The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (47 page)

Startled, Nora gave a small snort of laughter. “Well, I'm almost thirty! I probably
am
thirty by now. Why are you surprised?”

“You said that, in your own world, you were still a student. How long does your course of study last?”

The duration of graduate school, always a sore subject. “Oh, two or three more years, at least.” Or four or five. Nora sighed. “How old are you, Aruendiel?”

He seemed entertained rather than offended at the bluntness of her question. “Old enough so that thirty seems—well, I can barely recognize the arrogant fool I was at thirty.”

“Some forty-year-olds would say the same thing.”

“Old enough that even I have trouble figuring my age.”

“Hmm,” Nora said, unimpressed. She did not have high confidence in Aruendiel's mathematical skills. “That's an obvious evasion.”

“Old enough,” he said finally, “that the granddaughter of my granddaughter is an old woman.”

“Really!” Nora sat up straight. “Who is she? I didn't know that you had children or grandchildren—or great-great-grandchildren. I never heard Mrs. Toristel mention any.”

“Mrs. Toristel does not know every branch of my family tree,” Aruendiel said sharply.

“That must be at least—” She began to calculate. Say twenty-five or thirty years for a generation. “One hundred fifty years? One sixty?” She watched Aruendiel's face closely, but he gave nothing away. “Two hundred!”

“I am not
that
old,” he corrected her. “The last time I bothered to count, some birthdays ago, it was close to one hundred and eighty.”

“Goodness.” After a moment, she added: “That's not as old as I thought you might be.”

“Oh?” He arched his black brows.

“You made it a bit of a mystery—I thought you might be five hundred, or a thousand.”

“Gods forbid!” he said, an unexpected raw edge in his voice.

“As long as you don't actually look or feel that old—” Aruendiel's chilly look interrupted her thought. “Hirizjahkinis said that working magic keeps you young,” she added, a little lamely.

“To most appearances.” His tone did not encourage a response. They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then he stood up, grimacing as he straightened his back. “My spine feels even older than the rest of me,” he said, with a shade of bitterness. “It is turning to iron as I sit here by the fire like an old woman. Come, it is still light enough for a walk to the forest.”

“It's snowing,” Nora said, twisting to look at the hall's windows.

“Are you so frail, a sprig of thirty?”

The air outside, alive with lightly falling snow, was bright enough for them to see all the way to the river, although it was almost nightfall. They walked a little way into the woods, past the frozen river.

The elusive background murmur of the forest was not so elusive today. It washed into her ears and then out again, but not before she could sense a shape to it, a current of meaning, even if she could not understand what it meant. She could tell that Aruendiel had joined in the long, meandering song, a small, distinctly human voice among the wild, slow voices of the trees. Wood was his favorite among the elements that he commonly used in working magic. He lost patience with stone; air and fire were fast and showy but lacked staying power—whereas, he said lovingly, you could do almost anything with wood.

And all these trees, with their fat trunks and interlocking branches, were younger than he was. Sheep had grazed here, he'd said, within his lifetime. One hundred eighty years, when some people lived only sixteen.

•   •   •

“Have you any more passages of your book to be corrected?” Aruendiel asked, coming into the great hall toward the end of the fourth day. He must be very bored, she thought. Reading her last translation, before the holidays, Aruendiel had complained sharply about Mr. Collins. He was not a reader who suspended judgment easily, or who took pleasure in meeting characters in the pages of a book whom he would not want to meet in real life.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Nora said, after a moment's consideration. She had done some surreptitious translation that morning while keeping an eye on the fires.

“Bring it out,” he directed. “I might as well correct it now as later.”

“It's not unlucky to go over homework during the Null Days?” she asked slyly.

“Let us consider it more in the nature of storytelling. That is something that people always do at this season, when there is nothing else to pass the time.”

“The Toristels were telling stories last night,” she remarked, rising to fetch her book and wax tablets.

