The Smoke-Scented Girl

by Melissa McShane

  “Somewhere far away. I wish I knew how they were tracking her, because I might be able to do something about it. But we need to find a place where I can examine that spell.”

  “What if she’s correct, that there isn’t any way to remove it?”

  “And here I thought you had such faith in my abilities.”

  “Faith in your abilities doesn’t extend to, for example, a belief that you can make the sun rise in the west. Some things are simply impossible.”

  “Well, I’m going to behave as if it’s possible, for the moment, and we’ll deal with impossible if we come to it.”

  “Can you wake her up?”

  “Unfortunately, no. There’s no spell that breaks desini cucurri. Let’s get a few miles down the road. And hope none of the local constabulary sees us and wonders why we seem to be abducting a young woman.”

  They mounted up, the paralyzed Miss Haylter perched in front of Evon’s saddle, and rode out at the fastest gait they dared in the middle of the city, once again dodging carriages and carts and throngs of pedestrians. People did look at them strangely as they passed, and some even eyed their unconscious burden with concern, but no one tried to stop them. They took the eastern road out of Inveros, which was less well traveled than the coast road but turned north, opposite to the trend Miss Haylter’s journeys had taken her. Evon reasoned that if Speculatus was working out Miss Haylter’s position based on the path she’d taken, this might throw them off, if only for a short while. It was a wild hope, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do. The northern road passed through broad fields, bare-limbed trees growing here and there, with the road sunken some five feet below ground level. It felt like riding through a tunnel, sheltered from watchful eyes.

  Two miles past the city limits, Miss Haylter twitched, then began to stretch her legs. Evon stopped and put his hands under her arms to keep her from falling off. “You were struck with a paralysis spell,” he told her in what he hoped was a calming voice. The last thing he needed was for her to panic, start struggling, and fall off the horse to the frozen ground below. “It’s fading. There aren’t any lasting effects. Just relax and let it wear off. It feels a little strange, I know. I had to go through it as part of my training. The part I hated most was how my face stayed numb long after I could walk around again.”

  “I thought that part was very amusing,” Piercy said. “Evon Lorantis struck speechless.”

  “Well, you couldn’t turn your head for two days,” Evon retorted. “It was the longest any paralysis had lasted in the history of Houndston and we made a game of how often we could make you turn around just to look someone in the eye.” He dismounted and helped Miss Haylter off the horse, then steadied her as she gradually regained control of her body. “If you rub your arms and legs, the stimulation will make the paralysis wear off faster,” he said, and almost began to help her with that before he caught himself and had to turn his face away to hide his embarrassment. Who knew how she would react to him manhandling her? As soon as she could stand erect, he removed his hands from her waist and took a few steps away. “I’m afraid Speculatus found you,” he said. “Odelia knew enough about your location to be able to strike at you from a distance, which is something of a specialty with her. She didn’t know you weren’t alone. We’re free for the moment, but I don’t know how long that will last.”

  “You should’ve let her take me. I don’t want your deaths on my conscience.” Her words were indistinct but comprehensible, her face still a little stiff.

  “Odelia wouldn’t kill us,” Evon said, though he remembered his last look at her face and wasn’t sure that was true. “And we’re not going to abandon you. Did you have a destination in mind, after this last...event?”

  “Why didn’t you leave me?” she said, ignoring his question.

  “Leave you in the hands of Odelia Cattertis? Miss Haylter, we wouldn’t leave a diseased rat in her hands,” Piercy said. “She’d enjoy it too much. Besides, she and Lore have fought one another for years, and he is physically and emotionally incapable of allowing her to win even the smallest advantage.”

  “Am I a prize, then? An advantage?”

  Piercy’s mouth fell open. “Ah...I didn’t mean it that way....”

