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

by Emily Croy Barker

  “An accident. I see,” Sisoaneer said, looking as though she didn’t believe Nora but found her reticence amusing, and Nora could not help feeling that she had failed some kind of test.

  “I lost my—my traveling companion,” Nora said, “and then I met someone who wanted to hurt me. I tried to stop him. With an ax. It just slipped.” She registered a slightly jarring note of insistence in her own voice, and wondered if Sisoaneer also heard it.

  “But you stopped him, the one who wanted to hurt you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Nora said, too quickly. “That’s all right.”

  Sisoaneer nodded. “That’s good. How will you find your companion again?”

  Nora wished she had a better answer, or any answer. “I don’t know,” she said. She wondered if she could find her way back, through the darkness, to the clearing where she had left Aruendiel. And what would she find there?

  It seemed to her that her whole heart was calling out to him in anguish and sorrow—why did he not respond?

  “I must go,” Sisoaneer said suddenly.

  “Where?” Nora asked. She didn’t relish the idea of being alone again, of letting go of this thin filament of conversation and kindness. Even if there was something unsettling about Sisoaneer—she’d been so disturbingly casual about killing the villager—she was the only ally Nora had at the moment.

  “I’m going to another place where I’m needed.” Sisoaneer smiled at Nora. “Will you come with me?”

  “What? I don’t—” Nora glanced around at the scraps of light from the village fires, at the night forest beyond. “Is it far?”

  “Not if we hurry.” Sisoaneer’s fingers laced through Nora’s. “You don’t mind if we go on foot, do you? Flying in the dark is dull.” She smiled again, turned, and broke into a run, the warm clasp of her hand pulling Nora after her.

  Chapter 12

  Aruendiel held on to the tree with both hands, shuddering, and waited for the chill to pass. Mentally he cursed the treacherous, black-bleeding, pox-ridden Faitoren hag again. There had been at least three different toxins in her tail venom. One, as far as he could tell, was nearly identical in its effects to the classic poisoner’s recipe known as Nuelev’s Tears; he had countered it easily with a charm to keep his heartbeat regular. The other two poisons were more obscure, and there was no time to puzzle them out. He’d lost more than an hour in that unconscious fit. Now he was using all the magic at his command to avoid another.

  Yet he was cheered beyond all expectation by the sight in front of him: the headless body of Ilissa’s son. Nora had been here—Aruendiel knew the taste of her magic—and Raclin was dead. Even if Nora herself was nowhere to be seen, this was more and better than he could have expected. Aruendiel’s heart thudded against his ribs with relief, despite the Nuelev counterspell, and he sent up a rare prayer of thanks to the gods.

  Although, he reflected with a surge of pride, it was really Nora’s own quick wits and the magic he’d taught her that had saved her. Only a few months’ study, and she had defeated this monstrous, dangerous Faitoren. Remarkable, hard to credit—and yet why should he be surprised? Nora was remarkable; she would be as brilliant a magician as he had ever known. If she was still alive.

  He conjured a light in one hand and moved forward unsteadily, cursing the numbness in his feet, to study the ground around the corpse. An ax lay nearby. Good, Nora had remembered that the Faitoren were vulnerable to iron and steel. There was Raclin’s head, matted with blood and leaves. Aruendiel kicked it out of the way. He found a tangle of footprints in the dirt, large bootprints and smaller ones. The smaller boots had stayed near the half-burned tree under which the corpse lay. All around the tree they went, and then she had stood still for a long time. Aruendiel looked up at the blackened branches; Raclin had set a fire, and Nora had put it out. A couple of gashes up and down the trunk, one stained with blood, showed just where Nora had been standing.

  At this last sign, Aruendiel’s face darkened. He went back to the corpse and its head, and confirmed that Raclin had suffered one wound only, the blow to his neck. He thought for a moment, and then went hunting in the leaves and litter under the tree. At the sight of the severed finger, nestled next to a root, Aruendiel swore again and went cold all over, worse than the chills from the poison. Leaning against the tree for balance, he picked up the finger carefully, if clumsily—his hands felt as nerveless as his feet now—and conjured a linen cloth from the nearest village to wrap it in. He tucked the small bundle inside his tunic.

