The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  “Irseln is still very angry about being killed and eaten by her family,” Aruendiel said drily. After a moment, he added: “Mistress Massy was resourceful enough to find her way around a truth-telling spell, which is to say nothing at all. But she found the stool’s continuing movement unsettling. That is what finally drove her to confess.”

  “Oh, so you didn’t have to torture her?” Nora said, with an edge in her voice.

  “Torture? Oh, you are thinking of Short Bernl. I only subjected him to some additional unpleasantness because no one in the village would have believed him otherwise.”

  Nora frowned. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “They accepted his first confession, even though it was obviously false, simply because they had tortured him. That’s the problem with torture,” he added irritably. “It is practically useless unless it’s combined with a truth spell. Most people will say anything under torture, even before the irons are fully hot.”

  “There are other reasons why torture is bad, but at least we can agree on that one,” Nora said. She was silent for a moment. “Did the other children know what Massy did? They told me their mother found an injured goat and made it into stew.”

  Aruendiel shrugged. “The taste of goat and the taste of human flesh are quite different.”

  “How would you know that?”

  He gave her a sideways look. “There are some old spells that call for the magic-worker to consume the recently dead. A small portion.”

  “That’s such a foul idea I don’t even want to know where the dead bodies come from,” Nora said. Her idea of practicing magic someday suddenly seemed slightly less attractive.

  “It’s a very obsolete branch of magic,” Aruendiel said. “Well, the children might not have known the taste of goat, either. The only time peasants like these eat meat is the Black Offering at New Year’s.” He added: “The father might have noticed something amiss—if he hadn’t been in his cups. Massy told how much he had enjoyed the stew.”

  “Horrible. Poor Irseln! I don’t blame her for being angry.”

  Aruendiel made a vague noise of assent and passed a hand over his face. “I will judge Mistress Massy’s case tomorrow, before we leave.” His gaze was locked on the bones, still wrapped in cloth and lying on the hearth. Suddenly the story that Hirizjahkinis had told came back to Nora, and a mad, shimmering, impossible notion took shape in her mind.

  “Can you bring her back?” she asked.

  The stool lying on its side righted itself suddenly, then fell over with a thud.

  Aruendiel rubbed the back of his neck again. He spoke as though he were talking to himself: “Can I? The child’s spirit is here and willing; there is no need to summon it.”

  “Oh, if you can, of course you must!” Nora said passionately. “Yes, bring her back! You can do it?”

  “It is perilous to wake the dead,” he said, much as he had told the queen in Semr.

  “But she’s already awake.” The stool rocked and shuddered as though to underscore her words. “And Irseln was only a little girl,” Nora added. “All those years ahead, stolen from her. She deserves to come back, to live her life.”

  Aruendiel met her eyes with a long, pensive look. He spoke more kindly than before: “Many, many children die. They cannot all be returned to the living world.”

  “I don’t know, maybe they should be,” Nora said. She dropped her gaze, annoyed at the quaver in her own voice. “But here we’re talking about just one child. Irseln.”

  Aruendiel looked away, as if in search of another thought, and his crooked shoulders seemed to tighten under an invisible load. “Very well,” he said. “Fetch some wood for the fire, Mistress Nora.”

  * * *

  Aruendiel laid the fragile bones out carefully on a quilt taken from the bed, reassembling Irseln’s skeleton as best he could. With the kindling that Nora had brought, he filled in the missing parts of the skeleton, then scooped up the bones and twigs and dropped them into the iron pot. He emptied one of Massy’s pitchers into the vessel. Then, with a heave, he hoisted it to hang on a hook above the fire. Using his pocketknife, he scraped up some dirt from the packed earth floor and threw it into the pot.

  Without a word, he went out of the hut. Nora waited, listening to the restless movements of the fire and the faint hooting of owls outside. Irseln’s stool creaked from time to time.

  Aruendiel returned half an hour later, carrying a saddlebag over his shoulder and a small, stunned-looking brown rabbit pressed against his chest. The animal roused itself to a last spasm of hopeless kicking before Aruendiel killed it with a casual wrench of the neck. Like unscrewing a jar of pickles. Nora hoped he had not seen her wince.

