How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  When they stopped at midday to eat a little bread and cheese, Aruendiel asked, “You are in poor spirits, Nora?”

  “My head hurts,” she said. “The sun is very bright.” After lunch, she lay down for a few minutes in the shade of a bramble bush, eyes closed, so that she would not have to talk to him.

  Surprisingly, she felt a little calmer. If she had some time alone, a few hours, a day, she thought, perhaps she could regain her equanimity. But solitude was impossible. For now, there was no escape.

  Once they resumed their journey, Aruendiel said little. Nora kept her eyes on the landscape rather than look at him, but there was not much to distract the eye. They passed through scrubby forest and pastures where goats were devouring the new green growth. Occasionally there was a cluster of beehive-shaped huts almost too small to be called a village. In the fields, distant figures—so thin it was hard to tell whether they were men or women—scratched languidly at the dirt with wooden hoes.

  “In my great-grandfather’s time, these lands were called the breadbasket of three kingdoms,” Aruendiel observed, breaking a long silence. “Now the people here can barely feed themselves.”

  Despite herself, Nora was curious. “What happened?”

  “The soil is worn out,” he said. “And the curse that Fergon Smas put on the land in the Salt War did not help.”

  She might have known there would be a curse. Aruendiel was no doubt dying to tell her about it, the way he always loved to go on and on about magic, but she was disinclined to give him the satisfaction of being asked. She kept her mouth shut and felt that she had scored a minor victory when he said nothing more on the subject.

  It was not so easy to distract Aruendiel from magic, however. Half an hour later, as they approached a stream that crossed the track, he led the horse off the road, then halted. “You can get down now,” he said to Nora.

  “Why?”

  “It’s time for a lesson.”

  For a moment she was suspicious, then realized that he meant a lesson in magic. “Right now? I haven’t studied; except for yesterday, I haven’t done magic for weeks.”

  “All the more reason to resume your studies now.”

  “But we’re traveling. And—no books.”

  “We can manage without books. And I, for one, require a respite on a long afternoon of walking.” Aruendiel stared up at her implacably.

  “Fine,” Nora said after a pause. Possibly her mood would improve after she did some magic. Aruendiel helped her down from the horse, and they went toward the stream, Nora walking at arm’s length from him. At the bank, he bent down to pluck a small round stone from the streambed. Straightening, he balanced the rock on his palm, then tossed it gently upward. At the top of its arc, the stone froze in midair, still as a snapshot.

  “We shall do some levitation work,” he announced.

  “I don’t need to work on levitation,” Nora said. “My levitation skills are fine. I levitated myself up a cliff at Maarikok.”

  “It is your control that needs improving. Take the rock from me.”

  With a sigh, she did so, working her own spell to hold it in the air.

  “No, no, no,” Aruendiel said irritably. The stone had dipped a couple of inches, bobbing slightly. “Hold it steady.”

  “I am.”

  “It’s shaking.”

  “All right!” She tried to get the stone to hold still, but she could not eliminate the tremor entirely.

  “Very sloppy,” Aruendiel observed, placing his hand on top of the stone. With some effort, he forced it downward another few inches. “I should not be able to move the stone at all. The stone should remain exactly where you wish it to be.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.” This precision work was unbelievably tedious. What did it matter if the stone drifted one or two inches out of position?

  “Then your best is not good enough.”

  Nora thought that he could not be any more wearisomely critical and pedantic until they came to the next phase of the lesson, moving the object through the air. It was a childish exercise that she had done before—you directed the stone upward, downward, at right angles, in a spiral, at varying speeds, and so forth. Make-work, really. To her chagrin, though, the stone kept slipping out of her command. Aruendiel’s criticisms mounted. “No, too fast—now, too slow. To the left. To the left. Do you not understand what I am telling you? Halt it. Take it a handbreadth lower. Not that low. Now a smooth right turn. Smooth, I said. A drunken finch would fly more evenly. Try it again. Again. Are you drunk yourself? Now bring it back. Back. Do you want to send it all the way to Semr? I have never seen such poor control.”

  “It won’t do what I say!”

  “And stop moving your hands,” he added. Nora had been gesturing with increasing wildness, as though the stone would respond better to more obvious signals. “It’s very poor form. You’re signaling to any enemy within eyeshot exactly where you want to send the missile.”

  “I’ve seen you move your hands when you work magic. Yes, you do move your hands,” Nora insisted, to his dismissive look. “I’ve seen you.”

  “I don’t wave my limbs like a panicked chicken.”

  The stone changed direction again. Faster and straighter than it had moved during the entire lesson, it slammed straight at Aruendiel’s head. With horrified delight Nora thought: yes, yes.

  “This is intolerable,” Aruendiel said as the missile bounced harmlessly off the air near his left temple. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Trying to aim it properly.”

  “Well, that was better than you have done all afternoon. What ails you? You are as clumsy as a blind horse.”

  “I’ve had enough of this.”

  “On the contrary, you need more practice.”

  “No, I can’t stand it. This is stupid—boring. And you’re just trying to bully me.”

