Chapter 42

It took them more than a day to reach the edge of the Ivory Marshes. Either the ice demon was a poor judge of distance or—more likely—it was a faster walker than two cold and tired human beings, one of which it had recently consumed.

As Nora trudged across the frozen marshland, past curtains of brittle reeds as tall as herself, from time to time she could glimpse the higher land ahead, rocky islands hidden in the middle of the wetlands. Maarikok was the largest of these islands, with a ruined fortress on its highest point, according to the ice demon. Its own depredations, Nora gathered, had led to the castle’s abandonment. She was elated the first time she saw the keep’s tiny silhouette against the sky, but, as they kept walking, it did not seem to grow any larger.

Dorneng shuffled beside her, head lowered, mute. Evidently, being eaten by an ice demon didn’t kill you—at least, not at once. Instead, Dorneng seemed to be drowned in a vast apathy. He could walk, if Nora took his arm and pointed him in the right direction; he would eat, slowly and mechanically, if food was placed in his hand; but he did nothing to express or fulfill any volition of his own. “I told you it doesn’t hurt,” the ice demon said carelessly. This was after Nora had noticed, with a sick feeling, the white gleam of bone showing through the peeling flesh of Dorneng’s burned hand. Dorneng had not complained; he did not even seem to favor the injured hand. “They don’t care about anything, afterward,” the demon said.

She would have made better time without Dorneng—more than once she thought of leaving him sitting in the snow—but frustratingly, she also felt a certain painful obligation for him. He was pitiful in a way that was too familiar, even though she knew perfectly well that saving Dorneng would do nothing, nothing at all to make up for EJ. And at least Dorneng could carry the ice demon. It rode on his slumping shoulders, its arm crooked jauntily around his neck.

So far the thing had abided strictly by their agreement—it had not actually tried to eat her—but that did not prevent it from asking several times a day if it could do so, and complaining of hunger pangs when she refused. When Nora protested, the demon pointed out that it was only inquiring about renegotiating the contract, something either party could do at any time. She began to see exactly why Aruendiel disliked demons so much.

The first night, she hardly slept at all, afraid that the demon would attack her. How she would get to Maarikok without dying of fatigue, she was not sure at all until, thankfully, the next morning she made a chance discovery: The ice demon liked poetry.

One must have a mind of winter, she was thinking as she plodded along, lost in the white tedium of the landscape. And have been cold a long time. Being warm, so comfortable that you didn’t even think about where your skin stopped and the air began, had begun to seem distant and abstract, a happy condition she had only heard about. To distract herself, she said the whole poem aloud. There were relatively few great English poems about winter, she reflected, compared with the huge number of poems about autumn—the approach of cold and death being perhaps more poignant than their actual presence.

As she recited, she was conscious of a sense of longing, of powerful appetite. It was not hers, but so near to her that she felt the pang of frustrated desire almost as though it were her own. It belonged to a creature—she could sense this now—whose origins lay in silence, stasis, and cold. To move, to live, it needed Nora’s life, the thin filament of her consciousness. In return it promised an end to hope and pain alike.

“—‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’” Nora pulled back, just barely. The vast hunger retreated. She was safe, she still belonged to herself. She looked up to see the empty face of the ice demon turned fixedly to hers as it clung to Dorneng’s neck. Its round mouth, which had faded to pink since it fed on Dorneng, had reddened again.

“That was very good,” the demon said. “Not as filling as it could be, but still delicious. You see, it doesn’t hurt just to give me a taste, does it?”

Still shaken, Nora said: “What? A taste? That’s just a poem.”

“Whatever it is, it’s a nice morsel,” the demon said, stretching its mouth greedily. “Do you have any more?”

“More poems?” Nora stared at the ice demon. Was there was a way to keep it fed without sharing Dorneng’s fate? “I know quite a few. But you don’t speak English, right? How can you understand what I just said?”

“I don’t need to understand it,” the demon scoffed. “I just savor it.”

Interesting. She thought for a moment. “Try this: ‘Whose woods these are I think I know’—” The demon listened intently as she pulled the poem, line by line, from her memory. This time, somehow, she was better able to keep some distance from the demon’s insistent desire, like watching a shark’s grin through the aquarium glass.

“That was even better,” the creature said in its flat, piping voice. “There is some lovely despair there. I have eaten many men full of the same dark juice. More!”

“Later,” said Nora, quickening her step.

