The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  Then the white head swiveled toward her. Its face was as blank as a sheet of paper except for a mouth that bloomed bloodred. The mouth smiled at Nora.

  “Oh, good,” it said. Its voice was pure and high, like a child’s. “Another one.”

  She backed away, near Dorneng’s small fire, and picked up a piece of burning wood for protection. But the ice demon had turned back to Dorneng, who now slumped sideways, his eyes dull. The thing pawed at his chest, trying to reach inside his furs. Now, with a better view, Nora saw why she had first mistaken it for a marble bust. The demon’s form was oddly truncated: a head, shoulders, a single arm.

  Is that all? Nora wondered. If not, where was the rest of its body?

  The answer came to her all at once. She ran straight toward Dorneng and the demon, the burning brand leveled like a sword. “Get away from him!” she yelled.

  Disdainfully the ice demon smacked its red lips at Nora and continued to scrabble at Dorneng’s clothes. She swatted at it with the burning wood. The flame sputtered and went out. Behind her, the fire choked in a cloud of white smoke.

  “Oh, hell,” Nora said. The ice demon’s magic could evidently extinguish fire.

  Throwing down the wood, she took the demon by its shoulders and yanked it away from Dorneng with all her strength. The single arm snatched at her face, but she flung the flailing thing as far as she could. It landed ten feet away, facedown, and went into a spasm of activity, trying to right itself.

  Nora bent over Dorneng, pulling open his fur cloak.

  It was as she had expected. There were five small glass bottles secreted inside the pockets of his tunic. Three were full of what looked like water; one looked empty; and the fifth was broken, although there was still a tablespoon or so of clear liquid inside the intact bottom half. In a second she had mended the broken bottle, then gathered up all five. She held them carefully against her chest as she looked back at the ice demon.

  It was crawling through the snow with short, jerky strokes of its arm. “Give those to me!” it snarled. “They belong to me.”

  “Sorry, but no,” Nora said. “It’s the rest of your body, isn’t it?”

  “He trapped me,” the demon said. “He locked me up in those horrible bottles.”

  “I see. And then one of them broke and part of you escaped. What did you do to Dorneng?”

  “I ate him,” said the demon. With some distaste it added: “A poor meal. Very dry and sour. I’m still hungry.”

  “Is that so?” Nora glanced at Dorneng. Aside from the vacancy of his gaze, he looked perfectly normal. She called his name once, twice. He seemed not to hear.

  The demon kept squirming in her direction. Nora stepped back. “You mean you ate him as in—his mind? His soul?”

  “The living part, the tasty part. Not the foul meat. You, now,” the demon said, “I can tell that you are delicious.”

  “You won’t have the chance to find out.” Nora turned and began to walk rapidly, not sure exactly where she was heading. All directions looked very much the same, anyway—snow stretching out to a dim horizon. It was beginning to grow dark.

  “Where are you going with my body?” the demon called after her. “Come back here!”

  “Sorry, I don’t want you eating me.”

  “It doesn’t hurt!” the demon said. Nora kept walking. “And you don’t even know where you’re going!”

  “I’ll figure it out,” Nora said, but she slowed her pace and then stopped.

  “I know how it is with you humans,” the demon continued. “You’re weak. You can’t survive long even in this mild climate. You’ll wander around for a while and then you’ll die. And then you’ll be no good to me at all.”

  “Bad luck for you, then.” Her hands were already growing numb as she held Dorneng’s bottles. What if she dropped one? She looked back, trying to locate the ice demon, a blur of white on white.

  “Is it Maarikok you want?” the demon called suddenly. “You’re going in the wrong direction.”

  “You know where Maarikok is?” Nora asked suspiciously.

  “I used to catch humans there all the time.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “I could be there in a few hours—if I had my legs.”

  “I’m not going to give you your legs,” Nora said. Was there any reason to think that the ice demon was telling the truth about Maarikok? In the twilight, she could not see the thing clearly, but she could hear it rolling in the snow some distance away, like a grotesque baby.

