Chapter 23
Nora pushed a stray lock of hair back from her face and grimaced, catching the smell of apples on her fingers. She had always liked the sweet, mild odor of apple flesh, but that was before she had to peel and slice a dozen bushels of apples for drying in the autumn sun, press more bushels for cider, and load still more apples into the castle cellars. Not to mention having to pick the fruit in the first place. At first their smell reminded her of Massy and her children, but now she was only sick of it.
The trip to Semr seemed to have happened a long time ago. Since then Nora’s life had been nothing but trying to wrest and preserve every last nutrient and calorie from the autumnal fields and forests around the castle. Before the apples, it was mushrooms. Before that, chestnuts and cabbages. She fell into bed exhausted every night, only to get up at first light to start working again. She had not had time to dip into Pride and Prejudice or to work ahead in the Orsian grammar or even to visit the bathhouse more than once or twice, another reason for the faint aroma of apples that clung to her skin and hair.
She had seen little of the magician since their return. He seemed to be spending most of his time in his tower workshop or in the forest. A few times he had swept past while Nora was working, slowing his pace not to greet her so much as to cast an approving eye over the foodstuffs that she was handling. It was a good harvest this year, everyone was saying.
“What did you expect?” Nora asked herself, picking up the knife again and reaching for another apple. The pile of fruit in the basket before her seemed to be getting no smaller. “That he would be your best friend? That there would be lots more little chats about magic and what have you?”
The problem is, Maggie—
She had begun writing letters to Maggie in her head again, although she was so busy that she rarely got a chance to finish them to her own satisfaction.
The problem is—I have to be honest—I have a strange sort of a crush on him.
You wouldn’t believe it to look at him. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that he saved my life a couple of times. And then we had these conversations on the ride back from Semr, mostly about magic, but other things as well, and I did enjoy talking to him.
But now I’m the invisible castle drudge again. Hard physical labor all day, no time to read or think. And this could be my life for years.
Everyone in Semr assumed I was his mistress. I’m not. And I’m not saying I’d want to be. He killed his wife—he told me so.
But I keep thinking about him, and wondering about all those stories that I heard in Semr that I can’t quite bring myself to ask him about, and wondering what it’s like to be able to do magic. He intrigues me. That’s always dangerous, you know.
It’s been years since I had a serious hopeless crush on anyone, unless you count my Donne thing. (Truly hopeless, that.) As I recall, if you wait long enough, it flames out, eventually, and you wonder what you ever found attractive in that particular person and you thank your lucky stars nothing actually happened.
Mrs. Toristel came into the kitchen from the courtyard, looking distracted, pushing the door open with her shoulder. She held a basin full of something slick, convoluted, and streaked with blood.
“Brains?” asked Nora, looking up. “Where did those come from?”
“The white calf. Broke its leg. Toristel is butchering it.”
Nice to have some meat for a change, Nora thought. “Why didn’t you ask him to fix it, though?” She jutted her chin upward, toward the tower.
“It’s the bull calf, we were going to kill it anyway,” Mrs. Toristel said distractedly. “And he hates to be disturbed for such things. Nora, you’re slicing the apples too thick.”
Nora put down her knife tiredly. “Sorry.”
“You’ll have to do those over.” Mrs. Toristel glanced at the water clock and suddenly looked distressed. “Sun and moon, here it is two hours past noon already, and I have to put these brains to soak and then help Toristel finish the butchering. The flies are something awful. Take up some lunch for him, Nora, will you? Some bread and herring. An apple or two. He won’t want much.”
With a faint flutter of excitement, Nora stood up. “How will I get in? The wall—”
“You just go through it. Now what have I done with the good knife? Not the one with the nick in the blade. Nora, have you seen it?”
After locating the knife, Nora put bread and herring and apple onto a tray, and then went to the place in the great hall where she thought the entrance to the tower was located, more or less. She tested the stone wall with her fingertips. Solid to her touch. She stood there for a moment, considering what to do.