  His head was splitting. Where was Nora now? There were other dangers in the wilderness. Aruendiel worked a testimony spell on the trees of the clearing, but they could tell him nothing he didn’t know already. Nora’s tree only babbled, half hysterical from the fire; the other trees had paid no attention to the movements of any particular two-legged animal that day. They were merely relieved that the ax that had been felling trees earlier had ceased to bite.

  The axman’s village—most likely Nora had headed there. Aruendiel located the village hearth fires: southeast, almost half a karistis away, he estimated. Faster to fly there, he thought, and then another thunderbolt of pain flashed through his skull. Aruendiel groaned, and found himself lying full-length on the ground.

  He could not remember falling. How long had he been unconscious this time? He tried to stand, but there was no feeling in his legs.

  Ilissa would be drunk with laughter to see him like this. For a moment Aruendiel thought he could hear that maddening, bell-like laugh. But the real joke was that she had used so much cunning magic over so many years to try to defeat him, when all along she could have killed him with one strike of her tail, if she’d ever cared to show her real form.

  Aruendiel raised himself from the ground with a levitation spell, grimacing at the way his legs hung limp and dangling. As dead as they’d been during those long years of convalescence. He could still move his arms a little. If he transformed himself into an owl, would he be able to fly? Nora—he suddenly wanted very much to see her face, her lovely smile. For a moment he thought he caught a glimmer of her magic, not so far away—lifting something into the air—then the trace was gone.

  She had saved his life once. It was another black joke that if he reached her now, he might be just as helpless as he had been then.

  If he reached her. The headache was starting again. There was no more time.

  With almost all of his strength, Aruendiel called the wind to him. It came, roaring at him as though to upbraid him for his stupidity and carelessness, and it wrapped his useless body in its supple power. He told it to take him northward, hoping that he would stay conscious long enough to find the place he was seeking. There were not many magicians who would know how to treat Faitoren poison, and only one whom Aruendiel trusted.

  As the rushing wind sucked him into the sky, he set the trees below on fire, to burn away the filth that lay dead under their branches. Hurling through the restless night, he watched the small red glow behind him for a little while, until he could see nothing more.

  They ran over dark fields streaked with silver from a setting moon tangled in a skein of cloud. A chilly wind whipped against Nora’s face and blew her hair straight back. She could not see the ground properly, even in the moonlight, because they were going so fast, but the other woman seemed to have no trouble finding their way. Nora felt the soft earth of newly turned fields under her feet, and then the slap of grass and brushy twigs against her legs.

  A dark, glimmering streak appeared almost under their feet, and they cleared it before Nora could even identify it as a brook. The black trunks of trees loomed and vanished. They vaulted up a slope and raced down the other side.

  Where were they going? The question lingered in the back of Nora’s mind, but it began to seem less and less important the farther they went. Earlier, in the daylight, she had been running for her life. Now she was running because she was alive.
Still alive. Her legs pumped with improbable energy, her lungs filled and emptied. She had never run this fast before. Nora sprinted harder, to see if she could pull ahead of her companion. Sisoaneer laughed. “Faster, faster,” she said, like the Red Queen.

  They ran on and on. The moon sank behind trees, leaving a sky jittering with stars and a world flooded with a deeper shade of night. They moved into woodlands, taking an unseen path, dodging trees, but hardly slowing at all.

  Then the other woman stopped, and after a split second, so did Nora—staggering a little, off-balance. The muscles in her legs twitched, still eager to run.

  “That was farther than I expected,” Nora said.

  “This is the place,” Sisoaneer said.

  Nora could make out only the outline of treetops against the dim sky. “Where are we?”

  “Do you hear?”

  The wind rustled shadowy leaves. From somewhere not too far away came the gurgle of a hidden brook. “Hear what?”

  “She’s calling me. Come on. This won’t take long.” Sisoaneer’s voice receded, her footsteps quiet. Nora caught the whiff of woodsmoke and latrine. Wherever they were, it was close to human habitation.