  Giving it a wide berth, she ran back to the Avaguri’s mount and climbed into the saddle, but she could not make it rise. When she tried a levitation spell, it only shuddered and shed some feathers.

  The demon was still talking—whining, really. “It will take me months to regrow my legs and my other arm,” it said. “And the nights are growing shorter. I won’t be able to walk before the brutal spring heat arrives.”

  “Will you melt?” Nora called, curious in spite of her fear.

  “I’ll melt and soak into the ground and wait for the cold again, with nothing to eat, nothing. It will be agony.”

  “What direction is Maarikok?” Nora asked unsympathetically.

  “I’ll take you there,” the demon said promptly, “if you give me my body back.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’ll promise not to eat you,” the demon wheedled.

  “Why should I believe you? You just said you were still hungry.”

  “I never break my word.”

  Nora let out a disbelieving snicker, then scanned the barren landscape around her. She was hoping to see some speck, some eminence on the horizon that could, conceivably, be the keep at Maarikok. Nothing.

  She could try to find Maarikok on her own—and probably die of exposure, as the demon predicted. She could wait here for someone to find her—it might be Hirizjahkinis, it might be Ilissa—and die of exposure anyway. Somewhere around here was, or had been, a gateway to her own world, but she did not have the slightest idea of how to identify it. Meanwhile, Aruendiel was a prisoner.

  Nora gritted her teeth. She must have heard Aruendiel say a dozen times that demons were not to be trusted, but now she had no choice. Wizards had made plenty of pacts with demons before, she reminded herself. “If you take me to Maarikok—and don’t eat me—then I’ll give you your legs and the rest of your body back,” she said. “After we get there.”

  “Give it to me now!” the demon countered.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Can I have just a little of you, to keep my strength up?”

  “No! You just ate Dorneng. That should last you a while, no matter what he tasted like. If you try to eat me, even the slightest attempt—if you even tell me how delicious I would taste—the deal is off.”

  There was silence for a moment. “All right, then,” said the demon. “I agree. I hope there is something to eat at Maarikok, though.”

  Chapter 42

  It took them more than a day to reach the edge of the Ivory Marshes. Either the ice demon was a poor judge of distance or—more likely—it was a faster walker than two cold and tired human beings, one of which it had recently consumed.

  As Nora trudged across the frozen marshland, past curtains of brittle reeds as tall as herself, from time to time she could glimpse the higher land ahead, rocky islands hidden in the middle of the wetlands. Maarikok was the largest of these islands, with a ruined fortress on its highest point, according to the ice demon. Its own depredations, Nora gathered, had led to the castle’s abandonment. She was elated the first time she saw the keep’s tiny silhouette against the sky, but, as they kept walking, it did not seem to grow any larger.

  Dorneng shuffled beside her, head lowered, mute. Evidently, being eaten by an ice demon didn’t kill you—at least, not at once. Instead, Dorneng seemed to be drowned in a vast apathy. He could walk, if Nora took his arm and pointed him in the right direction; he would eat, slowly and mechanically, if food was placed in his hand;
but he did nothing to express or fulfill any volition of his own. “I told you it doesn’t hurt,” the ice demon said carelessly. This was after Nora had noticed, with a sick feeling, the white gleam of bone showing through the peeling flesh of Dorneng’s burned hand. Dorneng had not complained; he did not even seem to favor the injured hand. “They don’t care about anything, afterward,” the demon said.

  She would have made better time without Dorneng—more than once she thought of leaving him sitting in the snow—but frustratingly, she also felt a certain painful obligation for him. He was pitiful in a way that was too familiar, even though she knew perfectly well that saving Dorneng would do nothing, nothing at all to make up for EJ. And at least Dorneng could carry the ice demon. It rode on his slumping shoulders, its arm crooked jauntily around his neck.