“Mrs. Toristel talked about the black elves, I suppose?”

“Yes, she did.” The black elves, Nora had learned, sometimes lured their victims with haunting music played on flutes made from human bones. Or they called out in the voices of the recently dead. Even when they knew better, many people couldn't help calling back when they heard those lost, familiar tones—only to be chased down by the black elves with their small, powerful hands and their needle teeth. “Do black elves really exist?” Nora asked Aruendiel.

“I have never seen one,” he said with a snort, reaching for the wax tablets.

As usual, it took him some time to read through her translation, as he kept stopping to point out the deficiencies in her handwriting, spelling, and grammar. She was curious what he would make of the ball at Netherfield, but his only response was some skepticism that polite society would allow men and women to dance together in public. “I myself would not care one way or the other, who dances with whom,” he said, “but it does not seem very realistic.”

Something about Lydia had caught his fancy—he seemed to enjoy her brash waywardness—and Mr. Bennet had appealed to him from the beginning. But Aruendiel seemed to dislike Mr. Darcy as much as Elizabeth Bennet did at first. Mr. Darcy's famous pride, Aruendiel noted once, was excessive for a man who seemed to have little to occupy his time and was not even a real peer. Nora was taken aback by his reaction until remembering something Freud had said about how the people who annoy us most are those who remind us of ourselves.

“Even if you prefer not to use the feminine verb forms yourself, you should make sure that Mistress Bennet uses them correctly,” Aruendiel said as he put down the tablets.

“Must I?” Nora frowned. “It takes something away, to have those little ladylike hems and haws when she's sparring with Darcy. She's supposed to be impertinent, not demure. That's the problem with translations,” she added sadly. “You can never quite reproduce the flavor of the original.”

“Then let Mistress Bennet speak as you think she should,” Aruendiel said unexpectedly. “No one would take her for a well-bred Semran young lady, anyway.”

He seemed lost in thought for some moments, tapping his fingers slowly on the arm of his chair. Nora had the strong sense that he had been talking about her as much as Elizabeth Bennet. Was it a veiled criticism? His tone had been mild enough.

“How are you recovering?” he asked suddenly. He gestured toward her hand.

It was the first time Aruendiel had alluded to the ring episode since before the Null Days began. “Very well, thank you,” Nora said.

But he seemed disinclined to let the matter drop. “An unwilling transformation is difficult. Galling for the spirit. And what you endured was particularly vicious.”

“So, transformations aren't always that painful?” When Aruendiel shook his head, Nora asked: “What about Massy, the woman you turned into an apple tree?” She had been thinking about Massy lately, trying to remember the exact expression on her face as flesh became wood.

“No, she felt nothing except surprise. And as I recall,” he added with a lift of his eyebrows, “you said that I had been too gentle with her.”

“I've since changed my mind,” Nora said. She grinned at Aruendiel, and fleetingly he smiled back. She seized the moment. “Aruendiel, will you tell me how you learned magic? It
is
the season for storytelling.” He was about to demur, she could tell, so she went on: “I want to know everything there is to know about magic. Everything. So that I can use it well, so that I can protect myself and other people against the Faitoren or whatever they need protecting against. So that I don't misuse it.”

“Ah, and you think there are some lessons in my biography about the misuse of magic?”

“I wouldn't know,” Nora said. “You tell me.”

He snapped an eyebrow at her, then fell into another reverie, shadows from the firelight picking out the broken places in his face. She waited.

“It is a long story,” Aruendiel said warningly. Nora began to say that she didn't mind, she liked long stories. Then she saw that she did not need to say anything. He grinned crookedly at her. “But first it is time for dinner.”

A
ruendiel was silent at first, as they spooned up their barley soup and sipped the wine he himself had brought up from the cellar. (Some of the empty bottles in the far corner were not actually empty, if you knew how to examine them in the right way.) He was thinking back more than a century and half, sorting through his private stores of lost time and deciding what to bring into the light. The far past, that was the safest place to begin.

