Taking Flight

Chapter Twenty-One

Irith had paused in her story, but Kelder and Asha just waited, and after a moment she began where she had left off.

“It was... well, I’d heard the story from Kalirin, about how the great Javan went and ruined himself, and I was worried about the war, and I didn’t want to be a wizard, and I was really sick and tired of being an apprentice — I mean, for three years I had worked the skin right off my fingers, doing all this weird stuff,” Irith said. “And it seemed like a good idea, to go ahead and do the spell, and then I’d know some magic, but I couldn’t go into combat because I wouldn’t know the right kind of magic, and I’d never be able to do research — I wouldn’t be able to do any other magic, ever. So I started picking out the spells, and practicing up. The book said that Javan’s Second Augmentation was a seventh-order spell, but it looked a lot easier than that, and I was doing fourth-order spells without much trouble, and I figured that if it didn’t work I wasn’t any worse off. I mean, usually, when a spell doesn’t work right, nothing happens at all. Sometimes it goes wrong, and all kinds of horrible things can happen when that happens, but usually it doesn’t, you see?”

Kelder nodded.

“So I started picking out the spells I wanted, and collecting all the ingredients for everything. I can still remember what I needed for the Augmentation — maybe one reason I liked the idea was that there wasn’t anything really yucky in it. I needed three left toes from a black rooster, and a plume from a peacock’s tail, and seven round white stones, six of them exactly the same weight and the seventh three times as much, and a block of this special incense that had been prepared in the morning mist of an open field, and then I needed my wizard’s dagger.” Irith smiled dreamily, leaning on one elbow. “You know, I haven’t thought about this stuff in ages! All that stuff, to work magic!”

“You don’t have a wizard’s dagger now, do you?” Asha asked.

“Of course not,” Irith said, sitting up again. “I had to break it as part of the spell. I cut my knee doing it, too.”

“Go on,” Kelder said.

“Well, it took a couple of months to get ready,” Irith said, “and then an entire sixnight to work all the spells together. They didn’t all work — I’d picked some that were too hard for me. And some that sort of worked didn’t work right, like the invisibility spell. It was supposed to be Ennerl’s Total Invisibility, but it doesn’t act the way Kalirin’s book said it would; it’s a fifth-order spell, and I didn’t really know how to do stuff above fourth-order, but I figured I could give it a try.” She shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.”

“So what other spells did you try?” Asha asked.

“Oh, I picked all the best ones I could find,” Irith said, “but not stuff that the army would want. And I didn’t make Javan’s silly mistake; the very first one I did was a spell of eternal youth, and if that hadn’t worked I wouldn’t even have done the rest, I don’t think. I’m not really sure, because the magic messed up my memory a little bit — but anyway, the spell worked, so I was fifteen then, and I’ll always be fifteen — I can’t get any older unless something breaks the spell, and there isn’t anything that can break the spell!” She smiled brightly.

“What else?” Kelder asked.

“Well, there’s a Spell of Sustenance that they used to use on soldiers so they didn’t have to feed them — see this?” She lifted her head and displayed her throat, pulling away the velvet ribbon, and for the first time Kelder realized that the bloodstone she wore there was not on a choker, but set directly into her flesh. “As long as that stone is there, I don’t need to eat or drink or even breathe — but I usually do anyway, because it’s fun, and besides, if I go without too long it feels really weird and I don’t think it’s good for me. And I don’t get tired if I use it, I mean, not the usual way, but it... I don’t like to use it too much.” That explained how she could dance along the road for hours, Kelder realized — and also why she didn’t always, why she had gotten tired when carrying Asha on horseback.

(Could she use her other magic when not in human shape? She hadn’t said.)

“And I can change shape, of course,” Irith continued. “I have seven shapes. That’s Haldane’s Instantaneous Transformation, and it was the hardest part — I had to make bracelets from the skin of each animal, and soak them in my own blood stirred with butterfly wings.”

Kelder remembered the bands around her ankle, and once again, a mystery evaporated.

“Seven shapes?” Asha asked. “What are they?.”

Irith hesitated. “Oh, I guess it won’t hurt to tell you,” she said finally. “I can be a horse, or a bird, or a fish, or a cat, or me, or me with wings, or a horse with wings. And before you ask, I can’t carry much when I fly, even as a horse — I couldn’t have just flown us all to Shan. Flying with anything more than my own weight is hard.”