  Aruendiel put the rabbit into the pot and poked the fire. Obediently, the flames surged around the base of the pot. He watched for several minutes with an appraising eye, and then turned away. “You gave all of the ham to the dog?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She added, a trifle defensively, “There wasn’t much.”

  They dined on the rest of their provisions—bread, a sliver of cheese each, and Nansis Abora’s peach preserves—while the iron pot simmered beside them. After a while the meaty smell of broth filled the hut. Nora, not quite full, tried to ignore it. She was dying to find out more about what was happening inside the pot, but Aruendiel seemed disinclined to talk. The only time he responded with more than a monosyllable was when she asked how long the spell would take.

  “As long as need be,” he said irritably. “Are you an idiot? How long does it ever take to die or be born?”

  After that, he pushed his stool back and settled himself stiffly with his back against the wall, arms resting on his knees, his eyes half-closed. Nora waited where she was, not wanting to miss anything in case the spell took a dramatic turn, until Aruendiel frowned at her and directed her to find a sleeping place. It seemed indecorous to take Massy’s bed. Nora opted for the pile of straw, feeling somber.

  It had been a long, fatiguing day, but her sleep was uneasy. She woke up several times, thinking that the spell must be over by now, that she would now find out what had taken shape inside the darkness of the closed pot, but each time she opened her eyes to see the fire still burning and Aruendiel still crouched spiderlike in the shadows across the room.

  Toward dawn Nora fell into a deeper sleep and dreamed that she was about to fail a high school French exam.

  Chapter 22

  The magician was gone and the fire was out when Nora awoke. Milky morning light streamed through the windows of the hut. The iron pot still hung in the fireplace, the lid firmly in place.

  In the quiet of the new day, she felt faintly embarrassed to recollect how seriously she had urged Aruendiel to bring the dead child back to life. She had gotten carried away: Irseln’s death was a crime right out of one of the more gruesome Grimm’s fairy tales, and she had imagined a fairy-tale ending. If she looked inside the pot now, Nora thought, there would be only a few bones and sticks floating in a gritty broth.

  The flimsy door opened and Aruendiel entered. His eyes were shadowed with lack of sleep, but he moved more easily than Nora would have expected, the way a younger man would carry himself. He grunted by way of greeting, then went over to the fireplace. Wrapping his hand inside a fold of his cloak, he uncovered the pot, but replaced the lid before Nora could see inside.

  “Is she alive?” Nora asked.

  “Still dead.”

  “Oh.” Despite herself, Nora felt deflated. “That’s too bad.”

  Aruendiel snorted and tore a piece from the loaf of bread he had brought into the hut. “They’ll bring up Mistress Massy soon to be judged. We can leave after that.”

  After a moment Nora ventured to ask: “Will she be executed?”

  “It’s the penalty for murder,” Aruendiel said with a twitch of his shoulder, the expression on his face so black that Nora felt disinclined to pursue the conversation.

  They were finishing the bread when footsteps and voices sounde
d outside. It was a large crowd, judging from the noise, but only the headman, Massy and her guards, and a few others came inside. Massy’s face was drawn, her eyes reddened but dry.

  As she entered the hut, the stool in the middle of the floor creaked loudly.

  One of the other men was Rorpin, Massy’s husband, shaky and pale under an unkempt beard. He had obviously sobered up enough to learn exactly what had been happening in his family over the past few days. He stood a small distance from his wife, as though he could not bear to be too near her, but there was something painfully protective in how he watched her.

  The headman greeted Aruendiel with more friendliness than he had shown the day before. “Here she is, your lordship,” he said. “All that’s left is for you to pronounce sentence, and then we’ll take her down and hang her. You’ll be wanting to resume your journey, I’m sure.”

  “Thank you, Pelgo,” said Aruendiel, with a faint curl of his lip. “There is, however, another matter to attend to first.” He directed two of the villagers to remove the pot from the fireplace. It was only barely cool enough to handle; they let it down suddenly with a thud. “Open it,” said Aruendiel to the headman.