“In your world,” he suddenly said to Nora, “how did you decide on your course of studies—the stories and poems?”

“Because I was good at that sort of thing—some of it,” she said. “Because I was tired of being a cook. Because the life of a”—she searched for an Ors translation of
professor
—“a teacher was appealing to me.”

“What do you mean—you were good at some of it?” Aruendiel asked.

“Oh, I didn't have any big ideas,” Nora said ruefully, thinking of that last conversation with Naomi. “I was good at reading and understanding individual poems, for instance, but I had trouble working them into some bigger framework.” She noticed that she was talking about grad school in the past tense.

Aruendiel did not seem displeased by her answer. “That may help explain your capacity for magic. One cannot practice real magic without an understanding of the individual things—
this
stone,
this
stand of trees—from which the magic comes.”

Ha, Naomi, did you hear that, Nora thought, but she did not allow this intriguing theory of Aruendiel's to divert her from the main purpose of the conversation. “Did you always know that you had a capacity for real magic?” she asked. “Is that why you became a magician?”

“I trained as a wizard first,” Aruendiel said, parrying. “That was my parents' decision—at least in the beginning.” He glanced at Nora and then went on before she could speak again: “Perhaps it would be best to begin with an account of my upbringing, my education.

“This castle, of course, is where I grew up. It had been the seat of my mother's people for some six or seven centuries before I was born. My great-grandfather rebuilt the fortifications and the house in their present form, including this hall. He fought well in the Five Battles War, and was awarded lands as far south as the Old Ram River. You can see him hanging on the wall over there”—Aruendiel nodded toward the far end of the hall—“in the fur robe, wearing the gold that the king gave him.

“By the time my mother was of marriageable age, though, the line had dwindled. Her father had been killed in the Salt War, and she was the only heir. The estate was not as rich as it had been. Our wool did not fetch the price it once had, because of cheap wool from the new grazing lands in the far north. The lands my great-grandfather had won were in dispute—the lords of Lusul had laid claim to them, and my mother had no one to protect her rights.

“I am telling you this history, not just because it was drummed into my head when I was a boy,” Aruendiel added, “but because it does have some bearing on how I became a wizard.

“My mother was a perfectly handsome-looking woman, in my view, but she was not considered a great beauty. So she could not hope for a great match.”

“What did she look like?” Nora asked.

“She was like most people in her line, dark-haired, dark-eyed, more sturdiness than stature. There are half a dozen women in the village now who could be taken for her at a little distance.”

“But you're tall,” Nora pointed out.

“In that, I resemble my father. He was a very tall man, lean, with light hair and eyes, not like the people of the Uland. He was from Sar Lith, the youngest of five sons of a middling peer with mediocre holdings.”

“Where is Sar Lith?”

“South and west of here, two or three weeks' ride. There was a distant connection—one of my mother's great-aunts had married into his family. At any rate, although this small, poor estate in the northern hills could not have been very attractive to my father, by marrying my mother, he could at least secure a very old and honorable title of his own. So he came here and took the name Lord Aruen.

“My father had grown up in a family that was vassal to several different powerful and disputatious lords, and he had learned something about diplomacy and forging alliances, which my mother's family never much bothered with. He set about building better ties to other peers and to the court in Semr, in order to enforce our land rights. My father was a clever man,” Aruendiel said thoughtfully. “He had a knack for a sort of patient, intelligent prudence that I have never quite mastered.

“Because of these alliances, he was often away on campaign when I was a small child. My mother ran the estate and oversaw the upbringing of me and my siblings.”

“You were the youngest,” Nora prompted, when he paused for a moment.

“Well, the youngest who survived. There was actually an earlier Aruendiel, who died so soon after his naming day that my parents decided it made no sense to let the name go to waste and gave it to me when I was born. My sister used to tease me by telling me how much superior the first Aruendiel had been to me, although I am sure she was too young to remember him at all.

