The Shape-Changer's Wife

by Sharon Shinn

  “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.

  Aubrey watched though he did not want to watch, and he felt a small stone form in his stomach and make a deadweight. The scene did not last more than three minutes but it seemed to go on for hours, the man drunk on the flavor of the woman’s skin, the woman as still as a statue in his grip. Nothing had ever repulsed Aubrey so much in his life and he did not know why this should be so; but while the wizard kissed his wife he could not look away. The knot in his belly was so painful that he knew it would be days before it went away.

  Four

  GLYRENDEN WAS HOME three days and then abruptly gone. As soon as Aubrey woke in the morning, he knew by his curious sense of lightheartedness that the wizard was no longer in the house. He did not want to analyze his relief; he washed and dress
ed himself rapidly, all the while resolutely resisting the impulse to think.

  He came down to breakfast to find Orion and Arachne involved in a near-silent dispute, while Lilith watched disinterestedly from a chair at the table. Arachne was gesticulating and chattering in her strange, furious way; Orion was shaking his head and grunting out a clear, stubborn negative.

  “What’s wrong?” Aubrey asked, sliding into the chair opposite Lilith’s and helping himself to a plate of food.

  “We need supplies and Orion does not want to go to town.”

  “Haven’t we been through this before?”

  “Often.”

  Aubrey ate his meal, watching. Arachne, for all her incoherence, could be very insistent: She held out the empty canisters of rice and flour and stamped her foot on the stone floor in rage. Orion huddled in a far corner and covered his ears with his hands. “No,” he grunted. “No. No. No.”

  When this diversion had gone on as long as he could bear, Aubrey looked over at Lilith with his eyebrows raised. She too shook her head. “I’m not going,” she said. “You can.”

  Aubrey hesitated, shrugged and stood up. “I’d just as soon not starve to death,” he said. “Orion! On your feet, man. I’ll go with you.”

  Within a few minutes, the two men were on their way. Aubrey was certain they made an odd pair, he with his frayed cloak and easy stride and blond hair; Orion a good foot taller, hairy as a beast, moving with his disjointed, lumbering stride. Orion was quiet, though, padding through the forest on soundless feet; Aubrey began to see how the big man could be such an efficient hunter. His head swiveled constantly from side to side, reacting to sounds Aubrey scarcely heard—a bird’s cry, the rustling of a deer, the rattle of a pine tree. Orion seemed not so much nervous as alert, keening the breeze for every aroma and noise it could bring to him. Aubrey had to admit he was impressed.

  When they arrived in town, however, Orion definitely exhibited signs of anxiety. As Aubrey led him through the market stalls, the big man crowded up behind him. Aubrey could feel him jerking away from sudden voices and heard him whimper once for some unfathomable reason. The wizard was torn between irritation and compassion. He wondered how Glyrenden had ever been able to force Orion to come to town on his own.

  “And a fifteen-pound bag of flour, and a ten-pound bag of sugar, and one of those big sacks of potatoes—yes, that size,” Aubrey said to the young girl waiting on him. “No, I have a carrying sack, thank you very much.”

  He took his purchases and turned, practically into Orion’s arms. “You must stand back from me, just an inch or two,” Aubrey said, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice. “Here, load this up, can you? Getting too heavy for you yet?”

  Orion hefted the two large burlap bags they had filled already. Aubrey carried a third one over his shoulder. “Heavy,” Orion said.

  “Too heavy? Can you carry it back?”

  “I can carry.”

  “Good. We still need fruit—ah, yes, there’s a stand down at the other end.” The crowd had grown thicker between stalls, and Aubrey wanted to get this done and over with. “Look. See this nice place here?” The wizard pushed the servant over to a circular wooden bench built around an oak tree. “You sit here. You stay here. I’ll be back in a moment or two. You don’t have to talk to anyone, or do anything. Just wait. All right?”

  “You hurry,” Orion said in his guttural voice.

  “I will. I’m just going down there. I’ll be right back.”

  And Aubrey hurried off, slipping through the crowd much more quickly than he could have with Orion at his heels. Unfortunately, there were three women ahead of him at the fruit-seller’s stall, so it was twenty minutes or more before he was able to pick out the goods he wanted. “Apples—and oranges—and raisins—and pomegranates,” he rattled off, choosing the items his eye fell on first. “Lemons. Wild grapes.”

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Yes—plenty, thank you very much.”

  He had just laid his coins in the farmer’s outstretched hand when a furious commotion from behind caused him to spin around. He knew before his eyes even located the disturbance that something had happened to Orion; and he could tell, by the unruly mob forming around the oak tree, that he was right. But the press of people was too thick. He could not see what had happened.

  “Demons devour us,” he muttered (one of the oaths he had stopped using when Cyril frowned upon profanity) and snatched up his bundles. He was less gentle on this trip through the packed marketplace, using his elbows and hips to bump people out of the way. The shouts from the oak tree grew louder and more ragged, and Aubrey was not the only one moving in that direction. But when a high, childish, terrified shriek stabbed through the air, Aubrey dropped his packages, made his hands into weapons, and tore through the crowd.

