Vulpin held up his hands. “Then search as much as you like. She is no longer queen here. But please—I am appealing to your mercy as well as your honor, Lord Aruendiel—remember that we are a delicate race, and not accustomed to cold. If we might remake our dwellings—”
“How the Faitoren employ their magic will be a matter for discussion,” Aruendiel said. “Your dwellings will remain in their current, unadorned state, for now. However”—an immense bonfire blazed up in the center of the large circle—“your people will not freeze in the meantime. And some of you have enough fur or feathers to withstand a little cold. Before our two sides can talk of peace, I must satisfy myself that your queen and her prince are not here.”
“You have my word, and the word of all the Faitoren here,” Vulpin said. “I suppose, however, that is not enough for you.”
“No, it is not,” Aruendiel said.
He and the other magicians spent the rest of the day combing over the Faitoren lands, gradually removing layers of enchantment. A velvet lawn turned into a lake surrounded by snowcapped mountains, which in turn became a crimson-sailed galley, then a string quartet playing Pachelbel’s Canon, until it finally reverted to a patch of ground with a couple of fence posts sticking out of the snow. “Very careless, no sense of structure,” Aruendiel observed.
A few times he asked Nora for directions through the Faitoren landscape, but she recognized only a few of the shifting locales. The one place she wanted to find was the iron-fenced graveyard. After the magicians had been at work for several hours, Nansis Abora found it under a tropical atoll. At least, he turned up a pile of iron railings. Ilissa must have found some non-Faitoren—Dorneng, perhaps—to tear down the fence.
But there was no sign of the graves or headstones, let alone the yellow police tape that Nora had seen there the last time.
“The gate’s closed up,” Aruendiel said, watching Euren the Wolf sniff the ironwork. “Otherwise, they would have gone through into your world, Mistress Nora.”
“I didn’t think it would still be open.” She told him now about her abduction, and how Dorneng had tried to use her blood to make a new, permanent gate between worlds.
She could see anger hardening Aruendiel’s face as he listened. When she had finished, he set off a string of curses like bombs. “I thought they took you as a hostage, and even then I was afraid they might kill you. If I had known what they planned all along—” He swore again. “I was a fool ever to trust Dorneng.”
“Well, I was, too,” Nora said. She was not eager to admit how gullible she had been, but felt it was important to set the record straight.
He frowned at her, but there was a flaw, something pained and helpless, in his usual severity. “I did tell you not to leave the castle, did I not?”
“Yes, you did. I thought it was Hirizjahkinis, and that you were sending for me.”
“You should have known it was a trap. A good magician would have sensed,
“It
“Yes, perhaps—but enough! I am hardly one to lecture you about falling into a Faitoren trap.” Aruendiel shook his head. “I should have taken you with me, as you asked, Nora. Or I could have sent you elsewhere for safekeeping, found a way to hide you.”
“Turned me into a geranium,” she said faintly.
“Yes! Except that the weather is inhospitable for geraniums now.” His face tightened again. “You said Dorneng was killed by an ice demon? It was too easy an end for him. That he would try to cut your throat in cold blood—I would like to—”
“Aruendiel?”
“Yes, Euren?”
“There is a cave nearby that we have not searched yet.”
With an effort, Aruendiel collected himself. “By all means then, let us go there.” He limped away at Euren’s side. Nora, watching them go, had the odd thought that Aruendiel was just the slightest bit afraid of Euren the Wolf. Euren was one of the magicians who had brought Aruendiel back to life, she remembered, and she wondered if Aruendiel bore
She turned to find Nansis Abora beside her. “I beg your pardon, child. I could not help overhearing what you said just now about Hirizjahkinis. You blamed yourself for her death.”
“Well, yes. I know, it’s the Kavareen that killed her, but I can’t help thinking that if Aruendiel hadn’t been captured in the first place—”
“Oh, these things are difficult to predict,” he said vaguely. “This comes up very often in my time work. So many factors in the causation of even minor events—but excuse me, you were saying that Hirizjahkinis was killed. I must correct you a little. I was considering this last night during the more tedious parts of the war council, and you know, being swallowed up by a demon like the Kavareen is a terrible thing, but it is not the same as dying. Or perhaps I should say that death is not inevitable.”
Nora stared at him. “Do you mean that Hirizjahkinis might still be alive
“It is
“So if we could get her out—?”
“Yes, yes. Of course, there would be difficulties. Finding the Kavareen, for a start. And then not being devoured oneself—that is always important.”
This thread of hope cheered Nora to an almost unreasonable degree. Had she not sensed some kind of presence—voices, even—within the Kavareen? For the rest of the afternoon, as the party of magicians slowly moved through the Faitoren domain, she felt positively buoyant. When she caught sight of Perin with some of the other soldiers, she gave him a wave and a broader smile than she had shown him that morning; she wanted to tell him about Hirizjahkinis, but he was out of earshot, guarding Faitoren prisoners. He waved back at her.
At nightfall, Aruendiel called off the search. Ilissa and Raclin were nowhere to be found. He led half of the party to Lord Luklren’s castle, a few miles away, leaving Euren the Wolf and a hundred soldiers to occupy the Faitoren lands; the other magicians would relieve Euren in turn, Nora gathered. Vulpin would be escorted to the castle the next day for peace talks.
Lord Luklren’s castle was larger than Aruendiel’s, but his estate seemed hardly more prosperous. The sheepfolds they passed were half-empty—more Faitoren depredations?—and when they arrived at the castle, Luklren’s wife, Lady Nurkasa, came out to greet the guests with strained graciousness, obviously calculating fiercely how to feed the multitude.
Nora, wishing to be helpful, offered her services in the kitchen to Nurkasa, who seemed surprised at first but was glad enough to have another pair of hands besides her aged cook and two peasant girls. There was a flurry of frantic preparation—hams hauled out of the storehouse, stale turnips and cabbages being salvaged, soup boiling on the stove, a barrel of beer delivered from the tavern—and finally, very late, dinner was served in Luklren’s great hall.
It was a raucous affair. From the far end of the long table, where Luklren and the cavalry officers sat, there were periodic eruptions of song—war chants and, later, obscene ditties about the Faitoren women. The magicians’ end of the table, where Nora sat, was only slightly quieter. Aruendiel and Nansis Abora got into a long discussion of invisibility theory, heated enough so that Nansis said, “That’s a bit much, Aruendiel,” not once but several times. After several tankards of beer, one of the younger magicians, Uklin Bone, could not be dissuaded from transforming himself into a horse and urinating copiously on the floor. He was too drunk to turn himself back, and Fargenis Gouv had to find him a stall for the night. Euren the Wolf queried Nora at length about her trek with the ice demon to Maarikok. He was not so difficult to talk to, once you got used to his insistent yellow stare. The wolves, he remarked, also had chants that kept ice demons at bay.
The only incident that marred an otherwise exhilarating evening came after Nora got up to refill a soup tureen. The kitchen in Luklren’s castle was located across a dark courtyard—where, to judge from the reek, some revelers had already followed Uklin Bone’s example. Nora was returning through the courtyard with the full tureen when someone grabbed her arm. One of the cavalrymen, just finished with emptying his bladder. He mumbled something.
