The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  “And their empress with six breasts, to show how fecund she is—decidedly, Aruendiel, you must take this spell to Tfara one day,” Hirizjahkinis interjected. “But I am wondering: When do you return to Semr, after you leave tomorrow?”

  “Not until next year, if I can help it—and I can,” Aruendiel said, with feeling.

  “So we’re leaving tomorrow?” Nora asked.

  Aruendiel frowned suddenly. In planning the pursuit of Ilissa, he had not thought to account for the girl.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t take any extra burdens with me.”

  “So what will I do?” Nora asked.

  He stalled. “If I follow Ilissa all the way to her domain, it will be easier to return to my own lands than to come back to Semr.”

  “You mean, you would just leave me here?” the girl demanded, some fear in her voice.

  “Don’t be so rude and unkind, Aruendiel,” Hirizjahkinis cut in. “Of course he is coming back to Semr,” she said to Nora. She smiled broadly, but her head was cocked at a watchful angle, as though daring the other magician to contradict her. “He will return to see me again and to report that Ilissa is safely bound to her own domain and that we can all go about our business. You can stay here at the palace, as my guest, until he returns. Does that not sound like a good idea, Aruendiel?”

  “It is out of my way, coming back to Semr,” he objected.

  “Now I am insulted. I have traveled thousands of miles from my own land to come to Semr, and you, my old friend, cannot make a slight detour, a day’s journey or less, to spend a little more time with me.”

  Aruendiel glowered; Hirizjahkinis met his gaze with equanimity. “It is more than a day’s journey,” he said grudgingly. “But yes, I will stop at Semr on the way back.”

  “Very good,” Hirizjahkinis said. “So, Mistress Nora, you can leave with him then. And meanwhile, you have a few days to enjoy yourself in Semr.”

  “All right,” Aruendiel said. He added to Nora: “Although perhaps when the time comes, you won’t want to leave. You might find some other situation here in Semr. Did you not tell me that you could cook? Or maybe you will find another protector.”

  Nora’s lips tightened slightly as she considered the implication of his last words, but she only nodded and said that she would see what came along.

  As Aruendiel regarded her, though, he thought ruefully that both options were equally improbable. It was troubling to consider how out of place, how vulnerable the girl was. She was too plain, too poorly dressed to attract attention from the men of the court; the slashes on her cheek were healing well, but they had not vanished completely. And even though one might easily take her for a servant at first glance, in that unflattering dress, on a closer look there was something about the way she carried herself that made him doubt that anyone would give her a position.

  She was bold when she should be silent and ill at ease when she should be assured, and she stared too intently into his face when she spoke to him, the way a good servant would never dream of doing. Was she happy? he wondered suddenly. A strange question. Sometimes she brightened—as she had just now, asking about the spell—and you could see a warm and lively wit in her face that almost made you forget about her scars. More often she looked discontented, a little bewildered. She did not seem to appreciate completely the kindness he had shown in taking her in.

  And something in her manner a few minutes ago had made him uncomfortable, as though she were trying to be kind to him. He disliked kindness from some quarters. It was presumptuous. It felt too much like pity.

  He was glad to take his leave of both women.

  * * *

  Another situation? Another protector? Aruendiel’s words kept returning to Nora over the next few days.

  She found herself taken up by a group of court ladies that included her roommate, Lady Inristian. Nora’s recent adventures—her role in the freeing of Bouragonr; her near kidnapping by the beautiful, dangerous Faitoren queen; her presentation to the king—all had made her the object of some curiosity, and Inristian was obviously delighted to find that her accidental association with Nora had become a social asset. She made a point of pulling Nora into her group’s after-dinner gossips, their pickup ben matches on the palace lawn, and their promenades to Semr’s more select shopping district, an intersection near the palace where an array of tiny shops sold cloth, ribbon, jewelry, perfume, tapestries, rugs, and gold and silver tableware.

