The route that Perin had chosen took them along the northern side of a chain of narrow islands that rose from the icy marsh. The high ground provided some shelter from the wind, and also helped screen them from observation from the south and west. There was a deepening smudge of smoke on the southwest horizon—army campfires, Perin said. Twice, late in the afternoon, the wind blew the faint sound of a military horn to them.
The problem was that they could not tell which army was closest. Perin climbed a hill on one island for a better look, but could not make out any standards.
He looked thoughtful, though, as he came down the slope. “It’s a sizable force,” he said. “In this climate, an army—at least, a human army—has no reason to put off fighting any longer than it has to. Our forces will attack as soon as they have sufficient strength.”
Nora heard some regret in his voice. “Do you want to join them?” she asked.
“I’ll try to make up for my absence by delivering Lord Aruendiel.”
He was always careful to use Aruendiel’s title, although Nora never did. It seemed uncharacteristic of Perin to be such a stickler for correctness, like Lady Pusieuv, but perhaps if you were in line to have Lord in front of your name someday—as Perin evidently was—you paid more attention to things like titles.
It might also be, Nora thought, that Perin was the sort of person who found formality more useful in dealing with those he did not consider friends. His pleasant face always looked slightly harder whenever the magician’s name came up. She remembered the warning he’d given her in Semr.
His antipathy to the magician was odd, though, since he could be affable even to the ice demon. Gradually, he managed to coax the demon to tell them what it could about its former hunting ground of Maarikok. The castle, they learned, occupied a rocky promontory on one side of the island, and its gates opened to a narrow track, easily defended, carved into the side of a ridge. There was no other entrance.
Nora groaned inwardly at this. If the Faitoren mounted any kind of defense at all, she did not see how she and Perin could get into the castle. She wished that she had learned even one invisibility spell, or a transformation spell advanced enough to work on a human being.
“How did you get into the castle?” Perin asked the ice demon.
It preened slightly. “I went around to the back. They thought they were safe, but when they saw me—oh, they were so afraid, it was a feast.”
“But exactly how did you get in?” he pursued.
“I went up the cliffs. And through the wall.”
“How? Is there another entrance?”
“I made one. I made my hand into water and slipped it into the crack.” The ice demon’s single hand swerved back and forth to illustrate. “And then I made my hand hard, and the stones broke apart.”
Perin looked puzzled, but Nora nodded, thinking of how a glass filled with water will crack in the freezer. The ice demon had used some basic kitchen science combined with its own brand of magic. “You can melt yourself at will?” she asked.
“If I wish to. But why should I wish to? People will only lock you up in little glass bottles.” The demon’s pink mouth worked savagely.
“I haven’t forgotten our bargain,” Nora said soothingly, although she was dreading the moment when she would have to fulfill her promise. It seemed suicidal to give the demon its body back, and she kept wondering if she should renege and refuse to open the glass bottles she carried. And yet the ice demon, so far, had lived up to its side of the agreement—and more, since it had left Perin untouched.
Later, she thought, I’ll sort this out later. Let me get into Maarikok first.
They camped that evening on an islet, Maarikok no more than two hours away. Perin at first opposed lighting a campfire so close to the enemy, until Nora showed him that she could build a fire with jet-black flames and smoke that trickled away inconspicuously along the ground. The smoke spell came from Vlonicl; the black flames were her own idea, a variation on one of the spells that Hirizjahkinis had taught her. She was pleased to see that Perin was impressed.
“I was not sure what to think when you told me that you had been learning magic,” he said, watching a tendril of smoke flow across his foot.
“You thought that a woman could not be a magician,” Nora said.
“That’s right. But I was more surprised that a person like you—honest and good-hearted—would want to practice magic.”
“I enjoy it,” she said, smiling. “Why don’t you like magicians?”
“We don’t have much use for wizards in my family. There’s more glory to be gained with a good brain and a good sword.”
“But you see magic can be useful,” she said, indicating the fire.
“I don’t dispute that. Why do you enjoy practicing magic?”
