“What did you say, Nora?” Her mother’s eyes were wide, her mouth was an almost perfect O. She should have looked faintly ridiculous, but she didn’t. She had used the exact same words and the exact same tone the first time she heard Nora use the word fuck.
Nora looked back at her, horrified. Her mother, she suddenly realized, was one of the few people who might actually believe something close to the truth of where she had spent the past year. In her mother’s church—the one she’d joined after EJ died—there were no metaphors, only what its members considered to be unvarnished facts. Her mother might easily grasp that Nora had been ensnared and misled by ungodly powers. Anyone who wielded those powers, including Nora herself, could be considered an official emissary of hell.
“Did you say ‘magic’?” her mother asked.
“Yes,” Nora said in as neutral a tone as she could summon. “Something I just—well, those people I stayed with, they believed in some strange stuff. Um, superstitions.”
“They weren’t Christians.”
Definitely not. “They were good people, but no.”
“While you were away, I saw you in a dream.” Her mother’s voice sounded rich with emotion. “You were staring at a candle. Transfixed. I could tell you were trying to commune with the fire—you were worshipping it. It wasn’t normal.”
Nora looked worriedly at her mother. “That was a dream,” she said quickly. “I don’t worship fire.” Just practicing some basic fire magic, that was all she’d been doing. “I don’t worship anything.”
“Oh, I’m afraid for you, sweetie. What have you been doing?”
Nora took a deep breath. “Don’t worry, Mom. I haven’t been worshipping Satan.” A mistake to mention the Evil One by name; her mother’s expression was pained. “Or false idols or anything. You know, I’m just not a believer, period.”
Her mother looked even more distressed. “Don’t close your heart to God. It’s the worst thing you can do.”
“I haven’t closed it, I’m just agnostic.”
This was another discussion they’d had before. Actually, Nora was relieved to be treading familiar ground. Defending her own godlessness was safer than trying to explain what she had meant by Faitoren magic. (She was still unnerved at how easily the word magic had slipped out. As though she wanted her mother to know everything, absolutely everything.)
The funny thing, Nora thought as she argued with her mother, is that I have secretly joined the White Queen’s party, I am used to believing six impossible things before breakfast. I have met demons, if not the Devil. I have seen the dead come back to life. There is much, much more in heaven and earth than Horatio and his philosophy ever dreamed of.
And yet, she thought, I still can’t call myself religious. Why not? For a moment she envied her mother’s certainty, her trust in a mostly benevolent if judgmental power.
Aruendiel had a different kind of certainty about the divine. The gods existed. He didn’t like or trust most of them, but he acknowledged their existence the same way he accepted the reality of, say, furniture or horses or magic itself. She recalled how matter-of-factly he had mentioned a job he’d done for a merchant not so long ago, something about removing a sea-god’s curse from a shipping fleet.
Nora thought it would be impolitic to mention this to her mother, who was now talking—delicately, as though it pained her to mention it—about some of the horrors awaiting those who rejected God’s infinite, demanding love.
“I meant to ask, how are Kimmy and Nate?” she asked abruptly. Scott’s grandchildren had been visiting the week before.
Her mother hesitated, visibly reluctant to change the subject, but she reached for her phone. “Well, I have to show you the cutest picture.” A small figure in red rain boots, a grinning fuzzy dog. “That was the day we all went to the park,” her mother said, disappointment and regret erased from her voice. Nora bent over the screen, feeling relieved, a tiny bit jealous.
Adam called one night while Nora was still at her mother’s.
He was back in Chicago. He was not getting along with his department head. He was having trouble getting a paper on Virginia Woolf published. He had a slight cold. He said he wanted to see how Nora was doing.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said, thinking that she would never have heard from him if he hadn’t been having a bad day. She was not sure what to say to him, so she began to talk about her new car.
It was not, strictly speaking, a new car, but her mother’s four-year-old Volvo. Her mom had been ready to trade it in for a new one, but she and Nora’s stepfather had decided that Nora should have the car instead. Last year, after packing up her things in North Carolina, they had tried to drive her old car back to Richmond and ended up selling it for scrap. “I couldn’t start it, Scott couldn’t start it,” her mother said. “It would have cost more than the car was worth to fix the electrical.”
“There was a trick to it,” Nora said, wondering whether she had unknowingly developed a capacity for magic after years of coaxing her ancient Saturn to life. Magic required a certain empathy with the elements, Aruendiel said.
Adam listened to Nora’s account of the new car with more enthusiasm than she would have expected. She had started to tell him about the courses she was going to teach in summer school, when he suddenly uttered an indeterminate syllable, then swore.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Another mouse. It just ran out of the closet.” She heard a thump; he must have thrown something. “The exterminator was just here last week. Shit. I’m going to move.”
“Yikes. I had mice in my old apartment,” Nora said. “I found a mouse in the kitchen one morning, stuck on a glue trap.”
“Dead, I hope.”
“No, still alive.” It came back to her now. She had taken the animal outside and freed it by pouring olive oil over the mouse to dissolve the glue.