The cat, which had followed her and the herring from the kitchen, regarded her haughtily, its tail twitching. Then it walked through the wall.
“All right then,” Nora said, taking a deep breath. She closed her eyes and stepped forward, raising an arm to shield her face.
It was a curtain of sand that she encountered, a rain of fine, cool particles sifting against her skin. Then she was on the other side, trying to make out her surroundings in the half-light of an oil lamp hanging from the wall. A staircase wound upward along the curving wall of the tower, its treads coated with dust except for a narrow path wiped clean by footsteps in the middle. The cat ran lightly upstairs.
Nora followed. Shadows flickered at the corners of her vision, but when she turned to look, there was nothing there. She climbed faster, and felt some relief to emerge into a large, round room where she could glimpse sunlight threading through narrow windows.
“Oh, it’s you,” the magician said. He leaned over the scroll open before him. “Where is Mrs. Toristel?”
“She’s helping Mr. Toristel butcher a calf. It broke its leg.”
“Oh? How did it come to break its leg?” He glanced balefully at Nora as though she might have had something to do with it.
“I don’t know.” Nora’s attention was elsewhere. She had not seen so many books since the royal library at Semr. Their dark spines encircled the room; there were even rows of books lining the ceiling, held up by some magical means, she assumed—a neat space-saving trick, if you were tall enough to reach that high. Aside from the shelves of books, the room held only the table at which Aruendiel sat and another, longer table that was half-covered with papers and still more books. A spiral staircase led upward.
“You have a wonderful library here,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said briskly. “No, don’t put that here—on the other table.”
She took so long that after a minute Aruendiel put down his brush and lifted his head to see what was keeping her. She was bending over a book that he had left open.
“That can’t be very interesting to you,” he said, “since you can’t read it.”
Nora turned quickly. “Oh, but I can. Not very well, but I’m trying to learn,” she said.
“I see. What is it you’re reading?” he said, freighting the last word with a small load of irony.
“A book of spells, I think.”
“A magician’s library is bound to have many books of spells.”
“I’m not guessing.” She pointed to the page. “This is an invisibility spell. ‘For invisibility,’ it says.”
“A brave start. What does the rest of the spell say?”
Nora opened her mouth to read the spell aloud, then caught herself. “What if it works—and makes me invisible?” she asked, some challenge in her voice.
Aruendiel raised an eyebrow. “If you can work the spell, no doubt you will be able to perform the counterspell, too.”
Nora smiled quickly, with an air of pleased excitement, and glanced down at herself as though taking one last look before she disappeared. “‘Contemptuous needle—’” She halted, scanning the line again. “It doesn’t quite make sense.” No explanation or encouragement from Aruendiel. “‘Contemptuous needle something my ways—cloak my ways from, um, something eyes—tracking eyes.’ And this other word has
to be ‘unsound,’ even though the sentence sounds strange.
“‘Contemptuous needle unsound, cloak my ways from tracking eyes.’” She repeated it, more confidently. “Well? How did I do?”
If she were truly invisible, though, Aruendiel’s cool eyes would not meet her own gaze so precisely.
“You read it correctly. It’s an old, rather elementary invisibility spell—from the Compendium by Morkin the Asymmetrical. Well, I see you can read a little. Not fluently, but you can navigate simple sentences. I congratulate you on your progress.”
He spoke the last words dismissively. Hunching his shoulders, he picked up his brush again to make a note on the parchment in front of him.
Nora made no movement toward the stairs. She cleared her throat. “The spell didn’t work.”
“No,” he said, not looking up.
“Did I do something wrong?”
Before answering, Aruendiel dipped his brush in the ink and wrote a couple of lines. “In general, with spells of this sort, it helps to cut the throat of a small animal, or to burn hanks of your own hair with dried fox dung and blood mint, as an offering. But even so, you would never be able to work the spell.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are female.”
