The Shape-Changer's Wife (10 page)

Aubrey felt like one of those trees for a moment; he shivered, and did not know what moved him. “You're a poet,” he said.

She gave him her brief smile. “I liked the music,” she said.

Before Aubrey could speak again, Glyrenden was upon them. Even in this setting, there was a brilliance to him, an intensity that made it hard to look away from him to other, lesser men. His waxy cheeks were faintly flushed; his eyes were as bright as a fanatic's.

“My love, there are people here I would like you to meet,” he said. “Our host, for one. Somehow we slipped into the house this evening without greeting him. Aubrey, you too. You must meet Faren Rochester and his friends.”

Glyrenden led them to a group of five men standing in the back of the hall. The wizard, his wife and apprentice were all dressed in their traveling clothes, a fact which became more apparent to Aubrey the closer they drew to their host, for Faren Rochester and his friends wore so much lace and velvet, they would have been at home in the king's court.

“Lord Rochester,” Glyrenden said, bowing to a tall, solidly built man of middle years. “Let me introduce you to my wife, Lilith. And my apprentice, Aubrey. We are all honored to be your guests.”

Faren Rochester took Lilith's hand and made a shallow bow. His hair was fire-red and his eyes were a metallic blue. He looked to Aubrey like so much ice and calculation thinly covered with a veil of flesh. “Madam,” he said. He dropped her hand and turned to give Aubrey the briefest nod. “Sir.”

“And Lord Stephanis, Lord Maloran, Sir Calcebray,” Glyrenden continued, indicating three of the remaining men. Each of them repeated Lord Rochester's performance, and, to Aubrey, looked much like him.

“Lilith, my dear,” Glyrenden said, “this is Sirrit. A sorcerer. He serves Lord Rochester.”

The fifth man was decidedly different. Unlike Rochester and the other lords, who were dressed in stiff, well-cut velvets, he was attired in a flowing black robe heavily embroidered with silver. He wore three silver rings on one hand, a silver and onyx ring on the other, and a bracelet of gold around one wrist. His hair was white, threaded still with a hint or two of black, and combed severely back from his high forehead; it fell to his shoulders in soft tangles. He was a good twenty or thirty years older than Faren Rochester, and every bit as intelligent, and Aubrey knew two things before the introduction was made. This was Faren Rochester's house magician, and Glyrenden did not like him.

If the tone of his voice had not been an insult, the wording certainly was. Rochester's cold blue eyes gleamed, as he waited to see how Sirrit would respond to the slight.

The older wizard merely smiled faintly and offered his palm to Lilith. “Here's my hand, if you aren't offended to take it,” he said, and Rochester laughed aloud.

“The magicians joust,” he said ironically. “I must have been mad to bring more than one under my roof.”

“What does a man need with multiple mages?” Glyrenden asked sweetly.

Rochester shrugged. “Why does a sorcerer need multiple masters?” he responded. “You serve my cousin the king, and you would tend to my wants, too.”

Glyrenden's smile widened. “I have power and more to satisfy your needs and the king's needs and the needs of many other men,” he said.

“And yet, I have always been loath to share my treasures with many other men,” Rochester said.

“Myself as well,” Glyrenden answered. “Lilith, my dear, you have not shaken good Sirrit's hand.”

Indeed, whether by accident or design, Lilith had positioned herself as far from the sorcerer as the small circle of men would permit and turned her body so that she was sideways to him. Now, as Glyrenden nudged her forward, Sirrit smilingly extended his hand again. Slowly, as if reluctantly, Lilith laid her palm against his.

Aubrey had not stopped staring at Sirrit since he heard the name (it was a name Cyril had spoken often, with some reverence), and so he was watching the wizard when Lilith touched him. An indescribable expression crossed that lined face and was banished; for a moment, the man's hand crushed the woman's thin one in a far from social grip. And then Sirrit released her and Lilith stepped back, and suddenly everyone was talking about politics.

