The Shape-Changer's Wife (23 page)

Aubrey was silent a moment. “No,” he said at last, very slowly. “You will be as you once were, with no thought except what belongs to you, and no memory except that of soil and season. I have made the others forget, and I will make you forget, and these three years will be as if they never were.”

“But if I am made to forget Glyrenden,” she said, still whispering, “does that mean I will forget you as well?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then I do not want to forget.”

He was silent, for a wild hope laid a strangulating hand across his throat, and speech was impossible. She had felt nothing at all for Glyrenden, not love and not hate, for she was fashioned of a living thing that had no passions, desires or emotions. But she had been three years a woman, treated as a woman and loved as a woman by three very different men; she had speech and reason and a soul. Perhaps the transformation she had feared so greatly had finally come to pass.

“Lilith,” he said at last, his voice very low. “I know what you have suffered at Glyrenden's hands and that you could never have come to love the man he was. But I am not like Glyrenden, and I have loved you for a long time. I will do what you say—I will take you where you want to go. But my life will be sere and empty without you. The world that once seemed so full of color and promise will be gray and tedious. Say you will stay with me. Remain a woman and become my wife. You do not know how good that life can be. I swear I would die to make you happy.”

She was silent a moment, her head bowed, her marvelous eyes hidden. Then she lifted her head and he could see she was crying, even though she smiled. She came closer and put her two hands on either side of his face; and it was the first time he could remember that she had reached out to him. “It would not make me happy for you to die,” she said. “And if I could be happy as a woman, I know it would be at your side. But you forget so many things, Aubrey, my dear. You forget how strange I am, and that even simple peasants recognize that strangeness in me—”

“They would say nothing against you while I was near,” he interrupted swiftly.

“You forget that I have no family, that I cannot make friends, that I have no skills and no conversation. I could not move with you in the world of men, in the exalted circles in which you will someday move.”

“I do not care for the society of rich and exalted men. I would be content in a cottage in an untracked forest, if you were in the cottage with me.”

She smiled again. “You would not be content. You are a great wizard, Aubrey, and you are destined to be with great men. It would not help you to have me at your side.”

“I love you,” he said helplessly. “It could not hurt me to have you near me for the rest of my life.”

“But Aubrey,” she said, “can you not see how it will hurt me?”

“But then do you not care for me at all?” he cried desperately. “I thought—it seemed—surely you feel some affection for me after all?”

“I think I must love you,” she said, her voice very low. “For I feel as if this parting will break my heart. And I did not think I had a heart.”

He flung himself to the ground at her feet. “Then stay with me,” he begged. “A little while, stay with me. See what it is like to be a woman in love with a man. After that little while, I will ask you again, and then whatever you decide I will do.”

She looked down at him unflinchingly. “And then you will beg me again to stay just a little while, and again, and again, and soon I will forget to be anything except a woman and I will even be happy that that is what I am. But Aubrey, that is not what I want to be. I have been twisted out of my purpose, turned by black enchantment from my true shape, and I have been unhappier than you can imagine for three interminable years. There is a willow missing from the King's Grove where I was supposed to stand and make the forest complete. The world is out of kilter, just a little, because I am not where I should be. And I want to be there, Aubrey. I love you, but I do not love you enough.”

He dropped his head, and his shoulders seemed to draw in against his neck and make his whole body smaller. For a moment more he knelt before her, no longer pleading, but unable to climb again to his feet. She watched him, but did not touch him or speak again. At last, he looked up, then stood again, and on his face was the forlorn look of a man for whom all magic has faded.

“Let us go then to the King's Grove,” he said, and his voice, though soft, was steady. “We can forage for our food. There is nothing here either of us needs to pack or carry. Let us walk to the King's Grove.”

She could not help herself; she put one hand on his arm and the other to his cheek again. “But let us make the trip slowly,” she said, “so it takes us at least three days.”

IT TOOK THEM four days to make the journey to the King's Grove. Those four days, Aubrey knew, would be the last happy days of his life, and the only happy days Lilith had known in her three years as a woman. Aubrey hoped, though he did not voice his hope, that those four days would make her reconsider her decision, for during that time she loved him as much as any woman had ever loved him. But on the morning of the fifth day, they eluded the armed sentinels patrolling the borders of the King's Grove, and he knew that Lilith had not for an instant wavered in her determination.

For as soon as they stepped onto that protected soil, into that perfect and sanctified garden, she fell away from him. Her hand dropped from his arm, her body seemed to change and roughen; all her attention, which had been fixed on him, focused elsewhere. She ran from oak to elm to cedar with a childish delight, touching one coarse trunk, then another, naming to herself their real names, the names by which they addressed each other. The wind had picked up and danced through the bare autumn branches with an excited motion. They had no speech men could understand, these trees, but Aubrey almost thought he heard the fantastic, ancient language of the dryads as the news flew instantly from one end of the sacred grove to the other:
She's back, she's back, the one long gone has returned to us at last.

And when the woman finally rejoined him, and took his hand impatiently to draw him to the right spot, the special place, the oddly bare patch of land that was the one corner of the earth set aside for her particular use, he knew none of the last-minute supplications he had prepared would sway her. For she had changed already; it was a stranger's impersonal hand she laid in his, and her fey green eyes held virtually no recognition as they met his. He almost thought he could leave her in this place, still in the body of a woman, and the very intensity of her longing would gradually turn her back to the thing she once was. That greatly had she altered during the few short minutes they had stood inside this grove.

