The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  The Faitoren queen sent an emissary today to inform me that she has taken prisoner the two magic-workers who entered her kingdom three days ago. I said that had nothing to do with me. The emissary said that his queen understood that perfectly and then asked that I pass this message along to you.

  For the lives and safe return of the wizard Hirgus Ext and the witch Herezjawkenus—judging from the smeared ink, Luklren had made several attempts at the name—the Faitoren queen wants you to dissolve the imprisonment spells around the Faitoren kingdom. She asks that you then swear to abandon the practice of magic and that you surrender to the Faitoren. She also wants ten thousand additional silmas of land and two thousand head of cattle.

  As immediate proof of your good faith, she asks that you return her son’s wife, the princess Nora, by dawn tomorrow. If not, one of the captives will be killed. If you come near or attempt to enter the Faitoren domain before the dissolution of the imprisonment spell and your surrender, both of the captives will be killed.

  Lord Luklren evidently felt himself ill-used by all sides. His handwriting grew still larger and more agitated as she read further. I told you the last time I saw you not to stir up trouble with the Faitoren. If that imprisonment spell goes, they’ll steal everything on my lands that they can carry away. What were those two magic-workers up to? I warned them not to go in. I’ve already told the Faitoren that I’m neutral in this dispute, and I do not intend to be a party to any hostilities. . . .

  Her eyes raced through the remaining lines of the letter; then she handed it back to Aruendiel. “He thinks you should send me back,” she said.

  “Yes. I must apologize for his language there. He has an imperfect grasp of the situation.” Aruendiel stood up abruptly, as though he were tensed for some great exertion, but he only turned and began to pace fitfully in front of the fire.

  “Are you going to send me back?” Nora asked.

  “No.” He made it sound like a reprimand.

  With a sense that she was stepping over a precipice, Nora said: “But otherwise Hirizjahkinis might—”

  “I said no,” Aruendiel sliced through her words. “I do not intend to present Ilissa with any proof of my good faith. She knows exactly whom she is dealing with.”

  “It’s outrageous, what she demands.” Briefly Nora wondered how large a silma of land was, but filed the question away for later. “The only good thing—we know that Hirizjahkinis and Hirgus Ext are still alive.”

  “No, I don’t think we do.” He spoke with more weariness than before. “Ilissa is not negotiating in earnest, I fear. Her demands are too outsized. And she offers no evidence that her prisoners still live.

  “That makes my course more difficult to plot just now. If they are alive, I must proceed more cautiously. If they are dead—if Hirizjahkinis is dead—I will have a free hand to attack.” Arundiel gave a quick, hard smile, and Nora had the icy thought that perhaps he almost welcomed the idea of Hirizjahkinis’s death, if it meant that he had an unshakable reason to destroy Ilissa.

  “You sent a wind for me,” Nora said. “It carried me away, right in front of Ilissa, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

  Aruendiel was already shaking his head. “It was almost the first thing I tried, this time. Ilissa is better prepared now. My winds cannot cross into her domain.”

  “Well, what then? Why not—” Nora balled her fists, thinking in fury of how little she still knew of magic. “Why not just attack Ilissa herself? Make her drop dead? Raclin, too.”

  “This calls for more subtlety. I will tell Ilissa that I must have proof that Hirizjahkinis and Hirgus are alive. And in the meantime, I will start to dissolve the spells that hold the Faitoren captive.”

  “Let Ilissa go free?”

  “Those spells are walls that keep the Faitoren in—but they also bar or blunt many other kinds of magic. For example, a spell to make Ilissa drop dead.” A gleam of anticipation in the pale eyes. “Or to extract a captive. Ilissa has her own defenses, of course. I must think of how best to take them apart.”

  He threw himself down at the table and began to write rapidly on a sheet of parchment. Nora, after hovering for a moment, went downstairs to tell Mrs. Toristel that Aruendiel would not be leaving at present. When she returned, Aruendiel sent her down again to ask Mr. Toristel to bring out the chains from the dungeon and all the nails he could gather. “And the spikes from the old mercy bed.”

