“And the voice in my head said very clearly, ‘Raclin and Gaibon, they’re a pair of treacherous louts, both equally worthless, except that Raclin is the more vicious of the two.’
“I felt a great sense of release to hear this. It was my voice, I realized—my own mind speaking to me.
“After that, I began to notice all kinds of occasions when my thoughts seemed to diverge in completely opposite directions. I would spend the day hunting with great pleasure, and yet recall how much hunting bored me. There was a human girl there, too, a peasant girl that they’d married to Raclin, same as you, and something about the way they treated her bothered me. But I did nothing.
“Eventually—after far too long—it occurred to me that I’d been enchanted.”
“I heard a voice, too,” Nora said. “But I didn’t listen to it, most of the time.”
“A mistake on your part,” he said. “But it was unpardonable carelessness for me, an experienced magician, to miss so many obvious signs of enchantment.” He smiled, but there was no good humor in his expression.
“I went to Ilissa and taxed her with my discovery. Of course she did not deny it. She could not. Instead she tried to soothe me, first with caresses and sweet words, then—incredibly—with more magic. The arrogance of that woman! As though I had not already learned to recognize the touch of her spells, like poison lullabies.
“But it was fortunate that she overstepped in that fashion. It goaded me. I fought back, undoing every piece of her magic that I could find. I didn’t know as much then about Faitoren magic as I do now, but I knew enough. I found more spells that Ilissa had cast on me, and destroyed them, and then I began to unfasten the spells around me, the ones that are woven into the fabric of her domain. By the time I paused, the place where we stood looked very different—you would never recognize Ilissa’s palace without her magic—and for the first time I could see that Ilissa was frightened. She was afraid that I would strip it all away, no doubt, all the pretty things around her, even her own face.
“She rained down abuse on me, both verbal and magical. For a while, it was rather entertaining, and then I grew tired of hearing what a vain, deceitful, barbaric, clod-headed, puny-loined cad I was. I came away knowing that I had a new enemy, although not realizing quite how much Ilissa hated me or to what lengths she would go for revenge. That was only the first engagement in what has been a very long war.
“And it makes a long story. It is not a tale that I have broken in by frequent telling, so it tends to run away at a gallop when given the chance. At any rate, you see that you are not the only one who has been Ilissa’s dupe.”
“What happened to the girl? The peasant girl? You didn’t try to save her?”
“No.” He sounded grim. After a moment, he added, “It was only later that we realized how many young women had disappeared in the vicinity of the Faitoren, and discerned what was happening to them.”
“How many—?”
“I could not tell you.”
They rode on for a while in silence, and then Aruendiel asked brusquely, “How did you know that Ilissa had been my mistress?”
Nora tried to untangle the threads of her intuition. “Because you two hate each other so much! And you talk about her as though you knew her well. Also, something she said to you in Semr made me wonder.”
“Indeed.” He did not seem pleased by her deduction. “I thought that Ilissa might have told you. Or that you had heard some old gossip floating around in Semr.”
“No, I didn’t hear that in Semr,” Nora said, and then regretted it.
“Ah, what did you hear?” he inquired. When she did not reply at once, he laughed sardonically. “I suppose they told you all kinds of interesting things. People love to gossip about magicians.”
“They said you killed your wife,” Nora said, surprising herself, the words slipping out of her mouth as swiftly as an arrow.
Aruendiel’s face hardened. “Well, I did. So the fools have a good story to pass along to other fools.”
There was nothing graceful to say at this juncture, so again Nora said the first thing that rose to her lips. “Why?” Even if she knew the answer already, she did not understand it. No matter how awful Adam had been, Nora had never thought about killing him.
“Did they not tell you in Semr?” he asked.
She dropped her eyes to the back of her horse’s head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to pry.”
“But you are prying,” he said. “We have wasted enough time today discussing my biography.”
He spurred his horse ahead and vanished around a bend in the road. Did he mean to abandon her? Nora cautiously urged her horse to a faster gait, but for the rest of the afternoon, he was in sight only occasionally, when the road straightened for a stretch.
They spent the night with one of Aruendiel’s friends, a magician named Nansis Abora, who lived in a tidy cottage surrounded by vegetable plots. He had disheveled gray hair and a faint stutter. That night she lay in bed in a slant-ceilinged loft over the kitchen and listened to the two magicians talk late into the night, mostly about Nansis Abora’s recent work on various problems in time-travel magic. It sounded like a fairly abstruse branch of magic because of the complicated astronomical calculations involved; she wondered sourly if Aruendiel was really following the other magician’s explanation. In the morning she was so sore from the ride of the day before that she could hardly climb down the ladder from the loft, let alone mount her horse. Nansis Abora insisted on doing a spell to relieve the pain, for which she was very grateful. Aruendiel had not offered to help.
He was in a better mood, though, as they set out. At least, he stayed within view. From time to time, he pointed out a castle that he had once helped capture or made an acid observation about the condition of a farmer’s livestock. By the end of the day she had learned nothing more about magic, but had picked up a few tips about siegecraft and animal husbandry that, she supposed, might prove useful someday.
