The Shape-Changer's Wife

by Sharon Shinn

  THREE DAYS LATER, they left Faren Rochester’s house and returned to their own. As before, they were two days on the road, and the horses fought them the entire way; as before, Lilith scarcely spoke for the whole, long weary ride. Everything was the same; only Aubrey had changed. He stared out his window at the rusty frieze of trees and wondered what he would do.

  Eight

  THE WIZARD’S HOUSE in the middle of the forest seemed smaller, dustier and more solitary than ever, once they returned. Aubrey and Glyrenden spent the next few days in the teaching room, but the sessions were not productive. Aubrey could not concentrate on his lessons, and Glyrenden laughed at him.

  “You miss your new aristocratic friends,” he said. “We are too humble and dull for you.”

  “That’s not true,” Aubrey said swiftly. “I would far rather be here than at Faren Rochester’s.”

  “So you say now, boy, so you say now.” The wizard was making up a small pack of potions, for he was preparing to leave again in the morning, and Aubrey watched him select and mix herbal recipes. As always, Glyrenden was secretive about his task and his destination; Aubrey had learned not to ask. “The day will come when you will find lords and ladies to be the only company you enjoy.”

  Aubrey smiled faintly. “I don’t think so. I don’t come from a highborn house.”

  “But power is drawn to power, and magic feeds on the nobility,” Glyrenden replied. The older wizard appeared amused. “You will dally with the king’s daughters yet.”

  “Do you really think I will ever be that good?” Aubrey asked.

  Glyrenden smiled down at him, a peculiarly nasty smile. “You will be brilliant and powerful, or you will be nothing,” the wizard said. “I see no middle ground for you.”

  Glyrenden was gone the next day, but Aubrey’s spirits did not improve. He was so rarely depressed that he was alarmed by his symptoms; he did not know how to recover his lightheartedness. Even alone in Lilith’s company, he was not happy, though her presence was all that made the house tolerable. Then again, her presence was precisely what was making him so miserable.

  “I think you are very bored these days,” Lilith observed to him after he had moped around the house two solid days. “Perhaps you should go hunting with Orion.”

  “That does not sound especially enjoyable,” Aubrey replied. “I’m sure he hunts like a savage.”

  “Or go into town for a visit. We are low on supplies anyway”

  The idea had instant appeal. “We are? It is market day, I believe.”

  “I’ll ask Arachne what she needs.”

  Within a few minutes, he was on the road, pushing a small three-wheeled cart before him. His heart lifted as he drew closer to town. Perhaps that was all that was wrong with him—a lack of company. He had grown accustomed to agreeable society during his stay at Faren Rochester’s, and he missed it now. He was unused to being alone—or nearly alone, with only two strange servants to chaperone him while he kept company with the shape-changer’s wife. Any man would feel restless and on edge under such circumstances. What he needed was interaction with ordinary men and women, just the sort of people he was likely to find in the village.

  As always on market day, the square was crowded with farmers come to sell their produce and townspeople shopping for household goods. Aubrey maneuvered his cart carefully through the throng, apologizing frequently for grazing someone’s ankle or hip. He took his time about making purchases, engaging each entrepreneur in a lengthy debate about the merits of red apples over green, white rice over brown, yellow potatoes over white.

  “Well, for your pies—your pies, now, they’re best made with green apples,” a fat-cheeked old woman told him. “They’re a little sour for eating, but you sugar them up right, bake them in a crust, and they’re just as sweet as molasses. Can you make a pie, sir?”

  “I?” Aubrey laughed. “Well, I never have made one. I’m not a stupid man, though. I suppose I could make one if I tried.”

  She smiled at him out of the smallest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen. “Oh, you’ve got a woman as cooks for you,” she said, nodding wisely. “Well, that’s the best way, ain’t it? Having somebody to care for you.”

  “Having somebody to care for,” he returned lightly.

  She leaned closer and motioned him to bend down. Aubrey brought his ear to her mouth. “Down there a ways—see it? The stall with the black awning. Man there is selling things you might want to look at.”