  Mr. Toristel’s arthritis had been bad lately. Nora had to help carry up the biggest chains, the links as thick as her index finger. It took four trips to get it all moved into the courtyard. The spikes from the mercy bed were heavily rusted, as though they had not been cleaned after their last use.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Toristel was assembling a tray of bread and mutton for the magician. “I suppose he’ll be up all night. Make him eat something, will you?” Nora said she would, although she herself felt no desire for food. Mrs. Toristel sawed at the meat with irritating slowness.

  “When I was a little girl in Pelagnia, there were elves in the forest that had black skin,” the housekeeper said suddenly. “My granny told me about them. They liked to steal little children and eat their tongues. You had to be quiet and not speak, going through the forest, so they wouldn’t know you were there.”

  Nora saw where this was headed. “Hirizjahkinis isn’t a black elf.”

  “No, but I always think of them when I see her.” Mrs. Toristel was silent for a moment, tearing the bread. “Those Faitoren, they put spells on you to make you look different—prettier.” She gave a sideways glance at Nora, gauging her reaction. “Will they do the same to that Hirizjahkinis? Make her skin white, maybe?”

  Astounded, Nora opened her mouth to retort—she looks fine the way she is—and then closed it. If you looked past all the ways in which Mrs. Toristel’s inquiry was depressingly narrow-minded and offensive, there was a good question buried in it. What were Hirizjahkinis’s secret wishes, and how would Ilissa twist them to torture her? Nora could not say. She was fairly sure, though, that they did not include being white.

  “No, Mrs. Toristel,” she said finally. “I don’t think so.”

  Nora took the tray upstairs. Both tables in the library were now piled with a jumble of books, most of them lying open, and Aruendiel’s eyes were locked to the page of the folio in front of him.

  “What has taken you so long?” he demanded, not looking up. “The second volume of Vros—find it, will you? I need the section on inanimate-to-animate transformations. And then Seethros on reversals. And my notebooks on Faitoren illusionwork.”

  She had only begun to master Aruendiel’s library cataloging system—which grouped books by subject, by date, and also by how skilled a magic-worker Aruendiel judged the author to have been—but she found the books as quickly as she could. By then he had a new list of volumes to be fetched.

  “Do you have a plan yet?” she asked him, when books covered the floor around his chair.

  “Yes. Do you not see it? Are you paying no attention?” But he was too much occupied to direct any more abuse at Nora’s lapse. He jerked up from his chair after a few minutes and went upstairs to his workroom without a word. Nora, bent over a treatise by Trankias Mins on augmenting spells over distance, felt her stomach clench and roll and was thankful that she had not touched the mutton that Mrs. Toristel had prepared. Only rarely since she started practicing magic herself had Nora felt queasy in the presence of magic; whatever Aruendiel was doing up there, it was stronger magic than she had experienced before.

  Sooner than she expected, Aruendiel clattered down the stairs, pausing in the library only long enough to tell Nora to follow him down to the courtyard. Outside, the day’s heavy rain had eased to a freezing drizzle. Nora shivered and hugged her elbows, but Aruendiel seemed not to notice the cold. A single torch burned in a niche, showing a rumpled mass on the ground, where Mr. Toristel had bundled the chains and nails under an oiled tarpaulin to keep them dry. Aruendiel snatched away the cov
er.

  “I need more,” he said after a moment’s inspection.

  “That’s all we could find,” Nora said.

  “It’s not enough. Iron—that’s what I want. Anything made of iron or steel.”

  “The old armor in the attic?” She had been sorting it all week; Mrs. Toristel was after her to polish it.

  Aruendiel made an impatient gesture, as though flabbergasted why Nora was dawdling. “Bring it here.”

  She came back with helmets stacked in her arms like bowls. Now Aruendiel was in the center of the courtyard, looking upward. He held something in his left hand—a fistful of iron nails, Nora saw as she came closer. Methodically, he selected a few at a time to toss upward into the air. They disappeared into the darkness. Nora found herself waiting for the ping of nails falling onto cobblestones, but there was no sound at all. Or was that a faint clanking above?

  Something black flapped past Aruendiel’s head—a bat, Nora thought, recoiling instinctively. Aruendiel did not move. Not a bat, she decided after getting another glimpse of it. Not exactly.

