The Shape-Changer's Wife

by Sharon Shinn

  “Very fine,” Aubrey said. It did not; it looked ridiculous and out of place. Yet still Aubrey felt an illicit pleasure in giving this woman a beautiful gift. “I hope you wear it as often as you like.”

  She fingered the fine satin length of gold. “Glyrenden might wonder where I got it,” she said.

  Aubrey laughed. “I’ll tell him I was practicing my shape-changer’s skills and that I made it for you from a length of string.”

  “Will he believe you?”

  “You mean, is that something I am capable of doing?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Certainly I can. He taught me how himself.”

  “Then there is no reason he should not believe you.”

  They did not talk about the necklace again that night, or ever, but Aubrey was pleased to see that Lilith wore it every day for a week. One morning, she appeared at the breakfast table without it, and that afternoon Glyrenden returned home. She did not wear it again for two more days, by which time her husband was gone once again.

  Nine

  AUBREY COULD NOT tell if he was glad or sorry when Glyrenden told them that he had only come home for a brief two-day visit. The distrust Glyrenden had inspired in him so early had become a settled and accepted thing, at least in his own mind, and yet he still had great admiration for the older wizard’s powers—and an unquenchable desire to learn everything Glyrenden might be willing to teach him. Not only that, he was in love with the shape-changer’s wife, which made it difficult for him when Glyrenden appeared at the breakfast table in the guise of a husband. Yet Aubrey, clinging still to rational thought, realized it was no bad thing for him to be reminded now and then that the woman had a husband—for she did have a husband—and when Glyrenden was gone, Aubrey was in danger of forgetting that fact.

  So he was able to summon up real dismay when Glyrenden said he would be returning very shortly to the king’s palace.

  “So soon?” Aubrey questioned. “You are rarely here these days.”

  “And will be gone again and yet again in the next month or two, for events move rapidly at court,” the mage replied. He was sorting through bags of crystals and looking up formulas in spellbooks; he seemed abstracted but not irritated by Aubrey’s company.

  “More shape-changing?” Aubrey asked.

  Glyrenden looked over with a smile of excitement. “Not this trip,” he said. “This is one of those times when illusion stands me in better stead than alteration.”

  “We have not practiced illusions since I first arrived,” Aubrey said.

  Glyrenden laughed. “Have we not? Then you must let me show you a trick or two.”

  The wizard strode to the doorway. “Orion! Arachne! Come here a moment. I have need of you.”

  Aubrey’s eyes widened, for generally Glyrenden invited no one into his study except his apprentice. He misliked the wizard’s mood, so maliciously elated, and wondered what was really going on up at the royal court. Not for the first time, he found himself feeling a certain disapproval of the king and his methods.

  Orion and Arachne entered, the man behind the woman, neither of them looking pleased to be called. Arachne cast furtive glances around the room, gauging its disorder and dust content; Orion dragged his feet reluctantly across the flagged floor and kept his eyes on Glyrenden’s face.

  “Don’t be so apprehensive, nothing is going to happen to you,” Glyrenden told the big man in a chiding voice. “Just stand there, both of you—just like that. Fine. Try not to move if you can help it. An unattractive pair, aren’t they?” the sorcerer continued, scarcely dropping his voice as he turned to address Aubrey. “Does it turn your stomach to take meat from her hands or share the table with him?”

  Aubrey was so appalled at the casual cruelty, he scarcely knew how to answer. “No! I mean—they look fine to me,” he said lamely. “Not every man or woman is beautiful.”

  “But magic could make them so,” Glyrenden said. “I could have made them so. I can make them beautiful now. Watch.”

  The wizard had lifted his hands as he spoke; now, with a single liquid motion, he flicked his fingers in the air and dropped his hands. Both fascinated and repulsed, Aubrey kept his attention on the two servants. For a moment, their faces seemed to waver, or to take on a faint, luminescent glow; and then the haze evaporated and he could see them clearly again. Or perhaps not . . .