  “What things?” Aubrey said.

  “Ssh! Not everyone is to know. Pieces of gold, you know, rings and bracelets that a man might give to a lady. You’ve got a lady to give them to?”

  Aubrey thought of Lilith, reflexively; then, with determination, of the tavernkeeper’s blond daughter. “Yes,” he said.

  “Then go take a look. They’ve got mighty pretty things there.” And she drew back and smiled at him; and he straightened up and smiled back.

  Of course, with her eyes on him, he had to wend his way directly to the jeweler’s stall. He had no real intention of buying anything, but it couldn’t hurt to look. He owed the old woman that much for telling him the secret.

  On first inspection, however, the jeweler’s goods did not impress him. There were a few cheap pewter rings set with cut glass; wax beads had been painted with an oily substance to give them the lustre of pearls. For courtesy’s sake, Aubrey poked at a necklace or two, but he shook his head when the dark young man behind the counter asked if there was anything he particularly liked.

  “I was told—the fruit-seller from down the way—she said you had some gold jewelry I might like,” Aubrey said. “But I’m afraid I don’t see anything here–”

  “Ah, the gold pieces,” the young man said quickly. He had an odd, indefinable accent; even Aubrey, who had traveled some, could not place it. “We keep them in back. Not everyone we meet can afford them.” The young man disappeared behind a heavy curtain, reappearing in a few moments with a black velvet tray in one hand. “Were you more interested in something like this?” he asked.

  Aubrey’s silent admiration was answer enough. He had learned enough about gold, in his studies of shape-changing, to appreciate the quality of these items. The thick chains lay almost languorously on the black velvet, twisted here and there in voluptuous disarray. Aubrey picked gently through the bracelets and braided rings and ankle chains, and finally rested his fingers on a short gold necklace. It was wide and flat and sinuous; it would lie like a band of light across a woman’s throat. The clasp was studded with three diamonds set in a triangular pattern.

  “I think this may be the one I cannot live without,” Aubrey said, holding it up till it caught the sunlight. “I warn you, though, that I am a wizard of great skill. If its price is too high, I shall have to turn you into a monkey, and then you shall look very silly trying to sell your gold.”

  The young man grinned, unalarmed, but he did look interested. “Is that right? A wizard? Well, now—but perhaps you aren’t willing to trade your talent for gold.”

  Aubrey smiled and laid the necklace reluctantly aside. “I’ve traded it for less,” he said cheerfully. “What do you need done?”

  The jeweler looked, all at once, much younger and much less self-assured. “It’s my father. He usually comes with me when we journey to the markets, but he’s been ill—oh, a month or two. I hated to leave him, but sales in the city are so slow these days. Well, you know how it is, silver’s become the only thing the fashionable women will wear, and of course we haven’t any connections at the silver mines. So we come on the road, and we sell the gaudy pieces to the peasant folk and the gold to the lords and ladies. And I had to leave, but I hated to go, with him being so sick—”

  “Is it a potion you need?” Aubrey interrupted. “I can mix you one, if you know what his sickness is.”

  “Lung sickness,” the young man said. “He gets it every year. But—could you do something more? I’ve heard that wizards can look into a cup of water and call up visions.
Could you do that? Could you tell me how he is, right now, today?”

  “Well, not in a cup of water,” Aubrey said. He glanced quickly around the array of costume jewelry spread out at the front of the booth. He remembered an ugly pewter ring set with a huge glass marble; hardly an ideal scrying crystal, but for something this simple, it would do. Aubrey picked up the ring and slipped it over the smallest finger on his left hand.

  “Here,” he said. “Let’s see what we can discover.”

  Scrying was the first thing Aubrey had learned. Cyril was, by far, the best magician in the three kingdoms at this particular skill, and Aubrey had found it an easy enough ritual to master. Now he questioned the young man (“Where are you from? What is your father’s name? Describe your house to me”) while he passed his hand over the smooth surface of the glass. Soon enough, wavering colors formed in the heart of the globe and resolved themselves into shapes. Aubrey studied the tiny, moving forms, then held his hand out to the jeweler.

