The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  “I’m sure I’d survive for at least a few hours,” Nora objected, smiling. “But it’s good to be here. Did you want me to make the bread today?”

  In the magician’s study that afternoon, she found a pile of books waiting for her, with almost a dozen spells marked for her to learn. Duminisl on how to conjure smoke without fire; Vlonicl on how to set fire to your enemies’ bowstrings in the pouring rain; Morkin on how to build a fire underwater, among other things. She felt it was unlikely that she might need to burn up a bowstring, no matter what the weather, but Aruendiel was a great admirer of Vlonicl. Very few wizards or magicians, he said, wrote with such absolute concision and confidence, paring spells down to the bare minimum, yet always achieving a result that was more powerful than you would expect. Nora set to work, taking notes on her wax tablet, savoring the peace of the book-lined room. The fire sputtered companionably. The heavy parchment rustled gently under her fingers as she turned the pages. She tried not to think, as she read, of how nearly this small haven had been lost to her.

  She could hear Aruendiel’s footsteps faintly overhead. Once he came down in search of a book. He gave an absent nod when he saw Nora seated at the table.

  She did not speak to him again until the evening. After finishing her last kitchen chores and her dinner, she went to sit by the fire in the great hall to practice the spell that she had not yet been able to cast successfully: Concentrating on the candle that burned on the table, she willed it to extinguish itself. Over and over again, it refused.

  She began to wonder if she would ever be able to do the spell. That made it worse. The flame shone with a dreamy intensity, like a child too absorbed in a game to hear his mother calling.

  Odd noises overhead distracted her attention, too. From time to time, a deep-pitched throbbing came from the tower. Once she thought she heard a groan. She got up to investigate, but she discovered that she could not enter the tower through the wall. Aruendiel had sealed it off, presumably because he was working some sort of complex and risky magic up there. She returned to her own, more elementary spell, keeping her ear cocked, but she heard nothing more.

  Some time later, the door to the courtyard opened unexpectedly, letting in Aruendiel, his boots powdery with snow, and a wave of freezing air. The candle’s flame faltered for the first time that evening.

  “I thought you were up in the tower,” Nora said, confused. “What’s going on up there?” Aruendiel’s leather tunic had been ripped at the shoulder. As he came closer, she saw that the knuckles of his right hand were dappled with fresh blood. With some concern she said: “You look as though you’ve been in a fight.”

  “Only a new project that has proven to be more unpredictable than I expected.” There was also a raw-looking bruise on one cheekbone. Yet he moved more lightly than usual, and looked fresher, less worn than when she had seen him in the afternoon. Candlelight is flattering, she thought, and she also remembered what Hirizjahkinis had told her about how strong magic kept magicians young.

  “What kind of project?”

  “I will tell you about it later. And what is occupying you this evening?”

  She had to confess that she had been practicing the spell to extinguish fire, with no success. Aruendiel frowned. He began to say something, then checked himself. “Show me,” he said.

  She tried again. The flame did not even waver.

  “I can feel the fire,” she said. “And it can feel me. I know it can understand me. But I tell it to die—and it won’t. It just ignores me. And the whole thing gets harder as I go on. I start thinking, Who am I to kill this fire? It wants to live. After a while, I’m not even sure I could blow out the candle in good conscience.”

  Aruendiel shook his head slowly. “You are letting the element control you—which is very dangerous.”

  “I know. But I just can’t bring myself to kill it.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “You don’t need to kill it. You only need to master it. Let us try again.” The candle went out at his silent command, leaving them in near darkness. “Light it.”

  Nora did so, watching his angular features reappear, grave and intent, in the glow of the candle. The new flame flared slightly and then steadied.

  “Now,” he said, “take it lower.” At her asking, the flame diminished slightly. “Lower, lower.” She dimmed the flame again, until it was a bright bead clinging to the candlewick. “Now, you put it to sleep. Push it down. You’re not killing it. Fire does not die, it is eternal.” The flame brightened again momentarily. “No, bring it lower. Good. There is always fire somewhere, hungry for your attention. But when you have no need of it, you must be able to dismiss it, make it sleep, put it away from you, because you are its master, Nora. Do you see what I mean?”

  The tiny bead of light dissolved, filling the air with the smell of burnt wick. “I think so,” she said into the blackness.

  “Good,” he said. “Well then, good night.”

  “Good night,” she said, and listened to the lopsided rhythm of his steps move away across the hall and up the stairs. She did not relight the candle until he was gone.

