How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  Chapter 9

  Aruendiel watched Nora disappear down the road. He made no effort to follow. Better, he thought, that she should get as far away from him as possible.

  After a moment, he went to calm Applenose, who had tried to bolt when the top of the tree exploded and was now pulling at his tether in fear. The horse was too high-strung; it was going to be ruined by all these unexpected displays of strong magic. Aruendiel took his time with the animal, clucking to it, stroking its neck. But he could not soothe the horse entirely; it continued to shift uneasily under his touch. Only then did he notice the tremor in his own hand. He addressed himself to extinguishing, with great care and precision, every last spark of the burning tree. Its smoke was dense and resinous. The concentration cleared his head only a little.

  The lightning was a terrible mistake. He’d known that as soon as he’d started conjuring it, but some spells couldn’t be halted once begun. Destroying the tree was too showy a gesture, too uncontrolled, and it felt false to him even then, with Nora’s taunts fresh in his ears.

  What had possessed the woman? He’d never seen her so shrewish, so bitter. The poison in her voice. The way she glared and ranted at him, like a madwoman. Perhaps she was mad, and last night’s sweet tumble was part of the madness. Did it take insanity to make a woman desire him?

  Or was it some sort of pique, some sense of offended modesty, that afflicted her? He remembered how some girls, when you took their maidenhead, would weep and rail afterward, enough to drive you to distraction—one reason that he’d finally sworn off innocent virgins and switched to married women instead. Their regrets tended to be less histrionic. But Nora was no virgin. She’d been married—and had she even been a virgin when she entered that forced marriage with the Faitoren? How disdainfully she had appraised him, telling him he had done well for an old man. The clear import: she could compare him to any number of men.

  Aruendiel clenched his teeth. He’d called her a whore in anger, but maybe she really was a whore. The short skirt, that curiously short hair. Was that prostitutes’ dress in her world? He had only her word that she’d been a student at some kind of school. In some neighborhoods in Semr, that would be slang for a brothel.

  But all this speculation was beside the point. Why Nora had turned on him was less important than the simple fact that she had done so. And she’d left out nothing in explaining why he was so loathsome to her. Most of the insults she had flung at him were founded in perfect truth. It was only her manner that lacked reason.

  In his own life, Aruendiel reflected, he had known what it was like to develop a taste for something enticingly strange, the kind of thing that one would normally find abhorrent, like those maggoty herrings from Lunika, or the entire Olenan episode. Some such fancy must have seized Nora, that she would give herself to him so freely, and then recoil in disgust once her appetite was sated. His filthy touch, she’d said.

  Not a single wisp of smoke now rose from the branches of the blackened pine. Staring at it, Aruendiel found that his anger was almost as quenched, at least now that Nora was out of his sight, no longer spewing insults at him. They had quarreled before. It was one of the things he so liked about Nora, in fact—that she would stand up to him as fearlessly as she did.

  Now he felt mostly a deep, weary grief, as though he had just found out that a distant friend had died some months past, so that the new knowledge of his loss cast its shadow over the ignorant joys of all the days that had passed in the meantime. He wondered whether he should go after Nora before she came to any harm. She might still be panicked, though. She might run away again when she saw him.

  It was better to be patient, let her come to her senses—if she would—and return.

  He waited under the burned tree, distractedly watching a raven wheel and dive over a distant hill. Sooner than he expected, Nora reappeared. She approached him hesitantly, keeping her eyes fixed on his face. She was less bedraggled, after her mad flight, than he would have thought. The fragile smile on her face was full of pleading, but it also crossed his mind that she looked as though she expected to get what she wanted.

  “Back so soon?” he asked as she came up to him. “I had no idea you could run so fast. I’ve galloped racing-bred mares that were slower.”

  Nora laughed softly. “Oh, Aruendiel, I’m afraid I’ve been a very naughty girl.”

