The Shape-Changer's Wife (18 page)

Sirrit held up one hand to silence him. “Very well. Barbaric, then, but not surprising. The oldest urge in the range of human desires is to create another being in a familiar image. To create another being to love. That is why you were born, why I was born—why any of us is alive today and traveling from city to city—because the human drive to procreate is as strong as the drive to live.”

“Yes—but—that is a natural act, an inevitable progression of the race. But to make something—a being, a man or a woman—from material that was something else—”

Sirrit shrugged. “Wizards take shortcuts,” he said. “And they like to improve upon the imperfect human process.”

“It is outrageous!”

“No doubt, but it's not amazing,” Sirrit said. “The secondstrongest human urge is to find something helpless and control it.”

“That's not true!” Aubrey said hotly.

Sirrit regarded him for a moment with a half-smile. “Well, perhaps you're right,” he conceded. “But for some men it is an irresistible urge.”

Aubrey stared at him. If this man was as unprincipled as Glyrenden, if the whole race of wizards was addicted to such games of power, then he had cast his last spell; he could not bear to practice magic another day. “Have you ever,” he asked, his voice almost a whisper, “called forth such a creature? Done such a thing?”

“This was not a branch of magic that appealed to me,” Sirrit said dryly. “I never learned the spells.”

Aubrey felt a rush of relief; he knew it colored his face rosy.

“Cyril knows them but he will not use them, nor will many of the other great sorcerers. But you have learned them,” Sirrit said softly. “And having learned them, you cannot unlearn them. That is one of the other dark prices of knowledge.”

“I did not come here to ask you to teach me how to forget,” Aubrey said.

“Why, then?”

“To ask you how to undo another magician's spell.”

There was a long silence. “The easiest way,” Sirrit said, “is to kill him.”

“That is not the way I would choose.”

“No, and it is not always effective, either,” Sirrit said with a certain amount of regret. “Usually it is! I was in Cannewold when the sorcerer Talvis died, and I saw with my own eyes the ocean surge through the dams he had constructed to keep the city safe. I saw the houses fall to the blue hunger of the waves, and I saw sea foam swirl around the high spire of the viceroy's castle. A thousand men perished in that flood, and all because the magic died with the man.”

“But when Soetan died, the roses still bloomed on Virris Mountain, and it was his spell that had turned that barren earth fruitful,” Aubrey said. “And no wizard, not you nor Cyril nor Talvis himself, was able to reverse the spell that Soetan laid on King Reginald, and so the man finished his days blind and mute.”

“Well, Soetan was a man of exceptional gifts,” Sirrit said. “And it is hard indeed to break a spell when a powerful wizard does not want it to be circumvented.”

“How is it done, then?” Aubrey said. “Because I must know.”

“You have to be a better wizard,” Sirrit said simply.

Aubrey just looked at him.

“There is more, of course,” the old sorcerer continued. “You must love the thing itself, the thing that you are restoring—not the thing that it has become, which is sometimes more beautiful and more useful than the thing it was, but the thing that it was brought into the world to be. The reason none of us could return King Reginald to his former state was that none of us, really, liked him, and we had all rather preferred the world when he could not watch our doings or comment upon them. None of us would have visited his infirmities upon him, I believe, but we couldn't quite bring ourselves to correct his problems.”

“How can you love something you have never seen in its primeval state?” Aubrey asked. He had grown chilly at the wizard's words; he knew what it was to prefer the alteration to the original.

“That's the first unanswerable question,” Sirrit said. “There is another.”

Aubrey looked over with dread. “What?”

“When you release something from the grip of magic, or when you reverse magic, you put that person or that object at tremendous risk. Magic changes people—things—it sometimes makes them unfit to exist on their own. How do you keep from destroying the very thing you are trying to restore?”

“How?” Aubrey demanded.

Sirrit shook his head. “I don't know. No one knows. Magic, my friend, is even more capricious than love. Only you know how much your own is to be trusted.”

