In practice, though, he could not bring himself to say anything of the sort to Lolona. All he could manage, one evening, was an awkward remark to the effect that he had always viewed Mrs. Toristel as a sort of daughter.
Lolo gave him a curious, half-amused look. “Did you, now?”
“Yes,” Aruendiel said, wondering if he should say more, then thinking better of it. “She came to work for me when she was just a child.”
“Oh, and Ma always said how handsome you used to be back then.” Lolo gave a spurt of laughter. “Like a king, she said. And your great estate—she loved to talk about those times. I used to feel jealous that I’d never gotten to see how things were in the old days.”
Aruendiel smiled thinly and changed the subject. He did not mind Lolona’s allusion to his broken face. She had been bracingly matter-of-fact about his appearance since the age of four, when she boldly asked him why he was so ugly. He liked less the thought of Mrs. Toristel dwelling fondly on his lost good looks. Some misguided fancy from her girlhood, nothing he’d ever cared to encourage.
Then, several weeks after his return, Lolona informed him that she would be returning to Barsy and taking Mr. Toristel with her. “He can’t live by himself,” she told Aruendiel severely, as though he were pressuring her to leave the old man behind.
“Of course not,” Aruendiel agreed. “He should be with you. But you do not want to stay on in your mother’s place?” he added hopefully. “You are quite welcome to take her position at the castle.”
Lolona thanked him profusely. It was obvious, though, that she had no wish to be his housekeeper, even for the honor of following in her mother’s footsteps. No doubt Lolo could make a far better living brewing beer in Barsy, he thought.
With Lolo and her family gone, the castle sank deeper into silent torpor. For the first time in years Aruendiel found little joy in his books. Finishing a chapter, he could not always remember what its subject had been. Sometimes, after woolgathering, he would pick up his brush to complete a sentence and discover that the ink in the pot had already dried.
Nora’s tablets were still collecting dust on the library table. A few lines written on wax, that was all she had left behind. Why had he been so stingy and not given her parchment to write on, real notebooks? And yet it hadn’t seemed to matter to her. She’d been as enthusiastic a student as he could have wished for. He could still picture the light in her face when she tried a new spell. The magic she conjured was fresh, sweet, impatient. She would have been a great magician—he would have made sure of it. As good as Hirizjahkinis. Better.
Lolona had engaged a woman from the village to cook and clean for him. He refused to allow her to bring his meals up to him in the tower, so she left food for him in the great hall. He ate it when he remembered to. Or, as the night stretched on, he changed shape and flew out the tower window to hunt in the forest. It was easier to be an owl than a man, in some ways—his emotions sharper and simpler; his thoughts focused on flying and killing. But transformation was a temporary respite, and even then he kept finding his concentration was somehow askew. Too many times he dove, then rose back into the night with empty claws.
He was sitting over his books one afternoon when his reverie was disturbed by someone calling outside.
A woman with bat’s wings and indigo skin was flapping through the air, circling the tower. She grinned at him, pointing at something white that she held in her sharp, pointed teeth.
A mail demon—he had not seen one for years. Cautiously Aruendiel opened the window and took the letter from the carrier, trying to keep his hands away from her teeth. The letter was from that great fool, the wizard Hirgus Ext. He might have guessed it. Who else would send a missive by such a showy and archaic messenger? He read:
To Lord Aruendiel of the Uland, magician, greetings from the learned and puissant wizard Hirgus Ext of the Court of Fragrant Jasmine, Mirne Klep. (Gods, could Ext be more pretentious or effete? Court of Fragrant Jasmine, indeed.) Sir, notwithstanding our differences in the past, I address you with honest goodwill, extending the hand of fellowship in the hope that you and I may find common cause against a most repulsive enemy (Interesting. Did he mean Ilissa?) and come to the aid of a mutual friend. I trust that you will not scorn this application when you comprehend the nature of my proposition. (Why not get to the point, then?)