“Oh.” Nora stared into the fire’s shadowy flicker, only a shade lighter than the gathering twilight. Because magic was interesting and because she seemed to be good at it. But that was not the whole answer. She glanced at Perin, and the steady current of his interest emboldened her to try to explain. “Practicing magic takes a kind of awareness that you don’t feel ordinarily,” she said haltingly. “You have to really know the things around you and make them know you. And when you manage that connection, it’s as though the world belongs to you. You feel more at home in it. As though you could do anything.”
More drily she added: “That’s when everything goes well, of course. There are a lot of details that you have to get right. That’s what I spend most of my time working on.”
“And Lord Aruendiel is your tutor.” It was not a question, but there was a faint note of incredulity in Perin’s voice.
“Yes, a very good one.” She told him about working in Aruendiel’s study in the afternoons, how he assigned her spells to learn, then watched and critiqued the way she performed them.
“And the rest of the time, what do you do?” Perin asked. She told him. Now he was openly shocked. “You cook and clean and take care of the livestock? Doesn’t Lord Aruendiel keep enough servants to spare you such work?”
Nora smiled: Had Perin forgotten how he had taken her for a servant once? “Just the housekeeper and her husband.”
“You surprise me. The great Lord Aruendiel, with only two servants?” With a knowing grin, he added: “I suppose the peasants are afraid to work for him.”
“Possibly,” Nora said. There was truth in Perin’s observation, but she was unwilling to say anything that would turn him more strongly against Aruendiel.
“And how large is his garrison?”
“He doesn’t have one. I don’t think he needs one, being a magician.”
“Perhaps not.” He questioned Nora more about the size of Aruendiel’s holdings. Nora regretted that she had brought up Aruendiel’s finances—guiltily she remembered the near fiasco of her new boots—but it was difficult to be guarded with Perin. Finally he said, sounding faintly amused: “I didn’t know that Lord Aruendiel had such a modest estate. It sounds much smaller than my own father’s estate, which—I will be honest with you—is not grand at all. But the rumor in Semr is,” he added, with a shrewd look, “that Lord Aruendiel will soon be much richer.”
“What do you mean?” Nora asked, flabbergasted.
“I’ve heard that he intends to lay claim to another, much larger estate—Lusul.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of Lusul. It used to be his.”
“It was his wife’s estate. He held it through his marriage.”
“Aruendiel has never said anything about claiming it,” Nora said. Then she frowned. “Wait, his niece, Lady Pusieuv—she mentioned Lusul. She wanted him to claim it. As a dowry for her daughters.” The details came back to her now. “There’s an inheritance dispute, right? Lady Pusieuv said that Aruendiel should have kept Lusul all along because—well, his wife was unfaithful.”
“It’s a very rich prize, Lusul,” Perin said. “It’s no surprise that Lord Aruendiel would want to recover it, especially given his reduced circumstances.”
“But he doesn’t want it. He told Lady Pusieuv so.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“It’s true.” She shook her head. “If there are rumors going around Semr that Aruendiel plans to claim Lusul, it’s because of Lady Pusieuv. She’s probably telling people he wants it in hopes he’ll change his mind. Although he won’t.”
“Why not?”
He would want nothing to do with anything that reminded him of his wife. “Aruendiel’s very stubborn,” Nora said. “Once he has said no, he will not shift.” She stood up, uncomfortable—why should she feel so disloyal, talking about Aruendiel with Perin?—and pulled her cloak more tightly around her shoulders. “I should go feed the ice demon.”
By now, she had already fed the monster almost all of the poems she knew. She had a moment’s panic when it turned its mouth up to her, a deep well waiting to be filled.
Then a verse came into her head. It was from a long poem, and she didn’t know all the lines, but she knew enough. “‘That’s my last duchess painted on the wall’—”
When she returned to the fire, she and Perin divided the last of the dried beef from his kit. Chewing the rank, salty strips of meat made her jaws ache. Nora felt disinclined to speak of Aruendiel again—it seemed uncertain ground—so she asked, after finally swallowing a particularly stringy morsel: “If you don’t want to take a court position in Semr, what would you rather do?”
