Dorneng tugged on the key, trying to guide the ring over the first joint of Nora’s finger. The ring did not budge. He pulled harder.
“Well,” Nora said. “Nice try.”
“I’m sure this will work, though,” Dorneng said quickly. “This is a—a very powerful tool. Let me try here.” He inserted the hook at another spot on the ring’s curved edge and yanked again, but with no better results. Changing the angle at which he held the key did not help, either. When Dorneng resorted to using the hook as a sort of lever, jamming it through the ring and twisting it as though he could snap the gold band, Nora finally protested.
“That hurts. Look, this isn’t working.”
“It has to work, though,” Dorneng said, looking flushed, with an edge of troubled excitement in his voice. For a moment, she was afraid he might burst into tears.
“I told you, no one has been able to get this damned ring off.” Pulling her hand away, Nora was relieved to see, over Dorneng’s shoulder, Aruendiel’s dark-clad figure slice though the tower wall. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Let me try again,” Dorneng said, snatching for Nora’s hand. She tucked it behind her back.
“Aruendiel,” Nora said loudly, “Dorneng has, very kindly, tried to remove the Faitoren ring for me.”
Aruendiel’s footsteps quickened by a fraction. When he reached them, he looked down at Dorneng for a moment, and then at the hand that Nora was replacing in her lap. The pause before he spoke was just a beat too long to be absolutely polite. “I don’t recall giving you permission to practice magic on Mistress Nora,” he said to Dorneng.
Dorneng began to say something about wishing to be of service to the lady and hoping to repay Lord Aruendiel’s hospitality. A perfectly fine sentiment but Dorneng could not seem to find a way to express it succinctly. “I told him he could,” Nora said abruptly, interrupting. “He has something called an Eafroinios key. He was trying it out.”
Aruendiel’s dark eyebrows angled sharply. To Dorneng, he said: “And where did you get an Eafroinios key?”
Dorneng at first seemed inclined to equivocate, but then said: “From the wizard Kelerus Ruenc. He is selling off his collection.”
“I never heard he had an Eafroinios key.”
“He kept it quiet, mostly. I found out about it by a lucky chance.” An element of boastfulness came back into Dorneng’s voice.
“Anyway, it didn’t work on the ring,” Nora said.
Aruendiel seemed both unsurprised and—Nora thought—somewhat amused at the news of Dorneng’s failure. He sat down with an unhurried air and extended his hand to Dorneng. “Let me see it.” After a second’s hesitation, Dorneng handed him the key. Aruendiel weighed the small silver tool in his hand for a moment, then held it up to inspect the hook that Dorneng had fashioned. He turned it back and forth, looking at it from different angles, and ran an exploratory finger over the curved metal. His face brightened slightly with an expression of pleased concentration.
“It is the real thing,” Aruendiel said. “I congratulate you on your acquisition, Dorneng. There have been many, many false Eafroinios keys circulated. The magician Eafroinios the Fearful finished fewer than a dozen,” he said, glancing at Nora. “Silver has some limited antimagical properties to begin with, and then he literally trained the metal, day and night for years, to intensify those qualities.” Delicately, Aruendiel continued to stroke the hooked end, pausing every so often as though to admire the instrument. “Eafroinios was almost certainly mad. No one else has ever had the patience to replicate his effort. But the amulets he made can counter a wide range of spells. They require some skill to use properly, of course.
“Mistress Nora, your hand, please. The one with the ring.”
Feeling mild curiosity, Nora laid her left hand on the tabletop, fingers fanned, and leaned her chin on her right hand to watch what developed.
Deftly, as easily as he might skewer a piece of meat at dinner, Aruendiel hooked the tip of the Eafroinios key around the ring. The curved tip fit perfectly, pinching the gold band so tightly that hook and ring almost seemed welded together. He gave the key a long, steady pull.
Something was different this time—Nora could tell before the ring slid over the first joint of her finger. Whatever had been holding the ring in place had suddenly, finally let go. Still, she watched the ring bump along the length of her finger with a sense of unreality. It looked like any ordinary gold ring as it came off her fingertip, still held in the grip of the Eafroinios key.