Both I and my beloved spouse were grieved to hear the dark news from the north—to wit, that the lovely and most noble Lady Hirizjahkinis, who had been our houseguest until recently, was the victim of an attack by a foul fiend, her own trusted servant the Kavareen. I am sure that her comrades on the battlefield were not more shocked or distressed than we are.
Yet I dare to remind you that all hope is not lost. It is known that some demons can be induced to regurgitate their prey, under sufficient duress. Therefore I would like to propose that you and I, skilled and learned magic workers both, combine our formidable powers to trace the monster that has devoured our friend, and force it to give back its prize. In broaching this endeavor, I appeal to your affection for Lady Hirizjahkinis as well as your sense of honor and justice. I am confident that our shared efforts will meet with success and release our friend from her horrific captivity.
Aruendiel’s initial impulse was to laugh, the first time he had found anything amusing in days. Ext was so obviously afraid to go after the Kavareen by himself, and yet so determined to rank himself on the same level as Aruendiel. Refolding the letter, Aruendiel waved the mail demon away—no response.
But Aruendiel could not dismiss the letter out of hand. “Our friend,” Ext had written. Simple words stronger than all the florid pomposities littering his message. Ext was ridiculous in his presumption, a fool, but he had proposed a brave and honorable mission, and Aruendiel felt piqued that he himself had done nothing to free Hirizjahkinis.
That was assuming that Hirizjahkinis could be freed. Nansis Abora, who liked to ponder odd magical problems, was fairly sure that she survived inside the Kavareen, along with everything else the Kavareen had ever swallowed. But then the Kavareen was not an ordinary demon; it was the ghost of a demon. Anyone or anything in its belly might well have undergone some transformation impossible to predict by the usual demonic physics.
Aruendiel considered this new project for a day or so, feeling oddly sluggish and indecisive. Then he concluded that he could not, on principle, ignore a chance to rescue his old friend Hirizjahkinis. In the back of his mind, he reflected that Kavareen might be useful to himself, too, without spelling out, even in his own mind, what its uses might be.
He had only a few matters to settle before leaving. He made himself give planting directions to the peasants—they expected it, it reassured them—and he renewed the protection spells on the castle and the valley. Idly he wondered how long the magical barriers would last without him. From a niche in one of the castle’s ruined towers, he retrieved a few silver dishes engraved with the crest of his mother’s family. Mrs. Toristel had disapproved when he sold the family silver. She thought he didn’t know she’d held back those dishes and hidden them there, but there is no concealing anything from a magician in his own house. He had the silver sent to Lolona in Barsy. What Lolo would make of the gift, the legacy, Aruendiel did not know, but as he told Nora’s watchful shade in his own mind, it was the best he could do. Her own clothes, still in the chest in her room—he meant to tell the new housekeeper to give them to someone in the village, but it kept slipping his mind. They were still there when he rode away very early one morning.
Aruendiel had no intention of accepting Ext’s offer, so he did not turn his horse’s head toward Mirne Klep. In fact, he had very little idea of where to look for the Kavareen. But he knew of a scroll in Hajgog, in the library of the Old Temple, that described the monster, its habits, and the rituals the priests had once used to control it. When the priests had set the Kavareen after her, Hirizjahkinis had consulted the scroll—in
the guise of one of the temple’s sacred cats—and some of what she learned had been useful when she finally subdued the demon and made it her slave. So she’d said, anyway. Hajgog was as good a place to start as any. He would make his way to the southwestern coast—avoiding that reeking anthill, Semr, and its court—and take ship for the southern continent.
As he rode, passing through the rocky Uland and then into the richer lands beyond, his spirits changed slightly. They did not lift, exactly, but he found it refreshing to have a sense of purpose again. A long, difficult journey, the prospect of challenging a wickedly powerful adversary—these things quickened the blood. And the possibility that he would not defeat the Kavareen after all—that was also sweet in its own way.
The route he had chosen took him south through Pelagnia. With no conscious intent, he rode through country that he had passed through long ago. The market town of Kilmsy was very little changed from the old days, except that the inn he remembered was long gone. They still told stories in the town about how a mysterious green fire had burned it to the ground, and how every building erected on the same spot had also burned, until the site was finally abandoned.
