Reader Jenn W.B. asked me if I could post a couple of sentences from Book 2—because, she kindly said, she's missing Nora and Aruendiel so much. I'm not quite ready to post anything from the new book, because it could all change so much during writing and editing, but I can share some of the material that was cut during the process of editing down a 1300-page manuscript down to a 660-page one. (And you thought the final book was long!)

This section comes from the runup to the Null Days—just this time of year, in fact—after Aruendiel has asked Nora to look up some of his old spells, so that he can free the spirits trapped within. I cut this part because, although it's rather colorful, it didn't really advance the bigger story. In the hardcover, this scene would start around page 380.

“Have you found all of the spells I instructed you to look for?” he asked suddenly from the other side of the room.

Nora had found all of them except the spell for summer snow. “Well, perhaps it is just as well,” Aruendiel said, considering. “I have no wish to loose an ice demon into the countryside in winter.” She followed him up the stairs to the workroom at the top of the tower, where Aruendiel had drawn a large circle in charcoal on the floor. Standing inside the boundary, Nora was to read each spell, while Aruendiel repeated it and destroyed it, line by line.

“Of course, your own words will have no effect,” he noted as they began.

Because I’m a woman, Nora thought. “You don’t know these spells already?” she asked, an edge in her voice.

“I will be working two spells at once, so the fewer distractions, the better. And,” he said with a grimace, “it has been more years than I care to count since I composed them.”

The first spell began, “Kelp-bearded traitor, old fish-nibbled bones,” and Nora had to fight to keep Those are pearls that were his eyes out of her head. Aruendiel’s deep, cracked voice followed hers, producing a strong smell of brine and a disembodied voice that demanded to know what the foul wizard wanted now.

“Ah, Mernesr—it is Mernesr, is it not?” Aruendiel said easily. “I require nothing of you, nothing any more.”

“Nothing? You tricked me into doing your will as the salt water took my breath; you enslaved me for a dozen dozen years; and now you ask nothing of me?” The voice sounded affronted.

“I release you now,” Aruendiel said. “You may leave, you may do as you will.”

“As I will?” the voice repeated. “As I will?” The room grew gray and cold, filled with a freezing marine fog, as the voice howled insults at Aruendiel. There was a thump nearby. Glass shattered.

And then the room was clear and quiet again. The air remained icy. With a twitch of his shoulder, Aruendiel stepped out of the circle and bent over to pick up pieces of the bottle that had fallen from a shelf.

“That was a ghost,” Nora said, awed, accusatory. “A real ghost, not like that portrait in Semr.”

Aruendiel nodded. “Did I frighten you?” he said, with a trace of irony.

“No, but that was damned creepy.” Hesitantly she stepped out of the circle. “Who was he?”

Aruendiel set the restored bottle on the shelf. “Mernesr was a captain in the royal navy caught selling information to the Pernish. He was thrown overboard for treason, and we would have heard no more of Mernesr, except that I, a bright young wizard in the king’s employ, found some use for him, by binding his ghost into a new spell that I had written.”

“Where is he now?”

“Gone where ghosts go.” Aruendiel shrugged. “I knew he would not trouble us long,” he added, as if to reassure Nora. “Ghosts rarely have power to do real harm.”

Just as well, Nora thought at the end of the afternoon, because none of the spirits released had anything good to say to Aruendiel. Some raged, like Mernesr, or hissed baroque and poisonous insults before they disappeared. The ghost from the spell to make men grunt like pigs took the simple but eloquent route of flinging pigshit all over the room. Aruendiel, who seemed gloomier and more laconic after each supernatural encounter, grinned briefly as he made the mess disappear. “I remember that fellow—he was never subtle,” he said. “Being a ghost hasn’t changed him much.”

“Was it really a dozen dozen years ago, as Mernesr said, that you created the spell with him in it?” Nora asked as they finally left the workroom.

“Ghosts are notoriously bad judges of time,” Aruendiel snapped.


© Emily Croy Barker, 2013