“How did you get skin from a flying horse?” Kelder asked. He had never heard of flying horses, and certainly had never seen any.

“Well, I didn’t, really,” Irith admitted. “I used strips of ordinary horsehide braided together, with dove feathers woven in. And for just growing wings, I used dove feathers wound in my own hair.”

Kelder nodded. “Anything else?” he asked. “Shape-changing, invisibility, eternal youth, the Spell of Sustenance — that’s four, and you said there were a dozen.”

“I said you could maybe do twelve,” she corrected him. “I only tried ten, and half of them didn’t work.” She shrugged. “I was only an apprentice, after all.”

“Half — so is there one more?”

Irith bit her lip, and Kelder thought she blushed slightly; he couldn’t be sure in the dimness of the tavern.

“There is, isn’t there?” he said. “At least one more.”

“Just... just one, I think,” she admitted. “And I wish it didn’t work, and I’d gotten one of the protective spells instead, or the one that would let me walk on air, or the one to light fires. I still can’t believe I messed that one up — the fire-lighting spell. I mean, it’s about the simplest spell there is, one of the first things every wizard’s apprentice learns. I think I must have left it until last, and I guess by then I was really tired...”

“Irith,” Kelder said, cutting her off, “what’s the other spell?” He was not going to let his wife keep any important secrets from him, and while Irith wasn’t his wife yet and didn’t know she would ever be, he knew.

“...I mean,” she said, “here I was doing seventh-order wizardry, and I couldn’t get Thrindle’s Combustion!..”

“Irith.”

“Or maybe,” she went on desperately, “I never even tried it after all — maybe I forgot, or decided it would be too useful for the army. After all, if you use it on something that’s already burning, it explodes, so that would be almost like a weapon, wouldn’t it? So I must have decided not to use it, and my memory’s been playing tricks on me...”

Kelder leaned across the table and grabbed her by both wrists.

“Irith,” he said, in what he hoped was a low and deadly tone, “what was the other spell?”

She stared at him for a moment, then surrendered.

“It was a love spell,” she said. “Fendel’s Infatuous Love Spell.”

Kelder sat back, puzzled; why had she been so reluctant to name it? What was so terrible about a love spell? The local farmers back home had told some stories about love potions, and they hadn’t sounded particularly horrible.

“There might have been another one, maybe,” Irith said, speaking quickly, “I don’t know. It’s really, really hard for me to think about magic sometimes, now, and everything I remember from when I was getting the spell ready is all sort of blurry. But if there were any others, they were one-time things, like the youth spell, not anything I can use over and over...”

She was trying to distract him again. A dreadful thought struck him.

“Irith,” he said, “did you try that love spell on me?”

She stopped in mid-breath and stared at him, shocked. Then she burst into giggles.

“No, silly!” she said. “Of course not! You don’t love me that much, or you wouldn’t be arguing with me all the time, and asking me all these questions! Don’t you know how love spells... well, no,” she said, calming. “No, I guess you don’t know.”

“No, I don’t,” he said coldly.

Even as he spoke, he was thinking. The possibility still remained that she might use the love spell on him in the future; maybe that was why he would marry her. No, he told himself, that was silly. He already wanted to marry her, without any spell — didn’t he?

“It isn’t all love spells work that way, anyway,” she explained, “but there’s a reason this one is called Fendel’s Infatuous Love Spell.”

“You’ve used it?” Kelder asked.

“Well,” she said, “I was worried about the Northerners, you see. So I picked the transformation so I could grow wings and fly away, or turn into a fish and swim away, and I picked the invisibility spell so I could hide from them, and the sustenance spell so I wouldn’t need any food while I was hiding — and the youth spell didn’t have anything to do with the Northerners, I just didn’t want to grow old and mean like Kalirin. But the love spell was so that if the Northerners did catch me, somehow, I could make them love me, so they wouldn’t want to hurt me, you see? That’s all.”

“But the Northerners never came,” Kelder pointed out.

