The Shape-Changer's Wife Page 14

  “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.”

  Eleven

  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.”

  He saw her lips shape themselves to ask, Who? but then she remembered. “I would not wish you to go just because you love me,” she said.

  He had no answer for that, but the cool reply strangely enough did not discourage him. He thought, if anything, she was faintly pleased by his declaration; but he knew better than to press his suit.

  Instead, during the long walk home, he asked her the question he had wanted to ask for so long. He did not know how she would react to the inquiry, so he approached it obliquely, with another question.

  “Will she be all right, do you think?” he said first.

  “Will who be all right?” Lilith asked.

  “Eve.”

  Lilith shrugged. “She will not be happy. She will not be tame. I don’t think she will die of him, but I can’t be sure. It looks as though she will survive the day, at any rate.”

  Aubrey looked away from her to study the overgrown path before them, which—with their constant traveling—had come to resemble a trail again. “She is a doe, of course,” he said calmly, “or a fawn, rather. Very young. And I have learned the truth about Arachne and Orion, or I think I have. But you are still a mystery. I have studied the shapes of all the animals in the kingdom and not one of them reminds me of you. What is it that you really are?”

  For a moment she did not answer, and he thought she might not tell him—or, even more unlikely, did not know. Then she said, and her voice was dreamy, “In all this kingdom, there is only one place that I love and one place that I would consider beautiful. It is called the King’s Grove, and in it is planted one of every kind of tree that grows. No man is allowed to hunt there, no gardener to prune, and when the wind comes through on a summer evening the singing of the mingled leaves is a chorus so sweet that even the birds pause to listen. The scent of cedar blends with the fragrance of the blossoms on the fruit trees, and the white of the birch is no more beautiful than the heavy auburn of the elm. When the leaves are silent, there is no sound at all, and the only word is the echo of the name for peace.”

  And then he knew. He looked at her again and saw not the smooth brown hair and the coarse gray gown, but a long full shape, limber and graceful and arched against the sun.

  “A willow,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  TWO DAYS LATER, early in the morning, Aubrey was awakened by an urgent knocking at his bedroom door. “Just a minute!” he called out, dragging himself from his bed and pulling on a threadbare robe. He could not recall a time during the months he had stayed in this house that someone had summoned him early from bed.

  Lilith stood outside the door, already dressed in one of her gray gowns. “Come quickly,” she said. He had rarely seen her so stirred up; a wash of color accentuated the line of her cheekbones.

  “What is it?” he demanded, following her down the steep steps.

  “Eve,” she replied. “Hurry.”

  They found the young girl in the last place Aubrey would have expected—Glyrenden’s study. She lay on the floor, curled tightly in upon herself, moaning piteously. Her glossy hair was spread in tangled disarray over the stone floor; her nightdress was torn and twisted around her body. Arachne stood to one side of her, whispering under her breath. The room smelled unpleasantly of vomit—and something else even more malevolent.

  Aubrey dropped instantly beside the girl. “What happened?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Arachne found her a few minutes ago and came to get me.”

  Aubrey touched the colorless face, then ran his fingers lightly down from the girl’s throat to her abdomen. “Poison,” he said grimly. “One of Glyrenden’s mixtures, no doubt.”

  “Can you help her?” Lilith asked.

  “I don’t know. It depends on what she’s taken.” He looked up at her. “Where’s Glyrenden?”

  She gestured. “Gone. In the middle of the night. I don’t know where or for how long.”

  Aubrey nodded and rose to his feet. “Heat some milk,” he directed Arachne. “And some water. We’ll want to clean her up.”

  Lilith left with Arachne. Aubrey prowled the magician’s study, looking for clues. They were not hard to find. Eve had apparently crept down to the magician’s room as soon as he left, and put together a mixture of whatever potions were easiest to hand. She had left the jars standing open on the table, some of their contents spilled nearby. Aubrey tasted and identified each one: rue, belladonna, curare, and a handful of ensorcelled herbs, given more potency by magic. Any one of these would have been enough to kill the girl, but she had mixed too well—they had reacted against each other and made her so ill she could not keep them in her body. Her eagerness to die had no doubt saved her life.

