The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (60 page)

“Did I hear correctly that you were traveling with an ice demon?” Aruendiel hissed in her ear as they began to mount the stairs. “The same one that I just boiled away?”

“The same one,” Nora said, waiting while his foot groped for the next step.

“Do you know how dangerous that was—how foolhardy?”

“I didn't have a choice. I kept reciting poetry—it liked poetry. That worked for a while.”

Aruendiel grunted, with effort or contempt. A few steps higher, he said: “And Dorneng is dead?”

“Yes. The ice demon killed him.”

“Pity. I hoped to kill him myself.” A moment later, in a low voice he said: “Filthy coward. He tricked me into drawing that circle against him. And then I could not get out.”

“It was a magical impermeability spell,” Nora volunteered. “You were cut off—”

“Yes, of course, I knew that,” Aruendiel said with a flicker of his old impatient energy. “It was a spell that Dorneng modified. It came from, from—oh, what's the fellow's name. Part of that group from Yrsl. Named after a plant.”

“Parsley Micr?” Nora guessed.

Aruendiel sighed, suddenly deflated. “No. Why can I not think of it? Well, it was an old spell. I knew just how to undo it. But I could not quite summon—there was not enough magic to do my will.”

One more step, and they were on level ground again, in the passageway leading to the main corridor. Motioning them to be silent, Perin edged forward to reconnoiter.

“Filthy coward,” Aruendiel repeated querulously. “He was afraid to face me—he had to steal my power.” Glancing back, Perin put his finger to his lips again. Aruendiel snorted, an exertion that made his lean frame tremble slightly. “Tell your friend,” he said to Nora, “that we are wrapped in a silencing spell that even the subtlest Faitoren could not penetrate.”

He went forward with a shade more vigor. But his grip on Nora's shoulder did not lighten.

“Was it you who freed me?” he asked in a low, harsh tone. “Or him?”

“It was me,” Nora said. “He's not a magician.”

“No, of course not, he's a simple knight. But you, Mistress Nora—I would have thought it was beyond your powers to undo Dorneng's spell.”

“I didn't—I just sort of stretched it.” She sighed suddenly. “And how I did it, I'm not really sure now.”

“What spell did you use?”

“I used algebra.”

Aruendiel repeated the word inquiringly. “What is that?”

“Algebra is, um—a form of arithmetic. So unlikely that I would even think of using it.” Nora shook her head with mild bafflement. The formula had been so clear, so insistent. She had known exactly what to do, as though someone were showing her the way, step by step. Now that calm certainty was gone. “I used algebra to make the bubble bigger, that's all.”

“It would be useful to know this sort of arithmetic,” Aruendiel said musingly. “Can you teach me algebra?” There was unusual respect in his tone.

Nora almost laughed. “It would be the boar teaching the bull to dance,” she said, using an expression of Mrs. Toristel's. “If you want, though, sure, I'll teach you what I can.”

Her words were almost drowned out by a sudden din echoing down the corridor. The stomp of many booted feet, the clank of weapons, a wild chorus of shouting.

Ahead, Perin had his sword out. The Faitoren poured around a bend in the corridor, dozens of them—tall, broad-shouldered warriors in golden armor, swords and spears gleaming, the dewy, cinematic perfection of their Faitoren faces contorted with battle fury.

Aruendiel stopped and pulled himself as straight as he could, letting go of Nora's shoulder. “Ah, excellent!” he said with satisfaction.

Perin was already surrounded, trying to fend off two Faitoren at once. The magician watched him coolly for a moment, as though appraising the younger man's swordplay. Another Faitoren dodged past Perin and made a swing at Aruendiel.

Aruendiel lifted his chin slightly. The Faitoren vanished.

So did both of the Faitoren dueling with Perin. The ranks of Faitoren seemed to evaporate. All at once the corridor was quieter and mostly empty again, except for a flurry of movement on the floor. Nora looked down to see long naked tails and frantic rodent haste.

Only one of the Faitoren soldiers remained standing. He seemed taller but thinner, his armor loose. Perin ran at him. The Faitoren swung his sword clumsily, then dropped it.

Probably, Nora guessed after a second look at the Faitoren's furry arm, because the Faitoren now lacked an opposable thumb.

“Bind him with iron,” Aruendiel directed.

The Faitoren prisoner in tow, they walked along the corridor, faster now. The encounter with the Faitoren had done Aruendiel good. His hair was darker, the old man's timidity gone from his movements. As they went along, he discoursed on Faitoren fighting tactics. The kind of attack they had just witnessed, he said, was typical. The Faitoren always made a show of overwhelming force, but if you peeled back the spells, there would likely be nothing but a few outnumbered Faitoren and a pack of confused rats.