  Chapter 33

  Aruendiel lived up to his promise to keep Nora busy. There seemed to be an endless number of fire spells to learn. It also became tantalizingly clear that, once you had a real command of fire magic, you could use that understanding to power other spells that had nothing to do with fire: spells to make objects float in air, to make wild animals docile, to breathe underwater, to read unknown languages, to render an army invisible.

  “But you would never use fire for a spell to build a wall, for example,” Aruendiel instructed. “Unless you only needed the wall for a short time, to hold off an enemy for a single day, say. Fire is eager, but it grows bored easily. It does not lend itself to spells in which the effect is intended to be permanent.”

  “But what if you need to build a wall?” Nora asked.

  “You would draw on the stones directly, or you could impose a spell on them with wood. Wood is very strong and it will last a long time, and there is also a kind of intelligence to wood that is useful. It can outfox stone, persuade it to do things that it might not otherwise do. Stone is very stubborn and resists suggestion, although if you can master stone, the spells that you cast with it will last forever. Which is why,” he added severely, “you must never use stone for any spells that might need to be reversed. Most transformations. Some curses. Love spells.”

  “Love spells?”

  “Love spells should always be reversible and preferably temporary. In almost every case, the party who casts the spell, or for whom it was cast, falls out of love first. Then the enchanted party becomes desperate, sometimes vengeful. It can be very ugly,” Aruendiel said reflectively. Nora had a strong suspicion that he was speaking from personal experience. “If you ever cast a love spell, do it with fire, so that the attachment will be fierce and short-lived—but I advise you not to cast any love spells at all.”

  “No fear,” Nora said. “I’ve been on the other end, you know.”

  It was fascinating to hear about all the spells that, theoretically, she would be able to work using fire, but in fact, she could as yet work only a few of them. The most successful was the light-conjuring spell that Aruendiel had employed in the royal library at Semr. Nora stood in the courtyard at dusk, shivering, trying to coax some illumination from the kitchen fire. After several evenings of effort, she achieved a vague, flickering glow that might have allowed her to read the headlines on a newspaper, if any had been handy. Aruendiel could pull light from the village fires or from as far away as Red Gate. From what he said, Nora gleaned, he had a sort of constant, low-grade awareness of the nearest sources of magical power—fire, stone, forest, things that she had not yet learned about. He registered them automatically as he went about his business, the way a driver might note potential parking spots on a crowded city street.

  “You must be more alert, you must be able to sense the presence of useful elements,” he
said. “You do not want to be the sort of magician who must build a fire every time he wants to work a spell.”

  “Or she wants to work a spell.” Campaigning for nonsexist phrasing was a losing battle in Ors, where gender governed even the choice of preposition, but sometimes Nora could not resist. Usually Aruendiel tolerated these corrections with a minimum of sarcasm.

  “I speak of mediocre practitioners only,” he pointed out now. “I have encountered few female magicians, but they have all been good ones. I hope that you will not prove an exception.”

  “Really?” Nora asked with interest. “What other female magicians have you known, besides Hirizjahkinis? Do you mean Ilissa?”

  His expression shifted, like a door yanked shut. “Ilissa is hardly what I would term a magician. I was thinking primarily of Hirizjahkinis.”

  Interesting, though. He had certainly used the plural. Aruendiel’s past life was much on Nora’s mind these days, in part because of the new project with which she was assisting him. Hirgus’s visit had apparently inspired Aruendiel to free the ghosts that he himself had bound into spells at the beginning of his career, when he still called himself a wizard. So far the process had been quieter than she had feared: no more nocturnal explosions or unexplained bruises. Instead he had asked her to search through some of his old books and papers for a few specific spells.

  Here Nora found lists of demons and their attributes, recipes for potions, incantations—the sort of magic that she had never seen him practice. His handwriting was rounder and looser than the spiky hand he wrote now. In his younger days, Aruendiel also seemed to have been considerably less organized. Some spells were scribbled on the back of bills (twenty-two gold beetles for an inlaid dagger sheath, eight beetles six beads for scented gloves); others filled the margins of a manual on cavalry tactics, The Cunning Horseman in Battle.

