The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (42 page)

With her hands on the broken pottery, Nora began to feel more confident. She picked up two curved fragments from the largest pile, both with the same reddish-brown glaze, and touched them together experimentally. The shards grated roughly against each other. Wait, she corrected herself, reaching into the pile again,
this
one goes with
that
one. Two pieces flowed together, then a third. Finding the right piece got easier as you went along—the pot practically showed you how to put it back together.

It turned out to be a pitcher with an old man's face molded into its round belly. “Here you go,” Nora said, handing it to Caddo, who looked both gratified and suspicious. She turned the pitcher over and over, looking for flaws. “Go ahead, fill it with water if you want,” Nora urged. She turned her attention to the other piles of broken crockery. A bowl. Another bowl. A platter, painted with an intricate design of radishes and carrots. She was conscious, as she fit the fragments together, that the finished dishes were being passed around the room with whispers.

Then the pile of miscellaneous fragments. It was much harder to reconstitute an entire pot from a single shard. You had to summon the missing pieces from wherever they were, if they were even still in existence, or re-create them if they were not. You really needed the clay's cooperation here, and some fragments were more apathetic than others. If it had been a very long time since the original pot was broken, the piece might have almost forgotten that it was once part of a shaped and greater whole. Aruendiel could reliably bring back an old pot from a fragment as small as a fingernail, but Nora's success rate was perhaps one in three.

So this was good practice. By the time she had gone through the entire pile, she estimated that she had raised her rate to almost one in two, and Caddo was back in possession of another bowl, some roughly formed mugs, and a chamber pot with a sententious motto painted around the rim. (“Foul are my contents but sweeter than filth from the mouth.”)

“All right,” Nora said finally. “I think I've done all that I can do.” She stood up and looked questioningly at Morinen: What now?

Morinen had evidently prepped Caddo, who glanced shrewdly one more time at the newly mended dishes and then produced a small flagon of honey wine and three beeswax candles. After a second's hesitation, she also handed Nora one of the reconstituted pitchers. “I thank you, most excellent lady, for this favor you have shown me,” Caddo said, with a curtsy, “and I beg you to accept an unworthy gift in return.”

“Your gifts far outshine my humble offering, Faris's most excellent wife, and I thank you for your generosity,” Nora said, returning the curtsy. She was fairly sure that she had gotten the formula right—she had heard Mrs. Toristel go through the same ritual exchange when bartering with one of the villagers. Even so, the others in the room, even the little boys who had crowded in, seemed to be amused.

She got the same reaction—someone even tittered—at the next hut, when Morinen's aunt Narl gave her a skein of crimson yarn for mending a couple of plates and an oil lamp. “Did I say something wrong?” she murmered to Morinen as they left.

“No, no, what do you mean? You're doing fine,” Morinen said. “Aunt Narl was a little cheap, though. She could have done better than that yarn.”

“I don't mind giving your family a discount.”

“Not so loud—the whole village is family. Now, Pelinen's next. She'll probably have some cheese for you. We should start doing a little trading, or you'll never be able to carry all this stuff.”

“Trading?” Nora asked. “What should I—”

“Leave it to me.”

Pelinen was a square-faced widow of forty who owned the village's two best dairy cows. After Nora mended a cracked pickle crock, a chamber pot, and—a new challenge—a small square of looking glass, Morinen drew Pelinen into a muttered side consultation. Nora could not hear the details of the discussion, but she got the sense that both parties were volleying back and forth with practiced ease. A few minutes later she and Morinen left without the beeswax candles and yarn, but with half a wheel of cheese that they had to trundle between the two of them, since even Morinen was not strong enough to carry it by herself.

At the tanner's, the cheese and the honey wine and a half-dozen mended dishes turned into two goatskins. At Trouteye's, the rubbish heap had been excavated down to bare earth in Nora's honor; she spent more than an hour mending pots for him and his wife and left with a side of bacon. Lus had only a few items to be repaired, but he took the bacon in exchange for a cask of ale. At their next stop, as Nora mended dishes, the ale and one of the goatskins became a woolen blanket; at the hut belonging to Morinen's cousin Porlus, the other goatskin became an iron skillet.