“There were four of us who lived to grow up: Atl Aruendies, then Aruendic, then my sister, then me. Dies was eight years my senior. We all looked up to him, not only because he was the eldest—he was strong, fair-minded, an excellent warrior. My second brother, Aruendic, was very different. He had a short temper that was even worse than mine is. I cannot tell you how many times I felt his fists before I grew big enough to defend myself. I learned to be a very fast runner, as a child.”

Nora made a sympathetic noise, but Aruendiel shook his head. “I cannot say that I would have treated him differently, if our positions had been reversed,” he added. “We never got on well, Aruendic and I. Although it is not true,” he added, “that I was responsible for his death.”

“What?”

Aruendiel was a shade startled by his own words, and regretful. If he was not careful, he thought, he would find himself telling this odd, clever girl with the luminous brown gaze the entire history of his life. “That is a different story. Where was I? My brothers. In fact, though, I spent more time with my sister when we were small. She was only a year older than I.

“We had an irregular series of tutors. One, I remember, was a sailor who could barely read, but he could teach sums and geography—he drew chalk maps from memory on the floor. Another was a wizard—although he taught us no magic,” Aruendiel added, seeing the question in Nora's face. “We learned some astronomy and the
Nagaron Voy
and the
Ride of Brougnisr
from him. He would doze off during our recitations, but he had some sort of spell or spirit—probably a very clever copy imp—that would tell him how many lines we missed. It was a switch for every line—two switches if you missed the same line twice. Usually we had lessons in the deep winter. The rest of the year we spent on the usual childish things.”

“Such as?”

He thought for a moment. “It seems to me now that I spent entire weeks on the back of a horse when I was young. At planting and harvest, we helped in the fields. When I was ten, my father came home for good—he had lost an arm at Glous—and after that, he coached Aruendic and me in swordplay. At any rate, by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I had probably spent a total of two years at my schoolbooks.”

Nora could not resist observing that his early education was spotty by the standards of her world.

“If my father's estate had been larger, he might have hired a full-time tutor,” Aruendiel said, frowning. “Still, when I went away to school, I was not far behind the other boys. And they knew nothing of the higher branches of mathematics, such as the multiplication tables, which I had learned from Izl Whitehead, the sailor,” he added with some pride.

Nora gave a wicked grin. “I learned the multiplication tables by the age of seven.”

“Through twelve times twelve?” he asked.

“Yes. My brother taught me—he liked to do stuff like that. All children in my country learn multiplication. Of course, they learn nothing of magic,” Nora added quickly, as Aruendiel's face darkened.

“Are you sure that you wish to hear this tale?”

“Yes! Please continue. I won't interrupt again.”

Aruendiel raised a skeptical eyebrow, but he continued: “Where was I? Well, my brother Dies had gone into training to become a knight. My parents sent him to the court of Lord Boena. It was not inexpensive to send him there, but Boena was one of the great lords of the kingdom, and it was a great opportunity for Dies, whom my parents considered, quite rightly, to be the most promising of their sons.

“My brother Aruendic hoped to join Dies at Lord Boena's court, but my parents could not afford to maintain two sons there. Instead, Aruendic went to Lord Inos, who had a midsized estate on the White Boar River. Inos was a good fighter, a friend of my father's, but his court was a stagnant backwater compared to Boena's. My brother was quite bitter about it.

“I found Aruendic's disappointment very funny. Without thinking much about it, I was confident that, when it came time for the next stage of my education, my parents would send me to someone more like Lord Boena.

“But my father's means were straitened, and my sister was approaching marriageable age, which meant that he had to gather the funds for a dowry. You remember her portrait?”

“The one that I broke?”

“It was painted around that time. My parents had it made so that they could send it to prospective bridegrooms. And indeed, the eldest son of Lord Forsne was very taken with that same portrait. She was married on her fourteenth birthday.”

“Fourteen!” Nora could not stop herself. “And how old was he?”

