Together they pulled shut the door that led out of the world and held it closed. Then she knew that the gap had disappeared and that this world—unblemished again, finite, self-absorbed—had forgotten it already. With both exhilaration and unease Nora thought: there is no way back now. Micher Samle’s apartment, Ramona, Adam, the bed where she had woken up this morning, a million other familiar things—they were gone, they might as well not exist. But I don’t know that I’ll never see them again, she thought. The only way I’ll find out is by going forward.
“That was fine work,” Aruendiel said.
“Thank you.” She was exhausted, and yet she felt as though she had never been truly awake until this moment. This was why she had come back to this world, to be able to know the hidden life of mute things like fire and water, and to weave alliances with them. Now she could see how you could live to be a hundred and eighty—a thousand years old—by doing magic. Aruendiel looked brighter, less strained. It helped that he had smiled for a moment.
A few drops of rain splattered down, then a few more. The branches of the trees nearby rustled and swayed in a sudden swift breeze.
“You’re still having that problem with the rain, I see,” Aruendiel said.
“I don’t know why. I tried to be neat.” She sighed.
“You need to work on your control,” he said, as he always did, then added: “Otherwise, when you get to weather magic, you will be raising hurricanes and blizzards.”
The rain was developing into an actual shower. Nora raised her face resignedly to the heavens and let the raindrops touch her face like confetti, and she couldn’t help being secretly proud of them, no matter what it said about her lack of control. After a minute, Aruendiel swung his arm in the air over her head and his, as though tracing the brim of an invisible umbrella. The water arced over the circle his hand described, sluicing down on all sides, but leaving them standing dry in a shining tent made of rain.
“When will we get to weather magic?” she asked.
“Soon. There is more to learn about fire first.”
“Will you show me how to do what you just did?”
“Of course.” Aruendiel looked at her intently. “Nora, why did you come back?”
A simple question, with another question hidden inside. “I couldn’t stay there,” Nora said.
He looked serious, and anger stirred in his voice as he asked: “Did your people cast you out?” She must have told them too much about the Faitoren abduction for the family honor to bear, he thought.
“Oh, no, nothing like that!” Nora shook her head. “My family was great. They were happy to see me. They didn’t blame me for being away for so long—not too much, anyway—and it was all fine. And the university was ready to take me back, and I found out that I’d even won a prize, an honor that I didn’t expect. It was mostly because of a paper I’d written,” she added, wondering if Aruendiel might be impressed, “on the poet Emily Dickinson.
“And it even seemed”—Nora looked unwaveringly at Aruendiel as she said this; he might as well know everything—“that I could have taken up again with the man that I used to care about.”
One of the black eyebrows twitched, then steadied again.
“I couldn’t do it,” she said.
“Why not?” Aruendiel asked curtly. “When all things were set to prosper?”
“Because these things that I’d worked so hard for in the past—I didn’t want them so much anymore. What I mean is, I could see that they had value, and I was grateful for them in some sense, but they felt as though they didn’t have much to do with me.”
“You did not want to resume your old life?”
“It wasn’t my life anymore! I’m different, more than I thought. I’ve had experiences that I couldn’t even tell people there about.” Nora was quiet for a breath. “Ramona, my sister, she was the only one who had any idea. And she’s just a little girl. I did tell someone—Adam, the man I just mentioned—and he didn’t believe a word of it. He thought I made it all up because I’d been hurt, abused, so badly I couldn’t face the truth.”
She smiled ruefully, looking down. Aruendiel felt an obscure disappointment at losing sight of her clear, brown gaze. “I saw you and your sister once,” he said, the confession escaping him abruptly. “I did the observation spell.”
He was gratified as her eyes met his again, brightening, wondering. “You did? I wish I’d known!”
“It was to see that you had arrived safely in your own world,” he explained.
“What were we doing?”
“You were reading, both of you.”
“Oh, yes.” Nora smiled wistfully. “I did quite a bit of reading.”
“You looked well. Happy, I thought.”
She didn’t answer for a long moment. Then she said: “I’d thought that going home would be like waking up after a long dream. Even before you open your eyes, even before you’re completely conscious, you know that the dream is gone and you’re back in real life. If it was a nightmare, you’re relieved that it’s over. If it was a very good dream, you’re regretful. Either way, you always know instinctively that you’re back where you’re supposed to be.
“But it wasn’t like that at all, Aruendiel. I got back to my own world, and whenever I thought about this world, both places still seemed exactly equal to me. Neither of them was more real than the other. But at the same time, I’d made a choice, and it seemed to me that I had to live up to it. To forget about other realities, other lives I could have had.
“Except that I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t bear to live like that, pretending to everyone else and even to myself that I’d never walked on the soil of another world, or worked magic, or known you.”
“You were not there for so long, were you?” Aruendiel asked. “A few weeks have passed here.”
“A little more than a month there,” she admitted.
“Perhaps if more time had passed, you would have begun to think of this world and everything in it as a dream.” Speaking the words did not seem to give him any pleasure; he did it like a necessary task.