  The vague shape of a small hut materialized out of the darkness, chinks of reddish light around the door and in the walls. Their ragged pattern told Nora how dilapidated the building was. Now she could hear someone inside whispering, a female voice, hoarse and agitated. The woman seemed to be repeating the same words over and over.

  “She’s a widow. He’s her only son,” Sisoaneer said. “He has been ill for only two days, but she’s afraid for his life. The bloody flux.” She pushed open the door of the hut.

  The woman kneeling on the floor looked up, her eyes sunken. One graying braid had fallen loose from the tight weave around her head and was unraveling over her shoulder. Her cheeks gleamed wet in the scant light of the fire, but her expression was inert, stony. Nora recognized it. Her own mother had looked that way when EJ was dying, her face eroded of any soft emotion, worn down to bedrock.

  The room stank. This was where the latrine smell was coming from. Nora breathed shallowly, through her mouth. Sisoaneer swept into the hut as though she smelled nothing and bent down in front of the woman. Only then did Nora see the stained blanket mounded over a narrow body and the downy face of a teenage boy, looking as dry and fragile as an old man’s. Sisoaneer put her hand against his cheek, very gently.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said to his mother. “I heard your call, and I came.”

  The boy’s mother only stared at her.

  “He’s close to death, but he’ll recover. I will save him because you asked me to. Now”—Sisoaneer’s tone grew brisk—“do you have any water? Clean water.”

  The woman looked at her wonderingly. At first she seemed not to take in what Sisoaneer had said. Then she fell back, huddling against the wall of the hut. Her face crinkled with sudden emotion. “You? Great lady?”

  “Some water,” Sisoaneer said, “or your child will die.”

  With a gasp that she tried to smother, the boy’s mother groped in the shadows and thrust a pitcher forward. She did not take her eyes off Sisoaneer.

  Sisoaneer peered into the pitcher and wrinkled her nose. “I said clean water.” She held the pitcher away from her body as bright white flames curled over the top. Nora and the other woman blinked in the sudden glare. The flames sank hissing back into the pitcher, and a new smell filled the air, sweet and sharp. Sisoaneer swirled the liquid inside and angled the pitcher so that a few drops fell onto the boy’s cracked lips.

  “Drink,” she said.

  Shyly his tongue appeared. He swallowed. His lips smacked feebly.

  “More,” said Sisoaneer. She put a hand behind his shoulder and forced him upward into a half-sitting position, holding the pitcher to his mouth. As much water dribbled onto the blanket as the boy took in, but Sisoaneer, imperturbable, kept the pitcher pressed to his lips. After a long minute, he sat up and took the pitcher. Shakily he hoisted it to his mouth. Eyes closed, he gulped with steady greed until the pitcher should have been empty. And still he kept drinking.

  Finally the boy lowered the pitcher and let Sisoaneer take it from him. He lay down again. His eyelids flickered as he looked up at Sisoaneer, and then they closed.

  The hut was quiet as they all listened to the measured rustle of his breath.

  Sisoaneer handed the pitcher to his mother, the water inside sloshing faintly. She looked into the interior, then at Sisoaneer, her eyes wide with questions.

  “Have him drink all of it,” Sisoaneer said. “It will take him a day.”

  “A day,” the woman repeated. “He will live another day?” Her voice was strangled.

  Sisoaneer laughed in a way that was both mocking and kind and made it seem that she had known the other woman for a long time. “Sweet mother, he will live many, many days.”

  The woman was silent, as though to savor her words. Then she said: “Great lady! He is everything to me. The only one left.”

  “I know,” Sisoaneer said.

  “I didn’t know if you would hear me. I couldn’t bear it, I thought—oh, blessings, blessings and glory upon your head, great lady.”

  “I always hear those who call me.” Straightening, Sisoaneer glanced around the hut. “Wash him now. Clean up his filth.” The woman bowed her head. “In three days, invite your neighbors to come feast to celebrate your son’s return to health. He’ll eat more than anyone, I promise.”