  Hers was not the most fashionable circle in the court—Nora could tell that almost at once, instinctively—but that hardly mattered. It was pleasant to be lionized, even by the B list. People seemed to be endlessly interested in hearing about Nora’s own world or about Ilissa and the Faitoren, although Nora was deliberately vague about her exact situation in the Faitoren court. It was not something she cared to discuss.

  Find a protector? Even if she were inclined to, there was far too much competition. A protector was exactly what all the other young women were seeking, in the form of a husband. That was why they had left their country estates and come to Semr with their mothers, fathers, brothers, or married sisters to run interference for them. (At court, Nora discovered, a marriageable young woman could not speak to a man who was not a near relation unless chaperoned by a family member.) Inristian’s parents were dead, a handicap for her marriage chances; she had only an elderly uncle with a passion for gambling to help her find a husband.

  “Once an evening, if I’m lucky, he introduces me to an acquaintance for a few minutes,” Inristian complained to Nora. “Then just when I’m at my most charming, he goes back to his game, so what can I do but go back to my seat? And then he tells me it’s a disgrace that I’m not married yet.” Her tone was light, but there was something forced about it. She was almost twenty-three, she had those pockmarks, and from little hints she dropped—and the darns in her skirts—Nora had the idea that her estate in the Valley of the River of the White Boar, wherever that was, was not very prosperous. Once, in a corridor, they passed a young woman wearing an elaborate red head-covering, and Nora saw Inristian frown and look away. Someone told Nora later that the red headdress was a betrothal veil.

  Tearing through Pride and Prejudice in her spare moments, Nora found that the scene where Mrs. Bennet upbraids Lizzy for turning down Mr. Collins had a slightly different resonance now. “If you take it into your head to go on refusing every offer of marriage in this way, you will never get a husband at all,” cried Mrs. Bennet, “and I am sure I do not know who is to maintain you when your father is dead.” Mrs. Bennet had a point, although it pained Nora to admit it.

  Of course, Inristian already had an estate of her own, however poor. “Maybe you shouldn’t feel so much pressure to get married,” Nora said to Inristian one day, as they were coming back from a visit to the shops. Behind them trudged the palace footman who had to escort them every time they went outside the palace walls. “You could take more time and find someone who’s really right for you.”

  Inristian didn’t understand what she meant. “Oh, all the young men that I’ve met are right!” she said. “Some men at court do have very bad reputations, it’s true, but my uncle would never introduce me to them. He is careful about that, I will say. It’s only that he’s so lazy, he won’t do anything more than introducing me. It’s as though he expects me to negotiate my own marriage!”

  “Well, couldn’t you arrange the marriage yourself, if you had to? That’s what we do in my country.”

  Inristian looked both amused and nonplussed by Nora’s naïveté. “Oh, you know,” she said finally, “a marriage is not just between a man and a woman; any prospective husband of mine will want to know, well, how my family and friends can help him.”

  “A dowry, you mean?”

  “More than that. Politics, you know.”

  Nora had opened her mouth to reply when it suddenly struck her that for all the evident shortcomings in Lady Inristian’s method of finding a husband, it was better than Nora’s. After all,
hers had also been a political marriage of sorts. Even with only an apathetic uncle to oversee the process, the countess was unlikely to find herself married to someone who turned into a flying reptile during the day. “I hope you find a good husband,” Nora said. “I’m sure you will.”

  “Well, you know,” Inristian said with a giggle, “this is quite shocking, but I am almost certain that Lord Morasiv tried to catch my eye last night. He has a very nice estate in the south, smallish, but warm enough for a vineyard, is that not interesting? Of course wine can be quite lucrative. I think his chin is rather handsome. And I do like yellow hair. Have you seen him?”

  Nora shook her head with a smile. But she remembered Lady Inristian’s description, and that evening, as she was passing through a crowded room in the palace, she saw a man who matched it: blond, a stalwart chin. His eyes looked a bit like grapes themselves, green and bulgy. He was talking to someone else that Nora recognized: the young man who had arrived too late for dinner a few nights before.

  Nora had seen Inristian just a few minutes ago. She retraced her steps, meaning to alert Inristian. Perhaps the uncle could be torn away from his game to make an introduction.