“Twenty-seven or twenty-eight, something like that.”

She shook her head, disgusted. “Fourteen is too young to be married, especially to a twenty-seven-year-old.”

“I agree,” Aruendiel said, surprisingly. “But the youngest brides are often the most desirable. Perhaps if my parents had waited, she would not have made such a brilliant match.”

“Were they happy together?”

“Not particularly.” His mouth hardened for a moment. “But I am digressing again. My sister had just been married when I learned that I would not be going away to Lord Boena or even Lord Inos. My father had determined that he could not afford to send me anywhere at all.

“He felt I should stay home and manage the estate. I was smaller than my brothers had been at that age—they used to call me the piece of string, because I was so thin. It would be a waste, my father said, to train me as a knight.

“My mother did not disagree outright. But she said, ‘Aruendiel has a good mind. He has always been quicker than his brothers. He would benefit, I think, from further study.' She was thinking of wizardry school. There were quite a few, in those days. A wizard in need of funds would board pupils in his house and undertake to beat some spells into their heads in exchange for a dozen beetles or so. ‘It is always useful to have a wizard in the family,' my mother said. One of her great-uncles had been a wizard, although rather an indifferent one.

“My father was not convinced, at first. Wizardry was not altogether respectable. Anyone could be a wizard, if he was clever enough. I myself thought it was a terrible idea. My own thought was that I could go to sea as a cabin boy on a warship.

“My mother prevailed, however. The only thing that made it palatable in the smallest way was knowing that I was to be prepared to do something my brothers could not do. So I went away to wizardry school at Norus-on-the-Lok, three days' ride from here. It was run by a wizard named Odl Naxt out of his house—not a large house, either. Only one of the boys came from any kind of noble family—the youngest son of Lord Evarnou. The other pupils were the sons of merchants or manor-farm tenants, and one was just a peasant boy whose father brought over some vegetables every week for his tuition. I was pained to think that I would be trained for the same calling as these clods.

“The first weeks of school we did nothing but memorize and recite. Odl Naxt used to mumble, and coming from his mouth, even the geography of hell sounded as dull as the cow pasture outside. I had just about decided that I had had enough of this experiment when our teacher finally felt that that we might work one small spell.

“It was an elementary levitation spell—”

“Which one?” Nora asked.

Aruendiel gave a quick half nod, as though the question pleased him. “One of Morkin's. The invocation was to a spirit called Blood-Streaked Appalling Vermiform Putrescence. An apt description, according to my friend Abuka Lier, who once saw it materialize.

“At any rate, I tried the spell four times and failed, and then, the fifth time, a stone that I would have had trouble shifting with my own hands rose into the air and rested there as solidly as though it were still lying on the ground. I felt a sort of joy at this new power, and I thought then that perhaps the study of magic might be worth my time and attention after all.”

“
Five
tries?” Nora asked, all innocence.

“In the practice of wizardry—which you are spared,” Aruendiel said, with a lift of his eyebrows, “it is not just the words that matter, it is how you say them. The tone, the pronunciation, the rhythm. There is a whole series of spells that must be sung to be effective—I had a terrible time with them at school, until my boy's voice had finished turning into a man's.”

“Was this one of those spells?”

“It was not. Have you heard enough of this story, then?”

“No! Go on. You decided to stay at the school—” she prompted.

“Yes, I stayed. As it turned out, Naxt was not as great a hack as some of the wizards who go into teaching. He had worked for Baron Brodre, so he knew something of how magic is practiced at a great lord's court. We learned our share of the kind of simple, utilitarian spells that even a village wizard would know—how to keep milk from souring and the like—but also we also learned more complex magic as well. Some military spells, illusions, basic transformations, spells of influence and dissimulation. Naxt had a library of a dozen books or so, which was not bad for a school like that, and he corresponded with one or two wizards around the kingdom, so he had some knowledge of the latest developments in the practice of magic.