The ice demon had catholic tastes. It lapped up almost anything she could recite, and turned up its nose only at one of Ashbery’s mandarin lyrics. She did not always need to recite an entire poem to satisfy the demon, but it demanded constant novelty, never a poem repeated. Her memory was good but not perfect. As she walked, she excavated fragments from her mind, trying to restore them into something whole. After a while, her thoughts skipped in iambic pentameter. She estimated she knew enough poems to keep the ice demon fed for a few days, not more than a week. After that—if worst came to worst, Nora told herself, she would write her own damn poems.

By the end of the third day, Maarikok’s tower was bigger and more distinct than it had been that morning. Less than one more day of walking, Nora guessed. That night, for the first time, she was able to light a fire with magic instead of the flint and steel from Dorneng’s pack. Where she had pulled the fire from, she was not sure, but she took it as a good sign. She made sure that Dorneng was well wrapped in his fur cloak—he did not sleep now, as far as she could tell, but at night his torpor increased so much that he might as well have been asleep—and then she recited Donne’s “Elegy XIX” to the ice demon, which lay in the snow with its head propped on its elbow, a safe distance from the fire.

“‘Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee’”—the idea of taking off one’s clothes had never seemed less appealing than in weather like this. Yet the poem still warmed her, as it always did. Aruendiel would like it, she thought, more than he liked Jane Austen. Its frank lust, its humor. All those women he had seduced, years ago—no, better not to think of that.

Afterward, trying to sleep, curled up between the fire and a bank of snow piled up against the wind, she could still hear little icy rustles from where the demon lay.

“What is it?” she said finally, trying to sound stern.

“There’s another human nearby,” the demon said.

Nora sat up. “Who is it? Can you tell?”

“Very tasty, tender. A young one.”

Not Aruendiel, then. “Is it definitely human?” she asked, thinking of Ilissa.

“Of course, those are the best to eat!” The ice demon was scornful of her ignorance.

Nora stood and conjured a dim, reddish illumination from the embers of the fire. Cupping the light in her hand, she stared into the darkness. A shadow moved—no, it was a clump of reeds.

Suddenly, the ice demon launched itself toward something at her left, scuttling through the snow like a drunken crab.

She heard footsteps crunching, then the flat, dull bite of steel into ice. Someone grunted. Holding her light aloft, Nora ran over to where the noise came from.

She saw the ice demon first—glassy in the darkness, oddly contorted. Then she realized that it had wrapped itself around a man’s leg and was trying to shimmy up his body. The man was trying to push the demon back with his sword, but the tip kept slipping. The two strained at each other until finally the man managed to hook the demon in the armpit. With a thrust, he propelled the demon into the air and several yards away.

The ice demon rolled over twice and immediately began to struggle back toward the man.

“Watch out,” Nora called to the man. All she could see of him was that he was wearing a helmet and a long cloak. “Don’t let it near your mouth.”

“What in the blood of the sun is it?” the man asked. The demon was right: He had a young voice.

“An ice demon—it wants to eat you.” To the ice demon, she said severely: “Stop! Stop right there!”

“I’m hungry,” the demon groaned, but as Nora stared at it, it slowed. “Can’t you see I’m starving?”

“I’ll feed you again, in a minute. Just stop, hold it right there!”

Reluctantly, the demon paused, muttering. The man kept his sword poised as if to strike it again.

“I didn’t know ice demons were so small,” he said.

“It’s only part of an ice demon. But wait, let me just feed it quickly.”

Clearing her throat, she tried some Whitman. Halfway through she realized that she had mixed up part of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” with “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” but, tangled in the long, rich lines, the demon seemed not to notice.

“All right?” she asked it when she was done.

“That was good,” the demon allowed. “May I eat him now?”

“No, you may not,” Nora said. She took the man by the arm and pulled him toward the fire. To her relief, the ice demon did not follow. “It will leave you alone now—I hope,” she said. “It always says it’s starving, but given how much poetry it’s been sucking down, it can’t be that hungry.”

The man looked back toward where they had left the demon. “I have never met an ice demon before, but I understand that they are nothing to trifle with.”

“No, not at all,” Nora agreed fervently. “We have an agreement—the demon is guiding me to Maarikok, and then I will give it the rest of its body back. But if it didn’t like poetry so much, I think it would have eaten me already. It already ate Dorneng.” She gestured at Dorneng, hunched by the fire.

The young man was suddenly interested. “Dorneng? Dorneng Hul, the magician?”

