The Shape-Changer's Wife (6 page)

Without waiting for the woman to finish her curse, Aubrey lifted his arms in a blind, unreasoning gesture. But Lilith's hand, urgent on his elbow, stopped him again. He looked down and saw her as through a great distance, rage blurring even her clear-cut face, and thought on some calm, inner plane of his mind,
How odd. I would kill for this woman
. And then sanity was restored, and the world collapsed quickly to its normal proportions.

“Leave it,” Lilith was saying again. “We have what we came for. Let us go now.”

He kept his eyes on her face and allowed her to turn him so he would not be tempted to look again in the direction of the woman he had very nearly spelled from existence; and he allowed Lilith to pull him by the arm from the marketplace and out of the village and back to the path that led to Glyrenden's house. And never once did he look back, or down at his feet, or forward to the path that lay before them, because all that time his eyes were fixed on her profile, since she kept her face turned from him. And neither of them spoke for that long walk back, and never once did Lilith drop her hand from his arm.

GLYRENDEN WAS GONE for two more days. During that time Aubrey attended diligently to his studies, back in the room where he and Glyrenden practiced magic, where Lilith and Orion and Arachne never came. He did not want to act as though something extraordinary had happened, so he made appearances at mealtimes and was quite jolly. It was a waste of effort, he knew. Orion gulped his food down and ran from the table; Arachne scuttled around them, bringing in and removing platters, and neither of them cared if he spoke or was silent. Lilith responded with her usual carelessness when he addressed her, and obligingly kept quiet when he did not. He was not even sure if she sensed in him the tension her presence roused. But nothing had happened, really, and Glyrenden would be back in a day or two.

Glyrenden returned in the middle of the seventh night, and Aubrey knew he was back when he opened his eyes in the morning. He could not have said why he was so certain, but he was; the air was heavier or the light passed through a different filter when Glyrenden was nearby. The first few days of the wizard's absence, Aubrey had missed him, and waited impatiently for his return. But now he found himself filled with a curious reluctance to go downstairs and join the mage at breakfast or in the teaching room.

He went downstairs late, but husband and wife were still at the kitchen table. Glyrenden had Lilith's small, slim hand in his and he was playing some complicated lover's game with her fingers. From the doorway, it looked as though he took one finger at a time and pushed it back against the knuckle as far as it would go; but Glyrenden was smiling and Lilith had no expression at all on her face, so probably that was not what he was really doing. As Aubrey walked self-consciously into the room, Glyrenden planted a kiss on the back of Lilith's hand, then dropped it.

“Ah, my apprentice,” said the wizard, his lively black eyes examining Aubrey. “You slept late. Have you been holding splendid parties and drinking all night in my absence?”

“No, indeed. I have been most studious so as to impress you upon your return.”

“But I am already impressed with your powers; surely I told you that before?”

“There is still room for improvement.”

“There is for all of us,” Glyrenden said, but Aubrey had the impression he was not entirely pleased. “Except for my beloved Lilith. She comes to us perfect.” He nodded his head graciously toward his wife. Aubrey was a little embarrassed.

“You should be a judge,” Lilith said coolly. Aubrey looked over at her, but said nothing.

Glyrenden rose to his feet. “Eat quickly, my young disciple. I shall await you in my study.”

Aubrey sat down and hastily threw together a plate of the leftovers on the table. To his surprise, Lilith stayed with him after her husband had left the room, sipping her milk and watching him eat.

“You are very eager,” she remarked, observing him chew and swallow as rapidly as he was able.

“I don't want to try his patience,” Aubrey explained around a mouthful of food. “He can have a temper, sometimes stirred by very small things.”

“Can he?” she said, amused. “I hadn't noticed.”

“I'm sure you have,” Aubrey said quietly.

“Perhaps I just don't care.”

“That's moderately obvious.”

“What else is obvious about me?”

She had never asked him for an opinion on anything before, and he thought it strange that she would choose to ask that question, at this time, with her husband not twenty yards away. “Almost nothing,” Aubrey said with a certain bitterness.

She smiled again. “You have a lot to learn.”

Aubrey was standing now, gulping his last sip of coffee and feeling about as mannered as Orion at a meal. “Yes, I think so,” he said, and left the room.

The morning's lessons did not go well. Aubrey, wondering why this should be so, laid the blame on his own confusion, his doubts about Lilith, his faint, nagging distrust of Glyrenden. These things had built a gauzy wall of resistance between him and his mentor, impossible to articulate or discuss, but somehow there. He was clumsy with the spells he knew the best, and slow to learn the new ones, and Glyrenden called a halt to the lessons before the afternoon was half over.

“You have not impressed me today, my pet,” the older wizard said. “We can hope for better luck in the morning.”

And the next morning, things did go better. Aubrey had firmly pushed from his mind all thoughts of Lilith; he had entered the study room determined to do well. He had come in upon Glyrenden creating fantastic colors in a handheld ball of light, and a rush of admiration dizzied him for a minute. Then Glyrenden turned and smiled at him and held out the kaleidoscope of flame. Aubrey took it in his hand and it was as cool as water in his palm, although the gray smoke from the tiny fire drifted into his eyes and stung them.

“Is it not pretty?” Glyrenden said. “And very simple. Come. Can you tell me what it is made of?”

So Aubrey concentrated, and he felt again the liquid icy contours against his palm, and he saw the blue and rust of the burning minerals in the flames, and he knew he held an ounce of the ocean in his hand. So he silently recited the spell that would change an object back to the thing it had once been, and the fire went out and became water and dripped through his fingers to the floor.

“The sea,” Aubrey said.

“The sea,” Glyrenden said. “Now I am a little impressed.”

