The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  Two days before, she had been crossing the courtyard around midday, still a little groggy from sitting up the night before to fit pottery fragments together, when Aruendiel came around the corner of the house, his cool eyes meeting hers, and she knew that he was going to ask her about the broken bowl. She was saved when the dogs in the courtyard began to bark. Aruendiel walked to the gate and looked out. An instant later, he turned back, his brows knotted, and called out to Nora to find Mrs. Toristel, a guest would be arriving shortly.

  It was Aruendiel’s niece—Lady Pusieuv Negin, of Forel—Mrs. Toristel informed Nora, as they watched him help a woman in a long blue traveling cloak out of a glossy black carriage. Her fair hair was carefully arranged into a style that Nora had seen among the court ladies in Semr, known as “eels and baskets” or “whips and shields,” neither term quite conveying how complex or unflattering it was. She was on the small side; as she embraced Aruendiel, he had to stoop to kiss her on the cheek.

  Forel was in Pelagnia, the housekeeper added with a touch of pride.

  “I didn’t know he had a niece,” Nora said.

  “Grand-niece,” Mrs. Toristel corrected herself. “From his sister’s line, that married the duke of Forel. Oh, what will we do for dinner now? Trouteye in the village killed his pigs early—we might could get a fresh ham.” She sighed. “He’ll be angry if we don’t show her the best hospitality.”

  Lady Pusieuv Negin was sweeping toward them across the courtyard, accompanied by Aruendiel. Mrs. Toristel dropped a stately curtsy, and Nora did her best to imitate her.

  “My housekeeper, Mrs. Toristel, will see to your—” Aruendiel began, but his niece interrupted him.

  “Of course I remember Ulunip—it is Ulunip, is it not?” she said, with a wide smile.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mrs. Toristel colored slightly, pleased.

  “It is always a pleasure to hear a good Pelagnian voice in these harsh northlands. You come from the Four Rivers district, isn’t that right?” Mrs. Toristel said no, ma’am, the Purny Basin. “The Purny! One of my favorite places. The hunting there is excellent.” Lady Pusieuv discoursed briefly on the amenities of the Purny Basin, while Mrs. Toristel gave short, respectful assents. Then, abruptly, Lady Pusieuv broke off and looked directly at Nora.

  “And this is—?” she asked quizzically.

  “Mistress Nora Fechr,” Aruendiel said. “She is a guest here.”

  “Fischer,” said Nora.

  “I am delighted to make your acquaintance!” Lady Pusieuv said. Her round brown eyes bored into Nora’s. “I heard so much about you when I was in Semr.”

  “Oh, you’ve come from Semr?” Nora asked politely.

  “Yes, I arrived there just a day after you and my uncle left. Everyone was still buzzing about Uncle—and his companion. So clever of you to have found that poor wizard! I was terribly disappointed to have missed the two of you. So I decided to come pay Uncle a visit.”

  Nora expressed regrets that their paths had not crossed in Semr and hoped that Lady Pusieuv’s journey had been an easy one.

  “Oh, upriver was fine, but the roads past Noler have not gotten any better since I was here last, Uncle!” Lady Pusieuv launched into a rapid-fire account of a flooded ford and a broken axle. The trip, Nora thought, had obviously required a great deal of determination on her part.

  Nora joined Mrs. Toristel in the kitchen a few minutes later. A dusty wine bottle stood open on the table, next to two blackened goblets. Mrs. Toristel was slicing hastily into a rather sticky-looking brown loaf. “One bottle left of the tawny Sprenen, can you believe it?” she said. “Here, you polish the goblets. He doesn’t even know we have them. He sold all the silver settings years ago, but I held back a few pieces.”

  Nora fetched vinegar and salt from the pantry and began to polish the goblets with a rag. “Isn’t that the honey cake you made for Mr. Toristel?”

  “Yes, and he won’t be pleased to see it go, but we don’t have anything else fit for her ladyship. You know he doesn’t care for sweets, as a rule.”

  “Mmm,” said Nora, sorting out, with a little thought, the two different parties that Mrs. Toristel meant by he. “Is she really worth all this trouble?”