“It’s gone,” she said wonderingly. “It’s gone.”
Aruendiel put key and ring carefully on the table and then looked at Nora, his smile lifting like a kite tossed by the wind. He looked happier than solving a difficult magical problem—even succeeding where Dorneng had failed—could account for. “Yes, it’s gone,” he repeated.
Dorneng uttered an uncertain sound, but when she glanced at him, he was beaming. “Good work, my lord!” he said. “Beautiful work!” He clapped Nora awkwardly on the shoulder.
“After all this time,” Nora said. She clenched her hand into a fist, then spread her fingers again, admiring their splendid nakedness. “Thank you—thank you,” she said to Aruendiel, who looked a shade more gratified. He bowed slightly in acknowledgment. “And thank you for bringing the Eafroinios key,” she added politely, for Dorneng’s benefit. “It was your idea to try it.”
“Well, I’ll have to practice more with it,” Dorneng said, with some ruefulness. “His lordship got it to work on the first try.”
“That’s the only way it will work,” Aruendiel said. “You can never force it.”
“What will you do with the ring now?” Dorneng asked.
“Destroy it,” Aruendiel said, and Nora felt no inclination to argue.
Her finger felt strange without the gold band. She had gotten so used to the minor irritation of its presence, its subtle weight—now that the ring was gone, her hand felt oddly numb, sensationless.
Nora raised her hand for closer examination, a faint question in her mind. The flesh didn’t look healthy, she thought. It didn’t look right. Skin and nails had turned the same slightly yellowish white. She tried to flex her fingers, but they were frozen in place.
“My hand—” she started to say, and then discovered that she could not move her arm, either.
Panicked, she jumped up from the bench. On the other side of the table, Aruendiel leaped up, too. He lunged toward her. “Something’s wr—” Nora started to say.
She couldn’t finish the sentence. Aruendiel’s fingers were wrapped around her throat, digging into her windpipe. She goggled at him, unable to breathe. Why was he trying to kill her? She twisted away, trying to free herself, but her body felt stiff and unresponsive. Aruendiel grabbed her right arm, as though to restrain her, and hauled her across the table toward him. Her hip banged the wood. Crockery shattered. But then his grip on her throat loosened slightly, and she found her breath again.
“What the hell are you doing?” Nora screamed. Aruendiel, breathing hard, did not seem to hear her. He held her facing him, his fingers tightening again on her throat, his other hand still squeezing her arm.
“Can you move your legs, Nora?” Aruendiel asked levelly.
The big muscles of her thighs tensed. But they did not move at her command. She could not sense the floor under her feet.
“No,” she said. “It’s like I’m buried in cement. Let me go!” Nora made as if to pull away from him, and discovered that her hips, waist, torso, were all immobile. She could not even shift her weight.
She lifted her eyes and stared into Aruendiel’s eyes. “You broke my neck. I’m paralyzed.”
“Your hands, Nora. Look at your hands.”
She looked down. Past the edge of her sleeve, her left hand was no longer recognizably hers. That is, it was a copy of her hand in cream-colored stone. Marble, maybe.
The right hand was, blessedly, its normal light tan, faded a bit for the winter, the nails pale and a li
ttle ragged. This living hand, now warm and capable. She tried to move her fingers. They wiggled at her in a friendly fashion. Her eyes went up the arm to where Aruendiel gripped it so maniacally just above the elbow.
“Stone?” It was all she could bring herself to say.
“Stone,” he said.
“And you’re holding it back. Otherwise, my arm—my head. My whole body.”
“I am slowing it as much as I can.” He spoke with a precise, deliberate calm that was itself a kind of urgency. “What feeling do you have in your body, below the neck?”
“It feels tight. All over.” Yes, she could breathe, but pressure corseted her ribs; she tried to take a deep breath and found herself gasping. The import of Aruendiel’s words sank in. “You’re only slowing it? You can’t stop it?”
“The stone is only skin-deep, so far. Dorneng!” Aruendiel’s voice suddenly rose to gale force. “Do you perform a counterhex, now, or I will spill the curdled filth you call your brains.”
