The Shape-Changer's Wife

by Sharon Shinn

  Stubbornly she shook her head. “Hope was the first human emotion I learned,” she said. “With him, I have hope. With you, I have only love. It is not enough.”

  He closed his eyes. He was suddenly exhausted. “I have love, but no hope,” he said. “I cannot tell which is worse.”

  She came close enough to touch him, and he opened his eyes again to look down at her. On her face was a small, timid smile. “Please,” she said. “I do not want to fight with you. I do not want to be angry with you—or you with me. Let us—let us be the way we were.”

  She did not know how to express regret or fear; she did not even know that she was afraid of losing him. Aubrey watched her, wondering what else she would learn, without knowing it, against her will. “Do you want me to stay, then?” he asked slowly. “If I can only make your life worse, I will go now.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “You make it more difficult, but you do not make it worse. I don’t—I am not sure how I would survive now without you.”

  “I cannot stop loving you,” he warned. “If that prohibition is to be a condition of my staying on, I will have to go.”

  The color rose again in her face, but she shook her head. “I will not try to change you if you do not try to change me,” she said. “Please stay.”

  He wanted to kiss her again, or at least kiss her hand, but instead he gave her a short, courtly bow. “I will,” he said.

  Clasping her fingers in his, he led her back to the road; and hand-in-hand they began the long walk back to Glyrenden’s house. But Aubrey thought they had both lied not so long ago, though neither would admit it. He knew what it was to hope, and she knew what it was to love.

  GLYRENDEN WAS HOME when they returned, but he did not seem to notice that his wife and his apprentice had been gone. He sat in the kitchen, on one of the sturdy wooden chairs, with Eve perched tremulously on the chair beside him. Orion, seated on the far side of the room, watched them both with his usual apprehensive attention. Arachne, moving from table to countertop as she prepared the evening meal, cast them frequent furtive glances and whispered animadversions as she worked.

  Glyrenden had eyes for no one but Eve. “Ah, my beauty,” he gloated, stroking her soft hair. “How I missed you while I was gone! How I wished you could have come with me. You are not ready yet for the company of great men, but soon. Soon, you will travel with me wherever I go.”

  Eve stared up at him with her huge brown eyes, despair and supplication mixed upon her face. She shivered under his hands, and said nothing.

  Aubrey stood on the threshold so long that Lilith brushed past him to enter. She took her customary seat at the table, glanced at her husband and glanced away. She did not look again at Aubrey.

  And Aubrey continued to stand at the door, incapable of moving forward, incapable of walking out of the room. How much longer can I endure this? he was thinking. And what can I do?

  Glyrenden had only been home for two days—during which time almost no one spoke, almost no one ate, and almost no one seemed to breathe—when a messenger came to the front door looking for him. They were all still at the breakfast table when they were summoned by the broken music of the mistuned bells.

  Glyrenden was spooning honey-sweetened cereal into Eve’s mouth, and he scowled at the unexpected interruption. “Who could be calling here?” he demanded. “I am not expecting visitors.”

  Aubrey was glad enough of an excuse to leave the room. “Shall I go see?” he offered, already on his feet. Glyrenden waved his assent.

  Aubrey hastened down the dusty hall, wrestled open the heavy door and stared in displeasure at the figure of Royel Stephanis.

  “Her husband is here,” was Aubrey’s curt greeting. “You had best be on your way immediately.”

  As before, the young lord slipped inside the doorway before Aubrey had time to stop him. “It is Glyrenden I am here for,” Royel said “I have been sent by the king to fetch him back to court.”

  Aubrey had forgotten that Royel had been appointed to serve his liege. But even so. “I am surprised that the king would treat a nobleman as a messenger or page,” he said.

  “I volunteered to come,” Royel said. “Now, will you take me to him?”

  So Aubrey led the young lord back through the hallway, past the rusty suit of armor and the cracked stone stairway, into the kitchen, where the rest of the household waited. He wondered what Royel would make of this scene—the wizard’s wife sitting calmly at the table while her husband hovered possessively over a beautiful, frightened young girl. If anything was needed to convince Royel that Lilith should trust his love, thought Aubrey in resignation, this particular glimpse of domesticity should do it.