“That's fine for magicians,” Perin said politely. “What can a simple knight do against the Faitoren?”

Aruendiel gave Perin a level stare. “One good steel blade could take down that whole company,” he said. “A direct thrust would dissipate one of their puppet soldiers—or kill an actual Faitoren. The difficulty is in surviving long enough to deliver a blow to every soldier. Their bronze swords can inflict real wounds—or make you think that you have suffered real wounds.”

The corridor led into the fortress's main courtyard. Although it was drizzling lightly, the air seemed very bright after the confines of the castle. Aruendiel looked thoughtfully up at the overcast sky. “I must make my own way to the battle now,” he said, and glanced at Nora, his expression unreadable. “You will need protection on the way to camp.”

“I'll look after her,” Perin said, but Aruendiel ignored him. “Would you prefer the Dinthiak or the Pasnvos Nen spell?” he asked Nora.

“The Nen,” Nora said, after thinking for a moment. There was always a trade-off with protection spells, strength versus duration.

Aruendiel nodded. “You will have to hurry, then.” She felt the faint, internal quiver of strong magic, and something shifted in her vision, so that everything around her looked slightly farther away. Then, with an easy, practiced movement—perhaps the most graceful thing she had ever seen him do—Aruendiel swung himself upward and was gone. A gray owl flapped silently to the top of the castle wall.

Nora was as startled as Perin. Although she and Aruendiel had talked about transformations, she had never actually seen him perform one. It was unnerving to see how neatly a man's long body could be folded up into a bird's. Even a large bird's.

Together they watched the owl float away, until the castle wall blocked their view and they could not see it anymore.

W
hy didn't you tell me who your grandparents were?” Nora said to Perin. She was surprised by how wounded she felt at his omission. Perin had always seemed so forthright, so splendidly frank, she had never imagined he might not be telling the whole truth. Much like Wickham, she thought suddenly. Hopefully not as bad.

They were making their way along the road that twisted from the entrance of the Maarikok castle down to the marsh's edge. The ridge flanking their left blocked their view of the frozen marsh, but the noise of battle was growing louder, like hidden machinery.

After a moment Perin said: “I should have. I didn't know how much you knew of my family's history—or Lord Aruendiel's.”

“You and Aruendiel both told me that he stabbed his pregnant wife because she'd been unfaithful,” she said. “
You
forgot to mention that she was your grandmother. So the baby survived?”

“That was my father. Lord Aruendiel
told
you how he killed my grandmother?” The notion seemed to distress Perin.

“He wasn't boasting about it. I asked him to explain why he'd done such a thing.”

“Did he explain it to your satisfaction?”

“He told me what he had done.” She added: “He regrets it very much, I think.”

“It is late for regrets,” Perin said.

“Is your father really going to try to avenge his parents' death?”

“One of these days! He's no coward, my father.” Perin glanced at her as though he were anxious that she should understand that point. “He swore that oath when he was young and unattached—and then he married and had a family to raise. But he hasn't forgotten. We all grew up hearing the story of how he was orphaned before he was even born.”

Nora thought that Perin's father sounded rather self-pitying, even if justice was on his side. “And if they did fight, Aruendiel and your father, and Aruendiel won, what would happen? Would you have to try to kill him, too?”

“
If
Lord Aruendiel won. I wouldn't put high odds on that, after seeing him today. He's not what I expected. He's a feeble old man.”

“He's not always like that!” Nora protested. “He was like that only because he'd been imprisoned. You saw what he did to the Faitoren—and he turned himself into an owl—”

“But those are all magician's tricks. And yes, he did seem stronger as we went along, but that was a magician's trick, too.” Perin shook his head decisively. “My father will be furious to hear that I had Lord Aruendiel at my mercy and did
not
kill him, but blood of the sun! I couldn't attack a defenseless old doddard like that. It would be almost like killing my own grandfather.”

Nora looked curiously at Perin and wondered if there were any chance at all that—but no, Aruendiel had recognized in Perin's face the features of the man who had stolen his wife. “So tell me the truth, Perin,” she said resolutely, “when you said you'd help me find Aruendiel, what were you really thinking? Were you planning to kill him? Because I would hate to think that I almost betrayed him, leading you there.”

“You know I never pretended to be a friend of Lord Aruendiel's,” Perin said. “But I said that I would help you, and I did.”

She nodded, not entirely satisfied, but wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt. “How did your father survive, when his mother died?” she asked.

“My grandfather had hired a wizard. Otherwise Lord Aruendiel would have found them much earlier. The wizard saved the baby and brought him to one of my grandfather's cousins, who adopted him.”