  With mounting excitement, she watched him work until she was sure. When he had finished all the nails, he began to break the smaller chains into separate links—some cleaving spell, she thought—and then he threw each piece of iron into the air.

  “You’re making iron birds,” Nora said. Aruendiel nodded tersely, his eyes on the air. “That’s how you’re going to attack the Faitoren,” she said.

  “It’s how I will break down the walls of the Faitoren kingdom,” he corrected. “All the spells that Ilissa has wrapped around her lands to keep me out.”

  Nora clapped her hands softly. “Your birds will fly there—and iron is poisonous to the Faitoren—”

  “And each one carries a reversal spell that can take apart the Faitoren magic. Then I can send a wind—or some other emissary.” Suddenly the largest chain, still lying at Aruendiel’s feet, uncoiled itself with a creak and streaked toward the gate, looking less chainlike and more serpentlike with every instant. The other big chain, studded with manacles, gathered itself, then rose on four legs and hurled itself out of the courtyard, following the serpent. “The wolf is for Raclin, the snake is for Ilissa,” Aruendiel added. “Although it does not matter if they switch.”

  “Will they be there by dawn?” Nora asked. She had not checked the water clock in the kitchen for some time, but the night was advancing. The Toristels had retired some time ago.

  “Oh, yes. They will attack two hours before dawn, all of them together. The timing is very delicate.” He hefted a broken link in his hand, as though weighing it, and then threw it into the air. “The Faitoren defenses must come down at once, before Ilissa realizes what is happening, and then I will have to pull Hirizjahkinis out immediately—”

  “And Hirgus Ext.”

  “I will save Hirgus if I can. At any rate, the hostages will have to come out quickly—”

  “Before Ilissa can kill them,” Nora finished, her momentary elation draining away.

  “If they are even alive now,” Aruendiel said. “Give me those helmets, and bring me more iron.”

  Nora brought down the rest of the old weapons from the attic—Aruendiel reserved only a broken sword, he did not say why—and then went hunting cautiously in the kitchen and storerooms for ironware. She had a strong feeling that Mrs. Toristel would not be pleased to see her best kitchen implements given wings and sent flying away, and was grateful to find an iron cauldron with the bottom rusted out nestling in a stack of old barrel hoops.

  Sometime after midnight Aruendiel let the last of the iron creatures flap away into the night. “There is no use in sending any more,” he said. “They will not arrive in time.”

  Nora watched the departing bird. It looked small and clumsy as it clambered upward into the cloudy air. “Do we have a Plan B?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A second plan, in case this one fails.”

  Aruendiel shrugged. “Then I will attack again. In person this time.”

  Nora could not keep herself from saying: “You said once it would be suicidal to take on Ilissa in her own territory.”

  “Did I?”

  Without any more words, they went inside. The fire that Nora had lit in the great hall that afternoon had burned out, and the room was black and almost as chilly as the courtyard. Aruendiel told her that she must go to bed. When she protested, he said seriously: “It is important to sleep before battle. You don’t know when you might next have the chance to sleep, in a war.”

  Nora had not thought of what they were doing as war, exactly, but then reflected: What else would it be? “I don’t want to sleep through the attack,” she said.

  “I will rouse you beforehand,” he said, frowning, and she decided it would be better to believe him.

  Nora went upstairs and stretched out on top of her bed without changing out of her dress. About a quarter of the night left before the sun rose, Aruendiel had said. Not so long ago she had lain here sleeplessly, worrying about Ilissa, and yet now that moment in the past seemed to be one of almost infinite security and comfort. She pictured the great snake and the wolf racing to the northeast, under the cloud of birds that Aruendiel had made, and wondered how much farther they had to travel. The creatures might be made of metal, but they didn’t move like machinery. But not exactly like living animals, either. She watched them reach the top of a ridge and plunge down the other side, starlight gleaming dully on their sleek backs—

  Nora’s eyes popped open. She sat up and looked toward the window, which was noticeably brighter, the panes catching a reddish glow. Dawn, she thought.

  Damnit. Aruendiel let me sleep through the whole thing.