He passed within two karistises of Forel, but only to glance at the manor farm where his daughter Blackberry had once lived. The farmhouse had been enlarged; the place looked more prosperous than he remembered. He had ridden into the dooryard so many times to see Blackberry and her children. But they knew him only as a distant kinsman, some relation of Blackberry’s dead mother. Those visits, always joyful but faintly unsatisfying. He had a sudden stab of regret for those past lies, for having made Blackberry an orphan.
He had no desire to see the officially recognized remnant of his family, his grandniece and her brood, although Pusieuv would no doubt be delighted—if surprised—to see him ride through her castle gates. Another opportunity to harangue him about how her daughters needed Lusul, his wife’s estate, for their dowries. And if he told her that he’d been ready to give Lusul to Nora for her dowry? Aruendiel smiled crookedly to himself: Pusieuv’s outrage would be gratifying, although it would not outweigh the deadly tedium of a visit.
But Nora had refused his offer of Lusul, looking sickened, as though he’d insulted her with such a magnificent gift. Did she not understand that he was trying to protect her? Even if Pirekenies were mad enough to marry her without a dowry, that would hardly protect her from the scorn of his family. And Pirekenies himself might eventually lose respect for a poor wife.
Gingerly he recalled that last day with Nora, the strained conversation in Luklren’s library. It baffled him still, that rage of hers, when he suggested that she marry Pirekenies. What did she expect? She had to marry someone, it seemed, and there was no more eligible candidate than the boy. He was well-born, amiable, young—truly young, not an old man pickled in magic. And she was fond of Pirekenies. You could tell when you saw them together. Yet she was furious when Aruendiel did everything he could to convince her of the benefits of the match.
At the time, he’d almost welcomed her anger. It eased the task of saying goodbye to her, a little.
Why, Aruendiel thought suddenly, had he bothered to listen to the boy and his absurd scruples about protecting Nora’s good name? If Nora wanted to live under Aruendiel’s roof, study magic with him, and destroy her reputation in the process, why was it any concern of Pirekenies or anyone else? The world was officious toward unprotected women, probably because it was also so cruel to them.
And if she had stayed—? To lose himself again in conversation with her, to walk with her in the forested hills around the castle, to relish her quick wit in magic—he would have been content, almost. I could tell her anything, the village girl had said; there was so much more he wanted to say to Nora. And if one day he took her into his arms, kissed her pretty mouth? Would she have smiled back at him? Looked at him with sweetness and desire? Pure foolishness to even dream such a picture, but it made his pulse quicken.
What had he lost when Nora went away? Not only her, but some part of himself, fresh and fond and hopeful, that she had awakened, that he missed now.
He was still puzzling over these things as he came to Taslonr’s Mountain. It had also changed. A village had grown up at the foot of the hill, as though the place had lost its malign reputation. It had been generations now since the Lady of the Mountain had disappeared. Did the inhabitants even remember Olenan, how their great-great-grandparents had sought her out to beg for favors, how they’d tried to appease her?
Most of the hill was stripped of trees now, turned to grazing land. Aruendiel tied up his horse and walked slowly uphill, his boots squelching in the thawing mud. There was no trace of Olenan’s presence. He had not expected any, after all this time. At the top he gazed blankly at the view—rolling brown fields, dappled here and there with unmelted snow, with the foggy humps of mountains in the east and north.
How had Olenan done it, he wondered. More than one hundred years, and he had never come across any trace of her. As the years passed, he understood better the bitterness of passing time, how even without growing old you could lose everything that mattered to you. It had become obvious to him what she had done.
The deed was hard for a good magician. Your magic almost had a will of its own; it was nearly impossible not to save yourself, not to work a spell in the last extremity. You could take poison, but your body would reject it; you could plunge a dagger toward your heart, only to have the blade turn to water when it touched your breast.