  “Assuredly not.” Aruendiel frowned. “I am trying to teach you. Nora, these are important lessons. True magic—or any magic—is too powerful, too dangerous to be wielded carelessly. I—”

  “Oh, can you please stop,” Nora said, and then burst into tears. If only he would just disappear, she thought. That would be a spell worth doing.

  Aruendiel paused for a split second as though trying to gather his wits, and then stepped toward her. He rested one hand on her shoulder, very lightly. The other hand hovered at his side, as though he were not certain where to place it.

  “Nora,” he said softly. “Calm yourself. You are out of practice, that is all. You have spent weeks in a world without magic. We will stop now and resume when you have rested, when you are feeling more yourself, and you will see that the magic comes more easily.”

  Aruendiel raised his hand and gently brushed away a tear with the flat of his thumb. Nora stood stone-still. He stooped, looking into her face expectantly, like a bird seeking out the next place where it will land.

  Nora shuddered. Batting away his hand, she wrenched herself out of his reach. “Keep your hands off me,” she said.

  Aruendiel straightened, she heard his sharp intake of breath, but he said nothing.

  “Just don’t touch me,” she said. “I can’t stand your filthy touch.”

  “My apologies,” he said coldly. In a slightly different tone, he added: “Are you well, Nora? I am a strict teacher—you knew that already—no matter how favored the pupil. If I have slighted you or given offense—”

  “It’s disgusting, that’s all, the way you’re pawing me. It’s—” The Ors translation of the English phrase “sexual harassment” was only approximate, something like “lascivious intimidation.” It lacked the bite she sought. “You’ve been ordering me around as though I were your slave, not your student. You think you own me now because I slept with you.”

  “Nora—”

  “And why I did, I can’t say now. I do
n’t know what possessed me last night.”

  His face was hardening, the black eyebrows drawn together, but still his expression was mostly one of puzzlement. Not good enough, Nora thought. She would have to thrust harder.

  “You put some sort of spell on me, didn’t you?” she demanded. “Some love spell?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Aruendiel said sharply. “I would never do such a thing.”

  “I don’t know about that. Otherwise I would never have looked twice at you, that face of yours, never.”

  She got a strained and crooked smile from him. “I did nothing to ensnare you. Whatever passion moved you—however misguided it may seem now—it was your own.”

  “Don’t use the word passion. Insanity would be more like it.”

  “My apologies again. Obviously I mistook your intentions. As you flung yourself at me, you seemed willing enough.”

  “Oh, you think you’re irresistible, don’t you? With those hideous scars. The way you were all over me last night—” She laughed. “Well, it wasn’t a complete disaster. You did pretty well for an old man—a dead man. I was surprised.” There, she had hit him deep, she could tell from the glacial stillness that had settled into his face. “But another night like that one would probably take you out, wouldn’t it?”

  “I doubt it, but there is no need to repeat the experiment.” He folded his arms. “You have been sulky and short-tempered all day, but I did not realize the depth of your disdain until now.”

  “You have no idea,” she assured him. “And to think I threw away my entire life—everything I’d worked so hard for, my family, my friends—to come back to this dunghill of a world. I hate it. I hate you.”

  “You were both precipitate and foolish. It is not the first time that I have noticed these failings of yours.”

  His smugness was maddening. It reminded her of the first time she had laid eyes on Aruendiel’s ugly face—the superior tone in his voice as he warned her against marrying Raclin. He must have been so jealous of young, handsome, perfect Raclin, Nora thought.

  She said so.

  “Hardly,” Aruendiel said.

  She didn’t believe him. “And then you killed Raclin’s baby—my baby—and told me it was a monster. You never actually showed me, of course.”

  “I had more regard for your feelings than that. Why, I cannot imagine now.”

  “You didn’t want me to know that you’d wrung its neck.”

  “The infant died. It would not have lived.”

  “You didn’t do anything to save it.”

  “No.”

  So cold—he showed no shame at all. A sudden thought came to her. “Oh, my God, I just hope you didn’t get me pregnant. What was I thinking?”

  He looked almost amused. “You have no cause for concern. A corpse cannot father children.”

  “There’s nothing normal about you, is there?” she demanded. “If it weren’t for magic, you’d be—”

  “A heap of bones.”

  “It’s all so wrong. It’s not natural. I fucked a corpse. How did I get mixed up in all this—this magic? And I let you teach it to me. What was I thinking? What was I thinking?”

  The question was gnawing, maddening. Aruendiel might have ruined her life, but she had allowed the catastrophe to happen, and even abetted it. “Perin was right, you can’t trust a magician.”

  Aruendiel laughed, the lines in his face like gnarled branches. “So you take Pirekenies as your authority now? The boy does not have enough brains to fill a spoon.”

  “That’s not true. You were jealous of him. I could see that. Well, he was willing to marry me, he was concerned about my future. He cared about me more than you ever did.”

  “That is not true,” Aruendiel said quietly.

  “You know,” Nora said, groping for her sharpest blade, “out on those marshes, when we were trying to get to Maarikok to rescue you, it was damn cold. So, yes—I know you’ve been wondering!—Perin and I slept together, those long nights. Sometimes I thought we’d melt our way straight through the ice.

