The Shape-Changer's Wife (15 page)

“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 through 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.

“Am I really? But why?”

“I have never been interested in taking students. They waste one's time and interrupt one's schedule.”

“Why did you agree to take me, then?”

If anything, the smile became more malevolent. “Because Cyril convinced me that you were special.” There seemed to be no answer required to that.

Aubrey was delighted to learn that Glyrenden was to leave again in two short days, and this time be gone more than a week. More time to exercise his newfound abilities. He did not say so, of course. “Perhaps someday you will take me with you,” he said instead, though by now he knew Glyrenden would never invite him. By now he was glad of it.

Glyrenden laughed. “It would inconvenience me greatly to have you at my side—this time, at least. Maybe sometime in the future. If you beg me hard enough.”

Aubrey forced a smile to hide his distaste. “I begged once or twice when I first came here, and you never accepted my escort. You are not moved by begging.”

“Indeed, you are wrong. I enjoy it very much.”

“Perhaps then, if I plead hard enough, you will teach me something new,” Aubrey said, to turn the subject. “I have not been successful yet today, and I would like something fresh to practice while you are gone.”

Glyrenden regarded him narrowly for a moment, and then his mouth drew back in a feral smile. “I know just the lesson,” he said, and moved over to the narrow ebony desk pushed against the back wall. After a moment's debate, he picked up a small silver statuette in the shape of a nude woman with her arms stretched luxuriously above her head.

“I have a fondness for this piece,” he said. “But its color no longer pleases me. Can you turn it to gold?”

Smiling, Aubrey took the figurine from Glyrenden's hands, feeling the silken metal cool and smooth against his fingers. “I can try,” he said, and silently invoked the spell.

Despite his earlier failures this day, he was astonished when the silver woman did not immediately metamorphose to gold. Having learned to change the complex circuitry of his body, he had not expected to have trouble altering any mundane inert material. How had he miscued the spell? He tightened his fingers and tried the enchantment again.

Glyrenden, as usual, was talking. “A perfect woman, is she not?” he said, in his light voice. “Such detailing in the face, in the breasts—you can almost imagine the color and texture of her skin, if she were alive, if she were human. What does she reach for, with her hands lifted up like that? For the kiss of a man? For the heat of the sun? I think she just likes to feel the suppleness and elasticity of her own body. I think she has just risen from her bed, where her lover lies sleeping, and she is thinking that now, in the daytime, her body is her own again. But at night it is his, and she knows it is his—it was his the night before and will be his again this night, but for now she feels solitary and purified and free.”

As always, Aubrey was distracted by the sense of Glyrenden's words, for the wizard generally indulged in strange, seductively sinister monologues when he was trying to destroy Aubrey's concentration. Yet even so, had he been alone in the room and Glyrenden nowhere nearby, Aubrey knew he would have been unable to change the silver statue to gold. He could send his mind to the simplest, deepest level of the cast metal; he could feel the molecular bindings that held one infinitesimal fragment to the other, but he could not dissolve those bindings and rearrange them. The woman resisted his alchemy. The knowledge made him furious, but he would not let Glyrenden see. Glyrenden was teaching him something—or proving a point, it was hard to tell—and only meek deference would allow Aubrey to learn which.

He set the statue back on Glyrenden's desk. “I cannot change her,” he admitted. “She is impervious to my magic.”

Glyrenden smiled, well-pleased. He fondled the figurine, letting her stand where Aubrey had placed her. “And yet, she is receptive to sorcery,” the wizard said. “For she was not always a woman clothed in silver.”

Aubrey understood then. “She has been changed already,” he said.

Glyrenden nodded. His fingers still played lovingly over the curves and surfaces of the metallic body. “A beautiful piece,” he said. “Carved from cherrywood dark as port. The striations of the tree made black loops around her waist and ringed her wrists with bracelets. But I stroked her breast once and found a splinter in my hand, and that was the end of that wooden girl.”