The Smoke-Scented Girl (10 page)

Evon and Piercy looked at each other. Evon
wondered if the look of shock on Piercy’s face mirrored his.
“Powerful or not, this is just a spell,” Evon said. “A spell that
has somehow gotten tangled up inside you.” He didn’t say that he
had never heard of such a thing before, that it should be an
impossibility. No sense driving her further into despair, if that
was even possible. He had never heard anyone speak with such
hopelessness as she just had. “If I can remove it, you can return
to your old life. You don’t have to die.”

“I saw them all burn,” she said, unexpectedly
angry. “How am I supposed to live with that?”

“Every person who died from your spell was a
monster,” Piercy interjected. “Someone who had caused pain and
torment to anyone they encountered. I cannot imagine what you must
have gone through, but you should not blame yourself for innocent
deaths. They were all far from innocent. One man had raped and
killed six young women and buried them in his cellar. Whoever put
this geas on you was using you, true, but it seems to have been as
the unwitting hand of justice. This is a guilt you do not deserve
to carry.”

“Not all of them,” she said. “That little
boy—”

“Was a horrible accident,” Piercy continued.
“And one whose blame no doubt lies at the feet of the malefactor. I
assure you, Miss Haylter, you may have been the instrument, but you
bear no guilt.”

She looked at Piercy, then back at Evon. She
seemed to be struggling with some emotion, something she feared to
embrace. “Why do you care?” she exclaimed. “I’m nothing to you. Why
are you telling me these things? What do you want from me?”

Evon and Piercy exchanged glances again.
Piercy shook his head, minutely. Evon took refuge in the truth.
“When we thought you were a magician with a powerful new spell, all
I wanted was that knowledge,” he said. “But now....” He trailed
off, not knowing himself what he wanted. Her despair overwhelmed
him. “I want to help,” he said. “If I could remove the
spell...could you learn to...to live again?”

“You can’t remove it,” she said, but she
didn’t sound certain.

“Believe me, Miss Haylter, if anyone can do
it, Lore can,” Piercy said.

Her impassivity faded away, replaced by the
faintest expression of hope. “If you can,” she began, then her eyes
rolled up in her head and she fell off the chair, still in a seated
position, stiff and unmoving. Evon jerked back and looked at
Piercy. “What—” Piercy began. Evon tore his quizzing glass from his
waistcoat, fumbling a little, passed his hand across it and said
“Epiria
” with his eye squinted shut against the expected
blinding glow. Instead, faint blue light played across his eyelids,
and he opened his eyes to see the familiar ribbons of blue light,
scribed with runes he still couldn’t make out. Rough red cords
tangled with the blue, binding Miss Haylter’s arms and legs and
neck.
Desini cucurri.
“They’ve found her,” he said, ending
the revelation spell and putting away the glass.

“Found her, but not us, you think?” Piercy
said.

“If they knew we were with her, they’d have
tried to immobilize us as well. Probably succeeded. Any spell that
can affect someone the magician can’t see has Odelia’s grubby
fingerprints all over it. No, I think they believe she’s alone. Get
your things. You’ll have to carry her. We’re leaving.”

He slung his bag over his shoulder and
cracked the door open, listening, while Piercy hefted his own bag
and stick and awkwardly tried to find a way to carry the frozen
young woman. He was somewhat taller than Evon and ultimately put
his burden over his shoulder, her bent knees catching at his
shoulder and helping him balance her. “I won’t be able to support
her like this indefinitely,” he warned.

“Just to the stable yard. Now shush.” Evon
listened. The stairway was a bottleneck they couldn’t afford to be
caught unawares on. “Quietly. Let’s see if we can surprise them.”
He pushed the door open and they silently proceeded down the short
hall to the landing and down the stairs. Evon’s rapid breathing
echoed in his ears so much he was afraid he might not hear them,
but as they passed the second floor landing the sound of footsteps,
rapid and loud, came to him from the floor below. He gestured to
Piercy to stop and flexed his fingers. Despite the danger of their
position, Evon grinned. Speculatus was in for a surprise.

The footsteps approached. Evon looked down
over the bannister and saw three men and the flash of a black,
tiered skirt. Even better. He flicked his hands up and out and
whispered, “
Desini cucurri.”
The three men dropped, frozen
in place as Miss Haylter had been. The black skirt hesitated, and
Evon took a few steps down and around the landing to face Odelia.
Shock gave way to anger, and she clenched her fist and opened her
mouth to speak—

“
Presadi!
” Evon shouted, and the
iridescent, airtight bubble sprang up close around her, silencing
whatever she’d been about to say. Something fatal, judging by her
expression. She raised her hand and clawed at her nose and mouth,
then at her throat, then closed her eyes and fell hard on the
bottom steps. “Let’s go,” Evon said, and he and Piercy with his
awkward bundle made their way around the fallen bodies and out of
the stairwell. Evon looked down at Odelia for a long moment, then
dismissed the shield spell and took a minute to cast a stronger,
longer-lasting paralysis. He couldn’t bring himself to kill her,
though he wondered if he’d made a mistake exposing the new spell to
her. She was smart enough to possibly work out the details for
herself. It didn’t matter. It was time to leave.

The woman at the desk leaned against it,
frozen in the act of speaking, her hand raised and her index finger
pointed past them at the stairs. Piercy led them the back way
through the kitchens and into the yard, where they began rapidly
saddling their horses, shooing away the stable hand. Piercy had to
set Miss Haylter down in a pile of hay, solicitous of her comfort
though they both knew she couldn’t feel anything in that condition.
Pulling yet another buckle secure, Piercy said, “Where to now, dear
fellow?”

“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.”

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.”