Nora nodded. “But he’s not much of a magician now.” The man shook Dorneng’s shoulder and spoke to him, but got no answer. “He’s been like that ever since the ice demon attacked him,” she said.

“They say ice demons kill everything but the body,” the stranger said. “And the body doesn’t survive long.” Straightening, he looked more closely at Nora in the firelight. “We’ve met before, haven’t we? I thought I recognized your voice.”

Nora was at a loss. “We have?”

“Yes—although I’m confused. What is the woman who is not the mistress of Lord Aruendiel doing in the middle of the Ivory Marshes with this poor addled-brained fellow and an ice demon?”

Nora felt herself flush. “What—?”

“Forgive me, I am too familiar,” the man said. “But you should know that I am still smarting from the scolding you gave me, when we last spoke in Semr, for my incautious assumption about the nature of your relations with Lord Aruendiel.”

“Oh, that!” Nora said. That evening at the palace came back to her. The young man with the reddish hair. “You warned me about Aruendiel.”

“I did,” the young man said.

“Well, actually, I’m here to rescue Aruendiel,” Nora said, a defiant note in her voice. “Or whatever I can do. He’s a prisoner at Maarikok. Dorneng and Ilissa somehow captured him. I don’t know if you know that she escaped and—”

“I know about the Faitoren rebellion,” he interrupted. “That’s why I’m here. But, wait, you say Dorneng and Ilissa?”

“Yes, Dorneng was working with Ilissa.” The young man whistled under his breath as she went on: “And before the ice demon made a meal of Dorneng, Dorneng told me that they had captured Aruendiel and were keeping him at Maarikok. So I’m going there.”

“Wait, tell me all that slowly,” he said.

Nora went through the story again, starting with how Hirizjahkinis and Dorneng had come to Aruendiel’s castle to give the alarm. After she had finished, the young man was silent for a minute.

“Lord Aruendiel a prisoner, imagine that,” he said finally. “And how do you plan to free him, once you get to Maarikok?”

Nora hesitated. “I’ll have to figure that out. And you? You’re here because of the Faitoren rebellion?” An unpleasant thought struck her. “Which side—”

“I’m here to fight against the Faitoren, not with them,” he said. “I rode north with my cousin Ourvelren, but we were separated in a skirmish with the Faitoren, and my horse was killed. Now I am trying to rejoin the king’s forces. So we are on the same side, you and I—and perhaps we should introduce ourselves properly. I am Perin Pirekenies. I am ashamed that I don’t remember your name, Lady—”

“Nora.”

“Lady Nora, good,” he said, with brisk approbation—for what, Nora was not quite sure, but there was something so reassuring in his manner that she felt her spirits rise. “When I set out,” Perin continued, “I did not envision myself rescuing Lord Aruendiel—but he is too valuable an ally to leave in the enemy’s hands, so I offer you my services.” She felt him studying her again. “You must be fond of him to travel to his aid in deep winter in the company of an ice demon.”

“Yes, well, Aruendiel is my teacher, and he has been very good to me,” Nora said. She thought of saying that he was her friend as well as her teacher, but—remembering her last conversation with Perin—was afraid of being misinterpreted. “He has treated me with nothing but respect,” she added meaningfully.

“I am glad of it,” Perin said.

•   •   •

Nora had to promise the ice demon double rations before it would agree not to eat Perin in the night. She was running rapidly through her stock of poems, not to mention Dorneng’s small supply of food. It was fortunate that they were so close to Maarikok.

Perin, though, was not so sanguine about their route. The next morning, as they ate a rough gruel made from melted snow and dried-out bread, he suggested that they circle north to avoid Faitoren patrols. He sketched a rough map in the snow.

“So we’re not far from Faitoren territory, then,” Nora said, studying it.

“Frankly, I think you are lucky not to have met them already.” The new route, he said, would add perhaps another day to their journey.

“All right.” She sighed. “But I warn you, Dorneng doesn’t travel very fast. It will be more like two days.”

Perin frowned and glanced over at the former magician. Dorneng’s mouth hung open, a trickle of gruel staining his unshaven chin. He had barely eaten this morning. With each passing day he seemed more shrunken, less responsive.

Perin was no doubt ready to suggest that they leave Dorneng behind. Nora steeled herself to resist, while wondering if she was being incredibly stupid to give a damn about Dorneng’s welfare. Instead, Perin said, rising: “We can make better time than you think. There’s an ice-bull skeleton nearby—I almost broke my ankle tripping over it last night.”

