She could tell her words did not have the intended effect on Aruendiel. “You were fortunate,” he said coldly. “I am sorry your life was in her treacherous power for even an instant.”
“You are the treacherous one, Aruendiel. Pretending to greet me in friendship, and then turning on me.”
Nora tried to sound calm: “It doesn’t make sense to be fighting when—”
“It is you who will turn on us,” Aruendiel said. There was a sword in his hand; where it had come from, Nora wasn’t sure. A faint wisp of smoke drifted off the blade. She tried to step between him and Hirizjahkinis, but he pushed her aside.
“If you are enough of an idiot to do this, I won’t make it easy for you.” Hirizjahkinis lifted a hand to her shoulder and clenched her fist around a fold of the Kavareen’s hide.
“Stop it, both of you!”
“This is not easy.” Aruendiel ground out the words, but he raised the sword. It sang through the air. Hirizjahkinis drew back with agile grace.
Nora grabbed at Aruendiel’s wrist, trying to force the blade down; she could feel its heat on her skin. “You don’t want to do this, Aruendiel. Not again. Remember?”
She felt him recoil, as though she had bludgeoned him. “Nora, it’s not her,” he said.
“Close enough.” Nora stared up at him, willing him to meet her eyes.
The Kavareen’s fur brushed against her arm like thickly falling snow. But when they looked up, it was gone.
Chapter 30
Aruendiel lowered the sword, and it disappeared from his hand. He glowered down at Nora with a kind of incredulous intensity, as though he could burn away her misapprehension with a stare. “I won’t tolerate this fraud,” he said.
Nora folded her arms. “She’s not lying.”
“If she believes the lie, that doesn’t make it true.”
He called Hirizjahkinis she. That was progress. “But I recognize her,” Nora said. “She talks like Hirizjahkinis. She acts like Hirizjahkinis—and what I mean by that, she helped me and protected me and generally behaved like a good, caring, friendly person. A human person.”
“She is a clever simulacrum.” Aruendiel shook his head. “Do you not see? If you accept her as Hirizjahkinis, it’s no different from being beguiled by a Faitoren enchantment.”
Nora drew in her breath. “No! It’s completely different.”
“To embrace a falsehood courts your own destruction,” he said, with an edge of bitterness that made Nora suspect that he spoke to himself as much as to her.
“Since you mention Faitoren enchantments, Aruendiel!” Her own quivering fury took her by surprise. “You were tricked before, and you’re falling into the same stupid trap again.”
“I prefer not—”
“Remember all those terrible things I said to you—that you’re old, and dead, and I don’t know what? You know what? They were true. I admit it. I thought them, and then the ring made me say them.” She shook her hand with its now-naked ring finger in his face. “Ilissa and Raclin made me spew up every mean, fearful, dark, evil thought I ever had about you.”
These were things that she hadn’t quite told herself yet, but she went on, stone by stone across a raging river.
“There’s more in my heart than just fear, though,” Nora went on. “So much more.” She resolved not to say “love” again, she would not make that mistake. “You should know that. But you couldn’t see it then, and you can’t see it now, with Hirizjahkinis.”
“This is completely different,” Aruendiel said, white around the mouth. “It is not the same magic. The danger is greater—”
“Is it?” Nora snapped, then made herself speak more gently. “You’re worried about falsehoods? It would be false to say that Hirizjahkinis is not in there. She said she is, and you can see it. Look, I wonder, too, I have doubts, but in the end I think we have to trust her, until—unless she gives us some reason not to trust her. If you have a friend who has a—a terrible accident, and she recovers, and maybe she’s not exactly the same, maybe she’s very different, but still, she’s your friend, you try to stick with her. And if we don’t do that with Hirizjahkinis, then we’re not truly her friends. Are we?” She frowned up at Aruendiel.
“That blind loyalty is exactly what the demon is counting on.”
“It’s not blind! It’s about seeing things as they are. Recognizing someone even if they’ve been changed by magic, or anything else.”
