The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (62 page)

“Yes.” Vulpin held his big head very high. “Yes, since there is no one else to do so. My compatriots have chosen me to parley with you, as the sole representative of the Faitoren people. I have their permission to sue for peace.”

“Then you must lay down your arms in surrender,” Aruendiel said, “and swear that you will make no more war on myself, King Abele, his liege lords, and any of his people.”

“We will swear, those of us that are left.”

“How many of you are there?”

By way of answer, Vulpin called in that language that Nora had never learned. The other Faitoren trickled out of the huts. There were perhaps a hundred altogether. “This is all of us,” Vulpin said. “The rest you killed or captured.”

Nora would not have recognized any of the Faitoren. None wore the fair, enchanted faces that she was used to. Nor did any of them much resemble each other. Some were the height of a child; others were gangling giants. A few looked bigger than they were because of their horns or their sail-like ears. Some had fur, some had feathers, some had scales, and some had all three. As a group, the Faitoren seemed to have stepped from the pages of some mad bestiary—not exactly human, not exactly animal, and some of them looked more like extraordinarily animated trees than anything else.

Moscelle—she recognized Moscelle by her eight eyes. That memory had not been a nightmare, either.

“What about the glamours you people normally wear?” Aruendiel demanded. “Why are you showing your natural faces?”

“We've agreed to do this, all of us,” Vulpin said, showing more animation than he had previously. “The Faitoren are tired of wearing masks, of having to impersonate the dull uniformity of humans. Our own faces are nothing to be ashamed of.”

“A matter of opinion,” Aruendiel said.

“You would have stripped our glamours off in any event, the way you have been doing with everything else in our kingdom.”

“Yes, and I will continue to do so until I have located Ilissa.”

Vulpin held up his hands. “Then search as much as you like. She is no longer queen here. But please—I am appealing to your mercy as well as your honor, Lord Aruendiel—remember that we are a delicate race, and not accustomed to cold. If we might remake our dwellings—”

“How the Faitoren employ their magic will be a matter for discussion,” Aruendiel said. “Your dwellings will remain in their current, unadorned state, for now. However”—an immense bonfire blazed up in the center of the large circle—“your people will not freeze in the meantime. And some of you have enough fur or feathers to withstand a little cold. Before our two sides can talk of peace, I must satisfy myself that your queen and her prince are not here.”

“You have my word, and the word of all the Faitoren here,” Vulpin said. “I suppose, however, that is not enough for you.”

“No, it is not,” Aruendiel said.

He and the other magicians spent the rest of the day combing over the Faitoren lands, gradually removing layers of enchantment. A velvet lawn turned into a lake surrounded by snowcapped mountains, which in turn became a crimson-sailed galley, then a string quartet playing Pachelbel's Canon, until it finally reverted to a patch of ground with a couple of fence posts sticking out of the snow. “Very careless, no sense of structure,” Aruendiel observed.

A few times he asked Nora for directions through the Faitoren landscape, but she recognized only a few of the shifting locales. The one place she wanted to find was the iron-fenced graveyard. After the magicians had been at work for several hours, Nansis Abora found it under a tropical atoll. At least, he turned up a pile of iron railings. Ilissa must have found some non-Faitoren—Dorneng, perhaps—to tear down the fence.

But there was no sign of the graves or headstones, let alone the yellow police tape that Nora had seen there the last time.

“The gate's closed up,” Aruendiel said, watching Euren the Wolf sniff the ironwork. “Otherwise, they would have gone through into your world, Mistress Nora.”

“I didn't think it would still be open.” She told him now about her abduction, and how Dorneng had tried to use her blood to make a new, permanent gate between worlds.

She could see anger hardening Aruendiel's face as he listened. When she had finished, he set off a string of curses like bombs. “I thought they took you as a hostage, and even then I was afraid they might kill you. If I had known what they planned all along—” He swore again. “I was a fool ever to trust Dorneng.”

“Well, I was, too,” Nora said. She was not eager to admit how gullible she had been, but felt it was important to set the record straight.

He frowned at her, but there was a flaw, something pained and helpless, in his usual severity. “I did tell you not to leave the castle, did I not?”

“Yes, you did. I thought it was Hirizjahkinis, and that you were sending for me.”

“You should have known it was a trap. A good magician would have sensed,
smelled
the Faitoren magic—”

“It
was
stupid. So much of this is my fault. They would never have captured you—Hirizjahkinis would still be alive—if I hadn't been such an idiot.”

