The Shape-Changer's Wife (22 page)

Glyrenden spat out a single syllable of contempt. “I do not fear what others have taught you,” he said.

“It is not their education I intend to put to use,” Aubrey replied.

“Well, then,” Glyrenden said, and not another word. Almost before Aubrey realized Glyrenden had picked up the gauntlet, the battle was joined. Glyrenden was suddenly no longer a thin, restless man; he was a huge, wide-jawed wolf midway through a deadly lunge for Aubrey's throat.

But neither was Aubrey any longer a man. He had become a hawk, and his wings beat the air a full two feet above the head of the snarling predator. Then Aubrey dove, his talons curved to hook into his enemy's black eyes. But the wolf had flattened to the ground, and was a cougar, and sprang up again with a yowl, to leap for the banking hawk. Aubrey felt the thinnest imaginable scimitar of the cat's claw catch in the tip of his left wing, and on the instant, he was changed. He was a bear, bigger than Orion, with paws as huge as skillets, and he swiped at the cougar's squalling face with every nail extended.

But the cougar was gone. In its place was a rock, colorless and flinty, impervious to teeth and claws. Aubrey fell on it from above in the shape of a metal spike, six feet long and viciously pointed at the tip. A jagged line cracked down the stone's rough surface; then the two combatants both fell to the ground. Briefly they were men again, themselves, one dark and one fair. They rolled to their feet with four yards between them and measured each other with human eyes.

“So,” Glyrenden said, “you have been practicing while I was away.”

“Cyril must have told you how quickly I learn.”

“He told me. I confess I did not believe him.”

“Have you never met any wizard more skilled than you?”

“Oh, Cyril is a better illusionist, and better at calling up visions in water or glass. And there are others with talents I cannot quite match. But in this—no, my pet, I have never met my equal.”

“Turn him back,” Aubrey said again. “Turn them all back.”

Glyrenden merely smiled. His smile was so wide that his face became all teeth, his whole body a grinning face; he had grown monstrous, he was a dragon, his skin the rusty color of autumn trees and his fearsome teeth whiter than milk. The dragon growled deep in its throat and reared back, then fell forward with the power of falling rock to land in a heap upon the other wizard and crush him.

But Aubrey was too small and too agile; he had become a fly, tiny and inconsequential, riding on the dragon's back.

Dragon no more; Glyrenden melted before him to a limpid pool of water, thrashing itself into a rough sea that would drown the insect resting precariously on its surface. But the insect dashed to safe ground and grew ferociously, bursting into flame at the edge of the stormy lake. The water rose, spilling its imaginary banks to drown the blaze, but the fire was far stronger; its heat drove back every watcher in the woods.

Like dew under summer sunlight, the pool evaporated, but much more quickly; Glyrenden hovered over Aubrey as mist in the air. The fire suddenly vanished and in its place was a devastating chill, pursuing the heavy cloud of moisture that was the wizard. Glyrenden fell to the ground in a long white line of frost, diamond-backed; the crystals coalesced, and he was a snake, copper-colored and hissing. Aubrey chopped at his head as a descending axe, but the snake had become rust and clung to the iron of the blade. Aubrey changed to glass, fragile and slippery; Glyrenden shattered him as a bullet, catapulted from nowhere. But the glass was now sand, inches deep and unresisting. It smothered the cartridge with its weight.

Metamorphosis: The bullet writhed once and became a weed, able to grow in any soil, poking its shaggy head above the ridgeline of the dune. Then a great wind arose, focused and precise, whipping up the atoms of the sand to animal height, chest height, man height; then it was Aubrey again, on his feet but stooping over to snap the weed off its stalk.

But in his hand the weed changed to a bramble, thick with thorns; blood dotted Aubrey's palm in half-a-dozen places. He cursed softly, with an odd impatience, but kept his hold on the briar. The air was so still that his murmured words should have carried to all corners of the forest, but he spoke so quietly that no one understood what he said.