But Aubrey noticed two more things: Lilith could not bring herself to look at Sirrit, and Sirrit could not force himself to look away from her. And this was so strange that it did not occur to Aubrey for two more days that, in that strange interlude, Glyrenden had neglected to introduce him individually to the old wizard; although perhaps it had not been entirely by accident.

THE NEXT MORNING, Aubrey joined enthusiastically into the entertainment planned for the day. For the men, this meant a hunt through the fragrant green countryside; for the women, it meant a walking tour through the estate's extensive gardens. The day was fine, Aubrey's borrowed horse was patient, and the hunting was good, though Aubrey declined to take part in the actual kill. Nonetheless, he enjoyed himself. He found himself in the company of half a dozen young men who were nearly his age, and they conversed amusingly and accepted him without a second thought. As he had told Lilith, he was a sociable man, and he had missed such pleasantries in the last couple of months.

They were back from the hunt just in time to change for dinner, which, this evening, was far more formal than the night before. Aubrey wore his best clothes and used the barest hint of magic to make them appear finer than they really were. Then he hurried down to the great dining hall to seek his place at one of the long tables.

He found himself between two women. One was old enough to be his mother, but dressed to the highest standards of fashion; her face was made up and her hair was so elaborately coiffed that he imagined she was afraid to turn her head very quickly for fear of dislodging a curl. Nonetheless, she was charming in a gossipy, knowledgeable way. She pointed out to him a few of the notables at the table and filled him in on their latest scandals and accomplishments.

His other dinner partner was young enough to be shy, and pretty enough to be flattering; whoever had made up the tables had obviously thought he deserved to have attractive company. Her name, she told him, was Mirette. She was blond as firelight and her eyes were a guileless brown. When he smiled at her, she blushed and dropped her eyes, but he saw a small answering smile teasing at the corner of her mouth.

“You can't have been invited here on your own,” he said. “Who have you come with? A husband? A brother? Parents?”

The small smile grew. “Oh—not my husband!” she exclaimed, in a breathless voice. “I'm not—I have no husband.”

“A family, then?”

She nodded. “Yes, my mother and father and my sisters.”

“Sisters!” Aubrey repeated. “There are more of you?”

She laughed softly. “Two more.”

“And are they as beautiful as you?”

She laughed again, somewhat more breathlessly. “How can you ask such a thing! I think you would say they are far more beautiful.”

“Then I had best cover my eyes when I meet them,” Aubrey said solemnly. “Mortal men are not meant to endure such sights.”

This time she giggled, and shot him a quick sideways look from under her fair brows. “Many mortal men have looked at all three of us together and not gone blind,” she said.

“How can that be? I feel my eyesight failing even as we speak.”

It was lighthearted nonsense and she took it as such; she was not quite so unsophisticated as she first appeared, Aubrey decided, but every bit as pretty. Once or twice he caught another young man at the table eyeing him with a certain envy. One of his companions from the hunt actually winked at him when Aubrey glanced his way, then spread both his hands in a brief parody of wingflight. Aubrey knew this masculine signal from days past: “Hunt like the falcon,” it meant, and it was always a sign of approbation.

Of course he could not claim Mirette's attention for the whole evening; the man on her other side wanted a chance to flirt with her, and Aubrey too had another companion to entertain. It was late into the meal when it occurred to him to look around for his other friends to see if they were faring so well. Glyrenden was not hard to spot: He sat at the head table, only two or three places removed from his host. It took Aubrey some time to locate Lilith.

But once he saw her, his gaze stayed for a long time; he felt momentarily disoriented, out of place. She was wearing the green silk gown that he had liked so much, and she had taken some trouble with her appearance. Her dark hair, braided into its customary smooth coronet, was pinned in place with gold combs. She wore the emerald collar Aubrey had made for her from a strand of pearls, and the jewels glowed against her white skin with a startling vividness. Her face had been delicately painted—a blush smoothed onto the flat cheeks, a deep shadow applied under the high arch of the brows—and even from a distance, Aubrey thought he caught the faintest patchouli scent of her perfume.