Perin laughed, a little ruefully. “I’m happy enough serving in the King’s Guard, but my father is right. I can’t stay there forever. There’s not much chance for promotion or spoils these days, unless this Faitoren rebellion turns into a greater war. All the more reason, my father says, to make a good match.”
“You mean, to marry an heiress.”
Perin said nothing, but in the dimness, Nora made out a half nod. Then he said: “You said in Semr that you had had a cruel husband.”
“Yes.” Nora found that she did not much wish to discuss Raclin with Perin, either. “It was not a real marriage,” she added awkwardly. “I mean, he deceived me—I didn’t know what he was really like.”
“This was the Faitoren prince?” So Perin had heard that story in Semr, too. Was he going to press for details? No, he only said: “You deserve a far better husband.” He spoke with surprising warmth.
“I hope so!” Nora said. She laughed, and after a moment Perin laughed with her.
“So you think one ought to know what a husband—or a wife—is like before marriage?” he asked. Nora said yes, very firmly. “It’s not so easy, you know,” Perin said. “My family recently began marriage negotiations for me with Lord Denisk of Kaniskl, for his oldest daughter. I have met her just once. If the negotiations are successful and the marriage takes place, I would probably see her four or five more times before the wedding.”
Nora was surprised to register a pang of disappointment. But her instinct had been right: Men like Perin were always engaged. She said: “I think you should get to know her better. How did you like her when you met her?”
“Pretty, very shy. She wouldn’t talk at all at first, but I played with her puppy and I think she liked me a little better then. She is thirteen years old.”
“You can’t marry a thirteen-year-old!”
“She’d be fourteen or fifteen by the time of the wedding.” Perin sighed, an uncharacteristically gloomy sound. “To be honest, I’d much rather have a wife who is ready to cuddle her own babies, not just a puppy.”
“Then don’t marry a child! I think you should find someone closer to your own age to marry, to have children with. If that’s what you really want, a family,” Nora added, fumbling a little. “It sounds like it.”
“Oh, yes.” Perin’s tone was definite. “Not just to honor my ancestors, either. I like children—preferably a houseful of children, like the one I grew up in.”
Nora had a sudden, vivid mental picture of Perin with his yet-unborn family—roughhousing with the boys, carrying a little girl on his shoulders, holding a wiggling baby with gentle awkwardness. He seemed to cast a circle of light in which everyone was happy and safe; all of them were laughing, including the shadowy woman by the cradle. “You’ll be a good father, whoever you marry,” Nora said.
“The negotiations with Lord Denisk were not going well, the last I heard,” Perin said cheerfully.
• • •
The next morning they broke camp well before dawn. Nora groped her way over to Dorneng, hoping that it would be easier to rouse him this morning. Yesterday he’d been almost completely inert.
Today, though, as soon as she put her hand on his shoulder, she could feel that Dorneng was gone. His body was rigid, ungiving. She felt both relieved and somber. Every man’s death diminishes me.
“He had already departed,” Perin said gently when she showed him.
Nora remembered saying almost the same thing herself, the other time. “It was probably a stupid idea to drag him all this way,” she said. “But I couldn’t just leave him.”
“No, I see that,” Perin said. “You are not easily discouraged when you want to help someone.”
“Oh, no, it’s not that—” He was giving her too much credit, but his words made her glow. In silence together they weighted Dorneng’s corpse with stones, so that he would be buried in the marsh with the first thaw of spring.
By the time the stone towers of Maarikok turned pinkish gold in the first light, Nora and Perin were looking up at the castle from the eastern tip of the island. “Hmm,” said Perin. He was no doubt thinking the same thing that Nora was: Higher than we thought. On the island’s northern side, the hill on which the fortress was built reared almost straight out of the marsh.
Perin turned his gaze to the south and took off his helmet. The wind coming across the marshland ruffled his short-cropped hair. Nora admitted to herself that he was better-looking than she’d first thought: well-knit features, a level glance. Watch it, she told herself, recognizing the symptoms: not a crush yet, but a distinct tingle.
Perin held up his hand. “Listen,” he said. “The battle has begun.” She could make out only phantom shouts, a distant clatter. No gunfire, as there would be in her world. “It’s good for us,” he said reassuringly. “It’s a distraction.”
