matter how many times Nora replayed the events of the day in her head, they never ended any differently.
The camp was beginning to stir when she heard Aruendiel’s voice outside the tent. She fumbled at the flap and went out in a rush.
In the clear morning light, he was not the young man with the romantic good looks she’d seen the night before; he was not the dying old man she’d rescued; he was only Aruendiel, and the sight of him made her heart lighter, in spite of her grief. She came close, and impulsively she put her arms up to embrace him, but it was like hugging the trunk of a tree; she realized he was wearing armor under his cloak. With some awkwardness, she stepped away. “I heard about Hirizjahkinis.”
The gray gaze flickered, then steadied. Aruendiel pressed his lips together. “Yes,” he said. “She died bravely. It was a foolish accident, entirely preventable, but she died bravely.”
“Oh—” Did it matter whether Hirizjahkinis died bravely or not? The fact that she was gone was monumental enough. Nora felt the sudden weight of the kiss that she had never given Aruendiel. “I’m so sorry,” she said, clasping her hands. “I miss her, too.”
“She was stubborn, she never listened to any prudent warning about the Kavareen. She treated it like her toy, her pet, her plaything—pure madness!” Aruendiel seemed ready to give full rein to his anger, but he checked himself and said more quietly: “She feared to face the Faitoren without it. Even when I returned to join the battle, she would not give it up.”
“Aruendiel, I saw her yesterday afternoon, just for a moment. She was so happy that you had come, that you were alive.”
“She saved me once and I could not save her in return.” He shook his head violently, as though he did not want anyone to look too closely into his face. “And now we still have work to do. Your head—Nansis tells me you managed to break it open.”
“It’s fine,” she said, but Aruendiel had put his hand on her shoulder to spin her around. Unwinding the bandage, he inspected the back of her head. She winced a little at his touch, but said: “I had a headache yesterday. It’s gone now.”
“It would be better for you to rest more,” Aruendiel said, replacing the bandage. She turned and felt his eyes run over her, as though checking for other injuries. “But an army camp is no place to leave a woman alone,” he said, “and perhaps you will be of service where we are going. You shall come with us to look for Ilissa.”
The expedition to the Faitoren domain included some two hundred horsemen and nine magicians, including Aruendiel, Nansis Abora, and the man who she gathered was Euren the Wolf—slight, gray, forgettable except for his yellow eyes. Nora rode a horse bigger and livelier than she would have preferred, but she held on as best she could, a levitation spell ready in case she started to tumble off. They rode past the scene of yesterday’s battle, where dead horses and broken weapons lay petrified on dirty red ice, and then south across the snowy marshland toward a line of low, dark hills. Perin rode up beside her a couple of times to exchange a few words. She tried to smile as she clung to the saddle.
After a couple of hours, the marshland gave way to fir-covered hills. A scout galloped ahead, then returned to direct the force through a small pass. Nora looked around curiously, wondering if she would recognize any landmarks. They had almost reached Faitoren land.
Nothing seemed especially familiar, though, until a warm gust of wind touched her face. She caught the dreamy summer scents of roses and fresh-mown grass. Looking up, she saw the red-roofed towers of Ilissa’s castle, bathed in sunlight, not half a mile away, on the far side of a snow-covered rise.
“Mind this, Euren,” she heard Aruendiel say, then felt the glancing edge of his spell, a wrench in her gut. The stone towers rippled, quavered, like heat mirages on a highway in August. And vanished. “You see?” Aruendiel said to Euren the Wolf. “You saw how easily it came off, once I had the end of it?” Euren nodded, amber eyes hooded, then grinned suddenly. His teeth were very white.
That was how they entered the Faitoren domain, stopping now and then so that the magicians could strip away a clutch of Faitoren spells. Aruendiel was particularly thorough, undoing every piece of Faitoren magic he could find. A gold-and-ivory sundial became a gorse bush. The cloud of blossoms evaporated from the branches of a cherry tree. The scented breeze died away. Unexpectedly Nora felt a twinge of regret for the charmed, sweet beauty that, piece by piece, was passing away.
On the other hand, that statue of the two lovers that Aruendiel had just destroyed was dreadful, the girl smiling so moonily at the boy, who was just a little too gorgeous to be real. It was like a greeting card in stone. When you got right down to it, Ilissa had terrible taste—drippy, saccharine, juvenile. If she hadn’t come up with such a horrible version of me, Nora thought savagely, maybe I wouldn’t have minded being enchanted so much.
When they reached the site of the castle, most of the structure was already gone, but Nora thought she saw the balcony from which she had once spied on Raclin with a broken heart. Then it, too, trembled and disappeared.
What remained was a rough circle of snow-capped stones about the size of a tennis court. At the periphery were a collection of miserable huts—stone rings with crude roofs made of willow branches. As they approached, a small figure emerged from one of the huts. Nora recognized him by the tusks and the outsize, misshapen head. So it hadn’t been a dream, Vulpin’s transfiguration.
Vulpin looked up at the horsemen, his eyes settling on Aruendiel. He bowed.
“Where is your queen?” Aruendiel demanded.
“We have no queen,” Vulpin said. “The one you are looking for—and her son—they are not here.”
“Where are they, then?”
“We don’t know. We have not seen either of them since we retreated here yesterday.”
“Are they dead?”
“We don’t know. Nor do we care. She is our queen no longer.”
“What do you mean?”
“We served her loyally, but she led us into catastrophe and then abandoned us, so we have determined that we must rule ourselves.”
“Rule yourselves?” Aruendiel exchanged amused glances with Euren and Luklren.
“Yes.” Vulpin held his big head very high. “Yes, since there is no one else to do so. My compatriots have chosen me to parley with you, as the sole representative of the Faitoren people. I have their permission to sue for peace.”
“Then you must lay down your arms in surrender,” Aruendiel said, “and swear that you will make no more war on myself, King Abele, his liege lords, and any of his people.”
“We will swear, those of us that are left.”
“How many of you are there?”
By way of answer, Vulpin called in that language that Nora had never learned. The other Faitoren trickled out of the huts. There were perhaps a hundred altogether. “This is all of us,” Vulpin said. “The rest you killed or captured.”
Nora would not have recognized any of the Faitoren. None wore the fair, enchanted faces that she was used to. Nor did any of them much resemble each other. Some were the height of a child; others were gangling giants. A few looked bigger than they were because of their horns or their sail-like ears. Some had fur, some had feathers, some had scales, and some had all three. As a group, the Faitoren seemed to have stepped from the pages of some mad bestiary—not exactly human, not exactly animal, and some of them looked more like extraordinarily animated trees than anything else.
Moscelle—she recognized Moscelle by her eight eyes. That memory had not been a nightmare, either.
“What about the glamours you people normally wear?” Aruendiel demanded. “Why are you showing your natural faces?”
“We’ve agreed to do this, all of us,” Vulpin said, showing more animation than he had previously. “The Faitoren are tired of wearing masks, of having to impersonate the dull uniformity of humans. Our own faces are nothing to be ashamed of.”
“A matter of opinion,” Aruendiel said.
“You would have stripped our glamours off in any event, the way you have been doing with everything else in our kingdom.”
“Yes, and I will continue to do so until I have located Ilissa.”
