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

by Emily Croy Barker

  “You abused me shamefully!” she said. “Even now I can’t bear to think of it.”

  “That is not very helpful. Let me think. Did I get you with child and then abandon you? Did I infect you with the pox? Or did I beat you to death because you had become tiresome or inconvenient?” He stared down at her with a crooked smile.

  She did not flinch. Her outrage was flawless. “You are playing with me. You know very well what you did!”

  Suddenly he’d had enough of this puppet Warigan and her absurd bluff. “Yes, I do know, Ilissa. I had the temerity to throw you over. That’s my real crime, isn’t it? Let us stop pretending. I want to see your real face.”

  She squirmed in Aruendiel’s clutch, but his hands remained locked on her shoulders. Then she laughed, and Warigan’s angular features shifted and recalibrated themselves into Ilissa’s honed, luscious beauty.

  “You finally saw through my funny little game, Aruendiel! You’ve been very slow. I thought you were a clever man.”

  “Your real face, Ilissa.”

  There were layers and layers of Faitoren glamours wrapped around her, knotted and tangled. He could not even guess how old some of the spells were. Some of them had fused together over time so that he could not tell where they began or ended. Some had rotted away. It was far more magic than she needed to maintain her appearance. She must have been adding to it constantly, perhaps every day, like a bird building a nest and not knowing when to stop, or being afraid to.

  Ilissa shrieked as he tore into the matted edifice. Her magic was more fragile than it seemed at first—there was no structure, no organizing principle, and it was riddled with fault lines where old spells had failed. She put her hands to her face, as though that would do any good.

  “You brute! You vile, crazed, barbaric lout! I bring your dear ones back to you, the ones you lost, and this is how you treat me!”

  It was hard to make out the last sentence. Her voice had soared in pitch and acquired a strangled, almost mechanical stiffness.

  Aruendiel looked up at her curiously. He would not have predicted that Ilissa was naturally so tall. Much of that height was neck, though. He tried to decide whether her small head was more avian or reptilian. Despite her fine black scales, he settled on avian, mostly because of her long, spoon-shaped bill. No wonder she could barely make herself understood now.

  Her second set of arms was short but equipped with wicked-looking pincers, and her barbed tail was lashing. She got one blow in, the end of her tail striking his arm, before he stepped out of range and put a binding spell on her limbs.

  “I’ll thank you to let my dear ones rest in peace. You degrade their memory with your antics,” he said. “Gods, what Hirizjahkinis would say if she knew what you had gotten up to in her name.”

  And thank the sun and the moon that he had not succumbed to the false Hirizjahkinis, Aruendiel told himself. If the real Hirizjahkinis knew, she would never let him hear the end of it. Provided he ever had the good fortune to see her alive again.

  Aruendiel looked around. The bedroom was gone; he was back in the open air, and it was night. How many hours had passed while he was tangled in Ilissa’s enchantments? He conjured a light, and noticed Applenose’s foam-flecked bulk sprawled nearby, not moving. Well, it was too much to expect that Ilissa would leave an innocent animal untouched. He glanced down at his arm, the place where she had struck him. The sleeve was slashed. There was some blood—more than he expected, in fact, although he felt almost no pain.

  That should have been a warning to him, but now Ilissa was speaking again. Spewing more insults, he determined after careful listening.

  “Ilissa, someone who looks like you has no right to complain about my appearance.” Reflexively he touched his face; yes, he could feel the old scars and broken places again. Her glamours were gone, all of them. “Now—quickly, because I have wasted enough time—where is Nora?”

  A series of wild creaks and hisses poured from Ilissa’s open bill. Laughter, Aruendiel guessed. “With my dear boy,” Ilissa croaked.

  That meant that Nora was likely already as dead as Hirizjahkinis or Blackberry or Lusarniev. The thought would have hollowed him out completely if he had allowed himself to consider it fully.

  “I will make Raclin beg for the peace of hell,” Aruendiel said, fighting down a malign, ominous vertigo. “But first, what is to be done about you?”