  “Royel Stephanis, with a message from the king,” Aubrey announced, stepping into the kitchen with Royel at his heels. Glyrenden dropped his spoon and whipped around, but no one else in the room seemed much interested. Eve took advantage of Glyrenden’s distraction to pull her chair as far back from his as possible. Lilith sipped at her milk and glanced at the figure in the doorway. Arachne and Orion paid him no attention at all.

  “A message from the king?” Glyrenden snapped, coming to his feet. “I left him a few days ago, and he said he would not need me for another two weeks.”

  “A matter of some urgency has arisen,” Royel said stiffly. He covered it well, but Aubrey suspected he was rigid with shock. By a supreme effort of will, the boy kept his eyes fixed on Glyrenden and did not once look in Lilith’s direction. “I have a parchment here, closed with his seal.”

  “Let me have it,” Glyrenden said, and snatched it from Royel’s outstretched hand.

  What he read there apparently satisfied him—even pleased him—for he laughed shortly and folded the paper twice. “I will be with you in ten minutes,” he said. “There are sorcerous objects I must collect.”

  The wizard left the room. Royel’s eyes went instantly to Lilith’s face. “I have wondered—I wanted to know—I wished to know you were well,” the young man stammered, though he had spoken with great coolness to the mage. “I was glad for a chance to come here—to see you again, however briefly—”

  “I am fine,” Lilith replied. She met his eyes fleetingly and looked away.

  “Coffee? A meal?” Aubrey asked practically. “You must have ridden all night.”

  “I broke my journey late last evening in a village nearby,” Royel said. “I did not want to arrive in the middle of the night.”

  “Well, you may as well eat something while you’re here,” Aubrey said, and pushed him toward the table.

  But Royel, like everyone else in that house, had no appetite. He took a chair close to Lilith’s and spoke to her in a low, intense voice. “You seem unwell—unhappy,” he said. “How can I aid you? Who is that girl?”

  Lilith glanced at Eve. “My husband’s niece,” she said.

  “His niece!”

  “Royel—” Aubrey said warningly.

  Royel turned disbelieving eyes in his direction. “She is not that man’s niece!” he exclaimed.

  “It is better for all concerned if we say so,” Aubrey said. “Eat, and prepare yourself for a long ride back to court in the magician’s company.”

  Instead, Royel edged even closer to the wizard’s wife and took her hand in his. She regarded him steadily, with no expression. “If I return for you,” the young man said, “would you come away with me? I could take you to safety, I could take you to freedom—”

  “No,” she replied.

  “But I love you!”

  She pulled her hand away and picked up her glass of milk. Glyrenden stepped through the hallway door, back into the kitchen.

  “Ah, I see that my charming wife has fed you,” the wizard said gaily. It was impossible to tell what he had seen, overheard or suspected. “Come, young Stephanis. The king’s message was sent in some agitation. We have no time to waste.”

  Royel came reluctantly to his feet and bowed impartially to all those in the room. “The saints willing, I
will see you again shortly,” he said.

  Glyrenden laughed. “Oh, I am sure you will become intimate with all of us,” he said. “In time.”

  The wizard bent to kiss Lilith on the mouth. When he lifted his head, he kept his fingers cupped under her chin for a moment. “Once again I am reminded how beautiful you are,” he murmured. “Do not forget, I will be back quite soon.”

  Next, he took Eve in a close embrace, drawing her up from her chair to hold her small, shaking body against his chest. “My dearest,” he murmured into her dark hair. “The next time, I swear it, you shall travel with me.”

  These farewells made, the wizard turned to laugh at the young lord, who stood waiting with his face utterly immobile. “Shall we be on our way?” he suggested, and led the boy out of the room. Royel risked one last, hopeless glance back at Lilith. In a few moments, the noise of their passage died away, and they were gone.

  “There goes a very foolish young man,” Aubrey said severely.

  “And a very cruel old one,” Lilith responded.

