good, tasty human. Like you.”
Perin grasped Nora’s arm. She could sense him measuring the distance to the doorway. “You know, if you eat me, I won’t be able to give you any more poems,” Nora said.
The demon paused, as though it were thinking it over. “That’s true,” it said. “I could still eat him
“I’ll give you another poem now if you want,” Nora said, racking her brains for verses. “Um, had we but world enough and time—”
“You did that one already.”
“I did, that’s right. Let’s see, just a moment—”
“Which other one?” Perin asked suddenly.
Another poem, Nora thought, but the demon said: “The other human, so close. I can almost taste it from here. A good one.”
“Another human? Here in the castle?”
“That’s what I said,” the demon retorted. “Now, come here, I’m hungry.” It made a grab for Perin.
“No, I don’t think so,” Nora said with sudden decisiveness. The ice demon suddenly toppled over, its arm still extended. It fell like a dislodged statue, petrified, static.
A few flakes of snow whirled around the room as they stared down at the unmoving form of the ice demon. Nora smiled, and in her own heart—so much coveted by the ice demon, but still free and unconsumed—she thanked Aruendiel for insisting that she begin the study of water magic, the art of making the most fickle and yet stubborn of the elements do her bidding.
I only thought of it yesterday,” Nora confessed to Perin as they hurried down the corridor. “I’d been carrying around those little bottles of demon-water, and suddenly it dawned on me—hello, it’s water, and I can make water do what I want. Sometimes, anyway.
“I can’t hold it forever,” she added. “Sooner or later it will be able to move again.”
“Oh, with luck we’ll be far away by then, or maybe the weather will warm up,” Perin said. “Bring your light—here’s another door.”
They checked the rooms along the narrow corridor and found nothing but dust and rodent droppings. At the end of the hallway stone stairs spiraled upward; Perin put his ear to the door at the top before pushing it open. They picked their way carefully across a large room filled with debris, trying to make as little noise as possible, but Nora could not help gasping when she saw that the round stone next to her foot was a skull.
“The ice demon’s handiwork,” Perin whispered. Nora nodded. The skull and the vertebrae scattered nearby were dry, discolored. This was no new death.
“We don’t know for sure that the ice demon was talking about Aruendiel,” she whispered to Perin, for her own benefit as much as his. “That other human, I mean.”
“No, but if there’s any human in this fortress besides us, I’d like to try to save him.”
They went through an archway into another corridor. Here there were signs of more recent traffic, a muddle of footprints on the dusty floor. Perin moved cautiously down the hallway, his body tensed. Nora followed a few steps behind, trying to marshal in her mind the spells from Vronicl that seemed most relevant: How to Confuse Your Enemy’s Sight; How to Blunt His Sword; How to Make Him Drop His Arms. The corridor turned, then turned again. They passed more empty rooms, then rooms streaked with daylight because the roof had fallen in. The last chamber showed evidence of occupancy and a taste for comfort: embroidered rugs and tapestries; fresh flowers in lacquered vases; a stout, opulent sofa; and a bank of candles left burning although no one was in the room.
“The Faitoren,” Nora mouthed to Perin as they tiptoed past.
A minute later, as the corridor turned again, Perin suddenly pulled Nora against the wall, then put his finger to his lips. “There’s a guard ahead,” he breathed in her ear. “You stay here, and I’ll take him.”
“Wait.” Hastily she ran through the spell to confuse the enemy’s sight—although, never having actually performed it before, she was not sure that it would work. “Good luck.”
Perin slung himself around the corner. She could hear his running footsteps, a cry, and then a sustained metallic clatter.
Flattening herself against the wall, she peered around the corner. Perin and a Faitoren in gold-tinted armor were swinging swords at each other with great concentration. She thought she recognized the Faitoren. Sarcom, his name was. He was bigger than Perin but Perin appeared to be more agile. Whether that was because of the sight-confusing spell, she did not know.
As she watched, the Faitoren suddenly wheeled and ran in the opposite direction. Perin pounded after him. Nora began to follow, but halted where the Faitoren had been standing. He had been guarding something. A smaller corridor led off at an angle. She took it at a run, then pelted down the stairs at the end of it.
This was the place. She knew that, even before she could get her bearings in the new room, which was large and shadowy and seemed to be filled with many small, dark alcoves. The air was dense, tight with powerful magic. A single torch burned at the far end of the room. Starting toward the light, she bumped into something, a wooden bench. It fell over with a noise that made Nora catch her breath in apprehension, but nothing, no one moved in response.
The torch showed her a mess of old clothes bundled into the last alcove.
She came closer. It took her a moment to see the fragile outline of the curled body under the folds of cloth, the long, wasted legs tucked into boots far too heavy for them. A hand like a dried leaf, the long black hair gone white. He lay half-collapsed on his side, his head drooping toward the ground, as though he no longer had strength to turn himself. She knelt and bent her head sideways to try to look directly into his face, searching for his familiar features in the mask of crumpled silk that hung loosely from his skull.
She hoped he hadn’t heard her gasp. “Aruendiel?” Nora said, willing her voice to be steady and gentle. “Aruendiel, it’s Nora. I’m here.”
A white-lashed eyelid lifted on a stare as worn as an old coin, then closed with weary suddenness. That was all. She reached out to touch his shoulder.
And then she was sprawled on her back, shaking convulsively, sucking down great gulps of oxygen as though she had been underwater for a long time. She had the feeling that more than a few minutes had passed. There was a pulsing pain on one side of her brain and an unpleasant twitching sensation up and down her spine. She raised her head and saw that she was lying about a dozen feet from where she had been.
Nora got up slowly and went back to the huddled figure in the alcove. She kept a warier distance than before.
“Aruendiel?” No reaction at all this time. Nora was braced for the worst, but to her relief, the black cloth of his tunic rose and fell in a slow but regular motion. He was alive, but it seemed to her that at any sudden movement he might tear like old newspaper.
“What is this?” she asked wildly. “What did they do to you?” An aging spell. No, a spell that made Aruendiel look and feel his real age. No one lived to be that old naturally. He could die of old age at any minute.
“Aruendiel?” she tried again. “Can you hear me? It’s Nora—Nora.” He might be senile. He might not even know her now.
It was too hard to look at his wasted face. Ashamed, she let her eyes slide away.
Hirizjahkinis was right to blame me, she thought. If I hadn’t been stupid enough to be tricked by Dorneng, if Aruendiel hadn’t tried to save me, this would never have happened.
She made herself look back, and she noticed that Aruendiel appeared to be suspended just above the floor—not on it—as though he rested on some invisible support. Under him, there was a circle drawn on the stone flagstones, a yard or more across, its circumference completely girdling Aruendiel’s folded body.
She raised her eyes. There were circles on two walls of the alcove—again, each framing Aruendiel.
