disappear—it
“Raclin?” she said fearfully, then bolted for the door. The thing was too quick, leaping in front of her. She could feel its claws on her body, tearing into the flesh of her arms and belly. Oh, no, the baby, she thought. She struggled free and then slipped and went sprawling flat on the floor, so hard that the breath was knocked out of her. But she kept going, scissoring her legs, moving every limb like a swimmer.
Then she was through the door and in the hallway. She had the wild hope that the creature was too big to fit through the door frame, but it simply folded its wings and slipped through. Nora ran as fast as she could, the streamers of her torn nightgown flying. It was a long corridor, the walls painted with cherubs playing cat’s cradle with pink and blue ribbons; they grinned at her as she fled past. She could hear the reptile thing loping along behind her, its claws clicking on the floor.
The hallway divided. Nora took the left-hand turn and found herself at the top of a marble staircase that curved downward into dimness. There were tall windows to her left, light just beginning to filter through them. It was the same ballroom where a few hours ago she had been watching the dancers and worrying about where Raclin might be; she wished that Raclin’s indiscretions were all she had to worry about now. She started down the steps as fast as she dared, her body just bulky enough now to make her feel off-kilter. She couldn’t hear the monster anymore; perhaps it had taken the other turn.
Then she looked up. The dragon creature swooped just over her head. With a scream, she dodged, and then screamed again as she lost her footing on the polished marble. Slipping, then tumbling, she rolled over and over down the cool, smooth stairs, and as she hit each new step, she thought, Now I can stop, but she kept falling anyway.
At the bottom, she rolled once more and lay still for a minute, panting. It hurt to breathe. She saw a flash of dark wings in the corner of her vision, and she tried to get up, but her right ankle refused to take any weight. She didn’t want to think about what the fall might have done to the baby.
She lay back, clutching her stomach, listening to the sound of voices and running footsteps.
“Oh, Raclin.” Ilissa stood at the top of the staircase, her hair fanning out loose over her white dress. She called out to the monster crouching on the ballroom floor, her voice shaking with fury: “What have you done?”
Nora was in her own bed again, staring up at the silk canopy, willing herself to believe that everything she remembered from the past few hours was a bad dream. The pain told her otherwise. There seemed to be half a dozen different kinds of hurt warring over her body. The one that was hardest to ignore was the paralyzing cramp that kept seizing her lower abdomen. The bedsheets were soaked, sticky.
People were crowded around the bed. Ilissa’s face appeared, white and angry. She was shaking her head. “She’s going to lose it.”
Nora knew instantly what she meant. “No,” she said feebly. “Please, no.”
“Be quiet, you ungrateful, stupid girl.” Someone leaned over to whisper to Ilissa. “No,” she said harshly. “There’s nothing to be done. We’ve failed again.
Other faces hovered over her and disappeared. Then Nora was alone. Time passed, measured in waves of pain.
Two voices that she knew, near the bed.
“Vulpin, what are you doing here? Ilissa will be looking for you. She’s insane today. Insane.”
“Moscelle?” There was surprise in Vulpin’s voice. “Oh, I see. She’s taken it out on you.”
“She got the idea from what happened to
“You don’t look so bad. I got used to it. I sometimes wonder whether we should show our own faces more often.”
“Ilissa will make you wear your own face forever, if she finds you here.”
“My orders were always to look after Nora. Yours, too.”
“Oh, you can’t do anything more for her. Look at all the blood. How horrid.” Moscelle came over to the bed and looked down. “Oh, Nora,” she said in a different voice. “You’re awake. How are you feeling, darling?”
Nora thought that the fog of pain must be affecting her vision. Three or four pairs of blue eyes seemed to be peering out of Moscelle’s face. She tried to ask Moscelle about the baby, but none of the eyes showed any signs of understanding what she was attempting to say.
“She looks terrible,” Moscelle said to Vulpin in an undertone. Nora couldn’t hear his response. “Well, I liked her, too,” Moscelle went on. “But we can’t help her now. Come on.”
Her light footsteps retreated across the floor, followed by Vulpin’s heavier ones.
Nora lay there for a long time. No one else came. Everything was very quiet, except when the cramps made her groan. She felt weaker than she had before. It must be afternoon now, but the room seemed drained of color. Words drifted into her mind: And then I could not see to see. If Nora had had the strength, she would have howled in frustration, but now even the thought of doing something like that made her tired.
A small piece of dust floated across her sight. Ashes to ashes.
Not dust, a tiny gray feather, a piece of down from the pillow or the mattress. It hung stubbornly in the air over her face. Her breath made it tremble, but it only shifted its position in the air slightly.
Making an immense effort, Nora lifted her hand and took hold of the gray wisp between her thumb and forefinger. She looked at it carefully. Just a random feather.
What was the name? She couldn’t even remember the name.
“Help me,” she whispered. “You said you would help me.”
She opened her fingers and let the feather go. Caught in an air current, it whirled away.
It would be nice to have some hope, gentle as the tickle of a feather against your skin, but it was hard to feel anything at all but the rhythm of pain. She closed her eyes, waiting for it to end.
The magician Aruendiel had a headache. The night before, he had worked late on a spell involving two of the constellations in the southern sky, the Weaver and the Goose, but the results were poor, the stars frustratingly unresponsive. Then he had slept poorly, the old injuries in his back giving him pain as they often did when he was tired. Shape changing gave him some relief, so before dawn he rose and flew into the forest. The exercise helped his back, but he misjudged the time, and by the time he got back to the castle, the morning sunlight had given him the beginnings of a headache, which persisted even after he changed himself back into a man and ate his usual breakfast of oatmeal and ale.
Despite the headache, he spent the morning reading in his study, the shutters half-closed against the midsummer sun. A friend had sent him a scroll that purported to be the autobiography of the ancient wizard Rgonnish. It was certainly written in a very old dialect, which took a long time to read, but as Aruendiel got deeper into it, his initial suspicion that it was not Rgonnish’s own work hardened into certainty. You could tell that the writer did not understand all the magic he was describing. Certain details were left out; in other places, the writer had included extraneous, useless information or crude shortcuts. Rgonnish would no doubt have been infuriated if he had known that his own name would ever be associated with such trash. Aruendiel was massaging the bridge of his crooked nose between two fingers, wondering if he should give in and use magic to dispel the headache, when a small gray feather drifted across his line of vision. He brushed it aside. Dodging his hand, the feather settled on the page in front of him and quivered meaningfully.
Aruendiel picked it up and studied it carefully. Then he sighed.
“I warned her,” he said aloud. “She wouldn’t listen. And now I’m expected to drop everything and rescue this fool of a girl because it turns out I was right all along.” There was probably not much that he could do for her, anyway, he reflected. Years ago, Aruendiel had helped Lukl’s father rescue one of Raclin’s previous brides. She
