The Smoke-Scented Girl (35 page)

Then the horse screamed, and lurched, and
Evon shoved Kerensa away as the horse fell hard on its side and
began thrashing. He barely missed being crushed under its massive
body, but had the wind knocked out of him and lost precious seconds
trying to recover. Kerensa came to crouch next to him, casting
terrified glances back at Valantis and his riders. “Evon,” she
said, “now what?”

“Get the bags and get clear of the horse.
Keep running until I tell you to stop.” Evon backed away from their
pursuers as quickly as he could, passing the helpless horse and
silently apologizing to it for their desertion. He hoped it had
just stumbled and hadn’t broken a leg. He kept his hands raised,
and was heartened to see the men slow as they neared and then match
his pace, keeping about fifty feet of space between them. It was
good that they knew his reputation. That might keep him alive.

Valantis, at the front of his little band,
pulled his horse up and dismounted, holding his hands well away
from his sides to show that he was unarmed—or at least that
whatever weapons he had on him weren’t in his hands at the moment.
He continued to approach Evon on foot while his men pulled back a
little, each also displaying empty hands, though if they were all
magicians, that was more a threat than a reassurance. “Kerensa,
stop!” Evon shouted without looking behind him. He continued to
back up; Valantis continued to follow.

“You saved my life,” Valantis said. “Though
you probably didn’t mean to.”

“That’s correct. I should have killed you for
what you did to Kerensa.”

“That was Cattertis. She liked pain far too
much for my comfort, but she did her work well. You have your
revenge, though. She died in the fire.”

“I had my revenge before that when I snapped
her neck,” Evon said, raising his voice to make sure all the riders
heard him. Two of the men glanced at each other uneasily. If he had
time, he could take advantage of that. He probably didn’t have
time.

He became aware of Kerensa’s presence just
before she put her hand on his elbow to steady him. “How close are
we to the place?” he asked in a low voice.

“I’m not sure. I don’t dare pull out the map
right now. We might be right on top of it.”

“In any case, I owe you a life,” Valantis
continued. “I’ll spare you if you give us the woman.”

“Mr. Valantis, has anyone in the history of
the world ever accepted that offer?”

“You’d be surprised at what people will do to
save their own necks.” Valantis pushed back his hood so Evon could
see his face and held up a palm-sized glass sphere. It was pulsing
with a cool violet light. “I’ll just keep coming after her if you
don’t.”

Evon ground his teeth. They’d been using a
simple tracking spell, far less complex than the one on the coin,
the kind of thing any ten-year-old who could say
reperto
could perform. If he’d been thinking at all, he could have
countered it. “I can render that useless,” he said.

Valantis shrugged. “We have other methods.
Come, Lorantis, be reasonable. I swear I won’t hurt her. You can
even have her back when I’ve gotten what I want out of her.”

Evon was watching Valantis’s men as he said
this, so he saw the look that passed over one rider’s face that
said more than one person intended to get what he wanted out of
Kerensa, and fury swept over him.
“Forva!”
he shouted, and
immediately after,
“Presadi!”

The man went up in a column of white fire,
making his horse squeal and fling him off before dropping to the
snow itself to soothe its burns. Valantis’s remaining two magicians
raised their hands. And a six-foot-tall iridescent bubble of
presadi
sprang up around Evon and Kerensa. Whatever spells
the magicians cast struck the impermeable shield and bounced or
trickled off harmlessly. Valantis gestured wildly at his men, then
pulled out a highly illegal dueling pistol and aimed a shot at
Evon’s head. It ricocheted off the shield and Valantis ducked just
in time to have the bullet zing past his ear. He began
gesticulating and presumably shouting at Evon, who innocently
tapped his ear and shook his head.

“I can’t begin to tell you how impressed I am
right now,” Kerensa said. “But aren’t we trapped here?”

“Not exactly. We’ll probably look stupid, but
there isn’t anyone here whose opinion I care about.” Evon walked to
the far side of the bubble and put his hands against it. “If we
walk and push at the same time, we can make this roll all the way
to the dubious safety of that unknown magical place.”

Kerensa put her hands against the bubble and
followed his movements. “I thought the shield spell was small.”

