“This is Ors?” Nora demanded. Mrs. Toristel nodded, frowning. “I can’t read it. I can’t read at all,” Nora said. “I’m illiterate.” She began to laugh, then to weep again.
Later the same afternoon, Mrs. Toristel came back with some clothes and spread them out on the bed for Nora to see. A pair of jeans, a T-shirt, some underclothing. “Losi in the village, that does the wash, she had quite a scare.” The housekeeper’s tone was faintly accusatory. “I gave her what you were wearing when you came, a nightie. Losi said she put it to soak and when she came back, it had changed into these things.”
Nora recognized her Eno River festival T-shirt. “How did these get here? I wasn’t wearing them when I came.”
“No, you wore a nightie. Silk, with little pearls. Losi said to me, ‘I hope you don’t think I stole that nightie, ma’am. I swear I didn’t. I didn’t leave it for five minutes, and it was gone and these other clothes were in its place.’ She felt terrible, she knew that nightie was valuable, but the master said it was nothing she did, the clothes must have changed back when he took those spells off you.”
“What does he mean? That my nightgown was really jeans and a T-shirt?” The same jeans and T-shirt that Nora had put on that far-off morning in the mountain cabin, just before she went walking in the woods and met Ilissa.
Mrs. Toristel shrugged. “You look different now than when you came. It’s the same with your clothes, I expect.”
“How do I look different?” Nora asked quickly.
“Well, your hair. It was yellow when you came. Now it’s brown, mostly. Still yellow at the ends.”
Most of Nora’s hair was bound to her head by the bandages on her face. Now she pulled a thick strand loose. The hair fell past her shoulders. “It’s gotten so long,” she said, surprised. “Could I have a mirror? There was one in this room before, where that portrait is now.”
“That portrait? I didn’t take away the mirror,” the other woman said, looking puzzled. “You can’t see much of your face anyway, with all those bandages.”
And under the bandages? “Mrs. Toristel, these cuts, how bad are they?”
“They’re healing nicely,” she said. “And they’ll heal faster if you don’t worry yourself sick about them. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know what happened to your clothes. Losi worked hard to get them clean. They were very dirty,” she said with a sniff, “in addition to all the bloodstains. She mended the rips, too.”
After Mrs. Toristel was gone, Nora spent a long time turning the clothes over in her lap. Yes, Losi had done a good job. Surely no one had ever mended a T-shirt with such care. Nora spread her fingers into a claw and placed her hand over the places that had been torn. Her hand was too small to cover them. There were more of Losi’s neat stitches along the inside seams of the jeans. At some point, someone must have ripped out those seams. Were they too snug to accommodate an expanding belly?
If the magician was right, she had been wearing the same jeans and T-shirt for months. Ilissa had simply recycled them into dozens of delectable, extravagant outfits, one after another.
Or, Nora thought—getting a grip on herself—wasn’t it more logical to assume that she had simply been wearing jeans and a T-shirt when she arrived here, at this place? She’d had an accident on the mountain. Now she was recuperating in a hospital or rehab facility. The man she’d imagined was a magician was really a doctor; Mrs. Toristel was a nurse. Brain damage would explain why she couldn’t read, why she had trouble understanding speech; the whole idea of this foreign language, Ors, might be a self-protective fantasy she’d contrived to shield herself from knowledge of her new limitations.
Why this particular fantasy? Nora wondered. She had never much cared for fiction in the swords and sorcerers vein. When she’d had to read Lord of the Rings for Goldstein’s Modern Myths, she thought it was a bad joke, some of Tolkien’s falsely archaic language was so painful to read. A flash of bittersweet memory: EJ playing Dungeons and Dragons in the den on Saturday nights with his friends, a bunch of guys huddled around the coffee table, utterly absorbed. All geeks—Nora could tell, even at twelve—though some of them were cute and didn’t know it. D&D was the one interest of EJ’s that she couldn’t get. That and physics. Maybe, she thought clinically, her injured brain had hurled her into this magical, medieval-style hallucination as a long-delayed expression of grief for her dead brother. But in that case, wouldn’t she have come across EJ himself by now?