“Right,” she said, nodding. “Well, let’s take a better look.”
They made their way along the northern side of the island, under the cliff. From time to time, Perin glanced back at the ice demon on the sled. “Here?” he asked.
“Not here. Keep going.” The demon’s face was impassive as always, but there was poorly suppressed excitement in the way it shifted its position on the sled. It was looking forward to freedom and, Nora feared, a really satisfying meal after days of nothing but poetry.
Looking up, Nora could see how the demon had been able to climb the cliff on its earlier raids. The stone had split and eroded into jagged protuberances, where an exceptionally enterprising mountain goat—or an ice demon—might be able to find a path.
“Here,” the demon announced suddenly. “This is the way.”
“You’re sure?” Perin asked.
“I forget nothing,” the demon said.
Perin looked at Nora, a trace of skepticism in his glance. “Well, what do you think? Can you manage it?”
“I think so,” she said. Now that they were finally here, the rough wall of stone waiting to be attempted, she felt more sure of herself.
“Then—” He raised an open hand, an invitation that was mixed with faint bemusement. “Would you like to go first?”
Nora examined the rock in front of her and decided to aim for a ledge about eight feet off the ground. She took a moment to gather her thoughts. Then, putting a foot and a hand on the rock face, she worked as powerful a levitation spell as she could manage.
An instant later, she was scrambling up the cliff, moving easily, almost bouncing against the stone. The slightest purchase on the rock was enough to propel her higher. She went past the ledge she had been aiming for and pulled herself onto one above it.
She looked down at Perin’s upturned face and laughed. “It worked!”
He grinned up at her. “You can do the same with me?”
“Of course!”
As Perin swung himself upward, she did the spell again, keeping her eyes fixed on him. He moved rapidly up the cliff face and landed next to Nora.
“That’s a fine trick,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said with a small thrill of pride. She looked upward, trying to spot the next ledge.
“Wait!” It was the ice demon below, clambering down from the sled. “You are not going to leave me!”
Nora exchanged a look with Perin. “We can’t carry you up,” she called down. “Wait for us.”
“I want my body back!” the demon said. “I have fulfilled my side of the bargain. I have guided you to Maarikok. I have shown you the way that I took into the castle.”
“Well, we’re not in the castle yet,” she said. “I’ll give you the rest of your body when we come back.”
“If you come back,” the demon said suspiciously. “I am coming, too.” It scuttled to the bottom of the cliff, then reached up the rock face and began to climb. After a moment, Nora saw how: The demon could grip the rock by freezing to it, then pulling itself upward.
“Let’s keep going,” Perin said in her ear. She nodded. They went up the cliff by turns as the ice demon doggedly inched up the rock face below them. Nora decided it was better not to look down, to focus on nothing but working the levitation spell correctly and finding secure places to plant her hands and feet.
But during the brief intervals when she and Perin were side by side on the same ledge, she was embarrassingly conscious of the feel of his body against hers. She found herself looking forward to the moments when he would put his hand protectively against her back as she clung to the rock wall. Incredible that she could even think of sex in the middle of scaling a cliff, but there you have it, she thought. It had been a very long time.
Above, the castle wall rose smoothly from the rock, but when they were close to the top of the cliff, Perin pointed out the small dark gap at the base of the wall. One of the stone blocks was missing.
There were only a few yards to go—Nora had just pulled herself onto a ledge directly below the gap—when she heard the flapping of wings. Something bright flashed in the corner of her vision. She looked around carefully. A small bird whose feathers shone like mirrors had found a perch on a jutting piece of rock nearby. It fluffed its feathers against the cold and turned its head to look at her.
Nora frowned, then said hesitantly: “Hirizjahkinis?” The bird trilled, a faintly admonitory sound, and then took flight.
“What did you say?” Perin asked.
“The silver bird, did you see it? I think it belongs to a magician I know, Hirizjahkinis. You saw her at court.” Hirizjahkinis close by—perhaps Aruendiel was rescued already. Or could Ilissa mimic the flight of birds as well? Nora helped Perin onto the ledge, wondering how hopeful she dared to be.
