The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (13 page)

“You see?” Nora said triumphantly.

“There was no call to do that,” Mrs. Toristel said. “You're overexcited. You need some rest. Give me the tray, and you can lie down again.”

“Take it. I don't want it, anyway.” She gave the tray a great shove just as Mrs. Toristel bent to take it. A second crash, crockery hitting the floor. The front of Mrs. Toristel's brown dress was several shades darker, soaked with hot soup.

“Oh,” Nora said, frozen with shock, her hand stopped in midair.

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Toristel said through folded lips. She looked down at her stained skirts, then turned and left the room.

Nora looked at the shattered bowl and the puddle of broth on the floor, surprised by her own sudden talent for destruction. Some minutes passed, and Mrs. Toristel did not reappear. Was she burned? With a feeling of guilt, Nora pushed aside the bedclothes and tried to swing her legs onto the floor. At least she could clean up part of the mess she had made. She was surprised by how weak she felt, how hard the floor was.

“Stop that this instant.” It was the magician, or whatever he was. For an instant she wondered seriously whether he might have materialized out of thin air. But no, the door was closing behind him.

“I was going to clean it up.”

He came closer to the bed on uneven steps. “Very considerate. After throwing a bowl of soup at my housekeeper, you decide to tidy up.”

“I didn't throw it on purpose. It was a mistake.”

“I see. Was throwing the spoon a mistake, too?”

From her perch on the edge of the mattress, Nora had to tilt her head back to look Aruendiel in the face, but she refused to be intimidated. “I meant to do that.”

“That's how you like to amuse yourself, is it? Breaking things? Abusing my housekeeper?”

“Is she all right?”

“She is not injured, no thanks to you. She is not accustomed to having her veracity or her sanity questioned, however. Personally, I would never dream of doing so. I have known few people in my life to be as completely reasonable and truthful as Mrs. Toristel.”

“Well, what she was saying didn't make sense. I want to know what's going on. I want to see a real doctor, and I want to call my friends and my parents. Or am I a prisoner here?”

“You're no prisoner,” he said irritably. “The sooner your family and friends can take you off my hands, the better. Where are they?”

“My mother lives near Richmond. My father is in New Jersey.”

The magician looked even more annoyed. “Are those cities south of the Middle Lakes?”

“They're in the United States of America,” Nora snapped. “You've never heard of that, either, I suppose. Well, either you and Mrs. Toristel are lying to me—or you're crazy—or I am.”

“Given your behavior—”

“—and I'm not crazy,” Nora said. “I know I'm not.
Something
happened to me at Ilissa's, and I wasn't in my right mind then. But I am now. I feel like me again. Everything feels ordinary. Except it's not. Like that picture. It's really a mirror. There's some kind of trick here. That's why I threw the spoon.”

“Ah, so that was your logic.” Aruendiel raised an eyebrow.

“You see how it broke?” She pointed at the damaged picture. “It's made of glass.”

“How do you know it was not painted on glass?”

“Oh,” said Nora, discomfited. “But I saw the picture reflect light, like a mirror. Painted glass wouldn't do that.”

“Is that what you saw?” Aruendiel asked absently. He walked over to where the picture hung and picked up the broken piece from the floor, then fitted it into the empty space in the portrait. As he worked it back into position, the dark crackling disappeared from the girl's face, until the portrait was whole and unblemished again. The black-haired girl's red lips curled with more amusement than ever.

“You fixed it!” Nora said. “What did you do?” She knew already, though; there was a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach.

“I could tell you, but you wouldn't believe me,” Aruendiel said. “It's what you would call a trick.” He lifted the picture from its hook on the wall and regarded it with care. It was hard to read the expression in his battered face.

“If you mean magic,” Nora said awkwardly, “there's no such thing. How can there be? It's not logical
.
”

Aruendiel made an impatient noise deep in his throat. “You're a fool,” he said after a moment. “But you're right in one respect. This is not a portrait, exactly—it only looks like one.”

