angry, and she knew what his answer would be. “Yes,” he said.
“What happened?”
“What happened? I was a fool.”
Nora said cautiously: “You had a love affair with her.”
“At one time, yes.”
“Because of her magic?”
“No,” he said with a dry laugh. “She didn’t need to use magic, at least at first. I was idiotic enough on my own to take her as my mistress. The magic she worked came later.”
“What kind of magic?”
“Oh, there were various spells, very subtle, layer upon layer,” he said, grimacing. “Gods, I kept finding them and pulling them away, like cobwebs, for weeks afterward. Spells to rule my thoughts, to cloud my judgment—but everything was done very carefully, nothing so obvious that it might give me alarm. A more accomplished version of what she did to you.
“It was pleasant while it lasted, I will give her that. I remember feeling extremely fit and alert, although in reality I was blind and deaf to what was happening to me. Ilissa’s magic, her presence itself, seemed to hone and amplify my own. I began to think of all kinds of interesting possibilities that I had never brought myself to consider before.
“Ilissa had certain ambitions—still has them now, no doubt. She wanted to rule over more than just the Faitoren. She thought that I would be the perfect partner—or instrument—for her purposes. Well, I began to agree with her. Emperor over the five kingdoms? Why not? With my magic and Ilissa’s combined, no one could stand against us.”
Fascinated, Nora felt a faint consternation that Aruendiel had been so easily seduced by Ilissa’s grandiose plots. “And what happened?”
“You know how it is with the Faitoren, do you not? Always another ball, another hunt. We talked grand strategy, and meanwhile the days seemed to slip away.”
“Yes,” Nora said thoughtfully, “it was like that for me, too. Without the plans for world conquest, of course.”
“From time to time, I was fleetingly aware of odd thoughts, as though there were a voice muttering in my head, questioning things that I accepted to be true. I was far too beguiled with Ilissa and her plans and the Faitoren’s endless, mindless merrymaking to pay attention.
“Then one evening I was passing time with Raclin and his companions, as had become my custom, I regret to say. They were casting lots and drinking, until fisticuffs broke out between Raclin and another Faitoren. The one called Gaibon, in fact—the Faitoren who took Bouragonr’s place. Raclin knocked Gaibon down, and Gaibon swore that he would be revenged, and Raclin swore that he would knock Gaibon down as many times as it took to teach him not to cheat. And the rest of us all laughed, and I thought to myself what good, high-spirited fellows they both were, Raclin and Gaibon, and how fortunate I was to have them as comrades.
“And the voice in my head said very clearly, ‘Raclin and Gaibon, they’re a pair of treacherous louts, both equally worthless, except that Raclin is the more vicious of the two.’
“I felt a great sense of release to hear this. It was my voice, I realized—my own mind speaking to me.
“After that, I began to notice all kinds of occasions when my thoughts seemed to diverge in completely opposite directions. I would spend the day hunting with great pleasure, and yet recall how much hunting bored me. There was a human girl there, too, a peasant girl that they’d married to Raclin, same as you, and something about the way they treated her bothered me. But I did nothing.
“Eventually—after far too long—it occurred to me that I’d been enchanted.”
“I heard a voice, too,” Nora said. “But I didn’t listen to it, most of the time.”
“A mistake on your part,” he said. “But it was unpardonable carelessness for me, an experienced magician, to miss so many obvious signs of enchantment.” He smiled, but there was no good humor in his expression.
“I went to Ilissa and taxed her with my discovery. Of course she did not deny it. She could not. Instead she tried to soothe me, first with caresses and sweet words, then—incredibly—with more magic. The arrogance of that woman! As though I had not already learned to recognize the touch of her spells, like poison lullabies.
“But it was fortunate that she overstepped in that fashion. It goaded me. I fought back, undoing every piece of her magic that I could find. I didn’t know as much then about Faitoren magic as I do now, but I knew enough. I found more spells that Ilissa had cast on me, and destroyed them, and then I began to unfasten the spells around me, the ones that are woven into the fabric of her domain. By the time I paused, the place where we stood looked very different—you would never recognize Ilissa’s palace without her magic—and for the first time I could see that Ilissa was frightened. She was afraid that I would strip it all away, no doubt, all the pretty things around her, even her own face.
“She rained down abuse on me, both verbal and magical. For a while, it was rather entertaining, and then I grew tired of hearing what a vain, deceitful, barbaric, clod-headed, puny-loined cad I was. I came away knowing that I had a new enemy, although not realizing quite how much Ilissa hated me or to what lengths she would go for revenge. That was only the first engagement in what has been a very long war.
“And it makes a long story. It is not a tale that I have broken in by frequent telling, so it tends to run away at a gallop when given the chance. At any rate, you see that you are not the only one who has been Ilissa’s dupe.”
“What happened to the girl? The peasant girl? You didn’t try to save her?”
“No.” He sounded grim. After a moment, he added, “It was only later that we realized how many young women had disappeared in the vicinity of the Faitoren, and discerned what was happening to them.”
“How many—?”
“I could not tell you.”
They rode on for a while in silence, and then Aruendiel asked brusquely, “How did you know that Ilissa had been my mistress?”
Nora tried to untangle the threads of her intuition. “Because you two hate each other so much! And you talk about her as though you knew her well. Also, something she said to you in Semr made me wonder.”
“Indeed.” He did not seem pleased by her deduction. “I thought that Ilissa might have told you. Or that you had heard some old gossip floating around in Semr.”
“No, I didn’t hear
“Ah, what did you hear?” he inquired. When she did not reply at once, he laughed sardonically. “I suppose they told you all kinds of interesting things. People love to gossip about magicians.”
“They said you killed your wife,” Nora said, surprising herself, the words slipping out of her mouth as swiftly as an arrow.
Aruendiel’s face hardened. “Well, I did. So the fools have a good story to pass along to other fools.”
There was nothing graceful to say at this juncture, so again Nora said the first thing that rose to her lips. “Why?” Even if she knew the answer already, she did not understand it. No matter how awful Adam had been, Nora had never thought about killing him.
“Did they not tell you in Semr?” he asked.
She dropped her eyes to the back of her horse’s head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to pry.”
“But you are prying,” he said. “We have wasted enough time today discussing my biography.”
He spurred his horse ahead and vanished around a bend in the road. Did he mean to abandon her? Nora cautiously urged her horse to a faster gait, but for the rest of the afternoon, he was in sight only occasionally, when the road straightened for a stretch.
They spent the night with one of Aruendiel’s friends, a magician named Nansis Abora, who lived in a tidy cottage surrounded by vegetable plots. He had disheveled gray hair and a faint stutter. That night she lay in bed in a slant-ceilinged loft over the kitchen and listened to the two magicians talk late into the night, mostly about Nansis Abora’s recent work on various problems in time-travel magic. It sounded like a fairly abstruse branch of magic because of the complicated astronomical calculations involved; she wondered sourly if Aruendiel was really following the other magician’s explanation. In the morning she was so sore from the ride of the day before that she could hardly climb down the ladder from the loft, let alone mount her horse. Nansis Abora insisted on doing a spell to relieve the pain, for which she was very grateful. Aruendiel had not offered to help.
He was in a better mood, though, as they set out. At least, he stayed within view. From time to time, he