  Nonetheless, some of the toxin was still seething through her blood; her continued pain made that obvious. Glyrenden was not the kind of man to accidentally drink his own poisons, nor to administer them and then regret, so he had not bothered to brew antidotes for any of the deadly potions on his shelves. Aubrey worked quickly, combining ingredients for the cures he knew, guessing at the ones he didn’t.

  Arachne entered behind him, carrying a kettle of hot milk. “Set it there,” Aubrey said. “And I’ll need a clean glass, and a spoon—yes, thank you.”

  Lilith had returned at Arachne’s heels, bringing towels and a pail of water. She had a clean muslin nightgown thrown over one shoulder.

  “Will she be ill again?” the wizard’s wife asked practically. “I don’t want to ruin another nightdress.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Aubrey said. “I think the chemicals have already been absorbed too far into her system. Now we have to counteract them, not expel them.”

  Lilith nodded and knelt at the girl’s side. Aubrey, mixing the hot milk into his desperate concoction, spared a moment to watch Lilith work. As he might have expected, she was neither distressed nor repulsed by the sick and filthy girl; she took the brown head onto her lap and began wiping away the vomit and spittle. What surprised Aubrey was her gentleness, what he would even call tenderness if he did not know better. Eve cried out once sharply, when Lilith began to unbutton the collar of her nightgown.

  “Ssh,” Lilith said, her voice almost a croon. “Ssh, now. You will be all right. You’ll see. It is not as bad as you think.”

  No, it’s worse, Aubrey thought, turning back to his stirring. He had never known Lilith to lie before, even to offer comfort. In fact, he had never known Lilith to offer comfort. He felt a small, irrational chill shiver at the base of his neck, and he shook his head to dispel it.

  By the time Aubrey’s potion was mixed, Lilith had cleaned and changed the girl, even combing out the knotted masses of her hair. Aubrey knelt down and handed Lilith the glass of doctored milk.

  “I’ll hold her up,” he said, taking Eve into his arms and raising her against his shoulder. “You help her drink.”

  Eve resisted, but they managed to pour most of the drugged milk down he
r throat. She still had not opened her eyes, and she did not seem to be conscious, but she thrashed in Aubrey’s arms and uttered intermittent cries of horror. But the potion had its quick effect. Shortly after she swallowed it, she calmed a little. Her body relaxed and she seemed to tumble down the precipice of sleep.

  “Now what will happen?” Lilith asked.

  “Now I don’t know,” Aubrey said. “I am only guessing with all of this.”

  “Can we move her somewhere more comfortable?”

  “Yes.”

  Aubrey rose with Eve in his arms and carried her back to the kitchen. It was the warmest room in the house, the place where they could all hover round and watch her. Orion had made up a bed for her on a cot by the stove, and Aubrey laid her there gently. She turned to her side and did not move again.

  “Sick,” Orion said.

  “Very sick,” Aubrey agreed. “But we hope she will get better.”

  “We should have Arachne clean the study,” Lilith said. “Before he gets home.”

  “We’d best do it ourselves,” Aubrey said. “I would not like to leave any signs of Eve’s trespassing.”

  So they got more buckets of water and a handful of rags and returned to the sour-smelling study. They had worked about half an hour in silence when Lilith spoke.

  “What will happen to her?”

  “She will be sick a day or two, and she will have to eat easy things, like soup and bread. And then she should be all right.”

  Lilith looked over at Aubrey sorrowfully. She stood across the room from him, the very picture of a domestic servant—her dark hair piled on her head, her gray skirt hitched up, a wet rag wrapped around both hands. And yet she did not look humble or ridiculous to Aubrey.

  “No,” she said. “What will happen to her, Aubrey? While she continues to live in this house?”

  He felt that stone in his stomach grow heavier. “What will happen to any of you?” he asked in turn.

  Lilith gestured and laid aside her cloth. “For the rest of us, it does not matter so much,” she said. “Arachne and Orion he does not trouble. They were not formed for his pleasure, merely for his amusement. He created them but he leaves them alone.”