  Nora leaned against the tree, keeping her wounded hand curled against her chest. She tried to keep her eyes averted from it. First, because the hand was a maimed and gory mess, with a finger missing, and second, because she had failed—she’d cut off the wrong one, the pinkie, while her bedeviled ring finger, still wearing the ring, hung by a flap of flesh and half-cut bone that she could not bring herself to hack through. She was a rotten coward: one stroke of the ax, it turned out, was all that she had the stomach for.

  At least the pain from her wound seemed to have countermanded the ring’s magic. She felt blessedly free of any urge to give herself over to Raclin’s tender protection, and her left hand no longer obeyed his commands, not that it could do much harm in its current state. Now she was more afraid that she would pass out and drop the ax.

  Raclin prowled on the other side of the tree, taunting her. He found her self-mutilation very funny. “Be quiet, Raclin,” Nora said wearily. But he kept on.

  “Are you going to bleed to death?” he asked after a while.

  “No,” she said, although she was not completely sure. Her teeth had started to chatter. Blood had soaked the front of her blouse, and she could feel the night chill seeping through the sticky fabric.

  “Humans are so weak, sometimes the slightest little thing will kill them,” he said, a faint wrinkle appearing on his brow. “I was looking forward to doing it myself.”

  “What was all that about promising to protect me?”

  “I never said I would protect you. I said you needed protecting.”

  “You should have been a lawyer, Raclin,” she said, but he didn’t get the joke.

  After a while, dizziness made her slide down against the tree. She sat crouched at its foot. Raclin loomed over her—dangerously close—but she left the ax propped up on her knee and hoped that it would be enough to hold him off. Despite the pain in her hand, she wanted more than anything to go to sleep. It was a struggle to keep her eyes fixed on Raclin. He smirked as though he knew what torture it was for her to stay awake. She kept blinking, and each of her blinks lasted longer.

  When she heard the baby gurgle, and saw it crawl toward her across the brown leaves, she was afraid for a moment that she had fallen asleep, that she was dreaming. But Raclin was still there, and he also was watching the child. The baby laughed as he crawled, proud of how fast he could scoot along on his hands and fat knees.

  As the baby came close, he looked expectantly at Nora, as though he knew without question that she would welcome him. He was naked, with that fine infant skin like the morning sky, and his eyes were blue and infinite. Nora looked into them and felt herself falling hopelessly in love.

  “I thought you’d like to see our son,” Raclin said.

  The baby reared back on his haunches and held out his arms, wanting to be picked up. He babbled something. Baby gibberish, but with the uncanny understanding of parents, Nora knew he was calling for his mother. She smiled at him sadly, willing this moment to last. Then, swallowing, she tilted the head of the ax toward him, carefully, blunt end first, so that he wouldn’t cut his fingers on the blade.

  He reached eagerly for the shiny thing. Raclin swore, dived for the child, and then recoiled as the baby’s hand touched the steel.

  What clung to the tip of the ax was a wizened, tiny thing, toothpick bones strung together with scraps of desiccated flesh. As she watched, the little assemblage slid off the steel and crumpled into a heap that could fit into the palm of her hand. One round fragment ro
lled free. It grinned jaggedly up at her.

  Nora gave the skull a long, quiet look. “I’ve never seen a baby with teeth that large. That sharp,” she said.

  “What kind of unnatural mother are you?” Raclin asked, as bitterly as though he were truly offended.

  “I don’t know,” Nora said. “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t stand to see what you could have had.”

  “I don’t want to be lied to again.” That was not quite all of it. “Raclin, it wasn’t wrong or stupid for me to want to love, or to be loved. To want a lover—or husband—a child. What was wrong was for you to take that wish and use it against me. Do you see what I’m saying?

  “Oh, never mind,” she added, as he looked at her—pityingly, she thought. “Never mind. Where did you get the poor little thing? Is that why you came to Aruendiel’s castle last summer?”

  “He’d buried it in a field, like an animal. My son.”

  “You should have left it there.”

  Nora leaned back, feeling the roughness of bark against her scalp. If only she could close her eyes for a moment. Raclin was talking again, something about what a humiliation it had been to marry her.