“Let me go ahead,” Perin said, looking up at the hole in the wall. When he had gone past her, she looked down cautiously. The ice demon was still making its way up the rock face, perhaps a hundred feet below. Another disquieting thought struck her—could the bird be Hirizjahkinis’s own call for help? Once before, she had used it to summon Aruendiel to Semr.
Apprehension mounting, Nora scrambled through the wall opening into musty darkness. “Perin?” she whispered.
“Here.” His voice came from a few feet away. She caught the gleam of his helmet.
“Do we risk a light?”
“I think so. I don’t hear anything.”
Standing up, Nora conjured a weak light. They were in a low-ceilinged room about twenty feet square, the single doorway half-blocked with a rubble of stone and wood. Gritty icicles hung from the ceiling. Perin stooped and picked up a rotted barrel stave from the floor. “We’re in one of the old storage cellars,” he said. “We’ll need to find our way to the dunge—”
“So you did escape Ilissa!” A new voice, speaking louder than either of them.
Perin stepped forward, his sword already in his hand. Nora hastily summoned a brighter light and peered at where the voice at come from. “Hirizjahkinis?”
A column of air thickened, grew viscous and murky, then resolved itself into the shape of a woman, almost invisible except for her pale dress and the watery gleam of her jewelry.
“Hirizjahkinis?” Nora said uncertainly. “Is that really you?”
“Don’t be alarmed—it is only a fetch!” It was Hirizjahkinis’s voice, strong and confident. “I am some little distance away—and there is a Faitoren army between us, in fact—so I have come to see you without my body, so to speak.”
Nora badly wanted it to be Hirizjahkinis—but her own avidity was a warning sign, she reminded herself. “I don’t mean to be rude, but how do I know that you aren’t one of Ilissa’s illusions?”
Laughter, slightly strained. “You are cautious, little one.”
“That’s the sort of thing Ilissa would say to distract me.” Although Ilissa would have called me “darling,” Nora reflected.
“I am Hirizjahkinis herself, the only one, and if I were a Faitoren counterfeit of me, I could not say that. And are you a Faitoren illusion yourself?”
“No, I’m Nora, not a Faitoren. I’m sorry to be skeptical, but that’s how Ilissa kidnapped me, pretending to be you.”
“I would have liked to see that! She is a tricky one—cleverer than I thought, I must admit. It would be much easier—” Hirizjahkinis hesitated, uncharacteristically. “You know that we do not have Aruendiel now.”
“Ilissa said he had been captured. How—?”
“He lost his temper!” Hirizjahkinis laughed, a little bitterly. “I have never seen him so angry. He would not hold back, he would not wait for the rest of us—he would go after Ilissa and that lying scorpion Dorneng by himself—and by some means they took him.”
“Angry?” Nora was startled. She had been so sure that whatever had weakened Aruendiel must have come from his own blackest wishes, that Ilissa had tempted him by promising to do a second time what she had done once before. “What was he angry about?”
Hirizjahkinis stared straight at Nora. “You.”
“Me?”
“He was enraged that Ilissa had taken you. We were awaiting two other magicians, Euren the Wolf and Fargenis Gouv, when I heard your call, that you were with Ilissa and you needed help. I told Aruendiel—and then there was no stopping him.
“And now I see that you are free and well, remarkably enough. Unlike Aruendiel!” There was no mistaking the rancor in Hirizjahkinis’s tone now.
Nora put her hand to her face. “I never thought—”
“Never thought what? That Aruendiel would be such an idiot? You have done well enough without him or me, it seems. And now you are sneaking into a Faitoren stronghold. Or are they expecting you?”
Nora shook her head, her throat tight.
“Forgive my sharp tongue,” Hirizjahkinis said fiercely, “but I need to know the truth. Did you summon me at Ilissa’s bidding?”
“No, of course not. She didn’t even know I had your token—at least, not then.”
“But she let you go unharmed, I see.”
“It wasn’t like that at all,” Nora said, her voice rising. “I got away by pure luck, an accident. Dorneng was about to kill me—”
“Dorneng? Where is he now? We have lost track of him for some days now.”