“Yes, perhaps—but enough! I am hardly one to lecture you about falling into a Faitoren trap.” Aruendiel shook his head. “I should have taken you with me, as you asked, Nora. Or I could have sent you elsewhere for safekeeping, found a way to hide you.”

“Turned me into a geranium,” she said faintly.

“Yes! Except that the weather is inhospitable for geraniums now.” His face tightened again. “You said Dorneng was killed by an ice demon? It was too easy an end for him. That he would try to cut your throat in cold blood—I would like to—”

“Aruendiel?”

“Yes, Euren?”

“There is a cave nearby that we have not searched yet.”

With an effort, Aruendiel collected himself. “By all means then, let us go there.” He limped away at Euren's side. Nora, watching them go, had the odd thought that Aruendiel was just the slightest bit afraid of Euren the Wolf. Euren was one of the magicians who had brought Aruendiel back to life, she remembered, and she wondered if Aruendiel bore
him
any grudge.

She turned to find Nansis Abora beside her. “I beg your pardon, child. I could not help overhearing what you said just now about Hirizjahkinis. You blamed yourself for her death.”

“Well, yes. I know, it's the Kavareen that killed her, but I can't help thinking that if Aruendiel hadn't been captured in the first place—”

“Oh, these things are difficult to predict,” he said vaguely. “This comes up very often in my time work. So many factors in the causation of even minor events—but excuse me, you were saying that Hirizjahkinis was killed. I must correct you a little. I was considering this last night during the more tedious parts of the war council, and you know, being swallowed up by a demon like the Kavareen is a terrible thing, but it is not the same as dying. Or perhaps I should say that death is not inevitable.”

Nora stared at him. “Do you mean that Hirizjahkinis might still be alive
inside
the Kavareen?”

“It is
possible
.”

“So if we could get her out—?”

“Yes, yes. Of course, there would be difficulties. Finding the Kavareen, for a start. And then not being devoured oneself—that is always important.”

This thread of hope cheered Nora to an almost unreasonable degree. Had she not sensed some kind of presence—voices, even—within the Kavareen? For the rest of the afternoon, as the party of magicians slowly moved through the Faitoren domain, she felt positively buoyant. When she caught sight of Perin with some of the other soldiers, she gave him a wave and a broader smile than she had shown him that morning; she wanted to tell him about Hirizjahkinis, but he was out of earshot, guarding Faitoren prisoners. He waved back at her.

At nightfall, Aruendiel called off the search. Ilissa and Raclin were nowhere to be found. He led half of the party to Lord Luklren's castle, a few miles away, leaving Euren the Wolf and a hundred soldiers to occupy the Faitoren lands; the other magicians would relieve Euren in turn, Nora gathered. Vulpin would be escorted to the castle the next day for peace talks.

Lord Luklren's castle was larger than Aruendiel's, but his estate seemed hardly more prosperous. The sheepfolds they passed were half-empty—more Faitoren depredations?—and when they arrived at the castle, Luklren's wife, Lady Nurkasa, came out to greet the guests with strained graciousness, obviously calculating fiercely how to feed the multitude.

Nora, wishing to be helpful, offered her services in the kitchen to Nurkasa, who seemed surprised at first but was glad enough to have another pair of hands besides her aged cook and two peasant girls. There was a flurry of frantic preparation—hams hauled out of the storehouse, stale turnips and cabbages being salvaged, soup boiling on the stove, a barrel of beer delivered from the tavern—and finally, very late, dinner was served in Luklren's great hall.

It was a raucous affair. From the far end of the long table, where Luklren and the cavalry officers sat, there were periodic eruptions of song—war chants and, later, obscene ditties about the Faitoren women. The magicians' end of the table, where Nora sat, was only slightly quieter. Aruendiel and Nansis Abora got into a long discussion of invisibility theory, heated enough so that Nansis said, “That's a bit much, Aruendiel,” not once but several times. After several tankards of beer, one of the younger magicians, Uklin Bone, could not be dissuaded from transforming himself into a horse and urinating copiously on the floor. He was too drunk to turn himself back, and Fargenis Gouv had to find him a stall for the night. Euren the Wolf queried Nora at length about her trek with the ice demon to Maarikok. He was not so difficult to talk to, once you got used to his insistent yellow stare. The wolves, he remarked, also had chants that kept ice demons at bay.

