The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  “Lusul was his estate,” Mrs. Toristel corrected her. “Very grand it was, with good farms all around, not like this place. Plenty of staff to keep it up. My job was to keep the fires going and the rooms swept and dusted in just one wing of the house. There was another girl for the other wing, and another for the bedrooms. And I had to keep all the vases filled with fresh flowers. Her ladyship was so fond of flowers. That was the first magic I ever saw his lordship do, growing roses and such in the middle of winter.” Mrs. Toristel’s wrinkled face brightened. Nora asked how she got the job. “Ah, that was a kindness of his lordship and his wife’s. My father had died, and I was the oldest, twelve. We had an old connection with his lordship’s family, and when we heard that he would be getting married and living at Lusul, my mother wrote to him and asked if there might be a place for me in the household.

  “Well, she didn’t write to him,” Mrs. Toristel corrected herself. “She had one of our neighbors, who was in trade, write to him and read the letter to her when it came back. It was her ladyship who wrote back to say yes. I said to my mother how funny it was to think of a woman writing a letter, but she said that great ladies learned how to read and write, some of them.”

  Nora couldn’t help saying that she could read and write, but Mrs. Toristel only looked sharply at her. “When I showed you those books, you said you couldn’t read them.”

  “I can read perfectly well in my own language. I’ve spent years in school, in fact.”

  “I thought you said you’d been a cook.”

  “I’ve done that, too.”

  “Well, I know how to read, too, a bit,” Mrs. Toristel said with a sniff. “The master taught me, so that I could keep the accounts for him. But there’s no call to read or write unless you’re a magician or a lawyer or a merchant, maybe.”

  Job opportunities for English professors: zero. What did it signify, Nora reflected grimly, that she would wind up in a place—real or imagined—where she could not practice the occupation for which she had spent years preparing? But something else that Mrs. Toristel said had caught her attention. “So his wife—the Lady Aruendiel—”

  “Lady Lusarniev Aruendielan.” Mrs. Toristel embarked on a brief explanation of family names and titles among the aristocracy. “All right, I see,” Nora said when the other woman was finished. “What of her? Is she—” She paused politely, but with something wriggling urgently at the back of her memory. Something she’d heard back in that hazy time among the Faitoren.

  “Ah, well,” Mrs. Toristel said, a little stiffly, “sad to say, their marriage didn’t last long.” Nora looked at her inquisitively, but Mrs. Toristel pressed her lips together, as though to keep the answer from tumbling out. “I don’t like to gossip about his lordship’s private affairs.”

  “Oh, no, of course not,” said Nora.

  “It’s not what he pays me for.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “There are some who’d tell you all kinds of terrible stories about him.”

  “That’s too bad,” Nora said sympathetically. “Of course, if there are terrible rumors out there, it’s good to know the truth.”

  “Well, all I’ll say,” said Mrs. Toristel with a nod, “is that some people take their marriage vows less seriously than others. It causes a lot of heartache, but that’s the way of the world.”

  “I know it,” Nora said. She pulled at the ring on her finger, as she had gotten into the habit of doing. As usual, it stayed put—this was starting to be seriously annoying. “So he—?”

  “No, she,” Mrs. Toristel corrected. “Devastated, he was. He came home and she wasn’t there. Gone. Off with another man. One of his closest friends.

  “I remember how his lordship walked into the house that day, never suspecting a thing. He’d been in Semr, I think, at court. The other servants made themselves scarce. No one wanted to tell him she was gone.

  “I didn’t know any better. I was just a child myself, and I didn’t quite realize what it meant, that Lady Lusarniev had ridden away the day before with that young man. Oh, I knew it wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t believe that her ladyship might be unfaithful to him.” She lowered her voice slightly. “To such a famous magician. Think about it. How would you even hope to keep something like that a secret?”

  “She did, evidently,” Nora observed.

