The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  “But now—” She began to cry again. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Rorpin’s no father to them. If I’m gone, who’ll look after my children? What does one dead kid matter—who’s not even dead anymore—compared to four living kids?”

  The crowd grumbled its disapproval. “I got hungry kids, too, and I never chopped up one to feed the others,” muttered a woman standing near Nora.

  “Well, I tell you, if Massy gets off, she won’t have any trouble getting her kids to behave,” said a man. “Especially right before dinnertime.”

  Aruendiel’s voice cut harshly through the commentary. “What of the innocent man who was almost executed for the crime you committed?”

  “It wasn’t I who said he should die!” she said, flaring up. “And what if they did kill him? He was lucky to get off with losing a hand when they found him with the boy!”

  Aruendiel looked at her for a long time before he spoke again. “Massy Rorpinan, you took a human life, and you have shown little or no remorse,” he said. “Under the law and custom of this land, you deserve to be put to death.”

  Both Horl and Sova were crying now.

  “You have pleaded that your children will suffer if they are deprived of their mother. Yet it hardly seems a kindness to let them be raised by a mother who has already killed a child.”

  Massy groaned and drew her son and daughter so close that it seemed she would smother them against her body. She cried, “It’s death for my kids, too!”

  “No, only for you,” Aruendiel said. “But there is another way. As you say, the child Irseln has been restored to life. The unfortunate Bernl was not actually executed. The harm you have done has been remedied. I can offer you an alternative to the rope. Imprisonment, of sorts.”

  An audible wave of disappointment moved through the crowd. The headman narrowed his eyes. “We don’t have a place to lock her up, your lordship.”

  “You could stay here, Massy Rorpinan, with your children. You could live in their midst as they grow up. It would not be life as you live it now, but it would be life. Your punishment would be that you could not see them or hold them or speak to them.” Aruendiel paused, and his mouth twisted sardonically. “You would, however, be able to feed them.”

  Massy looked frantically at Aruendiel. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean exactly what I say. You have heard my offer.”

  “Not see my children?”

  “No.”

  “Never!”

  “Very well,” said Aruendiel, with a slight nod, as though to courteously acknowledge her choice. “As suzerain of these lands by blood and sword, taking into account the crimes of which you stand guilty, I hereby condemn you, Massy Rorpinan, to die by—”

  “Wait!” Massy shrieked. She was trembling. “You say—the other way—I would live?”

  He nodded.

  “Then I choose that way!”

  “You are sure?” he said, folding his arms.

  “Yes,” she said, sounding not sure at all.

  With the rest of the crowd, Nora waited for Aruendiel to reply, to pronounce the legal formula that he had begun to recite before.

  Instead Massy uttered a gurgling, half-strangled cry. Nora had the impression that she was getting to her feet—no, Massy was actually growing taller, her body elongating to impossible proportions, losing its human shape. She loomed swaying over the crowd, like a bent and twisted column. Eight feet above the ground, her thin face looked down, distorted with surprise, and she opened her mouth to say something. But the words were never heard as her features thickened and disappeared under the dark tide of a coarse, encroaching carapace devouring her skin. Massy spread her arms as if in entreaty, stretching them and bending them, snakelike, until they stiffened, grew hard and still, while dozens of twigs bearing leaves like green flags sprouted triumphantly from what had been soft flesh a few moments before.

  The new apple tree growing next to the old one trembled in the morning light, its thousands of leaves whispering urgently of fear, remorse, love, or only the movement of air.

  The crowd of onlookers stepped backward almost as one. The two children, stunned into quiet, stared up into the canopy of leaves above them, looking at the spot where Massy’s face had been. After a moment, an apple fell from a branch and thudded into the dust near Horl’s feet.

  He picked it up and looked at it as though he had never seen an apple before. Then he wiped it off and tucked it carefully inside his shirt.