The only incident that marred an otherwise exhilarating evening came after Nora got up to refill a soup tureen. The kitchen in Luklren's castle was located across a dark courtyard—where, to judge from the reek, some revelers had already followed Uklin Bone's example. Nora was returning through the courtyard with the full tureen when someone grabbed her arm. One of the cavalrymen, just finished with emptying his bladder. He mumbled something.

“Let me go this instant,” she said.

“Don't be so stiff, girl,” he slurred. “Everyone knows you're the wizard's whore.”

Not again, she thought angrily. “I am
no
man's whore.” The hot soup arced out of the bowl, rearing up like a snake, and splashed right in the man's stupid face. He yelped and dropped her arm, railing at her.

Another figure loomed in the darkness. Nora heard a blow, a groan, and the impact of a large, drunken man hitting the ground. “Lady Nora, are you all right?” It was Perin's voice.

“I'm fine, thanks.” Nora tried to sound composed. “I'm just going back to the party. We're out of soup now, unfortunately.”

“Ah, you threw it at him.” He laughed suddenly. “Quick thinking. He deserved a soaking.”

She hadn't thrown the soup—not the way Perin meant. But she had helped make that soup, and when she asked it, it did her bidding in a jiffy. Aruendiel would be pleased with how she used magic to get out of that particular jam.

The wizard's whore. Except, she thought, I can never tell him.

T
he peace talks lasted several days. Vulpin was willing to agree to almost any restrictions on magic practiced outside the Faitoren lands, but he held a firmer line on magic practiced at home. “We are magical beings,” he said, clasping his stubby hands on the table. “We are willing to forswear magic for certain ends, but I cannot promise that we Faitoren will
not
do magic. Such restrictions would kill us.”

Aruendiel was unimpressed by the last argument, but with some reluctance he assented to the eventual compromise: The Faitoren were prohibited from casting glamours on any living thing—including themselves—in their own domain or out of it. “So there will be no more hiding people in books or camouflaging sheep as ladybugs or disguising kidnapped young women, is that clear?” he growled at Vulpin. Yes, very clear, Vulpin said mildly.

As for reparations for the livestock that the Faitoren had stolen over the years—Luklren's main concern—there was less haggling. Vulpin agreed to a number only slightly lower than the one that Luklren first named.

The reason, Nansis Abora explained to Nora, was that both sides knew that there was small chance that the Faitoren would ever be able to pay the reparations. Almost any figure named would be essentially fictional. “Their land is very poor,” he said, shaking his head. “And none of them is a real farmer, from what I can tell.”

“But that's just asking for trouble down the road, setting up unrealistic expectations the Faitoren can't meet,” Nora said. She was thinking of the Treaty of Versailles.

“I'm afraid you're right, my dear. As the dog said when he bit the serpent's tail, this will lead to nothing good. Well, neither side really has a choice. The Faitoren are in no position to argue—but really, what leverage do we have? We can't do much more to them, short of putting them all to the sword, and then the reparations will never be paid. At least Lord Luklren has had his claims acknowledged. But bad bargains like these,” he added, “are why I got out of politics.”

Nansis Abora was Nora's main source of information on the negotiations—filling her in when he came down to the kitchen in the afternoons for a goblet of hot sheep's milk and whiskey. If Aruendiel was not in the talks with Vulpin, he was closeted with Luklren or the other magicians, or taking one of the watches over the Faitoren. Nora spent almost all of her time with Lady Nurkasa, struggling with an embroidery needle. Perin came in a few times to visit, for which Nora was grateful, although under Nurkasa's eye, he talked only about the weather and his hostess's cousins near Semr, whom he knew slightly.

Sometimes Nora thought that she had enjoyed herself more on the frozen desert of the Ivory Marshes.

After Vulpin went back to the Faitoren to get their approval for the treaty, the magicians continued to meet by themselves—arguing about the new protection spells to install around the Faitoren domain. “Dull stuff,” Nansis Abora said, although Nora wished that she could sit in. It would be a good part of a magical education to witness this kind of debate, and she was slightly hurt that Aruendiel had not included her.

Euren the Wolf had already left. “He wants to get back to his pack,” said Nansis Abora. “He doesn't mind the fighting, it's the talking afterward that he can't stand.”

Nora finally asked the question that she had been wondering about since meeting Euren. “Is he a werewolf?”

“Oh, no!” Nansis Abora seemed both horrified and amused by the question. “Not at all. No, Euren is a man—a man who prefers to live as a wolf.”

“What is the difference?”

“There's a world of difference, my dear. For one thing, Euren won't bite you. Well, he did bite Aruendiel once,” Nansis added vaguely, “but then he was provoked.”