There was an unusual amount of joviality accompanying each of these transactions, it seemed to Nora. Sometimes people would glance at her worn boots and laugh. It took her a while to realize, from snippets of overheard conversations, that they were not laughing at her, but Aruendiel. Morinen had evidently told all—how Aruendiel had refused to buy new boots for her and how the cobbler was charging her at least double the usual price.

Further, Nora gleaned, one of the accused on trial before his lordship in Stone Top at this moment was a boy of nineteen from the village, known as Ferret—Morinen's second cousin. Ferret was probably destined for the gallows anyway, everyone said, but most believed him innocent of the crime that he was accused of, beating and robbing an elderly peasant of his horse. The judges were likely to sentence him to hang.

“So everyone's helping me because they're angry at Aruendiel?” Nora asked Morinen, as they went from one hut to another.

“No, I wouldn't say angry, not at all.” Morinen glanced around with a trace of uneasiness. “They just think it's funny, you having to buy your own boots. And they do like having their dishes fixed.”

By this time, the light was fading. Nora had mended at least three dozen dishes and cooking vessels, two mirrors, four glass bottles, and two small clay figures of a rabbit-headed gnome with an oversized phallus. (“That's Gingornl,” Morinen said matter-of-factly. “He brings children. Folks keep him in the bed with them, so he's always getting broken.”) Nora was not tired at all—the opposite, in fact—but she was beginning to think that her brain would explode into tiny shards from working an unceasing succession of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles.

“So what have we collected?” Nora asked Morinen.

“A skillet, three sheepskins, a goatskin, a kerchief, a flask of blackberry cordial, a dozen sausages, three skeins of yarn, and a bag of dried peas,” Morinen said with satisfaction.

“And the stockings that Fori gave me. Do you think that's enough for my boots?”

“I think so. Let's go over to Bitar's now; he might give us some cash for this lot.”

Bitar's small, cluttered hut was the village's closest equivalent to a general store. He bartered for goods in the markets in Red Gate and Stone Top, then traded them to the villagers for a premium, and was rumored to have a box of gold beetles buried under his hearth. Mrs. Toristel said that she would never eat anything that came out of Bitar's hut, but she sometimes went to him for small oddments like needles or string if she had no time to go to Red Gate on market day.

Bitar greeted them by complaining that they had ruined his business in dishes for the next six months. “No one wants to buy your bowls anyway, they're much too expensive,” Morinen retorted. “But this is your lucky day, Bitar. Look at all the lovely things that Mistress Nora and I have to sell to you. Didn't Porsn do a nice job of tanning these hides? We have some of Blue Dove's blackberry wine, and this skillet, very clean, no rust on it anywhere, not like that iron pot you sold my ma last year.”

“She got a good price on that pot, I don't know what you're complaining about.” Bitar pointed out the dent in the skillet and the stain on one of the sheepskins. He and Morinen haggled for a few minutes until he finally agreed to pay them three silver beads for the lot, except for the sausages and the yarn. “I couldn't give those away,” he said, scratching his chin. “Not this time of year, with everyone killing pigs. And I've got bags of yarn already. What would I be wanting more for, especially this coarse stuff?”

“You don't know good wool when you see it,” Morinen grumbled, watching as Bitar fished a leather purse from somewhere in the region of his crotch and then slowly counted out three beads. They were black with tarnish. Morinen polished them on her apron until she was satisfied that they were real silver.

“He robbed us—we could have gotten twice that in Red Gate,” she said to Nora as they went outside. “'Course, it would have taken us all day to get there and back.”

“And it's snowing now, too,” Nora said, turning her face away from the wind. “You did a fantastic job, Morinen, not just with Bitar but with all those people. Three silver beads is better than I expected. I couldn't have done it alone—I wouldn't have known what all those things were worth, let alone how to bargain for them.”

Morinen smiled, her eyes squeezed tight against the blowing snow. “I used to go to Red Gate with my pa to sell kids and lambs when I was little—now, that's some hard bargaining. This was easy. And living in the village, you know who needs what and what they'll give for it.”

“Well, here, you take the extra bead—you earned it. Take the sausages, too, and the yarn. No, I insist,” Nora said, as Morinen began to demur. “We have plenty of sausages, and if I take the wool back to the castle, Mrs. Toristel will just make me knit it into something.” Nora was thinking, too, that if she returned with sausages or yarn, Mrs. Toristel would want some explanation. Not that the day's activities would remain secret for long—one of the villagers would be sure to spill the beans—but she wanted time to prepare her story.