  “Ignore Piercy, he lives with his foot in his mouth,” Evon said. He took Miss Haylter by the shoulders and made her look at him. Her hazel eyes were almost angry now, and it relieved his mind to know that she was still capable of feeling. “You want me to tell you you’re not worth saving,” he said. “You have lived with this guilt for so long that you have forgotten that you are as much a victim as the people this spell kills. Well, Miss Haylter, it’s true I came after you for selfish reasons. That spell could make my career. But can you think that I—that either Piercy or I—are such monsters as to not see another person suffering and not want to help?”

  “At the cost of your lives?” she exclaimed.

  “It won’t come to that. Remember, I survived your attack once already, and Piercy has the best sense of self-preservation I have ever seen.”

  To his amazement and dismay, Evon saw tears come to her eyes. “I—I can’t,” she began, dashing them away with the back of her hand. “I just want this to be over.”

  Evon released her and stepped away, disturbed that his next impulse had been to embrace her, which would have made things worse rather than better. “Let’s find a safe place,” he said, “and I’ll see what I can do about making that happen.”

  Chapter Six

  The road eventually rose to ground level, and they rode along it between acres of fallow ground, weeds bent and snow-blasted into dead tangles. These were not farmlands, but unclaimed territory between the ocean and the forests that lay to the north and east, tenanted only by a few desperate folk scrabbling out what living they could on the land. Evon kept his attention southward, watching for riders, and wished he’d brought a pair of spectacles to cast a distance-viewing spell on. He could try enhancing his own eyes, but given the extraordinary success of olficio, it was likely he’d just blind himself. So he merely watched behind them and left the guiding of the party to Piercy, who’d taken Miss Haylter up behind him. Nothing moved except sea birds wheeling in the sky, occasionally descending on the weed-choked fields to snap up whatever insects had survived the first freeze. Their white bodies stood out against the gathering gray clouds. Snow was coming.

  “Evon,” Piercy said, and Evon turned around to see Piercy pointing into the distance. “A farmhouse. Is that what you had in mind?”

  “Yes. No.” Evon chewed on his lower lip in thought. Did he really want a farmer’s family as audience for this attempt? It wasn’t that he minded failure, or that he was afraid of looking ridiculous, it was that he wasn’t sure what might happen when he tried to remove the spell. He’d been almost dismissively certain when he told Miss Haylter he could remove it; now all the concerns he should have had before clamored for his attention. Suppose he managed to trigger the spell? No, all things considered it was better not to have bystanders.

  “We should ask to use their barn,” he said finally. “I think it’s better to have some privacy for this.”

  Miss Haylter turned to look back at him. He wondered if she could read his fears in his face and tried to look as unconcerned as if he were proposing a winter outing. “I assume I am your sister again,” she said.

  Piercy laughed. “Is that what you told the old dragon guarding the gate? You do have similar coloring, though I must say, Miss Haylter, you are a good deal prettier than Lore.”

  “You have a flattering tongue, Mr. Faranter,” she said, in a voice that said she didn’t much care for his flattering tongue. The smile dropped from Piercy’s face. Evon felt sorry for him. Piercy flirted with women the way he breathed: unconsciously, but with sincerity, and courtship came as naturally to him as magic did to Evon. He did it so well that women never seemed to mind that his flirtations never led anywhere serious. Miss Haylter, for her part, didn’t seem to realize
she’d hurt his feelings. She turned away from Evon and looked out across the fields toward the farmhouse. “There’s no smoke coming from that house,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” Evon said.

  “I’m familiar with fire,” she said, once again emotionless. “I think there’s no one home.”

  “Let us by all means find out,” Piercy said, rallying, and they went forward until they found a narrow track that led across the fields toward the small house. Miss Haylter’s assessment was correct; no smoke rose from the small chimney, and no one moved between the house and its outbuildings. As they neared the farmhouse, they saw missing shingles, a broken step, and windows missing their glass. “I don’t think this has been inhabited for many years,” Piercy said, dismounting at the foot of the three steps leading to the narrow porch. He pushed open the door with the head of his walking stick and stuck his head inside. “Definitely uninhabited,” he said, crossing the threshold and letting the weathered door, with its trace of yellow paint, swing shut behind him.

