Hirgus gathered his cloak around himself with a furious shudder. He muttered something under his breath, while sketching a complicated, looping gesture in the air with one hand.
“Oh, Aruendiel,” Hirizjahkinis said, with a sigh. “Dear Sister Night, did you have to provoke him quite so much?”
“On the contrary, I have been more tolerant than he deserves, Hiriz. I have not called
“But I am the one who will have to listen to his complaints all the way to—”
The fire covering the carriage grew brighter, a brilliant jack-o’-lantern orange, and then suddenly exploded outward. Nora felt its heat rise like a shining wall around her. Blinded by the glare, she shut her eyes and cringed, not knowing where to turn, as her throat filled with smoke.
Then she could breathe again, cold air salving her skin. She opened her eyes to the gray courtyard, half- shadowed in the angled morning sunlight. Hirgus stood trembling beside his carriage, his velvet cap askew, his face flushed. His carriage itself was a blackened shell, a few flames feebly licking the charred roof. The horses whinnied and shifted uneasily in their traces.
Aruendiel looked up. Following his gaze, Nora saw that one of the house’s eaves was ablaze. But as she watched, the flames disappeared and the smoke petered away.
“I am afraid your fire demon may be testy for the rest of the day, Hirgus.” Aruendiel turned back to his guest. “They never enjoy being quenched.”
Hirgus’s reply was unintelligible. With a jerk of his head, he climbed into what remained of his carriage.
“Perhaps I should have informed you before letting your captive ghost go free,” Aruendiel allowed. “But it was rude of you to try to burn up my house. Shall we call it a draw?”
“I am leaving now,” Hirgus called to Hirizjahkinis. “If you wish to leave this lunatic’s company, please come with me now. I will not wait any longer.”
“You can wait another minute, Hirgus,” Hirizjahkinis said crisply. She looked back at Aruendiel. “You are incorrigible! I do not understand what drives you to find quarrels with everyone around you, including your oldest friends. If that is what makes you happy, then you must be very content right now.”
“Content enough,” he said, a shadow passing over his face. “I wish you a good journey, Hiriz. And I thank you for your visit. We may not always agree, you and I, but your company is always one of my greatest pleasures.”
“Hmmph, you do not always make that obvious!” Hirizjahkinis said. “At least, it is never dull when I see you. Peace be your friend. And yours, too, Mistress Nora. You will need it, living under his roof,” she added, with a glance at Aruendiel.
She waved once as the carriage went through the gate, Hirgus a stiff and outraged profile beside her. “This is soot on your forehead,” Aruendiel said to Nora, who was waving back.
“I’m not surprised,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “I almost burned to death just now.”
He gave her a long look. “You must learn how to quench fire, now that you know how to light it. I will not have you setting any more of my private papers on fire.”
So her inchoate, guilty suspicion was right: Neither Aruendiel nor Hirizjahkinis had ignited the box of papers. “That was an accident,” she said.
“All the more reason for you to learn to put fires out. Between you and Hirgus, I am lucky the whole house has not gone up in flames. I would have thought him more subtle than to loose a fire demon on me, but I may have overestimated his capacities. And for him to say that I was jealous of him. The vanity of that imbecile!”
“You have a smudge on your cheek, too,” Nora informed him.
Running a hand over the rough terrain of his face, Aruendiel laughed unexpectedly. “What did Hirgus call me? A vulture-faced cripple?”
“Something like that.”
“At least the fool is observant,” he said as they went inside.
Aruendiel went north for a few days to visit Lord Luklren and to discern whether the magician Dorneng Hul was maintaining the magical barriers against the Faitoren to the standard that Aruendiel expected. He was almost—but not entirely—satisfied in this, Nora gathered when he returned. She felt some sympathy for Dorneng, who had had to refortify the barriers under Aruendiel’s supervision. It was decided that the flock of iron birds, currently roosting in trees and stony hills just outside the Faitoren realm, would remain as an additional safeguard. Back in his own castle, Aruendiel had the blacksmith in Red Gate send over two dozen horseshoes and a keg of nails, and spent an afternoon turning them into more birds, which took clattering flight and disappeared into the gray autumn sky.
She noticed a change in Aruendiel’s manner. The lessons resumed, but at a more erratic pace. Some days Nora did not see him at all. He spent more time in his workroom at the top of the tower, where she had never gone, and he stopped taking his dinner when she did in front of the fire in the great hall. Her translation of chapter fifteen of
She was having trouble with the next stage of fire magic: extinguishing fire. No matter how hard she concentrated, willing them to go out, the candles burned serenely on. She wondered distractedly whether this failure was the result or the cause of Aruendiel’s loss of interest in her magical studies.
Mrs. Toristel noticed a difference. “He’s not giving you a lesson today?” she asked one day in the kitchen as Nora scoured a pot with sand. They had been making sausages. The air was still rich with the smells of herbs and meat, and the loops of fresh sausages hung above their heads like celebratory bunting.
Nora had been wondering if there was a spell to clean dishes, and then reflected that at this rate, she might never get a chance to learn it. “No, not today.”
“Nor yesterday, either.”
“No.”
Mrs. Toristel sniffed. “Well, he changes his mind about things, you know. He gets a notion into his head, and then he drops it, and no one can say why.”
If her words were meant to be consoling, she had miscalculated. “Is he all right?” Nora asked after a moment. “He seems more irritated than usual.”
“He’s been in a foul mood since that black woman was here,” Mrs. Toristel said.
“I think he was more annoyed by the man, Hirgus.”
“That carriage! I wouldn’t ride in something like that for anything. The man himself was pleasant enough. But you never know when
“Yes,” Nora said, thinking that the someone might be herself. She cast about for a new subject. “Mrs. Toristel, I’m sorry to say this, but I don’t think these boots are going to last me through the winter.” It was too cold for clogs now. Even the poorest peasant women wore boots in the winter—surprisingly elegant boots, some of them: thick-soled, no heels, but expertly cut to show off the curve of the legs and ankles. Nora fantasized sometimes about taking a few dozen pairs back to her own world and selling them through some Madison Avenue boutique to pay for a year or two of school. The old boots that Mrs. Toristel had given her, though, were too small and almost worn out, the leather uppers eroded, the soles slick and spongy.
Mrs. Toristel set her mouth and looked at Nora’s feet. “I thought Toristel stitched them up for you.”
“He did, twice, but they’re still leaking, and he says the leather’s too rotten for him to put on another new sole.”
“Can’t you make them do a little longer?”
“They’re pretty hopeless.” Nora had finally given up on them the day before, as the pigs were being slaughtered. Averting her gaze from a struggling pig, she had stepped in a puddle in her leaky boots and had to go around the rest of the day with her feet soaked and stinking with blood. The clotted mess in her stockings— indescribable.