On the way home, she stopped by the cobbler's hut to order her new boots. He laughed when he saw her. “If I'd known you were so handy at fixing dishes,” he said, “I would have asked you to fix the bowl I threw at my wife the other night.”

“I'm done for the day,” Nora said.

S
now fell all night, a shadowy curtain blowing restlessly around the house, and continued into the next day. “Is it like this all winter?” Nora asked, staring out the window.

“This isn't so bad,” Mrs. Toristel said, with a short, rueful laugh. “After the Null Days is the worst. We never had winters like this in Pelagnia, never, with the snow deep enough to bury a man. Although
he
goes out in the worst weather.”

The following day was clearer. Nora was trying to decide whether to chance walking to the cobbler's in her old boots when Morinen's brother Posin struggled up the hill with the new ones. Nora thanked him and brought him into the kitchen to warm up, where he filled Mrs. Toristel in on the latest news from the village.

The new boots fit perfectly—better, in fact, than any shoes that Nora had ever owned in her life. In her own world, she reflected, it would have taken a lot longer than a single day to earn enough money for a pair of custom-made shoes. After Posin's departure, she hiked up her skirt to show them to Mrs. Toristel. The calfskin boots came up to her knee, high enough even for the snow that covered the ground now, and—pleasing her just as much—they had an interesting clunky, sexy look. She would have liked to wear them with tights and a miniskirt, although she did not mention this to the housekeeper.

“Cobbler does good work,” Mrs. Toristel allowed. “Mind, you polish them with tallow now, to keep the damp out.”

Nora went out late that afternoon to feed the animals, fearless of wet and cold. The leather boots gleamed in the lantern light; she enjoyed glimpsing her well-shod feet among the bustle of chickens demanding their dinner. At the kitchen door, she stopped and carefully wiped a crumb of dung off the top of her right boot.

“—two hours retrieving a fool who tried to make the pass at Witchneedle the night of the first storm.”

Aruendiel was back, still wearing his traveling cloak, a looming black pillar in the middle of the kitchen. His pale eyes flicked toward Nora and then back to Mrs. Toristel. “And then it was slow going to Red Gate,” he went on, “so I spent last night there.”

Mrs. Toristel reached for his cloak. “Any news from the inn, sir?”

“A lot of idiotic talk about the assizes. One of the drunkards presumed to tell me I should have hanged the lot. A shame that I cannot hang a man for stupidity.” Aruendiel glanced in Nora's direction again, without acknowledging her. “Clousit from the village was there, too, with a most amusing story. I could hardly avoid it, since he shared it with the rest of the taproom. He said that he had encountered our own Mistress Nora in the village, casting spells to mend the peasants' broken dishes.”

Mrs. Toristel, catching a sarcastic lilt in Aruendiel's tone, folded the cloak over her arm and turned to look at Nora. “Yes, she mentioned that.”

“Did she mention that she went house to house, through the whole village, taking payment for repairing chamber pots and Gingornls' cocks? She needed the money—so said Clousit—because his lordship refused to give her money for new boots. They had a good laugh over that at the Two Rams—at least, those who were too drunk to know I was in the room.”

Abruptly he turned to Nora. “Those are your famous new boots?”

“Yes,” she said, with a sinking feeling.

“You will take them off, and Mrs. Toristel will have them burned.”

“No!”

“Nora, is this all true?” Mrs. Toristel said, her thin face tightening.

After a moment, Nora nodded.

“Oh, dear, Nora.” Mrs. Toristel closed her eyes and looked faintly ill.

Nora tried to stay calm. “Yes, but I mended all kinds of dishes, not just chamber pots and whatsits. And yes, people paid me with cheeses and bacon and various things, and then I bartered them for cash, which I used to buy these boots. I'm sorry I let it slip that you wouldn't pay for them—”

“I am not accustomed to hearing my financial matters being discussed in the public room of the Red Gate tavern.”

“I'm very sorry, I shouldn't have said anything about that. But otherwise I don't see what the problem is.”

“The problem?” Aruendiel smiled unpleasantly. “You have only made a public spectacle of yourself. You took the magic that I taught you and used it to cheat ignorant peasants.”