“No, they didn’t,” Irith agreed. “After I made the spell, and it worked, mostly, I ran away and hid, and then when I didn’t see any fighting or anything I snuck into a tavern and listened, and I found out that General Terrek had just won a big battle, his retreat had just been a trick, and the Northerners weren’t coming. But I didn’t dare go back, then — I’d deserted in time of war, and that meant a death sentence. So I hid out in the mountains for three years, working my way north toward the Great Highway and sneaking down to get news sometimes, and in 4996 the Northerners turned a whole army of demons loose and blasted General Terrek and the eastern territories into the Great Eastern Desert, and I thought we were all going to die after all, except it would be demons instead of Northerners, and they could probably find me no matter how well I hid and the love spell probably wouldn’t work on them. But then the gods themselves came and fought the demons off, and wiped out the Northerners, and the war was over, and I stopped worrying, and after awhile I stopped hiding. And I ran into Kalirin one day, and I thought he was going to kill me, but he didn’t care any more, he said that with the war over it didn’t matter, and there wasn’t any point in punishing me anyway, because of the spell. So I stopped hiding, but I didn’t have anywhere to go back to, so I just started traveling around the Small Kingdoms, mostly along the Great Highway.” She took a deep breath and concluded, “And I’ve been here ever since.”

“And you used that love spell on someone anyway, even though there weren’t any more Northerners,” Kelder said, certain that Irith would have been unable to resist testing it out. He still didn’t see why she was so embarrassed and secretive about it, though.

“On Ezdral, I bet,” Asha said.

Kelder started. That idea, obvious as it now seemed, had not yet occurred to him; he threw Asha an astonished glance in response to her unexpected perspicacity, then looked back to Irith.

The shapeshifter nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “I enchanted Ezdral.”

“So that’s why he’s in love with you?” Kelder asked. “That’s why he’s been looking for you all these years?” The embarrassment and reticence suddenly made sense.

Irith nodded unhappily.

“Well, why didn’t you take the spell off when you left him, then?” Kelder asked.

Irith stared at him in surprise.

“Because I can’t, stupid!” she shouted. “I don’t know how! All I can do is put it on, not take it off!”

This revelation left Kelder speechless.

Irith filled the silence by babbling on, trying to explain.

“I didn’t know how it worked, don’t you see? I mean, I’m only fifteen, and I’d been cooped up in Kalirin’s stupid house in the hills near Degmor ever since menarche, and the only people I ever saw were wizards and army officers and a few servants with the brains of a turnip amongst them, so I didn’t know anything about love or sex or infatuation or any of that stuff, and there wasn’t anyone I could try the spell out on, to see how it worked, and there’s a counterspell, yes, but it isn’t part of the spell itself, and I didn’t include it, maybe I tried, I don’t remember, I can’t remember, and I can’t do any other magic! I couldn’t even touch Kalirin’s book of spells any more!”

“But that spell... From what Ezdral said, it ruined his whole life!” Kelder said.

“Well, I didn’t know it would do that!” Irith said defensively. “I didn’t know how it worked! I’d used it a couple of times, but those were different, and they’re all dead now, and Ezdral was so cute, when I saw him there — he was big and handsome and he was so good with those horses, they calmed right down when he petted them, I mean, I almost wanted to turn into a horse so he’d pet me that way, and he wouldn’t even look at me hardly, and before I knew it I’d done it. And he came and talked to me, and he was so sweet, and it was just wonderful, and we had a great time, we went all over the place together and did all sorts of stuff, and he was the best-looking man everywhere we went, and he was gentle and playful...”

“Then why did you leave him?” Kelder asked.

She shrugged. “Well, it got boring,” she said. “And he was talking about us staying together forever, and I knew we weren’t going to do that, because I’m only fifteen, I’m not ready to settle down, and he was getting older, and everything, and besides, I knew he didn’t really love me, he was enchanted, and I was young and pretty and everything, and even that was magic, so it wasn’t real, you know? So it didn’t count. So I didn’t want to stay with him forever, and I knew I’d have to leave sooner or later, and when we had that fight about my dancing I decided it might as well be sooner, and I thought it would wear off! I thought that if I wasn’t there, the spell would wear off and he’d forget all about me.”

“Really?” Asha asked.

Irith blushed again, and looked down at the table.

“I thought it might,” she muttered. “I didn’t know. I thought it might wear off. But I guess it didn’t, at least not right away.”

“Not ever,” Asha said. “He’s still in love with you.”

