The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

to her that she felt the pang of frustrated desire almost as though it were her own. It belonged to a creature—she could sense this now—whose origins lay in silence, stasis, and cold. To move, to live, it needed Nora’s life, the thin filament of her consciousness. In return it promised an end to hope and pain alike.

“—‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’” Nora pulled back, just barely. The vast hunger retreated. She was safe, she still belonged to herself. She looked up to see the empty face of the ice demon turned fixedly to hers as it clung to Dorneng’s neck. Its round mouth, which had faded to pink since it fed on Dorneng, had reddened again.

“That was very good,” the demon said. “Not as filling as it could be, but still delicious. You see, it doesn’t hurt just to give me a taste, does it?”

Still shaken, Nora said: “What? A taste? That’s just a poem.”

“Whatever it is, it’s a nice morsel,” the demon said, stretching its mouth greedily. “Do you have any more?”

“More poems?” Nora stared at the ice demon. Was there was a way to keep it fed without sharing Dorneng’s fate? “I know quite a few. But you don’t speak English, right? How can you understand what I just said?”

“I don’t need to understand it,” the demon scoffed. “I just savor it.”

Interesting. She thought for a moment. “Try this: ‘Whose woods these are I think I know’—” The demon listened intently as she pulled the poem, line by line, from her memory. This time, somehow, she was better able to keep some distance from the demon’s insistent desire, like watching a shark’s grin through the aquarium glass.

“That was even better,” the creature said in its flat, piping voice. “There is some lovely despair there. I have eaten many men full of the same dark juice. More!”

“Later,” said Nora, quickening her step.

The ice demon had catholic tastes. It lapped up almost anything she could recite, and turned up its nose only at one of Ashbery’s mandarin lyrics. She did not always need to recite an entire poem to satisfy the demon, but it demanded constant novelty, never a poem repeated. Her memory was good but not perfect. As she walked, she excavated fragments from her mind, trying to restore them into something whole. After a while, her thoughts skipped in iambic pentameter. She estimated she knew enough poems to keep the ice demon fed for a few days, not more than a week. After that—if worst came to worst, Nora told herself, she would write her own damn poems.

By the end of the third day, Maarikok’s tower was bigger and more distinct than it had been that morning. Less than one more day of walking, Nora guessed. That night, for the first time, she was able to light a fire with magic instead of the flint and steel from Dorneng’s pack. Where she had pulled the fire from, she was not sure, but she took it as a good sign. She made sure that Dorneng was well wrapped in his fur cloak—he did not sleep now, as far as she could tell, but at night his torpor increased so much that he might as well have been asleep— and then she recited Donne’s “Elegy XIX” to the ice demon, which lay in the snow with its head propped on its elbow, a safe distance from the fire.

“‘Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee’”—the idea of taking off one’s clothes had never seemed less appealing than in weather like this. Yet the poem still warmed her, as it always did. Aruendiel would like it, she thought, more than he liked Jane Austen. Its frank lust, its humor. All those women he had seduced, years ago— no, better not to think of that.

Afterward, trying to sleep, curled up between the fire and a bank of snow piled up against the wind, she could still hear little icy rustles from where the demon lay.

“What is it?” she said finally, trying to sound stern.

“There’s another human nearby,” the demon said.

Nora sat up. “Who is it? Can you tell?”

“Very tasty, tender. A young one.”

Not Aruendiel, then. “Is it definitely human?” she asked, thinking of Ilissa.

“Of course, those are the best to eat!” The ice demon was scornful of her ignorance.

Nora stood and conjured a dim, reddish illumination from the embers of the fire. Cupping the light in her hand, she stared into the darkness. A shadow moved—no, it was a clump of reeds.

Suddenly, the ice demon launched itself toward something at her left, scuttling through the snow like a drunken crab.

She heard footsteps crunching, then the flat, dull bite of steel into ice. Someone grunted. Holding her light aloft, Nora ran over to where the noise came from.

She saw the ice demon first—glassy in the darkness, oddly contorted. Then she realized that it had wrapped itself around a man’s leg and was trying to shimmy up his body. The man was trying to push the demon back with his sword, but the tip kept slipping. The two strained at each other until finally the man managed to hook the demon in the armpit. With a thrust, he propelled the demon into the air and several yards away.

The ice demon rolled over twice and immediately began to struggle back toward the man.

“Watch out,” Nora called to the man. All she could see of him was that he was wearing a helmet and a long cloak. “Don’t let it near your mouth.”

“What in the blood of the sun is it?” the man asked. The demon was right: He had a young voice.

“An ice demon—it wants to eat you.” To the ice demon, she said severely: “Stop! Stop right there!”

“I’m hungry,” the demon groaned, but as Nora stared at it, it slowed. “Can’t you see I’m starving?”

“I’ll feed you again, in a minute. Just stop, hold it right there!”

Reluctantly, the demon paused, muttering. The man kept his sword poised as if to strike it again.

“I didn’t know ice demons were so small,” he said.

“It’s only part of an ice demon. But wait, let me just feed it quickly.”

Clearing her throat, she tried some Whitman. Halfway through she realized that she had mixed up part of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” with “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” but, tangled in the long, rich lines, the demon seemed not to notice.

“All right?” she asked it when she was done.

“That was good,” the demon allowed. “May I eat him now?”

“No, you may not,” Nora said. She took the man by the arm and pulled him toward the fire. To her relief, the ice demon did not follow. “It will leave you alone now—I hope,” she said. “It always says it’s starving, but given how much poetry it’s been sucking down, it can’t be that hungry.”

The man looked back toward where they had left the demon. “I have never met an ice demon before, but I understand that they are nothing to trifle with.”

“No, not at all,” Nora agreed fervently. “We have an agreement—the demon is guiding me to Maarikok, and then I will give it the rest of its body back. But if it didn’t like poetry so much, I think it would have eaten me already. It already ate Dorneng.” She gestured at Dorneng, hunched by the fire.

The young man was suddenly interested. “Dorneng? Dorneng Hul, the magician?”

Nora nodded. “But he’s not much of a magician now.” The man shook Dorneng’s shoulder and spoke to him, but got no answer. “He’s been like that ever since the ice demon attacked him,” she said.

“They say ice demons kill everything but the body,” the stranger said. “And the body doesn’t survive long.” Straightening, he looked more closely at Nora in the firelight. “We’ve met before, haven’t we? I thought I recognized your voice.”

Nora was at a loss. “We have?”

“Yes—although I’m confused. What is the woman who is not the mistress of Lord Aruendiel doing in the middle of the Ivory Marshes with this poor addled-brained fellow and an ice demon?”

Nora felt herself flush. “What—?”

“Forgive me, I am too familiar,” the man said. “But you should know that I am still smarting from the scolding you gave me, when we last spoke in Semr, for my incautious assumption about the nature of your relations with Lord Aruendiel.”

“Oh, that!” Nora said. That evening at the palace came back to her. The young man with the reddish hair. “You warned me about Aruendiel.”

“I did,” the young man said.