He reached up and yanked her out of the air. The ground felt blessedly still and quiet after her flight, but when she tried to put weight on her injured leg, she screamed.
With a grunt, he hoisted her in his arms and carried her across the courtyard and through an open doorway, into a large room that was pitch-black after the sunshine outside. Even if he was trying to be gentle—which was not at all certain, Nora felt—she couldn’t help groaning; it was fiercely painful to feel any pressure against her torn body.
“Mrs. Toristel,” he called out, “I shall need you upstairs.”
Nora felt herself jolted through the shadows, upward. Then she was lying in a bed again. “Drink this,” someone said, and she drank thirstily, something milky, warm, and sweet.
There were two voices in the room, rising and falling, a man’s and a woman’s. Vulpin and Moscelle, debating what to do with her. Feebly, Nora rolled her head on the pillow, trying to get their attention. “Don’t leave me,” she tried to say. She had no idea whether they heard her.
* * *
Nora opened her eyes grudgingly. It seemed unfair to be wakened by her own cries, but there seemed to be no help for it. Her throat was sore. There were candles burning nearby.
By their light she made out the wizard stooping near the foot of the bed. His hands were glistening red. She heard a frail, high-pitched cry.
“What is it?” she asked, with a mad surge of hope: Ilissa had been wrong, her baby was alive. Struggling to sit up, she stretched out her right hand. “Oh, give it to me!”
The wizard glanced at her. She felt herself being pushed backward against her will. It was as though a large, powerful, invisible animal were sitting on her chest, keeping her pinned to the bed. She could still breathe, though, and she could scream.
* * *
She was tired, very tired of screaming and pain. None of it did any good.
* * *
The two voices were discussing her again. This time she could tell that they did not belong to Vulpin and Moscelle.
A gray-haired woman leaned over the bed, holding an earthenware cup. Nora could see every wrinkle in her face. It must be day now. Tasting the sweet liquid on her lips again, Nora swallowed.
* * *
A candle flared, and she saw the wizard standing beside the bed.
“Where’s the baby?” she asked.
Without responding, he lifted her arm and felt her pulse. She shifted slightly in the bed, and realized that what was binding her body was only a series of bandages, on her leg, her torso, her hand, even her face. “Mind the wrappings,” he said. “You were badly clawed.”
She understood that by not answering her question, he had answered it. “The baby is gone, isn’t it?”
The wizard’s countenance was stony. “Count yourself fortunate.”
She closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to see his hateful face, so that she could be alone to cradle her grief.
* * *
Nora dreamed that she had had the baby after all, but somehow it had crawled away and gotten lost. She went searching for it, wandering through stone castles and the high-ceilinged ballrooms of Ilissa’s palace and the corridors of the English department. Finally she found the baby, wrapped tight in blankets, in Ilissa’s arms. “Give it to me,” Nora demanded. Smiling, Ilissa refused: “This is my baby,” she said. Nora reached out to take the baby back, but all she grasped was an empty blanket. The baby had vanished. “Now see what you’ve done,” Ilissa said.
* * *
Daylight again. It was the gray-haired woman again, back with the cup. Nora took a sip and then pushed it away.
The woman shook her head and said something. She had to repeat it twice before Nora understood. “The master says you’re to drink it all.”
“I will. In a minute.” Nora had to grope for the words. It was almost—not exactly—the way she had felt sometimes at Ilissa’s, as though she had just run out of language. Brain damage, she thought, some kind of aphasia. So much for my career as an English professor.
“Where am I?” Nora asked carefully, and then listened hard to make sure that she understood the response.
“At Lord Aruendiel’s house.”
“The wizard?” Aruendiel, that was the name she hadn’t been able to remember.
“Magician,” the woman said. “He prefers ‘magician.’”
“Are you his wife?”
The woman’s face stiffened, as though she were shocked by the suggestion. “No, I tend house for him.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Mrs. Toristel.”
“I remember. He called you when I came.”
