The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (35 page)

T
he days settled into a new pattern. Nora awoke each morning in the chilly, predawn gloom and spent some time convincing herself to get out of bed. Then she dressed quickly, her arms pebbled with gooseflesh: linen shift, a layer of knitted woolens, one of her new winter dresses, long stockings, a pair of Mrs. Toristel's old boots. And still the cold gnawed at her until she had been up on her feet for a time—feeding the animals, bringing in firewood, hauling water.

The entire morning was taken up with chores. In addition to the usual cleaning, Mrs. Toristel had enlisted her to organize the attic storerooms, a treasury of dented armor, rusty weapons, faded tapestries, and chests of mildewed clothes. The thought had crossed Nora's mind that perhaps Mrs. Toristel had assigned her this task to try to minimize the time spent in the magician's tower. The housekeeper seemed deaf or distracted whenever Nora mentioned her new studies, and after a while Nora stopped making any reference to them.

Around noon each day Nora climbed the stairs to Aruendiel's study with the same tickle of apprehension that she'd felt before certain graduate seminars. Sometimes she would arrive to find that he was absent, or she would hear his footsteps in one of the upper rooms; sometimes he was so buried in his books that he paid no attention as she took her seat at the other table. Then the afternoon would pass quietly, with Nora working slowly through the spells that he had set for her to learn or reading over the notes she had made on a growing pile of wax tablets. Other days, glancing up as soon as she came in, he would challenge her to recite a spell and then to explain how it was put together and exactly when one might use it; why the wizard who wrote it had chosen this particular form; why he had included various commands and contingencies; what he had left out, and why; and—with a lift of the eyebrow—what he could have done better.

She could usually tell when she had made a mistake by the immediate spark of irritation in Aruendiel's face. When she finished, there would be some pointed questions—had she not noticed the obvious such-and-such? Then he would deliver a detailed, waspish accounting of everything she had missed or misunderstood. She had found, though, that the harshest sarcasm came at the beginning of his critiques. Once he had progressed into a discussion of the underlying magic, explaining general rules and the interesting exceptions, citing past authorities and the history of certain famous spells, his tone would mellow, his asperity would shift toward enthusiasm, and he would be more or less civil until her next blunder.

Sometimes, halfway through the afternoon, Aruendiel would tell her to get her cloak and they would set off for the forest across the river. The first time, Nora made the error of asking a question about a spell she had been studying. “We are not here to converse,” he said severely, striding ahead. What they had come for, he did not say, but it had something to do with the half-heard murmur, the almost-tangible presence that she could sense intermittently in the woods. She was not so sure that they had not come to converse. The shadows of the bare trees lay long and black on the earth as the sun sank westward, and sometimes it seemed as though nothing moved there except for her and the magician. Yet the forest seemed flagrantly, almost dangerously alive. At the end of these walks, no matter how tired her legs were from climbing hills, Nora often found herself ablaze with nervous energy, as though she had been at a long and stimulating party.

Some days—not frequently enough, in Nora's view—Aruendiel would set her to work an actual spell. Gradually, she learned how to mend a broken plate without touching it, without looking at it, and then without being in the same room with it; and then how to reconstitute two separate smashed dishes whose pieces lay jumbled together in the kitchen while she stood in the tower. There was a trick to it, she found: You had to work through the spell in your mind, while keeping the same kind of connection to the clay fragments that she had first felt while manipulating them with her fingers. How this insight would apply to other kinds of spells, she could see only dimly, but even Aruendiel seemed grudgingly impressed by the progress she had made in crockery repair.

She did not know why he was taking such pains with her. Boredom or loneliness, perhaps. More likely, she thought, he could not resist anything to do with magic, even if it involved spending hours teaching the rudiments to a rank beginner.

