The Bone Doll's Twin

by Lynn Flewelling

  It was Lhel.

  She was wrapped in a long fur robe, her hair loose over her shoulders. Both boys dismounted and went to her, clasping her hands in greeting. Arkoniel did not have the power to hear their words at such a distance, but he could see their faces clearly enough. This was not a meeting of strangers.

  The witch smiled fondly as she clasped hands with Ki. Tobin said something to her and she reached to touch his cold-reddened cheek.

  Arkoniel shuddered, remembering those same fingers cutting, stitching, weaving souls together.

  They talked for a few moments, then the boys mounted again and continued homeward. Arkoniel kept the sighting on the witch, but he could already feel the power of the spell waning. He pressed his fingers into his eyelids, straining to keep her in sight as his ability to focus slowly faded.

  Lhel remained in the road, watching them ride away. He would have to break it off soon, but he wanted desperately to see where she would go. Just before he gave up, she raised her head slightly, perhaps looking up at the rising moon. For an instant she seemed to look directly at him.

  Arkoniel knew he’d held the vision too long. Suddenly he was on his knees under the window, head pounding, and colored sparks dancing dizzily before his eyes. When the worst of it had passed, he pulled himself up and hurried down to the stables for his horse. Not bothering with a saddle, he climbed astride the sorrel and galloped up the road.

  As he rode, he had time to wonder at the pounding of his heart and the furious sense of urgency that drove him on. He knew beyond all doubt that Lhel would not harm the children. What’s more, he’d seen them part. Yet still he urged his horse on, desperate to find them—

  Her.

  And why not? he asked himself. She held secrets to magic he had only dreamed of. Iya wanted him to learn from her, and how could he do that without confronting her?

  And why would she still be there, standing in the cold road with night coming on?

  Tobin and Ki came around a bend and reined in to greet him. He pulled his gelding around so hard he had to cling to its mane to keep his seat.

  “You met a woman on the road. What did she say to you?” He was surprised at how harshly the words came out. Ki shifted uneasily in the saddle, not looking at him. Tobin met his gaze squarely and shrugged.

  “Lhel says she’s getting tired of waiting for you,” he replied, and for a moment he was again the dark, strange child Arkoniel had met that summer day. More than that; in the failing light, eyes shadowed to near black, he looked eerily like his demon twin. The sight sent a shiver up Arkoniel’s back. Tobin pointed back up the road. “She says for you to hurry. She won’t wait much longer.”

  Lhel. She. Tobin was speaking of someone he knew, not a stranger encountered by chance on the road.

  Lhel was waiting for him, would not wait much longer.

  “You’d best get home,” he told them, and galloped on. He grasped for words to greet her with and found only demands. Where had she been all these months? What had she said to the child? But more than that, what magic had she used the first time she’d come to Arkoniel in the forest?

  He cursed himself for not noting any landmarks in his vision, but in the end it didn’t matter. A mile or so on and there she was, still standing in the road just as he’d last seen her, her shadow lying blue on the snow. The failing light softened her features, making her look like a young girl lost in the forest.

  The sight drove every question from his mind. He reined his horse in and slid down to face her. Her smell came to him, hot on the cold air. It took away his voice and pulled a powerful ache of longing through him. She reached to touch his cheek, just as she had with Tobin, and the caress sent a jolt of raw desire through him, making it hurt to breathe. All he could think to do was to reach out for her, pull her close, and crush her warm body against his. She moaned softly as she pressed against him, rubbing a hard thigh against the answering hardness between his legs.

  Thought fled, leaving only sensation and instinct. She must have guided him, he realized later, but at that moment he seemed to be moving in a dream filled with hands and warm lips moving over his skin. He wanted to resist, to summon the rectitude that had guided his life to this point, but all he could think of now was Iya’s oblique permission to do exactly this; give Lhel what she wanted in return for the promise of knowledge.