And then standing before him, dazed and uncertain, stood Glyrenden, who had been changed by someone else's magic from one form to another. Just an instant he stood there, fury and comprehension coming to him together, but Aubrey did not wait for his wits to regather. He snatched the kitchen knife from Arachne's hands and dove for the black-haired wizard, and he drove the entire length of the blade deep into Glyrenden's heart. There was a moment when everything in the world was utterly motionless. Then, in a slow, elegant pirouette, Glyrenden fell to the ground at Aubrey's feet.

Then it was as if every beast in the forest let loose at once with whatever howl, cry or moan its throat would carry; there was a cacophony of primitive elation that rose from all sides, miles in each direction. Trees cavorted from the force of a driving wind, or created the wind themselves, whipping their branches from side to side till they clattered and interlaced. Behind Aubrey, slowly, as if stone by stone were being pried loose and dropped, the sloppy gray mansion that was Glyrenden's house toppled to the ground and began to disintegrate.

In the clearing just in front of the decomposing porch, the five living creatures that remained tried to keep their balance on suddenly shifting ground and strained to recover their numbed and disordered senses.

Aubrey woke from what seemed like a trance to find himself still clutching the bloodied knife and staring down at the crumpled figure of the dead wizard. It was a frightening thing to watch. Glyrenden had been dead less than a minute, yet all the scavengers of the forest had already gone savagely to work on him, the ants, the maggots, the fungi and the molds. Across each wrist and ankle, and wound around the white throat, creepers twined to bind him in place. His sooty black hair had fallen back from his white face, and the shape and structure of the skull could be plainly seen under the besieged membrane of the skin. By nightfall, not a bone nor scrap of hair would be left; not a rock would mark the place the house had stood. Glyrenden and his effects would have disappeared.

Aubrey roused himself with a sudden fear, and before he even looked to check who still attended him, he raised his arms and spoke a quick spell of suspension. All movement halted within the radius of his incantation; the trees stopped their swaying, the busy ants froze, the grass lay quiet again. The bear, which had staggered to its hind feet, slumped down on its haunches. The tiny brown spider, scuttling toward the promising overhang of a felled gray brick, stopped in her sticky tracks. The young man lying on his side, horror and bewilderment on his face, settled in to sleep again. The fawn froze with one foot curled against her chest.

But Lilith had not moved at all, and she only stirred now when Aubrey came over to her.

“He's dead,” Aubrey said to her unnecessarily.

She nodded. “For how long have you meant to kill him?” she asked.

“I suppose ever since I realized what he had done, and that he would not undo it.”

She gestured toward the others. “You have freed them with his death. Is that what you thought would happen?”

“Most of a wizard's magics die with him. They tell stories of rubies turning to rocks and whole mountain ranges melting back into meadows when the death of the great sorcerer Talvis finally reversed some of his spells. But a good wizard can make magic that lasts after his death. He can speak spells that are so true they become the truth, and then only new magic can reverse them again.”

Now she looked at him, and plainly in the green eyes he saw the unspeakable longing he had only sensed before. Very simply, she said, “Can you change me?”

“I think so,” he said, “but I am not sure.”

She glanced at the body of Glyrenden, then back at Aubrey. “You changed him against his will in the heat of battle. I would think that would be a harder thing.”

Aubrey smiled with no mirth whatsoever. “My old teacher, Cyril, always told me it was easier to kill than to create,” he said. “I never understood what he meant, but the only spells he taught me were spells of creation, and they were very hard indeed. By comparison, destruction is much simpler. I have learned that for the first time today.”

“I don't understand,” she said.

Aubrey pointed to a pile of fallen stones and they both sat. He carefully refrained from touching her. “To change something from one form to another is a difficult task, and the spells to do so are among the hardest things I have ever learned. To change a thing that has been made something else by magic is even harder, and the risks are greater. It was possible that I would kill Glyrenden by changing him back to his true form, but since I planned to kill him anyway, I did not greatly care. I run the same risk if I try to change you.”

“Oh,” she said.

“But I will try if you want me to.”

“Yes,” she said. “I want you to.”