  Lifting the lid carefuly, Pelgo stared down in puzzlement. “What’s this?” Then he gasped.

  “It is the child Irseln’s body,” said Aruendiel, just as Nora recognized that the dark tangle of hair inside the pot was the top of a head.

  “What do you mean?” Pelgo said. “She was just bones. They ate her.”

  “What was consumed has been restored,” Aruendiel said.

  Gingerly, Pelgo prodded the head with a finger. “More of your magic,” he said grudgingly. “It’s a marvel, your lordship, but I can’t see the use of it. She’s still dead, isn’t she? And you’ll never get her out of that pot, not in one piece.” Nora had to agree: It was a large pot, but Irseln’s body was wedged into it as tightly as an orange into its peel.

  Grasping the girl by the nape of the neck, Aruendiel somehow—Nora did not quite see how—pulled her free. The child’s body dangled from his hand. Massy gave a cry and jerked against the restraining hands of the guards. Aruendiel laid the small, naked corpse on the dirt floor. It was perfectly formed, pale as pearl, the face relaxed and empty. Irseln’s father inched forward, knelt, and took the body in his arms. “Irseln?” he said. She did not look as though she were either dead or asleep, Nora thought—more like an extraordinarily realistic doll.

  “You see where her skull cracked,” said Aruendiel in a conversational tone. He indicated the wide, curving dent that began at the girl’s temple. Skin flowed smoothly over the break, as though the injury had healed years ago.

  Irseln’s father touched the scar as though to wipe it away, then ran his hands over the child’s limbs. It was as though seeing his daughter’s body whole again, almost unblemished, made him realize for the first time that she was really dead. He looked up at his wife. “Massy?” he said, his voice raw and puzzled. “You did this? You killed her?”

  Aruendiel cleared his throat. “Put her down,” he said. “There, by that stool.” He squatted to carve a circle in the dirt floor around Irseln with his pocketknife, then set the stool upright inside the circle, next to the body. The wooden stool shuddered, and then began to burn, although Aruendiel had not touched a flame to it. There was almost no smoke. The fire gnawed at the stool for a few minutes until nothing was left except a fine gray powdering of ash.

  It was hard to say what was different about Irseln’s body. A faint flush in the white skin, perhaps. A subtle tension or readiness in the small limbs, as though they were once again bound to a governing will.

  “Ah,” Aruendiel said, exhaling satisfaction. He lifted Irseln’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. “Her heart begins to beat. She is nearly ready.”

  “She is not breathing,” Rorpin said after a minute.

  Aruendiel reached inside his left sleeve and withdrew a long gray feather. He inserted the plumed end into one of the child’s nostrils and twisted it briskly.

  Irseln sneezed.

  It seemed to Nora that almost everyone in the room sucked in their breath at the same moment—Irseln included. Her body pinkened as her chest rose and fell, again and again and again, stronger each time.

  “Irseln? Irseln?” After a second’s hesitation, her father picked her up again. She opened her eyes and looked blankly at him, then at the other adults. “Irseln, little one, are you all right?”

  A look of wondering surprise crossed Irseln’s face. “Pa?” she said. Then the child’s eyes fell upon Massy.

  Massy smiled nervously. “Irseln, chick—”

  Irseln screamed, her small face contorting. “Ma killed me! She threw me down, she hurt my head!”

  “Hush, hush,” Massy said, her smile fixed. “You’re all right now, sweet, everything’s fine. You were asleep, you see, and now—”

  “No, not asleep, I died! My head hurt, I was scared!” Irseln clung to her father’s neck, glaring at Massy. “I hate you!” Her wails gained strength. There was nothing wrong with her breathing now.

  “What happened, Irseln? Tell me,” Rorpin said, with a glance at his wife.

  “She hurt my head,” Irseln said, putting a hand on her temple. “I laid down. Then I couldn’t get up. I tried to say help me, but she didn’t hear me. No one heard me.”

  “Then what happened, sweet?” her father asked.

