“Are you joking?” Nora said. “When I was in Semr, that was all the young women talked about, marrying a wealthy man.”
“Did they?” A flash of amusement passed across his rough face. “But money is only part of it. If not, they might as well marry a tradesman.”
“A tradesman? Oh, I see what you’re saying. To be eligible, he’d have to be part of your crowd, an aristocrat.”
“My crowd? We cannot all be royalty, Mistress Nora. No, it is not just a matter of birth. A suitable bridegroom would have land, family alliances, some skill in battle—”
“Hmm. I suppose the best translation would be ‘A single gentleman in possession of a great estate must be in want of a wife.’ Does that make more sense?”
“That is better. Write it down. No, that is not how one spells ‘estate,’ not when it follows the adjective.”
The rest of the first chapter went better. Something about Mr. Bennet’s drily embittered sense of humor appealed to Aruendiel. He read her translations with more interest than she would have expected. In some ways he was more familiar with Austen’s stratified, preindustrial world than Nora was, and he was also particularly adept at helping her find Ors equivalents for the formal, faintly antique diction of the novel.
They usually went over her translations at night in the great hall, where, with the coming of the cold weather, wooden panels had been set up around the huge fireplace to block the drafts. Aruendiel took a more detached tone in correcting Nora’s translations than he did in critiquing her magical work, expressing only a sarcastic wonderment at her grammatical and orthographical mistakes. Afterward, in the reddish firelight, over the remnants of dinner, he was more approachable than he had been during the day, more willing to entertain Nora’s questions about things other than magic, or sometimes to question her.
“The society, the countryside, in your book are different from what I remember of your world,” he objected once, after they had penetrated several chapters into the novel. “Is this the sort of life that you led there?”
Nora explained that the novel was more than two hundred years old. A present-day Elizabeth Bennet would be in college at age twenty, probably thinking more about the job market than marriage. “Tell me more about your travels in my world,” she said after a pause. “Why is it that this world is full of magicians, but there are none in mine?” Not so long ago, Nora thought, she would have asked the question as a joke. Now she wanted to know.
“Some of the stones and mountains in your world had known magicians before me. But no, I never found another active magician there. A pity, for there were some rare opportunities to practice magic. There was great power in those cities—Chigago, and then the city across the ocean whose name sounds like ‘Dead Fish.’”
“London” was the closest English synonym. “What do you mean, there was great power in those cities?”
“I mean that the cities themselves generated power, from the crowds, from the action of the iron machinery in those enormous workshops. It was a new kind of magic. I spent a year working there, in a peasant’s job, in order to study it. Quite powerful, but unpredictable.”
“What sort of peasant’s job?”
He would not say, but from another comment he made later, Nora deduced that he had been shoveling coal. He had traveled to London via ship, she gathered, to reach the gateway to his world that would allow him to go home. But in London he discovered that a great war was raging in precisely the area where he wished to go.
World War II, Nora hazarded. “What did you do?”
“I am a magician,” he said, with a sliver of a smile. “And I did not need any particularly complex protection spells—they only had to be very strong, given the kind of artillery that I had to make my way through.” His face darkened. “I had never seen anything like the kind of warfare you practice in your world. Thousands upon thousands of men being torn to pieces by bits of flying iron. It was butchery.”
Nora agreed, but she felt obliged to observe: “Carving people up with swords isn’t so wonderful, either.”
Aruendiel remarked that it was more honorable to meet an enemy face-to-face in fair combat than to blow holes in him from two polists away. “And more enjoyable, too. But I admit that I myself have lost much of my taste for making war since—” He broke off, his eyes fixed on the fire.
“Since you were injured?” Nora asked delicately.
“Yes, since I was injured. And I am older than I was. War is for the young men.” Offhandedly, still looking into the flames, he added: “We must start you on fire magic soon.”
“Good, that sounds more exciting than mending pots,” Nora said rashly.