“My own magic, or my own love?” Aubrey said, rising to his feet. He felt shaky, a little dizzy. He wished he could believe it was the shape-changing that had so unnerved him, but he knew it was the conversation.

“Both,” said Sirrit. “Either.”

AUBREY WAS BACK at Glyrenden's house early the next morning, preceding the master of the house only by a matter of hours. But even had Aubrey been absent when Glyrenden returned, the wizard probably would not have noticed: He brought company with him, and all his attention was for her.

His new companion was a shy and frightened young girl Glyrenden called his niece. She was very small and very brown, with large liquid eyes and a dappling of freckles over her nose. She moved with a startled fluidity that was beautiful to watch. The slightest noise made her jump from her chair or tense in her tracks. As she moved from room to room she made her way cautiously from chair to sofa to table, as if taking shelter behind each piece before moving forward again. Glyrenden said she did not know their country's language, but Aubrey suspected she had no human speech at all.

“We shall call her Eve,” Glyrenden said fondly, running his cold, thin hand lovingly down the silky river of her hair. “Is that not a lovely name, my pet?”

She shivered under his touch but did not move away. Indeed, at all times she fixed her eyes on his face with a strange beseeching intensity whether he was near her or across the room; she never missed a single move he made. For his part, Glyrenden was quite besotted with her. He loved to sit by the girl, holding her small hand in his and stroking her hair back from her face, or dropping his hands to her shoulders and giving them a slight squeeze.

“Is she not lovely?” he murmured to Aubrey, or to Lilith, or to whoever was in the room. “Is she not perfect, in fact?”

It was obvious she was not his niece, but whether or not she was his lover, Aubrey was not able to determine. She looked to be barely out of her early teens, undeveloped and girlish, but even her slight charms were irresistible to the shape-changer. He even neglected to pay his usual cloying court to Lilith while Eve was in the house; all his sinister attention was focused on the girl.

What Lilith thought about the introduction of Eve to this household was impossible to guess. She treated the girl as she treated everyone else, with a cool indifference that was neither welcoming nor hostile. If she felt any jealousy—or compassion—it did not show. She simply did not care.

As for Aubrey, he walked around the house as a man inflicted with the influenza, his stomach in perpetual torment and the weight slowly dropping from his body.

From the time that Glyrenden returned with Eve, all lessons halted. The wizard was too taken with his young prize to waste time with a troublesome student, and Aubrey was too sick to ask for the shape-changer's attention. Although this was the busy season at the king's court, Glyrenden made no mention of leaving again soon; there was no way to know how long he would be at home this time.

So for several weeks they lived in a strange, uneasy state of idleness, the two men and the four changed things, and each of them filled the days as best they could. Arachne cleaned and cooked and kept to herself; Orion hunted by day and slept noisily in the evenings. Lilith and Aubrey played cards endlessly, match after match of picquet and whist and cribbage, till even the unmarked decks became familiar and predictable. And Glyrenden gloated over his newest possession.

It was by sheerest accident that Aubrey and Glyrenden came face to face one afternoon in the study where they had once practiced exercises and which now they seldom used at all. Aubrey was searching for a book Glyrenden had once lent him; the older wizard was looking up some wayward piece of knowledge. No one else was present.

“Still studying, my pet?” Glyrenden asked him, with that half-mocking smile that Aubrey had finally realized was really a sneer. “And have you learned much of any worth since I have neglected you so shamefully of late?”

“I have taught myself what I could,” Aubrey replied. “But I have rarely found my own invention good enough to equal a tutor's guidance.”

“No—how should you, indeed? It is a pity I have been gone so much, I know.”

Aubrey took a deep breath. “Perhaps it is time I left you . . .” he said slowly. “If you have no time to teach me—if I am in your way—”

Glyrenden smiled widely, his expression so wicked that Aubrey felt the very bones in his body shrink inward. “Do not pretend you will ever leave me,” he drawled. “You will stay with me months and weeks and years. You want so many of the things that I already have.”