  How far was she going to have to run today? Nora’s chest burned as she dodged forward, another bush whipping her as she went past. That creature—Raclin—was still close behind her, crushing with terrifying ease the same dense undergrowth that was making her passage such a misery. It was loping along, in no apparent hurry, and yet having no difficulty in keeping up with her pace.

  She was fleeing toward the place where she had heard the sound of an ax, and she hoped that there would be a whole crew of woodsmen there, armed with an arsenal of hatchets and saws. As she plunged deeper into the forest—not dense enough, unfortunately, to stop the monster behind her—the ax blows started up again, just ahead. She screamed as loudly as she could. A barrier loomed up—a tree that had just been felled, half its branches already stripped away. She scrambled over the trunk, calling for help.

  A lone man in a grimy smock looked over his shoulder at her, his face blank with astonishment. He had just swung his ax at the tree in front of him, sinking the blade deep into the wood.

  “Help! Please help me!” Nora hurtled toward him, flinging up an arm to indicate her pursuer. “Quick, kill it!”

  The man looked past Nora. His mouth dropped open and his eyes grew blank with terror. Letting go of the ax, he backed away, then took off running.

  “Wait!” Nora called after him. “Wait! It’s afraid of steel, this thing. Your ax—”

  It was no use. He had disappeared among the trees. Nora grabbed the ax handle herself and yanked the blade out of the wood. She spun around.

  The dragon-thing was mounting the fallen tree in a surge of wings and claws and teeth, wood splintering under its weight. Nora brandished the ax. “Get back!” she said. “Back! I’m warning you.”

  The thing scuttled closer, head turned slightly to one side so that a single yellow eye remained fixed on Nora. She backed up until she could feel the trunk of the tree behind her. “I mean it, Raclin!” she said, although she was also wondering if the blade of the ax could even penetrate his pebbled hide. “Don’t make me use this. Go away! Go! Leave me alone!”

  Not an hour ago she had said almost the same words to Aruendiel. Unfortunately, he had heeded them.

  The creature’s long jaw opened and closed with languid menace, so close that Nora could count every one of the black teeth, and then suddenly it made a feint, as though to attack her from the side. She had to pivot to keep the ax between herself and it. The thing kept sidling to the right, looking for an opening. Nora edged to the right along with it, bark scraping her back, half stumbling on the tree roots because she was afraid to take her eyes off those teeth and claws. Abruptly the monster Raclin changed direction and lunged at her from the other side. Twisting, she just managed to keep the head of the ax pointed at him. At the last instant, Raclin veered away.

  So the steel blade did repel him. She gripped the ax handle so tightly that she thought her fingers would cramp. Around the trunk they went again, first one way, then the other, circling the tree, until Raclin appeared to grow tired of the game. He halted and crouched lower, almost flattening himself on the ground. Under the wide staves of his ribs, his torso began to glow, as though there were a pile of hot coals where his liver should be.

  Think, Nora said to herself, running through a couple of fire spells in her head. Fire is easy. Fire wants to please. I can handle this.

  She cast a fire-dousing spell at Raclin, just as he raised his head and breathed a shaft of flame into the branches above her head. But her magic had no effect on him. The fire kindling inside Raclin’s body was beyond her con
trol: she could not get it to acknowledge her at all, let alone obey her commands to extinguish itself.

  Once the flames had left his body, it was different, she noted thankfully. The tree’s twigs burned with ordinary fire. She could quiet the flames as they tried to thread their way along the branches.

  But Raclin reignited them as rapidly as she could put them out. He was using the fire to force her into the open, she saw. In a way, it was oddly sportsmanlike, since he could roast her to a crisp with a blast of fiery breath at any time. “I suppose you like your meat rare,” she said.

  Raclin hissed at her, wisps of smoke curling through his teeth.

  Heat from the burning wood above pressed on her scalp. She was losing the battle with the fire. At any moment a flaming twig could fall and ignite her clothes.

  Aruendiel, she thought. Surely he would see the smoke, or sense the magic she was working. No matter how she had treated him, no matter how justifiably he hated her, he would not miss an opportunity to take on Raclin.

