horse before?”
“I used to ride all the time. At Ilissa’s.”
He snorted disdainfully. “Do you think that was really a horse?”
“What else would it have been?”
“A sheep, a goat—even a Faitoren that Ilissa felt like punishing.”
“Whatever I was riding, it didn’t seem as tall, and it was a lot steadier. How far to your castle?”
“Normally, it’s three days’ ride. At this rate—” Aruendiel leaned over, twitched the reins out of Nora’s hands, and slapped the horse with them. The mare broke into a slow trot. Feeling as though she were perched at the top of a swaying ladder, Nora restrained a shriek. “At this rate, perhaps we will get home in five days,” he said. “It’s a waste of horseflesh, putting you on that mare. You would have done just as well on a donkey, and it would have cost half the beetles.”
“I thought gentlemen didn’t quibble about money.”
“We are traveling by horseback for your benefit, Mistress Nora,” he said. “If I were to travel as I prefer, I would be home by tomorrow morning.”
“And how is that?” she asked. He urged his horse forward without bothering to reply.
They were riding through a landscape of thorny scrub and tidal marsh, strewn with a rubble of stone blocks. The place felt oddly desolate, for all that it was so close to the city across the river. A row of columns lay prone and half-covered by mud and sea grass, but still perfectly parallel. The remains of a paved road surfaced under their horses’ hooves, then disappeared into the soil. Nora tried to piece together in her mind’s eye the buildings and streets that had once been here.
Bracing herself, she gave the reins a shake as she had seen Aruendiel do and caught up with him. “What is this ruin?” she asked.
“Old Semr.”
“What happened to it?”
He looked faintly annoyed at her question, but answered: “The city was taken by a hostile army, the Taurnii. It fell, literally. The walls and roofs came down, and the sea rushed in. The besiegers slaughtered those who managed to escape.”
Another of those explanations that only raised more questions. “Do you mean there was an earthquake?”
“No, it was poor magic. Or rather, powerful magic that was poorly used.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not. You know nothing of magic, or of history.”
“But I’m interested,” Nora said swiftly. “Please, tell me what happened.”
“Well,” he said, after a moment’s consideration, “in truth it is not such a long story, if one leaves out the history of King Perlo’s War.
“Old Semr was built with magic, most of it—its walls and gates and towers and palaces and hanging gardens. The wizard Mererish Agor laid it out for King Corbos Bullface centuries ago. They say it was a magnificent city. New Semr, where we just came from, is an overgrown trading village by comparison.
“That ceramic lion you broke,” he added, “it came from Old Semr.”
Before Nora could correct him about breaking the lion, he went on: “The risk of using magic to build something, whether it’s a building or an entire city, is that the edifice is only as strong as the magic itself. If something happens to the magic, the structure simply collapses. The Taurnii wizards removed the spells that had built Old Semr, and the stones and timbers flung themselves apart like mad things. So said the few survivors.”
“Why was the city never rebuilt?” Nora asked.
“That is the more complicated part of the story. The simplest reason is that people began to consider this site unlucky.”
That would explain why the place was so quiet, Nora thought. Nothing moved among the rocks and marshes except for a few shorebirds and a distant boy clamming on a muddy inlet. The silence felt as big and clean as the sky after the clamor of New Semr.
After half an hour, they rode through a pair of broken pillars, and Aruendiel said that they had just gone through one of Old Semr’s twelve gates. The countryside took on a more domestic, bucolic feel, as they began passing fenced plots and whitewashed houses. Chickens and the occasional pig wandered across their path. Nora kept reining in the mare to avoid a collision until Aruendiel told her sharply that her horse could find its way around the other animals without her interference.
After a while she said, with some resentment: “I didn’t break that lion.”
“The lion?”
“The ceramic lion in the palace. I didn’t break it. I told you that at the time.”
“It’s an interesting question, how that figure came to be broken.” He gave her a searching glance. “I don’t know the answer yet.”
“Frankly, it looked to me as though the lion jumped,” Nora said. “Could it have been, well, some kind of magical figure?” Listen to me, she thought irritably, I sound as crazy as the rest of them.
“It was an ordinary clay figure,” Aruendiel said. “Nothing unusual, except for being extremely valuable.”
Nora looked down at her left hand, holding the reins. The ring gleamed on her finger. “Do you still think that I’m Ilissa’s spy?”
Aruendiel turned to regard her again. “No.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“I could tell how much magic Ilissa was using, when she tried to kidnap you,” he said. “She obviously encountered a great deal of resistance. I still don’t trust that ring of yours, but—” He shrugged. “She was not using it to control you.”
Nora felt a hidden knot of tension loosen. But she was not entirely free. “I have to be honest,” she said haltingly. “Part of me wanted to go with her. I was so afraid, and it seemed that if I only let go and gave in to her, everything would be all right.”
“And you did give in,” Aruendiel said.
“I thought I would be stronger, the second time I met Ilissa. I wasn’t.”
“What makes Ilissa’s magic so dangerous,” he said, “is that, usually, she does not force you to do anything truly against your will. She only makes you do what you wish to do.” The wind blew strands of hair across his face, making it hard to read his expression.
“I did try to fight—” Nora began.
“Her kind of magic is very difficult to resist. Because it speaks to the secret wishes of the heart, the fears and desires that we may not even recognize ourselves. I do not imagine, Mistress Nora, that you had any great wish to follow Ilissa back to her domain and become enslaved to her again. But even a slight inclination, a divided mind, would be enough for her. She offered you something you wanted, in some measure. It would be strange if you did not take it.”
Quickly Nora looked away, to study with blurred vision the bent backs of laborers in the adjacent barley field. She did not know exactly why the tears had sprung up, whether it was because she was ashamed or relieved to hear what Aruendiel had said.
“I am not telling you this to discomfit you, Mistress Nora,” he said. “Whatever hidden thoughts that Ilissa found in your heart and turned to her own uses—you might never have acted on them otherwise. I do not pretend to read them; they are your private concern.”
Nora nodded, unwilling to trust her voice to hold steady. They had ridden well past the barley field before she ventured to speak again.
“But how can anyone resist her, then?”
“Knowing your own secrets before Ilissa can steal them, that is one protection,” he said. “Easier in theory than in practice. Otherwise, some shielding spells are effective. But she has entrapped many people, including some skilled in magic, who should have known better.”
“You said that before,” Nora said. “Are you one of those people?”
She could tell just from the way his gloved hands shifted their grip on the reins that the question made him