“I didn't cheat them! I mended their pots, and they were happy to pay me. It was a fair trade.”

“Nevertheless, it was unseemly for you to charge them, and unseemly to put yourself on public display, to make yourself—and me—the object of village gossip.”

“As if you're not already, come on,” Nora said, feeling the growing temblors of her own anger. “People in the village gossip about you, they gossip about me, they gossip about each other, they have nothing else to do. And I wouldn't have had to earn that money in the first place if you had paid your own bills at the cobbler's. He charged me extra—four silver beads—because he said I was gentry—”

“He was mistaken there.”

“—and because you hadn't paid him for your last pair of boots.” What happened to his statement that a gentleman doesn't quibble with shopkeepers, she wondered.

“That is a matter between him and me,” Aruendiel said icily. “If he tried to overcharge you, you should have informed me.”

“You weren't here.”

“Or Mrs. Toristel.”

“She would have said to wait until you got back, and in the meantime, my old boots were falling apart,” Nora shot back. “You should be pleased that I put the magic that you taught me to good use. So what if I repaired some chamber pots? They're useful, and I saved the villagers the cost of replacing them.

“What you're really angry about,” she added, “is that a lot of peasants laughed at you in a tavern. Well, I'm sorry about that. But that doesn't mean I should give up my boots.”

She made a point of returning Aruendiel's stare. When finally he spoke, the edge of sarcasm was gone from his voice, replaced by something meaner, blunter. His face was blank with rage. Whenever she had seen Aruendiel angry before, she realized now, there had always been a sense that he was savoring the chance to frame exactly the right insult or give voice to his feelings with precisely the degree of force required. The black irony, the barbs, were a sign that he was in control. All that was gone now. “You do not even understand how you have disgraced yourself,” he said flatly. “Remove your boots and give them to Mrs. Toristel.”

Nora shook her head. “No,” she said, not as loudly as she wanted to.

“Then you will not remain under my roof.”

Her immediate response was relief. There was an escape. She was not going to be transformed into some small, crawling thing or run through with a sword. “All right,” she said.

“Sir!” Mrs. Toristel's voice had regained some strength. “Nora has certainly behaved badly, and I'm very sorry for it. I would have stopped it at once if I'd known.”

“I know you would have, Mrs. Toristel,” Aruendiel said in clipped tones.

“But is it necessary to turn her out of doors in winter? She has nowhere to go.”

“She cannot live in my household, if she will not obey my wishes.”

“Nora,” said Mrs. Toristel, “you must do as he asks. Come, give me the boots.”

“He's not asking,” Nora said, “and no.”

“Don't be silly, girl. You've been protected here, fed, clothed. If you leave here—in this weather—a lone woman—what do you think will happen to you?”

“I'd rather go anywhere else than be treated like this.”

“If you leave, Nora, there's nothing I can do to help you,” Mrs. Toristel said sadly.

“I know,” Nora said, working hard to keep her voice steady. “I'll be all right. I have a skill now,” she added stubbornly. “I can earn my own living, that's one thing I've learned from this stupid mess. People will pay me to mend pots. I can go from village to village and earn food and shelter and silver. I'll be fine.”

“You can hardly expect to travel from village to village unmolested,” Aruendiel remarked.

She jerked her head up to look at him. “Well, I expect you to make sure that I can pass safely through your lands. After that, what happens to me is of no concern to you.”

Mrs. Toristel shook her head. “Mending pots, Nora? You'll make a poor living.”

“I made three silver beads yesterday, and I could make a lot of money in Semr, mending fine porcelain for the nobility. And I'll pick up other spells, like bringing rain—” Seeing the contemptuous expression on Aruendiel's face, she faltered for a second. “Or curing warts or whatever. There's all kinds of useful magic that people will pay for.”

“At least think it over,” Mrs. Toristel said, with a sigh. “Don't be foolish.”

“She has made her choice,” Aruendiel said shortly, his eyes sliding away from Nora as though he found the sight of her distasteful.

“I'll leave tomorrow morning,” she said. Shouldering past him, she went out of the kitchen and upstairs, her heart thudding.