  So far the thing had abided strictly by their agreement—it had not actually tried to eat her—but that did not prevent it from asking several times a day if it could do so, and complaining of hunger pangs when she refused. When Nora protested, the demon pointed out that it was only inquiring about renegotiating the contract, something either party could do at any time. She began to see exactly why Aruendiel disliked demons so much.

  The first night, she hardly slept at all, afraid that the demon would attack her. How she would get to Maarikok without dying of fatigue, she was not sure at all until, thankfully, the next morning she made a chance discovery: The ice demon liked poetry.

  One must have a mind of winter, she was thinking as she plodded along, lost in the white tedium of the landscape. And have been cold a long time. Being warm, so comfortable that you didn’t even think about where your skin stopped and the air began, had begun to seem distant and abstract, a happy condition she had only heard about. To distract herself, she said the whole poem aloud. There were relatively few great English poems about winter, she reflected, compared with the huge number of poems about autumn—the approach of cold and death being perhaps more poignant than their actual presence.

  As she recited, she was conscious of a sense of longing, of powerful appetite. It was not hers, but so near to her that she felt the pang of frustrated desire almost as though it were her own. It belonged to a creature—she could sense this now—whose origins lay in silence, stasis, and cold. To move, to live, it needed Nora’s life, the thin filament of her consciousness. In return it promised an end to hope and pain alike.

  “—‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’” Nora pulled back, just barely. The vast hunger retreated. She was safe, she still belonged to herself. She looked up to see the empty face of the ice demon turned fixedly to hers as it clung to Dorneng’s neck. Its round mouth, which had faded to pink since it fed on Dorneng, had reddened again.

  “That was very good,” the demon said. “Not as filling as it could be, but still delicious. You see, it doesn’t hurt just to give me a taste, does it?”

  Still shaken, Nora said: “What? A taste? That’s just a poem.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s a nice morsel,” the demon said, stretching its mouth greedily. “Do you have any more?”

  “More poems?” Nora stared at the ice demon. Was there was a way to keep it fed without sharing Dorneng’s fate? “I know quite a few. But you don’t speak English, right? How can you understand what I just said?”

  “I don’t need to understand it,” the demon scoffed. “I just savor it.”

  Interesting. She thought for a moment. “Try this: ‘Whose woods these are I think I know’—” The demon listened intently as she pulled the poem, line by line, from her memory. This time, somehow, she was better able to keep some distance from the demon’s insistent desire, like watching a shark’s grin through the aquarium glass.

  “That was even better,” the creature said in its flat, piping voice. “There is some lovely despair there. I have eaten many men full of the same dark juice. More!”

  “Later,” said Nora, quickening her step.

  The ice demon had catholic tastes. It lapped up almost anything she could recite, and turned up its nose only at one of Ashbery’s mandarin lyrics. She did not always need to recite an entire poem to satisfy the demon, but it demanded constant novelty, never a poem repeated. Her memory was good but not perfect. As she walked, she excavated fragments from her mind, trying to restore them into something whole. After a while, her thoughts skipped in iambic pentameter. She estimated she knew enough poems to keep the ice demon fed for a few days, not more than a week. After that—if worst came to worst, Nora told herself, she would write her own damn poems.

  By the end of the third day, Maarikok’s tower was bigger and more distinct than it had been that morning. Less than one more day of walking, Nora guessed. That night, for the first time, she was able to light a fire with magic instead of the flint and steel from Dorneng’s pack. Where she had pulled the fire from, she was not sure, but she took it as a good sign. She made sure that Dorneng was well wrapped in his fur cloak—he did not sleep now, as far as she could tell, but at night his torpor increased so much that he might as well have been asleep—and then she recited Donne’s “Elegy XIX” to the ice demon, which lay in the snow with its head propped on its elbow, a safe distance from the fire.

  “‘Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee’”—the idea of taking off one’s clothes had never seemed less appealing than in weather like this. Yet the poem still warmed her, as it always did. Aruendiel would like it, she thought, more than he liked Jane Austen. Its frank lust, its humor. All those women he had seduced, years ago—no, better not to think of that.