“Are you serious? What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “You could recite that charm a thousand times, and nothing would happen. The same for every spell in that book. The spirits to whom those spells are addressed would simply disregard the puny, trivial pleadings of a female voice. And now, Mistress Nora, if you will excuse me, I have work to do.”
* * *
Nora walked sedately, furiously down the tower stairs. She checked herself just short of actually stomping. It was a dignified withdrawal she was making, she told herself, not a humiliated retreat.
Dear Maggie, she thought as she exited the tower through the wall, now that I think about it, there’s another way to end a hopeless crush: When the object of said crush behaves like such a jerk that you instantly lose all interest in him and realize what an idiot you were for entertaining any such feelings in the first place.
She went back to the kitchen, spread the sliced apples to dry in the back courtyard, fed the parings to the pig, brought in a load of wood for the stove, and decided to wait until after the butchering was completed before cleaning the kitchen floor.
I’m overreacting, she told herself sensibly, heading out to help the Toristels with the calf. He was just stating facts.
It was the way he said it. Something really nasty in his voice. As though he were angry at the whole idea of a woman doing magic.
Hirizjahkinis—it didn’t bother him that she did magic. And obviously there were some spells women could do. But which ones? Perhaps Hirizjahkinis was a special case. A former witch priestess—that must help. A lesbian.
He didn’t have to be so damned superior about it, she thought irritably, swatting at the whining black cloud of flies around her head while Mr. Toristel cut into the calf’s haunch. He didn’t have to brush me off like a servant. Except that he treats his actual servants with more respect than he treats me.
The next day Morinen came up from the village to help with digging turnips. As she and Nora went down the rows, squatting on the chilly soil, their hands gloved in mud, Nora took a perverse pleasure in telling her about the visit to the court at Semr. Morinen, she could tell, was picturing the palace at Semr as a version of Aruendiel’s ramshackle castle, so Nora went to some lengths to emphasize how much bigger and grander it was. With a slight edge in her voice, she described the lavish banquets, the ornate dress of the courtiers, the days of busy idleness in which noble ladies like Inristian had nothing to do except fret about getting married.
It would be no bad thing, Nora began to feel as she talked, if Morinen and others like her could be brought to recognize that they worked and slaved and starved (sometimes) to support an essentially parasitic class, qualified to rule only by hereditary privilege.
Morinen was not a ready subject for revolutionary conscious-raising, however. She listened without saying much, and seemed to be as impressed to learn that the streets of Semr had cobblestone paving as by any detail of court life. She did look a little puzzled, though, by what Nora told her about Inristian.
“A great, rich lady like that, and she can’t find a husband?”
“She’s not as rich as some of her rivals,” explained Nora, but the answer did not seem to satisfy Morinen. Looking up the social scale from a turnip patch, Nora thought, it was difficult to discern degrees of wealth. “She also has smallpox scars.”
Morinen sighed. “Poor lady. I feel sorry for her, not able to be married.”
“Inristian? I suppose.” Nora looked at Morinen more closely and considered the faint droop of her mouth, the fact that she was quieter than usual. Mrs. Toristel had mentioned that the blacksmith’s wedding to the miller’s daughter would take place next month. “You’re right,” Nora said. “I think she’s lonely.”
Morinen ducked her head lower, running her hands carefully through the soil, although she had already searched that particular spot. “I don’t know if you heard about Dorviv.”
Dorviv was the miller’s daughter. “I heard she’s getting married, yes.”
“You know who she’s marrying?”
Nora nodded. “You liked him, didn’t you?”
Morinen gave a noncommittal shrug without raising her eyes. Nora abused the blacksmith for a few minutes.
“It’s all right,” Morinen said finally. “He’s not a fool. She’s pretty, Dorviv is. Not as big as me. Her father’s giving them a field—freehold, not just leased from his lordship. I was all upset at first, but Ma gave me a talking-to. She said I had no right getting my hopes up. It’s not as though we have any land.”
“Well, you’re pretty, too, Morinen,” Nora said staunchly. “And you know—I’m not sure if this is what your mother meant, but honestly, if all this man wants in a wife is land, you’re better off not marrying him.”