He turned the frame in his hands and showed it to her. The black-haired girl was gone. The silver skin of a mirror caught the light and gave Nora a glimpse of her own bedraggled figure sitting upright on the edge of the bed. “Until a few days ago, this was a mirror. Then I thought it might be better not to have a mirror in this room, so I made it look like a portrait—doing a rather clumsy job of it. It was clever of you to notice that reflection and realize what it meant. It's too bad you're not clever enough to see and understand some of the other things in front of your eyes.” His voice was quiet, flat with contempt.

Nora swallowed and said the first thing that came into her head. “Who was the girl?”

“What?” Aruendiel looked puzzled.

“The girl in the portrait.”

“Oh,” he said, with a shake of his head. “My sister. I suppose I remembered an old portrait of her. This was her room.” His face settled into harsher lines. One side had been scarred somehow, seamed and roughened. It was hard to see the resemblance between him and his pretty sister, except for the dark hair and something about the tilt of the head. He spoke without emotion, but from the way he said this was her room, Nora understood that his sister was dead.

“Why did you get rid of the mirror?” Nora said. “No, I know why. Because of my face.” Odd that he would be so considerate, but then obviously he had no reason to like mirrors himself. “Could you give it to me, please?” She reached for it. Aruendiel hesitated, then walked over to hold the mirror in front of her.

At first, it wasn't as bad as she had feared. No sign of the shimmering blond goddess that she'd been, but that was all right. Under the bandage, she could see the contours of her old face again: hazel eyes and straight brown brows, a wide mouth, a squarish chin. The skin of her face had a mottled, yellowish look, a tracery of fading bruises. And the great white slash of the bandages hiding her cheeks and nose.

“I'm taking this off,” Nora said, scrabbling at the bindings behind her head.

Aruendiel hesitated, then said: “As you will.”

Nora looked into the mirror again. Mrs. Toristel was right, the wounds were healing, but the two long cuts across her cheek still had a raw look. Garish and pitiful, they made the rest of her face invisible. “Huh,” she said finally. “Will they scar?”

“I don't know,” he said. “But the flesh is healthy. You can leave the bandage off now.”

Looking up at the broken places in his face, she wondered whether her question about scarring had been rude, but he gave no sign of offense. He returned the mirror to the wall.

“What happened to the portrait of your sister, the real one?”

“I haven't seen it for years,” he said. “Now, what was the name of the last place you mentioned?” He garbled the name. “Is that near a place called Galifornia?”

“California!” Nora said with a delighted gasp. “Yes, California is one of the states, the United States. You know California? Are we in California?”

“I have been there, many years ago,” he said. “From there—let me think—I went to a city called Chigago.”

“Chicago, yes,” she said. “I have a friend there.”

“And eventually I went farther east and sailed across the ocean to another country whose name I can't recall now.”

“France, England? That's wonderful. I knew I didn't just fall off the end of the earth.”

Aruendiel gave her a tight half smile. “But I'm afraid that's exactly what you've done. Galifornia and Chigago are not in this world at all. I traveled there and came back by very strong magic. As you must have come here by magic, Ilissa's magic or some other kind.”

Nora stared at him. She shook her head. “What?”

“Now I see why you are so skeptical of magic. Before I visited your world, I had never been to a place whose inhabitants were so abysmally ignorant of magic.”

Was he trying to be insulting? “Well. It's not something I've ever had any use for.”

•   •   •

Downstairs, Aruendiel pushed open the door of the kitchen, where Mrs. Toristel was kneading dough. On the table in front of her, he set the glazed bowl that Nora had broken. It was whole again, filled with the soup that she had spilled on the floor.

“You may disregard what I said earlier, Mrs. Toristel,” he said. “My guest will remain with us for now, although I must apologize again for the way she mistreated you.” He brooded for a moment. “The girl is from a different world, I gather. It would be remiss to turn her out of doors without friends or connections.”

Mrs. Toristel acknowledged his apology with a slight bob. “A different world, sir? Well, that goes a long way to explaining the odd things she says. She's been very quiet in general, so today when she threw the bowl I thought I'd better let you know.”

“She seems rational enough now, but it's hard to say how these things will go,” Aruendiel said with some exasperation. Saving the life of an innocent was all very well, he thought; the aftermath of a rescue was often tedious and less satisfying. “I took enough Faitoren spells off her to make a cat bark. Just to be safe, you should get someone from the village to help you with the girl,” he added. “Who was that tall girl who was helping Toristel with the shearing? She took a firm line with the old ram. Very impressive.”