  The woman looked up, more tears spilling down her cheeks, and reached out blindly as though to grasp the hem of Sisoaneer’s dress. Sisoaneer laid her hand lightly on the woman’s head, then stepped back. She motioned to Nora to follow her.

  Outside the hut, Nora took a deep breath of fresh air. “What did you do in there?” she asked.

  Lifting her eyebrows, Sisoaneer seemed to find Nora’s question funny. “I healed him.”

  “I mean, what spell was that? The flames, the water.” She knew—she’d read—that people with dysentery could die of dehydration. In her world, they’d be cured by being hooked up to an IV, not by being dosed with magical water.

  Sisoaneer regarded Nora more seriously. “Do you know anything about healing magic?”

  Nora shook her head. “Not really.” She felt some need to explain the deficit in her skills. “Aru—that is, my teacher—thought it was too advanced for me. That I needed better control before I learned any healing spells.”

  “Healing magic isn’t so difficult,” Sisoaneer said. Again, she sounded amused. “You could learn it quickly enough.”

  If I had a teacher, Nora thought. If I ever find Aruendiel again, and if, if—

  “Where are we now?” she asked. One section of the sky had lightened. It must be the east. But what did that tell her?

  “I’m not entirely sure, but it doesn’t matter,” Sisoaneer said. “I am going home.”

  “But it does matter,” Nora said, suddenly engulfed by a wave of tiredness, her legs ready to fold beneath her. How far had they run tonight? And before that, she had run from Aruendiel, fled from Raclin, and—

  Nora shuddered. Not an hour ago, it had seemed that she could outrun all the pain and fear that had inexplicably taken over her life in the past day. She found herself almost envious of the woman inside the hut for being safe and secure at home with someone she loved, someone who was now also safe and secure. Nora had also been rescued by Sisoaneer, but it had not solved any of her real problems.

  “Where do I go?” she asked. “I’m lost.”

  “You can come home with me,” Sisoaneer said. “If you want.”

  “I need to go back to where I was. I need to find my, my—” The exact nature of her relation to Aruendiel was hard to define right now. And she was oddly reluctant to say his name; it felt unlucky. “The person I was separated from.”
r />   “Back to the village of halfwits?”

  “No. Near there.”

  “But you don’t know where he is,” Sisoaneer said reasonably. “Do you?”

  “Well, I don’t really know you, either. Why should I trust you enough to go home with you?”

  “You’ve trusted me enough to come this far.”

  Nora quirked her mouth. “Maybe that wasn’t so smart.”

  Sisoaneer gave a low chuckle. “Everyone else you’ve met today has tried to kill you—but not me. I want to help you, Nora. I watched you fight your enemies tonight, and you showed your strength. You weren’t afraid to use your power as you were taught. But even the strongest need to rest. Come home with me.”

  Nora shook her head. “I am tired. Too tired. I can’t run anymore.”

  It was a relief to have a simple, unarguable reason to say no to Sisoaneer’s invitation, although what she would do instead was too complicated and exhausting a question to consider properly at the moment.

  “We’ll go by river,” Sisoaneer said.

  The sound of the brook was suddenly much louder. A churning whiteness coiled through the trees and came almost to their feet. Cold spray touched Nora’s bare legs. Something large and dark drifted toward them on the current.

  “Our boat,” Sisoaneer said. She took hold of its side. “Go on, get in.”

  “But—” Nora said. She looked around as though she could discern in the darkness the vanishingly slender thread of fate that would lead her to Aruendiel again.

  “Please,” Sisoaneer said, already in the boat. “I don’t want to leave you here alone.”

  Nora paused, irresolute. A half-formed thought moved through her mind: that thread of fate is me. If I live, I will find him again. I will.

  She waded into the water. It was not very deep. The boat rocked gently as she climbed into it and groped her way to a cushioned seat. She felt polished wood under her fingers, and then a fold of soft woolen cloth, a blanket, was pressed into her hands. Sisoaneer sat behind her. “I’ll navigate,” the other woman said. “It will take the rest of the night to get there.”