  Lhel wasted no time on niceties. Pulling him down on top of the fur robe, she dragged her skirt up to her waist. He fumbled his tunic out of the way, then he was falling onto her, into her, and she was pulling him deeper, so deep that he could scarely comprehend the hot grip of her body around his before he felt something like lightning strike him, pulling a raw cry of amazement from his throat. She shoved him over onto his back, and he felt the soft snow cradle him as she rode him beneath the first stars of evening. Head thrown back, she keened wildly, clenching his member with whatever strange inner muscles women possessed. Lightning struck again, harder and more consuming this time, and Arkoniel went blind, listening to his own cries and hers echoing through the forest like wolf song.

  Then he was gulping air, too stunned to move. She leaned forward and kissed his cheeks, eyelids, and lips. His throat was sore, his body cold, and their mingled fluids were trickling in a chilly, ticklish stream over his balls. He couldn’t have stirred if a whole regiment of cavalry had come thundering down the road at them. His horse nickered softly nearby, as if amused.

  Lhel sat back and took his hand. Pressing it to one full breast through her rough dress, she grinned down at him. “Make spell for me, Orëska.”

  He goggled stupidly up at her. “What?”

  She kneaded his fingers into her firm, pliant flesh and her grin widened. “Make a magic for me.”

  The stars caught his eye again and he whispered a spell in their honor. A point of brilliant white light sprang to life above them, radiant as a star itself. The sheer beauty of it made him laugh. He spun the light into a larger sphere, then split it into a thousand sparkling shards and placed them in her hair like a wreath of frost and diamonds. Bathed in their ethereal light, Lhel looked like a wild spirit of the night masquerading in rags. As if reading his thoughts on his face, she grasped the neck of her dress and tore it down the front, revealing again the marks of power that covered her body. Arkoniel touched them reverently, tracing spirals, whorls, and crescents, then shyly reached down to where their bodies were still joined, flesh to flesh.

  “You were right. Iya tried to tell me …” he managed at last, caught between wonder and betrayal. “It was all a lie, that this robs a wizard of power.” He raised his hand to the crown of light glowing in her hair. “I’ve never made anything so beautiful.”

  Lhel took his hand again and pressed it to her heart. “Not lies for all, Orëska. Some can’t serve the Goddess. But you? What you feel here …” She tapped his chest with her free hand. “That’s what you make here.” She touched his forehead. “Iya thinks this. She tried tell you.”

  “You heard us talking that day?”

  “I hear a lot. See a lot. See you sleep with longing in your raluk.” She squeezed him inside of her and gave him a playful wink. “I try send my words to you in dreams, but you stubborn one! Why you make me send children after you with all that heat in you?”

  Arkoniel stared up at the sky, trying to summon the fear that had beset him less than an hour earlier. How had he come to be here, sated and laughing, without any memory of decision or consent? “Did you make me—?”

  Lhel shrugged. “Can’t make if desire don’t be in you. Wasn’t, that first time in the mud place. Now it is; I just call it out.”

  “But you could have had me easily in the—the ‘mud place’!” Yet even as he said it, Arkoniel knew that something important had shifted in himself since that day at the marsh.

  “I don’t take,” she said softly. “You give.”

  “But I didn’t have any intention of—of—” He gestured weakly. “Of any of this until the moment I got here!”r />
  “You did. In here.” Lhel caught one of the light points on her fingertip and placed it on his chest. “Heart don’t always tell head. But body know. You learn that.”

  “Yes, I learn that,” Arkoniel agreed, surrendering to her logic.

  Lhel rolled off him and stood up. Her feet were bound up with rags and strips of bark but she showed no sign of minding the cold. Pulling the torn dress and the robe around her, she said, “Too much in they head, you Orëskas. That why you need me for the shaimari anan. Why you need me put those keesas’ shaimari back right.”

  “You’ll teach me?”

  Lhel looked down at him and raised an eyebrow. “You keep pay?”

  Arkoniel got up and straightened his own clothing. “By the Four, yes, if that’s your price. But can’t you come to the keep?”

  Lhel shook her head. “No, Iya right in that. I seen your king, read his heart. Nobody knows, is better.”

  Sudden doubt leeched up through Arkoniel’s buoyant mood. “I saw you speak to Tobin and Ki in the road. They know you.”