  Starting down a staircase, Nora recognized the hard, high tones of one of Lady Inristian’s friends, Baroness Fulvishin, coming from below. Then she heard her own name.

  “So how did this thing Nora get the scars on her face?”

  Nora’s first thought was that her command of Ors was getting to be quite good. Effortlessly, she had registered the grammatical mistake in the baroness’s question. It was an error in word choice: using a demonstrative pronoun meant for inanimate objects or animals to designate a person. That is, Nora.

  But the baroness had not made a mistake, Nora reflected. She had heard courtiers use that construction a few times in the past few days, to refer to servants or peasants. She hesitated, wondering: Do I really want to hear this?

  “—an accident,” Inristian said.

  Another person said something else that Nora couldn’t quite catch, but that provoked a small storm of giggles.

  “Honestly, Soristia!” said a fourth voice, laughing. “Aren’t you being a little—”

  “Well, he murdered his wife, everyone knows that. This poor Nora thing, she must not have pleased him enough.”

  “Or maybe that’s how she pleases him.”

  More laughter, agreeably shocked.

  “No, but to be serious.” Inristian’s voice. “At first I assumed she was, but she has shared my bedroom every night. And she has said nothing to indicate that she is his whore.”

  “Oh, don’t be naive, sweet! Besides, I know what a sound sleeper you are.”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He sent her off to separate lodgings so that he can sleep with other women while he’s here!”

  “But he is so ugly. What woman would ever—?”

  “Wizards can make anyone fall in love with them. And my grandfather says there used to be all kinds of stories about him. Even the queen—remember the portrait the other night, the one that came alive?”

  “Oh, that was so boring. I wanted the dwarfs to come back—I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.”

  “You know the old saying ‘Never trust a wizard’? My grandfather says that it’s because of Lord Aruendiel.”

  “Did he really murder his wife?”

  “Yes. And her lover.”

  “Then she was a slut, what did she expect?”

  “Well, I feel sorry for Nora, having to—you know—with a man like that.”

  “I feel sorry for him. She’s nothing to look at, even if you don’t count the scar. And her clothes!”

  Nora had heard enough. Gathering her skirts, she moved back up the staircase as quietly as she could. She tried to summon a smile at the lurid spectacle of herself and Aruendiel playing out some kind of sadomasochistic sex game. It would be easy enough to go downstairs and tell them how wrong they were. But why? She was a thing, not a person to them, no matter how often she’d gone ribbon-shopping or played ben with them.

  She wandered into an adjoining gallery and sat down on a bench, attempting to give her full attention to the musicians piping nearby.

  It didn’t matter if they thought she was sleeping with Aruendiel, Nora thought angrily. First, because she wasn’t. And second, why should it matter? At home—the real world, Nora thought—having sex out of wedlock didn’t make you a whore. That was something she’d never liked about nineteenth-century novels: All those fallen women—Hester, Tess, Maggie, Hetty—one slip and they were ruined. Lydia, too, if not for Mr. Darcy. It was one thing to read about a society obsessed with female purity—quite another to find yourself living in one. Inristian and her friends, they were the real whores, strategizing about how to make their fortunes by luring vineyard-owning noblemen into matrimony.

  The music ended, and Nora stood up, so suddenly that the person passing in front of her had to step back. She turned to apologize and found herself facing the ginger-haired man she had spoken to a few evenings ago, the one she’d seen earlier with the presumed Lord Morasiv.

  He seemed almost embarrassed to see her. His eyes darted away, and he mumbled something about begging the lady’s pardon.

  “For what? I’m the one who got in your way just now.”

  More signs of distress, then he spoke crisply: “I apologize for my regrettable forwardness the other night. I am very sorry if I caused any offense—it was entirely unintentional.”

  “What do you mean? You didn’t offend me,” Nora said, surprised.

  “I’m afraid I did not realize to whom I was speaking. I hope there was no misunderstanding.”