  Mrs. Toristel sniffed. “She’s his only family left, she and her line. Lady Pusieuv used to visit at Lusul, she and her parents, when she was just a little thing,” she added, her voice softening. “Lady Lusarniev doted on her. I can see her now, letting the little girl play with her necklace.”

  “So Lady Pusieuv must be well over fifty now,” Nora said meanly.

  “Tsk, it doesn’t seem possible.” The housekeeper sighed again. “What a darling little girl she was.” Mrs. Toristel disappeared into the pantry and returned with a crock of the sweet-pickled blackberries. She added a generous purple dollop to the plate that held the sliced cake. “I wonder,” she said, in a crisper tone, “what brings Lady Pusieuv all this way?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s been more than a dozen years at least since she visited here last. And you heard what she said about the roads. Mark my words, she has some reason for coming here now.”

  “I can tell you why,” Nora said. “It’s because of me.”

  Mrs. Toristel gave her a look that, by its very neutrality, expressed deep skepticism.

  “She came because of what she heard in Semr. You know, when I was there, they all assumed I was his mistress. Aruendiel’s mistress,” Nora added, to be perfectly clear. “Absurd, of course, but that’s how people there think.” She was conscious of trying a little too hard to keep her voice casual. She had never told Mrs. Toristel about the stories, true and untrue, that she had heard circulating in Semr about Aruendiel, or what he had told her himself. “So I’m sure Lady Pusieuv wanted to get a look at me. See what sort of baggage her uncle has picked up.” If she tries to pull a Lady Catherine de Bourgh and break up our impending nuptials, Nora thought, I will be pleased to set her straight.

  “I’ve never known his lordship to take any interest in women since Lady Lusarniev,” Mrs. Toristel said with a sniff.

  “All the more reason for Lady Pusieuv to see what all the fuss is about. She came a long way for nothing, obviously.”

  “She’ll figure out which way the river flows soon enough. One look at you, she should know.”

  Nora laughed, a little bitterly. “Once upon a time, before I got clawed by a monster and when I could wear decent clothes, I wasn’t considered that bad-looking.”

  Mrs. Toristel looked at her critically. “Your face isn’t so bad. Those scars have faded a bit. But to think that a great lord, especially one that was married to Lady Lusarniev, would take you as his mistress—well, the folk in Semr must be as idiotic as he always says.”

  “I wouldn’t dispute that,” Nora said, suppressing an urge to mention that the great lord in question had, by his own account, murdered the beautiful Lady Lusarniev. Mrs. Toristel didn’t know that. Well, she knew it, Nora thought, but she wouldn’t admit it.

  That was two days ago. To Nora’s relief, she had had only the briefest of encounters with Lady Pusieuv since then. Yesterday, Aruendiel had taken his niece riding downriver—“Lady Pusieuv is an excellent horsewoman,” Mrs. Toristel murmured approvingly—and in the castle, Lady Pusieuv was little in evidence. Except for mealtimes, she spent most of her time in one of the drawing rooms on the first floor, because—Mrs. Toristel had heard her tell Aruendiel—the great hall was drafty and old-fashioned.

  “But those other rooms are a mess!” Nora exclaimed to the housekeeper. “There’s no furniture! They’re a ruin!”

  Mrs. Toristel laughed unexpectedly. “Not today,” she said. “For once, they’re as fine as they should be. With all the proper chairs and tables and tapestries and such.”

  “How—?”

  “He did it. Well, he couldn’t put her in an empty room, could he?” She laughed again, drily. “He does it every time she visits. It’s the only time he bothers.”

 
“Too bad he couldn’t have done the same for her bedchamber,” Nora said. The day of Lady Pusieuv’s arrival, she and Morinen had spent a hurried hour upstairs dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, and changing the linens for her ladyship.

  But Mrs. Toristel, Nora suspected, would not trust magic, even Aruendiel’s magic, to provide clean sheets.

  Tonight Aruendiel and his niece were dining in the great hall, as Nora waited in the kitchen, her hands sorting the broken shards of pottery. They felt cool and hard and intractable under her fingers. If Lady Pusieuv had not been here—if Nora had not been working harder than ever since their guest’s arrival—there might have been more time to steal away to a quiet place where she could be undisturbed and could focus, focus, until the magic words came into her mind, or whatever it was that would make the shattered pieces snap together.