Morinen gave Nora a bemused look. “But who’ll ever marry me, when I don’t have any land? Ma says men always like to have a wife with a strong back, but they don’t like it if she’s bigger than they are. Gravin’s like an ox, he didn’t mind how tall I was. I wish I hadn’t been so free with him now,” she said sadly.
“Free? Oh. Well, you really liked him, didn’t you?”
“I did like him, and I thought he’d surely marry me,” Morinen said, her face suddenly crumpling.
“Oh, Morinen,” Nora said, wiping her hand on her apron and putting her arm on the girl’s shoulders. A thought struck her. “Are you pregnant?”
“No,” said Morinen, with a shake of her head. “I wish I were! Then my brothers would make him marry me.”
Nora almost laughed, but Morinen was in earnest.
“Listen, Morinen,” she said. “You’re better off without him. You have to realize that men—they really only care about themselves.” Nora jerked at a turnip so roughly that the green top tore off in her hand. “They don’t think about whether they might be hurting someone else. They’re just wrapped up in themselves and what they want. It’s true in my world—and it’s even truer here.
“You know, sometimes, very innocently, you can develop a sort of fascination with a man, and then you see all these little signs that actually don’t mean anything, but it’s too late because you’re reading in them exactly what you want to read. Be careful, is all I’m saying. It’s easy to get fooled.”
Nora stopped, hoping that Morinen would not wonder whom, exactly, Nora was really addressing. “Well,” she said, with an apologetic smile. “I didn’t mean to get carried away.”
Morinen uttered a short, grudging laugh. “You sound just like my ma,” she said.
* * *
With only a little care, Nora found, it was possible to avoid almost all encounters with the magician. He had no real fixed routine, which made it hard to predict his comings and goings, but No
ra contrived to spend more time in those places where he was less likely to go—avoiding in particular the great hall, where he might unexpectedly pop out of the wall.
It was absurd, she knew, to go to such lengths to keep from running into Aruendiel. It was also easier. She could still hear those contemptuous words on his lips: “the puny, trivial pleadings of a female voice.” They burned in her memory, dosed with some venom that she guessed had something to do with her own dashed hopes for—whatever it was she’d been hoping for. Better to keep a safe distance.
When Mrs. Toristel directed her to carry a message to Aruendiel one afternoon—the first afternoon in weeks when Nora had found some time to settle down with the Ors grammar—Nora could barely conceal her annoyance.
“He’s not in the tower?”
“No, he went out a while ago, down the path to the river.”
“To the forest?” When Mrs. Toristel nodded, Nora said: “The last time I went down there, he almost bit my head off. Accused me of trespassing.”
“Oh, he won’t mind,” Mrs. Toristel said, although she looked concerned. “Just go and come back quickly. He wanted to know how young Dandelion was doing, and I just got back from the village and they’re saying the leg will have to come off.”
“Ugh,” said Nora, rousing herself.
She took the path through the orchard, where the gnarled trees were now stripped of both fruit and leaves. The grass was wet and slippery from rain earlier. Ahead, the hills on the other side of the river had tarnished to a dirty bronze, except where the black stands of fir trees held their ground. Autumn was subdued here, Nora thought, just rain and gathering chill, no wild scarlets or golds to cheer the heart.
There was no sign of Aruendiel near the river. Nora made her way across to where the path continued on the other side. “Hello?” she called. Her voice struck her own ears as being unnaturally loud, yet it could hardly press past the heavy branches of the firs.
Just go and come quickly, Mrs. Toristel had said. Nora walked as fast as she could up the sloping path, a narrow corridor between the trees. The sound of the rushing water faded behind her. After ten minutes or so, the track grew steeper and less gloomy, as the fir trees gave way to rusty-leafed oaks. The path forked just ahead, in front of an oblong boulder. A goat-hide sack with a drawstring top rested on top of the rock.
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 32