  Thirteen

  FOUR DAYS LATER, Glyrenden returned. He was riding his bad-tempered black stallion and leading a horse that looked very much like the one Royel had ridden in on. Behind them, running as though his legs were aching and his muscles unused to so much work, pattered a mixed-breed hound just past puppyhood. As the small cavalcade reached the doorway of the wizard’s house, the dog collapsed to its belly with an audible sigh, closed its eyes and was instantly asleep.

  Lilith and Aubrey, just back from their afternoon stroll, turned silently to observe the new arrivals. Eve, who had been sitting on the ground before the flower garden, came to her feet uncertainly as the wizard dismounted. The horses backed nervously away from Glyrenden’s hands, creating so much disturbance that, in the end, Aubrey came forward to take the reins of both animals. He secured them to the hitching post and untied Glyrenden’s saddlebags from the stallion’s back.

  Then he turned and stared down at the hound now sleeping at the door.

  “Was this not an odd thing?” Glyrenden said, although no one had questioned him at all. “We were not halfway to the palace when a rattlesnake uncoiled from the ground at our feet, and this excitable steed reared to the air and threw his master. Young Stephanis was killed instantly, though I did my best to save him. When I took the sad news to the king, he expressed great grief and thanked me for my attempts to succor him. In reward, he gave me the boy’s own mount, and his favorite hound as well. I like the dog, but the horse is something of a brute. If I cannot tame it, it will have to be gotten rid of.”

  Now Orion and Arachne had emerged from the house, drawn by the nervous nicker of the horses or some even stronger portent of disaster. Orion had gone to the beasts’ heads and miraculously calmed both; Arachne had come to a halt before the dog and looked down on it with a heavy frown. Hair to clean up from all the furniture and who knows if it’s housebroken? she might have been thinking, from the expression on her face. In her hand she carried a long-bladed kitchen knife, for she had evidently been interrupted while preparing the evening meal, and this she wiped mindlessly on the dirty hem of her apron. Eve had made herself into a small, shivering pile on the front porch. Lilith, unmoved as ever, merely watched Aubrey.

  Aubrey stood with his head bowed and horror moving through his veins like acid. He could not have said why this was worse, but it was. It was so bad it could not be lived with. The decision that he could not make had suddenly been made for him.

  “Turn him back,” he said to Glyrenden without even lifting his head.

  Glyrenden had been sorting through his saddlebags for something acquired at court, and when he brought his gaze around to Aubrey he looked blank and preoccupied for a minute. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

  Aubrey raised his eyes, looked levelly at Glyrenden, and said a little more loudly, “Turn him back.”

  The wizard dropped his bags and straightened, to return Aubrey’s steady stare with an unfriendly one of his own. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Aubrey pointed. “The dog. That was once a man. And the king’s man, at that. Turn him back.”

  For a moment, Aubrey thought the wizard would deny it again, but then suddenly the older man laughed. The sound cut a discordant swath across the cheerful colors of the autumn afternoon. “He amuses me as he is.”

  “Turn him back anyway.”

  “At your command? I think not.”

  “Turn him back. Or I will transform him myself.”

  Glyrenden seemed to grow thinner and tauter, and his black eyes resembled the night sky, so full were they of distant points of cold light “You will have to kill me to be able to counteract my spells.”

  “Yes,” said Aubrey. “Turn him back, or I will do it myself.”

  They were standing in the small clearing before the house, hedged in on all sides by trees and overgrown shrubbery and the house itself. As Aubrey spoke, the space seemed to shrink down by half, as if all things living within a mile of that arena drew closer to watch. Eve stopped shivering, the hound lifted its head; but neither of the antagonists noticed. They had attention for nothing except each other.

  “You are good,” Glyrenden murmured, “but are you that good? I have not taught you all I know.”

  “But I have learned much without your help,” Aubrey said calmly. Now that the moment had come, the cancer in his stomach had melted away; now he would kill Glyrenden or be killed. Either way, he would no longer have to live cozily with guilty knowledge, and relief made his mind exultant and finely honed.

  Glyrenden spat out a single syllable of contempt. “I do not fear what others have taught you,” he said.

  “It is not their education I intend to put to use,” Aubrey replied.

  “Well, then,” Glyrenden said, and not another word. Almost before Aubrey realized Glyrenden had picked up the gauntlet, the battle was joined. Glyrenden was suddenly no longer a thin, restless man; he was a huge, wide-jawed wolf midway through a deadly lunge for Aubrey’s throat.