Following her afternoon lessons, she made dinner from whatever Mrs. Toristel had left for her to cook. Then there was a little time for more study: translating a few pages of
Pride and Prejudice
into Ors. That was another assignment from the magician. Nora had been rather proud of keeping her notes in Ors instead of English, but when Aruendiel saw them, he was appalled at her handwriting and said that her spelling was even worse. After some debate about the best way to improve both—Aruendiel's preferred solution was to have her copy out a hundred lines of the
Nagaron Voy
every day—Nora suggested that she would translate passages from
Pride and Prejudice
, and Aruendiel would correct them. To her surprise, he agreed. He was curious about the book that had been used to imprison Bouragonr, he said.

At first, it seemed that the famous first sentence would be a fatal stumbling block. After reading Nora's translation, Aruendiel was puzzled, a little contemptuous. He took issue with the basic premise. “Why would possession of a large fortune mean that an unmarried man needs a wife?”

Nora launched into the freshman English explanation of irony. There was a certain satisfaction in being the teacher again.

“Yes, yes, I do not need tutoring in the basics of rhetoric,” Aruendiel said impatiently. “But no young girl of good birth would marry a man only because he is rich.”

“Are you joking?” Nora said. “When I was in Semr, that was all the young women talked about, marrying a wealthy man.”

“Did they?” A flash of amusement passed across his rough face. “But money is only part of it. If not, they might as well marry a tradesman.”

“A tradesman? Oh, I see what you're saying. To be eligible, he'd have to be part of your crowd, an aristocrat.”

“My crowd? We cannot all be royalty, Mistress Nora. No, it is not just a matter of birth. A suitable bridegroom would have land, family alliances, some skill in battle—”

“Hmm. I suppose the best translation would be ‘A single gentleman in possession of a great estate must be in want of a wife.' Does that make more sense?”

“That is better. Write it down. No, that is not how one spells ‘estate,' not when it follows the adjective.”

The rest of the first chapter went better. Something about Mr. Bennet's drily embittered sense of humor appealed to Aruendiel. He read her translations with more interest than she would have expected. In some ways he was more familiar with Austen's stratified, preindustrial world than Nora was, and he was also particularly adept at helping her find Ors equivalents for the formal, faintly antique diction of the novel.

They usually went over her translations at night in the great hall, where, with the coming of the cold weather, wooden panels had been set up around the huge fireplace to block the drafts. Aruendiel took a more detached tone in correcting Nora's translations than he did in critiquing her magical work, expressing only a sarcastic wonderment at her grammatical and orthographical mistakes. Afterward, in the reddish firelight, over the remnants of dinner, he was more approachable than he had been during the day, more willing to entertain Nora's questions about things other than magic, or sometimes to question her.

“The society, the countryside, in your book are different from what I remember of your world,” he objected once, after they had penetrated several chapters into the novel. “Is this the sort of life that you led there?”

Nora explained that the novel was more than two hundred years old. A present-day Elizabeth Bennet would be in college at age twenty, probably thinking more about the job market than marriage. “Tell me more about your travels in my world,” she said after a pause. “Why is it that this world is full of magicians, but there are none in mine?” Not so long ago, Nora thought, she would have asked the question as a joke. Now she wanted to know.

“Some of the stones and mountains in your world had known magicians before me. But no, I never found another active magician there. A pity, for there were some rare opportunities to practice magic. There was great power in those cities—Chigago, and then the city across the ocean whose name sounds like ‘Dead Fish.'”

“London” was the closest English synonym. “What do you mean, there was great power in those cities?”

“I mean that the cities themselves generated power, from the crowds, from the action of the iron machinery in those enormous workshops. It was a new kind of magic. I spent a year working there, in a peasant's job, in order to study it. Quite powerful, but unpredictable.”

“What sort of peasant's job?”

He would not say, but from another comment he made later, Nora deduced that he had been shoveling coal. He had traveled to London via ship, she gathered, to reach the gateway to his world that would allow him to go home. But in London he discovered that a great war was raging in precisely the area where he wished to go.

World War II, Nora hazarded. “What did you do?”

