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

by Emily Croy Barker

  “Trout.”

  Nora nodded. Previously she had only encountered trout on a plate, with a fork in her hand. She wondered if she’d ever be inclined to do so again.

  “You must have been doing a lot of magic,” Nora said, looking at Aruendiel. His eyes seemed brighter, his battered face fresher and less worn—almost handsome, from the right angle. That was to be expected, she supposed, given that he’d been working magic against another magician powerful enough to give a reasonable impersonation of a goddess. But his expression was new to her. His gray, luminous gaze, which did not leave her face, was honed to sharpness, yet seemed almost painfully unguarded.

  “How did you get here?” she asked. “Into the caves?”

  “A sinkhole, upriver.”

  “Can we get out that way?”

  Aruendiel shook his head reluctantly. “It would be a long swim in that tunnel, and Olenan might be waiting at the other end. This is her flood, you know—she conjured a storm, and it’s raining snakes and sticks up there. She wanted to drown me. And you,” he added, his mouth twisting. He put his hand against her face as though to brush the hair out of her eyes again, although Nora had not noticed any stray hairs in her field of vision.

  “Nora, I am greatly—I am—” He appeared to be rummaging with some anxiety for the words. “I am very well pleased to find you.”

  “I am so happy to see you, Aruendiel,” Nora said with a small sigh. “I didn’t know if I would ever see you again. I should have listened when you said we had to leave. We would have had a head start, we would have escaped all this mess.”

  Aruendiel shook his head. “I should have—”

  “I was wrong. I wanted to do one last good deed, to save that prisoner. Only it turned out that someone was going to die no matter what. I pardoned both of the prisoners, and no one was happy about that. Except the prisoners, I suppose. And—I don’t know.” You protected the weak, the guiltless and the guilty, in my name. Sisoaneer. The real one. Nora found that she did not want to say the name even in the silence of her own thoughts.

  “Their life was not worth yours, but you have a kind heart. It does not bear—Nora, I did not know what to think.” Aruendiel’s voice sounded raw. “I had the conviction, as soon as we parted, that some great evil had happened to you. That you were—lost. I could not shake it, even when I followed you to that vile temple and heard your voice, even when I found traces of your magic in these caves. Even now, I almost can’t believe I see you here.”

  “Oh.” Nora felt oddly chastened. “Well, I am fine. I really am.” There was plenty more to say, the whole story in her throat, ready to be told, but looking into his face, his searching eyes, she saw something there that she was afraid her words would injure.

  “And there is this,” Aruendiel went on, reaching into his tunic. He pulled out a blue glass bottle that she recognized. Removing a twist of cloth from the opening, he tilted the bottle so that the small object inside slid into his palm.

  The timestone looked different from what she remembered: wizened, smaller, and darker, like a fossilized raisin. She gave Aruendiel a puzzled frown.

  “When I was exchanging salvos with Olenan up there, I thought to use the timestone, and I found it like this. Burned out.”

  “Burned out?” Nora asked. “You mean—”

  “It had been used already. When you smash a timestone—”

  “—all the stored time is released at once, and everything nearby is pushed into the past. The recent past,” she added. “Portat Nolu said you couldn’t go back more than an hour.” Where had she learned all this? From Aruendiel, surely, although he looked slightly surprised at her answer.

  “Correct,” he said. “You see how blackened this stone is, and dense? Now it holds time that never was. A history that never happened.”

  “And if you smashed it now—”

  “It would take us to a different present.”

  “A different present,” Nora repeated. “So we might not be here, we might be somewhere else?” She wondered: would I be anywhere? Feeling a new tension in the center of her body, she asked: “And you think you were the one who used it?”

  Aruendiel set his jaw, and his face grew harsher. “I don’t know that for certain, although that seems most likely.”

  “And you don’t remember why you used it,” Nora said. “Most people don’t.” It was remarkable how much she knew about timestones. Taking the stone from Aruendiel’s hand, she rubbed it between her fingers, feeling its dry, roughened surface.

