The Smoke-Scented Girl (11 page)

“You have a flattering tongue, Mr. Faranter,”
she said, in a voice that said she didn’t much care for his
flattering tongue. The smile dropped from Piercy’s face. Evon felt
sorry for him. Piercy flirted with women the way he breathed:
unconsciously, but with sincerity, and courtship came as naturally
to him as magic did to Evon. He did it so well that women never
seemed to mind that his flirtations never led anywhere serious.
Miss Haylter, for her part, didn’t seem to realize she’d hurt his
feelings. She turned away from Evon and looked out across the
fields toward the farmhouse. “There’s no smoke coming from that
house,” she said.

“Are you sure?” Evon said.

“I’m familiar with fire,” she said, once
again emotionless. “I think there’s no one home.”

“Let us by all means find out,” Piercy said,
rallying, and they went forward until they found a narrow track
that led across the fields toward the small house. Miss Haylter’s
assessment was correct; no smoke rose from the small chimney, and
no one moved between the house and its outbuildings. As they neared
the farmhouse, they saw missing shingles, a broken step, and
windows missing their glass. “I don’t think this has been inhabited
for many years,” Piercy said, dismounting at the foot of the three
steps leading to the narrow porch. He pushed open the door with the
head of his walking stick and stuck his head inside. “Definitely
uninhabited,” he said, crossing the threshold and letting the
weathered door, with its trace of yellow paint, swing shut behind
him.

Miss Haylter made as if to follow him, but
Evon restrained her. “Piercy will make sure it’s safe,” he told
her. “An abandoned house like this, there might be anything
residing here now. Animals, probably, but also drifters. Piercy
will take care of whatever he finds.”

“You’re good friends.”

“The best.”

She regarded him for a moment. “You’re
lucky,” she said.

Piercy put his head out through one of the
empty windows and said, “Come inside. I think this may meet your
needs admirably, Lore.”

Evon held the door politely for Miss Haylter,
then shut it behind himself. With the light fading behind the
clouds outside, the interior was almost black. Evon sent a light
bobbing to the ceiling to cast a soft glow over the three of them
and the small room they stood in. The farmhouse’s front room was
bare of furnishings, though there were dark marks on the wall where
pictures had hung. The unvarnished floorboards, pale and uneven,
were blackened from soot and sparks from the brick fireplace
against the far wall. Evon looked through the inner door to the
next room, which was a small kitchen containing only an old
cast-iron stove that sagged into the floor, its chimney dangling
loose. Light came in from the hole in the ceiling where the chimney
had once exited. Another door at the far side of the kitchen hung
by its lower hinge, swinging gently.

“That’s merely an empty room,” Piercy said.
“Probably someone’s bedroom once.”

“We really only need this front room, though
I wish we had a chair or something.” Evon looked at Miss Haylter,
who gave him a guarded look. He wished he knew what she was
thinking. It looked bad, objectively: she’d gone off with two
strange men, who now had her alone in a place where no one would
hear her if she screamed, with no way to defend herself against
anything they had in mind. Either she was a total innocent, or she
genuinely didn’t care what happened to her. “Do you mind sitting on
the floor, Miss Haylter?” he asked. She looked even more skeptical,
but lowered herself to sit near the front door with her legs
crossed. Evon couldn’t tell if she was positioning herself to flee,
but guessed that her skirts, while not as full as Odelia’s, would
still hamper her getting to her feet quickly. She folded her hands
in her lap and looked up at him, waiting.

“Stand over there, would you?” Evon said to
Piercy, then squatted in front of Miss Haylter. “The spell on you
is complex,” he told her, “and I’m just going to look at it at
first, to see what I can learn. It won’t hurt.”

Her eyes had regained that dead look she’d
worn before, but Evon noticed that the knuckles of her clasped
hands were white, the tendons straining against the skin, and he
felt relieved, again, that she wasn’t entirely indifferent to her
fate. The idea that someone so young and beautiful—and she
was
beautiful, he now had time to realize, despite the
shadows under her eyes and the strange, poreless appearance of her
skin—that someone like her could have given up hope so completely
seemed sickeningly wrong to him and left him with a renewed
determination to free her from this spell.

