Lawrence Watt-Evans - Taking Flight

(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.

Even as he spoke, he was thinking. The possibility still remained that she might use the love spell on him in the future; maybe that was why he would marry her. No, he told himself, that was silly. He already wanted to marry her, without any spell-didn’t he?

“It isn’t all love spells work that way, anyway,” she explained, “but there’s a reason this one is called Fendel’s Infatuous Love Spell.”

“You’ve used it?” Kelder asked.

“Well,” she said, “I was worried about the Northerners, you see. So I picked the transformation so I could grow wings and fly away, or turn into a fish and swim away, and I picked the invisibility spell so I could hide from them, and the sustenance spell so I wouldn’t need any food while I was hiding-and the youth spell didn’t have anything to do with the Northerners, I just didn’t want to grow old and mean like Kalirin. But the love spell was so that if the Northerners did catch me, somehow, I could make them love me, so they wouldn’t want to hurt me, you see? That’s all.”

“But the Northerners never came,” Kelder pointed out.

“No, they didn’t,” Irith agreed. “After I made the spell, and it worked, mostly, I ran away and hid, and then when I didn’t see any fighting or anything I snuck into a tavern and listened, and I found out that General Terrek had just won a big battle, his retreat had just been a trick, and the Northerners weren’t coming. But I didn’t dare go back, then-I’d deserted in time of war, and that meant a death sentence. So I hid out in the mountains for three years, working my way north toward the Great Highway and sneaking down to get news sometimes, and in 4996 the Northerners turned a whole army of demons loose and blasted General Terrek and the eastern territories into the Great Eastern Desert, and I thought we were all going to die after all, except it would be demons instead of Northerners, and they could probably find me no matter how well I hid and the love spell probably wouldn’t work on them. But then the gods themselves came and fought the demons off, and wiped out the Northerners, and the war was over, and I stopped worrying, and after awhile I stopped hiding. And I ran into Kalirin one day, and I thought he was going to kill me, but he didn’t care any more, he said that with the war over it didn’t matter, and there wasn’t any point in punishing me anyway, because of the spell. So I stopped hiding, but I didn’t have anywhere to go back to, so I just started traveling around the Small Kingdoms, mostly along the Great Highway.” She took a deep breath and concluded, “And I’ve been here ever since.”

“And you used that love spell on someone anyway, even though there weren’t any more Northerners,” Kelder said, certain that Irith would have been unable to resist testing it out. He still didn’t see why she was so embarrassed and secretive about it, though.

“On Ezdral, I bet,” Asha said.

Kelder started. That idea, obvious as it now seemed, had not yet occurred to him; he threw Asha an astonished glance in response to her unexpected perspicacity, then looked back to Irith.

The shapeshifter nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “I enchanted Ezdral.”

“So that’s why he’s in love with you?” Kelder asked. “That’s why he’s been looking for you all these years?” The embarrassment and reticence suddenly made sense.