“It wasn’t me who had to see reason, it was him,” Nora said. “And he did. It was—surprising.”
“Oh, yes, taking off on foot in the middle of winter, that’s very sensible. When I saw your note this morning, I thought, Well, I’ll never see that one again.”
“It would have been a better plan in summer,” Nora admitted. “Did you say anything to him? To make him change his mind?”
“Do I look as though I can make him change his mind? Him, in a rage like that? I wouldn’t know where to begin. Oh, you don’t know how lucky you are. You could be out there lying dead in a snowdrift somewhere. I wouldn’t let Toristel go past the village today, not with the roads in the state they’re in.”
“I’m sure I’d survive for at least a few hours,” Nora objected, smiling. “But it’s good to be here. Did you want me to make the bread today?”
In the magician’s study that afternoon, she found a pile of books waiting for her, with almost a dozen spells marked for her to learn. Duminisl on how to conjure smoke without fire; Vlonicl on how to set fire to your enemies’ bowstrings in the pouring rain; Morkin on how to build a fire underwater, among other things. She felt it was unlikely that she might need to burn up a bowstring, no matter what the weather, but Aruendiel was a great admirer of Vlonicl. Very few wizards or magicians, he said, wrote with such absolute concision and confidence, paring spells down to the bare minimum, yet always achieving a result that was more powerful than you would expect. Nora set to work, taking notes on her wax tablet, savoring the peace of the book-lined room. The fire sputtered companionably. The heavy parchment rustled gently under her fingers as she turned the pages. She tried not to think, as she read, of how nearly this small haven had been lost to her.
She could hear Aruendiel’s footsteps faintly overhead. Once he came down in search of a book. He gave an absent nod when he saw Nora seated at the table.
She did not speak to him again until the evening. After finishing her last kitchen chores and her dinner, she went to sit by the fire in the great hall to practice the spell that she had not yet been able to cast successfully: Concentrating on the candle that burned on the table, she willed it to extinguish itself. Over and over again, it refused.
She began to wonder if she would ever be able to do the spell. That made it worse. The flame shone with a dreamy intensity, like a child too absorbed in a game to hear his mother calling.
Odd noises overhead distracted her attention, too. From time to time, a deep-pitched throbbing came from the tower. Once she thought she heard a groan. She got up to investigate, but she discovered that she could not enter the tower through the wall. Aruendiel had sealed it off, presumably because he was working some sort of complex and risky magic up there. She returned to her own, more elementary spell, keeping her ear cocked, but she heard nothing more.
Some time later, the door to the courtyard opened unexpectedly, letting in Aruendiel, his boots powdery with snow, and a wave of freezing air. The candle’s flame faltered for the first time that evening.
“I thought you were up in the tower,” Nora said, confused. “What’s going on up there?” Aruendiel’s leather tunic had been ripped at the shoulder. As he came closer, she saw that the knuckles of his right hand were dappled with fresh blood. With some concern she said: “You look as though you’ve been in a fight.”
“Only a new project that has proven to be more unpredictable than I expected.” There was also a raw- looking bruise on one cheekbone. Yet he moved more lightly than usual, and looked fresher, less worn than when she had seen him in the afternoon. Candlelight is flattering, she thought, and she also remembered what Hirizjahkinis had told her about how strong magic kept magicians young.
“What kind of project?”
“I will tell you about it later. And what is occupying you this evening?”
She had to confess that she had been practicing the spell to extinguish fire, with no success. Aruendiel frowned. He began to say something, then checked himself. “Show me,” he said.
She tried again. The flame did not even waver.
“I can feel the fire,” she said. “And it can feel me. I know it can understand me. But I tell it to die—and it won’t. It just ignores me. And the whole thing gets harder as I go on. I start thinking, Who am I to kill this fire? It wants to live. After a while, I’m not even sure I could blow out the candle in good conscience.”
Aruendiel shook his head slowly. “You are letting the element control you—which is very dangerous.”
“I know. But I just can’t bring myself to kill it.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You don’t need to kill it. You only need to master it. Let us try again.” The candle went out at his silent command, leaving them in near darkness. “Light it.”
Nora did so, watching his angular features reappear, grave and intent, in the glow of the candle. The new flame flared slightly and then steadied.
“Now,” he said, “take it lower.” At her asking, the flame diminished slightly. “Lower, lower.” She dimmed the flame again, until it was a bright bead clinging to the candlewick. “Now, you put it to sleep. Push it down. You’re not killing it. Fire does not die, it is eternal.” The flame brightened again momentarily. “No, bring it lower. Good. There is always fire somewhere, hungry for your attention. But when you have no need of it, you must be able to dismiss it, make it sleep, put it away from you, because you are its master, Nora. Do you see what I mean?”
The tiny bead of light dissolved, filling the air with the smell of burnt wick. “I think so,” she said into the blackness.
“Good,” he said. “Well then, good night.”
“Good night,” she said, and listened to the lopsided rhythm of his steps move away across the hall and up the stairs. She did not relight the candle until he was gone.
Aruendiel lived up to his promise to keep Nora busy. There seemed to be an endless number of fire spells to learn. It also became tantalizingly clear that, once you had a real command of fire magic, you could use that understanding to power other spells that had nothing to do with fire: spells to make objects float in air, to make wild animals docile, to breathe underwater, to read unknown languages, to render an army invisible.
“But you would never use fire for a spell to build a wall, for example,” Aruendiel instructed. “Unless you only needed the wall for a short time, to hold off an enemy for a single day, say. Fire is eager, but it grows bored easily. It does not lend itself to spells in which the effect is intended to be permanent.”
“But what if you need to build a wall?” Nora asked.
“You would draw on the stones directly, or you could impose a spell on them with wood. Wood is very strong and it will last a long time, and there is also a kind of intelligence to wood that is useful. It can outfox stone, persuade it to do things that it might not otherwise do. Stone is very stubborn and resists suggestion, although if you can master stone, the spells that you cast with it will last forever. Which is why,” he added severely, “you must never use stone for any spells that might need to be reversed. Most transformations. Some curses. Love spells.”
“
“Love spells should always be reversible and preferably temporary. In almost every case, the party who casts the spell, or for whom it was cast, falls out of love first. Then the enchanted party becomes desperate, sometimes vengeful. It can be very ugly,” Aruendiel said reflectively. Nora had a strong suspicion that he was speaking from personal experience. “If you ever cast a love spell, do it with fire, so that the attachment will be fierce and short-lived—but I advise you not to cast any love spells at all.”
“No fear,” Nora said. “I’ve been on the other end, you know.”
It was fascinating to hear about all the spells that, theoretically, she would be able to work using fire, but in fact, she could as yet work only a few of them. The most successful was the light-conjuring spell that Aruendiel had employed in the royal library at Semr. Nora stood in the courtyard at dusk, shivering, trying to coax some illumination from the kitchen fire. After several evenings of effort, she achieved a vague, flickering glow that might have allowed her to read the headlines on a newspaper, if any had been handy. Aruendiel could pull light from the village fires or from as far away as Red Gate. From what he said, Nora gleaned, he had a sort of constant, low- grade awareness of the nearest sources of magical power—fire, stone, forest, things that she had not yet learned