Aubrey made no reply to that, hoping she might add a word or two to soften the finality of her choice, but she said nothing else. Finally, he rose to his feet again and made his way to where the other creatures waited, stayed in place by his quickly woven command.

He placed his hand over the bear's eyes and took from him all knowledge of what it meant to be a man. He took away the memory of table and bedroom, village and fair, the rudiments of speech and the taste of cooked meat. He took away the hatred of mankind that he found in Orion's heart, but he left the sense of terror that even a man's faint scent could bring. “Go now,” he whispered, releasing the bear from the spell that held him in place. “Live well and happily, and avoid humankind for the rest of your days.”

He knelt beside the small brown spider and laid a finger fleetingly on her hunched back. There was little room in that tiny brain for memory, but Aubrey cleaned those cluttered cells as best he could of the shape and remembrance of womanhood. In her true form, she was a dainty thing, no beauty but delicately made. Aubrey stroked her back with the gentlest of motions. “Forget everything,” he murmured to her, “except your fear of men.” Then he lifted his hand and she hurried away, moving as fast as her thin, fine legs would carry her.

The fawn watched him motionlessly, her great eyes at their widest, and even under the spell of stillness, she trembled. Aubrey put his palms to either side of her pointed face and closed her eyes with his thumbs; and as he closed her eyes he wiped away all the interior images that caused her still to shiver. Almost immediately, she quieted, and almost as quickly grew frantic again. For he had not taken from her that instinctive distrust of man, and here he was, a man and holding her. He let his hands drop away and he undid his spell, and she darted away through the welcoming forest without a backward glance.

Last, Aubrey turned to the sleeping man, little more than a boy and wearing, even as he dreamed, a puzzled, frightened look. Aubrey rested his hand upon Royel's brow and pulled from his thoughts all memory of the past four days, the journey to Glyrenden's house, the awful moment of transfiguration itself, the feel of the dog's feet, the foreign smoothness of the beast's muscles, the sound of the hound's baying, so strangely liquid coming from one's own throat. He hesitated as he rummaged through Royel's mind and found image after image of Lilith, but in the end, he allowed the boy to keep those visions. Had positions been reversed, he would not have wanted Royel to destroy his own pictures of the wizard's wife; he could be that generous in return.

To replace the memories he took away, Aubrey fashioned new ones, of a fall from his horse, a dizzy day of amnesia, and two days of being nursed to health by a friendly peasant woman. The king might wonder why Glyrenden's version of the young lord's disappearance differed so radically from Royel's own, but he would soon have more to wonder about as Glyrenden's disappearance raised more questions.
And those questions,
Aubrey thought,
will never be answered.

He rose to his feet and glanced over at Lilith, who watched him still. The boy at his feet continued to sleep. “Is he dead?” Lilith wanted to know.

“No,” Aubrey said. “But I think it will be best if we are gone from here before he wakes up. I am not eager to answer any questions he may have.”

She glanced around the clearing, which was less of a clearing every moment that they stayed. Aubrey had lifted his spell of suspension, and the forest was creeping closer, almost as they stood there and watched. “He may find this a strange place to awake if he sleeps too long.”

“I have laid a protection upon him. He will not be harmed.”

“And what news of Glyrenden will he carry back to the king?”

“No news, but only the rumor that will soon be on everyone's lips—the great wizard is dead.”

She looked at the body of her slain husband with no expression on her face. “There will be no proof of that.”

“No,” said Aubrey. “But he is still dead.”

She came to her feet and looked at him directly, and he marveled again at how green her eyes were, such beautiful eyes in such a plain and such a beloved face. “And me?” she asked.

“We will walk to the King's Grove,” Aubrey said, “which is a place I have long wanted to see. And then I will leave, and you will stay, and the world will be as it was before Glyrenden was ever born.”

“Not quite the same,” she whispered, and for a moment he thought he saw the faintest glitter of tears in her eyes. “For you will remember and use the spells he taught you. And I—I will live a long time with an alien memory in my heart.”