  “—no matter what my mother did to try to salvage your appearance, I could always smell the human stench—”

  She tried to make herself interested—anything to stay awake.

  “—and now I’ll have to go through it all over again with some other cretinous bitch! Because you failed.”

  “Why don’t you just tell your mother no?” she said wearily. “It’s not as though you’re really cut out for marriage.”

  “Tell my mother no?” He grinned. “Life is much more pleasant when Ilissa is happy. You must have noticed that.”

  “You know,” Nora said, “women don’t like men who are ruled by their mothers. It makes them look weak and childish. Even if the man turns into a monster every day.”

  Nora was going to add, Especially if he turns into a monster every day, but at that moment the ax handle jerked in her hand. For a moment, she had the distinct impression that the ax had come to life. Then, she saw, it was only that she had tiredly, stupidly let the ax slip off her knee.

  She grabbed for it. So did Raclin. He was faster, seizing the ax by the handle and then flinging it away as though it were red-hot. The ax landed with a thud in the darkness behind him. Nora looked up at him, shocked. Abstractly she thought, I should run away now. But there was not enough strength in her legs to lift herself her body off the ground.

  “And for your information, I don’t let Ilissa rule me,” Raclin said, squatting in front of her. Nora flattened herself against the tree, pulling in her bent knees as if she could hide behind them. He leaned forward and lifted his right hand with an easy, speculative grace, as though he were going to caress her. His fingers slid around her neck.

  “Raclin, look.” Was it remotely possible to reason with him? “Please, this is stupid. You don’t want to do this. Just let me go. Please.”

  He laughed, putting his other hand on her neck. “I don’t want you to think I’m weak or sissified.”

  “I won’t. I don’t.”

  “Good,” he said. His grip tightened around her windpipe. She kicked at him. It only shook his grasp on her throat for an instant. He laughed again and shifted his knee to pin her leg to the ground.

  The air in her lungs was burning away. But Raclin’s body pressing down on hers brought her to her senses for a moment. There was no sense in struggling physically. He was too strong and too heavy. With a great effort, she forced herself to stop squirming.

  “Don’t give up yet, Nora,” Raclin said. He looked more handsome than ever, perhaps because of the look of pleased concentration on his face. The stray lock hung down, swaying slightly. Nora’s chest felt like a bomb that was about to go off. She tried to fight off the dizziness and focus her attention elsewhere.

  There was a faint noise from behind Raclin, like something shifting in the dry leaves. He cocked his head, alert but showing no great concern.

  Silence. Then a thud, metal against wood. Nora’s tree shuddered.

  Raclin shouted a couple of brisk Faitoren syllables and let go of Nora’s throat. Gratefully she sucked in air. She looked up. The ax had bitten the tree so hard that it stuck there, just above Raclin’s head.

  “What the hell, you mangy bitch!” Raclin looked blankly from the ax to Nora and back again. Then he began to chortle. “You missed me.”

  Poor control, poor control. How many times had Aruendiel told her that? Hell, she thought, I almost killed him today with that rock, I should be able to kill Raclin. Working the levitation spell again, Nora wrenched the ax out of the tree and lifted it higher, beyond Raclin’s reach.

  “Raclin, I’ll be your widow if I have to be,” she said.

  He hesitated. She began to hope. Then his hands clamped around her throat again.

  She ran out of air faster this time. For a moment, she fumbled with the spell, not sure how to aim the ax or even which end was which. And then, so quickly it surprised her, she heard a meaty snap and felt the impact of the blow traveling through Raclin’s frame. The ax fell sideways. Something changed in his face. He looked even angrier for a moment, then foolish, and then his head pitched forward and thudded to the ground.

  Nora would have screamed if she could have. The night was suddenly much darker than it had been. Raclin’s body tilted and crumpled. His weight settled on her legs. His hands still clutched her throat.

  With her good hand, she jerked his fingers loose. They came away reluctantly, still tensed. She breathed deeply, counting each breath as though that meant something. The air was thick with the smell of blood.