He removed his gloves, took out his quizzing
glass and cast the revelation spell. Once again the flowing,
fluttering blue ribbons of magic appeared, their color and
intensity as muted as they’d been when he’d looked at them back in
their inn room. When he’d seen them in Coreth, at the site of
Fullanter’s death, they’d been so brilliant he could barely endure
looking at them. He already knew, from what Miss Haylter said, that
the spell had a dormant phase, but this suggested that the spell
actually exhausted itself when it was triggered. Why its
reactivation was variable, he didn’t know, but that question could
wait.

His calves burned from crouching so long, so
he sat cross-legged in front of Miss Haylter, holding his quizzing
glass about seven inches from her heart. As he turned the glass,
she inhaled sharply and said, “Is that...does it really look like
that?” He looked up to see her craning her neck to see through the
lens. With his free hand, he took one of hers and brought it up to
grasp the glass.

“It does, and it doesn’t,” he said, as she
ran the glass across her legs and up her arm. “Magic isn’t
something we can comprehend in its...I suppose you could say its
natural state. The runes and command words we use are a sort of
compromise between our limited perception and the vast
incomprehensibility that is magic.
Epiria
reveals the
structure of spells, but in a form that we can make sense of.”

“Does it look different from other
spells?”

“Very. May I?” He accepted the glass from her
and held it in a position about midway between their bodies. “It
keeps moving, for one thing, and it’s also covered in runes. A rune
is supposed to be a focal point that gives shape to a spell, not
part of the magic itself. I’ve never heard of anything like it.
Would you mind being quiet for a moment? I need to concentrate on
this. But I’d be happy to answer any questions you have, later. You
have a perfect right to know what this thing is about.”

She nodded, and Evon went back to studying
the spell. The movement wasn’t random, he realized, but he was
damned if he could identify the pattern. He felt as if he ought to
recognize it, but the longer he stared at the fluid magic, the
blurrier his vision got. What he needed was to see it all at once,
not just through the two-inch-diameter lens.

He stood and dug in his pocket for his chalk.
“No, don’t get up, I’m going to try something else,” he said
absently. He glanced at Piercy, whose face was so expressionless it
had to be on purpose. “What?” he said.

“You have that look again,” Piercy said.

“What look?”

“The mad genius look. Should Miss Haylter and
I seek shelter?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Just because I’m trying
something I’ve only ever read about in books.” He drew a large,
lopsided circle around Miss Haylter and began chalking runes inside
it. “This will extend the range of
epiria
to cover your
entire body at once,” he told her. “It should be a better
perspective. Just stay still.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her
clasp her hands together in her lap again, once more clenching them
tight. He stopped mid-rune and went to kneel in front of her,
careful not to smudge the circle. “I apologize,” he said. “Piercy
will tell you I have a regrettable habit of getting too caught up
in my work. I forgot that this is personal for you.”

Hazel eyes met his with that disconcerting
gaze. “I have nothing to lose,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I trust
you? After all, I couldn’t kill you; that should count for
something.” To his astonishment, a smile touched her lips, just
briefly, but long enough that it transformed her face and made him
wonder what he could do to make it return.
Get her free from
this spell, of course
.

“I hope to be worthy of your trust,” he said,
and finished chalking runes on the uneven floorboards. He once
again seated himself cross-legged in front of her, put the chalk
away and dusted his hands on his trouser legs. He held his quizzing
glass in front of him, tilted it so the runes scratched on its rim
lined up with the ones chalked on the floor, and pictured it
enormous, a lens five feet in diameter, rim the thickness of his
upper arm. With that image firmly in mind, he said,
“Epiria.
”

The writhing blue ribbons of the spell
blossomed into full view. They twisted and rolled around Miss
Haylter’s body, making her look like a statue wreathed in tendrils
of blue smoke. Miss Haylter sat unmoving except for her eyes, which
darted in every direction as if she couldn’t decide which
spell-ribbon to follow.

“Do you see a pattern?” Evon asked Piercy,
who left his position by the wall to stand next to where Evon sat
on the ground.

“I don’t. But it feels as if I should. It
seems very familiar.”

