The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

added politely, for Dorneng’s benefit. “It was your idea to try it.”

“Well, I’ll have to practice more with it,” Dorneng said, with some ruefulness. “His lordship got it to work on the first try.”

“That’s the only way it will work,” Aruendiel said. “You can never force it.”

“What will you do with the ring now?” Dorneng asked.

“Destroy it,” Aruendiel said, and Nora felt no inclination to argue.

Her finger felt strange without the gold band. She had gotten so used to the minor irritation of its presence, its subtle weight—now that the ring was gone, her hand felt oddly numb, sensationless.

Nora raised her hand for closer examination, a faint question in her mind. The flesh didn’t look healthy, she thought. It didn’t look right. Skin and nails had turned the same slightly yellowish white. She tried to flex her fingers, but they were frozen in place.

“My hand—” she started to say, and then discovered that she could not move her arm, either.

Panicked, she jumped up from the bench. On the other side of the table, Aruendiel leaped up, too. He lunged toward her. “Something’s wr—” Nora started to say.

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Aruendiel’s fingers were wrapped around her throat, digging into her windpipe. She goggled at him, unable to breathe. Why was he trying to kill her? She twisted away, trying to free herself, but her body felt stiff and unresponsive. Aruendiel grabbed her right arm, as though to restrain her, and hauled her across the table toward him. Her hip banged the wood. Crockery shattered. But then his grip on her throat loosened slightly, and she found her breath again.

“What the hell are you doing?” Nora screamed. Aruendiel, breathing hard, did not seem to hear her. He held her facing him, his fingers tightening again on her throat, his other hand still squeezing her arm.

“Can you move your legs, Nora?” Aruendiel asked levelly.

The big muscles of her thighs tensed. But they did not move at her command. She could not sense the floor under her feet.

“No,” she said. “It’s like I’m buried in cement. Let me go!” Nora made as if to pull away from him, and discovered that her hips, waist, torso, were all immobile. She could not even shift her weight.

She lifted her eyes and stared into Aruendiel’s eyes. “You broke my neck. I’m paralyzed.”

“Your hands, Nora. Look at your hands.”

She looked down. Past the edge of her sleeve, her left hand was no longer recognizably hers. That is, it was a copy of her hand in cream-colored stone. Marble, maybe.

The right hand was, blessedly, its normal light tan, faded a bit for the winter, the nails pale and a little ragged. This living hand, now warm and capable. She tried to move her fingers. They wiggled at her in a friendly fashion. Her eyes went up the arm to where Aruendiel gripped it so maniacally just above the elbow.

“Stone?” It was all she could bring herself to say.

“Stone,” he said.

“And you’re holding it back. Otherwise, my arm—my head. My whole body.”

“I am slowing it as much as I can.” He spoke with a precise, deliberate calm that was itself a kind of urgency. “What feeling do you have in your body, below the neck?”

“It feels tight. All over.” Yes, she could breathe, but pressure corseted her ribs; she tried to take a deep breath and found herself gasping. The import of Aruendiel’s words sank in. “You’re only slowing it? You can’t stop it?”

“The stone is only skin-deep, so far. Dorneng!” Aruendiel’s voice suddenly rose to gale force. “Do you perform a counterhex, now, or I will spill the curdled filth you call your brains.”

Behind Nora, out of her sight, Dorneng began to babble, something about Manathux petrifaction. “This is not the Manathux curse,” Aruendiel snarled. “This is Faitoren.”

“My hand hurts,” Nora said. Was it her imagination, or was it getting heavier, too? “It hurts a lot.” As though she were wearing a too-tight glove that was getting smaller still, surrounding and binding each finger with meticulous, implacable force. She wanted very badly to wring her hands.

“But the stone is crushing the flesh, as it grows,” Dorneng said. “That’s Mana—”

“The ring, wormsnatch,” Aruendiel thundered. “Destroy the ring.”

