“Aruendiel will be furious when he finds out what you and Ilissa have done,” she said aloud. “He’ll find you and kill you.”
“I don’t think so,” Dorneng said. He chuckled again.
In fact, she reflected, Aruendiel would also be furious with her, Nora, for being tricked by Dorneng, for not escaping, for not using the magic he had taught her. Think, she admonished herself. Think. There’s a fire right over there. I can borrow some of its power. I could burn these ropes right off, she thought. And damn, probably my clothes and most of my skin, too.
They had stopped. This was the place where she would die. No more time left. Nora wriggled helplessly inside her bonds. Dorneng was fumbling under his furs. She heard the clank of glass as he produced a small stoppered bottle.
“I want to save a little of your blood,” he explained.
“Oh? What for?” Nora asked, buying time. “A souvenir?”
“There may be some ancillary spells that I can use it for.” He reached under his fur cloak again. This time he drew out a dagger. He handled it with some pride, Nora thought. It had a silver handle inlaid with gold. Very pretty.
He looked up at the sky one more time. “I don’t see her,” he said.
“Probably because she’s too busy begging for mercy from Hirizjahkinis,” Nora said.
“I doubt that very much,” Dorneng said, but he waited another minute. Then he leaned down and rolled Nora over onto her stomach. Standing astride her torso, he grasped a handful of her hair and yanked her head up from behind, much the way Aruendiel had held the ram at New Year’s. Dorneng’s grip was surprisingly strong.
She saw the gleam of the blade from the corner of her eye. Then Dorneng paused as though to consider something.
“These are new gloves,” he said thoughtfully. “They’ll be ruined.” Putting down the dagger, he pulled off his right glove with his teeth, then picked up the dagger again with his bare hand. The blade scratched her throat as he searched for the artery.
She had never actually tried the spell before. But in her mind’s eye she could see it on the page of Vlonicl’s
The blade sketched a line of fire against her neck. She jerked back with a cry, thinking: It’s too late. He cut my throat.
But Dorneng was screaming. He thrust his hand wildly into the air, as though to fling the dagger away, yet his fingers remained curled stubbornly around the handle. The air smelled like burned meat.
Nora looked down. No blood on her cloak. A burn, not a cut. He’ll slash my throat anyway, she thought, if he keeps waving that blade around. She threw herself backward against Dorneng, and heard the muffled sound of breaking glass, then rolled off his body to one side.
Dorneng sank hand and dagger into a rapidly melting snowdrift. His eyes were closed and he was swearing.
Nora struggled against her ropes. She hadn’t realized how strong the spell was. She hadn’t expected it to cook his fingers—at least, not so quickly. Dorneng was now holding his blackened hand to his chest, and she could see the wondering rage in his face, the shock and fury that she had not only wounded him but tricked him, too.
Grasping the dagger with his gloved hand, he wrenched it away from his injured one, then got to his feet. He had shredded her spell. The dagger was cool enough to touch now, cool enough to kill her with.
Nora pushed herself backward, her eyes fixed on the blade. Dorneng took a step and stood over her. He was swaying, about to lunge. She braced herself.
He shouted something. It took her a second to realize that he was shouting for help.
Something round and white, like a balloon, hovered beside Dorneng’s head. No, not a balloon. She had the confused impression that he was clinging to a marble bust. Or it was clinging to him. The white thing touched his face, obscuring it.
Dorneng’s cries halted. Then, with a spastic effort, he shoved the white thing away from his face with his good hand. The dagger dropped into the snow.
“Help me!” he roared.
“Why?” Nora dived for the dagger and managed to grab it with her bound hands. “You’re trying to kill me.”
“Ice demon! You broke the bottle!”
She began sawing at the ropes around her wrists, a complicated process that required her to hold the dagger as though she were about to stab herself. “Where’s Aruendiel, then?”
“Help me!”
“Where’s Aruendiel?”
“Aruendiel? He’s—” Dorneng was craning his neck, trying to pull away from the white thing—the ice demon, apparently—but it was still holding him as close as a lover. Its head practically rested on his shoulder. “Maarikok— the keep—Ivory Marshes.”
“Where’s that?” Nora demanded, but he only kept calling for help. “I can’t do anything right now,” she hissed. “You tied me up! Where’s Maarikok?”
The blade frayed the last strand of rope, broke it. Nora’s hands were free. She went to work on the ropes on her ankles. As she hacked away, she registered from the corner of her eye that Dorneng was still struggling, the white head of the ice demon now pressed tightly against his face.
When the rope finally gave, Nora stood up painfully and looked around. Dorneng had fallen to his knees. The ice demon had wound him into a tight embrace. He was quiet now. What does it do, kiss you to death? she wondered. There was something terrible about how limp and unresponsive his body seemed in the ice demon’s grasp.
Then the white head swiveled toward her. Its face was as blank as a sheet of paper except for a mouth that bloomed bloodred. The mouth smiled at Nora.
“Oh, good,” it said. Its voice was pure and high, like a child’s. “Another one.”
She backed away, near Dorneng’s small fire, and picked up a piece of burning wood for protection. But the ice demon had turned back to Dorneng, who now slumped sideways, his eyes dull. The thing pawed at his chest, trying to reach inside his furs. Now, with a better view, Nora saw why she had first mistaken it for a marble bust. The demon’s form was oddly truncated: a head, shoulders, a single arm.
Is that all? Nora wondered. If not, where was the rest of its body?
The answer came to her all at once. She ran straight toward Dorneng and the demon, the burning brand leveled like a sword. “Get away from him!” she yelled.
Disdainfully the ice demon smacked its red lips at Nora and continued to scrabble at Dorneng’s clothes. She swatted at it with the burning wood. The flame sputtered and went out. Behind her, the fire choked in a cloud of white smoke.
“Oh, hell,” Nora said. The ice demon’s magic could evidently extinguish fire.
Throwing down the wood, she took the demon by its shoulders and yanked it away from Dorneng with all her strength. The single arm snatched at her face, but she flung the flailing thing as far as she could. It landed ten feet away, facedown, and went into a spasm of activity, trying to right itself.
Nora bent over Dorneng, pulling open his fur cloak.
It was as she had expected. There were five small glass bottles secreted inside the pockets of his tunic. Three were full of what looked like water; one looked empty; and the fifth was broken, although there was still a tablespoon or so of clear liquid inside the intact bottom half. In a second she had mended the broken bottle, then gathered up all five. She held them carefully against her chest as she looked back at the ice demon.
It was crawling through the snow with short, jerky strokes of its arm. “Give those to me!” it snarled. “They belong to me.”
“Sorry, but no,” Nora said. “It’s the rest of your body, isn’t it?”
“He trapped me,” the demon said. “He locked me up in those horrible bottles.”
