There was almost no furniture in the hut, just a low platform next to the fire covered with blankets, where everyone was sitting crosslegged. Probably it was also their bed. Nora would have liked to lie down right then and go to sleep, despite the pain in her hand, but she forced herself to keep her eyes open, and smiled at the shaggy-haired children who piled together like wolf cubs and stared at her with round, wary eyes. “What are your names?” The answers came haltingly. She listened harder this time: Amawau, Awau, Yowaum, Clover, Sweet Pig.
The women wanted to know how many children Nora had and where her husband was. It was out of the question to tell them that her ex-husband was lying dead in the forest a mile away, but when she simply told them she had no husband or children, they giggled suspiciously. The old woman mumbled something—evidently a joke, because the other two women laughed again.
Should I ask her to repeat it? Nora wondered, looking uncertainly from one woman to another. In the darkness of the forest, the idea of warmth, safety, human contact had drawn her like a beacon, but now she could not shed a sense of unease. Awkwardly she lifted the drinking bowl with her one good hand to take another sip of broth.
A log rolled off the fire, glowing red, and bumped up against Nora’s knee. “Shit!” She flung it back on the fire as fast as she could, then put down her bowl to brush off her knee and make sure that the blankets hadn’t ignited.
When she lifted her head, the women were staring at her.
Nora smiled at them, more confidently than she felt. “Is anything wrong?” Some breach of etiquette? In the Uland, even after months there, she’d made egregious faux pas all the time. What the local customs or taboos were like here, she had no idea.
Then she realized why they were staring. She hadn’t touched the log when she moved it.
The women muttered to one another, not taking their eyes off Nora. I guess they don’t see levitation spells every day, Nora thought. The youngest woman got up hurriedly and went out of the hut.
“It’s very basic magic,” Nora said. “Nothing to worry about. See—” She made the drinking bowl rise a few inches into the air.
The old woman said something to her companion. Nora caught the word witch.
“Magician,” Nora corrected. “Don’t worry,” she said as she lowered the bowl to the ground. “It’s perfectly safe.”
But the other two women were already on their feet, reaching protectively for their children, backing away from Nora. They shoved the kids through the door and ducked through themselves.
I thought people in this world were used to magic, Nora thought. She’d met plenty of people who were distrustful of magic and magicians, but no one who actually fled when a spell was worked. She stood up to follow the women outside, wondering if she could somehow reassure them, perhaps by working some useful magic. Her studies so far had included a lot of military spells—tracking Aruendiel’s own interests—but she knew a few spells for sharpening tools or finding lost animals and the like. And she could always mend more pots.
The door of the hut wouldn’t open. Which was surprising, because there was no real lock, just a wooden latch on the inside. Someone was holding the door closed from the exterior. Nora knocked, then pounded with her good hand. “Let me out,” she shouted. She could hear voices outside the hut, a lot of them. “Please, let me out. I don’t mean you any harm. And honestly, I’m just a student, I’m not dangerous.”
The voices outside were louder, agitated. Apparently they didn’t believe her reassurances. She kept calling and beating on the door for a while anyway. Then she gave up and turned back to the fire, where the water in the earthenware pot was beginning to steam. She scooped the hot water into her bowl and tentatively began to clean her left hand, wincing as the water touched the wound. What remained of her ring finger looked white, waxy, somehow unconvincing as a finger. I suppose it, too, will have to come off, Nora thought. Oh, fuck, this has really turned out to be the worst day of my life.
Aruendiel must be dead. He had to be. If he were alive, no matter how cruelly she had hurt him, how much he hated her now, he would know somehow—magic or instinct—that she was maimed and exhausted and being held prisoner by crazed peasants in the middle of nowhere, and he would come to rescue her. If only for the satisfaction of killing her himself.
A picture flashed through her mind: the pine tree, so close to her, broken and burning with Aruendiel’s rage. The lightning strike had missed her, though. Was that just a mistake?
Suddenly she realized the voices outside were quiet. She listened. Had everyone gone away? She got up to try the door again. Something was not right. She caught a sound like wind above her head; she smelled smoke. Red stars glowed in the roof.
They had set fire to the hut. Obviously they were counting on the roof to burn fast. It was all woven branches and thatch.
“Oh, that’s really smart.” She felt a sense of tired disgust. “Burn down your own house just to get me? I would have left if you’d asked nicely.”
When she ordered the fire to quench itself, the flames overhead died down at once, as though they sensed that she was in no mood to be crossed. A hank of burning straw landed on a blanket and flared up defiantly. Nora dowsed it with a frown.
A new murmur in the crowd outside. Nora could hear their consternation. After a minute, the roof was on fire again, new flames lapping the edges of the holes already burned. Nora killed the fire again.
“Look,” she called. “This is stupid. You can keep setting fires all night, and I’ll just put them out. If you want me to leave, I’ll go. Just let me out. Now.”
