The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (15 page)

This letter to Maggie was not turning out well, Nora thought. She wasn't telling enough of the truth, or maybe she was telling too much, and now she felt worse instead of better.

She pulled one more weed, then stood up slowly, stretching her cramped legs, and half considered going to the bathhouse now, stares or no stares. But she had promised Mrs. Toristel to help her clean some of the unused rooms on the ground floor of the manor house.

•   •   •

Some of the rooms were quite grand, except that the tapestries on the walls were moth-eaten and most of the furniture was missing. Mrs. Toristel said that Aruendiel had sold it off years ago.

“If he's such a great magician, why he does he let this happen?” Nora asked Mrs. Toristel, as she surveyed the wreck of a drawing room. The naked frame of a solitary armchair stood in the middle of the room, reflected in the cracked mirror propped against the wall. “Why can't he at least keep up his own house?”

Mrs. Toristel came as close as she ever did to rolling her eyes. “Can't or won't,” she said. “His purse is never very full, that's the truth, but he does find the money for things he likes, books or horseflesh or what have you.”

“It wasn't like this at Lusul, was it?” Nora asked slyly. She had discovered that Mrs. Toristel loved to talk about Lusul—not the scandal around Aruendiel's wife, which she had not mentioned again, but the opulent, bustling life of the estate itself.

“Yes, but that was his wife's house, you know. This place was always his family's seat. It's a very old line,” she added. “Not as prominent as the Lusars, but much older.”

“Does that mean better?” Nora asked. Mrs. Toristel only gave her a reproving look.

The next room was almost empty except for a pile of broken furniture. Surely there was no need to clean here, Nora thought, peering through the door. Then she saw the books, piled haphazardly on a shelf.

She couldn't resist. One look.

Halfway across the room, she had the sudden intuition that she was not alone. Mrs. Toristel was still in the hallway. This was something closer. She looked around, puzzled. It was almost as though she'd heard her name called, in happy recognition, by a voice that was somewhat familiar to her. She felt warmed suddenly. Was it only being in the presence of books again?

A clatter like a small rockslide drowned out any imagined voices. The heap of broken furniture rushed toward her. Nora recoiled.

No, it was just one chair. A high-backed oak chair that managed to be mobile, thanks to the four small wheels attached to the legs. A rickety-looking wooden framework was affixed to the scrolled arms.

The assemblage rolled rapidly after Nora and, thankfully, stopped just in front of her.

“I'd forgotten that was here,” Mrs. Toristel said from the doorway. “My goodness, it moved quickly.”

“Yes, it did,” said Nora, backed up against the wall, wishing she had something large between her and the chair. With a noisy shudder, part of its framework unfolded; it was composed of several jointed poles, each with a different attachment at the end: tongs, a cup, a nasty-looking hook. “What is it?” she asked, dodging, as the tongs reached toward her.

“That was the master's. He could wheel himself around the castle—the ground floor, anyway—and reach whatever he wanted with those long arms. When I first came here, that was the only way he could get around, unless someone carried him, and he never liked that.” Mrs. Toristel shook her head. “Oh, it was a shock to me when I came here and saw him all crumpled up in that chair. And his face so scarred, that had been so handsome—I wouldn't have known him, except for his voice.”

“What happened to him?” Nora tried not to sound as curious as she felt.

“He was injured in the war that was fought all over the country when I was young. Toristel and I were hired to look after the house, but at first it really meant looking after
him
.”

“I bet he was a difficult patient.”

“He never threw soup at me,” Mrs. Toristel said, giving Nora a significant look. “Anyway, he had his books here, and he managed to do his work, even though he was in a chair all the time. He put a spell on it to make it move, you see. I didn't know it would move without him, though.”

“It certainly does,” Nora said. The chair crouched in front of her like a huge insect, its wooden joints creaking. As she tried to sidle away, the arm with the tongs took hold of her wrist. “Stop that!” Nora said fiercely.

To her surprise, the arm obeyed. It hovered, as though waiting for a command, and then stretched toward the shelf with the books. With a pawing motion, it made a couple of passes at the books until it pulled one down. “Stop,” Nora said again, and the chair stopped moving.