Aubrey turned cold. What, besides his knowledge, did Glyrenden suspect that he coveted? “Why did you take me on as a pupil, Glyrenden?” he asked, for the first time using the wizard's name as an equal would. “Merely from fear that I was really as good as Cyril said I was?”

Glyrenden was still smiling. “It is a wise man who learns his antagonist young,” he replied.

“If you consider me an adversary, why teach me the spells at all?”

“Half the spells,” Glyrenden murmured.

Aubrey laughed shortly. “You think to leave me hungry,” he said. “But you have gained no power over me by treating me in such a way.”

“Have I not? Why are you still here then, Aubrey, my pet, my lamb? What holds you here, if it is not desire?” His smile, impossibly, widened. “Or is it fear?”

“I begin to think it is hatred, Glyrenden,” he replied quietly.

“Ah,” the sorcerer breathed. “Then you have learned something from me after all.”

That was the last private conversation that passed between the wizard and his apprentice for the next fortnight. The mood at the house grew more strained as the days passed; this was the longest period of time Glyrenden had spent at his own house since Aubrey first took up residence there. Everyone waited, with an unvoiced hope, for the day some new commission would take the wizard away again; but the days passed, and no such commission came.

Aubrey and Lilith had ceased playing cards except in the evenings. Now they spent much of their day walking, careless of what construction Glyrenden might put on their obvious preference for each other's company. During those hikes, in the bracing autumn air, Aubrey almost managed to be happy, almost managed to overlook the stone in his stomach and the continual, tortured circling of his thoughts. He could not persuade himself that Lilith felt any warmer feelings for him than mere liking, but since she did not even like anyone else, that was almost enough for him.

During those weeks, they talked only once about Eve, whom they had come across that afternoon at the border of the woods. They had found her with her mouth bloodied and her large brown eyes red with tears. Aubrey had crouched beside her, though she drew away in alarm, and healed as best he could the scrapes and bruises on her arms and legs. She would not answer his gentle questions, but as soon as he finished his ministrations, she struggled to her feet and ran back toward the house. The two of them watched her go, then slowly resumed their walk toward the clearing in the forest.

“Did Glyrenden beat her?” Aubrey asked at last.

Lilith shook her head. “I doubt it. His abuses seldom run that way.”

“Then what happened?”

Lilith shrugged. “I don't know. Probably she climbed the highest tree she could find and jumped from it, but the fall did not kill her.”

Aubrey was horrified. “Was she trying to kill herself?”

“It would not surprise me.”

Now he looked at Lilith with a fear that he knew would never leave him again as long as Glyrenden was alive. “Have you ever tried to kill yourself? Since he brought you to this house?”

She made a disinterested gesture with her hand. “Once, I did. I was not successful. Glyrenden's women are proof against death.”

“Why do you stay with him?” he whispered, though he knew the answer. “Why do you not run away?”

She looked over at him and suddenly the indifference was gone from her. Beneath her unemotional mask he sensed a longing so great that his own love for her was a paltry thing beside it. “Because only he can give me the one thing I want.”

He shook his head. “He will never give it to you.”

“I know. But I will get it nowhere else in this kingdom.” They had arrived at the clearing that had become, of every place in this entire forest, their place especially, and she asked him, “Why do you stay? Merely because you want to learn his terrible spells?”

He shook his head again, and spoke the truth with some desperation. “I stay because I cannot leave you,” he said. “I love you. Not even Glyrenden's evil is enough to drive me away.”

The clean lines of her face softened slightly, but she shook her head in denial. “I have told you before what I think of the love of men,” she said. “I do not know what to do with it when it is offered to me, and I have none to offer in return. I thought you understood.”

“I understood,” he said. “But it did not change me. Do not send me away as you sent away Royel Stephanis.”