  Orion’s massive, hairy face had been remodeled, slimmed down; he still had wide cheeks and a large forehead, but he looked like any other brawny, full-bearded man of moderate intelligence. Arachne’s small, angry countenance had smoothed out and warmed up. Her white hair had been pulled back and given an attractive golden sheen. Like Orion, she resembled any other peasant one might pass on the road—not lovely, certainly, but hardly extraordinary. Not at all strange.

  “What have you done?” Aubrey asked, as much in fear as wonder.

  “Oh, merely a little sleight of hand,” was the negligent reply. “A deception, not a transformation. You see?” Glyrenden spread his fingers again, and the illusion vanished. Back in their familiar shapes were the two homely creatures, still waiting patiently to do whatever their master bid them. Glyrenden smiled. “A momentary aberration only. You may go now,” he said, addressing his servants, and the man and woman left the room.

  “Most impressive,” Aubrey said, because he must say something. “You are as good at that as you are at everything.”

  Glyrenden laughed again, almost indulgently, it seemed. “Oh, I prefer out-and-out alchemy,” he said, “but there are many instances in which it is not appropriate. Then again, you would be surprised at how many people believe an illusion, even when the illusion is ripped away. They are as likely to believe that the false face is the true one and that the true one is the one that has been bewitched.”

  “How is one ever to know the difference, then?” Aubrey asked, keeping his voice even.

  Glyrenden spread his hands as if to signify that he did not know. “And does it matter?” he asked softly. “When disguise is preferable to the hard bare bones of reality?”

  “It matters,” Aubrey said.

  “You had best be prepared for some unpleasant surprises if you constantly seek the kernel of truth,” Glyrenden advised.

  “But magic is founded on truth,” Aubrey said. “Without an understanding of what a thing really is, it cannot be either uncovered or changed.”

  “But the heart of magic is illusion,” Glyrenden said. “And without the cooperation of gullible men, there would be no magic at all.”

  GLYRENDEN WAS GONE by nightfall, but his disturbing words lingered, as did the memory of the masks he had created for the faces of his servants. At the breakfast table the next day, Aubrey found himself still brooding over Glyrenden’s demonstration, and watching both Orion and Arachne with closer attention than he had given them for weeks. He was not sure why he was suddenly so intent, what he expected to read in their stubborn, familiar faces. They had not, after all, been permanently altered in Glyrenden’s study. They were the same as they had always been—and yet—and yet—

  Arachne came around the table one more time with her curious, sideways motion, her arms working so rapidly it almost seemed she had four arms, eight arms; certainly more than her allotted two. Her bleached skin was of the oddest texture, tougher than skin should be, with a faint sheen upon it that was not perspiration. Aubrey looked up at her face, trying to get a glimpse of her eyes, but she was turned away from him, and would not look in his direction. She whispered baleful words at him as she whisked past, the strange garbled sentences making no sense, as they never made any sense.

  Orion, as usual, had finished his meal with an indecent haste, then rose to his feet with a slow, unbalanced motion as if the act dizzied him. He shook his head so violently, his whole body trembled; then he gave a great yawn that exposed his large, sharp teeth. No one spoke to him; Aubrey’s troubled gaze aroused his anger and he stared back menacingly enough to cause the young man to look away. Or
ion waited a moment, as if expecting orders. When none came, he shook himself again, then lumbered over to his cot and stretched himself out on it full length. Within minutes, he was asleep.

  Together they were a strange woman and a strange man, but as Aubrey stared down at his plate he felt an awful conviction steal over him, and he laid down his fork, no longer hungry. A strange man and a strange woman; but he had been studying the essence of things these past weeks, and he did not think either of them had come into the world human. They had not at the core of themselves the things that humans had; their bodies seemed to have grown all the necessary organs and their faces to have been carved with the right features, but these were not the bodies and the faces they had once owned. They had been changed; and Aubrey knew of only one man in this kingdom who practiced the art of shape-changing.

