Taking Flight

“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.