Aruendiel pointed out, with some severity, that she still had more work to do in that area. “You have not learned to induce a ceramic vessel to change its form, or to break a dish so that only you can mend it, or—”
“All right, yes, I saw there’s a whole treatise by Setisonior the Left-handed on that. Aruendiel, will this magic I’m learning help me defend myself if I meet Ilissa again?”
He turned his head to look at her. “Not unless she decides to attack you by breaking all the dishes.”
“When will I learn something that will actually let me defend myself?”
“I can teach you a basic shielding spell, once you have some expertise with fire magic. It would hold Ilissa off for a few minutes. To truly protect yourself, though, you cannot let Ilissa know your heart better than you yourself do. It’s the only sure way. I’ve told you that before.”
In a milder tone, he added: “There is no reason to think that you will encounter her again. She is confined to her lands, and before the next king is fool enough to let her out, you will likely have returned to your world already.”
“Yes,” Nora said, unsatisfied, twisting the ring on her finger. “But sometimes I can’t help worrying.”
“Then you have learned some wisdom, I see,” he said with severe approval.
Later that night, as she lay in bed, her feet curled against a warm brick, she listened to Aruendiel’s tread up the stairs and down the corridor, one long step and then a shorter one, and she thought about what he had said. A daunting task, to take careful inventory of one’s own heart. Which, of all the secrets that were hidden there, would be most useful to Ilissa?
There was her low-grade obsession with Aruendiel. Nora had given up calling it a crush; it had lost some of its urgency, and it seemed indecorous now that he was officially her teacher. (Even across the worlds, she felt the invisible contraints of the sexual harassment policy of the Graduate College of Arts and Sciences.) Perhaps that was why her fixation had moderated: She had wanted Aruendiel’s time and attention, and now she had it, in some measure—in the lessons, in their oddly companionable evening talks. But she still felt something that might be termed an unhealthy interest. It was not really romantic in nature, she told herself sternly. More of a morbid curiosity. There were too many questions that she had not dared to ask or that he had refused to answer. His murdered wife was only one of them.
And she was ever mindful of his lank, battered, precariously balanced body. His face was not always so hideous, when he took the trouble to smile. Once or twice, when they leaned over a book together, she was troubled to think that she might feel the accidental warmth of his shoulder against hers, or even that his hand might suddenly take hold of her own.
Nothing like that ever happened, fortunately.
Ilissa would make hay with all of these repressed and tangled wishes. (Nora imagined her delighted laugh.) “The problem,” Nora reflected clinically, “is that I’m lonely and horny and starved for companionship—not to mention that my sex life has probably been permanently scarred because I was married to Grendel’s uglier brother—so naturally I feel hot and bothered when I get close to an eligible man, any man, no matter what he looks like.”
It had been almost six months since she had fled from Ilissa’s palace. Had things turned out differently, she would be a
new mother by now. (Or dead, according to Aruendiel.) The happy mother of a baby pterodactyl. Would she still have loved it, her own flesh and blood made monstrous?
Of course she would have, under Ilissa’s smiling, adamantine enchantments—but in truth, the enchantment might not have been necessary, because whatever the child looked like, it would have at least earned her pity by being tiny and helpless, and by then there would have been nothing else for her to love.
It was all so wrong. So unfair. Although she could not be sure of the real object of her outrage: Ilissa or Raclin or her own gullibility. She’d been an easy mark, so greedy for love that she had given the best of her own heart without stopping to consider what she received in exchange. Just as with Adam. If she could not learn to be more discerning, the only safe course was to avoid love altogether. Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust.
How old did you have to be before you learned the difference between the simulacrum of love and the reality? Listening to an owl calling outside, she tried to sleep.
* * *
The lessons in fire magic began a week later. Aruendiel refused to let Nora try any fire spells near his books; she had to practice with a pile of wood shavings in the great hall, with a bucket of water nearby. A wise precaution, Nora had to admit, after charring a hole in her apron.
Aruendiel was not amused. “It is the kindling that is meant to burn, not you.”
