Renegade’s Magic. Робин Хобб

a shapeless green dress, cut to allow for her growing pregnancy and round her middle, above her growing belly, a battered leather belt with tool loops on it. A canteen hung from one side of it. She’d snagged her dress on something; there was a long rent in the skirt, and it was obvious she’d simply let it drag behind her as she trekked through the forest to get here. Brambles and dead leaves clung to it like a dirty train. She’d unbuttoned the cuffs of her sleeves and turned them up to bare her forearms. Her face gleamed with sweat, and the throat and back of her dress were damp with it. Her hands were smudged with dirt and soot from her fire-making efforts. As I approached, she drew the back of her forearm across her brow, wiping sweat and leaving a streak of dirt in its wake. An open leather pack rested on the earth behind her. Despite her dishevelled appearance, she seemed to seethe with energy.

      ‘Burn!’ she cried in a low, mad voice. She gritted her teeth and I heard them grind together. ‘Burn, you cheat, you whore of magic. Burn, and be dead forever. As dead as Nevare. I did what you asked! I did all you asked; you promised you’d save him if I did! But you didn’t! You let Nevare die! You lying, cheating bitch!’ The words poured out of her like thick acid. She stooped awkwardly over her belly to snatch up an armload of the firewood and flung it onto the smouldering leaves. They compacted under the weight of the fuel. For a moment, I thought she had smothered the fire. Then the smoke thickened and a tiny tongue of flame wavered up among the heaped wood. It licked the bark of Lisana’s tree stump longingly.

      And all the while, Lisana herself manifested as a fat old woman with grey-streaked hair standing with her back against her stump and her arms spread protectively behind her. Her incorporeal presence could do nothing. Her bare feet and her long dress of bark fabric and moss lace dangled down into the lapping flames. I do not think she felt the fire but she still screamed as the flames ran up the trunk.

      It had been weeks since it had last rained. The forest was dry. I suddenly understood what the whispered words had meant. Fire fears no magic. Tiny sparks whirled aloft on an updraught of heat, floating on bits of blackened leaves. It was not just Lisana that was in danger. If this fire spread, it could engulf the entire mountainside and the Vale of the Ancestor Trees below.

      Soldier’s Boy had my memories. He knew her name and our language. ‘Epiny! Stop! Stop that! You’ll kill us all.’ He rushed forward and kicked barefoot at the fire. He scattered it, letting air into the smouldering mass, and the flames gushed up, crackling like laughter. Epiny, startled, made no move to stop him. She stared at him, her mouth hanging open.

      ‘Put it out, put it out!’ Lisana shrieked.

      I do not think Olikea and Likari heard her, but they recognized the danger all the same. Heedless of burns, Soldier’s Boy was stamping at the edges of the burning fire. Olikea had taken the food pouch from her belt and was using it to beat the flames down. But it was Likari who unshouldered the heavy waterskin he had been carrying. Opening it, he squeezed the bag, directing the stream into the heart of the fire. Epiny had retreated when the three had rushed up on her. Now she stood transfixed, watching as they tore her fire apart and poured water onto it and then stamped and smothered the remaining flames. In a few moments, the danger was past. Olikea was near sobbing with terror, but Likari was capering with joy. Soldier’s Boy sank down. He saw another glowing ember, and lifted a handful of the wet leaves and quenched it. All three of them were streaked with smoke and soot.

      ‘I told you!’ Lisana shouted angrily at Epiny. ‘I told you I’d kept my word. Even if I hadn’t, the magic would have. The magic doesn’t lie and cheat. There, you see him? You see? Nevare is alive. What you bargained for, you got. Nevare lives!’

      Soldier’s Boy turned towards her. Epiny stared at him. Her eyes ran over his dwindled body, but I think his nakedness was just as shocking to her. To her, he was a piebald thing, tanned face and hands, skin pale white and sagging where it was not sun-burned scarlet. She blushed, then deliberately fixed her eyes on my face. I burned with shame but Soldier’s Boy scarcely noticed his nakedness before her. With great hesitancy Epiny asked, ‘Nevare? Can that be you?’