“That's Morinen, Corlil's daughter. Four brothers and she's bigger than any of them.”

“That's the one. Get her to handle the trays and such,” Aruendiel said, turning toward the door. “Again, I'm sorry for the extra trouble this has caused you.”

“Oh, this one's easier than some of the folks who've come to you for treatment,” Mrs. Toristel said, covering the dough with a cloth.

“Oh? Do you mean the fellow who sang all the time?”

“No, he had a pleasant voice. I was thinking of the lady with the snakes in her hair.”

“Lady Asnoria Ulioran, with the Medusa syndrome? My dear Mrs. Toristel, you realize that none of those snakes were actually poisonous.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Toristel. “They could still bite.”

D
ear Maggie,” Nora said aloud, but speculatively, as though she were uncertain of how her voice might sound. She was crouching in the reddish brown soil of the vegetable garden, pulling weeds among the long rows of turnips, beets, and parsnips. The back of her linen dress and the inside of her straw hat were already damp with sweat. It was chilly at night, though, even when the days were hot.

Maggie, it's Nora. I can't mail you a letter, so I'm just going to speak it aloud, well, because I wish I could talk to you. Also, I miss speaking English. I don't even really know how long it's been since I saw you. Six months? Longer?

I'm living in the country. Which country or how I got here—that's complicated.

Somehow she had begun to get used to the idea that she was living in a world different from the one that she'd been born in—even if she still didn't see how that was possible. Maybe EJ and his physics-loving brain could have explained it to her.

The place where I'm staying is a castle. Yes, I know, it sounds romantic.

Nora raised her head to look up the hill toward the high, windowless stone wall that wrapped tightly around the towers and buildings inside. The castle's utilitarian function—keeping enemies out—was starkly clear, even though now, at midday, the heavy gates stood open.

To the north, she could glimpse the edge of the cliff on which the castle was built, and if she listened hard, she could hear the sound of the small river that flowed two hundred feet below. She turned to look in the opposite direction, at the unpaved road that wound from the castle gates past sloping fields and pastures to a small village, a collection of thatched roofs.

When Nora had first been able to walk again, after hobbling around for some weeks with a crutch, she'd had the notion of going to the village to try to find someone or something that might help her get home. A car, a telephone, might be too much to hope for, but there was no harm in seeing for herself whether she was as far from all modernity and civilization and rationality as she seemed to be. She gave that idea up the first time that she walked down the muddy lane that served as the village's main street, passed a line of barefoot children waiting to draw water from a well, and caught a whiff of the latrines behind the whitewashed huts.

When you go through the castle gates, you find yourself in a courtyard with a big stone tower to your left. Straight ahead is the manor house. Go through the doors and you're in the great hall.

It was the sort of cavernous gray space that Nora usually associated with parking garages or old train stations. The trussed roof was high enough for a second-floor gallery to crouch darkly at one end of the room. A long table ran almost the length of the hall, with benches on either side and a single tall, heavy chair at one end. On the wall parallel to the table was an enormous fireplace, big enough, Nora imagined, to give a convincing impression of the mouth of hell when it was in use.

The kitchen is next door. Stone flags, copper pots, a fireplace, a huge farm table. It would look spectacular in a decorating magazine. All it needs is a Viking refrigerator, an Aga, maybe some recessed lighting—and a good scrubbing.

Flies made graceful, unhurried sweeps through the open windows, as though they felt very much at home. In one corner was a red-and-white ceramic stove. Fresh straw on the floor, mixed with feathers and a few gnawed bones. Wrinkled sausages hung from the ceiling beams, as well as some strings of dried, fleshy things that looked very much like human ears and fingers. Mushrooms, Nora hoped.

My room is upstairs, along a hallway with other bedrooms.

One of the rooms must be the magician's; she had heard his footsteps passing at night. Nora had an irrational fear that at some point she would be walking along the corridor and a door would open and he would come out, a long shadowy figure with pale eyes.

There are stables and barns behind the manor house. Yes, horses—you'd like that! And then there are the towers along the wall. Most of them are empty, with leaky roofs, except for the big one. But I haven't been inside it yet.