“Dorneng is dead.” Perin spoke up matter-of-factly. “He died last night.”
The ghostly Hirizjahkinis looked at him for the first time. “Dead? How?”
“An ice demon killed him.”
“An ice demon? One of your vile northern monsters. Well, it served him right, but I am surprised. Dorneng was a good magician. He should have been able to fend it off.”
“He was too slow.” The ice demon’s piping voice came from behind Nora. She turned to see it clamber through the opening in the wall. “I took him before he could use his horrible magic. A very poor meal, though. I’m so hungry.”
“That’s how I got away, when the ice demon went for Dorneng,” Nora said. Edging closer to Perin for safety’s sake, she recounted the events of the past few days as quickly as she could. She could not tell from the apparition’s filmy countenance whether Hirizjahkinis believed her.
When she had finished, Perin added: “You must know, we would not have risked our necks climbing that cliff if we were to be guests of the Faitoren.” He spoke courteously but with nothing yielding in his tone.
“But why are you here?” Hirizjahkinis demanded. “Do you plan to take on that Faitoren garrison upstairs by yourselves?”
“No, we’re here to rescue Aruendiel,” Nora said.
“What?”
Nora could not decide whether Hirizjahkinis sounded more incredulous, affronted, or amused. “Dorneng said Aruendiel was here at Maarikok,” she said.
“He is not here.” Hirizjahkinis’s voice was definite.
“What do you mean, he’s not here?”
“I would know. I would know his magic anywhere, and he is not here. I can tell that there is only one magician in this castle right now, and that magician is much, much weaker and clumsier than Aruendiel.” Hirizjahkinis laughed, and her laughter sounded colder than usual. “I do not mean me. I am not really here.”
Dorneng lied, Nora thought. Or they moved Aruendiel somewhere else. Or—
“Well,” she said, at a loss for words.
“Lady Nora’s magic got us up that cliff,” Perin said quickly. “She might not be as expert as some, but it’s the results that matter.”
“And who are you,” Hirizjahkinis said, “who risked his neck to escort Nora up that cliff?”
“My name is Perin Pirekenies.”
“That name is familiar. You are—ah, Holy Sister, I know who you are! And you came along with Nora—”
“To help her rescue Lord Aruendiel, yes. I did not like to see a lady take on such a dangerous task alone.”
Hirizjahkinis shook her head. “Lady Moon, what Aruendiel would say! Perhaps it is as well that he—I knew your grandparents, Perin Pirekenies.” Perin gave a brief nod of acknowledgment. “Perhaps they were not very sensible, but they were brave, they did the best they could with bad luck—I respect them both. And here you are, coming to Aruendiel’s aid! Well, I am sorry that I do not have better news for you.”
“Hirizjahkinis,” said Nora, “if he is not here, where is he?”
Hirizjahkinis looked very steadily at Nora, and her image seemed to grow a shade more defined, as though she were concentrating hard. “I am sorry, little one, I was too harsh with you earlier. I did not know what to think, seeing you alive and Aruendiel gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Aruendiel was my teacher and my friend,” Hirizjahkinis said soberly. “I knew his work almost as well as I knew my own, and if I listened carefully, I could always hear the echo of his magic, even from the other side of the world. Those echoes are quiet now.”
“No,” Nora said.
“He is not here, he is not anywhere, Nora. I cannot tell you any more.” Hirizjahkinis paused, as though she were waiting for Nora to say something, and then she went on: “Perhaps he even welcomed it. He complained to me so often—he was so bitter about being alive.”
Nora looked down, scrutinizing a scrap of wood near her foot as though she would memorize every detail. She did not trust her voice. Aruendiel was bitter, yes, but there were things that he loved. Magic, his books, the forest, oatmeal and ale in the morning, his castle, his lands, even Mrs. Toristel, although he would never tell her so or why. Maybe even me, she thought numbly.
She felt as though she had been sitting in a warm house and suddenly the door was gone and cold air was hitting her face—but this was nothing, this was just the beginning, it would take time before the whole house chilled to freezing and she understood what true cold was.