Behind Nora, out of her sight, Dorneng began to babble, something about Manathux petrifaction. “This is not the Manathux curse,” Aruendiel snarled. “This is Faitoren.”
“My hand hurts,” Nora said. Was it her imagination, or was it getting heavier, too? “It hurts a lot.” As though she were wearing a too-tight glove that was getting smaller still, surrounding and binding each finger with meticulous, implacable force. She wanted very badly to wring her hands.
“But the stone is crushing the flesh, as it grows,” Dorneng said. “That’s Mana—”
“The ring, wormsnatch,” Aruendiel thundered. “Destroy the ring.”
“Oh.” Dorneng sounded apologetic. “Where is it? It’s not on the table. She must have knocked it to the floor.”
“Find it,” Aruendiel said. Nora started to moan, long, wavering notes that were wholly inadequate to the discomfort she was feeling. She needed to howl, but there was not enough air in her lungs. The small bones in her fingers were splintering, giving way. She could hear them crackle and shatter, even through her rapidly thickening skin of marble.
So that was how it worked—the stone spread from the outside in, and it pulped all the tender, living flesh within. You would think that turning to stone would be a painless process, but you would be mistaken. Was this what Raclin had felt, what Massy felt when she became an apple tree?
The big joint at the base of Nora’s thumb popped, and this time she did howl, very briefly. Now the long, delicate bones that ran through the hand were collapsing, one by one. Nothing left of her hand but pain. That would be her whole body in a few minutes, Nora saw. Her rib cage would implode, her pelvis would crack, her skull would crumple—
Aruendiel was speaking to her, she realized. After a moment she understood that he was asking if she wanted an anodyne, a spell for numbness.
“No,” she said despairingly, because the sickening pain in her hand was already gone. She could feel nothing at all, and she could guess what that meant. Stone had conquered flesh, all the last remnants of it. Now the marble was already starting to compress her forearm—her wrist caught in a vise. But at least she could feel something. Her body would be numb and dead, solid stone, soon enough.
Dorneng was scrabbling around on the floor, giving running commentary on his efforts to find the ring, as though to document how hard he was trying to help. Aruendiel’s mouth was set, and his eyes seemed to be looking at something very far away. She was suddenly aware of the magic he had unleashed, roaring and tearing at her marble skin, but it was—quite literally—like listening to a hurricane from inside thick stone walls.
“If it’s Faitoren magic, is all this an illusion?” she asked him in a whisper. Almost a joke. Aruendiel scowled, twisting his mouth as though determined not to let the words escape, but she knew what he meant anyway: Illusions can kill.
“Found it!” Dorneng said, just as Nora noticed that her right hand was whiter than it had been. Aruendiel saw it, too, and swore. She willed her fingers to move, to play an arpeggio in the air, but only her index finger responded, and then it too froze, pointing upward as though in admonition. Reluctantly, Aruendiel took his hand away from her arm; she could not even feel his touch lifting.
A blue flash, a thunderclap, so close it seemed to swallow her up. The concussion left even her marble hand vibrating. Lesser crashes followed, like tiles falling off a roof. Nora opened her eyes, not remembering when she had closed them. Off to the side, Dorneng looked stupidly at the floor, then stooped to pick something up.
He must have tried to do something to the ring. Still gripping Nora’s neck, Aruendiel held out his free hand, calling Dorneng a fool, demanding the ring. Running feet, fear in Mrs. Toristel’s voice: “What in the name of all the gods, your lordship?”
They can’t destroy it, Nora thought. Maybe the ring can never be destroyed. Inside its marble sleeve, her left arm was being ground to powder. The stone methodically crushed her elbow, then the shoulder joint. The nerves shrieked as they died.
“Aruendiel,” she said, her voice less than a whisper. Her panicked lungs were locked inside a shrinking box. “Aruendiel.” Finally he heard, and turned back toward her, stooping slightly to put his ear next to her mouth, so close her lips almost brushed his hair.
“Put it back,” she breathed. “The ring. Put it back.”
He jerked his head around to glare at her, black eyebrows diving with rage and astonishment.
“Now. Please,” she managed just before her lips grew hard and her tongue froze. Light turned to darkness as stone filled her eyes.