  “You look ill,” Lilith said, her voice breaking through the wave of nausea that had caused Aubrey to grip the table with both hands. “Shall I send Arachne for some medicine? I believe my husband keeps a full complement of herbs on hand.”

  Assuredly he would, but Aubrey was leery of taking something Glyrenden had mixed and left behind. He shook his head. “Nothing, thank you,” he said in a strangled voice. “I think perhaps I will lie down again, though.”

  So he did; and he forced himself to sleep. But when he awoke, the knot of nausea was still in his stomach, a little larger now. “I have imagined it,” he said aloud. “I am coming down with a fever and I am imagining things.” But there was no unwarranted heat in his body and he thought his mind was clear, and in his heart he knew he had stumbled on the truth.

  He spent most of that day and the next one away from the house, using one of Glyrenden’s smooth, well-oiled rifles to hunt for game. There were in the house, Lilith informed him, only two firearms, and Glyrenden had told her long ago to allow Aubrey free use of them. So Audrey had inspected the rifles and found them both in pristine condition, then asked Lilith which one Orion preferred to use when he hunted.

  “You must ask him,” she said. “I have never seen him leave the house with a gun in his hand.”

  But Aubrey did not ask him, because he did not want Orion to tell him that he caught game with his bare hands. He selected one rifle at random and left the house, only returning when it was too dark to see. He had missed the communal dinner, so he ate very rapidly in the kitchen by himself, and slipped away to his bedroom. Where again he forced himself to sleep, and where he woke up in the morning with the stone still lodged in his stomach.

  He breakfasted early, reloaded the gun and set off at a brisk walk. They had no need of meat, for both he and Orion had been successful the day before, but Aubrey did not think he could sit quietly in that house for an entire day, not while he was haunted by such terrible thoughts. Therefore, he would hunt, or he would pretend to hunt; and Glyrenden would be back tomorrow.

  He had hiked as far as the lake he had found one day with Lilith before some of his serenity returned to him. When he made it to the clearing, he rested the rifle against a tree trunk and sat on the top of the hillock which overlooked the pastoral scene below. As before, the squirrels played games that required them to chase each other from branch to branch; the birds made colorful patterns against the washed blue sky. A deer tiptoed to the edge of the water to drink. Aubrey sat so quietly, so lost in thought, that none of the wild things there feared him or ran from his presence.

  If a man could turn himself into an animal, then he could turn an animal into a man. For some reason, the logical extension of the shape-changing spells had never occurred to Aubrey. It might not be true, of course; he had no proof, and it was not the sort of thing you could ask a mage—if he had cast spells of transmogrification upon helpless beasts basically for his own amusement. But the incantations were simple enough—once you knew the makeup of body and blood and tissue—

  Again, the deer at the lake lowered its head to take a cautious swallow. I could do that, Aubrey thought, the idea coming to him uninvited but fully formed. I could be that deer and take that drink. I have studied him long enough.

  The thought filled him with the first true excitement he had felt for days, and he fought to keep himself calm, to truly assess his abilities. Well, he had been taught some of the spells. He had not practiced them under a master’s supervision, and that was always the requirement the first time a dangerous spell was spoken; that was only common sense. He perhaps could transform himself into a stag, but could he transform himself back? Could the animal remember what the man knew and follow the same complicated processes of reason? Perhaps not; perhaps not yet. He would be foolish to try it.

  But he rose to his feet anyway with his mind made up.

  Quickly, he stripped himself naked, making a small pile of his clothes and laying them neatly with the rifle by the tree. Then, moving into the patch of sunlight that had evaded the screen of the leaves overhead, he dropped to his knees and placed his hands on the ground before him. He closed his eyes and remembered everything he had read in Glyrenden’s books, remembered the exact placement of every muscle and bone in a deer’s body, the precise weight of the antlers on its head, the length of the jaw and the hardness of the pointed hooves. He did not speak the spell aloud, because any true wizard can cast a spell in silence, and he spoke it only once.

