The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  Going outside, at first she did not see him at all. She had a moment of panic, and then she spotted his dark head moving through the crowd, twenty yards down the street. Nora followed him as quickly as she could, edging her way between stalls and jostling the other pedestrians. She was relieved to see that he had stopped to wait for her in front of a tavern, just before the street forked.

  Something about the rigidity of his posture told her how furious he was. As soon as he saw her approaching, he turned and began to walk rapidly down the right-hand street.

  Catching up, she told him, “I have the rest of your money.”

  “You may keep it, if it means so much to you.” At the next intersection, he veered left without appearing to pay any attention to whether Nora was following him or not.

  “She gave you the wrong change,” Nora said. “It was a simple mistake. I just pointed it out, that’s all.”

  “You would have done better to have left well enough alone. In the future, perhaps you will let me conduct my financial affairs myself.”

  “Don’t worry, I will!” Nora snapped, suddenly furious, too. “Is that why you’re angry, because I dared to intervene in your finances?”

  “No,” Aruendiel said. They turned down another street before he spoke again. “What you did was very unseemly.”

  “Unseemly?”

  “To challenge those shopkeepers.”

  “Challenge? She made the wrong change, and I corrected her. That happens all the time in a store. I wasn’t accusing her of cheating you.”

  “A gentleman does not quibble with a shopkeeper over money.”

  “Not even if he’s being shortchanged? I don’t believe that. Besides, you were haggling with the man in the bookstore.”

  “That is entirely different. Gorinth is a learned man, an old acquaintance—”

  “I see! He’s closer to an equal, not that anyone’s ever quite equal to you. So it’s fine to engage in a little gentlemanly bargaining with him. But not with a couple of women selling fabric in a little shop—even if one of them, at least, is better at math than you are.”

  “You have only the crudest grasp of social niceties,” Aruendiel observed.

  “Well, in my world people can ask politely for correct change without committing a social crime. By the way,” she added, “you do agree that she shortchanged you, right?”

  He shrugged, his pale eyes elsewhere. “The exact tally of a few silver beads is of no concern to me.”

  “I thought so,” Nora said. “You still aren’t sure about the math.”

  They walked along in silence, single file because of the crowds. The rank, salty smell of the river became more pronounced. At last they came to a gate in the city wall. When Aruendiel gave his name, the guards waved them through, with a curious glance at Nora. She wondered what exactly she was famous for this time—rescuing Bouragonr, or being the mistress of a prominent magician and murderer?

  Ahead was a long quay lined with a thicket of tall-masted ships, dark-timbered, weather-beaten, burlier and more disreputable-looking than the gleaming white sailboats she remembered from the shore back home. The wind off the water whipped through her hair.

  “Are we taking a boat back?”

  “To the other side of the river.” Aruendiel dropped his bag and walked down the quay, looking for the ferry.

  I could still turn back, Nora thought. She glanced down at the bundles she carried. All her possessions in the world—this world—consisted of a change of clothes, a paperback book, and twelve silver beads. Would that be enough to pay for even one night’s lodging somewhere? She had no idea. There was also the fabric that Aruendiel had just bought her. That could be sold. Another dozen or two dozen silver beads. She worked her hand through the wrappings of the bundle from the dry goods store and fingered the blue worsted. It was good material, thick and felty. Warm for winter.

  Mrs. Toristel might have asked him to buy it. But lately Mrs. Toristel had been talking about making over one of her daughter’s old winter dresses for Nora. Would she even dare to ask the magician to buy Nora material for new clothes? The cloth was bound to be more expensive in Semr.

  Aruendiel was looking over the water, arms folded. Nora suddenly thought—why?—of the day they’d flown to Semr, after Raclin chased them, and how Aruendiel had stood alone, checking his hand for tremors. Did he find any? She could not get the image out of her head. Then she remembered the calm weight of his hand—the same hand—on her shoulder when she faced Ilissa. He would not let go, even when Ilissa’s magic fought him through Nora’s body.