On the second evening, Aruendiel arranged lodgings at a farmhouse, paying the young farmer with a silver bead and magic: spells to keep the rain out of the thatch, cure a toothache, and sweeten the well water. Nora awoke once during the night and saw, in the moonlight, that the space in front of the hearth where Aruendiel had been sleeping was vacant. She lay awake on her pallet for some time, wondering what she would do now that he had abandoned her after all. But in the morning he was lying there as though he had never stirred, his long limbs looking somehow askew even under the folds of his cloak.
As they were preparing to leave, she asked Aruendiel how much farther they had to go. About a dozen karistises, he said. She pressed him to put it in terms that she could understand. “We could be home by late tonight,” he said, “if the roads are not too bad, and if you are not as slow as you were the first day.”
“I could go faster if I didn’t have to ride sidesaddle,” Nora said. “It’s ridiculous to make women balance sideways.” As though horses weren’t huge and terrifying enough already.
She expected a caustic remark on her ignorance of social niceties, but to her surprise, Aruendiel smiled fractionally. “I agree with you. Women had a little more sense when I was younger. My mother never rode sidesaddle in her life.”
“Really?” Nora said, taken aback. Of course Aruendiel had had a mother, but it was odd to contemplate. “When did they start riding sidesaddle?”
“It was one of those crazes that start in the cities. It came in with the modern fashion for long skirts.”
Intrigued, Nora almost asked him for more details about this piece of fashion history, but thought better of it. “If I had the right kind of saddle,” she pointed out, “I could ride astride, and we could make better time.” Without answering, he heaved his own saddle onto his horse’s back and tightened the cinch under the horse’s belly. “Or would it be too unseemly for me to ride astride?” she asked sharply.
With a grunt, Aruendiel lifted her saddle from the fence. “There i
s nothing seemly about a bad rider,” he said. “You sit on the horse as though you’re made of wood. I once turned the Forest of Nevreng into cavalry for the count of Middle Duxirent. They rode much as you do.”
“Well, they didn’t have to ride sidesaddle, did—oh!” She had just noticed the saddle’s transformation. “Thank you! I don’t suppose you could shorten my skirt, too?”
“I am no tailor,” he said, frowning. “Rip the side seams out if you must.”
Riding astride on the transformed saddle, Nora did not exactly feel as though she and the horse were one, but at least they seemed to be more or less on the same team. It was easier to keep pace with Aruendiel. “There’s something I don’t understand,” she said to him. “Why can’t you just use your magic to wish us home? Hirizjahkinis moved the whole court to her country the other night and back again. Why can’t you do the same?”
“That was a temporary dislocation spell—and the Kavareen had much to do with it, if I’m not mistaken,” he said in a disapproving tone. “She is becoming far too dependent on that creature.”
“All right, but why can’t you do, um, a permanent dislocation spell, without the Kavareen?”
“Would you like me to summon up the winds to blow you to my castle, the way they took you from Ilissa’s castle?”
“No,” Nora said definitely. “That was enough excitement for one lifetime. But here’s the real question. Why don’t you use magic more often? Last night you could have changed, oh, a spoon or something into a bed for yourself, instead of sleeping on the floor. Or why even pay the farmer for a night’s lodging? You could have made him believe that you paid him, I’m sure.”
“Ah!” The question seemed to stir up a mixture of disdain and interest in Aruendiel. “The wizard Po Luin, when he traveled, used to construct a new city every night and then dismantle it in the morning. He used pebbles and twigs for the buildings, ants or field mice for the people. He disliked the country intensely; he found it dull.”
Nora wondered how interesting a city of former ants could be. But she said: “Why not do something like that? Everyday life is hard here, much harder than in my world. Why not use magic to make things easier?”
“Ilissa asked me a similar question once.”
Nora ignored the implied reproach. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her that magic was not a plaything. She found that very amusing.” He rode along for a few moments before speaking again. “I have been in worlds where people use almost no magic, like your own, and worlds where they use magic for almost everything. The Faitoren must have come from a place like the latter, originally. They cosset themselves with magic, and well, you see the result. It’s a pretty life, but none of it is real.
“Also,” Aruendiel added, his voice quickening with irritation, “it would be dishonorable to use magic to cheat a peasant.”
“I wasn’t seriously suggesting that.”
“I hope not.”
Another few minutes of silence, until Nora said: “Hirizjahkinis said that you taught her how to be a magician.”
“Yes. She was an excellent pupil.”
Before she could lose her nerve, Nora asked: “Will you teach me? I’d like to learn how—how to be a magician.”
The question amused him more than she would have liked. “A doubtful prospect. Very few are suited to become magicians.”
“What does it take?”
“Years of study and practice. But first one must know what magic is.”
The road dipped, and they splashed across a stream. “Well, what is magic? Do you command spirits, like Prospero? Did you sell your soul to the devil, like Faustus?”