  * * *

  Even after the horses were saddled, the headman seemed reluctant to let them go. “Twenty years, you say, twenty years she has to stay inside that tree? Why twenty years?”

  Nora could see that Aruendiel was irked to hear Pelgo say—as people already had many times that morning—that Massy was inside the tree. As the magician had informed Nora snappishly when she made the same mistake, Massy was not inside the tree; she was the tree. At this point, though, Aruendiel seemed to have abandoned hope of correcting the general misapprehension.

  “So the child Irseln will have time to grow up,” he said, shrugging.

  “And does it hurt her, being inside there?”

  “She’ll suffer the way trees suffer, if there’s no rain. Or if the winter’s bad,” Aruendiel said drily.

  “It doesn’t seem like much of a punishment, then, does it? I would have hanged her, myself, but then I’m not a wizard.”

  “No,” said Aruendiel, with a cold smile. “Oh, you might tell your villagers that there’s a curse on anyone who takes an axe to that apple tree before the twenty years is up. Just in case someone decides that Mistress Massy hasn’t suffered enough.”

  “A curse? No need to do that, your lordship. No one will touch the thing. I wouldn’t even eat the apples, myself.” He spat, painting a dark mark in the dust.

  “Just as well,” Aruendiel said. “They’re not for you.”

  The village seemed almost deserted as Aruendiel and Nora rode through it. The brief holiday excitement of crime and punishment was over, and the villagers were back at work, in their fields or huts. Or, Nora thought, intercepting a few glances from behind chinked shutters, they had decided to make themselves scarce until the magician had left town. When she and Aruendiel stopped at the baker’s hut to buy bread for the journey, it took a long time for the door to open, as though the baker had to gather his courage to answer Nora’s knock.

  Coming out of the hut with two loaves under her arm, Nora saw Horl and Sova watching from behind the corner of the building. “Hello,” she said hesitantly.

  The children looked at her, their eyes serious, until Sova broke the silence. “That wizard turned my ma into a tree.” Sova sounded almost proud of this fact, but Nora heard something accusatory in her words, too.

  “I know,” she said guiltily. “You must be sad about that.”

  “Irseln pulled my hair because I wouldn’t give her Princess Butter.”

  “Well, you should share,” Nora said, feeling a faint sense of déjà vu. She’d said the same thing, in English, about a thousand times to her own sisters when they were around Sova’s age.

  “Princess Butter doesn’t like her,” Sova said haughtily.

  Horl made a sudden movement as though to silence his sister, exactly the same gesture Massy had made that morning. “That man, that wizard—what he did to Ma—I’d like to—”

  “You’d like to do what?” Aruendiel came up behind Nora.

  “I’d like to kill you!” Horl exploded.

  A faint smile coiled its way along Aruendiel’s mouth, as though the threat rather pleased him. “You’re welcome to try,” he said. “But I am bigger than you and a powerful magician to boot, so I would probably kill you instead, and then who would look after your sisters?”

  A look of chagrin crossed Horl’s face, but he refused to back down entirely. “You shouldn’t have done that to my ma. Irseln isn’t even dead.”

  “Irseln lives because of my magic, as does your mother. Woul
d you rather have your mother hanged?”

  “She’s not alive. You made her a tree. A tree! She can’t even move.”

  “No,” said Aruendiel seriously, “you are right, she can’t move, but she lives the way trees live. And one day, twenty years from this morning, she will be restored to you as a human woman again.”

  Horl scowled, but Sova seemed interested. “Does she know it’s us?” she asked.

  “In some fashion. Trees are perceptive when they wish to be.”

  Sova nodded. “I told you so,” she said to Horl.

  Aruendiel twitched an eyebrow, then bowed toward Horl and Sova. “Good fortune to you both, Massy Rorpinan’s most excellent children,” he said, using the most ceremonial kind of Orsian address.

  “Good fortune to you, your most excellent lordship,” Sova responded correctly, bowing in return. After a moment, Horl bowed, too, a little awkwardly, and muttered the same formula.