“Oh.” Dorneng sounded apologetic. “Where is it? It’s not on the table. She must have knocked it to the floor.”

“Find it,” Aruendiel said. Nora started to moan, long, wavering notes that were wholly inadequate to the discomfort she was feeling. She needed to howl, but there was not enough air in her lungs. The small bones in her fingers were splintering, giving way. She could hear them crackle and shatter, even through her rapidly thickening skin of marble.

So that was how it worked—the stone spread from the outside in, and it pulped all the tender, living flesh within. You would think that turning to stone would be a painless process, but you would be mistaken. Was this what Raclin had felt, what Massy felt when she became an apple tree?

The big joint at the base of Nora’s thumb popped, and this time she did howl, very briefly. Now the long, delicate bones that ran through the hand were collapsing, one by one. Nothing left of her hand but pain. That would be her whole body in a few minutes, Nora saw. Her rib cage would implode, her pelvis would crack, her skull would crumple—

Aruendiel was speaking to her, she realized. After a moment she understood that he was asking if she wanted an anodyne, a spell for numbness.

“No,” she said despairingly, because the sickening pain in her hand was already gone. She could feel nothing at all, and she could guess what that meant. Stone had conquered flesh, all the last remnants of it. Now the marble was already starting to compress her forearm—her wrist caught in a vise. But at least she could feel something. Her body would be numb and dead, solid stone, soon enough.

Dorneng was scrabbling around on the floor, giving running commentary on his efforts to find the ring, as though to document how hard he was trying to help. Aruendiel’s mouth was set, and his eyes seemed to be looking at something very far away. She was suddenly aware of the magic he had unleashed, roaring and tearing at her marble skin, but it was—quite literally—like listening to a hurricane from inside thick stone walls.

“If it’s Faitoren magic, is all this an illusion?” she asked him in a whisper. Almost a joke. Aruendiel scowled, twisting his mouth as though determined not to let the words escape, but she knew what he meant anyway: Illusions can kill.

“Found it!” Dorneng said, just as Nora noticed that her right hand was whiter than it had been. Aruendiel saw it, too, and swore. She willed her fingers to move, to play an arpeggio in the air, but only her index finger responded, and then it too froze, pointing upward as though in admonition. Reluctantly, Aruendiel took his hand away from her arm; she could not even feel his touch lifting.

A blue flash, a thunderclap, so close it seemed to swallow her up. The concussion left even her marble hand vibrating. Lesser crashes followed, like tiles falling off a roof. Nora opened her eyes, not remembering when she had closed them. Off to the side, Dorneng looked stupidly at the floor, then stooped to pick something up.

He must have tried to do something to the ring. Still gripping Nora’s neck, Aruendiel held out his free hand, calling Dorneng a fool, demanding the ring. Running feet, fear in Mrs. Toristel’s voice: “What in the name of all the gods, your lordship?”

They can’t destroy it, Nora thought. Maybe the ring can never be destroyed. Inside its marble sleeve, her left arm was being ground to powder. The stone methodically crushed her elbow, then the shoulder joint. The nerves shrieked as they died.

“Aruendiel,” she said, her voice less than a whisper. Her panicked lungs were locked inside a shrinking box. “Aruendiel.” Finally he heard, and turned back toward her, stooping slightly to put his ear next to her mouth, so close her lips almost brushed his hair.

“Put it back,” she breathed. “The ring. Put it back.”

He jerked his head around to glare at her, black eyebrows diving with rage and astonishment.

“Now. Please,” she managed just before her lips grew hard and her tongue froze. Light turned to darkness as stone filled her eyes.

It’s over, Nora thought with disbelief. All of it. I’ll be a statue, forever, unless Aruendiel finds a way to change me back. Or, if he does, wouldn’t I just be a messy little puddle of crushed bone and blood? Her lungs struggled hopelessly for one more thin breath. Her head was heavier than before; she could not hold it upright if