  “See for yourself,” he invited.

  The young man, who had identified himself as Benni Rosta, looked dubious a moment, and then leaned forward to peer into the glass. He drew a sharp, quick breath. “That’s my father!” he exclaimed. “And he’s—he’s sitting up; he’s talking to someone. That must be—oh yes, that’s my aunt there with him. She must be caring for him while I’m gone.” Benni looked radiantly over at Aubrey. “He’s better,” he said.

  Aubrey took off the ring. Instantly, the shadowy shapes melted and disappeared. “It looks that way,” he said. “You say he has this lung trouble often?”

  Benni nodded. “Every year it gets worse,” he said. “The town doctors have given him drugs, but nothing seems to help. This year—this is as bad as I’ve seen it.”

  Aubrey nodded. “Do you have a flask of water you can spare?” he asked. “Something you won’t need on your journey?”

  “I suppose I do. Surely.” Benni looked inquiring.

  “I can lay an enchantment upon the water,” Aubrey explained. “Then your father can drink it, a little at a time when he grows ill, and it will heal his lungs. It should last him a long time—he shouldn’t have to drink more than a cupful once a year to turn the sickness away.”

  Benni was regarding him with astonished, disbelieving eyes. “You can do that?” he breathed.

  Aubrey smiled. “Yes,” he said, “if you have the flask of water.”

  What Benni gave him was a two-gallon jug made of heavy clay and corked tight. “Very good,” Aubrey said, and unsealed it. He inserted his finger into the mouth of the jug, just dipping it into the water, and silently recited the proper spell. This one, too, he had learned early; Cyril’s favorite patron had been a kindly old woman who suffered from troubled breathing, and Cyril had been at pains to keep her healthy.

  Benni, however, looked slightly skeptical. “And this will really heal him?” he asked. “This—a drink of this water—”

  “It is not an herbal remedy such as the doctors make,” Aubrey admitted. “It will look like water, and it will taste like water. But it will ease him. I cannot prove it to you now, but you may believe me.”

  “I saw his face in my glass ring,” Benni said. “I believe you.”

  When they were finished with magic, they turned to finance, haggling over the cost of the jewelry. Benni declared that Aubrey’s services were worth the entire price of the necklace, if not more; Aubrey insisted on paying him a few coins, nonetheless, because he didn’t feel he had worked hard enough to earn such a fee. In the end, they parted happy, each of them convinced he had gotten the better part of the deal, and Aubrey additionally buoyed by the gratification of having done a service to another human being.

  In this beneficent mood, he trundled his cart over to the tavern, parked it outside, spoke a few anti-theft words over it, and entered the warm, dark room. He took a seat in a booth near the back, nodding at the other patrons as he passed their tables. In a very few minutes, Veryl approached him, carrying a tankard of ale.

  “So! The wizard’s household needed supplies,” she said. “I wondered if you might be stopping by one day.”

  “It seemed better if I came alone,” Aubrey said, smiling up at her. “You were right.”

  “So it’s lunch you want this time?”

  “You told me you’d feed me. Don’t you remember?”

  She laughed at him. “I remember. Will you have ham or beef?”

  Both sounded suddenly good. At Glyrenden’s, they ate mostly game—venison and rabbit and quail, the meat that Orion brought in. “Ham, I think,” said Aubrey. “And anything that might go with it.”

  She was back in five minutes, carrying two plates. When she set the second one down, she slid into the booth across from him.

  “My lunch time too,” she said. “It’s hungry work.”

  They ate in companionable silence for a few moments, but Aubrey was marveling inwardly at how much she consumed. Lilith took in virtually no sustenance from morning till night, and he had yet to see Arachne eat anything. He had forgotten that women had appetites as hearty as a man’s.

  “So what did you buy today?” she asked, when she was through with the greatest portion of her food.

  He thought of the short gold chain, curled sleepily in its red velvet bag. “Oh, the usual items,” he said. “Rice and sugar and potatoes.”