  Mrs. Toristel nodded. “Lord Aruendiel asked if I’d seen her ladyship and when I told him that she had gone away with the knight, his own friend, I saw his face change. I saw the anger building in his eyes—oh, I never want to see that again. I’d been dusting the woodwork, and it came to me that he would turn me into dust, too. But he just said, very courteously, ‘Thank you, Ulunip,’ and then he left the room.”

  “Ulunip?”

  “That’s my given name,” Mrs. Toristel said. “A good Pelagnian name. It means ‘Little Rabbit.’ You don’t hear it around here very much.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “There’s not much to say. He left Lusul that day, and I don’t believe he ever went back.”

  “Did he go after his wife?’

  “All I know is that he left, the estate was closed up a few months later, and I lost my job there. We heard he’d gone into the wars. There were all kinds of dreadful rumors floating around—that she was killed, he was killed—but when he asked me to come work for him here, it was obvious that he wasn’t dead, even if he’d been terribly injured in the war. I never put much stock in rumors.”

  “But what did happen to his wife? Maybe she actually was”—Nora cleared her throat—“dead.”

  “Well, yes, she went to the gods, poor lady. He told me that when I arrived here, the first day. I could tell he didn’t want to say anything more, so I didn’t ask. It was none of my business, anyway.”

  “Still, I would think you’d want to know what happened to her. For your own peace of mind.”

  “That’s what Toristel said. He wasn’t happy to come here at first. He was like you, mistrustful of the magic, and he’d heard those stories about the master. But I told Toristel,” she added with a dry chuckle, “that I’d be perfectly safe as long as I didn’t marry his lordship and then run away with someone else. Toristel had to admit there was small chance of that, since I was already married to him.

  “We didn’t have much choice but to come here, anyway. My daughter was on the way, and there was no work for us near Lusul. People held it against me that I’d told his lordship about his wife leaving. As though he wouldn’t have found the truth in the end, anyway. This place seemed like the end of the earth after Lusul, and the winters are terrible, but you can get used to anything.”

  “And he never married again?”

  Mrs. Toristel seemed surprised at the suggestion. “Oh, no.”

  “It’s a sad story,” Nora said.

  “Yes, well, it’s an old story now. But I’m telling you this because you might hear worse from others, and you should know the truth.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Oh, it’s been many, many years.”

  “How many?” Nora asked, doing the arithmetic in her head. Mrs. Toristel couldn’t be younger than sixty, surely. Sixty-something minus twelve? Surely not. But the housekeeper confirmed it: “It must be four dozen years or more. Yes, I married Toristel four years later, and we’ve been married forty-seven years.”

  “So, fifty-one years ago this happened? How old is he?” Maybe the magician had married very young. She made a hesitant guess: “Seventy?”

  Mrs. Toristel gave a gentle snort and shook her head. “Seventy? Ah, he’s older than you’d think.”

  “Eighty? No. Impossible.” Nora was incredulous. “He looks old, but not that old.” The housekeeper only smiled. “Is this more magic?” Nora demanded.

  “What do you think?” Mrs. Toristel said.

  I think something very, very bad happened to Mrs. Aruendiel, Maggie. But maybe I’m projecting.

  I should have told you this before: I got marr
ied. Before I came to this place. It was a disaster. My husband cheated on me and almost killed me. I left as soon as I came to my senses.

  Some other things happened, but I don’t want to talk about them right now.

  One of the village women was heavily pregnant, and every time Nora saw her, her round belly drew Nora’s eyes like the moon. That could have been me, Nora thought wonderingly. By now, she estimated, she would have been maybe seven months along, big and slow, no doubt getting tired of being pregnant but quietly happy, feeling the baby grow stronger—

  “Enough,” Nora told herself severely, but it was useless, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She missed the child she might have had with a longing that she could not put a shape to, even if there was a horrific suspicion lurking in the back of her mind that the baby was not exactly a baby, just as its father was not exactly a man. What she also missed, she realized now, was the baby’s mother, the hopeful, joyful—deluded—Nora who was now a phantom, too.

