The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  Fori took the restored platter wonderingly. “That’s magic, isn’t it?”

  She seemed about to say something else, but one of the children jerked the puppy’s tail, provoking a frenzy of yelping. Morinen and Nora turned to leave. They were a few paces outside the hut when Fori called after them. Nora’s first thought was that the platter had already been broken again. But Fori was waving two pale strips of cloth in the air.

  “Stockings,” she said, pressing them into Nora’s hands. “Thank you.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  Fori had already disappeared inside, drawn by a fresh wail from one of the children.

  “That was nice of her,” Nora said, examining the stockings. “Lambs’ wool.”

  “Just good manners to pay you back for the favor.” Morinen paused, then said meaningfully: “You know, I believe everyone in the village has got some kind of broken dish they’d like to have fixed.”

  Nora looked at Morinen. “You really think so?”

  “I could ask around.”

  “And they might express their gratitude with more stockings?” Nora laughed. “Or goatskins?”

  “Goatskins.” Morinen nodded, smiling back at Nora. “Cheese.”

  “Well, that’s very interesting.” Nora considered for a moment. “I could come back tomorrow morning and see if anyone needs any pots mended.”

  “Oh, they will,” Morinen said. “People always drop things. I wish I had a pair of stockings for every dish I’ve broken.”

  The next morning, after finishing her chores as quickly as she could, Nora went back to the village, a little reluctantly. She was feeling a kind of stage fright—terror that she would forget how to do the spell. But that wouldn’t really matter, she reasoned, because Morinen was probably wrong and no one would be interested in having her mend their broken dishes.

  “People always want to see magic!” scoffed some brash interior carny that, until then, Nora had not known she carried with her. Strangely enough, it sounded a bit like Aruendiel.

  When she entered Morinen’s hut, pushing aside the sheepskin that hung inside the door, she saw that Morinen was not there. But Morinen’s mother and two of her brothers—one sharpening a scythe, the other fitting a new wooden handle to a mallet—looked up as though they had been expecting her.

  “Mori said for you to meet her at Caddo’s,” said Resk, the one with the mallet.

  “All right,” Nora said, trying to remember which house was Caddo’s. “That’s on the other side of the village, right? Next to the river?”

  “I’ll take you,” the other brother, Posin, said. “Mori said I wouldn’t want to miss this.”

  When they reached Caddo’s hut, Morinen was waiting inside with Caddo—Big Faris’s wife, Nora remembered now, who kept bees—and almost a dozen other women. There was a large basket of broken crockery by Morinen’s feet.

  “Morinen, did you tell everyone in the village about this?” Nora asked in an undertone.

  “Oh, yes,” Morinen said. “It’s not as though you could keep it secret, anyhow. Here’s Caddo’s pots—we dug them out of her rubbish heap this morning. I reckon there must be five years’ worth of broken dishes here.”

  “You’re not kidding,” Nora said, nudging the basket with her toe. She felt the leather of her boot pulling away from the sole, and the sensation steeled her resolve. She knelt beside the basket and rummaged through the contents, looking for pieces that might have come from the same dish. Caddo came forward to help her. By the end of ten minutes, they had what appeared to be the pieces of four separate dishes and a pile of unidentified shards.

  With her hands on the broken pottery, Nora began to feel more confident. She picked up two curved fragments from the largest pile, both with the same reddish-brown glaze, and touched them together experimentally. The shards grated roughly against each other. Wait, she corrected herself, reaching into the pile again, this one goes with that one. Two pieces flowed together, then a third. Finding the right piece got easier as you went along—the pot practically showed you how to put it back together.

  It turned out to be a pitcher with an old man’s face molded into its round belly. “Here you go,” Nora said, handing it to Caddo, who looked both gratified and suspicious. She turned the pitcher over and over, looking for flaws. “Go ahead, fill it with water if you want,” Nora urged. She turned her attention to the other piles of broken crockery. A bowl. Another bowl. A platter, painted with an intricate design of radishes and carrots. She was conscious, as she fit the fragments together, that the finished dishes were being passed around the room with whispers.