  Miss Haylter made as if to follow him, but Evon restrained her. “Piercy will make sure it’s safe,” he told her. “An abandoned house like this, there might be anything residing here now. Animals, probably, but also drifters. Piercy will take care of whatever he finds.”

  “You’re good friends.”

  “The best.”

  She regarded him for a moment. “You’re lucky,” she said.

  Piercy put his head out through one of the empty windows and said, “Come inside. I think this may meet your needs admirably, Lore.”

  Evon held the door politely for Miss Haylter, then shut it behind himself. With the light fading behind the clouds outside, the interior was almost black. Evon sent a light bobbing to the ceiling to cast a soft glow over the three of them and the small room they stood in. The farmhouse’s front room was bare of furnishings, though there were dark marks on the wall where pictures had hung. The unvarnished floorboards, pale and uneven, were blackened from soot and sparks from the brick fireplace against the far wall. Evon looked through the inner door to the next room, which was a small kitchen containing only an old cast-iron stove that sagged into the floor, its chimney dangling loose. Light came in from the hole in the ceiling where the chimney had once exited. Another door at the far side of the kitchen hung by its lower hinge, swinging gently.

  “That’s merely an empty room,” Piercy said. “Probably someone’s bedroom once.”

  “We really only need this front room, though I wish we had a chair or something.” Evon looked at Miss Haylter, who gave him a guarded look. He wished he knew what she was thinking. It looked bad, objectively: she’d gone off with two strange men, who now had her alone in a place where no one would hear her if she screamed, with no way to defend herself against anything they had in mind. Either she was a total innocent, or she genuinely didn’t care what happened to her. “Do you mind sitting on the floor, Miss Haylter?” he asked. She looked even more skeptical, but lowered herself to sit near the front door with her legs crossed. Evon couldn’t tell if she was positioning herself to flee, but guessed that her skirts, while not as full as Odelia’s, would still hamper her getting to her feet quickly. She folded her hands in her lap and looked up at him, waiting.

  “Stand over there, would you?” Evon said to Piercy, then squatted in front of Miss Haylter. “The spell on you is complex,” he told her, “and I’m just going to look at it at first, to see what I can learn. It won’t hurt.”

  Her eyes had regained that dead look she’d worn before, but Evon noticed that the knuckles of her clasped hands were white, the tendons straining against the skin, and he felt relieved, again, that she wasn’t entirely indifferent to her fate. The idea that someone so young and beautiful—and she was beautiful, he now had time to realize, despite the shadows under her eyes and the strange, poreless appearance of her skin—that someone like her could have given up hope so completely seemed sickeningly wrong to him and left him with a renewed determination to free her from this spell.

  He removed his gloves, took out his quizzing glass and cast the revelation spell. Once again the flowing, fluttering blue ribbons of magic appeared, their color and intensity as muted as they’d been when he’d looked at them back in their inn room. When he’d seen them in Coreth, at the site of Fullanter’s death, they’d been so brilliant he could barely endure looking at them. He already knew, from what Miss Haylter said, that the spell had a dormant phase, but this suggested that the spell actually exhausted itself when it was triggered. Why its reactivation was variable, he didn’t know, but that question could wait.

  His calves burned from crouching so long, so he sat cross-legged in front of Miss Haylter, holding his quizzing glass about seven inches from her heart. As he turned the glass, she inhaled sharply and said, “Is that...does it really look like that?” He looked up to see her craning her neck to see through the lens. With his free hand, he took one of hers and brought it up to grasp the glass.

  “It does, and it doesn’t,” he said, as she ran the glass across her legs and up her arm. “Magic isn’t something we can comprehend in its...I suppose you could say its natural state. The runes and command words we use are a sort of compromise between our limited perception and the vast incomprehensibility that is magic. Epiria reveals the structure of spells, but in a form that we can make sense of.”

  “Does it look different from other spells?”