Aruendiel’s mouth was pursed to reply, but he checked himself, his brows lifting almost uncertainly, as though Nora’s words had caught him off guard. “It’s a rare kind of sight,” he said after a moment.
“Not so rare. It’s called affection,” Nora said. “Friendship.” What the hell, she thought. “In my language, ‘love.’”
“Affection can cloud the sight as much as magic,” he said, but some of the conviction was gone from his voice. “One sees only what one wishes to see.”
“But that’s true of any emotion. Fear. Anger. They can cloud your perceptions, too. Come on, Aruendiel, we’re talking about Hirizjahkinis. She wouldn’t give up on you or me, if the situation were reversed.”
“Perhaps—not,” Aruendiel said, his mouth twisting. “Unless she already has.” Nora had to strain to hear him.
She was suddenly aware that the churn of falling water had grown much louder—because, she saw, the flow from the gap in the ceiling had thickened and intensified. Foaming water now covered the floor of the chamber.
“I completely forgot—there are some people from the temple up there,” Nora said, her eyes following the white column of water upward. “Yaioni and Lemoes and Piv.”
“They are loyal to Olenan?”
“Yaioni, definitely. The others, maybe not.”
Aruendiel glanced back the way they had come, then looked up at the gap in the cave ceiling again. “We should not delay,” he said. “If she warns Olenan, we may have a lively reception. You have the water’s favor, Nora. Make a path for us.” To her questioning look, he added, “Give the water a different shape, that is all. You don’t need to interrupt the current, only to redirect it.”
It was not so different, she decided, from the spell she had done before in the flooded tunnel to make a breathing space. After some coaxing, the falling water offered them a series of footholds, the approximation of a ladder. “It’s slippery,” Aruendiel called over his shoulder, but it sounded more like a warning than a critique. Nora climbed cautiously, feeling the liquid churn and bubble under her soles, and was glad to reach the cavern above.
She pushed the damp hair out of her eyes and did the water light spell again. The floor of the chamber was now completely flooded to a depth of several inches, with a noticeable current flowing from the far end. Lemoes and Yaioni were gone.
“That way.” Aruendiel pointed, and Nora nodded. They splashed toward the source of the current. Gradually the cavern narrowed to a passage that twisted in one direction and then the other.
“The spell I just did—is that how you held back the raindrops?” she asked. “Remember, when I first—”
“That also required some air magic. We must start you on that next. You will enjoy air magic, I believe, after the moodiness of water.”
It was the first time that he had made any clear reference to the continuation of Nora’s studies in magic, or indeed to any kind of further association with her. Did he intend for her to become his pupil again? Only his pupil again?
A draft of milder air touched Nora’s face. She noticed that the shadows where her water light spell didn’t reach were not as absolute. She and Aruendiel waded faster. They rounded a bend, and suddenly the cave seemed to expand in the streaks of grayish, splendidly mundane daylight that filtered through a slim crevice in the cave wall.
Nora gave a tired cheer. “Finally!”
In the new light, Aruendiel was grim
ier than he had seemed before, his tunic caked with mud, but the tired, wary look on his face crackled into something warmer. “A welcome sight,” he said. “And these are your friends?”
Nora turned quickly. In the shadows at the rear of the chamber, people were crowded onto a ledge just above the water. She recognized Lemoes, taller than the rest, and then Yaioni. The others were pilgrims and ganoi, jammed together like refugees on a lifeboat.
“Why are all of you here?” she asked. A harsh, weary snicker erupted from someone in the rear of the group. Nora felt reproved. “You’re hiding, is that it?” she asked.
“Of course we are hiding,” Yaioni snapped. “It is not safe, she is too angry.”
“Angry at you?”
“At everyone in Erchkaii,” Lemoes said.
“But—the pilgrims, too? That makes no sense.”
“Nora, come here.” There was urgency in Aruendiel’s tone. He was stooping over the opening in the rock, looking outside.