  “Keesas knows not to say.”

  “You put Ki in danger, you know, revealing too much.”

  Lhel shrugged. “You don’t be worry about Ki. Goddess send him, too.”

  This seemed to be the foundation of her reasoning. “She’s a busy lady, your goddess.”

  Lhel folded her arms and stared at him until he felt uncomfortable, then turned abruptly and motioned for him to follow.

  “Where are we going?”

  A chuckle floated back to him as she melted into the shadow of the trees. “You want have all lessons in the road, Orëska?”

  With a resigned sigh, Arkoniel reached for his horse’s lead rein and followed her on foot.

  Wizards saw well in the dark, and apparently so did witches. Lhel strode confidently through the trees with no path to guide her. Humming to herself, she seemed almost to dance ahead of him, brushing trees and stones with her hands as she went. Without the stars to sight by, Arkoniel soon lost track of the way and hurried to keep up with her.

  She stopped at last under an enormous oak.

  “Cama!” she said aloud, and a soft glow issued from an opening in its side.

  Following her inside, he found himself in a comfortable shelter. A light similar to the one he’d conjured glowed softly some twenty feet overhead where the cleft in the oak ended. Iya and he had found shelters like this in their travels; ancient oaks often split without dying. Lhel had made herself nicely at home here. A fur-covered pallet lay against the far wall beside a rumpled pile of what might be clothing; there were a few pots and baskets, and the fire pit and upper walls of the tree were well blackened with smoke. Even so, he could not imagine living all these years in such a place.

  Lhel pulled a deer hide across the entrance, then squatted by the firepit to strike a flame in the tinder stacked ready there.

  “Here, a gift.” Arkoniel took a small pouch of firechips from his tunic and showed her how to use them. Flames licked up and she fed the little blaze from a pile of twigs and broken branches next to it.

  She looked into the pouch and smiled. “Is good.”

  “How have you survived here?” he asked, hunkering down beside her. In this light he could see how chapped her face and hands were, and the thick calluses and chilblains on her dirty bare feet under the wrappings.

  Lhel looked at him over the fire. The flickering light sank deep shadows into the lines around her mouth and struck reddish glints in the silver streaks in her hair. As they’d rutted wildly in the road, she’d seemed so young; here she looked ancient as a goddess herself.

  “This good place,” she said, shrugging out of the cloak and letting the torn top of her dress slide off her shoulders to hang loose about her waist. Her full breasts glowed in the firelight, showing no sign of the symbols he’d seen there before. She reached into a basket and offered him a strip of dried meat. Arkoniel took it, still staring at her body as she found more food and began to eat. She was as filthy as ever, and had lost some teeth over the years. Those she had left were stained and worn. Yet as she turned to grin at him, she was still handsome, still deeply alluring….

  Without thinking, he leaned forward to kiss her shoulder, inhaling her odor and wanting her again. “How do you make me feel like this?” he whispered, genuinely mystified.

  “How many year you be?” she asked around a mouthful of wizened caneberries.

  Arkoniel had to stop and think. “Thirty-one,” he said at last. It was nearly a life’s span for some men; for a wizard he was hardly out of his youth.

  Lhel raised her eyebrows in mocking surprise. “Thirty-one year no woman and now you don’t know why you get hard?” She snorted and reached under his tunic to cradle his genitals in her hand. “You got power here!” Taking her hand away, she touched his belly, chest, throat, and brow. “Got power all places. Some can use. You can.”

  “And you’ll teach me?”

  “Some. For the keesa.”

  Arkoniel moved closer until his leg was pressed to hers. “That day at the marsh I saw you do something that I want to learn. I was on the road, and you appeared—”

  Lhel smiled slyly and made a pinching motion with thumb and forefinger. “I see you with your krabol.”

  Arkoniel stared at her a moment, then grinned sheepishly as he interpreted the hand gesture. “With the beans, you mean!”

  “Beans.” She repeated the word. “You think you move them—” Another less intelligible gesture, but he thought he understood.

  “You’ve seen me trying to move them about. But how?”