  An undefined emotion nagged at her. I want to know more, she thought—about magic and how magicians are made. About this magician. If I leave now, I believe I’ll regret it.

  She hesitated, then picked up the bundles and walked along the quay until she reached the spot where Aruendiel stood. Across the water, a skiff was making its way toward them.

  “I haven’t thanked you for buying me that fabric. It was very—” She wanted to find exactly the right word, one that would not annoy him all over again. “Very decent of you.”

  “There’s no reason to thank me,” he said, not looking at her. “It’s my duty to see that those living under my roof are fed and clothed.”

  “Well, I thank you anyway, because I’m pleased to have something comfortable to wear when the weather gets cold.”

  Aruendiel nodded, then turned to regard her. “I should remember to make allowances for you. You are a foreigner. It is not your fault that you do not always know what is appropriate and what is not.”

  It was not much of an apology. But Nora could not bring herself to apologize for asking the shopkeeper for correct change, either. The ferryman rowed another ten strokes closer before she answered. “I did not think that you were so concerned with social niceties.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because you’re a magician. Because, from what I’ve observed, you usually do what you want to do without worrying about the opinions of other people or their notions of propriety.”

  “That may be true. But here we are talking about my notions of propriety.”

  “Then maybe you should reexamine them.”

  The skiff bumped against the quay, and the sunburned young ferryman helped Nora into the boat. She sat in the bow and watched the walls and roofs of Semr recede across the water, the gray bulk of the palace crouching at the top of the city. Aruendiel sat crookedly in the stern, looking out to sea.

  Whistling, the ferryman steered them against the dock. “Fastest crossing I’ve had all day,” he remarked, sounding pleased. “Tide’s running hard right now, but we hardly felt it. That’ll be four silver beads for the both of you.”

  Aruendiel gave him two beads. “The lady can pay for herself,” he said. Nora did so, wondering if this was some gesture of respect, but thinking it was more likely that Aruendiel was simply being cheap.

  Chapter 20

  Aruendiel jerked his horse’s head around and circled back to where the girl was plodding along on the bay mare that he had just paid too much money for. “Is your mount lame, that it cannot go any faster?” he inquired.

  “No. I can’t go any faster.” Nora was clinging to both the reins and the saddle pommel with white-knuckled concentration, in the untested but powerful conviction that if she loosened her grip, she would instantly tumble to the ground. She shifted her weight in the sidesaddle, searching for a comfortable point of balance, not finding it.

  “Ridiculous,” he said. “Your mare is about to take root, she’s moving so slowly. Have you never ridden a horse before?”

  “I used to ride all the time. At Ilissa’s.”

  He snorted disdainfully. “Do you think that was really a horse?”

  “What else would it have been?”

  “A sheep, a goat—even a Faitoren that Ilissa felt like punishing.”

  “Whatever I was riding, it didn’t seem as tall, and it was a lot steadier. How far to your castle?”


  “Normally, it’s three days’ ride. At this rate—” Aruendiel leaned over, twitched the reins out of Nora’s hands, and slapped the horse with them. The mare broke into a slow trot. Feeling as though she were perched at the top of a swaying ladder, Nora restrained a shriek. “At this rate, perhaps we will get home in five days,” he said. “It’s a waste of horseflesh, putting you on that mare. You would have done just as well on a donkey, and it would have cost half the beetles.”

  “I thought gentlemen didn’t quibble about money.”

  “We are traveling by horseback for your benefit, Mistress Nora,” he said. “If I were to travel as I prefer, I would be home by tomorrow morning.”

  “And how is that?” she asked. He urged his horse forward without bothering to reply.

  They were riding through a landscape of thorny scrub and tidal marsh, strewn with a rubble of stone blocks. The place felt oddly desolate, for all that it was so close to the city across the river. A row of columns lay prone and half-covered by mud and sea grass, but still perfectly parallel. The remains of a paved road surfaced under their horses’ hooves, then disappeared into the soil. Nora tried to piece together in her mind’s eye the buildings and streets that had once been here.

