“That’s Morinen, Corlil’s daughter. Four brothers and she’s bigger than any of them.”
“That’s the one. Get her to handle the trays and such,” Aruendiel said, turning toward the door. “Again, I’m sorry for the extra trouble this has caused you.”
“Oh, this one’s easier than some of the folks who’ve come to you for treatment,” Mrs. Toristel said, covering the dough with a cloth.
“Oh? Do you mean the fellow who sang all the time?”
“No, he had a pleasant voice. I was thinking of the lady with the snakes in her hair.”
“Lady Asnoria Ulioran, with the Medusa syndrome? My dear Mrs. Toristel, you realize that none of those snakes were actually poisonous.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Toristel. “They could still bite.”
Chapter 10
Dear Maggie,” Nora said aloud, but speculatively, as though she were uncertain of how her voice might sound. She was crouching in the reddish brown soil of the vegetable garden, pulling weeds among the long rows of turnips, beets, and parsnips. The back of her linen dress and the inside of her straw hat were already damp with sweat. It was chilly at night, though, even when the days were hot.
Maggie, it’s Nora. I can’t mail you a letter, so I’m just going to speak it aloud, well, because I wish I could talk to you. Also, I miss speaking English. I don’t even really know how long it’s been since I saw you. Six months? Longer?
I’m living in the country. Which country or how I got here—that’s complicated.
Somehow she had begun to get used to the idea that she was living in a world different from the one that she’d been born in—even if she still didn’t see how that was possible. Maybe EJ and his physics-loving brain could have explained it to her.
The place where I’m staying is a castle. Yes, I know, it sounds romantic.
Nora raised her head to look up the hill toward the high, windowless stone wall that wrapped tightly around the towers and buildings inside. The castle’s utilitarian function—keeping enemies out—was starkly clear, even though now, at midday, the heavy gates stood open.
To the north, she could glimpse the edge of the cliff on which the castle was built, and if she listened hard, she could hear the sound of the small river that flowed two hundred feet below. She turned to look in the opposite direction, at the unpaved road that wound from the castle gates past sloping fields and pastures to a small village, a collection of thatched roofs.
When Nora had first been able to walk again, after hobbling around for some weeks with a crutch, she’d had the notion of going to the village to try to find someone or something that might help her get home. A car, a telephone, might be too much to hope for, but there was no harm in seeing for herself whether she was as far from all modernity and civilization and rationality as she seemed to be. She gave that idea up the first time that she walked down the muddy lane that served as the village’s main street, passed a line of barefoot children waiting to draw water from a well, and caught a whiff of the latrines behind the whitewashed huts.
When you go through the castle gates, you find yourself in a courtyard with a big stone tower to your left. Straight ahead is the manor house. Go through the doors and you’re in the great hall.
It was the sort of cavernous gray space that Nora usually associated with parking garages or old train stations. The trussed roof was high enough for a second-floor gallery to crouch darkly at one end of the room. A long table ran almost the length of the hall, with benches on either side and a single tall, heavy chair at one end. On the wall parallel to the table was an enormous fireplace, big enough, Nora imagined, to give a convincing impression of the mouth of hell when it was in use.
The kitchen is next door. Stone flags, copper pots, a fireplace, a huge farm table. It would look spectacular in a decorating magazine. All it needs is a Viking refrigerator, an Aga, maybe some recessed lighting—and a good scrubbing.
Flies made graceful, unhurried sweeps through the open windows, as though they felt very much at home. In one corner was a red-and-white ceramic stove. Fresh straw on the floor, mixed with feathers and a few gnawed bones. Wrinkled sausages hung from the ceiling beams, as well as some strings of dried, fleshy things that looked very much like human ears and fingers. Mushrooms, Nora hoped.
My room is upstairs, along a hallway with other bedrooms.
One of the rooms must be the magician’s; she had heard his footsteps passing at night. Nora had an irrational fear that at some point she would be walking along the corridor and a door would open and he would come out, a long shadowy figure with pale eyes.
There are stables and barns behind the manor house. Yes, horses—you’d like that! And then there are the towers along the wall. Most of them are empty, with leaky roofs, except for the big one. But I haven’t been inside it yet.
Something about the construction of the tallest tower, the way its unmortared stones fit together, made Nora think that it must be the oldest part of the complex. It served the magician as some sort of workspace, judging from things that Mrs. Toristel had said.
What sort of room a magician might do his work in, Nora had no idea. She pictured, at random: a telescope, smoldering incense, one of those lacquered cabinets in which beautiful young ladies vanished, candles with pentagrams carved into them, the dried mushrooms from the kitchen. Then one night, getting ready for bed, she glanced out her window and saw a light in one of the tower windows. It was close enough, just across the courtyard, that she could see clearly what the tower room contained.
Books. An entire wall of books, their bindings rich and lustrous in the light from unseen candles. Nora stared hungrily for long minutes. It did her no good to remind herself that she could read none of them. Once she saw the magician’s lean figure shamble across the window; his hand plucked a book from the shelves and he disappeared. What was he reading? Perhaps something incredibly dull. It didn’t matter; Nora still felt the bite of envy. She used to be able to do that—sit in a clean, well-lighted room, choose a book from hundreds, start reading, and effortlessly take herself to another world. And now she was actually in another world, and she might never read another book again.