“Yes, that was me. Now, drink. It will help you rest.”
Nora nodded. The short conversation had utterly exhausted her.
* * *
Mrs. Toristel came back in the late afternoon with another cup, but this time Nora refused to drink any of it.
“I don’t want to sleep,” she said. “I want to talk to the magician.”
Mrs. Toristel frowned and set the cup on the wooden table next to the bed. “The master’s not here. He probably won’t return until late.”
“I can wait.”
“I’m leaving the house soon to make dinner for my husband. There won’t be anyone here for you to call if you need help.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Mrs. Toristel shrugged her thin shoulders. “I’ll leave your draft here. You’ll want it soon enough.”
The housekeeper was right: As the hours passed, the soreness in Nora’s body grew more persistent. She took inventory. Her right ankle was bound and splinted. The pain in her side whenever she took a deep breath must mean a broken rib. Carefully she felt the bandages on her stomach, right hand, and face. The flesh beneath was tender and hot.
The cramps were gone, and her belly was flat again. Well, as flat as it ever got. She was wearing a long, coarse nightshirt of what looked like unbleached linen. Idly she wondered what had happened to the clothes she had been wearing when she arrived—some silky, embroidered blossom of a nightgown.
The room she lay in now was small, with a ceiling crossed by wooden beams, ornamented with crudely geometric carvings of leaves and flowers. More flowers were painted in a frieze on the walls, much faded; in one corner water damage had washed away the paint and left a brown stain on the plaster. There was one window, a checkerboard of small panes. A mirror hung on the wall opposite the bed. The few pieces of furniture in the room—the bed, a trunk, a small table, and a chair—were made of wood, dark and heavy, and looked very old.
The light faded and the sky outside turned to bluish purple. Nora was almost ready to give up and take the draft when she heard the clop of a horse’s hooves in the courtyard. More time went by before she saw a light through the crack under her door and heard footsteps outside.
The door opened and the magician came through it, carrying a candle in an iron candlestick. When he saw Nora looking up at him, he paused. “You’re awake,” he said, not sounding particularly pleased. “Did you not take the draft?” She had to concentrate to follow his words, just as with Mrs. Toristel.
“No. I want to talk to you.”
“Ah.” Putting the candle on the table, he pulled up the chair and took Nora’s pulse, then probed the wrapping on her ankle. Apparently satisfied, he asked, “How are the bandages? Any leakage?” Nora shook her head. “Good. Mrs. Toristel can change your dressings tomorrow. Except—let me see to this one on your face right now.” He reached over and unfastened the bandage, pulling it carefully away from her cheek. Then he produced a small square mirror from inside his black tunic and held it at an angle, evidently using it to look at her face.
“What are you doing?” Nora asked, raising her hand.
“Don’t touch your face.” From a drawer in the table he took a round clay jar and fresh bandages. He smeared something from the jar on Nora’s cheek—it stung, a little—then checked the mirror again and began to faste
n a new bandage, tying it around her head.
“What is the mirror for?” Nora asked.
“It’s to let me see the cuts on your cheek.”
“What do you mean?”
He finished knotting the bandage. “You had a fine collection of rather powerful enchantments on yourself, as I told you once before. I’ve been taking them off over the past few days, a few at a time. This last spell is one of Ilissa’s glamours, rather deeply ingrained by now. It’s meant to modify your appearance. In addition to bringing you up to Ilissa’s own standard of beauty, the spell also camouflages your wound. Hence, the mirror. This particular mirror has certain properties that allow it to reflect what the eye cannot ordinarily see.”
Nora thought about this, framing her next question. “What kinds of spells?”
Aruendiel shook his head. “The whole sorcerer’s cookbook, although of course Ilissa doesn’t use that kind of magic. There were several different glamours. Confusion spells, forgetfulness spells. Love spells. It looked as though she kept adding more magic, spells on top of spells, whenever she wanted to.” He added severely, “Very sloppy—I would have expected better craftsmanship from her.”
