogged his ears and fogged over his eyes. That was certainly more likely, particularly since he had neglected himself physically over the past three weeks.

  He rose slowly, catching first at the bed frame and then at the wall, but before he made it downstairs, his disorientation was wearing off. No one was in the kitchen, but today, unlike recent mornings, he was behind the crowd and not before. Grumbling beneath her breath, Arachne served him a late breakfast, and Aubrey ate as one just lately awakened from a stupor.

  He was good for very little that day, and neither Orion nor Lilith bothered to make conversation with him at dinner, but by the next morning he was much improved. He came out of bed with a bounce and joined the others at the breakfast table, and much of his old, easy camaraderie had returned to him.

  “I asked you once what you did when your husband was gone,” he said to Lilith. “And you said, nothing much. I see why now. His presence certainly changes the place, and his absence leaves one dull and lethargic.”

  She surveyed him with those unlikely eyes, utterly dispassionate. She still made no attempt to guard her tongue with him. “Do you think so?” she said. “I find just the opposite is true. I am much happier when he is away.”

  “Ah, that can’t be true,” he said heartily, pouring himself another cup of tea and sugaring it liberally. “He so obviously adores you.”

  “Do you think so?” she said again.

  “And you must have loved him once,” he pursued, waving a slice of toast at her before biting into it. “Or why else marry him?”

  The faint mocking smile was back on her pale lips. “Why, indeed?” she said.

  He had seen almost nothing of her while Glyrenden was there, but now he found he had thought about her, for he remembered without needing to be reminded the precise slant of her cheekbones and the rich summer-green of her eyes. He thought it was strange that Glyrenden’s presence in the house had blinded him so completely to Lilith’s existence, but that was exactly what had happened; the wizard had blotted out his wife. There did not seem to be enough room in one man’s head to be mesmerized by both of them, and Glyrenden had been by far the closer these past days.

  But Glyrenden was gone for more than a week, and during that time, Aubrey felt some of his allegiances changing again. He had always been a fairly straightforward young man, quick to like someone and slow to dislike, and he seldom changed his opinion once it was well and truly made up. But with Glyrenden gone, Aubrey remembered that Lilith seemed to dislike her husband; and now that he had met the wizard, it was important to Aubrey to learn why. Although he could not have said why this was so.

  Lilith did not seem to mind that he had ignored her so completely while her husband was home. With her usual mild civility, she accepted his attention again. He played games with her for hours, bringing out the onyx dice and demonstrating how to gamble, carving out a cribbage board and teaching her its rules. When they could not bear Orion’s silent observation, they played children’s card games with him as well. Then they escaped for long walks in the woods, where sometimes they talked and sometimes they were silent. Aubrey thought about it once or twice, but never suggested they make the long trek to the King’s Grove, and Lilith never again mentioned it.

  One day they took the downhill path to the village to buy spices and fruit and cheese. Orion had claimed to be ill with a fever, although Aubrey could feel no heat in his head, and they were nearly out of food.

  “He just does not want to go to the village,” Lilith said, standing beside Aubrey and looking down without much interest at the sick man. She had not lost her habit of speaking in front of the slow-witted giant as if he were not there or was incapable of understanding her. “I’m sure he is perfectly fine.”

  “Perhaps, but we can scarcely force him to go if he really does not want to,” Aubrey said.

  “Glyrenden would,” she said.

  Aubrey ignored that. He laid his hand on Orion’s belly, and the big man instantly drew his knees up and emitted an unpleasant grunt. “Well, I’m a passable healer, but he doesn’t respond to any of the simple spells,” he said at last, straightening. “So either he’s pretending, or he’s got something worse than my routine magic will cure.”

  Lilith’s eyes sharpened with a certain interest. “You mean, he might die?” she said. She sounded as if the prospect pleased her. Aubrey was surprised; he had not thought she disliked the servants with whom she shared her house.

  “I didn’t say that. Probably he is just pretending.”

  “Tha
t’s what I said from the very beginning.”

  “But we can’t send him to the village in this state. Let us go instead, you and I.”

  “To the village?” she repeated, as if he had proposed walking to the next kingdom. “Why?”

  “For food. And because I am bored. And because I am convinced a change of scenery would do you good.”

  “A walk to the village would not do me much good.”

  “Are you afraid to go?”

  “Not at all. I will if you want me to.”