Nora waded over to him. Water poured into the cave through the bottom of the fissure; this was the origin of the flowing water they had been following. Through the opening, she saw tree trunks, a mosaic of green leaves, sodden cloth tangled in branches. Beyond that, an enormous sheet of sullen gray water, lightly pocked with raindrops. Was it the lake? Had they made it that far? Then she recognized the tawny wall of the ravine opposite. Far to the left was a squat brown building—the second floor of the hospital, protruding above the floodwaters.
Her eyes went back to the tangle of bushes and young trees that screened the cave opening. The brush had trapped a bundle of floating debris. Something about the color and proportions was troubling to her.
She looked more closely. A shoulder, a sloping belly. Gray hair floated around the lolling head like a wreath. Nora sucked in her breath. She knew those heavy features.
“It’s the baron. One of the pilgrims. I treated him.” A day or so ago, she had seen him on the ward, walking shakily on his own. “He’s dead.”
“His throat was cut,” Aruendiel said. Nora looked away from the white gash under the baron’s chin.
“But he was getting better,” she said. “He was going to live.”
Aruendiel pulled her gently away from the opening. “That was why he died.”
She didn’t know what he meant. “He was my patient, my responsibility. I was, I—was she trying to get at me somehow?”
“That wasn’t why she killed him. It was only his life that she wanted. His and others’, I suspect.” Aruendiel looked across the cave at Lemoes. “How many did she kill?” he called.
“Dozens,” Lemoes said flatly.
“Do you think we had a chance to count?” Yaioni said, curling her lip. “All we could do was run away.” She nodded at Lemoes. “He knew about this cave, the ganoi told him about it the other time she was so angry. We brought the ones from the sick house who could walk, before the river was so high. Lemoes says she does not know about this cave.” Yaioni’s voice rose, trembling. “I am not so sure. And now the water is rising, we will drown anyway.”
A fish had smelled blood in the water, Nora remembered, but it did not guess where the scent came from. “Why?” she asked. “Why would she do this?”
Aruendiel did not respond at once. When he did, his tone was dry and ruminative. “To save her own life, what remains of it,” he said. “It’s a very old, primitive kind of magic, but it survives because it’s the easiest way to raise someone from the dead, as long as you’re willing to kill and kill again.
“Mefransk Redhand reigned two hundred years after the wizard Eoluthias brought him back to life on the battlefield, and they say a thousand people died in those years to keep the king alive—although the records are incomplete,” he added. “The toll could easily be higher.”
“You mean, he killed a thousand people to stay alive?” Nora repeated. “And she did the same magic here?” Not a thousand people, surely, but over time it would add up. “She said something, something—” The echo of Olenan’s voice in Nora’s memory seemed to come from another age. “She told me once that she had brought herself back from the dead. It proved she was a goddess.”
“She said that?” Aruendiel seemed grimly amused. “Well, yes, I suppose she could have worked the spell herself, if she found a victim just as she was dying. The timing would be tricky, the first time. But then she would be at leisure to find more sacrifices.”
“The prisoners from the Ghaki king,” Nora said, frowning.
“Or the occasional death of a patient,” Aruendiel said.
Yaioni shifted impatiently, frowning. “There were always enemies,” she said. “She has many enemies.”
Nora gave her a hard look. “You must have known what she was doing. All the priests she killed here—”
Yaioni drew back her lips, unsmiling. “They were heretics! And she was angry with them—that is all that I knew. She was my goddess, my life, and I did everything she commanded me to do.”
“Everything?” Nora asked. “What do you mean, ‘everything’?”
The other woman’s shoulders twitched. “Yes, everything. Even when she told me, ‘That pilgrim, this pilgrim, they must die.’ I let her have them, and they died. Everyone said I was a bad healer, but it was her wish, she wanted them to die.
“I would have died for her,” she went on. “She only had to say to me, ‘Yaioni, you must die,’ and I would have done it and been happy. But she said it to you. ‘Yaioni will be my sacrifice.’ I heard her.”
“That was not my idea,” Nora said. “And I was against it.”
