Lynn Flewelling - The Bone Doll's Twin

“You were right. Iya tried to tell me …” he managed at last, caught between wonder and betrayal. “It was all a lie, that this robs a wizard of power.” He raised his hand to the crown of light glowing in her hair. “I’ve never made anything so beautiful.”

Lhel took his hand again and pressed it to her heart. “Not lies for all, Orëska. Some can’t serve the Goddess. But you? What you feel here …” She tapped his chest with her free hand. “That’s what you make here.” She touched his forehead. “Iya thinks this. She tried tell you.”

“You heard us talking that day?”

“I hear a lot. See a lot. See you sleep with longing in your raluk.” She squeezed him inside of her and gave him a playful wink. “I try send my words to you in dreams, but you stubborn one! Why you make me send children after you with all that heat in you?”

Arkoniel stared up at the sky, trying to summon the fear that had beset him less than an hour earlier. How had he come to be here, sated and laughing, without any memory of decision or consent? “Did you make me—?”

Lhel shrugged. “Can’t make if desire don’t be in you. Wasn’t, that first time in the mud place. Now it is; I just call it out.”

“But you could have had me easily in the—the ‘mud place’!” Yet even as he said it, Arkoniel knew that something important had shifted in himself since that day at the marsh.

“I don’t take,” she said softly. “You give.”

“But I didn’t have any intention of—of—” He gestured weakly. “Of any of this until the moment I got here!”

“You did. In here.” Lhel caught one of the light points on her fingertip and placed it on his chest. “Heart don’t always tell head. But body know. You learn that.”

“Yes, I learn that,” Arkoniel agreed, surrendering to her logic.

Lhel rolled off him and stood up. Her feet were bound up with rags and strips of bark but she showed no sign of minding the cold. Pulling the torn dress and the robe around her, she said, “Too much in they head, you Orëskas. That why you need me for the shaimari anan. Why you need me put those keesas’ shaimari back right.”

“You’ll teach me?”

Lhel looked down at him and raised an eyebrow. “You keep pay?”

Arkoniel got up and straightened his own clothing. “By the Four, yes, if that’s your price. But can’t you come to the keep?”

Lhel shook her head. “No, Iya right in that. I seen your king, read his heart. Nobody knows, is better.”

Sudden doubt leeched up through Arkoniel’s buoyant mood. “I saw you speak to Tobin and Ki in the road. They know you.”

“Keesas knows not to say.”

“You put Ki in danger, you know, revealing too much.”

Lhel shrugged. “You don’t be worry about Ki. Goddess send him, too.”

This seemed to be the foundation of her reasoning. “She’s a busy lady, your goddess.”

Lhel folded her arms and stared at him until he felt uncomfortable, then turned abruptly and motioned for him to follow.

“Where are we going?”

A chuckle floated back to him as she melted into the shadow of the trees. “You want have all lessons in the road, Orëska?”

With a resigned sigh, Arkoniel reached for his horse’s lead rein and followed her on foot.

Wizards saw well in the dark, and apparently so did witches. Lhel strode confidently through the trees with no path to guide her. Humming to herself, she seemed almost to dance ahead of him, brushing trees and stones with her hands as she went. Without the stars to sight by, Arkoniel soon lost track of the way and hurried to keep up with her.

She stopped at last under an enormous oak.

“Cama! ” she said aloud, and a soft glow issued from an opening in its side.

Following her inside, he found himself in a comfortable shelter. A light similar to the one he’d conjured glowed softly some twenty feet overhead where the cleft in the oak ended. Iya and he had found shelters like this in their travels; ancient oaks often split without dying. Lhel had made herself nicely at home here. A fur-covered pallet lay against the far wall beside a rumpled pile of what might be clothing; there were a few pots and baskets, and the fire pit and upper walls of the tree were well blackened with smoke. Even so, he could not imagine living all these years in such a place.

Lhel pulled a deer hide across the entrance, then squatted by the firepit to strike a flame in the tinder stacked ready there.

“Here, a gift.” Arkoniel took a small pouch of firechips from his tunic and showed her how to use them. Flames licked up and she fed the little blaze from a pile of twigs and broken branches next to it.

She looked into the pouch and smiled. “Is good.”

“How have you survived here?” he asked, hunkering down beside her. In this light he could see how chapped her face and hands were, and the thick calluses and chilblains on her dirty bare feet under the wrappings.

Lhel looked at him over the fire. The flickering light sank deep shadows into the lines around her mouth and struck reddish glints in the silver streaks in her hair. As they’d rutted wildly in the road, she’d seemed so young; here she looked ancient as a goddess herself.

“This good place,” she said, shrugging out of the cloak and letting the torn top of her dress slide off her shoulders to hang loose about her waist. Her full breasts glowed in the firelight, showing no sign of the symbols he’d seen there before. She reached into a basket and offered him a strip of dried meat. Arkoniel took it, still staring at her body as she found more food and began to eat. She was as filthy as ever, and had lost some teeth over the years. Those she had left were stained and worn. Yet as she turned to grin at him, she was still handsome, still deeply alluring….

Without thinking, he leaned forward to kiss her shoulder, inhaling her odor and wanting her again. “How do you make me feel like this?” he whispered, genuinely mystified.

“How many year you be?” she asked around a mouthful of wizened caneberries.

Arkoniel had to stop and think. “Thirty-one,” he said at last. It was nearly a life’s span for some men; for a wizard he was hardly out of his youth.

Lhel raised her eyebrows in mocking surprise. “Thirty-one year no woman and now you don’t know why you get hard?” She snorted and reached under his tunic to cradle his genitals in her hand. “You got power here!” Taking her hand away, she touched his belly, chest, throat, and brow. “Got power all places. Some can use. You can.”

“And you’ll teach me?”

“Some. For the keesa.”

Arkoniel moved closer until his leg was pressed to hers. “That day at the marsh I saw you do something that I want to learn. I was on the road, and you appeared—”

Lhel smiled slyly and made a pinching motion with thumb and forefinger. “I see you with your krabol.”

Arkoniel stared at her a moment, then grinned sheepishly as he interpreted the hand gesture. “With the beans, you mean!”

“Beans.” She repeated the word. “You think you move them—” Another less intelligible gesture, but he thought he understood.

“You’ve seen me trying to move them about. But how?”

Lhel held up her left hand and made a circle with thumb and forefinger. Rattling off a quick gabble of sounds that didn’t quite seem to be words, she pursed her lips and blew through her fingers. When she took her hand away Arkoniel saw a small black hole in the air in front of them, no bigger than a horse’s eye.

“Look,” she offered.

Leaning over, Arkoniel peered into the spy hole and found himself looking at Tobin and Ki. They were sitting on the floor beside the toy city and Tobin was trying to teach Ki to carve. “Incredible!”