  She shook her head. “Prices are terrible,” she said. “Farmers lost crops in the drought, I know it, but they think they can charge the townspeople absolutely anything they want. We grow our own crops a few miles outside of town, and lucky for us! I don’t think we could afford to keep our doors open if we had to buy at market prices.”

  “I know very little about pricing vegetables,” Aubrey said.

  “Oh, we used to run a stall in the market, back before my pa had the tavern,” Veryl said. “Mostly fruit and corn, but then we started growing wheat when Pa bought up old man Russet’s farm. I didn’t work in the fields—Pa hired boys to do that—but I sure worked at the market, I can tell you. Bright and early! Setting up the awning, laying out the fruit. Don’t let anybody tell you it isn’t hard work.”

  Aubrey would not have believed that she could talk so much. That anyone could talk so much. All he had to do was murmur an assent now and then, or give a brief answer to a sudden, swift question, and she was off again, chattering away. He kept an expression of interest on his face, but he was wondering how long he would have to sit there listening to her. The exaggerated expressiveness of her face annoyed him, too—she laughed, grimaced, scowled and raised her eyebrows with nearly every sentence, as if she were enacting a pantomime to underscore the sense of her words. Aubrey felt his face muscles grow weary as he kept his smile in place.

  “Not easy running around waiting on all the men of the village, either,” she was saying. “But at least it’s indoors, so rain or shine doesn’t matter a bit! At the market, we were there winter and summer, wet weather or cold. And let me tell you, there were some cold, wet days I stood in the stall selling apples.”

  “Veryl!” The call came from the other side of the room—a man’s voice, surely her father’s. Veryl jumped up and scooped her plate and glass into her hands.

  “Looks like lunch is over,” she said, grinning down at Aubrey. “But it was a fun one, wasn’t it?”

  “Very pleasant,” Aubrey acknowledged. “I’m glad you could join me.”

  “Oh, I get an hour off now and then,” she said airily.

  “Veryl!” Her father’s voice sounded more impatient.

  “Next time,” she said, and skipped back toward the kitchen, laughing as she went.

  Aubrey quickly drained the last drops of ale from his tankard, laid his money on the table and extricated himself from the booth. As fast as he could manage it without appearing to run, he was back outside and once more on the forest road. He did not want to think about it, so he closed his mind to the implications of the afternoon, but he knew at least one thing for certain: He might
return to town again and again; he might come for supplies or drop in for companionship; he might even spend another thirty minutes listening to the tavernkeeper’s daughter telling him the story of her life. But there was nothing here that held any lasting appeal for him, nothing here he cared much about—nothing that could lure him from Glyrenden’s cold gray fortress for more than an afternoon or make him forget its inhabitants even for an hour.

  THAT NIGHT AT dinner, Aubrey gave the necklace to Lilith. Orion had already finished his portion and lumbered back to his corner to sleep. Arachne was cleaning around them, clucking and hissing at the mess they had made. Once, as Lilith reached out for her glass, Arachne’s hand slammed down on the table beside it, causing Lilith to pause just a moment before she picked up her honeyed milk.

  “A fly,” Lilith said in unconcern as Aubrey looked over, surprised. “Arachne hates them.”

  Aubrey had thought of any number of ways to make this presentation to Lilith, but in the end, they all seemed foolish. I bought you this lovely gift because you yourself are so lovely. . . I think of you, I dream of you, I want you to remember me—take this gift from my hands. . . . He reached into his pocket and pulled out the red velvet bag.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to her across the table. “I bought you something in town.”

  Incurious, she took it from him and spilled the contents into her palm. The gold chain uncoiled and preened in her hand. “A necklace,” she said. “Why, thank you, Aubrey.”

  “I did a service for a jeweler at the market,” Aubrey said. “He gave me the necklace in return.”

  “Shall I wear it now?”

  “Oh yes.”

  She clasped it around her neck, having a moment of difficulty with the diamond-studded clasp. It lay glittering and incongruous across the dull gray cotton of her high-necked gown. “How does that look?” she asked.