  “Be careful with that!” he said sharply.

  “I know,” she said.

  It was strange to hold her own death so compactly in her hands. Like a book that someone warns you not to read: “It’s terrible, so depressing, you won’t like it.” You already know how it ends, but you still feel a nagging curiosity to know exactly how the plot unfolds to the grim conclusion.

  Aruendiel reached for the timestone. “It is of no matter. I should have said nothing of this.”

  Nora did not give him the stone. Keeping her eyes on Aruendiel’s face, she said carefully, “When I met Hirizjahkinis, she told me that I’d died, but you undid it. I had no idea what she meant. What if she meant you used the timestone? That I died, and then you reversed time and prevented it?”

  “This is merely supposition.” He sounded pained. “There is nothing to prove—”

  “But then Hirizjahkinis and I went to a deep cave, very deep, and I saw myself there. Dead, in a coffin. And a voice said I belonged there. And—other things.”

  Aruendiel’s expression was stormy and fearful. “What other things?”

  “The voice, it showed me Raclin. Also dead. The voice said I belonged to her because I’d killed him. It told me I had to purify her temple, and then rest with her.”

  He gripped Nora by the shoulders. “What voice?”

  She grimaced, feeling an obscure embarrassment. “She called me her priestess. I think it was—you know—”

  “No. Ridiculous.” His tone was unyielding. “This is not worth a shred of your attention. You were hallucinating, or you encountered some crazed, forgotten monstrosity of a demon. Not a real god. And even if—well, I tell you, even gods can be wrong.”

  “That’s what the woman said. Funny,” Nora said, as Aruendiel gave her a hard, questioning look. “Not the voice. Not the—goddess. This was someone different. She just appeared, this woman, and spoke to me.”

  He seemed to be considering various possibilities, all of them somewhat troubling. “A dream, another demon?”

  “I don’t know.” Nora shook her head. “I felt as though I should know who she was, but I couldn’t quite place her. She said that I was alive, not dead, and that I shouldn’t listen to the voice, and I should leave right away.”

  “She was right, whoever she was. You did not die,” Aruendiel said. “It is not true, it never happened.”

  Nora held up her fist with the timestone in it. “Except maybe here—” She stopped at the look of clouded desolation in Aruendiel’s eyes.

  Almost blindly, he touched her cheek, then leaned toward her. Nora let herself rest against his shoulder, feeling his breath in her hair. This closeness was not quite enough to calm the secret, fearful sense of urgency that had seized her, now that she knew for certain of that other destiny, erased and written over like a chalkboard but still not entirely illegible. Aruendiel had given her back her life, but she wondered if it would ever feel completely hers again.

  “Thank you for saving me,” she said.

  “It should never have happened.”

  “It never did happen,” Nora said, and Aruendiel gave her a shadow of a smile. Then he pulled away, his black brows knotted. “Olenan. This was her revenge. She’s a madwoman. I was too cautious. I should never have tried to—to placate her.” His mouth twisted.

  “Well,” No
ra said dryly. “She’s your old flame. I’m sure it was nice for a while.”

  “I thought I would find some sweetness, I own that,” Aruendiel said, hunching his shoulders, “but there was only sour wine in that bottle. I thought I could beguile her. In the end it only made her angrier and more dangerous. I should have moved against her from the start.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Nora could not keep some bitterness out of her voice.

  The question seemed natural enough to her, but it appeared to take Aruendiel aback. He gave a slow sigh.

  “I feared for you,” he said at last. “She had you in her power. And I had some weakness of purpose. Even as I faced her just now, out there”—he nodded upward—“several times she was exposed, at a clear disadvantage, and yet I could not make the killing stroke.” He glanced away, frowning.

  “You still have tender feelings for her, then,” Nora said. Killing stroke, indeed. She felt it herself, right through the heart.