I’ve been here for a little over two months, as near as I can figure, given that the months here are different and the weeks have six days. But I’m still very much an outsider here. I’ve only gotten to know one person who’s even close to me in age.
A tall girl with wide shoulders had started bringing Nora her meals after the soup incident. She spoke Ors with an accent so much broader than that of either Mrs. Toristel or Aruendiel that it took several tries before Nora was sure that she had grasped the girl’s name correctly: Morinen. It was clear enough why she had replaced Mrs. Toristel. Once Nora asked for a knife to carve a piece of mutton, but Morinen shook her head. They did not trust her with sharp objects, evidently.
But Morinen had a ready smile and, unlike Mrs. Toristel, she had a propensity to linger, happy to talk to Nora in her near-incomprehensible speech about her brothers, her neighbors in the village, the goats she looked after, the weather, the crops, what Mrs. Toristel had said to her that morning. Nora’s Ors vocabulary included far more words having to do with dress, dancing, and court etiquette than with agriculture; listening to Morinen, she began to pick up other things—like the twelve different Ors words for sheep and the apparently inexhaustible number of ways to indicate whether it was likely to rain.
Morinen was curious about Nora, too. Her arrival in a gust of wind had been discussed widely in the village. Still distrustful of her own memories, Nora said only that she was far from home, that she had been a captive, and that Aruendiel had helped her escape.
That shut down further inquiry: The one subject that Morinen was reluctant to discuss at any length was the magician. “I don’t exactly know,” she said when Nora asked how he had acquired his limp or his scars or even how long he had lived in the castle. Once Morinen mentioned the handsome blacksmith in the next village; part of
his attraction seemed to be that he was the only single man for miles around taller than she was. “There’s the magician,” Nora pointed out teasingly. Morinen didn’t laugh; she looked anxious. Nora tried to smooth over what was obviously a bad joke by saying, “He’s rather old for you, though,” and then Morinen seemed even more uncomfortable.
Right now I’m weeding the vegetable garden. Earlier I mucked out the chicken house. There’s not much in the way of indoor plumbing here. No electricity, either. I have exactly two changes of clothing, hand-me-downs from the housekeeper. I would kill for a shower, but I’ve gotten used to smelling riper than I used to. There is, at least, a kind of communal bathhouse near the river, with a couple of big hot tubs, except they’re not hot. I’ll go there this afternoon to get rid of any lingering essence of chicken shit.
Nora calculated that if she went to the bathhouse late enough so that the villagers would be fixing or eating supper, there would be no one to see the scars on her face and body. She was tired of being stared at. Every time she went to the village, even with Mrs. Toristel, she could feel the eyes of the villagers on her and hear occasional whispers as she passed.
“What are they looking at?” she asked Mrs. Toristel once, as they walked back to the castle.
“They hardly see any strangers, dear, and they know you’ve come from another world.”
“What is there for them to look at, though?” Nora protested. “I don’t look that different from them.” She was dressed the same, in shabby wool or linen dresses; she was only a little taller; she wasn’t much cleaner. True, her teeth were straight, and she had all of them, but that hardly seemed like a reason to stare.
“There is something different about you, though,” Morinen said when Nora brought up the same point to her.
“What do you mean? Is it the scars?”
“Oh, no, everyone has seen scars.” Morinen thought for a while. “No, it’s something about the way you move or the way you look at things. It’s different.”
“How different?”
“Ah, it’s so clear, but it’s hard to put it into words. You seem so bold.”
“Bold?” Nora was pleased, but had to admit: “That doesn’t sound like me.”
“Well, you don’t act like a woman. You act like you’re not afraid of men. You look them right in the eye, and you don’t drop your voice, and you speak to them like you’re a man.”
Nora was speechless for a second. She always said hello to the village men she passed. “You don’t act as though you’re afraid of men, either.”
“Well, I’m not,” Morinen said with a laugh. “Most of the men are afraid of me, ’cause I’m so big. Ma is always after me to be more ladylike, not to talk so much in front of the men.”
“Why shouldn’t you talk in front of them?”
“Yes, well, Ma isn’t known for holding her tongue, either. But she talks this certain way. Sort of quiet and respectful and cautious, like I said, and that makes it all right.”
“So I act too much like a man, is that right?”
“Not like a man. More like a little boy.”
Nora laughed out loud. But in the bathhouse, naked among the other women, she still felt self-conscious about the long, rough scars on her torso. Some version of her stay among the Faitoren had circulated, that was evident. Some of the other women looked sympathetic; others seemed almost amused by the marks on her body. “What did you expect?” their sly glances seemed to ask. In all the stories in literature and mythology about women being offered as tribute to beasts or monsters, no one ever spelled out exactly what that meant, or what it might be like for the woman afterward.
This place belongs to a person named Aruendiel—excuse me, Lord Aruendiel. He’s away right now, on some kind of job.
Helping a merchant in Leorica get rid of the sea monsters that were wrecking his ships, Mrs. Toristel had said.