  She ran downstairs as fast as she could, a hand against the wall to keep from stumbling in the dark. The silence in the house was ominous. The assault failed, she thought. He’s left already to fight Ilissa. He never woke me up, he never said good-bye.

  But as she crossed the great hall, she heard noises in the courtyard. The stamping of horses. Voices. The orange light that came through the windows flickered and danced.

  She yanked open the door. Aruendiel was standing with his back to her, arms folded, a few yards away. In front of him was what Nora took to be an enormous bonfire.

  Two figures stepped composedly out of the flames. The smaller one she recognized as Hirizjahkinis.

  Chapter 28

  Greetings, Aruendiel!” Hirizjahkinis stepped forward, pulling the Kavareen’s hide more tightly around her shoulders, and then held out her hands to Aruendiel.

  Aruendiel unfolded his arms and stepped forward. Nora could not see his face, but there was tension in the angle of his shoulders. He ignored Hirizjahkinis’s proffered hands and looked hard into her face. Then, with one hand on her shoulder—he seemed to be bearing down hard—he grasped her chin and moved her head so he could stare into each of her ears, and finally her nostrils.

  Hirizjahkinis submitted, a half smile on her lips. “It is very good to see you, too!”

  “What on earth, Hirizjahkinis?” Aruendiel said finally, taking her by both shoulders. Nora had the distinct impression he would like to shake her. Hirizjahkinis perhaps had the same idea, because she gave a discreet wiggle to set herself free.

  “No enchantments?” she asked briskly. “Good. We spent the whole drive picking them off each other, Hirgus and I. Ilissa’s palace is no better than the inns in this country—you must be careful what you take away with you. You know Hirgus Ext the Shorn, of course?”

  The two men bowed. Hirgus Ext—stout, swathed in furs—began to say something about being a keen admirer of the magician Aruendiel and how pleased he was to renew his acquaintance. Nora could stand it no longer. She pushed past Aruendiel and threw her arms around Hirizjahkinis. It was obviously not the correct greeting—Nora could sense the surprise in Hirizjahkinis’s small, straight-backed body—but after an instant Hirizjahkinis returned the embrace warmly. “Now I begin to feel welcome,” she
said to Nora.

  “We were so worried,” Nora said. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I am perfectly fine. Hirgus’s conflagration carriage is marvelously warm. I felt no cold at all—until we got here.” She adjusted the Kavareen’s hide again and gave an exaggerated shiver. Nora looked back at the bonfire. Now she could make out the black outlines of a carriage under the fire’s brilliance. The flames, she noticed, had an oddly stylized quality, curling with rococo flair. Grinning faces in the fire winked and thrust out long tongues. Harnessed to the coach were a pair of black horses, larger than any horses Nora had ever seen.

  “But the Faitoren?” Nora asked. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes, except that Hirgus and I are famished!” She smiled up at Aruendiel, who had turned again to her, relief and irritation visibly struggling in his face. “Faitoren food is not as filling as you think it is when you are eating it.”

  Aruendiel’s face tightened again. “Mistress Nora, let Mrs. Toristel know that we have guests for breakfast,” he said brusquely.

  Nora found the Toristels already up. They had seen the glow of the coach in the courtyard, and first had thought the house was on fire.

  “So she didn’t need him to help her after all,” Mrs. Toristel said, putting a shawl over her shoulders. “All that worry, for nothing.” She sniffed and looked balefully at Nora, as though to reproach her for rousing needless fears. “And what are we supposed to give that Hirizjahkinis for breakfast? She won’t eat oatmeal. Oh, no! Last time she was here, she wouldn’t touch it.”

  “Because black elves eat children’s tongues, not oatmeal?” Relief made Nora giddy.

  “None of your silliness,” Mrs. Toristel said, amicably enough. “See if she’ll have some of that mutton.”

  As Nora hurried back through the courtyard, Hirgus Ext was directing Mr. Toristel as he unhitched the black horses from the fire coach. The great hall was empty. Aruendiel and Hirizjahkinis were in the tower, she guessed. She piled logs in the fireplace, then urged them into flame. It took only two tries, although the wood was damp from yesterday’s rain.