Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

Isaura felt no compunction to tell the pirate that she was using magick to conceal her presence. It was not a spell that prevented people from seeing her per se, for that would be impractical at best and was, as nearly as she knew, impossible. Instead the magick just made it simple for people to forget they had seen her. Her mother had taught her the complex spell and had worked with her until she had perfected its casting and maintenance.

Chytrine had explained it rather simply, despite the spell’s being quite a twisted confluence of magickal energies. Most individuals, men chiefly among them, take every bit of information they learn in a day and sort it like with like. What the spell did was to soften the points used to make such matches. Anyone looking at her would see a woman in a hooded cloak of white, but as they sought a similar image to compare her against, they might lose white or cloak or woman. As they tried to find another point, it, too, would vanish. Chytrine had likened it to trying to identify a wine by taste. After four mouthfuls, you might think you had it, but by then the wine would be gone. In the mind of the observer, there would be nothing to remember.

Vionna could see her because Isaura chose to permit it. Aside from not wanting to be rude to a traveling companion, Isaura did need someone who had experience of the Southlands to help her. Anytime she wished Vionna to forget she existed, well… The girl smiled; the pirate queen was not possessed of so sharp a mind that she could pierce the spell unaided.

The inn’s common room held both horror and delight for Isaura. The acrid scent of unwashed bodies, sour beer, urine, and woodsmoke from the huge hearth assaulted her. Even the heat was oppressive, with the blazing fire raising temperatures to a hedonistic level that would have consumed a week’s cooking wood in Aurolan in a night here. The fire’s ashes, from what little she had seen of the city, would not be used to fertilize a field, but would be tossed into the streets to darken snow and hasten its melting.

The people also surprised her. They presented a panoply of humanity, with hair of every hue and length. People tall and lean spoke with the short and fat. Twisted, humpbacked old women huddled in a corner, rocking, talking, watching with squinted eyes in puckered faces. Young men said things to a servant that made her stop, and her return comment made one of them turn a hot red. Clothing, most of it filthy, covered them in layers and seemed less meant to keep them warm than to make some sort of display.

She found it all repellent, and would have dashed away up the stairs in Vionna’s wake save for one thing. The old women, and the companions of the reddened youth, and most everyone else, laughed. Some were hearty laughs, some giggles, and some cackles of triumph or disgust, but they were laughs. Isaura could identify it as laughter easily enough, but had never heard so much in one place. And it made her smile.

Vionna tugged on her arm. “I said, come on.”

Isaura blinked her silver eyes. “Yes, forgive me.”

The Aurolani princess followed quietly, less hoping for useful instruction from Vionna than to catch any further laughter from below. The pirate led her up the stairs and down a narrow corridor. She pushed open a door, then took a candle from a wall sconce and used it to light the lamp on the small table beside the bed.

Isaura shivered. While she approved of the room’s size—small enough to be a proper Aurolani room built to warm easily—the low pallet on which she was to sleep had a thin blanket and a thinner mattress. The scent of moldy straw filled the room, though the lamp’s burning oil competed for domination. The tall ceiling bothered her, since all the warm air rose there, but a constant supply could stream up through the gaps between the floorboards from the common room below.

She pointed to the mattress. “This is soiled.”

Vionna bent over and took a deep sniff. “Only a couple of weeks old. There’s nothing here that will hurt you.”

“But I do not wish to sleep on it.”

Vionna straightened up, quickly covering the contempt flashing over her face. “Then I shall take this room and you may have the other.”

They crossed the hallway and found another similarly snug room, and the mattress did, indeed, have more and fresher straw. Vionna made a big show of sniffing the straw, then waving a hand toward it. “Perhaps more to your liking, Princess.”

“Perhaps.” Isaura sat on the edge of the bed. “I am fatigued. You may call upon me later.”

The pirate nodded. “As you wish.” The disdain she kept off her face still seeped into her words. “Later we shall explore, if that is what you want.”

Isaura nodded, then waved her out of the room with a light flick of her right hand. “That would please me.”

The pirate covered a yawn with her hand, then wandered out and closed the door behind her. Isaura heard the other door close and slowly smiled. The gesture of dismissal had spawned a spell that created a current linking the two of them. It eroded Vionna’s energy and brought to Isaura the fleeting impression of the pirate’s intent to find other ways to make the youths in the common room blush. Yet because of the spell, Vionna received Isaura’s fatigue, and the Aurolani Princess stood, refreshed as if she had napped for hours.

She acknowledged that using the spell on Vionna without her consent was not the sort of thing done to a friend, but Vionna was not a friend. Isaura had exaggerated the displeasure at the straw to provide Vionna a reason for disliking her. The pirate clearly had no desire to be her escort and saw her as a delicate rime-blossom that had no business being in the south at all.

Isaura harbored no illusions about her own lack of experience, but she also knew that did not make her a fool. She had learned much and would learn much more, but Vionna’s contempt hardly made her a good instructor. Moreover, Isaura’s mother had desired her to visit the Southlands to learn about them, and being toured around by a renegade-in-heat would hardly provide her with the sort of information she wanted.

With the wave of a finger Isaura extinguished her lamp and entered the hallway. She drifted past Vionna’s door, suppressing a smile at the snores echoing from within, then descended the stairs. A man coming up twisted his back to the wall to let her pass, though by the time he reached the hallway above he had forgotten her. She passed out the door and into the darkened street, leaving a shivering couple near the common room door wondering where the draft had come from.

Knowing the track of her boots in the snow would betray her presence, Isaura kept to the streets and walkways on which the snow had been tamped down by the feet of passersby. She saw well enough at night that she eschewed magick to enhance her sight. She did regret the way snow covered everything, for she wished she could see what lurked in the alley middens. From what little she could see as two tatterdemalions dug through one mound, each would have been a treasure trove in Aurolan, with useful bits of wood and food and scrap metal.

Wandering through the city as night fell and the day’s warmth fled, she found a city slowing as if moving toward hibernation. People hurried along the streets and crowded into common houses that rang with laughter. Yellow light and flickering shadows splashed over snow, and while the night was not nearly cold enough to discomfit her, Isaura still felt a chill.

She recognized it immediately for it was no stranger to her. In Aurolan she felt it often. Distance existed between her and the others. The sullanciri viewed her with a reverence that invited no intimacy. Nefrai-laysh might joke with her, or compose simple rhymes, but she knew that to be a compulsion with him, not anything born of affection. Neskartu, while praising her skills at magick, did not show her even as much fondness as he did his students.