“Nora, we can grieve later,” Hirizjahkinis was saying. “I must go back to this absurd battle. Imagine how annoyed Aruendiel would be if we lost.”
Nora nodded, made herself smile.
“Will you come join the fight? Perin, we could use you, I am sure.”
Perin bowed. “I will be there as soon as I can escort Lady Nora to safety.”
“Hmmf. Not too long, though. Nora is not so helpless.” The pale figure of Hirizjahkinis grew paler, and then it was gone.
There was a long silence in the room. It seemed darker than before. Nora realized that she had forgotten about the light she had conjured; the spell was running down. Dutifully she strengthened it, holding the flame away so that her face would be in shadow.
Perin cleared his throat. “Lady Nora, I honor your gri—”
“That’s enough talk,” said the ice demon. It had kept a wary distance during Hirizjahkinis’s appearance, but now it came scrabbling across the floor toward Nora. The round mouth was almost as white as the rest of its empty face. It must be very hungry. She had not fed it since early that morning. “Give me my limbs, the rest of my body, now. You promised.”
“Yes, I did,” Nora said vaguely, after a moment. She should have asked Hirizjahkinis about how to defend against ice demons. She glanced at Perin, half-apologetically. “I did promise.”
He looked at her with a question in his raised eyebrows, his sword at the ready.
“No, I have an idea,” she said. “I think it will be all right. Do you want to leave now?”
“Of course not,” Perin said, although his smile was doubtful.
“Now!” the demon said, its mouth contorting.
“All right,” Nora said. She had to pull herself together, shake off the dull heaviness that was dragging at her thoughts. Otherwise there was no chance this would work. She pulled out Dorneng’s small glass bottles from inside her cloak. They hardly seemed large enough to hold the rest of the ice demon’s body, but presumably there was some magic involved to make the liquid fit inside. Uncorking the first bottle, she poured the contents over the ice demon.
She knew it would be fast—she had seen how quickly the ice demon had reconstituted itself when it attacked Dorneng—but it was still startling to see how rapidly the ice demon’s new arm lengthened and solidified. The bottle was hardly empty before the demon was chortling and doing a sort of push-up on its newly matched limbs.
Biting her lip, Nora emptied the other bottles. The ice demon’s torso grew back, then its legs, and then—she was surprised to see—its tail. The full-sized demon was also bigger than she had expected, taller than Perin.
“Much better, much better than in those cramped bottles!” the demon said, flexing its arms.
“Good,” Nora said, stepping back. “So we’re all even. Right?”
“But I’m still so hungry,” said the demon, its tail lashing. “I’m starving. Oh, it’s terrible! I have my body back, but look how thin I am!”
“There’s a Faitoren garrison upstairs. How about eating them?” Perin suggested.
“Faitoren—faugh! They’re no good. Horrible, chewy things. No,” said the demon decisively, “give me a good, tasty human. Like you.”
Perin grasped Nora’s arm. She could sense him measuring the distance to the doorway. “You know, if you eat me, I won’t be able to give you any more poems,” Nora said.
The demon paused, as though it were thinking it over. “That’s true,” it said. “I could still eat him and the other one. I’m so hungry, though. I don’t think that will be enough.”
“I’ll give you another poem now if you want,” Nora said, racking her brains for verses. “Um, had we but world enough and time—”
“You did that one already.”
“I did, that’s right. Let’s see, just a moment—”
“Which other one?” Perin asked suddenly.
Another poem, Nora thought, but the demon said: “The other human, so close. I can almost taste it from here. A good one.”
“Another human? Here in the castle?”
“That’s what I said,” the demon retorted. “Now, come here, I’m hungry.” It made a grab for Perin.
“No, I don’t think so,” Nora said with sudden decisiveness. The ice demon suddenly toppled over, its arm still extended. It fell like a dislodged statue, petrified, static.
A few flakes of snow whirled around the room as they stared down at the unmoving form of the ice demon. Nora smiled, and in her own heart—so much coveted by the ice demon, but still free and unconsumed—she thanked Aruendiel for insisting that she begin the study of water magic, the art of making the most fickle and yet stubborn of the elements do her bidding.