That was the first thing Aubrey had ever changed from one thing to another, and he was very excited. To change an inanimate object from one state to another, even though the change returned it to its natural form, was not the most difficult part of shape-changing, but it was hard enough, and Aubrey was pleased with himself. He had read the truth behind the altered façade and he had spoken the spell of transformation properly. And Glyrenden was pleased with him.

That whole week he changed many things to many other things and back again. It was easiest, as Glyrenden showed him, to change something to something else that it resembled or would eventually become. For instance, it was a simple matter to turn a lump of coal into a diamond, a caterpillar into a great, multicolored butterfly. The essential truths and structures were in the items themselves, only to be learned and carried out.

Much more difficult, Glyrenden said, was to take something and twist it entirely from its purpose.

“But it can be done,” he said. “It is difficult and it requires great skill and it can almost never be reversed, but it can be done.”

Glyrenden kept in this room a carved wooden box filled with a string of pearls, which, he said, had belonged to a mistress he had loved long ago and now hated the very memory of. “She gave me the box and I gave her the necklace and now I have both,” he said, and the smile he gave Aubrey was touched with devilishness. “She must have thought that was unfair, but it is hard for a wizard to lose in the game of love. Or do you know that already? I wonder sometimes what it is you do and do not know.”

Glyrenden was talking as usual to try and distract Aubrey from the task at hand, which was to change the wooden box to a crystal one. Aubrey tried to block out the smooth, hypnotic voice, putting all his attention on the jewel case before him, but he could not help but hear some of Glyrenden's words.

“Love, now there is something I think you could tell me about. We are both magicians—we look on these affairs with eyes attuned to alterations. What do you think? Is love the ultimate illusion? Or is it what it seems to be—the greatest transformation of all?”

Without Aubrey's willing it, Lilith's perfect face took shape at the back of his mind. He was so surprised that Glyrenden would frame such a question, his concentration slipped. The box remained wooden and obdurate. Glyrenden smiled with a certain satisfaction.

“Do you know what an attractive boy you are? I feel certain you must, but you don't trade on it often. I sense a certain naivete beneath your earnestness and a certain shyness behind your easy charm. Let me tell you, there is more than mere shape-changing I could teach you if you had the heart for the initiation.”

Aubrey resolutely closed his mind to the sense of Glyrenden's words, though his voice was so well-trained and perfectly pitched that it was impossible to ignore it completely. He focused instead on the silky, polished grain of the cedar box, the veins in the wood that marked its age and its history, fifty years old before the lumberjack had arrived with his axe and saw and laid a charcoal marker across the line he intended to cut. Aubrey felt, as if his fingers were upon them, the oily, creamy texture of the pearls inside, piled on top of each other with a sort of sensuous abandon, the braided silk wire running through their hearts on a perfectly symmetrical plane. As if he had chopped down the tree himself, as if he had been a grain of sand that layered itself lovingly into this cocoon of white, he understood the essence of the wooden box, the string of pearls; and as he understood them, he changed them.

“—But you'll never know, will you?” Glyrenden said. “Because you haven't heard a word I've said.”

Aubrey looked up at him and grinned. He realized he was sweating across his forehead and his chest, but he felt charged with energy. “Look,” he said, “I've done it.”

Glyrenden picked up the jewel case, now a delicate structure of etched glass, and peered in at the choker of emeralds inside. “So you did,” he said. There was a note in his voice Aubrey had never heard there before, and it startled him out of his smiling, so nasty and unpleasant was it. Glyrenden opened the box and pulled out the necklet of emeralds, big and heavy and ripe and cold, and Aubrey knew that this was what had displeased him.

“I'll change them back,” he offered quickly. “I had just thought—to show you, you know—that I could do two things at once.”

“I know exactly what you were trying to show me,” Glyrenden said, and his eyes were still on the necklace. When he lifted his gaze, Aubrey recoiled in sudden alarm, so fierce and furious was that gaze; but even as Aubrey stepped back, the wizard smiled. “Most impressive again,” he said, in his customary, mellow voice.

Aubrey was not sure what to make of this. “I'll change them back,” he said again, nervously.

“Nonsense, why should you? They are quite lovely—much lovelier than the pearls, and I have no sentimental distaste for them. We shall give them to Lilith. Won't that be nice? Thus we will wipe out forever the memory of that other lover. Much better all around, don't you agree?”

But Aubrey, who had entered the room this morning vowing to trust the wizard completely, was not deceived. Glyrenden was enraged with him for the double transformation; he did not want Aubrey to have mastered that particular trick, or at least not yet. And that seemed strange to Aubrey, who had always found Cyril delighted when he forged ahead in his studies, learning by some fantastic leap of understanding the difficult tasks when he had only been taught the easy ones. Glyrenden perhaps did not want him to learn shape-changing at all. But in that case, why had he agreed to take Aubrey on to begin with?

Over dinner that night, Glyrenden presented Lilith with the necklace of emeralds. “This is something Aubrey made for you,” he told his wife, fastening it about her throat with a certain lingering care. “Is it not exquisite?”

She had bent her head forward and held her unbound hair out of his way so he could secure the clasp at the base of her neck. When she spoke, her voice was muffled from her head being held in this odd position. “Why did he make a gift for me?” she asked.

“Because you are very beautiful,” Glyrenden said. He leaned forward and kissed the exposed column of her neck just under the hairline. She did not move. He kissed her again, bringing one of his hands forward to cup around her throat, over the jewels, and hold her steady against the pressure of his mouth. His eyes were closed; his fingers tensed against her white flesh and then relaxed, tensed and relaxed, while he continued kissing her. She sat as though he had changed her into marble. Not a single strand of hair fell from the impromptu knot she was holding together with her hand; she did not shiver or draw away or respond. She seemed not to be even breathing.