“I kept thinking that would happen, and it didn’t.” Nora paused, wondering how to summon the nerve to say the words she wanted to speak, until something in his face beckoned her on. “Aruendiel, I missed you too much to let you slip away like a dream. I came back to see you again.”
His gray eyes searched hers, and it seemed odd that she could ever have thought that they were cold and unreadable.
“I didn’t know it would be so hard to leave you,” she said. “I couldn’t even say goodbye. When I looked at you just before I went through that gate, for the last time, I thought my heart would break.”
Aruendiel was silent for a moment. “And mine,” he said.
He bent toward her hesitantly, like a tree pushed by the wind. Nora reached up, her fingers spread as though to brush away the raindrops that still hung like a constellation in his hair, but instead she found her hand cupping the back of his neck, and all at once his arms encircled her, his hands sliding confidently over the curve of her waist as though he already knew every inch of her by heart. She stepped closer, pushing herself tight against him, as he leaned down to sink a deep, ravenous kiss on her open mouth.
So, Nora thought dazedly, was it always this simple? All this time? Aruendiel smelled of horse, wet wool, woodsmoke, and underneath it all there was a slight, tantalizing astringency that she could not quite identify, although she felt willing to spend as much time as necessary to figure it out, to track the scent through his clothes and all over his long body. He was not as rickety as he looked, once she had him in her grasp. She could launch herself against him, and he met her easily. Her lips ran over his face, questioning, affirming. At first, out of pride it seemed, he wanted to keep his head turned slightly, presenting her with his unblemished side, but she was adamant and thorough.
The scarred skin on his cheek and jaw was warm and only a little uneven under her kisses, like the tooled binding of a book that one has held in one’s hands for a long time.
After a while, Aruendiel, stooping, murmured in her ear: “Perhaps we would be more comfortable—”
“Yes? Yes.”
Plucking his cloak from the ground—at some point it had slid off Nora’s shoulders—he shook it out and spread it on the air at knee level. The folds of cloth billowed and then settled, a tolerable approximation of a bed, resting on nothing. Nora laughed as he pulled her down.
A resolute, pleasantly heated struggle ensued, as each of them tried to figure out how to remove the other’s clothes. Something about Nora’s bra seemed to amuse Aruendiel—more brevity, so unlike the long, modest shifts that other women wore under their dresses—and by a sort of instinct he discovered on his own how to unfasten it. Nora had to show him how the zipper on her skirt worked. Her hands discovered where to loosen the lacings of his tunic, and then he obligingly peeled it off.
As they went on, pressing past each boundary, Nora found that Aruendiel made love the way he did many other things, with seriousness, urgency, and a clear sense of where he wanted to go, but that he was willing to countenance that there were many different routes to that destination, all happy and all worth pursuing. She mapped his body—there were more scars on his back and chest, but she had no time to count—and he took her to himself with rampant joy.
Once, Aruendiel paused and looked at her through tangled black hair. “Nora?” he said. “Are you—this is pleasing to you?” She said that yes, it was, and a small bubble of sound that might have been either laughter or a sigh escaped his throat. “It has been a long time,” he said, so softly she could hardly hear him.
Afterward she was a little sore in the hips and thighs, from folding herself so vigorously against him, and chilled in all the places where her naked skin did not touch his. She was glad of the discomfort. This was real, this was no airbrushed Faitoren ecstasy.
Nora and Aruendiel pulled their clothes back on slowly, reluctantly, like tired swimmers who despite the lateness of the hour do not wish to leave the water. It was growing dark. Aruendiel tended to the horse, moving stiffly, as though his back ached slightly. When he returned, Nora had gathered wood and conjured a fire. They ate bread and cheese and dried apples from Aruendiel’s pack. Nora found some chocolate in her bag and broke it in two, giving half to Aruendiel. She had to tell him what it was, the English name; he had never had chocolate before. Its musky bittersweetness surprised him.
Years before, when Aruendiel had found it an agreeable game to seduce other men’s wives, he’d imposed a strict rule on himself: never to linger long after the first tryst. It was a mistake to leave too soon—women hated that—but it was equally unwise to dawdle with a woman for hours as though he had nothing better to do. Loitering encouraged sentimentality and mistaken presumptions. It was more useful for the woman to understand that she would never quite have as much of him as she wanted. But he could hardly leave Nora alone in the middle of the countryside, nor did he have even the slightest wish to do so.
At his asking, she began to tell him more about what she had been doing in her world. He listened as carefully as he could, puzzling privately over some of the unfamiliar customs she alluded to. But when he did ask a question, she seemed to relish answering it. Aruendiel found himself moved at hearing how she had tried to work magic over and over again, in secret and without success. If she had found magic in her own world, he wondered, would she have returned to his? He watched her in the firelight as she wove the stories, her eyes shining, her mouth smiling at him, and he marveled that she was here, and that he was.
Chapter 8
The morning sunlight felt hot and grainy in Nora’s eyes. She blinked uncomfortably, turning her head to elude its unrelenting brightness, until full consciousness returned and she knew that she could not hide from the light any longer.