Silence again, then some whispers. Next they’ll send Bill down the chimney, Nora thought. Instead, the door opened. A stone the size of an apple flew past Nora’s head. Shadowy figures pushed through the doorway, carrying rocks and cudgels. Outside, people began to shout.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait, please, this isn’t necessary.” A rock hit her side and she almost fell. Another rock just missed her jaw. She backed away until her shoulder blades smacked into the cool earth wall of the hut. “Kill the witch!” someone screamed outside, and then everyone was crying the same thing. In the dimness the men crowding toward her were like a single large animal with a dozen waving arms. Stones thudded into the wall beside her head; they slammed into the soft flesh of her belly, her thigh, her shoulder. “Witch, witch, dirty witch, kill the dirty witch!”
Ducking, raising her arms to shield her head, she remembered the vision-clouding spell, but at this range it didn’t help much; they couldn’t miss her if they tried. She tried a shield spell from Vlonicl, although it was really designed to protect against arrows. Some of the rocks got through anyway. “Witch, whore, filthy sow!”
She tried using magic to make the stones turn back on her attackers. It was hard to keep up. A blow to her elbow, and her right arm went numb.
“Rotten cunt!” A stone grazed the top of her head. The flying stones, the men with their open mouths and frightened, furious eyes all swirled before her for a drunken moment. If they knocked her out for even a second, her shield spell would falter, she would be lost.
“Fuck the witch, kill the witch! Make the stinking she-cat yowl!”
A rock smashed against her ribs; she grunted and staggered. They would be on her like dogs on meat if she fell. There were too many of them, and too many rocks, and their roaring hatred was a choking fog in her brain. Her bleeding hand throbbed.
She found herself screaming for help, as though Aruendiel might hear, as though anyone at all in the middle of this desolate, alien night might care what happened to her.
“Kill the witch! Kill her, kill her, kill, kill, kill her—”
“Stop,” someone said. “Right now.”
The stones obeyed, freezing stock-still in mid-flight.
The men kept up their rhythm of throwing, but the stones that they hurled slowed and then halte
d as though the air had gelled around them. Dizzily, Nora turned to see who had spoken.
“They’re always so cruel. It’s because they’re ignorant.”
A woman stood next to Nora. Taking in her ragged gown and the rough gray hood that covered her head, Nora thought she was one of the villagers. But her voice was wrong, edged with a different accent. Nora bent forward to try to see her face.
“And so they’re afraid of you,” the woman continued. “But fear is no excuse for cruelty.” She turned, and Nora met smiling dark eyes under brows that arched like question marks.
“Who are you?” Nora asked.
Before the other woman could answer, one of the men collapsed to his knees, right in front of Nora.
She noticed suddenly that all the men had their mouths open, as though they were still shouting at her, but she could hear only the muddled cries of the crowd outside the hut. A silencing spell of some kind? No, some of the men clutched their throats. Others bent over, their bodies heaving.
Another man buckled, eyes wide, his face purple under his beard.
“What are you doing?” Nora demanded of her new companion. She could feel the slow churn in her stomach that signaled strong magic being worked nearby. “They can’t breathe. You’re choking them.”
“I’m doing justice to them,” said the woman calmly. “They wanted to kill you.”
“But they’re going to die if they can’t breathe,” Nora said.
“That’s right.”
“I don’t—I just want them to stop attacking me. They don’t have to choke to death.”
The other woman gave her a friendly, faintly incredulous look. “You don’t want them to die?”
“Really, I don’t,” Nora said. “I just want to get out of here.”
The woman in the gray hood paused, as if to give Nora a chance to change her mind, and then nodded. A deep, collective gasp passed through the crowd. The shoulders of the men slumped as they drank in air.
The purple-faced man drew in great shuddering breaths and sat up slowly, bracing himself against the ground.
“Idiots!” the woman in gray said.
The men looked at her with dazed fixity. She made an impatient gesture, like brushing away flies. Although she was at least a head shorter than most of the men, she had the air of looking down at them from a considerable height.
“You are clodheads and criminal beasts, all of you,” she said in a cool, sure voice that did not quite lose its sweetness. “You have broken the law of hospitality, and you’ve raised your hand against the innocent. You should die for that. But I’m giving you justice and mercy because this one has pleaded for you.”
As she nodded at Nora, her hood slipped down, and Nora got a better look at her face, a pale narrow oval framed by shining dark hair. Her finely shaped features were set into an expression of sternness like a drawn bow. It was hard to tell how old she was.
The men shifted uneasily. Then one said softly: “She’s a witch, too.” Under a bulbous, balding forehead, his ruddy face was squeezed into a stubborn expression. He glanced quickly at the other men, inviting them to join him.
“That one’s a filthy stinkpot witch,” he said, more loudly now, facing the woman in gray, “and so are you.”
Another collective intake of breath in the small crowd. But it was not shared by the man who had spoken.
He clawed at his throat, gagging. His neighbors stared. Some edged away. His face darkened as he fought for air. One man pounded him on the back, then appeared to think better of it. Nora found she was holding her breath with instinctive sympathy.
“I gave you justice and mercy—and then justice again,” the woman said to the crowd, with a rueful half smile. “It was a foolish thing for him to say. The rest of you are wiser, I hope.”
She stared hard at them. Their faces were pale, grudging, angry, but none of them spoke.