“Confusion spells?” she asked carefully, not sure that she had understood everything he had said. He nodded. “Forgetfulness spells? Love spells?” He nodded again.
That would explain a lot. That is, if there were such things as confusion spells or forgetfulness spells or love spells. “Did you take them all off?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “All except this last glamour. If you prefer to retain your current appearance, you can, although I recommend against it. You’ve been exposed to more than enough magic for the present. Too much enchantment sickens the body.”
“I’m still—” She stumbled and had to start again. The magician’s cool gray stare didn’t help her confidence. “I have trouble speaking. I can barely understand what you say.”
Aruendiel shrugged. One shoulder moved more than the other. “She put a translation spell on you, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to understand her or the other Faitoren. They speak a version of our common tongue, Ors—in addition to their own language, which I’m sure Ilissa did not permit you to understand. I removed the translation spell last night.”
“We’re not speaking English?” As soon as she said the word “English,” she knew it was true. Her mouth had to reshape itself to pronounce the word, which came out sounding familiar and foreign at the same time.
“No,” he said. “It’s no wonder that you’re having difficulty with Ors now. It’s strange, in fact, that you can speak it at all. You must have picked up some knowledge of the language while you were speaking it under the spell.”
“I’ve always been pretty good at languages,” Nora said.
“Indeed,” he said. He sounded skeptical.
There was a long pause. Nora sighed and looked down at her bandaged body. “So I dreamed it all? It wasn’t real?”
“Oh, it was real enough. It wasn’t exactly as you believed it to be, though. That is Ilissa’s specialty. She traffics in illusion.”
“The baby was real?”
“Yes.”
She looked up directly into his eyes. “That was a terrible thing you said to me the other night.”
Another uneven shrug. “It was true.”
“But I wanted that baby so much.”
He frowned. After a moment he said, his voice cold: “I know what it is to lose a child. But this baby would have killed you.” There was another long silence. He pushed the chair back and stood up. “Well. Shall I remove the glamour, or are you content to remain as you are?”
“Oh,” she said slowly, “take it off.”
Aruendiel touched her chin with his finger, tilting her head back slightly. It seemed to Nora that his face darkened as he watched her, but she was more interested to find that she could feel a change in herself at once. The skin of her face seemed cooler, freer, despite the bandages. “That is better,” she said.
“Good,” he said, eyes narrowed. “Now drink your sleeping draft.”
Nora raised herself on the pillow and reached for the cup with her left hand. “Is it magic?” she asked, sniffing the cup suspiciously.
“Poppy juice and honey and some herbs. No magic. Except—” He took the cup from her, held it for an instant, then gave it back to her. The cup was warm now.
For an instant the idea of drinking from it made her faintly alarmed, almost queasy, but she fought back the unease and took a sip, feeling the heat of the drink against her tongue. She shivered.
“Thank you,” she said doubtfully.
He waited until she had finished, and then took cup and candle out of the room. In the darkness, Nora listened to the magician’s footsteps moving away, one foot dragging a little, and then she was asleep.
Chapter 9
Several days passed quietly. The housekeeper appeared at intervals at Nora’s bedside, bringing more cups of the poppy-juice draft and, after a while, small meals on a wooden tray: broth, brown bread, stewed cherries. Nora ate obediently, but without any real enthusiasm. The food felt heavy and strange in her mouth. She had to remind herself to chew and swallow it.
Mrs. Toristel volunteered little on these visits, except for some terse commentary as she changed the dressings on Nora’s torso. “You were lucky these didn’t go deeper. Still inflamed.”
Nora looked down incuriously. The raw red lines etched across her stomach, sewn with coarse thread, were like a map of some alien terrain. “Should I see a doctor?” A real doctor, not a magician.
Mrs. Toristel seemed faintly surprised at the notion. “There used to be a doctor in the market town, old Farcap, but he died of the dry plague two years ago.”