At the end of the third day Nora finally heard from one of Luklren's servants that the Lord Aruendiel would be pleased to have a word with her. With relief she put down her embroidery needle and followed the servant. Aruendiel was in the room that Luklren called a library, although there were more weapons in it than books.

As she approached, the door opened and Vulpin emerged. He bowed. “Princess Nora.”

“No one calls me that anymore.”

“I wasn't sure who you were at first,” Vulpin said. “You know, I never saw your real face before. I was happy to see that you recovered from your injuries.”

“Really?” Nora said. “I don't recall you showing much concern before, when I was bleeding to death.”

Vulpin's tusked face was masklike, but she heard him sigh. “It was difficult, you know. Ilissa treated us badly, too.”

“She didn't kidnap you or marry you to her monster son, did she?” Nora demanded. Then she sighed, too. “Well, I don't want to stir all this up again. You were more decent to me than the others, and all of us are here to make peace, aren't we?”

“Yes.” He paused. “There is one thing I was wondering about—whether you have any intention of asserting your claim to the Faitoren throne.”

“What? My claim? You mean, because I was married to Raclin?” Nora laughed. “Gods, no! I have no interest in your throne. Your people are more than welcome to govern yourselves. But there's something I want to ask you, too. I still have Raclin's horrible ring on my finger, and no one can remove it. The one time someone succeeded, I almost turned into a marble statue. How do I get it off—without dying?” She showed it to him.

Vulpin shook his head regretfully. “That is Raclin's magic—the unitary ring. It is a sort of glamour, but not one of our usual Faitoren glamours. There appear to be only two rings.” Seeing Nora's blank look, he went on: “Your ring and Raclin's ring are the same ring, and only he has the right to take it off your finger. The best thing to do, I think, would be to ask Raclin.”

“He'd never do that.”

Vulpin shrugged. “Who knows what Raclin might do. It is funny”—Vulpin nodded again in Aruendiel's direction—“
he
asked me the same question, about your ring. Well, good-bye and good fortune to you, Your Highness.”

“You can stop calling me that.”

With a flash of his old debonair manner, Vulpin said, “But you will always be a princess to me, no matter how long the Faitoren rule themselves.” He raised his small hand and went down the corridor.

Nora laughed a little sourly and pushed open the door of the library. Aruendiel was sitting at a table near the fire, reading a scroll. Glancing up, he gestured for her to take a seat opposite him, then returned to the scroll.

After half a minute he asked: “And how are matters with you, Mistress Nora? The head you bruised, is it healing properly?”

“It's fine.”

“And your health otherwise, and your spirits? You are keeping yourself sufficiently occupied while these damnable negotiations drag on?”

She thought he looked at her more seachingly than usual. “I'll be happy when we leave, but I'm fine.”

Aruendiel grunted and took up a piece of paper from the table. “I have received a letter from Lolona, the Toristels' daughter. I had written to Mrs. Toristel to notify her that you had been found. It was Lolona who replied.”

“Lolona? Is she at the castle?” Something in Aruendiel's tone gave Nora a feeling of disquiet. “Why didn't Mrs. Toristel answer your letter?”

“Mrs. Toristel is dead.”

Nora stared at him, aghast.

“Yes, it seems that she suffered a constriction of the chest.” He seemed to be trying to speak crisply, but his voice dragged. “She had had one before, a few years ago, but recovered. This one was more serious.”

Nora closed her eyes and saw again Mrs. Toristel struggling in the snow, where Dorneng had flung her. A constriction of the chest? A heart attack, most likely. “What caused it? Was it because Dorneng—”

“It happened shortly after your abduction, as best I can tell from Lolona's account. She is not much better a letter writer than her mother was. Well, they did not have a patient teacher.”

“Mrs. Toristel tried to warn me. She knew something wasn't right about Hirizjahkinis—I mean, Ilissa pretending to be Hirizjahkinis.”

“I am not surprised. She was ever an astute judge of character.”

I had only a handful of friends in this entire world, Nora thought, and that's the second I've lost. She took a deep breath. “This would not have happened if I had not—”

“If you are planning to take responsibility for Mrs. Toristel's death, I must preempt you. She was an old woman who was not in good health, who worked too hard for an exacting master, and that same master, who might have saved her, was absent, taken captive through his own foolishness. It is maddening, Mistress Nora, that I have spent several lifetimes practicing magic and yet that is no guarantee that I use it wisely or that it brings any good to me or those around me.”