Aruendiel wanted to know who Prospero and Faustus were. She tried to explain: “Magicians from stories in my world. Written, oh, some four hundred years ago.” She had never thought about it before, but surely the Elizabethans were almost the last to use magic as a plot device in serious literature. After Cervantes, the enchanters were living on borrowed time. “Prospero has a couple of magical servants,” she went on, “the most powerful being a spirit, Ariel, who can do things like raise storms and tread the ooze of the salt deep. Faustus makes a deal with the devil to acquire magical powers, but in the end he goes to hell, if you know what that is.”
“I do not command spirits,” Aruendiel said, with asperity. “It’s true, there is magic that is based on enslaving demons and spirits of various kinds, and I have studied it, but it is not the kind of magic that I practice now.”
“Well, then, what is magic? The kind that you practice now?”
He gave her a penetrating look. “Once you have worked magic, then you start to understand it.”
“That seems a bit circular,” Nora objected. Aruendiel’s only response was an impatient tilt of the head. “All right, I see,” she said. “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
He seemed struck by the sentiment. “That is well put.”
“Thanks, but I didn’t think of it myself,” Nora said.
Chapter 21
The countryside took on a different character when they left the lowlands around Semr. The road dwindled to a muddy track that snaked around wooded hills scabbed with bare black rock. Aruendiel said that once they crossed the Trollsblade Hills, they would enter the basin of the river Uel, which would bring them into his own lands. Nora asked, as a joke, whether there were any trolls in the area, and Aruendiel said no, not for at least two hundred years. She registered the stippling of yellow in the leaves of the trees, and was just wondering if the winters here would be as bad as Hirizjahkinis had warned, when they came into yet another tiny village.
This one seemed unusually lively. A crowd of at least fifty people were gathered around a wooden framework in the village square. As Nora and Aruendiel rode closer, Nora figured out what the frame was for. A rope dangled from the top beam. The prisoner crouched at the foot of the gibbet, bound with ropes.
“They are having some sport,” Aruendiel said, spurring his horse forward. When Nora caught up, he was already talking to a man in brown with a small, tight-featured face like a pebble. The village headman, Nora gathered as she listened.
He gave short, reluctant answers to Aruendiel’s questions. The prisoner had been condemned to death for murder. A little girl, missing three days. No, they hadn’t waited for the magistrate.
“This village is the possession of Lord Olven Obardies, is it not?” Aruendiel asked. “Lord Olven is my vassal; I am Lord Aruendiel of the Uland. He would not be pleased to have one of his peasants put to death without proper authority.”
“The bastard confessed already, your lordship. And it’s good riddance. No kids are safe around him.”
“Yes,” said Aruendiel, glancing at the prisoner huddled beside the gibbet. “I see he lost a hand. The left hand, so it was not theft.”
“We caught him pawing a boy, two years since. We should have hung him then.”
“Remarkable that he managed to kill a child with only one hand,” Aruendiel observed. “How did he kill her, by the way?”
“We can’t say,” said the headman, a note of exasperation entering his voice. “We can’t find her body, and the maggot won’t tell us.”
“You have not loosened his tongue enough.”
“We’ve tried, your lordship. The stones and irons both. But she wasn’t either of the places he said. We thought we’d have another go with the irons before we hang him.”
“Leave him to me,” said Aruendiel. “It’s my right and obligation to examine him, and he will not lie to me.”
The man in brown looked thoughtfully at the prisoner, then back to Aruendiel. “They say you’re a wizard, as well as a lord. You have spells to make him talk?”
“A magician. I have spells that will pluck the truth from him as fast as the ravens pluck the flesh from a hanged man’s carcass.”
The man in brown seemed pleased by the simile. He nodded at the two men who stood guard over the bound man. They yanked the prisoner t
o his feet, his face brocaded with blood and dirt, as Aruendiel slid off his horse. He studied the man for an instant, then touched his forehead.
The prisoner jerked back as though he had been burned. He screamed once and fell to his knees, heaving for air, pawing uselessly at his throat with the stump of his unbound arm. Interested, the crowd pressed closer. Nora looked away, then back again in time to see a new, bright stream of blood trickling from the prisoner’s nose.
Enough, Nora said to herself. Over the heads of the crowd, she called out to Aruendiel to stop, then realized that she was speaking English. Even when she switched to Ors, Aruendiel gave no sign of hearing her. The people around her did, though; she was collecting unfriendly looks.
Suddenly the prisoner broke into speech. “No,” he howled. “No. I didn’t.” Another scream, and then, more clearly: “No, I didn’t kill her. I went to the house because I was hungry. I thought Massy would give me something to eat. The little girl wasn’t even there.”
“He’s lying, the bastard,” someone else said. Angry cries of assent rose from the crowd.
“He’s gone back on his story,” said the man in brown, in deep frustration. “I thought you said you’d get the truth out of him.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Aruendiel said. “He lied to you before, when he said that he killed her. He did not kill her, and he does not know who did. You can let him go.”
The two men on either side of the prisoner looked from Aruendiel to the headman and back again.
“I said—” Aruendiel began.
The man in brown evidently came to the end of a quick calculation. “Let him go, boys,” he said. “You heard his lordship. Let the sheepfucker go. He didn’t kill the little girl, his lordship says. His lordship’s magic says.”
The guards began to untie the prisoner’s bonds. Discontent buzzed through the crowd.
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 28