Aruendiel pointed out, with some severity, that she still had more work to do in that area. “You have not learned to induce a ceramic vessel to change its form, or to break a dish so that only you can mend it, or—”
“All right, yes, I saw there’s a whole treatise by Setisonior the Left-handed on that. Aruendiel, will this magic I’m learning help me defend myself if I meet Ilissa again?”
He turned his head to look at her. “Not unless she decides to attack you by breaking all the dishes.”
“When will I learn something that will actually let me defend myself?”
“I can teach you a basic shielding spell, once you have some expertise with fire magic. It would hold Ilissa off for a few minutes. To truly protect yourself, though, you cannot let Ilissa know your heart better than you yourself do. It’s the only sure way. I’ve told you that before.”
In a milder tone, he added: “There is no reason to think that you will encounter her again. She is confined to her lands, and before the next king is fool enough to let her out, you will likely have returned to your world already.”
“Yes,” Nora said, unsatisfied, twisting the ring on her finger. “But sometimes I can’t help worrying.”
“Then you have learned some wisdom, I see,” he said with severe approval.
Later that night, as she lay in bed, her feet curled against a warm brick, she listened to Aruendiel’s tread up the stairs and down the corridor, one long step and then a shorter one, and she thought about what he had said. A daunting task, to take careful inventory of one’s own heart. Which, of all the secrets that were hidden there, would be most useful to Ilissa?
There was her low-grade obsession with Aruendiel. Nora had given up calling it a crush; it had lost some of its urgency, and it seemed indecorous now that he was officially her teacher. (Even across the worlds, she felt the invisible contraints of the sexual harassment policy of the Graduate College of Arts and Sciences.) Perhaps that was why her fixation had moderated: She had wanted Aruendiel’s time and attention, and now she had it, in some measure—in the lessons, in their oddly companionable evening talks. But she still felt something that might be termed an unhealthy interest. It was not really romantic in nature, she told herself sternly. More of a morbid curiosity. There were too many questions that she had not dared to ask or that he had refused to answer. His murdered wife was only one of them.
And she was ever mindful of his lank, battered, precariously balanced body. His face was not always so hideous, when he took the trouble to smile. Once or twice, when they leaned over a book together, she was troubled to think that she might feel the accidental warmth of his shoulder against hers, or even that his hand might suddenly take hold of her own.
Nothing like that ever happened, fortunately.
Ilissa would make hay with all of these repressed and tangled wishes. (Nora imagined her delighted laugh.) “The problem,” Nora reflected clinically, “is that I’m lonely and horny and starved for companionship—not to mention that my sex life has probably been permanently scarred because I was married to Grendel’s uglier brother—so naturally I feel hot and bothered when I get close to an eligible man, any man, no matter what he looks like.”
It had been almost six months since she had fled from Ilissa’s palace. Had things turned out differently, she would be a new mother by now. (Or dead, according to Aruendiel.) The happy mother of a baby pterodactyl. Would she still have loved it, her own flesh and blood made monstrous?
Of course she would have, under Ilissa’s smiling, adamantine enchantments—but in truth, the enchantment might not have been necessary, because whatever the child looked like, it would have at least earned her pity by being tiny and helpless, and by then there would have been nothing else for her to love.
It was all so wrong. So unfair. Although she could not be sure of the real object of her outrage: Ilissa or Raclin or her own gullibility. She’d been an easy mark, so greedy for love that she had given the best of her own heart without stopping to consider what she received in exchange. Just as with Adam. If she could not learn to be more discerning, the only safe course was to avoid love altogether. Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust.
How old did you have to be before you learned the difference between the simulacrum of love and the reality? Listening to an owl calling outside, she tried to sleep.
The lessons in fire magic began a week later. Aruendiel refused to let Nora try any fire spells near his books; she had to practice with a pile of wood shavings in the great hall, with a bucket of water nearby. A wise precaution, Nora had to admit, after charring a hole in her apron.
Aruendiel was not amused. “It is the kindling that is meant to burn, not you.”
“Either nothing happens”—which was most of the time—“or pop, suddenly I’m on fire.”
“You must be firm with it. Fire wants to please, which is one of the things that makes it so useful, but sometimes its enthusiasm becomes dangerous. It will come straight to you if you do not direct it elsewhere. Keep it in check.”
Nora looked over at the fireplace, at the fire she had built there in the ordinary way, stacking the logs and then applying a hot coal from the kitchen. Somehow she was supposed to draw on its power to set the shavings alight. “This fire doesn’t look very enthusiastic. Maybe I should start again.”
“The wood is damp,” Aruendiel said disapprovingly. “But that should not affect the spell.”
She kept trying. Aruendiel, obviously bored, returned to the tower, after putting a spell on the water in the bucket so that it would dowse the flames if Nora caught fire again. “If you do not wish to be drenched, you had best master this spell,” he warned. By the end of the day, Nora had singed the end of her braid, causing the water in the bucket to slosh about alarmingly before she managed to extinguish the spark. The smell of burnt hair lingered.
Coming into the hall from the kitchen, Mrs. Toristel paused to sniff, then looked hard at the almost- untouched pile of shavings. “You haven’t started the fire yet,” she observed.
“No, not yet.”
“You’ve been at it all afternoon. I would think it frustrating to keep trying, with no luck.”
“Yes, but I’m close, I can feel it. I can feel the fire, sometimes. It’s an amazing feeling.”
“There’s nothing remarkable about feeling the fire, if you’re close enough to it.”
“I feel it inside.” Nora smiled, elated enough to disregard her self-imposed rule about not talking to Mrs. Toristel about her magic studies. “I feel flashes of something that’s—it’s not exactly happy—it’s excited, very excited, and hopeful. Hungry. I know it’s there. Now I just have to make it do what I want.”
Mrs. Toristel looked unimpressed. “You don’t have to be a magician to make a fire. How long before you learn to do the kinds of things that he can do?”
“I don’t know. Someday.”
“Someday. Well, if you have the patience for it. And if he has the patience. Why is he trying to teach you this, do you know?”
Nora had to say again that she did not know. “I assume it interests him, somehow.”
“He takes these fancies, sometimes, about teaching people what he thinks they should know. He tried to have me read one of those great long poems once, when he taught me my letters. I didn’t know half the words. I had to tell him, I wasn’t cut out to be educated.” Mrs. Toristel frowned, her features growing pinched. “Well, maybe it will be a help to him to have someone around who knows a little magic,” she added grudgingly. “At least you can mend the broken plates now, that’s useful. I never liked to ask him before.”
Once Nora could reliably set the shavings, and not herself, on fire, the next lesson involved precision: lighting every other candle in a twelve-branched bronze candelabra. It was surprisingly hard, after she had gotten the hang of lighting a fire magically, to learn to hold back and
She knew exactly what Aruendiel would say when he came down to check on her progress: that skillful magic was as much about control as about power, and would she have the grace to remember that candles are expensive? When Aruendiel finally appeared, she almost told him to spare his breath.
Then she saw his face. Hollowed out with rage, his eyes cold and wild.