  Enveloped in his black cloak, Aruendiel looked down at the children, then bent again and gave something to Horl. A small gray feather. The boy looked up, puzzled. “In case you have great need,” Aruendiel said, before turning on his heel and disappearing around the corner of the hut.

  “Take it. Keep it,” Nora said. “It’s magic. That’s how I got away from the Faitoren—remember, I told you?”

  “I remember,” said Sova, delighted. “Can I see it?” she asked her brother.

  Horl was looking both uncertain and a little angry, as though he would like to throw away the feather, but his sister’s request prompted him to clutch it more tightly. “He gave it to me, Sova,” he said.

  “Well, I must go now, too,” said Nora, regarding the children critically. She noticed again how thin they were, and remembered the bare larder in Massy’s hut. The children couldn’t live on apples alone. It might have been more practical for Aruendiel to turn Massy into a nanny goat or a cow. “Here,” she said, reaching into her own pocket and pulling out the twist of rag in which she had wrapped the silver beads from Semr. Counting out four quickly, then a fifth before she could reconsider, she held them out to the children.

  There was an avid look on Horl’s face, but he said: “We don’t need your money.”

  “That’s fine, take it anyway,” Nora said, pouring the beads into Sova’s palm and closing the girl’s fingers over them. “For Gissy and the baby.”

  She hurried around the side of the baker’s hut, back to the horses, leaving the children bent over the money. She was hoping that Aruendiel had not overheard her last exchange with them. But as they rode on, he asked how much she had given them. He raised his eyebrows when she told him.

  “Five silver beads is a small fortune in a village like that. They could live for months on that sum.”

  “Oh?” Nora said airily, feeling a twinge of dismay. She had not meant to be that generous. “But it cost two silver beads just to cross the river at Semr.”

  “Everything is expensive in Semr. These peasants are lucky to see a dozen silver beads in a year. Why did you give them the money? Trying to make up for the loss of their mother?”

  “No, just to help them survive. What of it? You offered to help them in great need. I don’t have any magic, and I do have some silver. They have nothing—except for those apples.”

  “There are many children with worse fates. You already talked me into bringing one unlucky imp back from the dead. One cannot provide for them all.”

  Nora remembered the flush of blood and breath in Irseln’s waxen body, and felt an odd, disproportionate surge of happiness, as though part of herself had been restored to life, too. “What you did was amazing! How did you do it? It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen.”

  For a moment Aruendiel looked rather gratified, an unexpected light coming into his gray eyes. He frowned to compose himself: “It went very well. The hardest part was restoring her body. It required a complex of interwoven spells—transformation, enhancement, some time manipulation.”

  “Yes, but then, the way she just woke up, as though she’d been asleep—that was incredible.”

  “That was the least of it. If a dead soul comes across a body that is, so to speak, empty but perfectly usable, it will often take possession of it. Especially its own body. There is likely to be recognition. Curiosity.” He spoke the last word with a hard edge in his voice. “And Irseln was eager, very eager, to return to her body,” he went on. “So that part, bringing Irseln’s soul and body together, was easy. It’s much chancier, of course, to bring back the dead when the soul has truly departed. The dead may not wish to return.”

  Nora thought about this for a moment. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  He gave her a slicing, sideways glance. “If you cannot imagine, Mistress Nora, then you have led a fortunate life indeed.”

  “Oh, I can think of dozens of reasons to wish to be dead,” she said. “‘And by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’” The lines translated rather well into Ors. “But once dead, would one want to stay dead? I don’t know. What happens after death?” She looked at him expectantly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not with all your magic?” Or from having died yourself, she wanted to ask—but something in his expression held her back.

  “No,” he said at last.

  “But this isn’t the first time that anyone has raised the dead?” Nora pressed.

  “Resurrection of the dead is a well-established branch of magic. There is always a demand for it. Although good resurrection spells are difficult even for the most skilled magicians. If they’re bungled, the results can be unpleasant, not to mention dangerous.”

