“It’s not given out to just anyone, Valder, but you’re a special case. You saved my life last night, and, after two hundred and eighty-eight years, I consider my life rather precious. Besides, for forty years you’ve lived quietly, despite owning a sword that could have put you on a throne in the Small Kingdoms or otherwise cut a swathe in the world’s affairs; I don’t think the Guild need worry too much that you’ll upset anything or take unfair advantage of extended youth. In fact, you already have immortality, and that’s the hard part; all I’ll be doing is restoring your youth, not extending your lifespan. I’ll be saving eighteen other lives, as well; you’ll have no need to draw Wirikidor again, no reason to want to be murdered. More than eighteen, since after your death the sword would take a new owner, who would have to kill his own quota before he could die. That’s a very nasty sword you have there, and I’m sure that taking it out of circulation indefinitely is a good enough reason to grant you your youth. I’m certain my Guild colleagues will agree.”
“Just because I haven’t done anything stupid? A life is a life, that’s all, and I never saw any reason to treat mine differently because of Wirikidor.”
“Ah, but that’s what makes you special! Most people would have shaped their lives around the sword.”
“You can’t just remove the spell somehow?” Valder was not sure whether he wanted to be young again; the idea was strange, unfamiliar, and he needed time before he could accept it fully.
“I could, actually, but we would both die as a result, and I am not in the least interested in dying.”
Valder was not interested in dying, either. Here, finally, was his way out, if he could only accept it. He would be young again — he would live forever, if he chose. He could not help but think that there was some trick to it, some hidden catch; it had been wizardry that had complicated his situation in the first place, when the hermit had wanted to get rid of him. Now another wizard was volunteering to interfere with his life, and he was sure there would be drawbacks — but he could not think of any. After several minutes of thought, he reached a decision. He would not be deterred by his previous experience. He would accept this incredible gift being offered him. Perhaps with new youth, his eyesight would return to what it had once been; he would like that.
“All right,” he said, pushing his chair back from the breakfast table. “What do we do now?”
Iridith smiled. “Come with me.”
CHAPTER 31
The house by the seaside was pleasant enough, with its covered porches and wooden walkways down to the beach, but it was not at all what Valder had expected of a centuries-old wizard capable of eleventh-order magic. He had been expecting a glittering palace, not a ramshackle old house with walls of rough wood and fieldstone and a roof of thatch.
He mentioned this to Iridith, who replied, “I had a palace once; it seemed the thing to do at the time. This is more comfortable.”
Valder found that hard to believe at first, looking over the cobwebbed furnishings and feeling the cool, damp sea breeze blowing through the chinks, but he had to admit that, after Iridith had cast a restorative spell or two and conjured up a blazing fire, the house was quite cozy.
The main structure, not counting the sprawling verandas and terraces, contained just four rooms — an immense workshop filled with the arcana of the wizardly trade occupied the entire western end, a fair-sized bedroom the southeast corner, a small kitchen the northeast, and a small parlor faced south toward the sea at the center. Each room was equipped with a vast stone hearth and cavernous fireplace; when all four were lighted, the moist chill that had bothered Valder vanished in a matter of moments.
They had arrived shortly before midday; the flight from Ethshar of the Spices had been quite brief, just across the peninsula to the southern shore. It had been Valder’s first flight in more than forty years and quite a refreshing experience; he had forgotten how exciting it was to soar above the landscape and remembered wryly how he had taken it for granted during his time as an assassin.
“You’ll sleep in the parlor,” Iridith told him, “if you have no objection.”
“I’m scarcely in a position to object,” he replied. “But how long do you expect me to be staying here?”
“I can’t really say; until I’ve gotten the approval of the elders of the Guild and gathered the ingredients I need for Enral’s Eternal Youth Spell.”
“Oh? What are the ingredients?”
“I don’t remember them all; I’ll need to look it up. I do know that I’ll want powdered spider, blue silk, cold iron, dried seaweed, candles colored with virgin’s blood, and the tears of a female dragon; I don’t recall the others offhand.”
“Virgin’s blood and dragon’s tears?”
“I think you’ll be staying for a while; those are the easy ones.”
“Oh.” He looked around. “The parlor should do just fine.”
He had been at the wizard’s house for five days, days spent strolling along the beach enjoying the fine spring weather or reading the many strange books that she loaned him from her workshop — in addition to assorted grimoires and magical texts, she had a wide variety of histories and books of philosophy. She, in turn, spent her time in the workroom, consulting with other wizards by various magical methods and trying to locate the needed ingredients for the spell. In addition to those she had remembered, she needed the ichor of a white cricket, the heart of an unborn male child, and the hand of a murdered woman.
“It could be worse,” she had told him at dinner that first night, a dinner she had prepared herself by perfectly natural methods and which they ate in the kitchen. “Any woman killed by another person will do, I think. She needn’t have been a virgin, or a mother, or whatever. I should be able to find one eventually. And an aborted or miscarried child should work.”
He had agreed without comment.
“Don’t worry,” she said, sensing unease. “I’m not going to kill someone myself just to help you. I’m not that sort of wizard.” ’
That had relieved him somewhat; the remainder of the meal had passed in amiable silence for the most part.
Since then he had seen only brief glimpses of her, other than at meals. At breakfast she would usually be planning the day’s investigations, and by supper she would be too tired to talk much, but at luncheon she chatted freely, exchanging reminiscences of the war and the changes that they had both seen in their lifetimes. She reacted to his admission that he had been an assassin with a sort of horrified fascination, even while admitting that it was certainly no more morally repugnant, logically, than her own wartime work of more straightforward wizardly slaughter. After that first dinner, his own longstanding habits prevailed, and he played host, preparing and serving the meals.
Between meals she was always in her workshop, using various divinations to try and locate what she needed. Powdered spider, cold iron, and candles colored with virgin’s blood she had on hand; she explained that all three were useful in many spells. The iron was meteoric in origin, but, she assured him, that could only add to its efficacy. Blue silk was easily acquired in a short jaunt back to the city. The seaweed Valder provided himself after a walk on the beach, bringing back a mass of dripping weed to hang over the workshop hearth and dry.
That left the dragon’s tears, cricket’s ichor, baby’s heart, and severed hand. Iridith was cheerfully optimistic about all of them. “I found them once,” she said repeatedly.
That was how things stood on the fifth day, when she emerged unexpectedly from the workshop in the middle of the evening, holding a small pouch. “What’s that?” Valder asked, looking up from a book that purported to describe the now-dead religion of the ruling class of the Northern Empire. “Find something?”
“No,” she answered. “But I now have explicit consent from enough of the Guild elders to go ahead with the spell, and besides, I thought I needed a break, so I made this as a sort of celebration and a token of my esteem.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a bottomless bag, made with Hallin’s Spell.”
“What’s a bottomless bag?”