Irith shuddered. “Well, I’m certainly not in love with him,” she said. “Can’t we just forget about him and go on without him?”

Kelder knew at once what the answer to this was — no, they couldn’t. Maybe Irith was capable of that sort of selfishness, maybe even Asha was, but he wasn’t. Not when he was who he was, and not when he was fated as he was.

He did not say so immediately, however; he paused to think it over, to consider not just what to say, but the entire situation.

He expected to marry Irith — Zindre’s prophecy said he would, and he had liked the idea very much. Irith was bright and cheerful, incredibly beautiful, and her magical abilities gave her all the appeal of the mysterious and exotic.

He still liked the idea, but it was obvious that Javan’s Second Augmentation had changed her into something that wasn’t quite the girl she appeared to be, and the thought of loving and marrying a creature that might not be quite human any more was a bit frightening.

And he knew that Irith was far from perfect; she could be selfish and thoughtless. In particular, it was obvious that she would leave him when he started to show any sign of age — or maybe even just signs of maturity.

He did not want a wife who would leave him when he aged; the Shularan custom, and his family’s tradition, was to marry for life. He had assumed that that was what Zindre had prophesied for him, that he would have Irith with him for the rest of his life, but now that he knew Irith, knew who and what she was, that looked very unlikely.

But then, was that really all that bad? He would survive if she left him, just as he would if he were widowed, and while the marriage lasted, she could certainly be an agreeable companion when she chose to be.

Still, he had doubts. This whole adventure was turning out differently than he had expected, and he was not sure yet if it was better or worse. The Great Highway was a dirt road, most of it ugly. He had seen the great city of Shan, but only very briefly and without pleasure; he had seen the vast plain of the Great Eastern Desert, and it had frightened and depressed him more than it had awed or exhilarated him. The wife he had been promised appeared to be a flighty and unpredictable creature, an immortal shapeshifter rather than an ordinary woman. Championing the lost and forlorn he had expected to be a matter of facing down thieves or slaying a dragon or some such traditional act of heroism, not stealing a dead bandit’s severed head on behalf of an abused child, or defending the rights of an ensorceled drunkard.

If this was the destiny he had been promised — and really, how could he doubt that it was? — then he had to consider whether he wanted it.

And if he decided he did not, could he refuse it, or was he foredoomed?

He really couldn’t say; he had hardly been thinking of such things when he spoke to Zindre as a boy of twelve. He might be doomed to carry out his destiny, or he might not, he simply didn’t know.

If he wasn’t trapped, did he want to go on?

Well, discharging his promise to Asha was easy enough now; he would certainly go on and hold Abden’s funeral, as he had said he would.

But did he still want to marry Irith?

She was as lovely as ever, and he thought he would enjoy her company for as long as they were together, but there was the little matter of what she had done to poor Ezdral. That was not something he wanted hanging over his married life, that some dismal old sot was madly in love with his wife, that she had been completely responsible for it and didn’t seem to care.

And that spell of hers — that wasn’t anything he wanted hanging over him, either. What if Kelder tired of her before she tired of him, or even if he just refused her now and turned away — what if he decided not to marry her after all, and she decided otherwise? Would she use her spell on him?

Would he know it if she had? Would he even care? Ezdral knew that Irith had deserted him, had avoided him, but he was still in love with her, still looking for her.

Kelder had no desire at all to live out his life under such a curse.

Of course, spells could be broken — Kelder knew that, at least in theory. Irith had said there was a counterspell for the love charm — or at least, that she thought there was; by her own admission, she was unreliable on any question having to do with magic.

Could the love spell be broken?

Could Irith’s spell be broken — Javan’s Second Augmentation of Magical Memory? Irith hadn’t been able to do any new magic for two hundred years, so anything she might say would be out of date; maybe a counterspell had been found long ago. If she were restored to an ordinary, non-magical existence, that would certainly simplify any marriage plans.

Of course, he didn’t know if Irith wanted all her spells broken, but there was certainly one she would like to be rid of — Fendel’s Infatuous Love Spell.

There was supposed to be a counterspell for that. The prophecy hadn’t mentioned anything about it specifically, but Kelder knew where all the great wizards were supposed to be, and Zindre had said he would see cities, plural. Shan was one; there had to be another.