  Lhel held up her left hand and made a circle with thumb and forefinger. Rattling off a quick gabble of sounds that didn’t quite seem to be words, she pursed her lips and blew through her fingers. When she took her hand away Arkoniel saw a small black hole in the air in front of them, no bigger than a horse’s eye.

  “Look,” she offered.

  Leaning over, Arkoniel peered into the spy hole and found himself looking at Tobin and Ki. They were sitting on the floor beside the toy city and Tobin was trying to teach Ki to carve. “Incredible!”

  Lhel elbowed him sharply and closed the hole with a wave of her hand, but not before Arkoniel glimpsed two startled faces look up as one, trying to find the source of the voice that must have come out of thin air.

  “I forgot that I could hear you through it, too,” Arkoniel exclaimed. “By the Light, it is a tunnel in the air!”

  “What ‘tunnel’?” asked Lhel.

  When Arkoniel tried to explain, she shook her head. “No, it is—” She mimed what he finally understood to be opening a shuttered window. “Like that, with two side—” She pressed her palms tightly together.

  Arkoniel pondered this with growing excitement. If a voice could go through so easily, then surely an object, or even a person, could as well? But when he tried to explain this to Lhel her eyes widened in alarm.

  “No!” she warned, shaking his arm for emphasis. Placing her other hand on his brow, she spoke in his mind, as she had that day at the marsh. No solid thing that goes into a seeing window comes out again, on the other side or anywhere else. They swallow up whatever is put into them.

  “Teach me,” he said aloud.

  Lhel took her hands away and shook her head. “Not yet. Other things more needful. You don’t be knowing enough.”

  Arkoniel sat back on his heels, trying to swallow his disappointment. It was not the magic he’d hoped for, but one that would take him closer to his goal than anything else he knew of. He would bide his time. “What must I be knowing, then?”

  Lhel produced a bone needle from somewhere in her skirts. She held it up for him to see, then pricked the pad of her thumb and squeezed out a bright red droplet. “First you learn the power of this, and flesh, and bone, and the dead.”

  “Necromancy?” Was he so blinded by a single rut that he’d forgotten the darker roots of her magic?

  Lhel gazed at him with unfathomable
black eyes, and again she looked ancient and powerful. “This word I know. Your people call us this when you drive us out of lands that be ours. You wrong.”

  “But it’s blood magic—”

  “Yes, but not evil. Necromancy is—” She struggled with the language. “Most worse dirty thing.”

  “Abomination,” Arkoniel offered.

  “Yes, abomination. But not this.” She squeezed out another drop and smeared it across her palm. “You have blood, flesh. I have. All people. No evil. Power. Evil come from heart, not blood.”

  Arkoniel stared at her palm, watching the thin smear dry into the lines of her palm. What she’d said went against everything he’d ever been taught as a Skalan in his father’s house and as a wizard. Yet sitting here with this woman, feeling the aura of power that surrounded her, he sensed no evil in her. He thought of Tobin and the demon, and the lengths to which Lhel had gone to make things as right as she could. Grudgingly, fearfully, he listened to his heart and guessed that she spoke the truth.

  Had he been gifted with future sight, he would have seen the course of Skalan and Orëska history shift ever so subtly in that moment of uneasy realization.

  Chapter 30

  Arkoniel found himself in the dual roles of teacher and pupil that winter, instructing his reluctant young charges each morning, then seeking out Lhel for his own lessons.

  Tharin proved a stout ally in the former, for he refused to begin weapons practice until both boys had made an acceptable effort at Arkoniel’s lessons. This system met with some resistance at first, but as Tobin finally mastered his letters and could read a little, he suddenly developed a taste for learning. His enthusiasm increased when Arkoniel offered to teach him to draw. As far as Arkoniel could tell, it was the only skill he possessed that impressed Tobin.

  Ki still fidgeted and sighed a great deal, but Arkoniel saw improvements there, too, though he knew better than to flatter himself as to the reason. For Ki, the sun rose and set on Tobin and he would strive at any task his companion set value on. Whatever the young prince chose to apply himself to, Ki threw himself into with a will.