  “That’s why he wanted to marry me afterward. Because he wanted to do the right thing. It was very sweet of him, don’t you think? I don’t think it would have worked out, Perin and I, but still, it was sweet.”

  “You are lying.”

  “No, it’s quite true.” She gave a fierce nod. For a moment she almost believed the story herself.

  “Pirekenies is a fool, but not a complete idiot,” Aruendiel said, calmly and deliberately. “If he had bedded you, he would never have sought to marry you. He would have known you for the whore you are.”

  “Oh.” Nora had thought she was braced for anything, but she still flinched. “Well, you are making your feelings very plain.”

  “I see no reason to dissimulate just now.”

  “I’m a whore, am I, because I slept with you?” Nora had found her footing again. “You just hate women, don’t you? Yes, you do. You’re afraid they’ll make a fool of you, the way your wife did—running away with another man. That’s what this stupid magic of yours is all about, control. Well, I have news for you—you’re already a laughingstock. You couldn’t control your wife. You can’t control me. And you’re a coward, that’s what it comes down to. You’re afraid of being alive, afraid of being dead.”

  “You are raving,” Aruendiel said.

  “I’m just speaking the truth. So I’m a whore, like your wife? Are you going to kill me, like her?”

  It was a stupid, reckless thing to say, Nora thought before she had even finished speaking.

  Aruendiel, very pale around the lips, said: “Like this?”

  A blue-white flash, a crack that emptied all other sounds from the air. The smell of ozone was overpowering. Nora looked around, her ears ringing. A pine tree not thirty feet away had split in half. A smoky orange flame was already flaring along its upper branches.

  Nora backed away from Aruendiel, slowly, then faster. “Leave me alone,” she said, shaking her head, raising her arms as though she might actually be able to fend him off, if he came after her. He looked at her silently. She could read nothing in his face.

  “Just leave me alone,” she said again, then turned and ran.

  Her footsteps pounded the dirt track, her torn skirt flapping against her legs. Her breath came in frenzied gasps. She did not look back. It seemed to her that if she did see Aruendiel in pursuit, she would be too frightened to move. Coming around a bend in the track, she almost collided with a herd of goats in the care of two small ragged boys. Reeling, she swerved around the mass of animals and children and kept running, while the boys stared and shouted at her in words she could not make out.

  A half mile, a mile. She could run farther, normally, but not at an all-out, run-for-your-life kind of sprint. She stopped running because she had to, when she had no more wind left and her legs felt too heavy to move.

  For the first time Nora looked behind her. The dirt track was empty, curving away into brush and forest. She could hear nothing except her own panting and the rustle of the wind in the grass and leaves. And from far away, in the woods to her left, the repeated ring of an ax: someone chopping wood.

  She bent over for a second, breathing hard, like any runner finishing a race, then gathered herself up and moved forward at a walk, cooling down. Her blouse was soaked, and her heart was pounding. Nora pushed tendrils of damp hair back from her face, feeling the surge of well-being that comes after exercise, and wondered, as she always did, why she didn’t work out more often. She thought back to Aruendiel, to what had just passed between them down the road, and wondered blankly: what the hell was that all about?

  For the life of her, she could not recall or understand exactly why she had been so angry and so cruel. Launching cheap insults at Aruendiel, goading him until he responded in kind. It was like being an actor trapped in a bad play, a
truly ghastly play, mouthing crude dialogue by a first-time playwright who had seen far too many productions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It had seemed important to provoke Aruendiel, to see how far he would go. And then, yes, the lightning strike, he’d blown up the tree. Evidently she had succeeded.

  Nora walked slower now, absorbed in the problem of why half an hour before she had felt it necessary to abuse Aruendiel in every possible way she could think of, when now she felt only surprise at herself and a deepening sense of regret and shame. Gingerly, apprehensively, she probed the wasp’s nest that was her recollection of the past six or eight hours. She’d been tired and cranky when she woke up, but that didn’t excuse anything, and it didn’t explain why a mildly sour mood had mutated into full-blown rage and paranoia within a few hours. Like a head cold turning into pneumonia overnight.

  Am I simply the bitch from hell? Nora asked herself. Or just plain loony?

  Aruendiel probably thinks I’m both, Nora thought. With justification. Did I really say all those things to him? Yes, I did.

  The sun raked the back of her sticky, gritty neck. She kicked at a rock in the middle of the track. “Damn it. Damn it.” Without thinking any more about it—certainly without trying to recall exactly what she had said or trying to imagine with any specificity how Aruendiel must have felt hearing it, because that projection was too dreadful—she resolved to face him again. And sort this mess out if possible, though she could not begin to imagine how. Some things you couldn’t apologize for. Some things you could never make up for. She hoped this was not one of them.

  Nora turned to retrace her steps. She froze.

  She was no longer alone. Something was blocking the road, filling the gap between the trees on either side. Her first, fleeting thought as she took in the enormous, outstretched, leathery wings: how could that thing have landed without making any noise?

  Then, as it grinned at her with its chainsaw mouth and beat its tail against the dirt, she formed a second, more cogent thought. Raclin. I should have known.