“So did I. I took a chance that I could make
it bigger. If it failed...I used most of my reserves to cast this,
and we would have been defenseless. So I’m glad it worked.”

“
I’m
glad you didn’t mention that
before.” The bags tumbled against Evon’s ankles, rolling with
presadi
. The copse of trees grew nearer.

The shield shivered a little. Evon glanced
over his shoulder and saw Valantis hacking away at the bubble, his
lips spewing soundless invective. “I wonder if I could combine this
with
recivia,
make a shield that returns blows with equal
force on the attacker,” he mused.

“Evon Lorantis, you really are always
thinking up new spells in the back of your head.”

He reddened. “I try not to let it interfere
with other things, but sometimes I become moderately obsessed.
Something you should no doubt know about me.”

She smiled and laid her hand atop his. “Your
obsession is going to save my life. I can hardly complain about it.
But when all this is over, you can expect me to give you gentle
nudges when your obsession interferes with your life.”

“I welcome it. I look—”

With a soundless burst, blinding red light
flared up around them on every side.

Blinking back tears of pain, Evon squinted to
see what had attacked them. They were surrounded by a ball of
sparkling crimson light, sometimes flaring like a flame given new
fuel, sometimes spitting like water dropped into hot oil. Valantis
was gone. Evon couldn’t see anything past the red light, which, it
occurred to him, was exactly the same size as
presadi
and
formed a wall in front of them, exactly where they’d been pushing
the shield along. Evon reached out and put his palm flat against
it, and it gave a little, just like
presadi
. He looked down
and saw that the crimson light ran under his feet as well. He
walked back to what had been the rear of the bubble and tried to
see out, but the light was opaque as well as coruscating. It was
starting to become a little stuffy where they were.
“Desini,
” he said, and a thin mist of black dispelled the
shield and made the flickering red light vanish.

They stood about a hundred feet from the
copse of trees. Previously bare, the trees now clung to the last of
their autumn leaves, which covered their roots in inches-deep
color. There was no snow on the ground, which felt soft, not yet
frozen. Valantis and his men were nowhere in sight. Evon turned to
say something to Kerensa and took a step back. “You’re glowing,” he
said. She was surrounded by flying spell-ribbons, dark blue and
dormant, but also by a flickering golden light that limned her
silhouette and the lines of her body. It looked as if someone had
used a burning taper to outline her with fire.

She looked down at her hands and gasped. “I
don’t feel anything,” she said.

“I think there’s something about this place
that makes magic visible,” Evon said. “As if it had a kind of
permanent
epiria
cast over it. There’s the spell, and...that
must be the fire magic.”

“But
epiria
never showed this
before.”

“
Epiria
is for revealing spells,
organized magic, not raw magic. This place must be incredibly
powerful to do something like that.”

She turned her head to look over her
shoulder. “It’s
everywhere.”

“It’s beautiful,” Evon said. “You look
extraordinary.” He reached out and took her hand. “It’s not
actually fire. I can still touch you.”

“Thank the Gods,” Kerensa said, and flung
herself on him. She was shaking. “I’m sorry,” she said, “it was
just facing Valantis, and now this....”

Evon held her close. “Be glad,” he said. “I
might be able to figure the fire out here, without our having to go
all the way to Nystrantor.”

She nodded. “This place seems sort of
peaceful, flamboyant visual displays aside. I wonder when we are.”
They began walking toward the copse, which lay still in the face of
the slight breeze that brushed their faces. Even the dying leaves
were motionless.

“It looks as though we’ve gone back in time a
few months,” Evon said, scanning the ground ahead.

“Or forward by nearly a year. Or several
years. Or a millennium.”

“You’re right. I just hope we don’t stay
offset in time when we leave. If we return to find a landscape
decimated by the Despot’s armies, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

They reached the copse, where Evon had to
duck a little to avoid the low-hanging branches. Leaves brushed
softly against his hair and face, dry but soft, like old parchment.
“Let me get that,” Kerensa said, and removed a rust-colored oak
leaf from his hair. “How long do you think we should stay in
here?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking we should
circle around and come out at a different place.” Evon looked at
the map again, then folded it and put it away. “Though if this
doesn’t restore itself, we could end up very lost.”