And she sat at the brightly lit table with a hundred people, and she watched her plate as she ate almost nothing; and men sat on either side of her and across the table from her, and no one at all looked in her direction. She seemed utterly alone, abandoned, alien and strange. She seemed to sit in a pool of darkness so deep no one was willing to peer into its depths. Whether that darkness sprang from her or was forced on her, Aubrey could not tell, but everyone else at the table, consciously or not, seemed to be aware of it, and to turn away.

Yet it seemed to him, as he watched her from twenty feet away, that she was more dramatic, more glorious, more alive, and more beautiful than any other human being in the room. The angular face, the heavy hair, the thin wrists, the pale skin, were as familiar to him as his own features, his own body, but they struck him now with an unbearable poignancy. He was pierced to the heart by her troubled incandescence. It seemed impossible to him that no one else in the room noticed her, that no one else stared at her with the same arrested fascination. He could not believe that she was not ringed with men begging for a glance from her eyes or the lightest touch of her fingers. He watched her and he felt vertigo surge through him. If he'd been obliged to at that moment, he could not have risen to his feet and crossed the room. She was the shadowed center in a garish and over-bright universe; she drew him in with the power of her darkness, and he could not look away.

“Aubrey,” said a soft voice in his ear, and he started so violently, he almost spilled his wine. The voice laughed, and he managed to turn his head and track down the source. The blond girl beside him spoke his name again.

“Aubrey. Aren't you going to speak to me again this evening? What have I done to offend you?”

He heard the words but it took him a moment to sort them out and even longer to respond. This girl he had admired just a moment ago suddenly seemed to him shallow and formless, constructed of meaningless bright pastels and breathy laughter. Against Lilith's darkness, she shone too metallic; against Lilith's stark beauty, she was as insubstantial as water.

 

 

SOMEHOW HE MADE it through the meal. If Mirette's continued light laughter was any gauge, his sudden conversion was not noticeable, and indeed he struggled to keep up an appearance of gaiety. He wished he had not been so successful, however, when the woman on his left turned to him as the meal ended.

“Tonight we have dancing,” she said. “Faren loves to show off his ballroom. You must excuse my forwardness on the grounds that I am so much older than you, and tell me please if you would be willing to lead me out for the first waltz?”

He had wanted to make his way immediately to Lilith's side, but courtesy forbade him to refuse his dinner partner. “I would be delighted,” he said. “You anticipated my own request.”

Mirette could hear every word; there was no help for it. “And you, most lovely lady,” he said, hoping he disguised the effort it took to speak so lightly. “Would you honor me with the second dance?”

She gave him her pretty sideways smile. “I would. Thank you very much for saving me the trouble of asking.”

In a relaxed, disorderly fashion, the guests rose to their feet and strolled to the ballroom, then stood around gossiping as the orchestra members worked together to find a common pitch. Lilith somehow was on the opposite side of the room, alone, her back resting against the painted marble wall. She stood absolutely motionless, her eyes fixed on some point halfway across the ballroom floor. Her hands were behind her back, as if she crushed them between the wall and her body to keep herself from reaching or gesturing. Her face, tilted slightly downward, showed no expression that Aubrey could read. People brushed by her and did not see her; no one spoke to her at all.

Aubrey almost started across the room to her side, but just then the music began. His promised partner took his arm. “Ah, ‘The Dance of the Naiads,' ” she said, naming the piece for him. “It is one of my favorites. I feel certain you are an excellent dancer.”

In fact, he had only average skills, but this woman was so good, his own deficiencies were unnoticeable. Mirette, too, proved to be a flawless dancer, one who had moreover perfected the art of flirting with her partner without missing a step. He hoped he did not disappoint her. He answered most of her sallies wholly at random, and paid compliments so pallid as to be worthless, or so extravagant as to be completely incredible. Nonetheless, when their dance ended, she honored him with a smile and a deep curtsey.

“Perhaps later in the evening—?” she began, and paused delicately.

“I will live for the hour,” Aubrey said, bowing. Her hand was still gently clasping his when three young men elbowed each other out of the way to present themselves to Mirette as possible partners, and Aubrey escaped.