  “Misunderstanding?” Nora considered him for a moment, then looked down at the unfashionable blue-and-black dress. “Oh, you thought I was a servant, didn’t you? Someone’s maid. That’s why you asked me about getting some dinner.”

  He bowed very low, the tips of his ears reddening. “I am terribly sorry. It was a completely absurd mistake.”

  “And now you’re concerned you’re not supposed to talk to a well-behaved young lady without a chaperone, right? Well, don’t worry, I’m not a well-behaved young lady.”

  Her admission did not seem to reduce his confusion.

  “By the way, my name is Nora,” she added.

  “I know who you are. And I apologize again. I hope I do not offend the Lord Aruendiel by speaking to you.”

  “Offend—? I see.” So he was another one. Nora felt her temper rise. “You and everyone else here assume that I’m screwing Lord Aruendiel, is that right?”

  He recoiled slightly at her choice of words. “Listen, I hate to disappoint you,” Nora went on, “but you’re wrong. It’s not like that at all. I’m not Lord Aruendiel’s mistress, and I don’t have any desire to be. And my guess is that he’s quite happy that I’m not. Is that clear?”

  The young man bit his lip. “Yes, that’s clear. I—”

  “Please don’t apologize again.”

  For the first time, he smiled. “Then I will not.” For a moment, she saw the affable young man she had met the other night, and then his face grew serious again. “But I should explain myself. Lord Aruendiel is a notorious rakehell. He has an extremely bad reputation where women are concerned.”

  “I’ve heard something on that subject since I came to Semr,” Nora said. “A little more than I wanted to know. Although, frankly, these stories surprise me. I have lived in his household for months, and it’s as quiet as, well, as a tomb.”

  “Well, if he hasn’t made you his mistress, you’re fortunate.”

  The young man’s sober tone struck her. “Because of what happened to his wife?”

  “What do you know of that?”

  “I’ve heard talk.” She frowned, trying to follow a silky wisp of memory from the Faitoren court. “Is it true? Did he kill her?”

  The young man returned her gaze steadily. “He stabbed her. She was pregnant.”

  It was Nora’s turn to flinch. �
��Ugh.” She was silent for a moment, picturing the scene. “And what happened to him? Was he tried for murder?”

  “Technically, Lord Aruendiel was within his marital rights,” said the young man. “So he wasn’t subject to the king’s justice.”

  “Ugh,” Nora said again. So this was how Mrs. Toristel’s story about the errant wife ended. “Because she was unfaithful?”

  He gave a brief, stilted nod. “But very few men would have been as brutal as Lord Aruendiel was. I’m saying this not to slander him, but because you should know these things, if you are living in his household—even if not quite in the manner that everyone thinks.”

  “Well, yes, I will be careful,” she said. “Though the thing is,” Nora added, with a sudden, harsh laugh, “as bad as Lord Aruendiel was to his wife, my husband was worse.”

  Chapter 19

  Nora pulled the door of the palace kitchen shut. The greasy hubbub behind her diminished slightly, but she could still hear the noise through a solid inch of oak. She sighed. “Now I remember why I left restaurant work,” she said aloud as she mounted the staircase, back to the upper regions of the palace.

  Nora had gone to the kitchen with the intention of asking for a job. She’d lasted about an hour. The chaos, the heat, the noise, were all familiar to her from her earlier life as a cook. But here it was trebled. Rats scrabbled in the corners over scraps of spoiled food, the chickens destined for tonight’s dinner ran around clucking underfoot, and a quarrel between two of the cooks exploded into a sudden knife fight. A flurry of spectacular jabs, and then the loser exited cursing, a reddening napkin held to his face, while the rest of the staff jeered. Nora finished chopping her onions, took off her apron, and made her escape.

  It might be safer to live with one murderer than to work with a whole staff of likely ones, she thought.

  Passing by a window, she saw that Lady Inristian and her friends were playing ben on the lawn, but she felt no interest in joining them.

  She heard quick, purposeful steps behind her. Nora turned. It was Hirizjahkinis. Nora had seen little of her since the banquet. “Mistress Nora! Good day to you. I am glad to have the chance to say good-bye.”