“I am a magician,” he said, with a sliver of a smile. “And I did not need any particularly complex protection spells—they only had to be very strong, given the kind of artillery that I had to make my way through.” His face darkened. “I had never seen anything like the kind of warfare you practice in your world. Thousands upon thousands of men being torn to pieces by bits of flying iron. It was butchery.”

Nora agreed, but she felt obliged to observe: “Carving people up with swords isn't so wonderful, either.”

Aruendiel remarked that it was more honorable to meet an enemy face-to-face in fair combat than to blow holes in him from two
polists
away. “And more enjoyable, too. But I admit that I myself have lost much of my taste for making war since—” He broke off, his eyes fixed on the fire.

“Since you were injured?” Nora asked delicately.

“Yes, since I was injured. And I am older than I was. War is for the young men.” Offhandedly, still looking into the flames, he added: “We must start you on fire magic soon.”

“Good, that sounds more exciting than mending pots,” Nora said rashly.

Aruendiel pointed out, with some severity, that she still had more work to do in that area. “You have not learned to induce a ceramic vessel to change its form, or to break a dish so that only you can mend it, or—”

“All right, yes, I saw there's a whole treatise by Setisonior the Left-handed on that. Aruendiel, will this magic I'm learning help me defend myself if I meet Ilissa again?”

He turned his head to look at her. “Not unless she decides to attack you by breaking all the dishes.”

“When will I learn something that will actually let me defend myself?”

“I can teach you a basic shielding spell, once you have some expertise with fire magic. It would hold Ilissa off for a few minutes. To truly protect yourself, though, you cannot let Ilissa know your heart better than you yourself do. It's the only sure way. I've told you that before.”

In a milder tone, he added: “There is no reason to think that you will encounter her again. She is confined to her lands, and before the next king is fool enough to let her out, you will likely have returned to your world already.”

“Yes,” Nora said, unsatisfied, twisting the ring on her finger. “But sometimes I can't help worrying.”

“Then you have learned some wisdom, I see,” he said with severe approval.

Later that night, as she lay in bed, her feet curled against a warm brick, she listened to Aruendiel's tread up the stairs and down the corridor, one long step and then a shorter one, and she thought about what he had said. A daunting task, to take careful inventory of one's own heart. Which, of all the secrets that were hidden there, would be most useful to Ilissa?

There was her low-grade obsession with Aruendiel. Nora had given up calling it a crush; it had lost some of its urgency, and it seemed indecorous now that he was officially her teacher. (Even across the worlds, she felt the invisible contraints of the sexual harassment policy of the Graduate College of Arts and Sciences.) Perhaps that was why her fixation had moderated: She had wanted Aruendiel's time and attention, and now she had it, in some measure—in the lessons, in their oddly companionable evening talks. But she still felt something that might be termed an unhealthy interest. It was not really romantic in nature, she told herself sternly. More of a morbid curiosity. There were too many questions that she had not dared to ask or that he had refused to answer. His murdered wife was only one of them.

And she was ever mindful of his lank, battered, precariously balanced body. His face was not always so hideous, when he took the trouble to smile. Once or twice, when they leaned over a book together, she was troubled to think that she might feel the accidental warmth of his shoulder against hers, or even that his hand might suddenly take hold of her own.

Nothing like that ever happened, fortunately.

Ilissa would make hay with all of these repressed and tangled wishes. (Nora imagined her delighted laugh.) “The problem,” Nora reflected clinically, “is that I'm lonely and horny and starved for companionship—not to mention that my sex life has probably been permanently scarred because I was married to Grendel's uglier brother—so naturally I feel hot and bothered when I get close to an eligible man, any man, no matter what he looks like.”

It had been almost six months since she had fled from Ilissa's palace. Had things turned out differently, she would be a new mother by now. (Or dead, according to Aruendiel.) The happy mother of a baby pterodactyl. Would she still have loved it, her own flesh and blood made monstrous?