“Better than very dead.” Kerensa found a
fallen tree to sit on and dragged the bag of food into her lap. “Do
you want something to eat? Mortal terror seems to make me
hungry.”

He sat next to her and accepted a hunk of
wax-coated cheese. Something stirred in the bushes behind them, and
he whipped around to see—nothing. “I’m still edgy,” he laughed. The
rustling started again, louder and more persistent. “I’m suddenly
thinking about the kinds of fauna places like this might
produce.”

“So am I. But isn’t it just as likely that
the creatures are friendly plant-eaters?” Then she leaned away and
said, “What is
that
?”

Evon turned to look behind him and saw what
looked like a shimmering square, radiant with blue and green and
yellow, ripple through the air several feet above his head.
“Ambient magic,” he guessed. “With magic being visible here, if the
place’s magic were part of the landscape, everything would glow. It
must pool together, or something similar.”

“Or weave together. That looked like cloth,”
Kerensa agreed. “There’s another one, way up there.”

Now that he knew what to look for, Evon saw
the magic everywhere. It didn’t seem to be self-aware the way
Kerensa’s spell was, but it had enough instinct to avoid obstacles,
such as trees or his head. They sat on the tree and watched the
magic for a time, mesmerized by its beauty.

The rustling started again. Something kicked
up the leaves fallen at the base of one of the trees. “I didn’t see
anything,” Kerensa said, alarmed. “And I just realized we haven’t
seen a single bird.”

Evon pulled out the glass and cast
epiria,
which sent out white tendrils like hair-thin vines
to tangle around the lens; he tried wiping them away, but his
fingers passed through them without feeling anything. Shrugging, he
held the glass out in front of him and scanned the ground where the
leaves had been disturbed. “I don’t see anything,” he began, and
then he did. “It’s a chipmunk,” he said, handing the glass to
Kerensa. “A normal chipmunk, except that it’s invisible.”

“Why doesn’t the
epiria
of this place
reveal the creatures?”

“I have no idea. It makes no sense. I wonder
what else is invisible.”

Kerensa swung the lens up to look at the sky
and exclaimed, “I saw a raven!”

Evon looked where she pointed and saw nothing
except a blue and red cloth of magic undulating across the sky.
Suddenly it rippled as if shuddering, then for a brief moment he
saw a flying bird outlined against the cloth, then the cloth
wrapped itself around something that struggled and cried out
weakly. The cloth constricted, twisting as if it were a rag being
wrung out by invisible hands, until it was twisted nearly in half.
Then it spun open and continued undulating through the air. Seconds
later something hit the ground nearby with a soft
thump
.
Evon and Kerensa looked at each other, aghast.

“And now we know why the animals are all
invisible,” Kerensa said.

“I wonder that we haven’t been attacked,”
Evon said.

“Maybe we’re too big to be enveloped?”

“Or perhaps they just aren’t that hungry
yet.”

“I like my explanation better.”

Evon took Kerensa’s hand and squeezed it
gently. “I want to see whether I can work out how the fire is
attached to you,” he said. “It won’t hurt, I promise.”

“If you find a solution, I don’t care if it
hurts,” she said, but her voice was a little wobbly. “What do you
want me to do?”

“Just sit there.” He stood and surveyed her
body, trying to look at the golden fire objectively and not think
about how perfect her figure was and how it felt to have it pressed
against him. He pinched the bridge of his nose to clear his
thoughts and tried again. The spell-ribbons were a manifestation of
the binding spell. They were attached to that spell. Therefore, it
followed that the golden fire he saw must be attached to the fire
magic deep within Kerensa. Suppose it was visible all the way down?
If he could see inside her body....

“This may take a while. I’ve only ever read
about it and I don’t remember it very well because I wasn’t
planning to go into medicine.” A spell that let doctors look inside
the body, something about
spexa
and some other command word,
something unlikely...why couldn’t he remember? Another cloth of
magic drifted past, this one hovering only a few feet above
Kerensa’s head; he waved it away and the draft he caused made it
flutter a little before continuing on its path.