  Or maybe, she thought, they never would.

  The door to the great hall opened, and she saw Aruendiel’s lean figure in the doorway.

  “Where’s Mrs. Toristel?” he asked.

  “She’s gone back to her quarters,” Nora said. “Do you need her?”

  He made a gesture of annoyance, as though snatching at a fly. “What in the name of Nagaris did she leave for a sweet course?”

  “Do you mean the pie? It’s on the table already.”

  “There’s something resembling a tart, yes. It appears to be full of pebbles.”

  “Walnuts. It’s a walnut pie.”

  “Your handiwork?”

  Nora nodded yes.

  “I see,” Aruendiel said, packing an extraordinary amount of skepticism into a few syllables. Then he noticed the shards of crockery on the hearth. “You have not mended the dish yet?”

  “No,” she said shortly. “Still broken.”

  “Ah,” he said, with a shrug. Nora could almost hear the unspoken thought: I expected no better. “Leave that and come help me amuse my niece.”

  “I wouldn’t want to intrude on a family dinner,” she demurred. Strange to hear the magician ask for help, even of the social sort.

  “It is no intrusion. We have reached that stage in conversation when another party begins to be most welcome.”

  At the sight of Nora, Lady Pusieuv looked surprised, then smiled graciously. She expressed equal wonder to learn that the pie was made with walnuts, that Nora had made it, and that Nora had come from another world.

  Come on, Nora thought, walnuts in a pie, it’s not such an earthshaking idea. She’d simply made a pecan pie using neither pecans nor corn syrup. She tried a bite. Not bad. It would have been better with cinnamon.

  “I heard,” Lady Pusieuv said, “that you actually used to live among the Faitoren.” She glanced at her uncle, but Aruendiel, who was taking a cautious bite of pie, said nothing. “And what was that like?”

  What exactly was she getting at? Nora wondered, but she answered: “I enjoyed it at the time. I would not care to repeat it.”

  “I saw a Faitoren once, ages ago. They’re very attractive, aren’t they? The men and women both.”

  Nora gave a noncommittal shrug. “They put on a good show.”

  “Of course, they are not to be trusted, I know. They’ve caused a great deal of trouble, over the years. Shocking.” Lady Pusieuv took a sip from her goblet, and Nora noticed how flushed her cheeks appeared in the candlelight. The bottle of wine that stood on the table was empty. “A great deal of trouble,” she repeated.

  Nora nodded in agreement, wondering how Aruendiel was reacting to this line of conversation, but it was impossible to read his expression. Even the black eyebrows were decorously still.

  “What I hear is that you had the unfortunate experience of being married to one of them,” Lady Pusieuv burst out.

  Ah, so that’s it, Nora thought with a half-smile. The other woman’s tipsy curiosity filled her with unexpected cheer, as though she had just downed a glass of strong drink herself.

  “It’s absolutely true,” she said. “I married the son of the Faitoren queen.”

  “Indeed! That must have been, oh, dreadful.”

  “It was not a good idea,” Nora allowed. She turned to the magician. “Aruendiel tried to talk me out of it, but I wouldn’t listen.”

  “Oh?” Lady Pusieuv was alert, her eyes flitting back and forth between Nora and Aruendiel.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Aruendiel took his cue. “Luklren’s men picked her up on the border, so we interrogated her, then sent her back. It was clear she was enchanted, but there was nothing we could do then.”

  “Aruendiel helped me escape later on, though,” Nora said, letting a trace of huskiness creep into her voice.

  “Mistress Nora called for help, and I responded. Any unfortunate in the power of the Faitoren deserves no less.”

  “I owe him my life,” Nora said, with a confiding smile to Lady Pusieuv. She sighed, as though overcome with emotion. “I can never fully repay him.”

  Aruendiel gave Nora a sharp look. She herself was interested to discover, after two days of resenting Lady Pusieuv for assuming that she was Aruendiel’s mistress, how wickedly pleasurable it was to encourage the misperception—or at least to allow the falsehood to flourish unchecked. It felt strangely liberating.

  Aruendiel, though, had evidently had enough of Nora’s rescue. He changed the subject, remarking that he expected to make fewer journeys to the Faitoren borderlands from now on, since he had finally persuaded Luklren to retain a magician of his own. Had Lady Pusieuv seen Luklren at court? She had not, but she had seen his cousin Lord Oslewen, who had just married the second daughter of Baron Marn.