The three of them had been sitting in silence for several seconds, thinking their several thoughts; now Kelder broke the silence.

“Listen,” he said, “suppose that after we’re done in Angarossa, after Abden’s funeral is all done and his soul set free, we all go on along the highway, all the way to Ethshar, all four of us — you, Irith, and you, Asha, and me, and Ezdral — and see if we can’t find a wizard who can break the love-spell.”

“All four of us?” Irith asked, startled.

“That’s right,” Kelder said, gathering enthusiasm, “all four of us! It would give poor old Ezdral a chance to be with you one last time, just as far as Ethshar — I’m sure we could find a wizard there who could cure him of his infatuation.”

“But why bother?” Irith asked.

“So Ezdral can live out the rest of his life in peace, of course,” Kelder said, annoyed. “And so you can either get rid of the love spell permanently, so you won’t accidentally use it again, or so at least you can learn to dispell it if you do use it.”

As he finished saying this he suddenly realized that he might be making a mistake — if she could turn the love spell on and off, Irith might well use it more often. That was scarcely a good thing.

She would be able to use it on him, whenever they argued.

Well, he told himself, the words were out now, and it was too late to take them back.

“You’re probably right,” Irith agreed thoughtfully. “If one of them could break the spell, I guess that would be nice for poor old Ezdral, wouldn’t it? I mean, it wouldn’t give him his forty years back or anything, he’d still be a horrible old man, but maybe he wouldn’t be so bad.” She brightened. “And then he wouldn’t have any reason to follow me around any more, or bother me at all — not even sit and wait for me, or anything!”

Kelder nodded, pleased that she seemed to have missed his accidental suggestion.

“That would be great!” Irith said. “I don’t like the idea of that awful old man thinking about me all the time.” She paused. “Do we all need to go?”

“Well,” Kelder said, “we probably need to have you there so the wizard can see how your spell works, and we need Ezdral so we can use the counterspell on him, and Asha doesn’t have anywhere else to go except with us, and I want to see that everything works out all right.”

Irith nodded. “I don’t like the idea of being around him,” she said, “but I guess I can stand it as far as Ethshar.”

“Why do we have to go all the way to Ethshar?” Asha asked plaintively.

“Because that’s where all the best wizards are, of course,” Irith told her.

“There are wizards in other places besides Ethshar, aren’t there?” Asha asked.

“Of course there are,” Kelder agreed, “and we’ll look them up along the way — we’ll ask in every village and castle along the Great Highway. I’ve always heard, though, that for real, serious wizardry, the best place to look is Ethshar of the Spices.” Besides, Zindre’s predictions clearly implied that he would see Ethshar before returning home; what other great city was there? The Great Highway ran between Shan and Ethshar, it didn’t go to Sardiron of the Waters or Tintallion of the Coast or any other important cities.

“You can find good magicians in any of the three Ethshars, really,” Irith said, “but Ethshar of the Spices is supposed to be the biggest and best, and it’s certainly the closest. I’ve never been to the other two.” She sipped her ale, and added, “And I haven’t been to Ethshar of the Spices in ages!”

“There are three Ethshars?” Asha asked, in a pitiful little voice.

“Four, actually,” Irith said, counting them off on her fingers. “There are the three in the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, of course — Ethshar of the Spices, Ethshar of the Rocks, and Ethshar of the Sands — and then there’s a place that calls itself Ethshar of the Plains that’s one of the Small Kingdoms, one of the smallest, over to the southeast of here, just south of Thuth. It split off from Dria right after the Great War ended, I think. Or maybe even before the war ended.”

“I didn’t know that,” Kelder remarked. “I thought there were just the three big ones.”

Irith shrugged. “Well, nobody knows all the Small Kingdoms,” she said, “or at least I don’t think so. There are more than a hundred in all, and who could remember that many? But I know a lot; I’ve traveled all over the northern half of them, not just along the Great Highway.”

“Well,” Kelder said, lifting his ale in salute, “you’ve certainly had time for it.”

Irith eyed him, trying to decide whether he meant anything insulting, and decided that he did not. She smiled at him and sipped her ale.

Kelder watched her, wondering whether her enchantments could all be broken, whether she would be any different if they were, and whether, if both of those were the case, the changes would all be for the better.