  “Then let us go.”

  So they walked down, and it was Aubrey’s first time back in sunlight since the day he had left to find Glyrenden’s house. At first, it was like the morning he had awakened after Glyrenden left: Everything looked strange to him. The farmers in their market best, the peasants in their much-mended smocks, the pretty girls in their colorful dresses, even the dogs and the horses and the well-built houses looked out of place and exotic. He had been too long with odd people in an odd house, he knew that was it; yet it had been barely a month since he had been alone among the folk of this village. They should not have appeared so distorted to him.

  He and Lilith strolled through the marketplace like any burgher and his wife, she with a basket over her arm and he with the money Arachne usually counted out to Orion. Lilith was not much of a shopper, for she had no idea what they needed or how much things should cost, but she seemed to get a mild pleasure from hefting the ripe squash and sniffing at the shrunken cantaloupe. Aubrey picked the bread, and the herbs, and the wine and the salt. Lilith bought a bunch of flowers with the handful of change he gave her, and clipped the small purple blossoms into the braid over her right ear. They gave her a girlish, flirtatious demeanor he had never seen before.

  They had just left a small, gaily striped stall where Lilith had considered, then rejected, a large watermelon, when Aubrey looked back to check on some slight disturbance behind them. The small, dirty woman who had watched them buy nothing had thrown the melon violently to the hard earth at her feet, and was in the process of stomping its sweet ruby fruit into pulp against the dirt. She looked up angrily to catch Aubrey’s astonished gaze, and glared back at him remorselessly.

  “Spoiled!” she called at him, shaking her fist. “Spoiled it, she did!”

  Aubrey took a step toward her, almost too shocked to know what he was doing. “My good woman—” he began, but Lilith tugged on his arm and pulled him up short.

  “Leave it,” she murmured.

  “Spoiled it, she did!” the woman was shouting now. “Naught else to do with a good piece of fruit than to throw it away, once such as that has put her hand to it. Rotten clear through, it would be!”

  Aubrey shook off Lilith’s hand and came closer to the woman, feeling his own anger stir. “How dare you say such a thing about a respectable woman?” he said sternly. “We pay you with proper money for proper goods and you should—”

  “Respectable!” she screeched back at him. By this time, they had drawn the attention of most of the other merchants in the immediate vicinity, and not a few of the customers as well. “She’s a witch, she is! A changeling! Dogs don’t go near her, nor horses, nor cats, nor even the rats of the village. Children run from her, and all good men look away when she walks by. She touches a thing and it’s spoiled for decent people—”

  “That’s enough!” Aubrey thundered so violently that the fruit-seller fell silent in awe. There was such fury in his body, such a torrent of wickedness, that it was all he could do not to speak the incantations that he knew could be used to punish her. “Not another word, do you hear me? Or I swear I will make you sorry you ever stepped foot inside this village, let alone insulted a lady who—”

  “Lady!” the fruit-seller repeated, regaining her voice. “If such a one as that is a lady, then I’m—”

  “Aubrey.” It was Lilith’s voice, cool and indifferent as dew; she had come to stand by him but did not look at the ranting shrew. “Leave it. Let us go now.”

  But unfortunately, her interruption had drawn the fruit-seller’s attention again. She whipped her two hands before her and crossed the forefingers devoutly; and this ward against the dark forces she held between her heart and Lilith’s gaze. “Evil!” she cried. “Evil! Stay back from me, evil one! Or come to you blood and destruction and hate—”

  Without waiting for the woman to finish her curse, Aubrey lifted his arms in a blind, unreasoning gesture. But Lilith’s hand, urgent on his elbow, stopped him again. He looked down and saw her as through a great distance, rage blurring even her clear-cut face, and thought on some calm, inner plane of his mind, How odd. I would kill for this woman. And then sanity was restored, and the world collapsed quickly to its normal proportions.

  “Leave it,” Lilith was saying again. “We have what we came for. Let us go now.”

  He kept his eyes on her face and allowed her to turn him so he would not be tempted to look again in the direction of the woman he had very nearly spelled from existence; and he allowed Lilith to pull him by the arm from the marketplace and out of the village and back to the path that led to Glyrenden’s house. And never once did he look back, or down at his feet, or forward to the path that lay before them, because all that time his eyes were fixed on her profile, since she kept her face turned from him. And neither of them spoke for that long walk back, and never once did Lilith drop her hand from his arm.