I wish I were in a fantasy with real bathrooms, at least, she thought. Even Ilissa had indoor plumbing.
She looked closely at Mrs. Toristel the next time the older woman came into the room, trying to see the nurse within. It was not easy. Mrs. Toristel was old for a nurse, stiff in the joints, with the kind of yellowish gray hair that meant she’d once been a redhead. As hard as Nora stared, the housekeeper’s ankle-length dress refused to resolve into a nurse’s scrubs. When Nora asked her directly whether this place was really a hospital, the woman looked at her incredulously. “Nothing like that around here. I never heard of such a thing.”
“You’d think they’d be encouraging me to abandon this fantasy, wouldn’t you?” Nora demanded of the girl in the portrait, after the door closed behind Mrs. Toristel. The black-haired girl’s half smile was especially mocking today. “Maybe you’re not real, either,” Nora continued, switching into English. “You don’t look like something that would be hanging in a hospital room. Or maybe you are a mirror, but my mind won’t admit it because I’m afraid to look at my scarred face.”
It was late afternoon, and sunlight streamed through the window’s thick panes, throwing a bath of light on the wall where the portrait hung. And the portrait in turn reflected an oblong of light onto the ceiling.
But the picture was unglazed, Nora noticed; there was no glass in the ornate black frame. She watched the patch of reflected light until the sun moved on and it faded.
When Mrs. Toristel came in that evening, bearing a tray of food, Nora was ready. “Where am I?” she asked. “I mean, what is the name of this place, this area?”
Mrs. Toristel pursed her thin lips as she settled the tray of soup and brown bread on Nora’s lap. It seemed to be a question that she hadn’t considered previously. “When I lived in Pelagnia as a girl, we called this the Northlands,” she said finally. “But that would mean a very large territory, from the sea all the way to the Ice. Right around here, they call this area the Uland, after the river Uel. Most of the master’s lands fall inside the Uland.”
None of these names meant anything to Nora. “What cities are near here?”
That was Red Gate, the market town, Mrs. Toristel said. Three hours away on foot. Barsy, where her daughter lived, and Stone Top, the next market town. “I don’t know what comes after that,” she added. “I haven’t traveled beyond Barsy myself since coming to live here. The king’s seat is at Semr, but that’s a long way away. Several days on horseback.”
“There’s no king,” said Nora. She now felt on solid ground. “There’s no king, I bet there are no towns called Barsy or Stone Top or Red Gate, and I don’t think that man Aruendiel can do magic. This is all bullshit.” Apparently the word for bullshit was a lot worse in Ors than in English, because Mrs. Toristel looked genuinely shocked. But then there was no such language as Ors, Nora reminded herself. “Can’t you just tell me the truth?” she went on. “Where are we? How do I get to I-40 from here? Or Asheville?”
But Mrs. Toristel disclaimed all knowledge of I-40 or Asheville or—upon further questioning—even the United States of America.
“You’re lying or you’re crazy, then,” said Nora. “Or maybe you don’t know anything about geography. Maybe you really believe there’s a king, or that your precious master is a magician. I don’t have to believe it, though.”
“You should calm down.”
“I’m sorry, you’ve been kind to me, and I don’t mean to insult you. But this is all insane.”
Mrs. Toristel said nothing, the wrinkle
s around her eyes deepening as she looked at Nora.
“I want to go home!” Nora cried out. “Where things are real, where they don’t change. Nightgowns don’t turn into jeans, or—look,” she added, pointing. “That picture on the wall, it’s not a picture. It’s a mirror. I’ll prove it.” Picking up the spoon, she aimed it at the portrait and sent it spinning through the air. There was the sound of breaking glass, and a web of black cracks shot across the girl’s pale, fine-boned face. A triangular shard containing most of the girl’s left shoulder fell to the floor.
“You see?” Nora said triumphantly.
“There was no call to do that,” Mrs. Toristel said. “You’re overexcited. You need some rest. Give me the tray, and you can lie down again.”
“Take it. I don’t want it, anyway.” She gave the tray a great shove just as Mrs. Toristel bent to take it. A second crash, crockery hitting the floor. The front of Mrs. Toristel’s brown dress was several shades darker, soaked with hot soup.