Strange, she thought. Carefully, she took the book from the motionless tongs. “What does it say?” she asked Mrs. Toristel. With some hesitation, the housekeeper read: “
On the Selective Breeding of Fruit-Bearing Trees, with the Aim to Increase Both Yield and Vigor
.”

“That doesn't sound very interesting,” Nora said. “Are they all like that?”

“Heavens, it would take me all day just to read the titles. This one I know, though,” Mrs. Toristel said, slipping out the book that had been next to the horticultural guide, an oversized volume with a leather binding that was turning to powder. “It's for children. I learned to read from it myself.”

Nora opened the book. On the first page, a complicated curl of ink next to a picture of what seemed to be a sheep. A is for
ama,
she guessed—the most common of the twelve Ors words for sheep.

“Would it be all right if I borrowed this?” she asked hopefully.

T
he brave warriors are ready for battle. Their long swords are eager to spill blood and carve the flesh of the enemy.”

Nora flipped back in the book to check something—that knot of brushstrokes, was it an
r
or long
e
?—then sounded the words out again slowly. The first sentences she'd managed to read in Ors.

Nice reading for little kids. She could hardly wait to hear what happened next.

By habit Nora pulled on the ring on her left hand—still stuck there—and looked up, trying to guess the time from the sunlight filtering through the tree branches. Four o'clock? Five? Back at the castle there were beans to shell and a kitchen floor to scrub. Mrs. Toristel would be back from Red Gate soon. Nora stretched, thinking that she should get up, not really wanting to.

Some weeks back, cutting through the orchard, she had discovered a path in the tall grass that led through the sloping fields, threaded a grove of birches, and emerged on the banks of the river below the castle. Since then, Nora had gotten into the habit of walking down to the river when she had a free hour. It was always cool by the water, although no one else ever seemed to take advantage of that fact. There was one place where you could cross on stones to a small island, really just a slab of rock with a pine tree growing out of it. A good place for sitting and trying to read a book in a foreign language. The stepping-stones on the other side of the island were fewer and the water looked deeper; Nora had not yet attempted a crossing, although she could see that the path continued, carving a narrow passage through the wild black firs on the far bank.

Now, as Nora stood up and tucked the book into her basket, she looked across the water and felt a pulse of curiosity. Why not? she thought. The beans can wait. She put the basket down and walked to the water's edge.

She stepped to the first rock, then leaped to the next one. The ankle that had been broken felt perfectly sound, Nora was pleased to note. She launched herself at the next rock.

“What are you doing here?” someone asked testily, directly ahead.

Nora checked herself in midspring, and discovered that both the rock she had left and the one she was aiming for were equally out of reach.

The water was not as deep as she'd feared, but colder. She thrashed around, fighting the current. The person on the bank had extended a hand. She grabbed it. Pulling herself upright, she recognized the magician. His black tunic was only a little darker than the forest shadows.

Nora scrambled out of the water. “You startled me.”

She thought she saw his mouth twitch. “My apologies,” he said, more cordially than before. “I did not intend for you to throw yourself into the river.”

“Neither did I.” Nora looked down at herself ruefully; her dress was completely soaked. “I don't suppose you have any magic to dry clothes?”

“Certainly,” he said, with a lift of his eyebrows.

The water trickling out of her clothes picked up momentum; she watched the dampness recede down the length of her dress. She felt a little queasy and much warmer. “Thank you,” she said.

“I thought you didn't believe in magic,” the magician said.

“I don't know,” Nora said. “I just find it somewhat—unexpected.”

“That is not a bad thing,” Aruendiel said, surprisingly. “Magic is not something one should take for granted. Not at all.” Briefly, he seemed to be thinking about something else. “You haven't answered my question yet,” he said, more sharply. “What are you doing here?”

“I come down here sometimes to see the river. I wondered where the path leads.”

He studied her through narrowed eyes. “Indeed. It is a long climb up and down the hill, no small exertion for a mending ankle.”

It was hard to tell whether the sharpness in his voice was from concern over her leg or something else. She told him that her ankle was fine, that she walked everywhere now.