  What he found under the oak tree for a moment petrified him. Orion stood on the bench, his arms raised and his great palms spread open, ready to slap downward. Three men stood before him, one brandishing a pitchfork, one holding a large curved hunting knife, and the third one swinging a length of barbed chain. On the ground about four yards from the bench, a young boy lay motionless and bloody. Two women bent over him; one was sobbing. The rest of the crowd hung back, away from the wild man’s overt menace, but there were plenty of calls for violence and justice.

  “Kill him, Joe! Drive it home.”

  “Did you see? He threw that boy down, like to broke his neck.”

  “No better than an animal! An animal!”

  Aubrey shoved himself between the man with the knife and his partner with the chain and leapt up to the bench beside Orion. Instantly, he felt the big man’s terror subside a little.

  “What’s going on here?” Aubrey demanded—as if he couldn’t tell, as if he couldn’t guess. He made his voice as stern and displeased as possible. “What’s going on?”

  “That crazy man knocked Kendal in the head—may have killed him!” the man with the pitchfork called back. “You get outta here. None of your mix.”

  “This man is under my protection,” Aubrey said, not yielding his place. “Nobody here touches him.”

  Twenty or more voices cried out a negative response to that. Aubrey made his own words louder. “I want to know what happened,” he said. “Why did he try to hurt the boy? What did the boy do to him?”

  “Didn’t do nothing! Kendal was just standing there—”

  “That crazy man slammed him against the ground—”

  “Kendal was just standing there—”

  Aubrey turned his head slightly so he could speak to Orion. “What happened? Why did you hit that boy?”

  “Hit me,” Orion said emphatically. “With rocks. Hit me. Lots of rocks.”

  Aubrey quickly glanced down. There were a handful of common gray rocks lying around the perimeter of the bench, but then, the whole street was littered with them; hard to prove these had been thrown at anybody.

  “That’s all?”

  “And hit me. With a stick.”

  Indeed, there was a long thin ash branch lying half a foot from the injured boy’s head. Aubrey raised his voice again.

  “Did anyone see what happened? Orion claims that the boy was teasing him—throwing rocks and such.”

  “Well, and no wonder if he was!” a male voice shouted back. “That big old half-wit doesn’t belong here! Scares everybody, he does! He’s mean—and he’s strange—”

  “That doesn’t justify abusing him,” Aubrey said, but no one heard him; others had taken up young Kendal’s case.

  “That wizard’s got no reason bringing such odd creatures here, this crazy man and that woman—”

  “Boy’s got a right to come to town, see the market—”

  “Kendal was just standing there—”

  “Kendal never did a thing to this animal—”

  Suddenly a new voice made itself heard over the general muttering of mob anger. “Kendal did so throw rocks at this man—I saw him and so did you,
” said the speaker briskly. Aubrey, quickly locating her with his eyes, recognized her as the tavernkeeper’s daughter. “Poked him with a stick, too—here, this one. I saw him do it. No wonder the poor simple man struck him. I’d like to hit Kendal myself most days of the week.”

  A few of the raised voices denounced her now, but with a little less conviction. She had been kneeling beside Kendal, but now she was on her feet, hands on her hips and a fierce expression on her face. “You all just go on now, do your marketing,” she said. “The half-wit isn’t going to hurt anybody else.”

  “Yeah, well, what about Kendal?” someone called out, and the cry was taken up by others. “What about Kendal? How bad is Kendal?”

  “Kendal will be just fine as soon as he gets a little peace and quiet,” the girl said with asperity. “Go along, now! Get out of my way!”

  “Stay here,” Aubrey said briefly to Orion, and jumped off the bench. Down among the disgruntled spectators, he began to herd them back toward the market stalls, smiling benignly to show that everything was all right, laying his hand on an arm or a back in a show of fellowship. He was not above using a bit of magic in this situation, a spell of well-being, encouraging the townspeople to cheer up and forget their anger. Within a few minutes, virtually the whole crowd was dispersed.

  Aubrey then quickly turned his attention to Kendal, still lying with alarming rigidity on the ground. The woman kneeling beside the boy was probably his mother, Aubrey guessed, and he dropped down beside her.

  “How is he doing?” Aubrey asked.

  She shook her head. “He’s breathing, he is, but I can’t tell much else.”

  Aubrey nodded and touched his hands to the boy’s skull, throat and chest. He was not one of those magicians with an inborn talent for medicine, but he knew the basic healing skills; they were among the first that Cyril had taught him. Healing is merely a matter of making whole, Cyril had said; both illness and injury disrupt the perfect and complementary circuits of the body. Find the failed synapse, the broken vessel, the obscured and cloudy patch of fever; remove or repair. Aubrey’s fingers, skating over the permeable surface of the skin, detected the surge of blood through the resilient tissues and over the recalcitrant bones. He cleared some slight debris from the sleeping brain, reknit an artery that had split its seams, and made sure there was room enough for air in the lungs. Kendal sighed and stirred, curling up instinctively toward his mother.