  “It came too soon,” Mrs. Toristel said with a sigh, when Nora ventured to ask her about the baby one day as they were packing dried plums into boxes. “There was nothing to be done. He told me the next day, after he stayed up with you.”

  “He told me that it was a good thing that the baby was gone. A good thing.” Nora paused. “Was there something wrong with it?”

  “You were lucky to live, that’s all I know. Take this from someone who lost two of her own before they were born. Some things weren’t meant to be. This batch is all wormy, Nora, didn’t you notice when you were sorting it?”

  Deciding what next to tell Maggie, Nora found that her eyes were wet. She squeezed her lids shut and felt the tears burn.

  I’m depressed a lot, yeah. But there’s a lot to be depressed about.

  I try to keep busy and be useful, and I’ve learned how to do things like milking cows and goats. Cooking on a woodstove. I get distracted for a while, and sometimes I’m kind of proud of just surviving in this place.

  Then I think, What am I doing here? Nothing I’ve done in my entire life matters now.

  I mean, yes, I was having problems in grad school—but when I think I’ll never have the chance to even try to finish my Ph.D., it just feels hopeless. Like I’m trapped.

  And I miss—well, everyone in my life. Maybe not Adam. But everyone else. Even Naomi. It’s still sinking in, that I might not see you or my parents or my sisters or anyone else again. I remember that awful night, the party after the rehearsal dinner, wishing my life were different. I didn’t mean like this.

  This letter to Maggie was not turning out well, Nora thought. She wasn’t telling enough of the truth, or maybe she was telling too much, and now she felt worse instead of better.

  She pulled one more weed, then stood up slowly, stretching her cramped legs, and half considered going to the bathhouse now, stares or no stares. But she had promised Mrs. Toristel to help her clean some of the unused rooms on the ground floor of the manor house.

  * * *

  Some of the rooms were quite grand, except that the tapestries on the walls were moth-eaten and most of the furniture was missing. Mrs. Toristel said that Aruendiel had sold it off years ago.

  “If he’s such a great magician, why he does he let this happen?” Nora asked Mrs. Toristel, as she surveyed the wreck of a drawing room. The naked frame of a solitary armchair stood in the middle of the room, reflected in the cracked mirror propped against the wall. “Why can’t he at least keep up his own house?”

  Mrs. Toristel came as close as she ever did to rolling her eyes. “Can’t or won’t,” she said. “His purse is never very full, that’s the truth, but he does find the money for things he likes, books or horseflesh or what have you.”

  “It wasn’t like this at Lusul, was it?” Nora asked slyly. She had discovered that Mrs. Toristel loved to talk about Lusul—not the scandal around Aruendiel’s wife, which she had not mentioned again, but the opulent, bustling life of the estate itself.

  “Yes, but that was his wife’s house, you know. This place was always his family’s seat. It’s a very old line,” she added. “Not as prominent as the Lusars, but much older.”

  “Does that mean better?” Nora asked. Mrs. Toristel only gave her a reproving look.

  The next room was almost empty except for a pile of broken furniture. Surely there was no need to clean here, Nora thought, peering through the door. Then she saw the books, piled haphazardly on a shelf.

  She couldn’t resist. One look.

  Halfway across the room, she had the sudden intuition that she was not alone. Mrs. Toristel was still in the hallway. This was something closer. She looked around, puzzled. It was almost as though she’d heard her name called, in happy recognition, by a voice that was somewhat familiar to her. She felt warmed suddenly. Was it only being in the presence of books again?

  A clatter like a small rockslide drowned out any imagined voices. The heap of broken furniture rushed toward her. Nora recoiled.

  No, it was just one chair. A high-backed oak chair that managed to be mobile, thanks to the four small wheels attached to the legs. A rickety-looking wooden framework was affixed to the scrolled arms.

  The assemblage rolled rapidly after Nora and, thankfully, stopped just in front of her.

  “I’d forgotten that was here,” Mrs. Toristel said from the doorway. “My goodness, it moved quickly.”