  “No, that is not right.” He spoke with more characteristic sternness. “It is this: in all my life, I have killed one woman, a woman I shared a bed with, and I do not wish to do so again. No matter how she has wronged me.”

  He was talking of his wife, that shadowy girl, who would always be both stained and immaculate in his eyes. Nora felt a sudden shyness, but she said, “Even if that woman might be trying to kill you?”

  Aruendiel gave a dry and rusty laugh. “There would be no satisfaction in it.” He stood up abruptly, almost hitting his head against the rocky ceiling, and nodded toward the darkness that lay beyond his light. “We have dawdled here long enough,” he said. Dimly Nora could make out a narrow passageway that twisted upward.

  He gave Nora a sharp look. “Mistress Nora, you have been clever enough to dry our clothes and light your way with water magic. Do you know how to find our way out of these caves?”

  She was glad to have some happier news to discuss. “I do,” she said.

  Chapter 29

  “Hirizjahkinis told me the water would remember the light,” Nora said to Aruendiel as she scrambled onto a muddy shelf of rock. She examined the sloping limestone in front of her, looking for her next handhold. “Then I discovered the water remembers other things.”

  Behind her, Aruendiel grunted approvingly. Or perhaps it was simply the exertion of hauling himself up the slick stone face. They were making the climb under their own power and not with magic. Levitation spells were tricky in tight, crooked confines like this one.

  “Water knows all these caves. It made them in the first place. Honestly, I can’t follow everything it’s telling me. Water is weird—it doesn’t think the way we do, does it?” Nora found a new grip and pulled herself upward. “But I can tell there are places where water gets into the caves, and where it goes out, and I can get an idea of what’s in between. It’s not perfect, but it’s something to go on.

  “I wish water’s idea of a direct route was a little more direct, that’s all,” she added.

  “Vresk the Navigator had the same problem with his water mapping spells,” Aruendiel said. “Water is a poor judge of distance. But your basic spell is sound—wait! Pray do not kick me in the face.”

  “Sorry,” Nora said. “Are you all right?” She peered down over her shoulder but could only glimpse the top of Aruendiel’s head and the splayed, grimy fingers of one hand grasping a knob of rock.

  “Keep going. The water mapping spell was not Hirizjahkinis’s suggestion?”

  “No, it was my idea.” Just too late, Nora saw that the conversation was straying onto dangerous ground.

  “She knows at least a half-dozen map spells. It is odd that she did not employ any of them herself. And how in the names of all the gods did she get out of the Kavareen?”

  Nora was relieved that Aruendiel could not see her face. “She said they came to an agreement.”

  A snort from below. “Has she not learned: never trust a demon?”

  Nora said nothing. Hirizjahkinis and the Kavareen, that was not her secret to tell. Trusting a demon, though—wasn’t that exactly what she was doing? With an exhalation that was theatrically louder than it needed to be, she attempted a sort of push-up to mount the ledge in front of her, but only got herself halfway over the brink. Her dangling legs scrambled for a foothold. “Pigfilth,” she said under her breath.

  Aruendiel’s hands closed around her hips, pushed her smoothly upward. They rested on her thighs for a fraction of a second more, and then released her. She missed the pressure of his hands as soon as he let go. It was odd, Nora thought in some confusion, not for the first time, how Aruendiel’s body could give a general impression of brokenness and dilapidation and yet move with such sureness when he wished.

  “Are you up?” he asked.

  “Yes, thank you.” Nora found that the passage had narrowed but also leveled out. She crawled forward to give him space to follow, although she had to keep contorting herself to avoid the drooping stems of stalactites.

  From somewhere ahead came a sudden, sharp clap. Small echoes resonated through the darkness. A rock falling, maybe. It was hard to tell how far away. Nora, pausing to listen, was aware that Aruendiel had also stopped.

  “Does she—does Olenan have some kind of invisibility spell that she likes to use?” Nora asked softly.

  “Oh, yes.” Aruendiel’s tone was knowing, slightly caustic. “It’s quite powerful.”