Aruendiel stabbed his wife in the chest, Nora thought. Between the ribs, he said. He could have killed both mother and baby, but he didn't. She thought of pointing this out to Perin, but had a feeling that it wouldn't appreciably change his opinion of Aruendiel.

They were almost at the marsh's edge before the road abruptly snaked to the left and gave them a view of the battlefield. “Oh,” said Nora.

“Look at that,” said Perin. He sounded almost appreciative.

The Faitoren were everywhere, wave after wave, stretching to the edge of sight. They blotted out the white marshes, moving with steady, inhumane precision. Even under a slate sky, their bronze swords and helms glittered. Like wasps swarming, Nora thought.

She looked around frantically for their own side, and found it. The human soldiers mustered in ragged bands against the encroaching sea of bronze. Their armor was pewter in this light. Not everyone had armor.

In the distance, a cloud of something like smoke suddenly descended on one section of the Faitoren army—a flock of birds, she realized—and it seemed to her those Faitoren ranks thinned slightly. Aruendiel's iron birds.

“It's not real, that army,” Nora reminded herself and Perin. “Not all of it. They're just mice. A lot of mice.”

“Right,” Perin said. “Do our men know that?” He studied the scene before them for a minute, then pointed out what appeared to be the tents of the human army, about a mile to the west. The frozen marshland that lay between them and the camp was mostly empty, Nora was relieved to see. “We'll be at the camp in a quarter of an hour,” Perin said. “You'll be safe there.” He was eager to join the battle, she could tell.

They reached the stone quay at the foot of the hill and started across the marsh. Rain had mashed the snow into a heavy, slippery sludge, and it was slower going than Perin had predicted. Nora slipped once, but was up again in an instant. The main fighting was going on several hundred yards to the left. Massed shouts were punctuated by the crunch of metal on metal, over and over again. It was odd to be walking past a battle in progress; Nora was reminded of the peculiar isolation she used to feel when she went past the stadium on Saturday afternoons in football season on her way to the library.

Something made her look up. Pure instinct—there was no shadow to alert her.

“Run!” she screamed at Perin. Absurdly, she flung up her hands and waved them around her head as she ran, the way you might try to shoo away flies. Perin, running beside her, said something about a dragon; he sounded both worried and excited. “Worse than that,” Nora panted.

She splashed through a patch of red slush, and almost stumbled over something soft. A man cried out. “Oh, I'm so sorry,” she said, wincing. Running, she was finding it a little hard to navigate, her sight skewed by Aruendiel's protection spell. The ground looked very far away. She dodged past another red spot with a dark, huddled mass in the center.

The protection spell. Nora stopped in her tracks. She didn't have to run from Raclin, not this time. Of course, Perin didn't have a protection spell, but he did have a sword. Nora turned and scanned the sky with a sense of righteous indignation, as though she might well summon Raclin down and finally have it out with him.

But Raclin was just a pair of distant wings against the clouds. Like a tea tray in the sky, and just as harmless-seeming. Vaguely annoyed, Nora lowered her gaze, just in time to see the looming bulk of a galloping horse and the golden flash of a Faitoren sword—missing her, not by much. The protection spell cuts it close, she thought, and then saw where she was. Human and Faitoren soldiers were on all sides of her.

A Faitoren knight swung his blade at the belly of a young soldier with curly black hair, and it came back trailing pink and red ribbons, as the black-haired boy crumpled. Another pair of soldiers, better matched, were trading sword blows—Nora had to scramble out of their way—until the human pinked the Faitoren on the shoulder. Looking greenish, the Faitoren dropped his weapon and staggered backward; his opponent stepped forward confidently and hacked through the Faitoren's windpipe. Another horse ran past, this one riderless. A couple of human soldiers bore down on a Faitoren—he looked familiar, Nora was sure she had danced with him once—but the Faitoren did something that made one of them go down on one knee, and then he slashed heavily at the second's man's face, under his helmet. The soldier's jaw fell down, all the way to his collarbone. He screamed and gurgled. Broken teeth flew.

“Mistress Nora, this is no place for you.” Perin, coming up behind her, his sword drawn, the tip stained dark.

No place for anyone, Nora thought, but all she said was “Where?” All directions were the same, a maze of men trying to kill one another. But Perin seemed to have an instinct for threading his way through the fighting. He took Nora's hand and they gave a wide berth to two more knights swinging swords, halted until several mounted knights had swept past, and then ran through an area where the fighting was sparser and wounded men had left mushy red trails in the snow.

“And the camp is just over there,” Perin was saying when something came down like a curtain across their path.