Nora started to tell Adam the story, then remembered that morning more clearly. It was only a few days after he’d dumped her. Abruptly the misery, the naked loneliness of that day came back to her. (No wonder the Faitoren had found her such a willing victim.) She felt a surge of new resentment toward Adam—and at herself for even taking his call, for letting him seek even the faintest trace of sympathy for his ridiculous grievances. She told Adam something was boiling over on the stove, and she hung up.
The mouse in the trap. She hadn’t thought about it for a year at least. That was the day she went to the mountains with Maggie for the wedding, the day before she wandered into a different world.
There were mice in Aruendiel’s house, too, but somehow, she had never minded them so much. They did not seem as out of place in the odd corners of a drafty, dilapidated castle as on the pink-and-gold vinyl tile in the kitchen of her old apartment. Aruendiel ate mice sometimes, when he was an owl. Nora had been reading up on owls lately, when she should have been working on her thesis. She thought about how an owl’s wings were fringed with soft feathers so that it could fly silently through the darkness; she imagined those feathers brushing the skin of her hand, her cheek.
None of the nature books mentioned anything about magicians who turned themselves into owls, or the transformation spells you’d need to know to do that. But then, most people would not consider that a significant omission.
Chapter 3
Adam called again, a week or so later. This time, Nora was back at school, in her new sublet, getting ready to teach a summer class and going through her notes on Donne’s Holy Sonnets, a more stressful process than she had expected. Many of the poems seemed newly obscure—her old readings strained, overcomplex, or simply trite. Other poems, unread for a year, had bloomed into new life that she found a little startling; one of the two thesis chapters that she’d completed would have to be rewritten, Nora realized with dismay. She found herself grateful for Adam’s interruption.
She could tell at once t
hat he was in a more upbeat mood this time, no need for commiseration. He was coming to town next weekend. Could they get together?
“Why are you coming?” Nora asked suspiciously. “You were just here.”
“Oh, my parents are moving out of their house. To Cardinal Hill.” It was the retirement community favored by former academics. Adam’s parents were retired history professors. “I’ll be coming down every few weeks this summer to help them move.”
Nora considered this. “Well, why don’t you call me when you get in?” she asked finally. If she made plans with Adam now, she thought, he would only find a way to break them once a better offer came along. And she was willing to bet that he wouldn’t call her when he arrived anyway.
He did call. He insisted on taking her to dinner. “We didn’t have enough of a chance to talk last time,” he said. What does that mean? Nora wondered. Certainly, conversation had stalled after the floating wineglass incident. Nora had been too elated to talk much, and Adam had seemed baffled, slightly annoyed.
She was feeling hopeful about magic again because yesterday her new watch—she had left the old one in the other world—had fallen off the top of the dresser while she was on the other side of the room. The watch had been lying close to the edge, admittedly, but not that close. She’d been running late, thinking, “Where is my watch?” and then she heard the small metallic thunk on the hardwood floor. (Control, you must improve your control, she could hear Aruendiel saying.) The crystal was cracked now. Would she be able to mend it herself, with magic, or would she have to take it back to the jeweler?
“Still married, I see,” Adam said, glancing at Nora’s left hand when they met at the Mexican place next to the food co-op. Nora had chosen the restaurant because it was crowded and noisy and not particularly romantic, and because she was still craving chili peppers after a year in a world without them.
Nora laughed brightly. She was now attempting to camouflage the gold ring with a couple of other rings stacked on top of it, as though she really, really liked rings or was making a fashion statement of some sort.
Thankfully, Adam said nothing more about the ring. He complimented her new haircut. Nora asked about his work, and he began to discuss departmental politics with a sort of amused resignation that suggested he was well above the fray and only paid attention to the machinations of his colleagues because they made such good spectacle. She did not believe in this posture for a second. His stories were funny, though. He asked about her thesis and had a couple of good suggestions about dealing with Naomi. They talked about mutual friends. He wanted to know more about her fellowship, and she talked about her plans with determined cheerfulness, although the idea of spending a year in Cambridge doing research on John Donne was now giving her the serious willies.
The restaurant’s margaritas were stronger than Nora remembered. Still, it was shaping up to be a perfectly pleasant, rather tame evening. Then Adam said, licking a speck of sour cream from his lip: “Tell me more about this fellow Aaron.”
“Aaron?” Damn. He meant Aruendiel. She took refuge in a swallow of margarita. “Well, what can I tell you?” she said, trying to sound brisk and casual.
Adam smiled. “What does he look like?”
Adam knew something. She had barely mentioned Aruendiel—Aaron—last time, but she must have given herself away somehow.
“What does he look like?” Nora repeated, as if Adam’s question were pure irrelevance. “Well, he’s tall. Long dark hair.” Here was an opening to swat down Adam’s suspicions. “He walks with a limp because of an accident years ago. It also left his face terribly scarred.” She swept a hand vaguely across half of her own face.
“Oh.” Adam nodded, his eyes tracing Nora’s scars. “How old is he?”
Another opening. “Oh, much older. I’m not sure. A hundred and eighty.” She laughed as though she were making a joke.