  “All right,” Nora said. “I’m alive.” The urge to scream was still there, but she was ignoring it for now. Urgently she pushed Raclin’s body off her own. Even her good hand was sticky now. She wished she had something to wipe it with. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. She rubbed it in the dirt and on the bark of the tree until it felt slightly drier.

  Nora stood up slowly, clinging to the tree. A thought struck her, and she made herself look at her wounded hand. The dangling finger was less horrific in the moonlight, just a shadow that hung too loosely from her hand. No gleam of gold. Very tenderly she encircled the wounded finger with her right hand to be sure. Nothing. The ring was gone.

  She was free, but she did not feel free. Nora moved away from the tree, jerking her foot back when it brushed against something hard. Just a root, not Raclin’s rootless head. She managed to get all the way across the clearing before sinking to the ground again. Finally, it was safe to cry, so she did. The tears rolled down her cheeks without carrying away any of her grief.

  How long she cried, she wasn’t sure. Overhead, through tree branches, the moon’s white tooth gnawed the sky slowly, and its gray light crawled across the ground, but the darkness around her was unchanging. Aruendiel did not come.

  Chapter 11

  What finally roused Nora was the memory of Raclin asking pleasantly if she was going to bleed to death. She was not going to give him that satisfaction.

  She raised her head and looked blindly into the night. Not too far away was the village where she had discovered a broken pitcher to mend that afternoon. She could sense the hearth fires, banked for the night, dreaming under their ashes. A mile, maybe.

  Numbly she made herself get up, start walking. The forest put trees and fallen logs in her way and clawed her with invisible branches. She tried summoning a light from the village fires, but it turned the tree trunks into pale, elongated phantoms, and tiny red eyes winked at her from just beyond her small circle of illumination. After that, she was more conscious of the million sounds haunting the night, the rustles and squeaks and odd sighing noises. She was putting distance between herself and Raclin’s body, true, but now the corpse coul
d be anywhere in the vast, shapeless dark behind her. What if she got really lost and went in a circle—she might find herself falling over him again. And who knew if decapitation would really kill a Faitoren, anyway?

  Get a grip, Nora told herself. Raclin is dead. Very dead. And if there is such a thing as a Faitoren ghost—well, I’m screwed, that’s all.

  Leaves slapped her face, and then she stumbled out into an open space, bright with moonlight. A freshly plowed field, she guessed from the feel of the ground under her feet. She followed a furrow to the other side of the field, where the smell of manure was stronger and she could make out the dim, rounded shapes of the villagers’ huts. An unseen dog caught her scent and began to bark frantically in a way that suggested that it had lived its whole life with the sole ambition of ripping out Nora’s throat. She caught herself expecting the whole place to come ablaze with electric light, like any house equipped with floodlights and motion detectors in her own world, but instead, after a few minutes, a couple of bearded men came out with torches and some sharp, heavy tools she couldn’t identify.

  Their Ors dialect was nasal and reedy, and Nora wasn’t sure how well they could understand her, but she showed them her hand and managed, she thought, to convey that she was a traveler who had had an accident. One of the men kept asking her something. She finally figured out that he wanted to know if she’d seen a dragon in the forest that day. The woodchopper whose ax she had borrowed must have brought back the news of his encounter with Raclin.

  “Yes,” she said, as brightly as she could. “Don’t worry. The dragon is dead. Dragon dead.” She should have brought the ax back with her, a goodwill gesture.

  After consulting with each other for what seemed like a long time, the men led Nora to the largest of the huts, where they turned her over to an old woman and two younger ones. Their names all sounded the same, a rush of vowels. One gave her a bowl of sour-tasting broth and some parched flatbread. The old woman wanted to bandage Nora’s hand with a strip of grimy cloth that she unwound from a lump of cheese. Perhaps it was some kind of folk remedy—homemade penicillin? Nora shook her head. She tried to communicate, in words and gestures, that she wanted to wash her hand instead. The old woman clucked at her but put an earthenware pot of water on the coals. The water was going to take forever to get warm, Nora saw; she did an unobtrusive heating spell, the Calanian protocol.