  But he was probably miles away by now, no doubt doing his best to forget the past twenty-four hours. She felt tears starting and tried to blink them away. Yesterday at this time she had been kissing Aruendiel in the rain—no, I can’t think this way, not now, Nora admonished herself. I have to concentrate, stay in control.

  Except—

  The rain yesterday was an accident. It fell because—as Aruendiel had told her so many times—she needed to work on her control.

  Nora turned her eyes to the flames unfurling in the branches above her and began to work more magic. She made the fire burn purple, then changed her mind: hot pink, then teal, then a venomous green. She threw Vlonicl’s vision-clouding spell at Raclin, and then followed up with a spell to induce weakness and mental confusion, although she wasn’t sure that either spell had any effect on him. His lizard face glared back at her, malign and apparently imperturbable. She did a spell to sharpen her own ax and a spell to try to mend the ripped seams of her skirt. After that, she went back to the flames, turning them khaki, then robin’s-egg blue.

  She worked this magic with grand, careless nonchalance, doing all the things that Aruendiel had told her never to do: thinking of other matters—she used to have a sweater that color, what had happened to it?—drawing on too much magic or not enough, picturing how she would do the next spell before finishing the one at hand. And as she worked, it began to rain.

  It was a light but steady drizzle that gradually intensified. She sensed a cracked pitcher in a village a mile away, and she mended it, and then she tried a spell to shrink Raclin, but it failed. She levitated the felled tree across the clearing a good ten feet in the air before she had to drop it.

  The fire in the tree hissed and gradually died. Raindrops sizzled on Raclin’s back, sending up small jets of steam. Nora’s clothes were drenched. Still, that was the least of her problems. She leaned against the tree and stared back at Raclin, clutching the ax.

  They seemed to have arrived at a standoff. He could not come any closer, because of the iron in the ax, and she was trapped.

  He squatted in front of her, almost close enough to touch, wings furled, nearly motionless except for the slow movements of his barred eyes. Occasionally he raised his head and showed her his teeth.

  Nora worked a spell to keep the ax from rusting and waited apprehensively for the fading daylight to disappear.

  Whore or madwoman? Aruendiel wondered gloomily to himself as Nora put her hand on his arm and smiled up at him. He was leaning toward whore: her boldness, the way she came simpering after him not an hour after declaring that he repulsed her, had a sort of calculated, professional finish to it. She had positioned herself so that he could look down into the warm, shadowy fold between her breasts.

  “Come, darling, tell me you forgive me. I was only teasing,” she said.

  What did it signify if she was a whore? Aruendiel argued with himself. He could take his pleasure with her as much as he liked, and then forget her. But rented affection was not what he had hoped for. And there was the vexing fact that—sometimes, not always—he was less of a man with whores. He knew more than he wished to about their wretched lives.

  “There are snakes with kinder mouths than yours, madam,” he said.

  “What can I say to show you how sorry I am? Oh, I won’t say anything. Let me kiss away those horrible things I said.”

  Nora slipped closer to him and lay both hands on his chest. She smelled of something sweet and indefinable—some kind of rose, perhaps—and her red mouth was tilted up toward his. Aruendiel grasped her shoulders, not pushing her away, but not pulling her near, either. Frowning, he said: “It is a charming offer, but insincere.”

  “You don’t believe me? Kiss me, and you’ll see.”

  Aruendiel shook his head. “A few minutes ago those lips of yours called me hideous and decrepit and half a dozen other things—and they were not lying then.”

  Nora laughed, a throaty chuckle. “But you’re so handsome, darling.”

  “You must take me for a fool.”

  “Darling, look! In the mirror!” She gestured to the side.

  Aruendiel turned and saw his reflection. His own face, unbroken. The pleasing, regular countenance he had taken for granted until it was gone. Instinctively he put his hand to his cheek and jaw. The bones felt straight and fine under his fingers, the skin unscarred.