Something about the construction of the tallest tower, the way its unmortared stones fit together, made Nora think that it must be the oldest part of the complex. It served the magician as some sort of workspace, judging from things that Mrs. Toristel had said.

What sort of room a magician might do his work in, Nora had no idea. She pictured, at random: a telescope, smoldering incense, one of those lacquered cabinets in which beautiful young ladies vanished, candles with pentagrams carved into them, the dried mushrooms from the kitchen. Then one night, getting ready for bed, she glanced out her window and saw a light in one of the tower windows. It was close enough, just across the courtyard, that she could see clearly what the tower room contained.

Books. An entire wall of books, their bindings rich and lustrous in the light from unseen candles. Nora stared hungrily for long minutes. It did her no good to remind herself that she could read none of them. Once she saw the magician's lean figure shamble across the window; his hand plucked a book from the shelves and he disappeared. What was he reading? Perhaps something incredibly dull. It didn't matter; Nora still felt the bite of envy. She used to be able to do that—sit in a clean, well-lighted room, choose a book from hundreds, start reading, and effortlessly take herself to another world. And now she was actually in another world, and she might never read another book again.

I've been here for a little over two months, as near as I can figure, given that the months here are different and the weeks have six days. But I'm still very much an outsider here. I've only gotten to know one person who's even close to me in age.

A tall girl with wide shoulders had started bringing Nora her meals after the soup incident. She spoke Ors with an accent so much broader than that of either Mrs. Toristel or Aruendiel that it took several tries before Nora was sure that she had grasped the girl's name correctly: Morinen. It was clear enough why she had replaced Mrs. Toristel. Once Nora asked for a knife to carve a piece of mutton, but Morinen shook her head. They did not trust her with sharp objects, evidently.

But Morinen had a ready smile and, unlike Mrs. Toristel, she had a propensity to linger, happy to talk to Nora in her near-incomprehensible speech about her brothers, her neighbors in the village, the goats she looked after, the weather, the crops, what Mrs. Toristel had said to her that morning. Nora's Ors vocabulary included far more words having to do with dress, dancing, and court etiquette than with agriculture; listening to Morinen, she began to pick up other things—like the twelve different Ors words for sheep and the apparently inexhaustible number of ways to indicate whether it was likely to rain.

Morinen was curious about Nora, too. Her arrival in a gust of wind had been discussed widely in the village. Still distrustful of her own memories, Nora said only that she was far from home, that she had been a captive, and that Aruendiel had helped her escape.

That shut down further inquiry: The one subject that Morinen was reluctant to discuss at any length was the magician. “I don't exactly know,” she said when Nora asked how he had acquired his limp or his scars or even how long he had lived in the castle. Once Morinen mentioned the handsome blacksmith in the next village; part of his attraction seemed to be that he was the only single man for miles around taller than she was. “There's the magician,” Nora pointed out teasingly. Morinen didn't laugh; she looked anxious. Nora tried to smooth over what was obviously a bad joke by saying, “He's rather old for you, though,” and then Morinen seemed even more uncomfortable.

Right now I'm weeding the vegetable garden. Earlier I mucked out the chicken house. There's not much in the way of indoor plumbing here. No electricity, either. I have exactly two changes of clothing, hand-me-downs from the housekeeper. I would kill for a shower, but I've gotten used to smelling riper than I used to. There is, at least, a kind of communal bathhouse near the river, with a couple of big hot tubs, except they're not hot. I'll go there this afternoon to get rid of any lingering essence of chicken shit.

Nora calculated that if she went to the bathhouse late enough so that the villagers would be fixing or eating supper, there would be no one to see the scars on her face and body. She was tired of being stared at. Every time she went to the village, even with Mrs. Toristel, she could feel the eyes of the villagers on her and hear occasional whispers as she passed.

“What are they looking at?” she asked Mrs. Toristel once, as they walked back to the castle.

“They hardly see any strangers, dear, and they know you've come from another world.”

“What is there for them to look at, though?” Nora protested. “I don't look that different from them.” She was dressed the same, in shabby wool or linen dresses; she was only a little taller; she wasn't much cleaner. True, her teeth were straight, and she had all of them, but that hardly seemed like a reason to stare.

