The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  Aruendiel must have left it there. But it was impossible to tell which way he had gone. Fallen leaves covered both trails, holding no trace of a passing boot.

  Seizing the chance to catch her breath, Nora sat down on a dry patch on the rock. She decided to wait for a few minutes, and then if—when—Aruendiel failed to appear, she would go back and tell Mrs. Toristel that she couldn’t find him.

  One of the paths continued straight up the hillside; the other angled west along an old stone wall. Hadn’t Aruendiel said that once sheep had been grazed here? Hard to imagine now. The tree trunks were burly with age; they must be more than a hundred years old. Some sunlight made its way between clouds and thinning leaves to warm Nora’s face. It was pleasant to have a chance to sit at leisure, alone, away from the castle—although the castle was not so far. She could see one of the towers through the trees, perhaps a half mile away.

  Nora closed her eyes and listened to the breeze stirring the dying leaves and the occasional drops of water falling from the trees around her.

  There was another noise, too, one that she could not quite make out. She found she could follow the tenuous thread of sound best by letting her mind wander slightly. It had a shape, like music, like a long, meandering conversation, overheard from some distance away, between people who know each other so well that they do not always need to finish their sentences to be understood. At the same time, it was so delicate, so weightless in her ears, that she began to wonder whether it came from within her own body, the way the roar of the ocean in a seashell was supposed to be the sound of blood in the arteries. This was even more fragile, though. It was like the noise that a school of fish makes as it swims; it was the rustle of air in a bird’s wing as it flies; it was the silence in the center of the thunderstorm.

  Someone coughed impatiently.

  “Bestir yourself, Mistress Nora.” Aruendiel was standing in front of her, a tall shadow against the sunlight. “What are you doing here?”

  She blinked. It took her a moment to remember. “Mrs. Toristel sent me to find you.”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “Someone in the village—Dandelion—is worse. She said you’d want to know.” Nora got to her feet slowly, feeling queasy, her body agitated, trembling. She took a deep breath, hoping that she was not about to faint.

  Aruendiel was surveying her with narrowed eyes. “Are you ill?”

  “I was dozing.”

  “This is not the proper place in which to—”

  “I know,” Nora said. “I can tell. There’s something going on here, something to do with your magic. You told me that before, but now I’ve seen—heard—for myself. Some background noise that isn’t really there. And I’ve got that weird feeling I get when you do magic.”

  Aruendiel raised his eyebrows. “You did not tell me that. An uneasiness in the gut, is that it?” He tilted his head to one side, still studying her. “There is nothing here that would hurt you seriously.” He sounded almost apologetic. “But, well, I am surprised that you could discern anything out of the ordinary.”

  “I’m not as slow as you think I am, even if I am a woman.” She turned and started down the path. After a moment, she heard him follow.

  “What of the boy’s leg?” he asked, as they neared the river.

  “Mrs. Toristel said it might have to come off,” Nora said, not looking back.

  “Good,” Aruendiel said. “There is a new spell I mean to try for regrowing severed limbs.”

  “And what if the spell doesn’t work?” Nora shot an irate glance over her shoulder. “Why not just try to save the boy’s leg in the first place? If you can raise the dead, I’m sure healing a gangrenous limb would be no trouble at all.”

  She stepped carefully from stone to stone across the water, remembering how she had fallen the last time. Behind her, she had the vague impression of sudden movement, a flurry in the air. Looking back from the other side of the river, she was not entirely surprised to see that Aruendiel had vanished.

  Back at the castle, the cow and goats had to be milked, the milk strained, firewood and water lugged into the kitchen, the bread dough set to rise. The copper pots could have used a good scrubbing, too, but by the time she had finished kneading the dough, Nora had had enough.

  It was dark outside. Her shoulders ached. Mrs. Toristel had gone back to her quarters some time ago. The magician might not return for hours. The castle was quiet, aside from the faint rustling of mice in the wall.

  Nora helped herself to a bowl of soup from the pot on the back of the stove—some of the white calf’s bones had gone to make it—and took her dinner into the great hall. She lit an oil lamp, fetched the Ors primer, and began to read laboriously about the vengeance that the wrathful Lord Devris Bearcrusher took on his ungrateful comrades. It reminded her of the first book of the Iliad, except that Devris was in a funk because he had been deprived not of a girl, but of three dozen horses, a golden necklace, and a shield made of magical cowhide.

  Turning the pages of a book at the long table in the dim hall was oddly comforting. After a while, she recognized why. It was like being back at school, studying under the vaulted ceiling of the reference library or in the cafeteria during the quiet hours between meals.

  Devris had just decapitated his chief rival, Udidin the Fair; reclaimed his magical shield; and was in the middle of an unpleasant ritual involving the dead man’s liver and testicles—was this book really for children?—when the door to the courtyard opened and Nora heard Aruendiel’s limping footsteps. She nodded briefly as he appeared in the feeble circle of light cast by the oil lamp.

  “Is there more of that?” Aruendiel asked, indicating her soup.

  “In the kitchen.” After a fractional pause, she added, “Shall I get some for you?”

  With a shake of his head, he sat down at the table, not in the high-backed chair at the end but on the bench opposite Nora, near the lamp.