  Then the pile of miscellaneous fragments. It was much harder to reconstitute an entire pot from a single shard. You had to summon the missing pieces from wherever they were, if they were even still in existence, or re-create them if they were not. You really needed the clay’s cooperation here, and some fragments were more apathetic than others. If it had been a very long time since the original pot was broken, the piece might have almost forgotten that it was once part of a shaped and greater whole. Aruendiel could reliably bring back an old pot from a fragment as small as a fingernail, but Nora’s success rate was perhaps one in three.

  So this was good practice. By the time she had gone through the entire pile, she estimated that she had raised her rate to almost one in two, and Caddo was back in possession of another bowl, some roughly formed mugs, and a chamber pot with a sententious motto painted around the rim. (“Foul are my contents but sweeter than filth from the mouth.”)

  “All right,” Nora said finally. “I think I’ve done all that I can do.” She stood up and looked questioningly at Morinen: What now?

  Morinen had evidently prepped Caddo, who glanced shrewdly one more time at the newly mended dishes and then produced a small flagon of honey wine and three beeswax candles. After a second’s hesitation, she also handed Nora one of the reconstituted pitchers. “I thank you, most excellent lady, for this favor you have shown me,” Caddo said, with a curtsy, “and I beg you to accept an unworthy gift in return.”

  “Your gifts far outshine my humble offering, Faris’s most excellent wife, and I thank you for your generosity,” Nora said, returning the curtsy. She was fairly sure that she had gotten the formula right—she had heard Mrs. Toristel go through the same ritual exchange when bartering with one of the villagers. Even so, the others in the room, even the little boys who had crowded in, seemed to be amused.

  She got the same reaction—someone even tittered—at the next hut, when Morinen’s aunt Narl gave her a skein of crimson yarn for mending a couple of plates and an oil lamp. “Did I say something wrong?” she murmered to Morinen as they left.

  “No, no, what do you mean? You’re doing fine,” Morinen said. “Aunt Narl was a little cheap, though. She could have done better than that yarn.”

  “I don’t mind giving your family a discount.”

  “Not so loud—the whole village is family. Now, Pelinen’s next. She’ll probably have some cheese for you. We should start doing a little trading, or you’ll never be able to carry all this stuff.”

  “Trading?” Nora asked. “What should I—”

  “Leave it to me.”

  Pelinen was a square-faced widow of forty who owned the village’s two best dairy cows. After Nora mended a cracked pickle crock, a chamber pot, and—a new challenge—a small square of looking glass, Morinen drew Pelinen into a muttered side consultation. Nora could not hear the details of the discussion, but she got the sense that both parties were volleying back and forth with practiced ease. A few minutes later she and Morinen left without the beeswax candles and yarn, but with half a wheel of cheese that they had to trundle between the two of them, since even Morinen was not strong enough to carry it by herself.

  At the tanner’s, the cheese and the honey wine and a half-dozen mended dishes turned into two goatskins. At Trouteye’s, the rubbish heap had been excavated down to bare earth in Nora’s honor; she spent more than an ho
ur mending pots for him and his wife and left with a side of bacon. Lus had only a few items to be repaired, but he took the bacon in exchange for a cask of ale. At their next stop, as Nora mended dishes, the ale and one of the goatskins became a woolen blanket; at the hut belonging to Morinen’s cousin Porlus, the other goatskin became an iron skillet.

  There was an unusual amount of joviality accompanying each of these transactions, it seemed to Nora. Sometimes people would glance at her worn boots and laugh. It took her a while to realize, from snippets of overheard conversations, that they were not laughing at her, but Aruendiel. Morinen had evidently told all—how Aruendiel had refused to buy new boots for her and how the cobbler was charging her at least double the usual price.

  Further, Nora gleaned, one of the accused on trial before his lordship in Stone Top at this moment was a boy of nineteen from the village, known as Ferret—Morinen’s second cousin. Ferret was probably destined for the gallows anyway, everyone said, but most believed him innocent of the crime that he was accused of, beating and robbing an elderly peasant of his horse. The judges were likely to sentence him to hang.

