He opened his hand in a dismissive gesture. “That was not her concern. She was pleased to be the wife of a famed magician, of course, but it mattered less to her than other things.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem like a great marriage to me,” Nora said, “not that that was any excuse for killing her. You chose her because she was safe and predictable, she wasn’t interested in what you’re most interested in—and we haven’t even touched on the age difference. She was eighteen, and you were what, a hundred and thirty?”
“It was a fine marriage,” Aruendiel said. “If not for Ilissa’s meddling.” He brooded for a moment. “Yes, I was far older than Lusarniev, but it meant only that I knew what I needed in a wife. Lusarniev was all that, and I cherished her for it.”
Nora felt another uncomfortable twinge of irritation toward the deceased Lady Lusarniev. “Too bad you killed her, then.” Honorably, she added: “And maybe you shouldn’t blame her so much for falling in love with another man. Ilissa probably put some extra glamour into that love spell to make Melinderic more attractive.”
“He was handsome enough already,” Aruendiel said, with distaste.
“Your wife was what, twenty-one? That’s very young.”
Aruendiel glanced at her with a flicker of what might have been amusement, but it faded. “Yes, she was very young,” he said heavily. “You know, I cannot even recall exactly what she looked like, except for that last wild look before she died. I remember that she was beautiful, but I cannot picture her beauty.
“Then I went after Ilissa. She’d stirred up her own war by then. I did not especially care what the war was about. I only wanted to kill Ilissa.
“Instead, she killed me.
“In battle, those last weeks, I was strangely distracted, clumsy. I thought that anger would sharpen my powers, as it always had in the past, but not this time. I could not seem to judge the strength of my own magic —my spells were either far too strong or not strong enough. Did Hirizjahkinis tell you how I died?”
“She said you fell from one of those flying contraptions.”
“An Avaguri’s mount,” Aruendiel said. “There had been other near misses in combat, but I was lucky the other times, or my allies covered for me. That day, in the Tamicr Mountains, I was chasing Ilissa, putting all my energies into the curse I was sending after her, and suddenly I felt myself falling. One of her illusions, I knew, and yet I reflexively leaned hard to the right, trying to correct my balance. And then I really did fall, right off my mount.”
“You could have saved yourself,” Nora said crossly, feeling a perverse satisfaction in pointing out the missed opportunity. “You could have raised a wind—transformed yourself into a bird—summoned the Avaguri’s mount back to you.”
“For some reason, I did none of those things,” he said. “I remember the sunlight on the snow below me was so dazzling that I had to close my eyes. And then I remember hitting the mountainside and not being able to move. Then I fell again. This time the ground fell with me. That was the avalanche, from what they told me later. I don’t remember anything else. Evidently I died very quickly.”
“And then what?” she demanded.
“Then they found my body and revived it, Euren, Hirizjahkinis, and the others, sometime later.”
“But what happened in the meantime?”
“In the meantime? I was dead.”
“What do you remember? You must remember something.” When Aruendiel said nothing, Nora pursued: “You—your soul must have been somewhere. Or they wouldn’t have been able to bring you back.”
“Those who come back from death have nothing to tell. Were you paying no attention when I resurrected the child Irseln?”
Nora remembered the puzzled shadow on Irseln’s face, the way she had ducked her father’s greedy questioning. Was she fearful because of what she remembered, or fearful because she could not remember? “She was a little girl. You’re a grown man and a magician,” Nora said. “You must have some recollection.”
Slowly Aruendiel’s gaze pulled away from Nora’s and roamed across the darkened hall. “I remember a sense of—engagement,” he said. “I was occupied with something that required my full attention. I can remember this only because I was conscious of being interrupted when they called me. I had no great interest in answering their call, but they persisted. So then I went to see what it was all about.”
“What do you mean, ‘went to see’? Was it an actual journey?”
He shook his head. “It was not a matter of physical distance. I found the four of them: Euren, Meko Listl, Hirizjahkinis, Lernsiep. I do not think I could have named them, then, but I knew who they were, and I knew they were there because of me. Their concern for me seemed absurd, misguided. I watched them, bemused that they were going to such trouble.
“Then—I do remember this quite clearly—I recognized my corpse, lying in the middle of their small circle. I could not see it exactly as the living see, but I could perceive that it was wrecked, empty. Whatever utility that body had once served was ended. And that should have been enough for me.
“The corpse was familiar, though. That was what drew me. I was curious”—he spoke the word with contempt—“the way one might have a whim to visit a place that one knew long ago.
“So, I lingered. I could see the corpse more clearly now, probably through the eyes of the others. I felt no particular emotion when I saw that half of my face was a smashed ruin. But my hands—” He lifted them from the table and turned them back and forth, inspecting them thoughtfully. “In some ways, we know our hands better than our faces. In life, I had never seen them so still and helpless. I felt pity that they would never move at my will again. And then—more curiosity,” Aruendiel said. “I wondered what it would be like to enter into the flesh again.
“That was all it took. I was caught.
“In an instant, I knew what it was to be alive again. Suddenly I needed air; I had no choice but to fill my lungs. I remembered cold, and then I remembered—well, I discovered what it is like to be broken in a dozen dozen places.
“As I said,” he added, with a sour rictus, “there was no good reason to resurrect me.”
He stopped speaking. Nora ran a fingertip over the table, tracing a figure eight. “You didn’t encounter your wife while you were dead, by any chance?” she asked suddenly.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember anything, except at the very end, when you came back.”
“This is correct.”
Aruendiel’s calm assertion of seamless ignorance—so uncharacteristic—was profoundly unsatisfying. She wondered if he was lying. But if he was not lying, what then? To know that there was something after death but not to know what it was, the undiscovered country still undiscovered, whether it was torture, hellfire, bliss, boredom, nothingness—what was the comfort of that?
“How did they bring you back? What spell?” she demanded.
For once, Aruendiel seemed oddly reluctant to talk about the particulars of a piece of magic. “Some of Euren’s wolf magic, to try to heal the corpse’s wounds and make it fit for life again,” he said dismissively. “A binding spell, to help bring spirit and body together. And to summon the spirit, that was more wolf magic. They simply sat together, the four of them, and called for me for a long time.”
“What do you mean, called for you?”
“By name, by thought.” He shrugged irritably. “It’s how the wolves call back their dead, according to Euren. Very loose, subjective, like all animal magic.”
Nora shook her head violently, as though she could dispel the sudden wave of fearful recognition that had washed over her. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
Aruendiel glanced at her, surprised.
“You know, after my brother’s accident, when he was in the hospital,” she said, finding her voice shifting, unsettled, “that’s exactly what we did, my parents and I. We spent
“If he had been somewhere, if he could have heard us, he would have come. If it had been possible to bring him back, we would have done it. Even without magic, we would have done it.”
Aruendiel answered slowly: “I cannot say whether your brother heard your call or not, Nora, or whether he could have answered it. Perhaps it was better for him not to.”