  GLYRENDEN WAS GONE for two more days. During that time Aubrey attended diligently to his studies, back in the room where he and Glyrenden practiced magic, where Lilith and Orion and Arachne never came. He did not want to act as though something extraordinary had happened, so he made appearances at mealtimes and was quite jolly. It was a waste of effort, he knew. Orion gulped his food down and ran from the table; Arachne scuttled around them, bringing in and removing platters, and neither of them cared if he spoke or was silent. Lilith responded with her usual carelessness when he addressed her, and obligingly kept quiet when he did not. He was not even sure if she sensed in him the tension her presence roused. But nothing had happened, really, and Glyrenden would be back in a day or two.

  Glyrenden returned in the middle of the seventh night, and Aubrey knew he was back when he opened his eyes in the morning. He could not have said why he was so certain, but he was; the air was heavier or the light passed through a different filter when Glyrenden was nearby. The first few days of the wizard’s absence, Aubrey had missed him, and waited impatiently for his return. But now he found himself filled with a curious reluctance to go downstairs and join the mage at breakfast or in the teaching room.

  He went downstairs late, but husband and wife were still at the kitchen table. Glyrenden had Lilith’s small, slim hand in his and he was playing some complicated lover’s game with her fingers. From the doorway, it looked as though he took one finger at a time and pushed it back against the knuckle as far as it would go; but Glyrenden was smiling and Lilith had no expression at all on her face, so probably that was not what he was really doing. As Aubrey walked self-consciously into the room, Glyrenden planted a kiss on the back of Lilith’s hand, then dropped it.

  “Ah, my apprentice,” said the wizard, his lively black eyes examining Aubrey. “You slept late. Have you been holding splendid parties and drinking all night in my absence?”

  “No, indeed. I have been most studious so as to impress you upon your return.”

  “But I am already impressed with your powers; surely I told you that before?”

  “There is still room for improvement.”

  “There is for all of us,” Glyrenden said, but Aubrey had the impression he was not entirely pleased. “Except for my beloved Lilith. She comes to us perfect.” He nodded his head graciously toward his wife. Aubrey was a little embarrassed.

  “You should be a judge,” Lilith said coolly. Aubrey looked over at her, but said nothing.

  Glyrenden rose to his feet. “Eat quickly, my young disciple. I shall await you in my study.”

&nb
sp; Aubrey sat down and hastily threw together a plate of the leftovers on the table. To his surprise, Lilith stayed with him after her husband had left the room, sipping her milk and watching him eat.

  “You are very eager,” she remarked, observing him chew and swallow as rapidly as he was able.

  “I don’t want to try his patience,” Aubrey explained around a mouthful of food. “He can have a temper, sometimes stirred by very small things.”

  “Can he?” she said, amused. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “I’m sure you have,” Aubrey said quietly.

  “Perhaps I just don’t care.”

  “That’s moderately obvious.”

  “What else is obvious about me?”

  She had never asked him for an opinion on anything before, and he thought it strange that she would choose to ask that question, at this time, with her husband not twenty yards away. “Almost nothing,” Aubrey said with a certain bitterness.

  She smiled again. “You have a lot to learn.”

  Aubrey was standing now, gulping his last sip of coffee and feeling about as mannered as Orion at a meal. “Yes, I think so,” he said, and left the room.

  The morning’s lessons did not go well. Aubrey, wondering why this should be so, laid the blame on his own confusion, his doubts about Lilith, his faint, nagging distrust of Glyrenden. These things had built a gauzy wall of resistance between him and his mentor, impossible to articulate or discuss, but somehow there. He was clumsy with the spells he knew the best, and slow to learn the new ones, and Glyrenden called a halt to the lessons before the afternoon was half over.

  “You have not impressed me today, my pet,” the older wizard said. “We can hope for better luck in the morning.”

  And the next morning, things did go better. Aubrey had firmly pushed from his mind all thoughts of Lilith; he had entered the study room determined to do well. He had come in upon Glyrenden creating fantastic colors in a handheld ball of light, and a rush of admiration dizzied him for a minute. Then Glyrenden turned and smiled at him and held out the kaleidoscope of flame. Aubrey took it in his hand and it was as cool as water in his palm, although the gray smoke from the tiny fire drifted into his eyes and stung them.