  Afterward, trying to sleep, curled up between the fire and a bank of snow piled up against the wind, she could still hear little icy rustles from where the demon lay.

  “What is it?” she said finally, trying to sound stern.

  “There’s another human nearby,” the demon said.

  Nora sat up. “Who is it? Can you tell?”

  “Very tasty, tender. A young one.”

  Not Aruendiel, then. “Is it definitely human?” she asked, thinking of Ilissa.

  “Of course, those are the best to eat!” The ice demon was scornful of her ignorance.

  Nora stood and conjured a dim, reddish illumination from the embers of the fire. Cupping the light in her hand, she stared into the darkness. A shadow moved—no, it was a clump of reeds.

  Suddenly, the ice demon launched itself toward something at her left, scuttling through the snow like a drunken crab.

  She heard footsteps crunching, then the flat, dull bite of steel into ice. Someone grunted. Holding her light aloft, Nora ran over to where the noise came from.

  She saw the ice demon first—glassy in the darkness, oddly contorted. Then she realized that it had wrapped itself around a man’s leg and was trying to shimmy up his body. The man was trying to push the demon back with his sword, but the tip kept slipping. The two strained at each other until finally the man managed to hook the demon in the armpit. With a thrust, he propelled the demon into the air and several yards away.

  The ice demon rolled over twice and immediately began to struggle back toward the man.

  “Watch out,” Nora called to the man. All she could see of him was that he was wearing a helmet and a long cloak. “Don’t let it near your mouth.”

  “What in the blood of the sun is it?” the man asked. The demon was right: He had a young voice.

  “An ice demon—it wants to eat you.” To the ice demon, she said severely: “Stop! Stop right there!”

  “I’m hungry,” the demon groaned, but as Nora stared at it, it slowed. “Can’t you see I’m starving?”

  “I’ll feed you again, in a minute. Just stop, hold it right there!”

  Reluctantly, the demon paused, muttering. The man kept his sword poised as if to strike it again.

  “I didn’t know ice demons were so small,” he said.

  “It’s only part of an ice demon. But wait, let me just feed it quickly.”

  Clearing her throat, she tried some
Whitman. Halfway through she realized that she had mixed up part of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” with “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” but, tangled in the long, rich lines, the demon seemed not to notice.

  “All right?” she asked it when she was done.

  “That was good,” the demon allowed. “May I eat him now?”

  “No, you may not,” Nora said. She took the man by the arm and pulled him toward the fire. To her relief, the ice demon did not follow. “It will leave you alone now—I hope,” she said. “It always says it’s starving, but given how much poetry it’s been sucking down, it can’t be that hungry.”

  The man looked back toward where they had left the demon. “I have never met an ice demon before, but I understand that they are nothing to trifle with.”

  “No, not at all,” Nora agreed fervently. “We have an agreement—the demon is guiding me to Maarikok, and then I will give it the rest of its body back. But if it didn’t like poetry so much, I think it would have eaten me already. It already ate Dorneng.” She gestured at Dorneng, hunched by the fire.

  The young man was suddenly interested. “Dorneng? Dorneng Hul, the magician?”

  Nora nodded. “But he’s not much of a magician now.” The man shook Dorneng’s shoulder and spoke to him, but got no answer. “He’s been like that ever since the ice demon attacked him,” she said.

  “They say ice demons kill everything but the body,” the stranger said. “And the body doesn’t survive long.” Straightening, he looked more closely at Nora in the firelight. “We’ve met before, haven’t we? I thought I recognized your voice.”

  Nora was at a loss. “We have?”

  “Yes—although I’m confused. What is the woman who is not the mistress of Lord Aruendiel doing in the middle of the Ivory Marshes with this poor addled-brained fellow and an ice demon?”

  Nora felt herself flush. “What—?”

  “Forgive me, I am too familiar,” the man said. “But you should know that I am still smarting from the scolding you gave me, when we last spoke in Semr, for my incautious assumption about the nature of your relations with Lord Aruendiel.”