  “So everyone’s helping me because they’re angry at Aruendiel?” Nora asked Morinen, as they went from one hut to another.

  “No, I wouldn’t say angry, not at all.” Morinen glanced around with a trace of uneasiness. “They just think it’s funny, you having to buy your own boots. And they do like having their dishes fixed.”

  By this time, the light was fading. Nora had mended at least three dozen dishes and cooking vessels, two mirrors, four glass bottles, and two small clay figures of a rabbit-headed gnome with an oversized phallus. (“That’s Gingornl,” Morinen said matter-of-factly. “He brings children. Folks keep him in the bed with them, so he’s always getting broken.”) Nora was not tired at all—the opposite, in fact—but she was beginning to think that her brain would explode into tiny shards from working an unceasing succession of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles.

  “So what have we collected?” Nora asked Morinen.

  “A skillet, three sheepskins, a goatskin, a kerchief, a flask of blackberry cordial, a dozen sausages, three skeins of yarn, and a bag of dried peas,” Morinen said with satisfaction.

  “And the stockings that Fori gave me. Do you think that’s enough for my boots?”

  “I think so. Let’s go over to Bitar’s now; he might give us some cash for this lot.”

  Bitar’s small, cluttered hut was the village’s closest equivalent to a general store. He bartered for goods in the markets in Red Gate and Stone Top, then traded them to the villagers for a premium, and was rumored to have a box of gold beetles buried under his hearth. Mrs. Toristel said that she would never eat anything that came out of Bitar’s hut, but she sometimes went to him for small oddments like needles or string if she had no time to go to Red Gate on market day.

  Bitar greeted them by complaining that they had ruined his business in dishes for the next six months. “No one wants to buy your bowls anyway, they’re much too expensive,” Morinen retorted. “But this is your lucky day, Bitar. Look at all the lovely things that Mistress Nora and I have to sell to you. Didn’t Porsn do a nice job of tanning these hides? We have some of Blue Dove’s blackberry wine, and this skillet, very clean, no rust on it anywhere, not like that iron pot you sold my ma last year.”

  “She got a good price on that pot, I don’t know what you’re complaining about.” Bitar pointed out the dent in the skillet and the stain on one of the sheepskins. He and Morinen haggled for a few minutes until he finally agreed to pay them three silver beads for the lot, except for the sausages and the yarn. “I couldn’t give those away,” he said, scratching his chin. “Not this time of year, with everyone killing pigs. And I’ve got bags of yarn already. What would I be wanting more for, especially this coarse stuff?”

  “You don’t know good wool when you see it,” Morinen grumbled, watching as Bitar fished a leather purse from somewhere in the region of his crotch and then slowly counted out three beads. They were black with tarnish. Morinen polished them on her apron until she was satisfied that they were real silver.

  “He robbed us—we could have gotten twice that in Red Gate,” she said to Nora as they went outside. “’Course, it would have taken us all day to get there and back.”

  “And it’s snowing now, too,” Nora said, turning her face away from the wind. “You did a fantastic job, Morinen, not just with Bitar but with all those people. Three silver beads is better than I expected. I couldn’t have done it alone—I wouldn’t have known what all those things were worth, let alone how to bargain for them.”

  Morinen smiled, her eyes squeezed tight against the blowing snow. “I used to go to Red Gate with my pa to sell kids and lambs when I was little—now, that’s some hard bargaining. This was easy. And living in the village, you know who needs what and what they’ll give for it.”

  “Well, here, you take the extra bead—you earned it. Take the sausages, too, and the yarn. No, I insist,” Nora said, as Morinen began to demur. “We have plenty of sausages, and if I take the wool back to the castle, Mrs. Toristel will just make me knit it into something.” Nora was thinking, too, that if she returned with sausages or yarn, Mrs. Toristel would want some explanation. Not that the day’s activities would remain secret for long—one of the villagers would be sure to spill the beans—but she wanted time to prepare her story.

  On the way home, she stopped by the cobbler’s hut to order her new boots. He laughed when he saw her. “If I’d known you were so handy at fixing dishes,” he said, “I would have asked you to fix the bowl I threw at my wife the other night.”