  They moved into a discussion of recent dynastic alliances in the kingdom, including the pedigrees of each party—Aruendiel seemed to have known most of their immediate ancestors going back two or three generations—and then moved inevitably into politics. Lady Pusieuv had a range of sharp observations to make on the players at the Semrian court; Nora had no way of judging how accurate her analysis might be, but it sounded trenchant enough, and Aruendiel seemed to be listening carefully.

  The interest he showed was surprising, Nora thought. She would have bet money that this sort of talk would have bored him senseless, and from time to time, as Lady Pusieuv held forth, she thought she saw a shade of weariness in his eyes. But when he responded to his niece, he spoke with a practiced, easy courtesy, a smooth attentiveness, which was far removed from his usual manner. For the first time, Nora thought, she could credit the stories about the women that he had seduced long ago.

  Or perhaps, as a landholder and peer of the realm, even as a magician who played some role in the affairs of government from time to time, he was more concerned with the political landscape in the kingdom than she had imagined.

  Nora, unfortunately, did not share the same interest. She was thinking longingly of her bed upstairs, and wondering whether her candle stub was long enough to let her read for a few minutes about Devris and Udesdiel before going to sleep, when a sudden change in Aruendiel’s tone caught her attention.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, “it is out of the question.”

  “But poor old Lord Tirigan died without near heirs; now it could go to some distant cousin who’s half Orvetian and doesn’t have nearly as good a claim as you do. Really, it’s a scandal to let a rich estate like that, in the heart of the kingdom, fall into the hands of foreigners.”

  “I have no claim at all,” he said coldly.

  “That’s not true, Uncle. You’ve always had a good claim, and to be frank, I think it’s mad not to assert it, especially now. Unfaithfulness cancels all dower rights, you know. Lusul should be yours.”

  “The estate passed to my wife’s cousin, her nearest legitimate relation, as was just.”

  “Well, he’s dead now. And the rumor in Semr is that the Pirekennys will raise a claim, too. I saw the grandson at court.”

  “That is no concern of mine.”

  “Well, I think it’s very shocking. The nerve of those people! They should be ashamed.�
�� Aruendiel was silent, so she went on. “I apologize for bringing up this old unpleasantness, but—well, think of the good of the family, Uncle. We still have four girls to marry off. It would be such a blessing to be able to offer them with part of the Lusul patrimony in their dowry.”

  “Surely the Forel is enough to provide for your family?”

  “It’s no Lusul!” she said vehemently. “For your own sake, too, Uncle, please consider it. It’s a shame that you have to live here, in this poor little castle, in this miserable northland, when you could be so much more comfortable.” Her glance moved across the table and fell upon Nora. “I’m sure that Nora would prefer living in a modern palace, on a great estate like Lusul. Wouldn’t you, Nora?”

  Nora was taken aback, and now a little regretful about the impression that she had fostered about her relationship with Aruendiel. “I’m actually not very particular,” she said awkwardly.

  “My dear Pusieuv, we have spent enough time on this subject. There is nothing more to discuss. Would you care for more wine?” Aruendiel reached for the wine bottle and discovered that it was empty. He rose from his chair. “Excuse me, ladies, I will bring out a new bottle.”

  “Would you like me to get it?” Nora asked, but he waved away her offer and limped toward the kitchen.

  “Uncle is stubborn,” said Lady Pusieuv into the silence that fell after the kitchen door swung shut.

  “I’ve noticed,” Nora said.

  Another pause. Lady Pusieuv took a last bite of pie and chewed it delicately. “You know, my dear,” she went on, “I think it falls upon me to remind you of something. My uncle is known as Lord Aruendiel. No matter what you call him in private, it is very important that, at least in company, you refer to him by that title. Or as his lordship. It is the proper address for one of his station.”

  “He has never asked me to refer to him that way,” Nora said. “And certainly he does not hesitate to correct me or anyone else, when he believes it necessary.”

  “My uncle tolerates—to some degree encourages—many lapses of decorum. He would be pleased, though, if you were to stop addressing him in such a familiar manner. It would show that you know your place.”