  “Do you think she might—?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t make that noise. I do not discern her magic so near.”

  Another minute passed. The sound was not repeated. They began to creep forward again, both moving more carefully this time. “Did she tell you about the spell?” Aruendiel asked.

  “I just guessed. She knew things. Sometimes she would just appear. People told me she heard everything.”

  “She would use the invisibility spell often, especially when we traveled,” Aruendiel said. “She enjoyed watching without being seen.”

  “Just like a goddess,” Nora said sardonically.

  “Perhaps. Although in my experience the presence of a true god is hard to disguise.”

  Nora thought back to the dry, relentless voice in the deep cave. She wondered suddenly if she would ever hear it again, and if so, what it would say to her. The idea was both unbearable and strangely attractive.

  “You said—you were talking about what it’s like to kill a person you’d shared a bed with,” Nora said. “Um, I did kill Raclin, you know.”

  “And it was a job well done,” he said at once. “I saw the viper’s carcass. I fault you only in that it was a quicker death than he deserved. And as for the notion that you are somehow bound to the service of a—some long-buried voice, simply because Raclin is dead,” he went on with some energy, “well, whatever you encountered in that cave was both greedy and deluded.”

  Nora rolled on her side to squeeze between two stalactites like upside-down beehives. She was hoping that the water map didn’t lead to a tiny fissure in the rock passable for liquid but not for humans, and she was also thinking hard about exactly what she was trying to say. “Even if he deserved killing, even if I had no choice—and I think both of those were true—it doesn’t make his death go away. It happened, and that knowledge will be there, somewhere, for the rest of my life.”

  She could say this to Aruendiel. He would know what she meant, the enormity of what she had done. There was silence for a moment, except for the scrabbling sounds of their progress over the rock. “Yes, that is true,” he said. “It’s a burden you should not have to carry. It should have been mine. I would have enjoyed killing Raclin more than you did.”

  “I didn’t enjoy it, but I didn’t not enjoy it, either. It was so easy,” she said. “That’s what scares me. I almost gave up magic afterward. It seemed so dangerous to have so much power.”

  “But you didn’t give up mag
ic,” Aruendiel said, not entirely able to tamp down the apprehension in his voice.

  “No, I thought I could use it to help people.” She sounded an ironic note in the back of her throat. “Well, for a while I did.”

  “It is dangerous to have so much power, and in your case, I am glad that you are dangerous. I would rather you felt some grief and regret because you used magic to kill someone, than to see you guiltless and dead. As for using magic for philanthropy,” he said, “that can be more difficult than it seems. Even if you don’t pretend to be a goddess.”

  “Sisoaneer—Olenan said that if I healed people, I would be healed, too. Watch out, there’s a drop here. Ouch.”

  With a faint curse, Aruendiel lowered himself over the edge. “And? Were you healed?”

  Nora reflected for a moment. “Not really. It made me feel better, treating the patients. I don’t think it made me a better person or washed away my sins or anything like that.” It was ironic that she would fall back on a concept like sin, although she was not sure it translated properly into Ors. The word she’d used had a religious connotation, but it meant something like an infraction of the rules. Crime, dereliction of duty, blasphemy? Those Ors words were more powerful, but none of them were quite right, either.

  “The best reason to heal people—with magic or no magic—is because they need healing,” Aruendiel said dryly. “Olenan has played goddess for I don’t know how many years, she has treated a dozen dozen dozen patients and more, and yet I would not say that she has been healed of whatever plagues her.”

  Nora decided to voice a question that she had been wondering about: “Have any other magicians played god?”

  “Certainly, it happens from time to time, but they’re rarely successful for long. Old acquaintances turn up, spells go awry. Olenan was clever to hide herself in this backwoods temple.”

  Nora pushed herself under a row of skinny stalactites and discovered more headroom beyond. Cautiously she got to her feet. “It seems like an obvious temptation. Did you ever think of it?”