Afterward, alone again, Nora went over in her mind what they had said. She still found it hard to believe that she could have learned a foreign language, the tongue the magician called Ors, without knowing it. Experimentally, she spoke to Mrs. Toristel in English the next time the housekeeper came into the room, but Mrs. Toristel gave her a blank stare. She tried some of the foreign languages she knew—French, German—but the other woman shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” Mrs. Toristel said.
Giving up, Nora responded in the same language, the words assembling themselves slowly in her brain: “It was nothing. Never mind.”
The poppy-juice drafts were smaller now and came only once a day. When Mrs. Toristel changed her dressings again, she seemed satisfied with how the wounds were healing. “Still hurt?” she asked, applying a new bandage.
Nora’s body was still sore, but the pain was duller, more familiar. “It doesn’t bother me,” Nora said, truthfully enough. After that, the poppy juice stopped altogether.
Time passed more slowly. She stared at the painted walls. Someone had taken away the mirror on the opposite wall and hung a picture for her to look at: a portrait of a pretty black-haired girl in a blue dress. The style was flat, a little crude, but the painter had managed to capture something of the sitter’s individuality. Her brown eyes looked into Nora’s, sometimes with pity, Nora thought, sometimes with mocking amusement.
She listened to sounds from outside: the barking of dogs; the fussing of chickens; the thunk of horses’ hooves; Mrs. Toristel, dry and quiet; the magician’s deep tones; other people whom she could not identify. Early in the morning, when it was still gray outside, she heard owls calling. One afternoon Mrs. Toristel stood directly under Nora’s window with another woman for half an hour engrossed in a disquisition on the current price and quality of flour, and Nora was hugely grateful for the diversion. The magician most often addressed his dogs, but she also heard him calling for Mrs. Toristel or her husband, who seemed to be in charge of the stables.
Nora had not seen Aruendiel since the night when he had rebandaged her face, which was something of a relief. Whenever she thought of how he had taken the cup into his hand and given it back to her steaming hot, she felt uncomfo
rtable. The quick, casual gesture, replayed in her mind, frightened her because she understood only that it was impossible. Then there was her flight through the air, also hard to explain. In fact, her mind shied away from even trying. Either there was a rational explanation—or not, Nora thought.
Remembering the poppy juice, she had a refreshing inspiration. She had emptied some dull opiate to the drains, had she not? And dreamed a storybook world for herself. Flying through the air—a hallucination. So was the monster that attacked her. The man she had married. Ilissa, and all those strange, beautiful people. The wonderful clothes. Having a baby. Some element of wish fulfillment fueling the fantasies, probably. (How pathetic was that?)
At the thought of the baby, though, she felt sadness deep within her body, like the slow fatigue of illness. There was no baby, it was just a dream, Nora thought resolutely, but her flesh said otherwise. Then there was the gold ring on her left hand. Still, what did a ring prove, one way or the other? She tried to pull it off with her other, bandaged hand, but she couldn’t get a good grip, and the ring refused to budge.
She found herself unexpectedly slipping into long crying jags. One day Mrs. Toristel, passing outside the door, came in to see what was wrong. Nora only shook her head mutely, overwhelmed at the idea of even trying to explain. Then she noticed what Mrs. Toristel was carrying.
“Oh, you have some books!” she said, sniffling, sitting up. “May I see them?”
“Oh, no, they’re the master’s—” Mrs. Toristel said, but Nora had already taken a book out of the housekeeper’s hands. It was a small leather-bound volume, the covers embossed with two dragons facing each other across an oval seal. Sitting upright on their hind legs, they resembled two small dogs begging for scraps.
Nora leafed through the book greedily. Strings of elegant brushstrokes climbed the pages, an unknown alphabet that made as much sense to her as a handful of broken twigs. “Another one?” she asked. After a second’s hesitation, Mrs. Toristel opened up a second volume, holding it out of Nora’s reach. The same as the first book, except this one was printed, the cryptic letters roughly carved into woodblock.
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 11