“Oh,” Nora said, frozen with shock, her hand stopped in midair.
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Toristel said through folded lips. She looked down at her stained skirts, then turned and left the room.
Nora looked at the shattered bowl and the puddle of broth on the floor, surprised by her own sudden talent for destruction. Some minutes passed, and Mrs. Toristel did not reappear. Was she burned? With a feeling of guilt, Nora pushed aside the bedclothes and tried to swing her legs onto the floor. At least she could clean up part of the mess she had made. She was surprised by how weak she felt, how hard the floor was.
“Stop that this instant.” It was the magician, or whatever he was. For an instant she wondered seriously whether he might have materialized out of thin air. But no, the door was closing behind him.
“I was going to clean it up.”
He came closer to the bed on uneven steps. “Very considerate. After throwing a bowl of soup at my housekeeper, you decide to tidy up.”
“I didn’t throw it on purpose. It was a mistake.”
“I see. Was throwing the spoon a mistake, too?”
From her perch on the edge of the mattress, Nora had to tilt her head back to look Aruendiel in the face, but she refused to be intimidated. “I meant to do that.”
“That’s how you like to amuse yourself, is it? Breaking things? Abusing my housekeeper?”
“Is she all right?”
“She is not injured, no thanks to you. She is not accustomed to having her veracity or her sanity questioned, however. Personally, I would never dream of doing so. I have known few people in my life to be as completely reasonable and truthful as Mrs. Toristel.”
“Well, what she was saying didn’t make sense. I want to know what’s going on. I want to see a real doctor, and I want to call my friends and my parents. Or am I a prisoner here?”
“You’re no prisoner,” he said irritably. “The sooner your family and friends can take you off my hands, the better. Where are they?”
“My mother lives near Richmond. My father is in New Jersey.”
The magician looked even more annoyed. “Are those cities south of the Middle Lakes?”
“They’re in the United States of America,” Nora snapped. “You’ve never heard of that, either, I suppose. Well, either you and Mrs. Toristel are lying to me—or you’re crazy—or I am.”
“Given your behavior—”
“—and I’m not crazy,” Nora said. “I know I’m not. Something happened to me at Ilissa’s, and I wasn’t in my right mind then. But I am now. I feel like me again. Everything feels ordinary. Except it’s not. Like that picture. It’s really a mirror. There’s some kind of trick here. That’s why I threw the spoon.”
“Ah, so that was your logic.” Aruendiel raised an eyebrow.
“You see how it broke?” She pointed at the damaged picture. “It’s made of glass.”
“How do you know it was not painted on glass?”
“Oh,” said Nora, discomfited. “But I saw the picture reflect light, like a mirror. Painted glass wouldn’t do that.”
“Is that what you saw?” Aruendiel asked absently. He walked over to where the picture hung and picked up the broken piece from the floor, then fitted it into the empty space in the portrait. As he worked it back into position, the dark crackling disappeared from the girl’s face, until the portrait was whole and unblemished again. The black-haired girl’s red lips curled with more amusement than ever.
“You fixed it!” Nora said. “What did you do?” She knew already, though; there was a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach.
“I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me,” Aruendiel said. “It’s what you would call a trick.” He lifted the picture from its hook on the wall and regarded it with care. It was hard to read the expression in his battered face.
“If you mean magic,” Nora said awkwardly, “there’s no such thing. How can there be? It’s not logical.”
Aruendiel made an impatient noise deep in his throat. “You’re a fool,” he said after a moment. “But you’re right in one respect. This is not a portrait, exactly—it only looks like one.”
He turned the frame in his hands and showed it to her. The black-haired girl was gone. The silver skin of a mirror caught the light and gave Nora a glimpse of her own bedraggled figure sitting upright on the edge of the bed. “Until a few days ago, this was a mirror. Then I thought it might be better not to have a mirror in this room, so I made it look like a portrait—doing a rather clumsy job of it. It was clever of you to notice that reflection and realize what it meant. It’s too bad you’re not clever enough to see and understand some of the other things in front of your eyes.” His voice was quiet, flat with contempt.