“Good. I charge you to be more hospitable to strangers in the future.” She looped her arm through Nora’s.
“You’re going to let that man die?” Nora whispered. She could not look away from the balding man. On his knees now, beginning to convulse, he still had some of that look of stubbornness.
The other woman pulled her forward. A twitch of uncertainty passed through the group of men, a half-hearted movement to block the path of the two women, but they fell back as the woman in gray brushed past them.
Outside was another crowd, mostly women. The cool night air reeked of sweat and smoke. The villagers pressed close; the torchlight flickered in their tired, frightened eyes. Nora could sense their confusion: should they try to overcome the dangerous strangers, who had bested the menfolk but were nevertheless outnumbered here, or should they flee for their lives? The buzz of their voices rose higher. Thinking of the gasping man inside, Nora found her own breath tightening.
The woman in the gray hood shook her head. “This is tiresome, isn’t it?” she said.
Nora sensed something ominous in her words: any second now, more of the villagers would be rolling on the ground, choking to death in the dust. “Let’s just get out of here,” Nora whispered. “Now.” Squeezing the other woman’s arm more tightly against her own side, she worked the fastest levitation spell that she knew and felt her body swing upward. Her companion dragged slightly on her arm but gained enough lift to follow her. They tilted drunkenly over the heads of the people below, who screamed and crouched and clutched their heads.
The woman in the gray hood gave a hoot of laughter. “Well done!” she said, although Nora felt she was being generous about their ragged flight. Anyone below could grab their feet with a good jump. Nora steered a wavering course away from the noise and confusion of the crowds and into the darkness. She pushed the spell as far as it would go, trying to avoid running into invisible trees or other obstacles, until the magic finally ebbed and they fell. The other woman laughed again, more softly.
Nora landed on her side, her wounded hand striking the ground. The pain flooded back, all the stronger for having been ignored before. She whimpered, then swore.
The woman checked her laughter. “You are hurt.” Her thin face appeared out of the darkness, although Nora could see no obvious source of light. “It’s your hand, isn’t it? Show me.”
Nora held her injured hand against her breast. “It’s not very pretty,” she said finally, knowing that her objection sounded absurd but also feeling an odd, primitive unwillingness to let the other see how vulnerable she was.
“I have seen some very ugly wounds,” the woman said. “I hope yours isn’t as bad as some. Well, let’s take a look.” Pulling Nora’s arm closer, she bent over the hand. “Ah, yes, that must hurt quite a bit!” Her fine dark eyebrows wrinkled sympathetically. “Would you like to be healed?”
“Well, yes.” Nora made herself look again at the spongy stump, the flapping dead finger. Seeing the wound diminished the pain a tiny bit, because she was so distracted by how disgusting it looked. “I think—I think my finger has to come off.”
With a serious look, the woman folded Nora’s throbbing hand between her palms. Her hands felt very smooth and clean, like fresh sheets, but Nora cried out as they pressed the torn skin and muscle.
“Don’t be afraid,” the other woman said.
Nora was about to say that she wasn’t afraid, it just hurt like fucking hell, when she discovered that her hand was somehow empty and quiet. The pain seemed to dribble away through her fingers like water. For an unbelieving moment, she tensed, waiting for it to return, and then yanked her hand back from the other woman’s grasp.
The hand looked almost the way it should. The ring finger was reattached, warm and alive again. She could bend it, wiggle it, curl it until her nail touched the top of her palm. Her little finger was still gone, but the stump had healed over with healthy skin, not even a scab to show where the horrible red-meat gash had been.
“You’re a magician,” Nora said slowly, distinctly. “What’s your name?” Aruendiel had never mentioned another female magician besides Hirizjahkinis—or at least not one this powerful.
A simple question, but the other woman appeared to give it serious consideration. “Here, I think they would call me Sisoaneer.” She gave a sudden, mischievous grin. “I have had other names in other places.”
Her answer wasn’t entirely satisfactory. Nora froze with a dreadful intuition. “I know who you are. Ilissa.” In a new disguise. It was obvious, Nora thought. Why didn’t I see before?
Sisoaneer broke into delighted laughter. With her wide, flexible mouth and sharp brows sketching every expression against pale skin, she somehow looked graceful and clownish at the same time. It was a face that held nothing held back. “You take me for a Faitoren, really? It’s the first time that has ever happened. My power is greater—much, much stronger—than any petty Faitoren enchantment. I came to help you, not to enslave you.”
It didn’t sound like something Ilissa would say, but Nora was still wary. “Why did you help me?”
“You asked for help. I heard you.” Sisoaneer spoke as though the answer were obvious. More gravely, she added, “You fought well, as you should have. But there were too many of them, and even those halfwits can aim a rock. Besides, this wasn’t the first battle you fought today, was it? Your hand was wounded before those idiots attacked you.”
“That was an accident,” Nora said, stubbornly cautious, although part of her yearned to spill out the whole miserable story of the past twenty-four hours. Something in Sisoaneer’s manner, her calm and merry eyes, made Nora think that she’d be a good listener, that it would take a lot to shock her.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 14