  “The boy Dandelion is improving,” he announced. “The report was wrong. The leg will not have to come off.”

  “Too bad. You’ll have to wait to try your new spell.”

  “There will be other opportunities,” he said as a bowl of soup appeared before him, followed by a mug of water.

  She could not resist commenting on the soup he had conjured: “Isn’t that a fairly trivial use of magic?”

  “Yes,” he agreed, more readily than she expected, “but I am weary tonight, and I did not come to rouse you from your dinner—”

  “Thanks, I’m almost done.”

  “—or your book.”

  Then why did you sit down? Nora thought, but he seemed to be in no particular hurry to begin a conversation. After a moment, she bent over the book and began to read again. It was harder to concentrate now, with Aruendiel drinking broth from his bowl, not silently—they did have spoons here, so why did no one think of using them for eating soup?—but she did her best to lose herself in the cascade of Ors brushstrokes.

  The action picked up again, which helped. Just as Devris was enjoying his victory meal, Udidin’s younger brother, Udesdiel the Hasty, launched a surprise attack seeking revenge. Devris, protected by his magical shield and fortified by all the fresh liver and mountain oysters he had just consumed, slew half a dozen of Udesdiel’s men and was closing in on Udesdiel, but Udesdiel had a spear that would always find its target—

  Nora turned the page to find out how this would play out—her money was still on Devris, despite Udesdiel’s nifty spear—but the next page was almost completely unreadable. She gave a low, frustrated sigh. Long ago, someone had spilled a thick puddle of ink in the middle of the paper, and then, evidently reluctant to let so much fine, wet ink go to waste, had dipped a brush into it and sketched a series of energetic caricatures across the page.

  She made as if to close the book, but her sigh had attracted Aruendiel’s attention. He reached across the table and took the book from her, then flipped through a few pages.

  “Why are you no
t reading the book that you took from the palace library?” he asked suddenly, putting the book down. “That one is written in your own language, is it not?”

  “I didn’t—” Automatically Nora began to deny her theft, and then thought better of it. The evidence was upstairs in her room. “How did you know? Is there some sort of magical antitheft device attached to the book? Or have you been using magic to spy on me?”

  “Neither. I saw you hide the book in your bag once during the ride home.”

  “It was my book originally, you know.” Although she was trying not to sound defensive, she felt a certain shiftiness creep into her tone.

  “So you said.”

  “The king has no use for a book written in English.”

  “He has no use for books written in his native tongue, from what I can tell,” Aruendiel said. “But you have not answered my question. Why are you reading this child’s primer? It is an account of the Thelbron War. An important passage in history, but not very relevant to your concerns.”

  “How would you even know what my concerns are?” Nora said—civilly enough, she thought. “I told you before. I’ve been teaching myself to read Ors. Mrs. Toristel said that she had learned out of this book, and I’ve been trying to do the same.”

  “Why do you wish to read Ors?” Aruendiel speared a chunk of meat from his bowl. “What use will it be to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Nora said tiredly. “I don’t like being illiterate. I need something to keep my mind occupied.” The defaced page stared up at her. “There’s no real reason.”

  There was a silence. “I can remove this ink stain, if you like,” Aruendiel said. “So that you can continue reading.”

  Nora shrugged. “I suppose. It’s just some child’s scribbles.”

  Aruendield picked up the book again. “My sister’s,” he said. “I recognize her hand. These figures are perhaps intended to represent my brothers and myself.”

  “Really?” Intrigued in spite of herself, Nora leaned forward for another look. “This was her book? Which one are you?”

  “We all used this book for lessons. The smallest is me, I would think. The one who is drawn with an open mouth.”

  “Huh,” said Nora, not seeing much resemblance. “You were the youngest?”

  “Oh, yes,” Aruendiel said, with a trace of asperity, as if surprised at her ignorance. “That is why I am called Aruendiel—Aruen’s third son. You have not reached the section in the book that treats the grammar of familial naming, I take it.”

  “No. I can’t wait.” She saw what she had not suspected, that there must be a thread of genealogical information coiled inside Ors names. Udesdiel was another third son, obviously. Another code to break, another rule to learn—and for what? So she could survive, so she could peel apples and grub turnips in this alien world for another decade, or more.

  Aruendiel was turning the pages of the book. “There are one or two other grammatical topics that I particularly recommend to you for study.”

  “I thought that I speak fairly good Ors at this point.”

  “Better than you once did,” he allowed. “Certainly you have nearly lost that vile Faitoren accent. But you have difficulties with the future potentive, for instance. It is more correct to say, ‘I will not be able to wait’ instead of ‘I can’t wait.’”

  “I was being ironic.” By some small blessing, Ors had a word for “irony,” or something close enough.

  “And you are careless with the verb genders, too. Very frequently you use the masculine form instead of the feminine.”

  “What do you mean?” It was news to Nora that the Ors verbs had genders. With a lift of his eyebrows, Aruendiel began to explain the language’s feminine verb prefixes. As she listened, it dawned on Nora that what she had assumed to be brief syllables of hesitancy—the equivalent of the English “um” or “ah”—in Mrs. Toristel’s or Morinen’s or Inristian’s speech was actually a construction intended to assure the world that the speaker was a woman.