Nora swallowed and said the first thing that came into her head. “Who was the girl?”
“What?” Aruendiel looked puzzled.
“The girl in the portrait.”
“Oh,” he said, with a shake of his head. “My sister. I suppose I remembered an old portrait of her. This was her room.” His face settled into harsher lines. One side had been scarred somehow, seamed and roughened. It was hard to see the resemblance between him and his pretty sister, except for the dark hair and something about the tilt of the head. He spoke without emotion, but from the way he said this was her room, Nora understood that his sister was dead.
“Why did you get rid of the mirror?” Nora said. “No, I know why. Because of my face.” Odd that he would be so considerate, but then obviously he had no reason to like mirrors himself. “Could you give it to me, please?” She reached for it. Aruendiel hesitated, then walked over to hold the mirror in front of her.
At first, it wasn’t as bad as she had feared. No sign of the shimmering blond goddess that she’d been, but that was all right. Under the bandage, she could see the contours of her old face again: hazel eyes and straight brown brows, a wide mouth, a squarish chin. The skin of her face had a mottled, yellowish look, a tracery of fading bruises. And the great white slash of the bandages hiding her cheeks and nose.
“I’m taking this off,” Nora said, scrabbling at the bindings behind her head.
Aruendiel hesitated, then said: “As you will.”
Nora looked into the mirror again. Mrs. Toristel was right, the wounds were healing, but the two long cuts across her cheek still had a raw look. Garish and pitiful, they made the rest of her face invisible. “Huh,” she said finally. “Will they scar?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But the flesh is healthy. You can leave the bandage off now.”
Looking up at the broken places in his face, she wondered whether her question about scarring had been rude, but he gave no sign of offense. He returned the mirror to the wall.
“What happened to the portrait of your sister, the real one?”
“I haven’t seen it for years,” he said. “Now, what was the name of the last place you mentioned?” He garbled the name. “Is that near a place called Galifornia?”
“California!” Nor
a said with a delighted gasp. “Yes, California is one of the states, the United States. You know California? Are we in California?”
“I have been there, many years ago,” he said. “From there—let me think—I went to a city called Chigago.”
“Chicago, yes,” she said. “I have a friend there.”
“And eventually I went farther east and sailed across the ocean to another country whose name I can’t recall now.”
“France, England? That’s wonderful. I knew I didn’t just fall off the end of the earth.”
Aruendiel gave her a tight half smile. “But I’m afraid that’s exactly what you’ve done. Galifornia and Chigago are not in this world at all. I traveled there and came back by very strong magic. As you must have come here by magic, Ilissa’s magic or some other kind.”
Nora stared at him. She shook her head. “What?”
“Now I see why you are so skeptical of magic. Before I visited your world, I had never been to a place whose inhabitants were so abysmally ignorant of magic.”
Was he trying to be insulting? “Well. It’s not something I’ve ever had any use for.”
* * *
Downstairs, Aruendiel pushed open the door of the kitchen, where Mrs. Toristel was kneading dough. On the table in front of her, he set the glazed bowl that Nora had broken. It was whole again, filled with the soup that she had spilled on the floor.
“You may disregard what I said earlier, Mrs. Toristel,” he said. “My guest will remain with us for now, although I must apologize again for the way she mistreated you.” He brooded for a moment. “The girl is from a different world, I gather. It would be remiss to turn her out of doors without friends or connections.”
Mrs. Toristel acknowledged his apology with a slight bob. “A different world, sir? Well, that goes a long way to explaining the odd things she says. She’s been very quiet in general, so today when she threw the bowl I thought I’d better let you know.”
“She seems rational enough now, but it’s hard to say how these things will go,” Aruendiel said with some exasperation. Saving the life of an innocent was all very well, he thought; the aftermath of a rescue was often tedious and less satisfying. “I took enough Faitoren spells off her to make a cat bark. Just to be safe, you should get someone from the village to help you with the girl,” he added. “Who was that tall girl who was helping Toristel with the shearing? She took a firm line with the old ram. Very impressive.”
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 12