“There is something different about you, though,” Morinen said when Nora brought up the same point to her.

“What do you mean? Is it the scars?”

“Oh, no, everyone has seen scars.” Morinen thought for a while. “No, it's something about the way you move or the way you look at things. It's different.”

“How different?”

“Ah, it's so clear, but it's hard to put it into words. You seem so bold.”

“Bold?” Nora was pleased, but had to admit: “That doesn't sound like me.”

“Well, you don't act like a woman. You act like you're not afraid of men. You look them right in the eye, and you don't drop your voice, and you speak to them like you're a man.”

Nora was speechless for a second. She always said hello to the village men she passed. “You don't act as though you're afraid of men, either.”

“Well, I'm not,” Morinen said with a laugh. “Most of the men are afraid of me, 'cause I'm so big. Ma is always after me to be more ladylike, not to talk so much in front of the men.”

“Why shouldn't you talk in front of them?”

“Yes, well, Ma isn't known for holding her tongue, either. But she talks this certain way. Sort of quiet and respectful and cautious, like I said, and that makes it all right.”

“So I act too much like a man, is that right?”

“Not like a man. More like a little boy.”

Nora laughed out loud. But in the bathhouse, naked among the other women, she still felt self-conscious about the long, rough scars on her torso. Some version of her stay among the Faitoren had circulated, that was evident. Some of the other women looked sympathetic; others seemed almost amused by the marks on her body. “What did you expect?” their sly glances seemed to ask. In all the stories in literature and mythology about women being offered as tribute to beasts or monsters, no one ever spelled out exactly what that meant, or what it might be like for the woman afterward.

This place belongs to a person named Aruendiel—excuse me, Lord Aruendiel. He's away right now, on some kind of job.

Helping a merchant in Leorica get rid of the sea monsters that were wrecking his ships, Mrs. Toristel had said.

He's a curious character. Um—

Nora pulled a couple of weeds as she considered what to say next. If she said straight out, “He's a magician,” Maggie—even imaginary Maggie—would doubt her sanity.

She thought about the last time she'd seen Aruendiel, the day he left. She'd been sitting in the great hall when Aruendiel came in, Mrs. Toristel trotting behind him. “—a few weeks at sea,” he was saying. “I expect to return before the harvest. It's probably the work of a sea hag, but the ocean turns up all kinds of quirky magic. We shall see.”

“Yes, sir, I'll pack some of your winter things, for the damp,” Mrs. Toristel said distractedly. “You'll want the new boots that Cobbler just sent over. And before you go, Big Faris and Lumper from the village came here, saying there's grasshoppers in the wheat.”

Aruendiel groaned. “Grasshoppers! Can they not raise a single crop without my aid?”

“They were wondering, sir, if you would be so kind as to send some birds to eat the grasshoppers, the way you did last year.”

“I can do that, but then what? Last year, they complained about the birds after the grasshoppers were gone. How about this: I'll turn the villagers into crows, and they can eat the damned grasshoppers.”

He turned and walked straight into the wall. The gray stone engulfed his frame like water, and he was gone.

After Mrs. Toristel had gone upstairs, Nora went over to the wall where the magician had disappeared and touched the freckled granite. It was solid and cool beneath her fingertips. She put her ear to the wall and thought she heard a distant, retreating footstep.

Into the silence that followed, Nora said quickly: “Open Sesame.” Then, louder: “Open Sesame!” She waited.

The wall waited with her, quiet, impermeable. Nora gave the granite an experimental smack with the side of her fist. Then she rubbed her hand ruefully. It stung.

Later that day, after Aruendiel had ridden away, she brought herself to ask Mrs. Toristel whether she, too, ever found the magic unsettling. “I saw him walk straight through the wall! Doesn't that bother you? And I heard what he said about turning the villagers into crows.”

“Ah, yes, the wall, that's the entrance to his tower,” Mrs. Toristel said, unperturbed. “There used to be a door there, and then he had it sealed up, and now you can only get into the tower by magic. Safer that way, he says. I've gone through that wall myself many times. It's like walking through smoke. But that's only if he wants to let you in.”

“Would he really turn those people into crows?”