  That meant zombies, Nora guessed. “Irseln—will she be all right? She’ll have a normal, healthy life?”

  “More or less.” After a moment, he added: “She will not have children, of course. That’s one thing magic cannot give back to the formerly dead—the power to bring forth life.”

  “Too bad,” Nora said. “Still, better than being dead.”

  “Oh, she’ll live all the longer. These peasant women wear themselves out in childbearing; half of them are dead by thirty. There are always plenty of widowers with motherless children in these villages. If Irseln wants a brood of brats,” he added carelessly, “she can follow her stepmother’s example and marry one of them.”

  “Yes, and look how well that turned out in Massy’s case. Those poor kids,” Nora said sadly.

  “No doubt you think I should have spared their mother, and left her to take care of the ragamuffins.”

  “No, I don’t,” Nora burst out. “In fact, I think you let Massy off easy. She killed that little girl and lied about it and fed the dead child to her own children. It’s like the violent fairy tales in my world that had to be sanitized for children. What I mean is, when something like this happens, people tell horror stories about it for generations. I don’t like the idea of executing anyone. But if anyone deserved it, it’s Massy.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like to have a cottage full of hungry children,” Aruendiel said shortly.

  “No, I don’t,” she said, slightly abashed. “Why, do you, Lord Aruendiel?”

  He scowled. “I’ve lived around poor peasants all my life. They may be stupid and brutal as beasts, some of them, but they’re not beasts. Children with empty stomachs, an empty larder—I cannot pass the harshest of judgments on Mistress Massy.”

  They rode along in silence for a minute, and then Aruendiel said: “You had no liking for the idea of being transformed into a geranium, even for a few days.”

  “No, but I hadn’t killed anyone, either.”

  “True. Have you never killed anyone, Mistress Nora?”

  No one except for EJ. Did that count? It was only a matter of turning off a machine. A family decision, everyone had to be heard. And she’d said: We have to, he’s already gone.

  “Not recently, no,” Nora said.

  “Ah,” Aruendiel sai
d, looking at her curiously, as though struck by the seriousness in her tone. “Well, neither have I—recently.”

  “Are you glad or sorry about that?” she could not resist asking.

  “Oh, very glad. Killing someone usually turns out to be an enormously complicated solution to what was a much simpler problem.”

  There were any number of questions that Nora would have liked to ask him at that point. She chose carefully. “But if you killed someone, and things became . . . too complicated, couldn’t you bring the person back to life again?”

  Aruendiel drew his dark eyebrows together. “Did you not hear me say just now how difficult it is to cast a successful resurrection spell? And it’s a rare ghost who returns willingly at his murderer’s summons.

  “Of course,” he added reflectively, “there is the famous case of the wizard Spornil Fivesheep, who killed his brother in a quarrel over land, and then, stricken with remorse, brought him back to life again. Some commentators, though, think that it was really an inferior Eoluthian substitution. His brother, newly revived, promptly killed him, which tends to support that theory.”

  “What’s an Eoluthian substitution?”

  “One life in exchange for another.” Aruendiel spoke sharply, as though annoyed at her ignorance, but his lined face was becoming more animated. “The sacrifice must be willing, or the revival is only temporary. In that case, to stay alive, the person brought back from the dead must keep sacrificing more and more people. It becomes very messy very quickly, but that never stops people from trying it. Now, a timestone—”

  Nora nodded, listening hard, trying to make sense of it all. She still had no clear understanding of the nature of magic, or why it worked, but perhaps if she picked up enough of these enticing details—timestones, Eoluthian substitutions—some greater meaning would slowly unfold for her.

  “—the longer one waits, the more unpredictable the results. Portat Nolu recommended that no more than an hour should elapse—”

  Aruendiel was well launched. There was a long day’s ride ahead, but as far as she could tell, they would not have any difficulty filling up the hours to come.