  For a moment Irseln screwed up her face in concentration; then she closed her eyes and shook her head, looking frightened. “She killed me!” she said with an air of explaining the obvious. “I hate her! I hate her!”

  That was all they could get out of her, no matter how her father pressed her to tell what she had experienced after she lay down and died. “It’s useless to ask her,” Aruendiel said at last. “She remembers nothing more—they never do.” He was standing a little apart, his arms folded. “Now,” he added, “we have other business. Let us go outside.”

  “Yes,” said the headman, with a slight look of confusion, glancing at the child in Rorpin’s arms. “It’s time for the sentencing.”

  * * *

  As the assemblage regrouped under the decrepit apple tree, Nora was conscious of a low rumble of dissatisfaction in the crowd. Rorpin was holding Irseln, now dressed and calmer, by the hand. People stared at her and muttered. Nora assumed at first that they were questioning the justice of sentencing a murderer when the murderer’s victim was now alive and well and trying to pat a friendly dog—the same dog, Nora noticed, who had been chewing one of Irseln’s leg bones the day before. Listening more closely, however, Nora discovered that the villagers were more concerned that Irseln’s resurrection meant that there would be no hanging.

  The headman recited the charges in round, official tones. Whatever doubts he might have about the propriety of condemning Massy now, he showed no signs of them. Massy had not only committed murder and cannibalism and lied about it, but she was also guilty of wifely disobedience and an offense called child theft, depriving her husband of the fruit of his loins. They had thrown the book at her.

  Massy herself seemed to pay little attention. With a peevish expression, she turned her head slightly from side to side, her eyes flicking indifferently over the faces of the spectators.

  “Massy Rorpinan, you have been shown culpable of these crimes by your own confession and by signs and proofs indisputable and clear to the minds of men,” Aruendiel said rapidly, as though running through a formula that he had recited many times before. “You have violated most grievously the laws established and upheld by your liege lord and by His Majesty the Most Glorious Abele the Fourth. It is the will of these princes that lawbreakers suffer commensurate punishment so that injustices are avenged and the peace of the land is restored. Before I pronounce sentence upon you, Massy Rorpinan, what do you have to say on your own behalf?”

  “Why I should be punished, I don’t see,” she said bitterly. “I don’t know what it was you done to her, but she’s fine now.” />
  “True,” said Aruendiel with what Nora thought might have been a trace of amusement. “But she was dead—not to mention cooked and eaten—by your hand, and the law is strict about such matters. Do you have anything else to say for yourself?”

  There was an agitation in the crowd, the sound of running feet, high-pitched cries. Massy turned her head, eyes alight.

  The boy Horl erupted from the crowd, ducking away from a man who tried to hold him back, and threw his arms around his mother. An instant later, his sister Sova followed, bawling.

  A red-faced woman, tendrils of hair plastered damply to her neck and forehead, pushed through the crowd. “I had them shut up,” she said to Pelgo, panting a little, “but they slipped out when I was seeing to the goat. They been like wildcats ever since they heard what’s happening to their ma.”

  “Pig’s blood, get them out of here, will you? They’ll have another chance to see Massy before—that is, later.”

  The children were less than comforted. Sova’s sobbing redoubled. Massy tried to embrace them as much as her ropes allowed. Then suddenly, with a fierce movement of her hand, she shushed the children and raised wet, angry eyes to Aruendiel. “You asked me what I have to say for myself, your lordship? These kids are what I have to say for myself.

  “I didn’t mean to push Irseln that hard. Then before I knew it, she was dead. She’s a handful—you saw what she’s like—but I never meant to kill her, I swear.

  “What I did next—well, your lordship, I looked at her lying there, and it just came to me. Do you know what it’s like to hear your children crying because they don’t have enough to eat? Night after night? I do. At least my kids got one good meal. They didn’t know where it came from. They were just glad to have their bellies full, for once.

  “Rorpin knew. He didn’t say anything, but he knew, for all that he’s acting so sweet to the kid now. He was hungry, too.” Massy took a deep breath. “When I think of it, how my kids’ faces looked after they’d eaten their fill, how they fell asleep like kittens, I’d do it all over again.