“Either nothing happens”—which was most of the time—“or pop, suddenly I’m on fire.”
“You must be firm with it. Fire wants to please, which is one of the things that makes it so useful, but sometimes its enthusiasm becomes dangerous. It will come straight to you if you do not direct it elsewhere. Keep it in check.”
Nora looked over at the fireplace, at the fire she had built there in the ordinary way, stacking the logs and then applying a hot coal from the kitchen. Somehow she was supposed to draw on its power to set the shavings alight. “This fire doesn’t look very enthusiastic. Maybe I should start again.”
“The wood is damp,” Aruendiel said disapprovingly. “But that should not affect the spell.”
She kept trying. Aruendiel, obviously bored, returned to the tower, after putting a spell on the water in the bucket so that it would dowse the flames if Nora caught fire again. “If you do not wish to be drenched, you had best master this spell,” he warned. By the end of the day, Nora had singed the end of her braid, causing the water in the bucket to slosh about alarmingly before she managed to extinguish the spark. The smell of burnt hair lingered.
Coming into the hall from the kitchen, Mrs. Toristel paused to sniff, then looked hard at the almost-untouched pile of shavings. “You haven’t started the fire yet,” she observed.
“No, not yet.”
“You’ve been at it all afternoon. I would think it frustrating to keep trying, with no luck.”
“Yes, but I’m close, I can feel it. I can feel the fire, sometimes. It’s an amazing feeling.”
“There’s nothing remarkable about feeling the fire, if you’re close enough to it.”
“I feel it inside.” Nora smiled, elated enough to disregard her self-imposed rule about not talking to Mrs. Toristel about her magic studies. “I feel flashes of something that’s—it’s not exactly happy—it’s excited, very excited, and hopeful. Hungry. I know it’s there. Now I just have to make it do what I want.”
Mrs. Toristel looked unimpressed. “You don’t have to be a magician to make a fire. How long before you learn to do the kinds of things that he can do?”
“I don’t know. Someday.”
“Someday. Well, if you have the patience for it. And if he has the patience. Why is he trying to teach you this, do you know?”
Nora had to say again that she did not know. “I assume it interests him, somehow.”
“He takes these fancies, sometimes, about teaching people what he thinks they should know. He tried to have me read one of those great long poems once, when he taught me my letters. I didn’t know half the words. I had to tell him, I wasn’t cut out to be educated.” Mrs. Toristel frowned, her features growing pinched. “Well, maybe it will be a help to him to have someone around who knows a little magic,” she added grudgingly. “At least you can mend the broken plates now, that’s useful. I never liked to ask him before.”
Once Nora could reliably set the shavings, and not herself, on fire, the next lesson involved precision: lighting every other candle in a twelve-branched bronze candelabra. It was surprisingly hard, after she had gotten the hang of lighting a fire magically, to learn to hold back and not light some of the candles. The fire that she wielded seemed all too willing, and the magic did not seem to understand that some of the candles should remain unlit. Every time she wound up with the whole candelabra enthusiastically blazing.
She knew exactly what Aruendiel would say when he came down to check on her progress: that skillful magic was as much about control as about power, and would she have the grace to remember that candles are expensive? When Aruendiel finally appeared, she almost told him to spare his breath.
Then she saw his face. Hollowed out with rage, his eyes cold and wild.
Chapter 27
What’s wrong?” Nora stood up. Her eyes went to the scroll Aruendiel held.
He took a deep breath. “I have just heard from Dorneng Hul. Concerning Hirizjahkinis.”
“Dorneng Hul?” It took Nora a half second to place the name: the magician from Semr who’d gone north with Aruendiel, trailing Ilissa back to her domain. She had the vague impression that he was up there still, working for one of Aruendiel’s friends, keeping a watchful eye on Ilissa. “What—”
Aruendiel brandished the scroll as though it were a weapon. “He writes that it has been three days and two nights since Hirizjahkinis and Hirgus Ext drove into Ilissa’s kingdom, and that he is growing concerned, since he understood that they meant to spend only one night there. Spend the night? Paying a call upon the Faitoren? Has Hirizjahkinis gone mad?”