“It was an insult to me,” Yaioni said broodingly. “As though I were a goat or a chicken for a New Year’s offering. She did not ask me. And then he told me”—a sidelong glance at Lemoes—“that she is not even a goddess.”
“She’s not,” Nora said.
Yaioni gave an unexpectedly joyous peal of laughter, her face brighter than Nora had ever seen it. “Good! Well, you are welcome to be High Priestess. I have had enough of trying to please the gods, real or false.”
“Gods are pleased or they are not pleased,” Aruendiel said with a lift of his eyebrows. “And it is difficult, even foolhardy, to try to change their mi—”
Black wings beat the air like an explosion, blotting out Aruendiel’s face. Nora felt a blow to the bridge of her nose, a sharp pain. Raucous shrieking, a stabbing beak.
Birds, but where had they come from? She ducked, shielding her eyes with her hands. Through her fingers she saw that there were two of them, crows, ravens, she couldn’t tell the difference.
Aruendiel was swearing. They were attacking him now, bloody streaks on his face. He raised a hand to beat them away.
But the birds grew out of his wrists; they could not be shooed away.
He lowered his arms with an effort. The birds flapped their wings and thrust their beaks at his face, squirming, croaking angrily. Abruptly one of them shrank into Aruendiel’s right hand. He took the second bird by its throat and squeezed.
Its wings fanned wildly, spilling black feathers, and then they became Aruendiel’s fingers and thumb. He flexed them, made a fist.
After the hoarse scolding of the birds, the cave seemed weirdly quiet. Nora became aware of the horrified stares from the pilgrims on the ledge. She daubed at the bridge of her nose. Her fingertips came away wet and red, but the beak had missed her eyes.
“It is nothing, a distraction,” Aruendiel said, still breathing heavily. “Olenan is taunting us.”
“Olenan.” Yaioni pronounced the name experimentally. “That is her, you said?”
“It’s her,” Nora said.
“Then she knows where we are,” Yaioni said.
Chapter 31
Thigh-deep in the river, Lemoes helped the last of the pilgrims, a thin, dark-skinned Enlite woman, step over the gunwale. She gasped as the boa
t rocked under her weight, then gave a quick, nervous chuckle; the other passengers squeezed together to let her pass to a space in the bow.
The wooden boat had been a floating oak branch, leaves still attached, not ten minutes ago. Aruendiel surveyed his craftsmanship critically, a small crooked frown lurking in the corner of his mouth. “It’s riding low in the water,” he said. “I should have used the Rgonnish spell.”
“Mmm. There won’t be room for anyone else, once Lemoes climbs in,” Nora said to him, arms spread against the rock behind her. They had a precarious footing on a skinny ledge outside the fissure that led into the cave, their feet just above the lapping water of the swollen river.
“They’ll stay afloat long enough to get down the river a karistis or two. And I’m putting an anti-drowning charm on all of them.” Giving Nora a sharp look, he added: “You would be safer if you went with them.”
Lemoes, holding the boat’s side, looked up. “I will stay, sir, and the High Priestess can go with the others.”
“No, Lemoes, that’s all right. Go,” Nora said before Aruendiel could answer.
“But the goddess—”
“I don’t care what the goddess told you. I’m telling you, you need to look after the pilgrims. And Yaioni,” Nora added. Lemoes still hesitated. “I mean it,” she said.
Lemoes nodded, and she thought he looked slightly relieved. Only then did Nora glance at Aruendiel. “I’m safer with you,” she said.
“I hope that is true,” he said.
The boat shifted uneasily as Lemoes climbed inside. Taking a seat in the stern, he grabbed the steering oar. “The goddess’s blessing goes with you,” he called. He guided the craft through a strait of half-submerged trees and into the main current; it picked up speed as it moved downstream. Nora lifted a hand in farewell. Lemoes was too busy steering to notice, but someone in the middle of the boat waved back. Nora wasn’t sure, but she thought it might have been Yaioni.
She turned back to Aruendiel to find him gazing upstream, toward the temple. Very high up, a dozen small shapes drifted in the cloudy sky, as fine and black as letters on a printed page.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 40