  “I’m done for the day,” Nora said.

  Chapter 32

  Snow fell all night, a shadowy curtain blowing restlessly around the house, and continued into the next day. “Is it like this all winter?” Nora asked, staring out the window.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Mrs. Toristel said, with a short, rueful laugh. “After the Null Days is the worst. We never had winters like this in Pelagnia, never, with the snow deep enough to bury a man. Although he goes out in the worst weather.”

  The following day was clearer. Nora was trying to decide whether to chance walking to the cobbler’s in her old boots when Morinen’s brother Posin struggled up the hill with the new ones. Nora thanked him and brought him into the kitchen to warm up, where he filled Mrs. Toristel in on the latest news from the village.

  The new boots fit perfectly—better, in fact, than any shoes that Nora had ever owned in her life. In her own world, she reflected, it would have taken a lot longer than a single day to earn enough money for a pair of custom-made shoes. After Posin’s departure, she hiked up her skirt to show them to Mrs. Toristel. The calfskin boots came up to her knee, high enough even for the snow that covered the ground now, and—pleasing her just as much—they had an interesting clunky, sexy look. She would have liked to wear them with tights and a miniskirt, although she did not mention this to the housekeeper.

  “Cobbler does good work,” Mrs. Toristel allowed. “Mind, you polish them with tallow now, to keep the damp out.”

  Nora went out late that afternoon to feed the animals, fearless of wet and cold. The leather boots gleamed in the lantern light; she enjoyed glimpsing her well-shod feet among the bustle of chickens demanding their dinner. At the kitchen door, she stopped and carefully wiped a crumb of dung off the top of her right boot.

  “—two hours retrieving a fool who tried to make the pass at Witchneedle the night of the first storm.”

  Aruendiel was back, still wearing his traveling cloak, a looming black pillar in the middle of the kitchen. His pale eyes flicked toward Nora and then back to Mrs. Toristel. “And then it was slow going to Red Gate,” he went on, “so I spent last night there.”

  Mrs. Toristel reached for his cloak. “Any news from the inn, sir?”

  “A lot of idiotic talk about the assizes. One of the drunkards presumed to tell me I should have hanged the lot. A sh
ame that I cannot hang a man for stupidity.” Aruendiel glanced in Nora’s direction again, without acknowledging her. “Clousit from the village was there, too, with a most amusing story. I could hardly avoid it, since he shared it with the rest of the taproom. He said that he had encountered our own Mistress Nora in the village, casting spells to mend the peasants’ broken dishes.”

  Mrs. Toristel, catching a sarcastic lilt in Aruendiel’s tone, folded the cloak over her arm and turned to look at Nora. “Yes, she mentioned that.”

  “Did she mention that she went house to house, through the whole village, taking payment for repairing chamber pots and Gingornls’ cocks? She needed the money—so said Clousit—because his lordship refused to give her money for new boots. They had a good laugh over that at the Two Rams—at least, those who were too drunk to know I was in the room.”

  Abruptly he turned to Nora. “Those are your famous new boots?”

  “Yes,” she said, with a sinking feeling.

  “You will take them off, and Mrs. Toristel will have them burned.”

  “No!”

  “Nora, is this all true?” Mrs. Toristel said, her thin face tightening.

  After a moment, Nora nodded.

  “Oh, dear, Nora.” Mrs. Toristel closed her eyes and looked faintly ill.

  Nora tried to stay calm. “Yes, but I mended all kinds of dishes, not just chamber pots and whatsits. And yes, people paid me with cheeses and bacon and various things, and then I bartered them for cash, which I used to buy these boots. I’m sorry I let it slip that you wouldn’t pay for them—”

  “I am not accustomed to hearing my financial matters being discussed in the public room of the Red Gate tavern.”

  “I’m very sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything about that. But otherwise I don’t see what the problem is.”

  “The problem?” Aruendiel smiled unpleasantly. “You have only made a public spectacle of yourself. You took the magic that I taught you and used it to cheat ignorant peasants.”