  Bracing herself, she gave the reins a shake as she had seen Aruendiel do and caught up with him. “What is this ruin?” she asked.

  “Old Semr.”

  “What happened to it?”

  He looked faintly annoyed at her question, but answered: “The city was taken by a hostile army, the Taurnii. It fell, literally. The walls and roofs came down, and the sea rushed in. The besiegers slaughtered those who managed to escape.”

  Another of those explanations that only raised more questions. “Do you mean there was an earthquake?”

  “No, it was poor magic. Or rather, powerful magic that was poorly used.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course not. You know nothing of magic, or of history.”

  “But I’m interested,” Nora said swiftly. “Please, tell me what happened.”

  “Well,” he said, after a moment’s consideration, “in truth it is not such a long story, if one leaves out the history of King Perlo’s War.

  “Old Semr was built with magic, most of it—its walls and gates and towers and palaces and hanging gardens. The wizard Mererish Agor laid it out for King Corbos Bullface centuries ago. They say it was a magnificent city. New Semr, where we just came from, is an overgrown trading village by comparison.

  “That ceramic lion you broke,” he added, “it came from Old Semr.”

  Before Nora could correct him about breaking the lion, he went on: “The risk of using magic to build something, whether it’s a building or an entire city, is that the edifice is only as strong as the magic itself. If something happens to the magic, the structure simply collapses. The Taurnii wizards removed the spells that had built Old Semr, and the stones and timbers flung themselves apart like mad things. So said the few survivors.”

  “Why was the city never rebuilt?” Nora asked.

  “That is the more complicated part of the story. The simplest reason is that people began to consider this site unlucky.”

  That would explain why the place was so quiet, Nora thought. Nothing moved among the rocks and marshes except for a few shorebirds and a distant boy clamming on a muddy inlet. The silence felt as big and clean as the sky after the clamor of New Semr.

  After half an hour, they rode through a pair of broken pillars, and Aruendiel said that they had just gone through one of Old Semr’s twelve gates. The countryside took on a more domestic, bucolic feel, as they began passing fenced plots and whitewashed houses. Chickens and the occasional pig wandered across their path. Nora kept reining in the mare to avoid a collision until Aruendiel told her sharply that her horse could find its way around the other animals without her interference.

  After a while she said, with some resentment: “I didn’t break that lion.”

  “The lion?”

  “The ceramic lion in the palace. I didn’t break it. I told you that at the time.”

  “It’s an interesting question, how that figure came to be broken.” He gave her a searching glance. “I don’t know the answer yet.”

  “Frankly, it looked to me as though the lion jumped,” Nora said. “Could it have been, well, some kind of magical figure?” Listen to me, she thought irritably, I sound as crazy as the rest of them.

  “It was an ordinary clay figure,” Aruendiel said. “Nothing unusual, except for being extremely valuable.”

  Nora looked down at her left hand, holding the reins. The ring gleamed on her finger. “Do you still think that I’m Ilissa’s spy?”

  Aruendiel turned to regard her again. “No.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I could tell how much magic Ilissa was using, when she tried to kidnap you,” he said. “She obviously encountered a great deal of resistance. I still don’t trust that ring of yours, but—” He shrugged. “She was not using it to control you.”

  Nora felt a hidden knot of tension loosen. But she was not entirely free. “I have to be honest,” she said haltingly. “Part of me wanted to go with her. I was so afraid, and it seemed that if I only let go and gave in to her, everything would be all right.”

  “And you did give in,” Aruendiel said.

  “I thought I would be stronger, the second time I met Ilissa. I wasn’t.”

  “What makes Ilissa’s magic so dangerous,” he said, “is that, usually, she does not force you to do anything truly against your will. She only makes you do what you wish to do.” The wind blew strands of hair across his face, making it hard to read his expression.