He’s a curious character. Um—
Nora pulled a couple of weeds as she considered what to say next. If she said straight out, “He’s a magician,” Maggie—even imaginary Maggie—would doubt her sanity.
She thought about the last time she’d seen Aruendiel, the day he left. She’d been sitting in the great hall when Aruendiel came in, Mrs. Toristel trotting behind him. “—a few weeks at sea,” he was saying. “I expect to return before the harvest. It’s probably the work of a sea hag, but the ocean turns up all kinds of quirky magic. We shall see.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll pack some of your winter things, for the damp,” Mrs. Toristel said distractedly. “You’ll want the new boots that Cobbler just sent over. And before you go, Big Faris and Lumper from the village came here, saying there’s grasshoppers in the wheat.”
Aruendiel groaned. “Grasshoppers! Can they not raise a single crop without my aid?”
“They were wondering, sir, if you would be so kind as to send some birds to eat the grasshoppers, the way you did last year.”
“I can do that, but then what? Last year, they complained about the birds after the grasshoppers were gone. How about this: I’ll turn the villagers into crows, and they can eat the damned grasshoppers.”
He turned and walked straight into the wall. The gray stone engulfed his frame like water, and he was gone.
After Mrs. Toristel had gone upstairs, Nora went over to the wall where the magician had disappeared and touched the freckled granite. It was solid and cool beneath her fingertips. She put her ear to the wall and thought she heard a distant, retreating footstep.
Into the silence that followed, Nora said quickly: “Open Sesame.” Then, louder: “Open Sesame!” She waited.
The wall waited with her, quiet, impermeable. Nora gave the granite an experimental smack with the side of her fist. Then she rubbed her hand ruefully. It stung.
Later that day, after Aruendiel had ridden away, she brought herself to ask Mrs. Toristel whether she, too, ever found the magic unsettling. “I saw him walk straight through the wall! Doesn’t that bother you? And I heard what he said about turning the villagers into crows.”
“Ah, yes, the wall, that’s the entrance to his tower,” Mrs. Toristel said, unperturbed. “There used to be a door there, and then he had it sealed up, and now you can only get into the tower by magic. Safer that way, he says. I’ve gone through that wall myself many times. It’s like walking through smoke. But that’s only if he wants to let you in.”
“Would he really turn those people into crows?”
“That was his jest. Although, it’s true, the villagers would not think it funny.”
Actually, there seemed to be surprisingly little magic in daily use in the magician’s household. “Why doesn’t he actually do something useful with his magic?” Nora asked. “Why do you have to do any work? Why doesn’t he just do some magic and poof, the castle would be clean?”
“He would love that as much as killing grasshoppers. Now that you say it, I do remember, when I first went to work for him, I thought it would be an easy berth, with him being a magician. I thought there’d be all kinds of, oh, spirits and demons to do the hard jobs, or maybe I’d learn some spells and my work would be done. It wasn’t that way at all. Same old sweeping and scrubbing as at home. But there was a bigger staff in those days, at Lusul.”
Maggie, I guess I’ll tell you more about Aruendiel later. I’ve been spending most of my time with the housekeeper, Mrs. Toristel. We had a rocky start, but now we get along okay.
You did tell me that I should go back to cooking.
True, Mrs. Toristel had looked a shade alarmed the first time she came into the kitchen and found Nora holding a knife, slicing plums. With a deliberate movement—hoping to impress the housekeeper with her sanity—Nora put the knife down and said mildly that she had smelled the vinegar syrup on the stove and seen the baskets of fruit on the table, only some of it peeled and sliced, and would it be all right if she helped make the preserves?
Mrs. Toristel watched Nora closely at first and did not hesitate to offer precise directions
on how plum skins should be removed, but by the end of the afternoon she had unbent enough to fill Nora in on the state of Mr. Toristel’s rheumatism, the two or three most misguided ways of making preserves, and Morinen’s prospects of marrying the blacksmith. (Poor, according to Mrs. Toristel. The miller’s daughter had her eye on him, too.)
“You’re not slow with the knife,” Mrs. Toristel said, with approval. “You must have done this kind of work before.”
A whole set of questions was folded into that statement. “I worked as a cook, a couple of years ago,” Nora said. “Before I was, um, a fairy princess.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Toristel, as though this were a well-established career progression. “Well, I can always do with some help in the kitchen. As long as you don’t strain yourself, now,” she added severely. “I don’t want him blaming me if your leg won’t heal properly.”
It was clear who him was. Nora remembered the way the English department secretary always referred to the department chair simply as “she”: “Oh, hello. You’ll have to wait. She’s running a little behind.”
And I’m back to the magician again, Nora thought, twisting a stubborn root out of the earth.
I still don’t know much about Aruendiel—Lord Aruendiel. Mrs. Toristel has told me a little. No family. A widower. I’m not sure how old he is. She’s worked for him her whole life, I gather.
Morinen would never have lasted a day at Lusul, she was a good-hearted girl, but far too careless, Mrs. Toristel observed irritably one day, after Morinen let the bread burn.
“What’s Lusul? A city?” Nora asked. She had heard Mrs. Toristel mention the name before.
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 13