Years before, when the pain from his injuries was unceasing, Aruendiel had stepped off the northern battlement, the one built on the cliff. He’d died in a fall once before, he reckoned—why not again? Instead, he found himself floating among the treetops on owl’s wings. He had changed shape in an instant, without conscious thought. He tried again, unsuccessfully. The fall that had killed him in that long-ago battle, he decided regretfully, had been a fluke.
If any magician had the fortitude, the magical control, for a deliberate death, it was Olenan. Aruendiel doubted that she would have done violence to herself. She would have chosen a more passive method. Perhaps turned herself into a deer—Olenan liked to do that sometimes—and then let herself be hunted to death.
Or, he thought with repulsion, it could have been something like what that treacherous calf of a magician Dorneng did to me. She could have walled herself up, away from all sources of magic, and let herself wither, dwindle, and die.
There was always the Kavareen, Aruendiel reminded himself as he descended the hillside. The trick would be to have it maul and kill you without swallowing you, but that could be managed. A quick death, an honorable one. He reclaimed his horse and rode westward, wondering the whole time how—with all his power and magic, with intelligence and honor and good intentions—he could have made so many idiotic mistakes in his long life, and found so many ways of ruining his own happiness. But looking ahead, he was resolved and darkly expectant.
Chapter 6
Nora floated silently in blurred gray dreams, in bland, formless peace.
Emptiness frayed and dissolved her thoughts, dispersing their dust across infinite expanses of quietude.
Occasionally some fragments of her lost self drifted close enough together for a spark of mutual recognition, a momentary flare of consciousness. And then she thought confusedly: is this all? Is this how it ends?
Words came to her out of oblivion, unexpectedly solid and familiar. I am re-begot. . . She clung to them, waiting. There was more. . . . Of absence, darkness, death. Things which are not. She repeated the line, even as the void encroached again and the words began to lose meaning for her. Other words curled closer. For I am every dead thing. . . .
How did the poem go? That’s right, it was a poem. Poems had existed, once, somewhere. For I am every dead thing, in whom love wrought new alchemy. Love? It had a comforting sound, but the meaning felt elusive. She tried to picture it and could not
.
Another word approached, demanded her attention. A name. Nora thought, Aruendiel?
Aruendiel. She could picture him, when she could see nothing else. Details, trivialities, as though she could not encompass him in a single glance. But she could piece him together even from fragments: his dark head bent over a manuscript; how he splayed his long, square-jointed fingers on the table as he talked; the wiry black hairs on the back of his wrist; the way he’d held tight to her shoulder as she helped him out of the dungeon; the warm light in those cool eyes when he watched her in the ruddy glow of an improvised Christmas tree.
And then she knew with a pure conviction exactly what he was doing right now.
He was on horseback, riding along a dirt track. She could not see him, but she could sense the chuff of the horse’s breath, its weight on the road, the creak of the saddle as Aruendiel changed position slightly, the breeze touching his face and ruffling the hem of his cloak—testimony from a multitude of witnesses that he was alive and moving through the world.
Aruendiel rode on through the material universe, distant, inaccessible, and Nora, hidden in nonexistence, traced his path. When he stopped to water the horse, she knew it, from the way the water filled the horse’s mouth; she knew by how Aruendiel’s shadow cooled the ground that it was a sunny day.
These fragments were not enough.
Again Nora felt the void scattering her thoughts, lulling her into forgetfulness, eating away with soft persistence at the boundaries of her soul. The great emptiness would make her its own forever.
Elsewhere, very far away, a pebble skipped into the air because Aruendiel’s horse had stuck it with an iron shoe. Nora followed its brief trajectory with despair. These tantalizing clues, these dropped hints from the real world—they would not save her from annihilation.
Aruendiel had the distracting and unwelcome sensation of being watched, even after he had cast a series of spells to reveal the invisible and to frustrate the vision of unwanted onlookers. A half-starved wolf wandered out of the underbrush, looking dazed, but it was only an ordinary animal, not a werewolf or a disguised and hostile magician.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 7