But speech was still left to her, though even with that she was impatient, using as few words as possible to convey her meaning. “Here,” she demanded. “Now. This place.” She planted her feet and with a luxurious, sensuous motion, spread her arms as wide as they would go.

He used his sternest voice, trying to catch her remote attention. “Lilith. Remember what I told you before. This is a hard spell, the hardest, and it is possible I could kill you instead of change you. You realize that, don't you? You still want me to speak the incantation?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, flinging her head back and closing her incredible eyes. “Now. Say it now.”

And he gazed once more at the coiled braids around her head and the simple, elegant lines of her body, and knew a craven moment of rebellion. If he did not speak the spell, she would never be changed; not a wizard in this kingdom could reverse Glyrenden's magic except himself. She would still be a woman. She would follow him wherever he went, needing something from him she could get nowhere else. She would be with him always, for he would never change her. He loved her. She would be his forever.

But he knew, even in that split second while the evil thought took hold of him, that he would never hold her so against her will. That would make him no better than Glyrenden; that was one thing. For another, he loved the woman known as Lilith, and he would not be able to live with her unhappiness. So he closed his eyes, so he would not have to watch her while he spoke this spell, and silently he chanted the charm that would change a woman to a willow. And he put into the enchantment all the baffles he knew, all the protectors, all the safeguards. He made the spell so strong not even Glyrenden, had he been alive, would have been able to undo it.

And then he opened his eyes. It was the most beautiful, the most awful thing he had ever seen, this transformation of a woman to a tree. Her body thickened and grew brown, her legs lengthened and rooted slowly in the earth. Her arms stretched and her fingers stretched, and tiny twigs began forming on her fingertips. He had missed the point where her brown head melted into the silver-brown trunk, for suddenly her face was no longer to be seen, and then none of her body was to be seen, and her slim, wiry branches arched over him like a rainfall, splashing in all directions. It was nearly winter, but she dazzled him with a repertoire of seasons; hard buds formed on her long, delicate limbs, then unfurled to a brief, heady green, then crinkled up and became old, and fell lazily around his feet. The trailing, clinging branches closed about him, brushing his shoulders and chest, and he had to push them aside with some force to move away from her, out from under her shade and into the white sunlight.

She had told him she wanted to remember and so he let her remember, but he did not think it would take any spell of his to make her forget. As for himself, no magician in the world would be able to take this memory from his mind; it had patterned itself over the intricate whorls and ridges of his brain and would be a part of him till the day he died. He stood looking for one long moment at the single willow in the King's Grove, which was more beautiful than any object he had ever seen; then he stooped to retrieve something that had fallen from her when she changed. It was the gold necklace he had given her, which she had worn for the past four days and had no use for now. Aubrey pocketed it and turned away, and made his way as quickly as he could back past the guards and out of the grove of trees.

 

SOME SAY THAT is the end of the story, and some say it is not. For while much is known of Aubrey's life, he who became known as the Gifted, much still lies within the realm of myth and speculation. Some say he never again laid eyes on the woman known as Lilith and that she remained as he had changed her until the king's forest burned down and all life within it perished. Others say that is not so.

These eager romantics will tell you that, as the forest took fire, and one by one the trees succumbed, spicy cedar lending its burning fragrance to the hot pitch of the pine, one tree did not burn when the flames reached it. That tree shook in the acrid breath of the approaching fire, and collapsed in upon itself, and remembered, when the need was upon it to remember, how to be a woman and how to run. And that woman escaped the conflagration that destroyed every other living thing in the King's Grove; and she stole clothes from the first peasant's hut she came to, unwatched and untended; and she made her way slowly from village to village, stealing food and remembering the language, until she reached a town that was large enough to have news. They say that there she inquired as to the whereabouts of a wizard named Aubrey, and that she traveled to the place where he lived, which was a thousand miles and two kingdoms from the grove where she had started. And that they were reunited that one time and never again, for they were never again parted from that day until the day they died.

It is true, as these storytellers say, that the King's Grove burned down; and it is true that in his later years Aubrey the Gifted had with him at all times a woman companion who was reputed to be green-eyed and strange. Any record of the magician's life will give you these facts. But as to the woman's identity, there are no clues. None of the histories record her name, and it is hard to believe that a spell spoken by Aubrey the Gifted could be so easily overturned. Moreover, she had once preferred the risk of death to the prospect of life as a woman, and she had had many years to forget that she had once had feet and could run from the threatened fire. But the stories persist, and no scholar has definitely refuted them.

As for the great magician, Glyrenden, the stories are even stranger. It is said that you can spend your whole life quartering the king's domain and never yet come across the wizard's remains. That whole forested area, to this day still wild and nearly impenetrable, is so overgrown that it is impossible to find in it any of the paths and roadways that once existed. The forest has taken its revenge on Glyrenden, the villagers say, and obliterated all traces of his existence, so that even those who have heard about him from others who have heard about him cannot prove he ever once lived and breathed and cast malicious spells; and they cannot be inspired to emulate a man who has disappeared so entirely from the memory of the earth.