The Shape-Changer's Wife Read Online Free PDF

sensed his pupil’s impatience, was not a man to be hurried. Over the next three weeks he quizzed Aubrey on the facts from the textbooks; when Aubrey was not letter-perfect, he required him to read the volumes again. He ordered Aubrey to perform his spells while he, Glyrenden, attempted to distract him with more colorful antics and spells of his own. When Aubrey’s illusions wavered before Glyrenden’s assault, Glyrenden refused to teach him anything new. So Aubrey gritted his teeth and buckled down to his studies again, vowing to have the books memorized and the illusions so perfect not even Glyrenden could see through them.
    â€œTo successfully transform yourself,” Glyrenden told him one night after Aubrey had managed to resist Glyrenden’s efforts to pierce his illusion, “requires a complete knowledge of the thing which you are to become. It requires as well an ability to hold on to the thing you have become, through every imaginable distraction. Say you have transformed yourself into a hare, and you are set upon by a wolf. If you forget you are a hare, and that you can bound with great swiftness to the small burrow which is too narrow for a wolf to enter—or for a man, which is what you really are, to enter—if, as I say, you forget you are a hare, you will be transfixed. You will be unable to move. Or if you move, you will not move like a hare but like a thing that is half something else. And the wolf will be upon you, and the wolf will devour you and you will taste just as good to him as any hare that was not in reality a man.”
    â€œIf the wolf was after me, why couldn’t I just turn myself back into a man?” Aubrey asked reasonably. “Or better yet, to an eagle, and fly away?”
    â€œOf course you could, and you would be wise to do so if you did not think the hare could escape the wolf’s attack. But if you do not study the books I have given you, you will not know what it is like to be a man, what muscles and bones and cells go into making a man, let alone an eagle, and unless you learn how to concentrate, you will not be able to cast the spells, anyway. The ability to transform must be instant and almost by rote; and the knowledge of that thing you are to be must be a part of the subconscious level of your brain, or you will never be a great shape-changer. You may perhaps learn how to change shapes slowly and under perfect conditions, but you will not be able to change shapes when your life depends upon it, and there is no other reason for knowing how to change shapes. In my opinion.”
    So Aubrey read the books again and asked for more books, and learned about rocks and trees and mountains as well as rabbits and deer and wolves. Eventually, he hoped, there would not be a single thing, animate or inanimate, that he could not transform himself into if the need arose. If he ever learned the spells that would teach him how to transform himself.
    Glyrenden knew those spells. In Aubrey’s mind, there was no doubt at all about that. Behind those black eyes was a knowledge more comprehensive than Aubrey had encountered anywhere outside Cyril’s unpretentious house. And Aubrey, whose hunger for knowledge had led him before down paths lesser men would have shied from, making signs against evil, found himself famished for the information Glyrenden possessed. It led him to feel for Glyrenden an admiration bordering on the fanatical or the ecstatic. He watched Glyrenden with a close, obsessive attention; he tried to read the secrets in a face clearly designed to keep secrets; he shivered with delight when Glyrenden praised him, and was swamped with angry despair when Glyrenden was displeased.
    And Glyrenden did nothing to discourage this. If anything, he encouraged the younger man’s devotion. He used the fluid gestures of his long, thin fingers to hypnotize the young man’s eyes; he leaned forward when he spoke, so that his black eyes came between