“Show me,” Aruendiel said, and watched as Nora walked a few paces along the riverbank and returned. “No pain?” Kneeling, he ran a hand over her shinbone and palpated her ankle joint. “It has healed well,” he said finally, sounding more cheerful than before. “Of course,” he added, rising, “it is not so hard to set and mend one bone at a time. Mending several dozen, that is more complicated.”

Nora looked at him curiously. A war injury, Mrs. Toristel had said. He held himself with more ease and vigor than she remembered from their previous meetings, and he seemed younger, closer to forty than to seventy. She could even see a certain resemblance to that portrait of his sister. On one side of his face, the planes of cheek and brow and jaw were smooth, strong, intact. The other side was rough and broken. He might have been handsome once. But overall, there was a sense of dilapidation about his lean face and frame, an impression of odd angles, joints that were out of true, a great disorder patched together and animated in an act of unlikely improvisation.

She wanted to ask him exactly how he had broken dozens of bones at once, but instead she said, “How was your trip? I didn't know you were back.”

“I returned today, a few hours ago,” Aruendiel said. “The voyage itself was damp. But all was resolved satisfactorily. A matter of reversing a sea god's curse.”

“A sea god?”

“A local deity,” he said dismissively. “Now, can you cross the river without falling in again? These woods are not the proper place for an afternoon stroll.”

She turned and jumped to the island, conscious that she was making a little show of her agility. He came behind her. “Where does the path go?” she asked, picking up her basket.

At first she thought Aruendiel was not going to answer, but then he said: “Into the hills. It used to run up to the sheepfold, when we grazed sheep on these slopes.”

“But this is all forest.”

“So it is.”

To her chagrin, her foot slipped on the opposite bank, and she had to grab a root to keep from falling. Despite his limp, Aruendiel navigated the stepping-stones with a nonchalance that Nora found ever so slightly irritating. His legs were longer, she reminded herself, and he had probably crossed here a thousand times.

“I've been wanting to talk to you,” she said as they started up the path to the castle. “About how I can get out of here—that is, go home. Back to my own world.”

Aruendiel cocked an eyebrow. “Well, how did you get here?”

He
was the magician—why couldn't he tell her? “I don't know,” Nora said. “But the last completely normal, ordinary, nonmagical thing that I remember is going to the mountains with some friends, for a wedding.” She described that weekend, her walk in the woods alone, then finding her way to Ilissa's gardens.

“You believe something happened to you on that mountain,” Aruendiel said.

“Maybe some kind of accident. I've wondered whether I might have hurt my head and become, well, confused. Or maybe—” This possibility had come to her in a black moment; she had tried to dismiss it, and failed. “Maybe I died.”

To her secret terror, and also relief, Aruendiel took the idea seriously. He frowned for a moment. “Perhaps. It is unlikely, however. A ghost remains a ghost in any world, and you are certainly alive in this one. There is no sign that you have died even once.”

She could not help laughing a little at that. “The graveyard, though. It could have been a sign of my death.” He wanted to know more about the graveyard. “It was just a few old headstones in the middle of nowhere,” she said, and recounted how she had gone into the cemetery to read the inscriptions on the graves.

“You read the words aloud?” Aruendiel asked. When she nodded, he said: “Some kind of spell there, cloaked in the poem.”

“Really?” Nora asked, dubious, fascinated. She ducked under a low-growing branch, trying to keep up with him.

“It's clear enough—there's a gateway in the graveyard that goes from one world to the next.” In a quickened tone, he asked: “Does Ilissa know about it?”

“Well—” Nora was not sure how to answer the question. “She knew about the graveyard.”

“I thought she might know of such a door to another world. She's not from this one, we know that. But then why hasn't she used this gateway to escape?” Aruendiel turned to look hard at Nora, as though she might actually know the answer.

“That first day, she talked about the graveyard as though she hadn't seen it for years. And then the second time—” Nora tried to piece the memory together. “She was angry. She didn't want me there. I remember throwing up. I was pregnant then,” she added, the last few words in a subdued voice.

“Morning sickness.”

“I guess. I never really had any, except for that one time.”

“You were fortunate,” Aruendiel said. “Well, Ilissa would not want you wandering back to your world while you were carrying her heir.”