  But neither was Aubrey any longer a man. He had become a hawk, and his wings beat the air a full two feet above the head of the snarling predator. Then Aubrey dove, his talons curved to hook into his enemy’s black eyes. But the wolf had flattened to the ground, and was a cougar, and sprang up again with a yowl, to leap for the banking hawk. Aubrey felt the thinnest imaginable scimitar of the cat’s claw catch in the tip of his left wing, and on the instant, he was changed. He was a bear, bigger than Orion, with paws as huge as skillets, and he swiped at the cougar’s squalling face with every nail extended.

  But the cougar was gone. In its place was a rock, colorless and flinty, impervious to teeth and claws. Aubrey fell on it from above in the shape of a metal spike, six feet long and viciously pointed at the tip. A jagged line cracked down the stone’s rough surface; then the two combatants both fell to the ground. Briefly they were men again, themselves, one dark and one fair. They rolled to their feet with four yards between them and measured each other with human eyes.

  “So,” Glyrenden said, “you have been practicing while I was away.”

  “Cyril must have told you how quickly I learn.”

  “He told me. I confess I did not believe him.”

  “Have you never met any wizard more skilled than you?”

  “Oh, Cyril is a better illusionist, and better at calling up visions in water or glass. And there are others with talents I cannot quite match. But in this—no, my pet, I have never met my equal.”

  “Turn him back,” Aubrey said again. “Turn them all back.”

  Glyrenden merely smiled. His smile was so wide that his face became all teeth, his whole body a grinning face; he had grown monstrous, he was a dragon, his skin the rusty color of autumn trees and his fearsome teeth whiter than milk. The dragon growled deep in its throat and reared back, then fell forward with the power of falling rock to land in a heap upon the other wizard and crush him.

  But Aubrey was t
oo small and too agile; he had become a fly, tiny and inconsequential, riding on the dragon’s back.

  Dragon no more; Glyrenden melted before him to a limpid pool of water, thrashing itself into a rough sea that would drown the insect resting precariously on its surface. But the insect dashed to safe ground and grew ferociously, bursting into flame at the edge of the stormy lake. The water rose, spilling its imaginary banks to drown the blaze, but the fire was far stronger; its heat drove back every watcher in the woods.

  Like dew under summer sunlight, the pool evaporated, but much more quickly; Glyrenden hovered over Aubrey as mist in the air. The fire suddenly vanished and in its place was a devastating chill, pursuing the heavy cloud of moisture that was the wizard. Glyrenden fell to the ground in a long white line of frost, diamond-backed; the crystals coalesced, and he was a snake, copper-colored and hissing. Aubrey chopped at his head as a descending axe, but the snake had become rust and clung to the iron of the blade. Aubrey changed to glass, fragile and slippery; Glyrenden shattered him as a bullet, catapulted from nowhere. But the glass was now sand, inches deep and unresisting. It smothered the cartridge with its weight.

  Metamorphosis: The bullet writhed once and became a weed, able to grow in any soil, poking its shaggy head above the ridgeline of the dune. Then a great wind arose, focused and precise, whipping up the atoms of the sand to animal height, chest height, man height; then it was Aubrey again, on his feet but stooping over to snap the weed off its stalk.

  But in his hand the weed changed to a bramble, thick with thorns; blood dotted Aubrey’s palm in half-a-dozen places. He cursed softly, with an odd impatience, but kept his hold on the briar. The air was so still that his murmured words should have carried to all corners of the forest, but he spoke so quietly that no one understood what he said.

  And then standing before him, dazed and uncertain, stood Glyrenden, who had been changed by someone else’s magic from one form to another. Just an instant he stood there, fury and comprehension coming to him together, but Aubrey did not wait for his wits to regather. He snatched the kitchen knife from Arachne’s hands and dove for the black-haired wizard, and he drove the entire length of the blade deep into Glyrenden’s heart. There was a moment when everything in the world was utterly motionless. Then, in a slow, elegant pirouette, Glyrenden fell to the ground at Aubrey’s feet.