The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

“I see. And then one of them broke and part of you escaped. What did you do to Dorneng?”

“I ate him,” said the demon. With some distaste it added: “A poor meal. Very dry and sour. I’m still hungry.”

“Is that so?” Nora glanced at Dorneng. Aside from the vacancy of his gaze, he looked perfectly normal. She called his name once, twice. He seemed not to hear.

The demon kept squirming in her direction. Nora stepped back. “You mean you ate him as in—his mind? His soul?”

“The living part, the tasty part. Not the foul meat. You, now,” the demon said, “I can tell that you are delicious.”

“You won’t have the chance to find out.” Nora turned and began to walk rapidly, not sure exactly where she was heading. All directions looked very much the same, anyway—snow stretching out to a dim horizon. It was beginning to grow dark.

“Where are you going with my body?” the demon called after her. “Come back here!”

“Sorry, I don’t want you eating me.”

“It doesn’t hurt!” the demon said. Nora kept walking. “And you don’t even know where you’re going!”

“I’ll figure it out,” Nora said, but she slowed her pace and then stopped.

“I know how it is with you humans,” the demon continued. “You’re weak. You can’t survive long even in this mild climate. You’ll wander around for a while and then you’ll die. And then you’ll be no good to me at all.”

“Bad luck for you, then.” Her hands were already growing numb as she held Dorneng’s bottles. What if she dropped one? She looked back, trying to locate the ice demon, a blur of white on white.

“Is it Maarikok you want?” the demon called suddenly. “You’re going in the wrong direction.”

“You know where Maarikok is?” Nora asked suspiciously.

“I used to catch humans there all the time.”

“How far away is it?”

“I could be there in a few hours—if I had my legs.”

“I’m not going to give you your legs,” Nora said. Was there any reason to think that the ice demon was telling the truth about Maarikok? In the twilight, she could not see the thing clearly, but she could hear it rolling in the snow some distance away, like a grotesque baby.

Giving it a wide berth, she ran back to the Avaguri’s mount and climbed into the saddle, but she could not make it rise. When she tried a levitation spell, it only shuddered and shed some feathers.

The demon was still talking—whining, really. “It will take me months to regrow my legs and my other arm,” it said. “And the nights are growing shorter. I won’t be able to walk before the brutal spring heat arrives.”

“Will you melt?” Nora called, curious in spite of her fear.

“I’ll melt and soak into the ground and wait for the cold again, with nothing to eat, nothing. It will be agony.”

“What direction is Maarikok?” Nora asked unsympathetically.

“I’ll take you there,” the demon said promptly, “if you give me my body back.”

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll promise not to eat you,” the demon wheedled.

“Why should I believe you? You just said you were still hungry.”

“I never break my word.”

Nora let out a disbelieving snicker, then scanned the barren landscape around her. She was hoping to see some speck, some eminence on the horizon that could, conceivably, be the keep at Maarikok. Nothing.

She could try to find Maarikok on her own—and probably die of exposure, as the demon predicted. She could wait here for someone to find her—it might be Hirizjahkinis, it might be Ilissa—and die of exposure anyway. Somewhere around here was, or had been, a gateway to her own world, but she did not have the slightest idea of how to identify it. Meanwhile, Aruendiel was a prisoner.

Nora gritted her teeth. She must have heard Aruendiel say a dozen times that demons were not to be trusted, but now she had no choice. Wizards had made plenty of pacts with demons before, she reminded herself. “If you take me to Maarikok—and don’t eat me—then I’ll give you your legs and the rest of your body back,” she said. “After we get there.”

“Give it to me now!” the demon countered.

“Absolutely not.”

“Can I have just a little of you, to keep my strength up?”

“No! You just ate Dorneng. That should last you a while, no matter what he tasted like. If you try to eat me, even the slightest attempt—if you even tell me how delicious I would taste—the deal is off.”

There was silence for a moment. “All right, then,” said the demon. “I agree. I hope there is something to eat at Maarikok, though.”

Chapter 42

It took them more than a day to reach the edge of the Ivory Marshes. Either the ice demon was a poor judge of distance or—more likely—it was a faster walker than two cold and tired human beings, one of which it had recently consumed.

As Nora trudged across the frozen marshland, past curtains of brittle reeds as tall as herself, from time to time she could glimpse the higher land ahead, rocky islands hidden in the middle of the wetlands. Maarikok was the largest of these islands, with a ruined fortress on its highest point, according to the ice demon. Its own depredations, Nora gathered, had led to the castle’s abandonment. She was elated the first time she saw the keep’s tiny silhouette against the sky, but, as they kept walking, it did not seem to grow any larger.

Dorneng shuffled beside her, head lowered, mute. Evidently, being eaten by an ice demon didn’t kill you—at least, not at once. Instead, Dorneng seemed to be drowned in a vast apathy. He could walk, if Nora took his arm and pointed him in the right direction; he would eat, slowly and mechanically, if food was placed in his hand; but he did nothing to express or fulfill any volition of his own. “I told you it doesn’t hurt,” the ice demon said carelessly. This was after Nora had noticed, with a sick feeling, the white gleam of bone showing through the peeling flesh of Dorneng’s burned hand. Dorneng had not complained; he did not even seem to favor the injured hand. “They don’t care about anything, afterward,” the demon said.

She would have made better time without Dorneng—more than once she thought of leaving him sitting in the snow—but frustratingly, she also felt a certain painful obligation for him. He was pitiful in a way that was too familiar, even though she knew perfectly well that saving Dorneng would do nothing, nothing at all to make up for EJ. And at least Dorneng could carry the ice demon. It rode on his slumping shoulders, its arm crooked jauntily around his neck.

So far the thing had abided strictly by their agreement—it had not actually tried to eat her—but that did not prevent it from asking several times a day if it could do so, and complaining of hunger pangs when she refused. When Nora protested, the demon pointed out that it was only inquiring about renegotiating the contract, something either party could do at any time. She began to see exactly why Aruendiel disliked demons so much.

The first night, she hardly slept at all, afraid that the demon would attack her. How she would get to Maarikok without dying of fatigue, she was not sure at all until, thankfully, the next morning she made a chance discovery: The ice demon liked poetry.

One must have a mind of winter, she was thinking as she plodded along, lost in the white tedium of the landscape. And have been cold a long time. Being warm, so comfortable that you didn’t even think about where your skin stopped and the air began, had begun to seem distant and abstract, a happy condition she had only heard about. To distract herself, she said the whole poem aloud. There were relatively few great English poems about winter, she reflected, compared with the huge number of poems about autumn—the approach of cold and death being perhaps more poignant than their actual presence.

As she recited, she was conscious of a sense of longing, of powerful appetite. It was not hers, but so near