  “Yes, it did,” said Nora, backed up against the wall, wishing she had something large between her and the chair. With a noisy shudder, part of its framework unfolded; it was composed of several jointed poles, each with a different attachment at the end: tongs, a cup, a nasty-looking hook. “What is it?” she asked, dodging, as the tongs reached toward her.

  “That was the master’s. He could wheel himself around the castle—the ground floor, anyway—and reach whatever he wanted with those long arms. When I first came here, that was the only way he could get around, unless someone carried him, and he never liked that.” Mrs. Toristel shook her head. “Oh, it was a shock to me when I came here and saw him all crumpled up in that chair. And his face so scarred, that had been so handsome—I wouldn’t have known him, except for his voice.”

  “What happened to him?” Nora tried not to sound as curious as she felt.

  “He was injured in the war that was fought all over the country when I was young. Toristel and I were hired to look after the house, but at first it really meant looking after him.”

  “I bet he was a difficult patient.”

  “He never threw soup at me,” Mrs. Toristel said, giving Nora a significant look. “Anyway, he had his books here, and he managed to do his work, even though he was in a chair all the time. He put a spell on it to make it move, you see. I didn’t know it would move without him, though.”

  “It certainly does,” Nora said. The chair crouched in front of her like a huge insect, its wooden joints creaking. As she tried to sidle away, the arm with the tongs took hold of her wrist. “Stop that!” Nora said fiercely.

  To her surprise, the arm obeyed. It hovered, as though waiting for a command, and then stretched toward the shelf with the books. With a pawing motion, it made a couple of passes at the books until it pulled one down. “Stop,” Nora said again, and the chair stopped moving.

  Strange, she thought. Carefully, she took the book from the motionless tongs. “What does it say?” she asked Mrs. Toristel. With some hesitation, the housekeeper read: “On the Selective Breeding of Fruit-Bearing Trees, with the Aim to Increase Both Yield and Vigor.”

  “That doesn’t sound very interesting,” Nora said. “Are they all like that?”

  “Heavens, it would take me all day just to read the titles. This one I know, though,” Mrs. Toristel said, slipping out the book that had been next to the horticultural guide, an oversized volume with a leather binding that was turning to powder. “It’s for children. I learned to read from it myself.”

  Nora opened the book. On the first page, a complicated curl of ink next to a p
icture of what seemed to be a sheep. A is for ama, she guessed—the most common of the twelve Ors words for sheep.

  “Would it be all right if I borrowed this?” she asked hopefully.

  Chapter 11

  The brave warriors are ready for battle. Their long swords are eager to spill blood and carve the flesh of the enemy.”

  Nora flipped back in the book to check something—that knot of brushstrokes, was it an r or long e?—then sounded the words out again slowly. The first sentences she’d managed to read in Ors.

  Nice reading for little kids. She could hardly wait to hear what happened next.

  By habit Nora pulled on the ring on her left hand—still stuck there—and looked up, trying to guess the time from the sunlight filtering through the tree branches. Four o’clock? Five? Back at the castle there were beans to shell and a kitchen floor to scrub. Mrs. Toristel would be back from Red Gate soon. Nora stretched, thinking that she should get up, not really wanting to.

  Some weeks back, cutting through the orchard, she had discovered a path in the tall grass that led through the sloping fields, threaded a grove of birches, and emerged on the banks of the river below the castle. Since then, Nora had gotten into the habit of walking down to the river when she had a free hour. It was always cool by the water, although no one else ever seemed to take advantage of that fact. There was one place where you could cross on stones to a small island, really just a slab of rock with a pine tree growing out of it. A good place for sitting and trying to read a book in a foreign language. The stepping-stones on the other side of the island were fewer and the water looked deeper; Nora had not yet attempted a crossing, although she could see that the path continued, carving a narrow passage through the wild black firs on the far bank.

  Now, as Nora stood up and tucked the book into her basket, she looked across the water and felt a pulse of curiosity. Why not? she thought. The beans can wait. She put the basket down and walked to the water’s edge.