“You again,” Nora said disgustedly to Raclin, who gave her a jagged, insinuating grin and rattled his wings at her. She stepped in front of Perin with the unformed hope that the protection spell might safeguard him as well. The air was warm from Raclin's breath and smelled of burnt hair. Raclin himself—his long head, his yellow eye—kept swimming in and out of focus, so that it was hard to judge exactly how far away he was.

Then suddenly Nora's vision cleared, and Raclin looked startlingly real and close. Her heart sank as she realized what that meant. “I think my protection spell ran out,” she said despairingly to Perin.

Behind her, a deep snarl that made her bones vibrate. She turned abruptly and found herself looking into the blank golden eyes and gaping, empty mouth of the Kavareen.

With an impatient swat of its paw, it batted Nora aside, then launched itself at Raclin. But Raclin, screaming in indignation, had already hauled himself into the air with a frantic flapping of wings. He circled low, hissing and baring his teeth. The Kavareen hissed back, gathered itself, and leaped upward; Raclin had to twist in midair to avoid the Kavareen's claws. He shot upward, still scolding. The Kavareen crouched on the ground, ears back, tail lashing, and watched him climb until he disappeared among the lowering clouds.

Nora got up carefully from the icy patch where she had landed. The Kavareen turned its glassy gaze back to her. She didn't recall being able to look at the Kavareen eye to eye. “My goodness, you've grown,” Nora said, trying to sound upbeat and friendly. “Remember me? We took a nap together once.” She saw with dismay that the creature's tail was still snapping back and forth. Its mouth opened wider.

This time, it seemed to Nora, the darkness inside the Kavareen was dense, crowded, full of lost, shadowy things. Aruendiel had said that it liked to eat whole cities; perhaps he hadn't been joking. A thin, wailing sound hovered maddeningly in her ears, like the whine of an unseen insect; she understood intuitively that, inside the dark mystery of the Kavareen, it would be a howling storm of trapped, desperate voices.

“Nora!” Then a string of fierce, unknown syllables.

The Kavareen shrank backward. Hirizjahkinis flung her arms around Nora. “Don't mind the Kavareen,” Hirizjahkinis said, laughing. “He is excitable today, very greedy. I do not let him eat so much, usually. Nora, you found Aruendiel!” She hugged Nora tighter. “I did not believe it at first, when I saw him come. You did very, very well. That was not just good magic—that was you, your
kanis,
what is here.” She made a fist and touched it lightly to Nora's sternum.

“Oh, Hirizjahkinis,” Nora said, “I was so—” But Hirizjahkinis had already released her and was moving away.

“I must attend to Ilissa. We have turned the battle, now that Aruendiel is back. There he is, you see.” Hirizjahkinis pointed into the thick of the battle; Nora looked for him vainly. “I want to hear all about how you freed him, later. He would only tell me a little.” She called to the Kavareen—then called him a second time, more severely—and the two of them disappeared into the press of soldiers.

“Perin?” Nora started and looked around. There was no sign of him nearby. He'd been right behind her until the Kavareen came along—Nora was formulating a panicked thought in her mind until her eye fell on a pair of combatants at the edge of the battle line and she recognized Perin's helmet. She relaxed only a little as she watched. He seemed to be holding his own—no, better than that, the Faitoren was being forced back. She began working through the spell to confuse an enemy's sight.

Running footsteps and the clank of armor made her turn. A man in bronze ran staight at her, an axe lifted high.

Nora couldn't move. But somehow she was working the levitation spell. The Faitoren soldier bounced into the air. And hung there, legs pumping vainly. She almost laughed with relief.

He threw the axe. She began to duck, not fast enough.

A black flutter in the air, the sound of clanking iron. The spinning axe disappeared in a bronze flash.

Pumping its wings awkwardly, Aruendiel's iron bird landed heavily on the snow with another clank. Then it took to the air again, heading for the Faitoren.

Nora felt a light touch on her arm. “It is Mistress Nora, is it not? Aruendiel told me to look out for you.” An older man, slightly stooped, slightly familiar. Aruendiel's old friend Nansis Abora, she realized after a moment, with relief and some pleasure. “This is no place for a young lady. Would you like to come back to camp with me? I have just been seeing to some of the wounded,” he added, and she noticed his blood-streaked apron.

“I want to make sure that my friend is all right,” Nora said, gesturing toward Perin. The Faitoren's sword blade had broken off; Perin had his own blade pointed at the Faitoren's throat.

“That boy there? He looks as though he's doing a tolerable job of taking care of himself, child, and Aruendiel won't thank me if anything happens to you while we dawdle here.”

Nansis Abora had a small sled drawn by a pair of mules, in which he was transporting wounded men back to the hospital tent. To Nora's chagrin, he insisted on treating her as one of the wounded as soon as he noticed the bloodstain on the back of her wool cap.