The whole dispute was trivial, absurd, she thought, sitting in her small chamber—not hers anymore, after tomorrow—and yet now the conflict seemed inevitable. If Aruendiel was going to play lord of the manor—which of course was exactly what he was—then something, anything would have been bound to set him off eventually. No reasonable person could predict when she might unintentionally break one of their repressive, ridiculous, medieval codes. In her own world, what she and Morinen had done would be admired as plucky, smart, entrepreneurial. Sheer bad luck that the one time she had ever discovered a way to make some money, it had to be in a place where her initiative would only land her in disgrace.

Of course, Mrs. Toristel was right, she reflected more soberly. She, Nora, might be raped, robbed, murdered, frozen to death, reenchanted by Ilissa, as soon as she moved beyond the protective radius of the magician's power. But then his power was the problem. That was why she couldn't stay here to be ordered around like a slave. Better to die a free woman. If any woman in this wretched world could be said to be free.

Hirizjahkinis. She had given Nora her token. Nora felt relief flood her. If she got into real trouble, she could call on Hirizjahkinis. Maybe it would work, after all, this plan of going out to make her living by fixing pots. Nora already knew how to set things on fire. Hirizjahkinis could teach her other spells to protect herself.

She recalled, with some chagrin, how easily she'd told Hirizjahkinis she did not fear Aruendiel. Well, it was true then. Hirizjahkinis said he would not hurt her. Maybe Hirizjahkinis had never seen him as he had been today, rage freezing every trace of reason or compassion. He had been irritated with Nora for weeks, and now this. She had no idea what might have first turned him against her. It didn't matter now.

Mrs. Toristel called her downstairs to the kitchen and tried to get her to eat something. Nora forced down a few mouthfuls of stewed lentils, aware that this might be her last warm dinner for a while, but she felt too anxious to eat much. Seeing Nora's agitation, Mrs. Toristel began to plead again that she reconsider, apologize, surrender her boots, and stay at the castle. Aruendiel was nowhere to be seen, but Mrs. Toristel spoke in an urgent whisper, as though she were afraid he might overhear. Her eyes were wet. On the verge of tears herself, Nora tore herself away and went back upstairs.

She had little to pack. Her few clothes,
Pride and Prejudice
, Hirizjahkinis's lock of hair. When she had made up her bundle, Nora sat on the bed and tried to map out a plan. Her first stop should be Red Gate, she decided. If everyone there was gossiping about her pot-repairing exploits, she might as well take advantage of the free publicity. With luck and a good pace, she could be there by tomorrow night. Probably she could work out some barter arrangement for shelter at the inn. Any establishment for eating or drinking would have plenty of broken dishes.

She thought she would not sleep at all. But she awoke, startled, from fractured dreams. Ilissa had featured in them, in some disturbing cameo. Well, Ilissa had been right about Aruendiel, what a bastard he could be—you had to give her that. Nora dressed herself as warmly as she could. It was still dark, and Mrs. Toristel wasn't up yet. That made her exit easier. She would have liked to say good-bye, though. She wrote a note instead, on a leaf torn from the endpapers of
Pride and Prejudice
: “Thank you. You have been a kind friend to me, and I am sorry to leave.” The words sounded curt and insufficient as she read them over, yet she was afraid that if she wrote something longer and more eloquent, Mrs. Toristel might have trouble reading it.

She wrapped up a loaf of bread and a sausage for the day's provisions. Mrs. Toristel would not begrudge her a little food, even if the magician might. Then, swinging her cloak over her shoulders with a sudden flourish, as though waving defiance at the world, she stepped outside, crossed the still-shadowy courtyard, and shoved at the castle gate, stuck in the snow, until it let her through.

The sun had risen over a world of clean and seamless white. Two or three inches of fresh snow had fallen during the night, softly blurring the double line of tracks that Posin's feet and Aruendiel's horse had left the day before. Thank God, she thought, I have good boots.

Wrapping her cloak tight against the cold, Nora started down the hill to the village, stepping in Posin's trail. It was slower going than she had expected. Once she wandered off the road and stumbled in the deep snow. Perhaps she could stay with Morinen until a few days' use cleared the roads. The idea cheered her, until it occurred to her that the magician might take some revenge against Morinen and her family.

She looked up, after some minutes, and saw that she was not alone after all. Someone else was struggling up the road from the village. It was laundry day, when Losi came up to help Mrs. Toristel.