      ‘It’s me,’ he lied. And for the first time, I fully realized my position. This other entity was controlling my body. Completely. Using it as he willed without regard for me at all. I flung myself against his walls, and battled hard to take back control of my body. I could feel his contempt for Epiny, and recalled that she had been instrumental in defeating him the first time we had battled. He looked at her and saw his old enemy, come back to give him more trouble. I saw my cousin, ravaged by grief, dirty, tired, thirsty and miles from where she should be. She was heavy with her first pregnancy, and I knew that it was a difficult one. She should have been home, safe in her house, with Spink and Amzil and her children. I thought I had arranged all that. When I’d changed the memory of every witness to the mob, when I’d sent Spink and Amzil home relatively unscathed, I thought I’d bought that for her. I knew that if I’d tried to stay, if I’d even planned to make some sort of a return to the people I knew and loved, the magic would have found a way to take them all away from me.

      Two nights ago, it had nearly done it. If I hadn’t surrendered to it, if I hadn’t used it and allowed it to make me its own, Amzil would have been gang-raped on the streets of Gettys. Spink, I knew, would have died fighting to save her and to protect me from the mob. What would have become of Epiny, her unborn child and Amzil’s little children then? Unchanging grief for Epiny, loss and poverty for Amzil’s children. That was why I’d made that sacrifice. Everything I’d done, I’d done to save them.

      Yet here she was, wild-eyed and dishevelled, miles from home in a hostile forest. And a man wearing my flesh was pretending to be me. She goggled at me, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. ‘You’re naked,’ she pointed out in distress. ‘And you’re … you’re not fat any more. What happened to you? How could that happen in one night? How can you be alive? Spink and Amzil saw you killed. Spink saw you beaten to death on the streets, by his own fellows, his own regiment. Do you know what that’s done to him? Do you know how that’s made him hate everything he was once so proud of? Amzil saw the end of everything that she had just begun to hope for. But here you are. Alive. I don’t understand, Nevare! I don’t understand anything!’

      She took two hesitant steps towards me. If I had opened my arms, she would have rushed into them. But Soldier’s Boy did not. He stood before her, naked and unlovely, my arms folded on my chest and asked her solemnly, ‘Why did you come here? What do you want?’

      ‘Why did I—what? I came to avenge you, you great idiot! To make her suffer for your death as we were all suffering. I came to make her sorry for betraying you, to punish the magic for not keeping its word! And what do I want? I want my life back! I want my husband to see me when he looks at me instead of looking through me. I want Amzil to stop scowling and snapping at the children. I want her to stop weeping at night. I want my baby to be born healthy and happy, not into a house where daily we endure floods of desolation or tides of panic. That’s what I want. That’s what I came for. I knew I wouldn’t get it, but I thought I could at least kill one of those who had taken it from me.’

      I felt as if I was dying. I threw myself against Soldier’s Boy’s awareness, trying to break through. I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her; I wanted something for Epiny. It seemed that everything I’d thought I’d purchased for her by turning my back on Gettys was hollow and sordid by the light of day. I hadn’t solved anything when I’d given way to the magic. I’d only left them to muddle through grief burdened by guilt that none of them deserved.

      ‘I won’t let you kill her.’ He spoke flatly to Epiny. ‘You should just go home. Pretend you never saw me here. Accept that I’m dead. Then leave Gettys. Go back west where you and your kind belong.’ He lifted his eyes to Lisana as he spoke, but I had the oddest sensation that he could not see her. The strangest part was that I felt Lisana definitely could see me. I stared through his eyes at her, begging her for some kind of mercy, for some splinter of kindness for my cousin. What had she ever done to them save try to protect me and stand by me? Why did she have to suffer so for the magic?

      Lisana spoke softly to Epiny. ‘As you see, Gernian, I spoke truth to you. The magic keeps its word. Nevare isn’t dead.’

      Epiny