“A what?” Nora asked, but he had already disappeared into the reeds.

He reappeared dragging two enormous curved things that Nora at first took for staves of weather-bleached wood. Then she saw that they were bones—the ribs of a very large animal. After another trip, he brought back two more. “The skull must be frozen under this ice,” he said. “The tusks would be worth a pretty penny in Semr—if you want to come back after the spring thaw.” He grinned at her.

“This is an ice bull?” A dinosaur seemed more likely, from the size of the bones.

“Why do you think they call it the Ivory Marshes?” Perin said.

With leather ties from his pack, he made a crude sled from the bones. They set Dorneng on it and let the ice demon—still sulky, still muttering about how delicious Perin would taste—ride in his lap. Perin pulled the sled while Nora contributed a mild levitation spell to keep the runners from sticking. They could travel twice as fast as she and Dorneng alone, she found.

At last, she thought, something is going right.

In daylight it was easy enough to recognize Perin as the young man she had met in Semr, even though that encounter felt as though it had happened years ago. Now she remembered not just the red hair, but the ease and openness of his manner. He bore himself as though he were inclined to be pleased with whatever or whomever he encountered. And yet there was nothing naive about him: His shrewd brown eyes, already edged by a few wrinkles, seemed to miss very little. The overall effect, Nora found, was to make you feel determined to live up to the warm opinion that he had already formed of you.

She learned he was a captain in the King’s Guard. He was twenty-seven years old, the oldest of nine children. His father had an estate in eastern Muergen, wherever that was. He was unmarried, although his parents had started telling him it was high time to secure a suitable bride. His father also wanted him to obtain a position at court, but Perin was still weighing the idea.

“The king has plenty of flatterers already,” he said. “Not that I am so opposed to flattery, but I’ve had relatively little practice in it, and the competition in Semr is terrible.”

There were no awkward pauses in conversation with Perin, Nora found. After a little while, it was as though she had known him a long time, and in a way she had—he reminded her of certain young men she’d known in her own world, cheerful, responsible sorts launching themselves in medicine or law or business with energy and optimism. She often found them attractive—they had frank and fearless smiles and well-tended, athletic bodies—but regrettably they were always engaged to longtime girlfriends they’d met in college. She almost forgot her fears for Aruendiel as they went along, it was so refreshing to talk to someone of her own age who talked un-self-consciously about himself but who was even more interested in finding out about Nora. He seemed surprised to learn that some of the rumors he had heard about her in Semr were true.

“You are really from another world?” Nora assured him that she was. But he was not entirely convinced. “You are not very different from someone born here. You speak the same language—you have the right number of eyes, ears, limbs—”

Nora laughed. “Thank you! Although in fact we speak a different language in my world—you heard me recite those poems. I’ve been told that I speak Ors rather poorly.”

“With a strange accent, but no stranger than other accents I have heard.” Perin smiled and shook his head. “Well, which world do you prefer?”

No one had asked her that before. “Oh, I miss my own world a lot,” she started. “My family, my friends.” He wanted to hear more about them, so she talked about her parents and her sisters until she began to be afraid that she was boring him. “On the other hand,” she said, seeking to change the subject, “there’s no magic in my world.” People always seemed to be startled by that notion. Perin was, too, but not quite in the way she had anticipated.

“By the day-blade, you’re lucky! This world would be a better place without magic, to my mind. Sorcerers have too much power, nothing happens in this kingdom without their say-so—and yet so much of their magic is useless.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Look at why we’re here. Wizards at war with other wizards, but in the end it will be decided by swords and men. That’s always the way, in all the battles I’ve ever been in, no matter which wizard we had on our side.”

“Hmm. Aruendiel would say that a good magician—or wizard—can turn a battle, but not just with magic—it takes brains and strategy.” She added: “And of course he’d say that you need good soldiers, too.”

After a moment, Perin said: “For all the ill things I’ve heard of Lord Aruendiel, I never heard that he was a stupid man or a bad wizard. How was he taken captive?”

“I don’t know,” she said unhappily. What had Ilissa found, rummaging through Nora’s mind? Nora remembered again that awful last night at the castle, how she and Aruendiel had quarreled over his poisonous regret at being alive. Ilissa traps you with what you want. And if what you want is to die—

She wrenched her attention back to Perin. “I don’t know. He’s been in worse fixes than this.”

Without hesitation, Perin said: “Then he will certainly get out of this one, too.”