  “Very. May I?” He accepted the glass from her and held it in a position about midway between their bodies. “It keeps moving, for one thing, and it’s also covered in runes. A rune is supposed to be a focal point that gives shape to a spell, not part of the magic itself. I’ve never heard of anything like it. Would you mind being quiet for a moment? I need to concentrate on this. But I’d be happy to answer any questions you have, later. You have a perfect right to know what this thing is about.”

  She nodded, and Evon went back to studying the spell. The movement wasn’t random, he realized, but he was damned if he could identify the pattern. He felt as if he ought to recognize it, but the longer he stared at the fluid magic, the blurrier his vision got. What he needed was to see it all at once, not just through the two-inch-diameter lens.

  He stood and dug in his pocket for his chalk. “No, don’t get up, I’m going to try something else,” he said absently. He glanced at Piercy, whose face was so expressionless it had to be on purpose. “What?” he said.

  “You have that look again,” Piercy said.

  “What look?”

  “The mad genius look. Should Miss Haylter and I seek shelter?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Just because I’m trying something I’ve only ever read about in books.” He drew a large, lopsided circle around Miss Haylter and began chalking runes inside it. “This will extend the range of epiria to cover your entire body at once,” he told her. “It should be a better perspective. Just stay still.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her clasp her hands together in her lap again, once more clenching them tight. He stopped mid-rune and went to kneel in front of her, careful not to smudge the circle. “I apologize,” he said. “Piercy will tell you I have a regrettable habit of getting too caught up in my work. I forgot that this is personal for you.”

  Hazel eyes met his with that disconcerting gaze. “I have nothing to lose,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I trust you? After all, I couldn’t kill you; that should count for something.” To his astonishment, a smile touched her lips, just briefly, but long enough that it transformed her face and made him wonder what he could do to make it return. Get her free from this spell, of course.

  “I hope to be worthy of your trust,” he said, and finished chalking runes on the uneven floorboards. He once again seated himself cross-legged in front of her, put the chalk away and dusted his hands on his trouser legs. He held his quizzing glass in front of him, tilted it so the runes scratched on its rim lined up with the ones chalked on the floor, and pictured it enormous, a lens fiv
e feet in diameter, rim the thickness of his upper arm. With that image firmly in mind, he said, “Epiria.”

  The writhing blue ribbons of the spell blossomed into full view. They twisted and rolled around Miss Haylter’s body, making her look like a statue wreathed in tendrils of blue smoke. Miss Haylter sat unmoving except for her eyes, which darted in every direction as if she couldn’t decide which spell-ribbon to follow.

  “Do you see a pattern?” Evon asked Piercy, who left his position by the wall to stand next to where Evon sat on the ground.

  “I don’t. But it feels as if I should. It seems very familiar.”

  “That was my sense as well.” Evon stood, focused on a single twisting ribbon and watched it flow slowly down Miss Haylter’s left arm and back up again, around her chest and back to her arm again. It wasn’t a continuous circle, but there was a clear sense that it was following a path dictated by the shape of the spell. Up, down, around and back. “It’s a circulatory system,” he said, absently watching the ribbon flow through its path. “It mirrors Miss Haylter’s own body, not perfectly, but close enough.”

  “By the Twins, you’re right,” Piercy exclaimed. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s how it stays bound to her. You. Excuse me. This spell is damned—excuse me, Miss Haylter—very complex, if it can have an entire aspect devoted to staying connected to you.”

  “So you can’t free me.”

  “I didn’t say that.” He leaned in to examine one of the spell-ribbons more closely and once again it moved just far enough away that the black runes thronging it remained indistinct. The spell was definitely reacting to his presence, which spoke to a level of awareness that worried him. He tried, absurdly, to take hold of one of the strands, but it was as incorporeal as any other spell and didn’t even bother moving out of the way of his hand. Evon felt he was being taunted. Irritably, he clenched one fist, slapped his open palm over it, and growled, “Desini cucurri.”