She had managed to get some sleep. Not much, but a few hours, maybe. The first part of the night, she’d been disturbed more than once by Aruendiel shifting position or by the grunts and mumbles he emitted in his sleep. And when he’d awakened in the middle of the night and reached for her again, there was no sleeping then. It was a miracle that she’d managed to get any rest at all. Her head buzzed with morning static.
Nora sat up slowly and pushed her snarled hair out of her eyes. It already felt lank and oily. She would have to get used to life without shampoo again. It had been easier when she had hair long enough to braid. She groped for her scattered clothes, wrinkled and grubby, and began to pull them on. What a wretched idea to sleep in her clothes, when they all came off during the night anyway. She was going to look like hell today, even worse tomorrow.
She glanced around for Aruendiel and spotted him at the top of the hill, a hundred yards away. He was doing something with the horse. Fine—she hoped he stayed busy there for a while, so that she’d have some time to collect herself.
No such luck. Aruendiel was heading back, leading Applenose. Something in the angle of his head and the set of his shoulders indicated a sense of general well-being, no matter that his night had been almost as sleepless as hers. She reached for her bag and rummaged through it resentfully, looking for her brush and comb. She only had enough time to give her hair a few rapid strokes before he reached her. Aruendiel took in her disheveled appearance with a raised eyebrow and a glance that seemed faintly mocking. Then he leaned down and gave her a quick buss, touching his lips to hers with a sort of possessive nonchalance that was delightful or irritating, Nora could not decide which.
“You slept late, Nora.”
“I hardly slept at all.”
He laughed proudly at that, pulled her to her feet, and kissed her again, longer this time. Nora leaned her head against his chest and felt perfectly happy for a moment. Then her brief sunny mood dimmed once more. She would have been hard put to say why.
Aruendiel did not notice the fluctuation in her spirits. “I took the liberty of preparing some breakfast,” he said. “Perhaps you would have preferred to do it yourself, excellent cook that you are, but I did not wish to wake you.”
As though she had risked her life traveling back to this world in order to make him breakfast. “Thanks,” Nora said, biting her tongue. “I can smell it.”
The breakfast was grilled rabbit. Aruendiel must have killed it that morning. While flying around in an owl’s body, no doubt. She felt a spasm of distaste for the heaviness of meat first thing in the morning when what she really felt like was some raspberry low-fat yogurt and coffee; for the way Aruendiel had made these transformations of his into a routine that he tried to keep secret but would not abandon, like a drug habit; for herself, who had slept with a man who could go directly from making love to changing himself into a cruel and stinking bird of prey in order to hunt down small, helpless animals. Almost like Raclin. But Raclin couldn’t help it, it was his nature, while Aruendiel could choose. It seemed almost an insult to her that he couldn’t stay with her in human form for an entire night.
She forced down some of the rabbit. As she ate, Aruendiel laid out his plans for their travel that day and the next. Her heart sank as she listened. It would take several days’ journey before they reached any sizable town. She thought, I gave up a lot to come back here, but I expected to have at least a bed and a roof over my head every night. Aruendiel added, as if to allay her misgivings, that doubtless they would find lodgings with peasants along the way. “We could have pressed on last night—there is a hamlet further down the stream—but the hour was late, and I judged you were fatigued enough. And I had no desire for any other company.”
“Oh me neither,” Nora said, rousing herself. “Last night was wonderful.”
As they set out, Nora jolted along on Applenose’s back, trying to feel at ease. Horses were higher than they looked, she discovered again. Aruendiel
led the horse, and she watched him narrowly from her unaccustomed height. His limp seemed more noticeable from this angle; his head wagged unattractively as he moved.
Back in my own world, she thought with sudden longing, I could be driving my mom’s Volvo, smooth asphalt unreeling in front of me, the AC on, Puccini on the speakers, or Ella, Joni, Alicia Keys, anyone. Or, she amended—testing herself—I might be having another dinner with Adam. Picturing Adam himself left her mostly unmoved, but the idea of being in the civilized precincts of a restaurant was nevertheless appealing. They’d talk more about the Blum-Forsythe. Aruendiel might not understand its significance, but Adam did. He’d have advice for her, how best to use the fellowship to advance her career; no one was better at navigating the treacherous waters of a university English department than Adam. She’d never been good at following his counsel in the past, but things were different now; she could play the game at an entirely new level.
Except, of course, that she couldn’t. She’d said goodbye to the Blum-Forsythe and school and career and all that. Gone, gone, discarded in an instant.
Nora felt slightly sick. Her entire life thrown away for a freakish passion, one wild night. She could hardly believe she’d been so stupid. And now what?
From time to time Aruendiel turned to address a comment to her, usually some remark about the country they were passing through. His usual cooler, more sardonic manner had reasserted itself. Nora was pleased by this, because it suited her mood that he not be too amiable, but she was also irritated. The tenderness he’d shown last night—that secret smile, the way he’d said her name—all of it had served its purpose and been packed away, she thought bitterly. He’d taken what he wanted; now there was no more need for soft words. Her own replies were short and as civil as she could manage and did not invite further discussion.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 9