  “I did try to fight—” Nora began.

  “Her kind of magic is very difficult to resist. Because it speaks to the secret wishes of the heart, the fears and desires that we may not even recognize ourselves. I do not imagine, Mistress Nora, that you had any great wish to follow Ilissa back to her domain and become enslaved to her again. But even a slight inclination, a divided mind, would be enough for her. She offered you something you wanted, in some measure. It would be strange if you did not take it.”

  Quickly Nora looked away, to study with blurred vision the bent backs of laborers in the adjacent barley field. She did not know exactly why the tears had sprung up, whether it was because she was ashamed or relieved to hear what Aruendiel had said.

  “I am not telling you this to discomfit you, Mistress Nora,” he said. “Whatever hidden thoughts that Ilissa found in your heart and turned to her own uses—you might never have acted on them otherwise. I do not pretend to read them; they are your private concern.”

  Nora nodded, unwilling to trust her voice to hold steady. They had ridden well past the barley field before she ventured to speak again.

  “But how can anyone resist her, then?”

  “Knowing your own secrets before Ilissa can steal them, that is one protection,” he said. “Easier in theory than in practice. Otherwise, some shielding spells are effective. But she has entrapped many people, including some skilled in magic, who should have known better.”

  “You said that before,” Nora said. “Are you one of those people?”

  She could tell just from the way his gloved hands shifted their grip on the reins that the question made him angry, and she knew what his answer would be. “Yes,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “What happened? I was a fool.”

  Nora said cautiously: “You had a love affair with her.”

  “At one time, yes.”

  “Because of her magic?”

  “No,” he said with a dry laugh. “She didn’t need to use magic, at least at first. I was idiotic enough on my own to take her as my mistress. The magic she worked came later.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  “Oh, there were various spells, very subtle, layer upon layer,” he said, grimacing. “Gods, I kept finding them and pulling them away, lik
e cobwebs, for weeks afterward. Spells to rule my thoughts, to cloud my judgment—but everything was done very carefully, nothing so obvious that it might give me alarm. A more accomplished version of what she did to you.

  “It was pleasant while it lasted, I will give her that. I remember feeling extremely fit and alert, although in reality I was blind and deaf to what was happening to me. Ilissa’s magic, her presence itself, seemed to hone and amplify my own. I began to think of all kinds of interesting possibilities that I had never brought myself to consider before.

  “Ilissa had certain ambitions—still has them now, no doubt. She wanted to rule over more than just the Faitoren. She thought that I would be the perfect partner—or instrument—for her purposes. Well, I began to agree with her. Emperor over the five kingdoms? Why not? With my magic and Ilissa’s combined, no one could stand against us.”

  Fascinated, Nora felt a faint consternation that Aruendiel had been so easily seduced by Ilissa’s grandiose plots. “And what happened?”

  “You know how it is with the Faitoren, do you not? Always another ball, another hunt. We talked grand strategy, and meanwhile the days seemed to slip away.”

  “Yes,” Nora said thoughtfully, “it was like that for me, too. Without the plans for world conquest, of course.”

  “From time to time, I was fleetingly aware of odd thoughts, as though there were a voice muttering in my head, questioning things that I accepted to be true. I was far too beguiled with Ilissa and her plans and the Faitoren’s endless, mindless merrymaking to pay attention.

  “Then one evening I was passing time with Raclin and his companions, as had become my custom, I regret to say. They were casting lots and drinking, until fisticuffs broke out between Raclin and another Faitoren. The one called Gaibon, in fact—the Faitoren who took Bouragonr’s place. Raclin knocked Gaibon down, and Gaibon swore that he would be revenged, and Raclin swore that he would knock Gaibon down as many times as it took to teach him not to cheat. And the rest of us all laughed, and I thought to myself what good, high-spirited fellows they both were, Raclin and Gaibon, and how fortunate I was to have them as comrades.