“That was my sense as well.” Evon stood,
focused on a single twisting ribbon and watched it flow slowly down
Miss Haylter’s left arm and back up again, around her chest and
back to her arm again. It wasn’t a continuous circle, but there was
a clear sense that it was following a path dictated by the shape of
the spell. Up, down, around and back. “It’s a circulatory system,”
he said, absently watching the ribbon flow through its path. “It
mirrors Miss Haylter’s own body, not perfectly, but close
enough.”

“By the Twins, you’re right,” Piercy
exclaimed. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s how it stays
bound to her. You. Excuse me. This spell is damned—excuse me, Miss
Haylter—very complex, if it can have an entire aspect devoted to
staying connected to you.”

“So you can’t free me.”

“I didn’t say that.” He leaned in to examine
one of the spell-ribbons more closely and once again it moved just
far enough away that the black runes thronging it remained
indistinct. The spell was definitely reacting to his presence,
which spoke to a level of awareness that worried him. He tried,
absurdly, to take hold of one of the strands, but it was as
incorporeal as any other spell and didn’t even bother moving out of
the way of his hand. Evon felt he was being taunted. Irritably, he
clenched one fist, slapped his open palm over it, and growled,
“
Desini cucurri.”

The entire spell froze, all movement ceasing
in an instant. Evon’s mouth dropped open. “Good Gods,” Piercy said
weakly, “did you break it?”

“Should it not do that?” Miss Haylter
asked.

“Ah....” Evon looked down at Miss Haylter,
half-expecting to see her go blue and begin choking due to lack of
blood circulation. She seemed only curious and a little uncertain.
“Do you feel any pain? Any discomfort or unusual sensations?”

“I feel just the same,” she said, flexing her
fingers. “A little cold, though I don’t think it’s a good idea to
light a fire in here. That chimney is probably full of smuts and
birds’ nests.”

“What did you do, Evon?” Piercy asked. He
came forward and leaned in so his nose was inches away from one of
the unmoving spell-ribbons.

“Lost my temper, just a little,” Evon said.
“I think this spell is sentient.” He mirrored Piercy’s gesture
until he was close enough to make out the tiny black runes. They
quivered with energy, their edges blurred, but Evon could still
make them out. His heart sank. “They don’t mean anything,” he said.
“I recognize some of the runes, but they don’t trace out any spell
I’m familiar with. They’re more like fragments of spells, but...I’m
thinking about this the wrong way.” He closed his eyes and tried to
think about something else, give his subconscious time to work out
the solution. “How long since the first time you felt the pull,
Miss Haylter?” he asked.

“Almost a year ago,” she said, her voice once
again expressionless. It was the sound, he was beginning to
realize, her voice took on every time she spoke about the spell.
“And I’ve felt compelled to...eleven times now.”

“We established that there’s no pattern to
the...incidents, they aren’t evenly spaced geographically or
temporally.”

“That’s right.”

“Does this have a point, Evon?” Piercy
said.

“I’m just lining up everything we’ve learned.
I beg your pardon if this is painful, Miss Haylter.”

“No more painful than being pulled apart and
put back together again.”

Evon’s eyes flew open. “Are you speaking
literally?”

She shrugged. “It’s how it feels to me. The
fire destroys me the way it does my victim. And then I come back
together.” Her tone was flatter than ever.

Evon leaned over and traced the curve of one
of the spell-ribbons. “They aren’t fragments,” he said, “they’re
links in a chain. No, a chain mesh. Each link is broken and it
makes a spell when it comes together with another link, or several
links. They break and reform dozens of times a minute. This is
extraordinary
. Miss Haylter, the—” He saw her face. “I beg
your pardon,” he said more quietly, “I’m being insensitive
again.”

“I’m starting to think you might be able to
remove this thing from me,” she said with that tiny, fleeting
smile. “Be as insensitive as you like.”

Evon felt his cheeks redden. “Well, um, it’s
just that the ribbons, Miss Haylter, they are how the
spell...remembers you. It’s how it’s able to...reassemble you
after...it destroys you. And the runes are...I’m not exactly sure
yet, they seem to do so many things, but I imagine they decide
where you should go and who you should find, and how to know when
you’ve reached your destination to trigger the event. If I could
read the runes more completely, I could be more specific. Whoever
invented this spell created hundreds of new runes to do it, which
is simply unheard of. Are you certain you can’t remember this being
done to you? A loss of time, perhaps, or an unexpectedly long
sleep, or an encounter with a stranger?”