“Jesus,” Nora said, and Aruendiel fixed her with a stare.
“Did she say anything about this in Semr?” he demanded. “Any hint that she was considering such a thing?”
“No, not at all. She said—she told me she didn’t even think about Ilissa that much—that Ilissa wasn’t worth bothering about.”
Aruendiel swore a few hot syllables. “She will know differently by now. Three days! And Dorneng only now thinks to inform me. What possessed her? Why did she say nothing to me?”
“Who is Hirgus Ext?” Nora asked.
“That’s another mystery. He is a wizard of no great skill from Mirne Klep. As tedious as his tongue is long. I have no idea why Hirizjahkinis would spend an hour in his company—let alone travel to Ilissa’s domain with him. Yet Dorneng says they arrived together at Luklren’s castle and went on together.” Aruendiel glanced suddenly at Nora as though he had just been reminded of something. “I do not think—”
“No, nothing like that. He doesn’t sound like her type,” Nora said at once. “Are you sure they’re actually in Ilissa’s kingdom? Dorneng isn’t mistaken?”
Aruendiel shook his head. “There is no reason to doubt him. I can find a few traces of Hirizjahkinis’s magic northeast of here, near the Faitoren. They are at least a day old, nothing more recent. She has my token. But she has not used it to call for help.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Nora saw, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, how stupid her question was. “Unless, of course, it means she can’t use it,” she finished lamely. “Because the Faitoren have enchanted her.”
“Or worse.” Aruendiel turned away, back to the tower. “I will leave shortly to find Hirizjahkinis. Tell Mrs. Toristel to pack a bag for me.”
Take me with you, Nora was about to say, but at the same time she remembered Ilissa smiling at her in Semr, the kind of silken smile that could bind your soul in an instant and never let you go. Nora flushed and stopped in her tracks as Aruendiel went
through the wall.
* * *
“At nightfall, at this time of year? In this rain, he’s leaving?” Mrs. Toristel put down the onion she was holding and wiped her hands on her apron with a kind of studied vehemence. Nora had finally located her in one of the storerooms. “Dear gods, and where is he going?”
Nora began to explain again about Hirizjahkinis having fallen into the hands of the Faitoren.
“Well, she was fool enough to put herself in danger, wasn’t she?” Mrs. Toristel demanded. “And now he has to get her out of it?”
“Yes, of course!” The words came charging out louder than Nora had anticipated. She found that it was a relief to shout, although Mrs. Toristel only looked sour. “Of course he has to. Look what the Faitoren did to me. And they’ll treat her worse.”
Nora had had time, as she searched for Mrs. Toristel, to consider exactly how Ilissa might deal with a captive and defenseless Hirizjahkinis. “Hirizjahkinis is their enemy, she fought them before. They’ll torture her, humiliate her. Raclin will—” Nora spread her hands frantically, helplessly.
“Will do what?” Mrs. Toristel asked.
“If she’s lucky, he’ll just eat her,” Nora said. She went flying out of the room, headed for the tower, propelled by an incoherent conviction that somehow, with the right argument, with the right amount of insistence, she could persuade Aruendiel to take her with him.
Nora was disconcerted to find him sitting quietly at his usual table, a piece of paper in front of him. “Aruendiel, before you go—”
“I’m not going.” His voice was sharp with frost. “Not yet.”
She stared at him blankly. “Not going!”
“There is another letter,” he said venomously. “From Luklren. Ilissa holds them hostage. She is trying to tie my hands.”
“Oh.” Nora waited, but there was no other explanation forthcoming. “May I see it?”
The parchment was covered with large, rather childish brushstrokes. She skipped over the long greeting, studded with Lord Luklren’s various titles and Aruendiel’s, and read:
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 37