“You do a great deal of good,” Nora said, more heatedly than she meant to. “And you do use magic wisely, more wisely—” She was going to say more wisely than he'd behaved in other areas of his life, but that sounded like faint praise. “Mrs. Toristel,” she added, “admired you very much.”

“Perhaps she was not as good a judge of character as I thought.” Aruendiel sat in silence for a moment, his gaze unfocused, then glanced back at Nora. He cleared his throat. “I confess, I still do not quite grasp how you were able to free me. Algebra, you said.”

“It took me a while to work it out,” Nora said. In more detail, she told Aruendiel how she found him, figured out what sort of trap he was in, and then floundered by sheer luck into a way to enlarge his prison, even if she could not destroy it. Aruendiel nodded slowly as he listened.

She was not sure what to say about the wasted, white-haired figure in the dungeon, although she had an inkling that it was already less real and less fearsome for her than it was for Aruendiel. “I knew that once you could reach out and start doing magic again, you would be fine,” Nora said.

Aruendiel said only: “I am grateful. It was a horrific imprisonment.”

Then he remarked, more easily: “Ershnol the Silent was caught in a similar trap once. He escaped when a rat knocked over a candle and burned the building down. In my case, of course,” he added, “it would have been more difficult to burn down that dungeon.”

It felt familiar and consoling to be talking magic with Aruendiel again, after all that had happened since her last lesson back in his tower, the day they'd done the observation spell. She wished they were there now, safe among his books. How soon before we can finally leave this place and go home? she thought. There is no Mrs. Toristel to welcome us, now. That will be hard, very hard. But I'll have Aruendiel. And he will need a friend, he'll need me more than ever, with Mrs. Toristel dead and Hirizjahkinis dead or a prisoner or whatever has happened to her. And—Nora resolved suddenly—I will
make
him finish
Pride and Prejudice
with me, and he will see what happens with Darcy and Elizabeth.

“Now we must talk of different matters,” Aruendiel said. “We must discuss your future.”

“What is there to discuss?” she asked, surprised.

Aruendiel frowned. He looked at Nora without catching her gaze directly. “There are two things. The first concerns the young man who escorted you through the Ivory Marshes.”

“Perin Pirekenies.”

“Yes. I gather that you first made his acquaintance in Semr last summer. He has been to see me.”

“What for?” Her first, uneasy thought was that this had something to do with the challenge that Perin's father had issued to Aruendiel. They were going to fight a duel.

“He would like to marry you. He has asked for my permission, since I have been your—guardian, in a sense. I have, of course,” Aruendiel paused, “given my consent.”

Nora wondered whether she had heard correctly. Aruendiel's face was composed and serious, as though what he had said made perfect sense. Finally, she managed to get a single word out: “Why?”

“I have given it careful consideration, and I believe this is a very desirable offer of marriage. I have made a few inquiries about Perin Pirekenies, and from all accounts he is an honorable man and a good soldier, and he stands to inherit an estate that, while not exceptionally large, will be adequate to support you and your children.

“His bloodlines are not unblemished, of course.” A bitter rasp entered Aruendiel's controlled tone for an instant. “You may not be aware that he is the grandson of my wife and her lover.”

“I figured that out.”

“Ah. Well, his father was legitimately adopted by another relative, and the rest of the family line is entirely respectable. Despite the scandal involving his grandparents, he is connected to some of the greatest families in the kingdom. Given my own involvement in the matter, I could rightfully refuse permission for this match, but I am not inclined to do so. On the contrary, I must recommend that you accept his offer.”

“I barely know Perin,” Nora said. “I've spent a few days with him. And why would he want to marry me? I'm not a noblewoman or an heiress.”

“He admits that it would be an unconventional match, but that does not seem to trouble him. He has taken a liking to you and is concerned for your welfare. He argues convincingly that the marriage will rescue you from the unfortunate situation in which I have unfairly placed you.”

The conversation was becoming more and more surreal. “Unfortunate situation? What do you mean?”

“Perin Pirekenies,” Aruendiel said impassively, “has pointed out how your name has been tarnished because of your association with me. It is commonly assumed, he tells me, that you are my mistress.

“You are young and unmarried—at least, you are absented from your husband—and I am a widower with an old reputation for being a libertine. It is no surprise that the world would jump to mistaken conclusions. I have heard such fools' talk from time to time, but never considered it worthy of notice. I did not think about the injury that such gossip would inflict upon you.”