They were coming to a subject that she preferred not to think about. But his words had triggered another memory. “Actually—” Nora said. “I could see, inside the fence, that the ground was torn up, and there was one of those yellow ribbons that they use at crime scenes. Do you know what I'm talking about?” Aruendiel shook his head uncomprehendingly.

“Never mind,” she went on. “The point is, it was from my world. I was looking through the fence at a piece of my world. Why the police tape, I don't know.” No, she did know. It was because of her own disappearance. At some point searchers must have tracked her, probably with dogs, to the graveyard. And then what? Her trail ended. No doubt the police had never once thought to look for magical gateways to alternate universes. More likely they considered other, more reasonable explanations for Nora's disappearance: wild animals, serial killers.

And her parents must be—Nora shoved that thought down quickly, unwilling to imagine what they must be thinking. First EJ, now this.

“The fence around the graveyard,” Aruendiel said. “Was it made of iron?” Nora nodded, and he looked very pleased with himself. “Of course. The Faitoren cannot abide iron. It is like poison to them. That was how we were first able to defeat and confine them, with weapons of iron and steel.”

It all sounded highly unlikely, this antipathy to iron—except that she had heard something like this before. “Wait,
fairies
! Do you mean to say that the Faitoren are fairies?”

Aruendiel shrugged. “Is that what they are called in your world?”

“Yes, except there's no such things as fairies! They exist only in folklore, stories.” Nora added: “There is an old theory that fairies were actually a Bronze Age people in Britain who went into hiding to escape invaders with iron weapons, but that's just a historical explanation for the legend. In my world, if you call something a fairy tale, by definition it's not true.”

Aruendiel rubbed his chin—touching his hand to the good side of his face only, Nora noticed. “I never came across any Faitoren when I was in your world. Although that doesn't mean that they weren't there, or that they had not been there before.”

Nora seized upon the one notion that seemed to have some relevance for her. “This gateway, though. To get back to my world, all I'd have to do is go back into the graveyard again, right? Would you help me go there?”

A flash of interest kindled in Aruendiel's face, but then he shook his head. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to take on Ilissa,” he said. “And I defy you to find another magician who could have extracted you from her castle. But it would be suicidal to battle her on her own turf.”

“What if I took, oh, a sword and just marched in?” Nora said. “That's iron—steel. She couldn't touch me, could she?”

“She could still enchant and bemuse you,” said Aruendiel with a dark smile. “As she did before, as she has done to people much older and much wiser than you.”

“Well, how else could I get back home? How did you get there?” Nora demanded.

“I was traveling, passing through the thin places between worlds, and when I tried to return home, I found myself in yours. It was no great catastrophe. I only had to wait until another thin place opened up in the skin of your world and then slip back into my own—a matter of a year or so.”

Nora was dismayed. “That long?”

Aruendiel shrugged his shoulders. “I passed the time tolerably well. It was intriguing to see how a world can be organized without magic. There was magic there, of course, but the inhabitants might as well have been blind or deaf, they were so unaware of it. Of course they were ingenious in other ways,” he added, as though making a belated attempt at politeness. “Those great ships, and the swift carriages that run on iron roads, and the mechanical devices for sending messages—telegroms, they were called—were very impressive.”

“Hmm,” said Nora. “When was this? Never mind—this thin place you used, is it still there?”

He shook his head. “It knitted up long ago. But other thin places will develop. They come and go, like little bruises, as the different worlds touch one another. My friend Micher Samle has made a study of them. He is away in another world right now—your world, very possibly. I spoke to his former apprentice, Dorneng Hul, when I was last in Semr, and Dorneng expects a way back will open within the next ten years or so.”

“
Ten
years? What will I do for all that time?”

“Do?” He seemed puzzled.

“Yes—earn my living, pass the time, whatever.”

Aruendiel took a minute to turn this new problem over in his mind as they walked along the stone wall that marked the edge of the upper pastures. “In your own world, what is your station?” he asked finally. “Despite your alliance with the Faitoren prince, it seems to me that you are not originally of the nobility.”

Nora smiled tightly. “Oh, can you tell?”