  He glanced away from the oval mirror and saw that he was standing in a bedroom. The hangings of the bed embroidered with dragons and climbing flowers—he knew them well. Through the open window he saw smooth green lawns, raked with early-morning light.

  “You see? There is no one handsomer than my husband,” said the woman beside him, one hand resting gently, possessively on his shoulder.

  He twisted to look at her. “Lusarniev!” he said, taking in the chiseled, pale loveliness of her face. His wife, the way he always wanted to remember her but never could. She wore a white nightgown, her hair loose. He took her hands, not knowing exactly what to think or say. “Lusarniev, what is this? Where—”

  “This is our bedroom, darling.”

  “No, no,” he said, wanting to believe her, but shaking his head. “This can’t be. You died.” Raising his voice, he said: “I killed you.”

  “Hush.” She smiled at him, the placid, gentle smile that she used to give him in the early days of their marriage.

  “I killed you,” he repeated, feeling the relief of confession pass through him like a storm, “and I have never stopped being sorry.”

  “But I was a bad wife to you,” she said reasonably. “I scorned you, I betrayed you, I ran away. Can you forgive me? I want to make it up to you now,” she went on, pulling him toward the great bed. “Come back to bed, it’s still early. There’s no need for you to be dressed already. We have plenty of time to dally.”

  Aruendiel allowed himself to be led. “Lusarniev, how can this—”

  “Hush, darling, I insist.” Sitting on the side of the bed, she unlaced her nightgown. As she pulled the folds of cloth apart, his eyes went automatically to the spot under her left breast where he had thrust the sword. His wife’s skin was creamy and unmarked. There was no wound, no scar.

  Aruendiel exhaled a long breath that he had not known he was holding. “How can this be?” he asked, but without caring much about the answer. He put his arms around her and kissed her, then leaned down to pillow his head against her breast. She was laughing as he had never heard her laugh. As he began to close his eyes, he caught a sudden movement on the other side of the room.

  “Who’s that?” he said, lifting his head.

  “What? There’s no one there.”

  He had seen something, though. “By the door. There was a woman.”

  “One of the maids. They’re always spying.” Lusarniev raised her voice: “Leave us now!” With a shrug, she let her nightgown slide off h
er shoulders and twined her arms around him.

  Obediently Aruendiel kissed the mouth she offered and thought of rose petals, but he could not shed the nagging fear that had just seized him. Somehow he had the fierce conviction that the shadow he had glimpsed—was it really a woman?—had come to menace Lusarniev.

  “One moment, sweet,” Aruendiel said, releasing her reluctantly. “Let me see what this is about.” He crossed the room with hurried steps, vaguely registering that his limp had vanished, and opened the door.

  When Raclin changed shape, it was already too dark for Nora to see exactly how the transformation occurred. But his breathing sounded different, and then she saw that his dim silhouette had changed, grown slimmer and more upright.

  She tensed, trying to be prepared for anything. Deep in the twilight, Raclin chuckled.

  “Now you’d like to see me, right?” he said. “Here, take a look.” Two tall silver candelabra, their branches elegantly looped and curved, appeared on either side of the figure before her. Just Faitoren illusion, Nora thought, but the light of their tapers was real enough to show Raclin’s silver-screen good looks, his broad-shouldered frame—perhaps a shade beefier than she remembered. The mischievous lock of hair still flopped down onto his forehead.

  “You see?” he said. “The monster’s gone. It’s only me. You can put down the ax now, dear.”

  “No,” Nora said dryly. “Why are you here, Raclin?”

  “I’m here to see my long-absent wife. Are you not even a little happy to see me?”

  “I’m not your wife,” she informed him. “Go away.”

  “Not my wife? You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?” he said, smiling. “My dear, I knew you’d break your vows sooner or later, but I thought you had better taste than to betray me with that crippled wreck. Were you just trying to insult me? Or was he simply the best you could do, looking the way you do now? I’m afraid you’ve let yourself go a bit.”