  “So you ought to have said, ‘I was being ironic,’” Aruendiel finished. He used the feminine form. The sentence sounded strangely tentative, coming out of his mouth.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Nora objected. “The extra syllables make the sentence seem weaker.”

  “It’s the way women speak.”

  More codes to master, Nora thought. In fact, she had consciously tried not to mimic Mrs. Toristel in this particular linguistic habit, taking the filler sounds as a sign of lazy, uneducated speech. A bit of snobbery that had backfired.

  “I was trying to copy you,” she said. “I thought that was the correct way to speak.”

  “It is correct for me,” he said.

  “Well, yes! Everything is basically correct for you.” Nora’s hands made fists in her lap. “You can do what you please, because you’re a magician and a lord—but most important, a man. You can travel, you can talk to anyone you please, you can read a book without being laughed at. Tell me any woman could do the same.”

  Aruendiel did not contradict her. “You are unused to the ways of this world,” he said.

  “Listen, I’m not trying to change the world—your world. I’m just passing through. But then I think about that bookseller in Semr, how he thought I was joking when I said I could read, and it makes me want to scream. Can you even imagine how that feels? Of course you can’t. The Lord Magician Aruendiel is not accustomed to having his intellect or status questioned.

  “And now it turns out that women can’t even talk like men. Which is a clever way to invalidate women’s discourse, isn’t it? No wonder women can’t do magic; no wonder spirits won’t listen to their puny, trivial voices. It’s all woven into the basic structure of the language.” She stopped, looking at Aruendiel’s impassive face, thinking that none of what she had just said made sense to him, but feeling a certain relief that she had said it.

  Aruendiel skewered the last piece of meat from his bowl and chewed it thoughtfully. He tilted the bowl toward his mouth, drained it, and put the empty bowl on the table. “I never said that women cannot do magic.”

  “You said that the spirits would not listen to women.”

  “Do you think that is all there is to magic, begging favors of spirits?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea. You’ve never explained to me what magic is.”

  “And what do you think it is that Hirizjahkinis does, if not magic?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose she has some special dispensation.”

  “No, she is only a very fine magician, and yet she is a woman, or so I understand.” He made a noise deep in his throat that could have been a very dry chuckle, then closed the book. “I will give you no more suggestions for your grammatical studies. You must decide for yourself what is worthy of your attention.”

  “As you like.” Nora shrugged. She was thinking that it was time to bring the conversation to a close and make her escape to bed. Something new had engaged Aruendiel’s fancy, however. He reached for Nora’s bowl and brought it closer to the light.

  “This is an old one,” he said.

  “What, the bowl?” she said, taken aback. “Well, I suppose. It’s not like the others.”

  “The other ones in the set must be long since broken. We used these bowls when I was young.” He rubbed a finger over the rim, tracing the pattern of interlocking spirals under the brown glaze. “We had a potter in the village then, who made these for my mother. Oxleg, they called him. This red-and-white stuff,” he added, looking at his own bowl, “is newer.”

  “It’s from the potter in Barsy, Mrs. Toristel said.” Nora pushed the bench back and stood up. The sight of the book and now the bowl had obviously stirred up some odd nostalgic current in the magician, but she was in no mood to give him a sympathetic ear. She held out her hand to take the bowl from him, intending to take it back into the kitchen.

  He made no move to return it. “Why did you choose this odd one, instead of one from the set?”

&nb
sp; “It’s a good size and shape. I use it a lot.” Although she did not wish to say so, she had come to think of the bowl as her own. She usually ate alone; it wasn’t as though her dish had to match the rest of a table setting.

  “Do you?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow. “You like it, then?”

  “Well, yes.”

  With a fluid motion, Aruendiel lifted the bowl and flung it onto the floor.

  Nora flinched as the bowl smashed on the flagstones. She looked at Aruendiel round-eyed. “What? Why did you do that?”

  “Fix it,” he said calmly.

  “Fix it?” she sputtered. “How?” Confusedly she thought of the little white Elmer’s Glue bottle with the pointed orange top. Was there anything like that in this world?

  “That’s the same bowl you broke some time ago, if you don’t remember. I repaired it then. Now you fix it yourself. Make it as perfect as it was a minute ago. You want to know what magic is, Mistress Nora? Now you have an opportunity to find out.”

  Chapter 24

  This is hopeless,” Nora told herself for the twentieth time. She picked up two of the shards that lay on the kitchen hearth and touched the broken edges together. An exact fit—but she knew that already. The shattered bowl was a jigsaw puzzle that she had learned by heart over the past two days. Yet the jagged pieces refused to adhere to each other, falling inexorably apart as soon as she took her hands away.

  The crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead. Of course, where else would it lead? There was no reversing time or entropy. Mechanically, she moved her hands over the broken pieces, keeping an ear cocked toward the great hall. She wondered if the coast was clear yet, if she could make her way upstairs now. No, she could still make out the low hum of voices through the door.

  She was not keen to see Aruendiel, with no mended bowl to show him. Nor was she especially eager to encounter his visitor.