  He did not open his eyes until the changes were complete. So different did the world appear to him that at first he thought he had spoken the wrong incantation and removed himself to some entirely different wood in a kingdom far from this one. But then he saw the rifle against the tree and the pile of man’s clothes beside it, although the rifle looked three times its normal size and the clothes quite unfamiliar, and he knew that he was a deer.

  He glanced forward again. Yes, that was water, though he no longer saw it as a simple, pleasant gray lake. It was larger and more perfect in outline; even from here he could make out the rocks below the surface of the water and the fish swimming in a particular current. Each separate tree between him and the body of water below took on its own significance; he found himself judging the distance between them, seeing each tree as a friendly shelter in this clearing with its potential hazards. But although they were trees, and harmless, they looked different than they had before. There was no red or yellow in their leaves, no shades of difference between the browns of the aspen and the oak. In fact, there was very little color anywhere, although every outline of every object and animal in this wilderness was distinct and sharp, and he knew what each one was even though there were some he had never seen before or noticed if he had seen.

  He lifted one foot daintily, the foot that had been his left hand, and he felt the peculiar ripple of muscle extend from the joint at the hoof to the low, outthrust shoulder and across his chest. He carefully laid it on the ground again and lifted the other foot; then, one by one, his hind legs. Then, even more cautiously, he moved forward, feeling the odd interplay of bone and sinew, and catching in his nostrils as he moved the keenest mix of scents he had ever encountered.

  He remained a deer most of the day, moving with gradually increasing sureness up and down the hillock by the lake and around the lake itself. It was a delightful sensation, he discovered, to run with a body meant for running; the air was alive with such rich odors that merely to smell the breeze was to feast. Sounds were complex, and even from far away brought messages to him, but nothing in the forest spoke of danger. He saw other deer come up to drink, but he stayed back from them, solitary in the forest, not wanting to alarm them. They would sense his strangeness, he knew instinctively. But some day he would be able to take their form, and run with them and drink with them, and they would never know he was not one of them.

  He remained a deer till nearly sunset, and then he returned to his rifle and his pile of clothes. This should have been the hard part, but it was not. Aubrey had known since he first opened his deer’s eyes to see like an animal but think like a man that he would be able to cast the spell in reverse. He had to think it t
hrough carefully, slowly, not wanting to make a mistake, but it came to his mind even more easily this time, and then he was once again a man. He was crouched on his hands and knees, naked and wild, in a slowly darkening and brilliantly colored forest, and all the smells and sounds that had been so clear all day were muffled or swept away. He shook his head once to clear it, then fell back to a sitting position and stretched his legs out before him as far as they would go.

  He was a shape-changer.

  WHEN GLYRENDEN RETURNED the next day, he was in such a foul mood that Orion hid from him and Arachne stayed in the kitchen, and both Lilith and Aubrey held their tongues. Aubrey had decided the day before to make no mention of his own remarkable progress, and indeed he did not speak to Glyrenden at all until breakfast the following morning.

  “Your last expedition did not go well?” he asked respectfully, as Glyrenden’s scowl showed no signs of disappearing.

  “Well enough,” the wizard shot back. “Why do you ask?”

  The teaching sessions did not go smoothly that day, for Aubrey had a hard time concealing that he had already moved beyond simple exercises; and this attempt to lie made him mispronounce even the spells he knew. But his maladroitness restored to Glyrenden some of his good humor, so Aubrey felt perhaps the deception was proving useful.

  “Old Cyril told me a thing or two about your cleverness before he sent you to me,” Glyrenden said as they stopped to take the afternoon meal that Arachne brought into the study. “I confess, I have only once or twice seen evidence of it. But perhaps it is a slow thing to learn, eh? I have been a shape-changer so long, I cannot recall how long it took me to learn the skills.”

  Aubrey was piqued by the slighting reference to his ability, but he tried to hide it. “Have you had many students besides me?” he asked. “And have I been the slowest one to learn?”

  Glyrenden took a swig of light ale and gave Aubrey a somewhat malicious smile. “You are the first,” he said.