Adam laughed, too. “But his hair’s dark. Maybe he dyes it?”
Nora hesitated, then said: “He looks younger than his age.”
“How much younger?”
Nora shrugged and took another sip of margarita. She had just seen Aruendiel in her mind’s eye—his black eyebrows lifting, his gray eyes meeting hers with a steady light—and now she had to look away from Adam for a moment.
“He helped you get away from the guy who was not so nice to you, right? Evidently he’s not completely decrepit.”
“Oh, no.” Nora shook her head. Adam had been a reporter before going to grad school. He must have been better at dragging facts out of unwilling sources than she’d thought.
“Are you going to see him again, do you think?”
“I can’t.” There was too much hopelessness in her tone. She tried to recover. “I mean, I don’t even really know how to get back there.” With mock severity, she added: “You know, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Adam shot back. “Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and fear—”
Good, he would have to go through the whole routine now. Adam recited the lines with a tinge of irony, as though he were mocking the men—they were usually men—who believe there is a Monty Python quotation appropriate for almost every situation in life, but the truth was, he was one of them. It was one of the few chinks in the armor of his intellectual snobbery.
He surprised her, though, by breaking off before he got to the nice red uniforms.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to be a jerk. Tell me if I’m being annoying.” He grinned at her. “It might be none of my business, but I’m interested in what happened to you. And maybe I’m wrong, but I’m getting the sense that you cared about this man, Aaron. So I’m just wondering what he was like. Am I out of line?”
“It wasn’t a relationship,” Nora said warningly. Was Adam jealous? Or just prepared to be entertained by whatever unusual amatory adventures Nora had embarked on after he himself had cast her off?
“No, but you liked him.” Adam paused; she did not contradict him. “Did he like you?”
Nora remembered Aruendiel’s face at the end, pale and strained, the way his eyes glittered too brightly in the moonlight. She was going to tell Adam no, or that she didn’t know, but then she thought, why don’t I just tell him the truth?
“Yes,” she said, startling herself with the conviction in her tone. “He did.”
“No wonder,” Adam said, with a faint smile. She could sense him trying to decide what to ask next. “What sort of person was he? What did he do?”
Nora in turn took a moment to consider her response. Why bother to lie? “He’s a magician,” she said matter-of-factly.
Adam thought she meant the kind with a top hat and a rabbit. “He had a magic act?” he asked. She could have retreated, waffled, come up with some kind of fib, but the delighted incredulity in Adam’s tone goaded her, and the truth tasted too good in her mouth.
“No, he works magic. Real magic.” She sat up straight in her chair and smiled at Adam. “Not wizardry—nothing to do with demons or spirits. Just natural magic, real magic.”
“Oh,” Adam said, not showing much reaction, which meant that he was trying to figure out what the hell Nora meant—was she nuts, was she speaking figuratively, was there a joke there he had missed? The waitress came back to their table and asked if they wanted dessert.
“I’ll have another margarita,” Nora said.
After a moment, Adam agreed: “Another round.” Nora was amused by his hesitation: did he think she was already drunk? She was not as drunk as she wanted to be.
When the waitress left, Adam said to Nora, a little too carefully: “So—magic. You were saying?”
“Maybe I’d better begin at the beginning,” Nora said. “I glossed over some things before. The day I got lost on the mountain, I found this old graveyard—”
She told him about the sp
ell on the tombstone and how it had opened a door to another world. How she had fallen in with the lovely, deceitful Faitoren and been seduced by their beauty, their careless pleasure-making, their apparent kindness—but mostly by the spells they put on her. “They’re what we would call fairies. But not Tinkerbell-sized,” Nora explained. “Normal height.”
Adam nodded, as though what she said was perfectly reasonable; the strain showed only a little around his mouth.
She told him about Ilissa, the Faitoren queen. “Her magic is essentially that she gives you what you want. It’s an illusion, but it’s very powerful. And me, I wanted to be pretty and popular—and rich—and I wanted to meet someone new, since you’d dumped me.” (Adam had the grace to flinch faintly here.) “And I got all those things. I ended up marrying this man who seemed absolutely perfect. Raclin.” She pronounced the name with distaste. Adam followed her lead and frowned.
“That’s where the ring came from.” She held up her hand. “Only, Raclin wasn’t as perfect as he seemed to be. Nothing was.”
The new margarita had arrived while she was talking. She pulled at the straw and went on: how she discovered that Raclin turned into a sort of dragon during the day—“a small one,” she specified. Nora touched the scars on her cheek. “It wasn’t a bear that clawed me. It was Raclin. And Aruendiel—his name is Aruendiel, not Aaron—helped me escape.” She explained that he had tutored her in magic, when it turned out she had the ability for it.
She still left out quite a bit. There was no reason to talk about monster babies or ice demons or the less savory details of Aruendiel’s past.
Adam listened, leaning on one elbow, his mouth now hidden by a curled hand. His eyes darted over and around Nora as if in search of some confirmation for her story. Only as she finished did he speak: “And the reason your ring won’t come off is because of mag—” He gestured as though he preferred that she say the word.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 3