It’s over, Nora thought with disbelief. All of it. I’ll be a statue, forever, unless Aruendiel finds a way to change me back. Or, if he does, wouldn’t I just be a messy little puddle of crushed bone and blood? Her lungs struggled hopelessly for one more thin breath. Her head was heavier than before; she could not hold it upright if her neck were not already turning to stone. It was not death, for I stood up, and all the dead lie down, she thought, but there was no comfort there.
Her knees gave way. She collapsed.
Someone grabbed at her, but she landed on the side of her hip, hard, the same spot she’d barked on the table before. Her hands smacked the chilly stone floor, too late to break her fall.
In a rush she understood that the flagstones under her stinging palms were cold because her hands were warm and alive. Her lungs gulped air gratefully. She raised her left hand for inspection: healthy skin over living muscles, nerves, blood, and bone. And Raclin’s ring encircling the third finger.
It was what she had wanted, sort of, but Nora began to cry anyway. Her sight blurred, the ring mockingly brilliant as it dissolved into golden light. She covered her face and curled into a ball and sobbed passionately with all the grief and fear and heartbreak that marble statues can never feel. Someone took hold of her shoulders with kind, strong hands. She turned to Aruendiel gratefully.
But it was Mrs. Toristel pulling her close, patting her gently on the back, calling her a poor little mouse. Nora leaned her head against Mrs. Toristel’s thin shoulder and cried harder than ever.
After a while Mrs. Toristel helped her to her feet. Nora stood up shakily. On the other side of the great hall, near the outside door, Aruendiel was talking to Dorneng, evidently showing him out. Dorneng, she thought, looked wilted. As he went out the door, he sneaked a glance back at Nora, but he looked away quickly when he saw her looking at him.
Aruendiel followed Dorneng’s glance. As soon as the door was shut, he came over with long, limping strides. Mrs. Toristel was steering Nora upstairs, to be dosed with hot applejack and honey and then to spend the rest of the day in bed; Nora could not think of a reason to oppose the plan. The housekeeper gave the magician a reproachful look—daring for her, Nora thought—and asked him if it was really necessary to scare the poor child so. She seemed to be under the impression that all the mischief stemmed from the explosion that Dorneng had used to destroy the ring.
Aruendiel hesitated for a moment, then s
aid: “I regret any anxiety I may have caused you, Mistress Nora. How are you feeling now?”
Nora was about to say that it wasn’t his fault. But then it came to her that he was the famous magician, after all—perhaps he should have known that removing the ring would make something terrible happen. “I’m all right.” She lifted her hand with a rueful smile, showing him the ring. “At least this worked.”
His pale eyes flicked over the ring. “It is not much of a cure,” he said venomously.
“You could try cutting off my finger.” She wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not. Maybe, she thought angrily, that was the only way to get rid of the ring. It might be worth trading a finger to avoid the risk of ever becoming a marble statue again.
Aruendiel’s face contorted. For a moment he looked stricken, then wrathful. Mrs. Toristel uttered a cry.
“What a terrible idea, Nora,” she said, pursing her lips. “There’s no reason to do that, even if you can’t get it off. If you must have it gone, I’m sure his lordship will find a way eventually, but I think it’s a handsome ring, after all, nothing to be ashamed of, and it never caused any trouble before.”
Not exactly, Nora thought, but she let herself be led off to bed. The applejack took away some of the lurking dread that still oppressed her spirits, but she found she did not want to drink the entire enormous draft that Mrs. Toristel had pressed on her. Anything that threatened her control of her own body seemed anathema. What she did drink sent her to sleep for a few hours. Nora dreamed not of marble statues, thankfully, but of a disjointed conversation with EJ—something about not forgetting their mother’s birthday—that ended when she remembered that he was dead.
She awoke in a contemplative mood and spent some time regarding the ring on her finger, wiggling her toes at intervals just because she could. There was some solace in Mrs. Toristel’s observation, Nora thought wryly: At least she wasn’t stuck with something ugly on her finger. How fortunate that Raclin had decent taste in jewelry. After screwing up her courage, she gave the ring a tentative tug to see if it would come off. To her secret relief, it did not.
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 48