  She read with curiosity, looking for hints of the life that Aruendiel had led as a young man. Much of the magic had some military function, direct or indirect. There were spells to keep sword blades sharp; to embolden cowards; to redraw an opponent’s maps; or to revive a man who has been cut in half. She lost count of the number of spells for panicking an enemy’s horses. He had scrawled notes alongside many of the spells. Best under a quarter moon. More sulfur. A thicket of calculations, not always accurate. Whoever said this would cure the clap should be fucked backward. There were several such spells for curing venereal diseases—always useful in an army camp, no doubt. She found no love spells, although she noted a disturbing spell for making a woman as drunk on one glass of wine as if she had drunk three.

  “Did you compose all of these spells yourself?” she asked Aruendiel one day, as he came into the library.

  “Some of them,” he said indifferently. “Most I swapped with other wizards, or found in books. How are you progressing? Have you found the spells I asked for?”

  “Two of them so far,” she said, consulting the list on her wax tablet. “The spell for making men grunt like pigs, and the one for making it rain poisonous toads. There are half a dozen spells for wrapping an army in fog—which one did you want?”

  “The one I require starts with roasting the heart and feathers of a black rooster over a fire of dung—gods, the smell!” Aruendiel grimaced. “Is there a black rooster in the flock now?”

  “No, he’s speckled. Glory be to God for dappled things—all things original, counter, spare, strange,” she added in English. Aruendiel fixed her with a questioning eye. “Sorry,” she said, switching back to Ors, “something that just came to mind.”

  “Was that a spell in your language?” he asked with a trace of suspicion.

  “Poetry. There’s a black rooster in the village, in Porlus’s flock.”

  “It’ll be expensive, three weeks before the Null Days,” Aruendiel said, clicking his tongue with annoyance. He went back to his workroom upstairs, hunching slightly as he climbed the spiral staircase.

  Three weeks, two days, Nora thought as she went back to her scroll. The Null Days were looming large in her life. Currently, she and Mrs. Toristel were engaged in a general housecleaning for the holidays, to be followed by a kitchen round of roasting and baking. Mrs. Toristel worked with an unusual air of animation; her daughter and a grandson were coming to visit from Barsy.

  The Null Days, Nora had learned from Mrs. Toristel and an old almanac in Aruendiel’s study, were the five, sometimes six days that were not counted in the official calendar of 360 days. They fell when the nights were at their longest, after the old year had ended, before the new year began. No legal business could be transacted then, no new enterprises undertaken. It was considered unlucky even to light a fire during the Null Days, so the same fire was kept burning continuously throughout the holiday—not that anyone let their fire go out at this time of year anyway—along with special, fat candles designed to burn for days. While the Null Days lasted, Nora gathered, one did as little as possible. No cooking, no cleaning, and only the most necessary chores involving the livestock—all fine with her—but also no reading, writing, or practicing magic. Then came New Year’s Day, when a new fire was kindled and a yearling animal, all black, was killed with a stone blade. Mr. Toristel had set aside a young black ram some months ago for this purpose.

  In other words, the Null Days were a solstice holiday, a lighted pause in midwinter darkness, celebrated with food, fire, conviviality, idleness, this world’s equivalent of Christmas without the religious backstory. Nora was looking forward to it with cautious interest. “So what do people do to pass the time?” Nora asked Mrs. Toristel one morning as they rubbed beeswax into the railing of the gallery in the great hall.

  “Well.” Mrs. Toristel sighed. “Back home in Pelagnia, we always took care to observe the Null Days properly. None of this feasting or merrymaking. We fasted every day, all of us, and some folks would flog themselves at nightfall.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

  “We know what’s owed to the sun lord. You have to show him proper respect. Here, they don’t take it as seriously. All this eating and visiting they do. And the drinking! My father never took a drop during the Null Days until the New Year. Toristel’s gotten as bad as the rest of them. He has his ale the same as ever and a little extra. He says winter’s worse up here, and a man has to do something to keep the chill off.

  “Oh, heavens,” she added, with another sigh. “So much left to do. Nora, can you sweep the hall, or are you going up to see him now?”

  With some reluctance, Nora thrust the broom under the long table and began fishing out a quantity of grit, wood ash, and dog hair. A small object among the sweepings caught her eye. She noticed it only because she had seen something like it in the courtyard recently. A small, whitish object, roughly oval. It had a smooth, organic look, like the chrysalis of a large insect. Experimentally, she stamped on it with her boot. Inside, a bundle of bones, delicate as needles. The remains of a mouse, perhaps.

  Nora looked around thoughtfully, up toward the crossing beams that supported the roof of the hall, then back at the litter of bones on the floor.

  “I’d like to know more about transformations,” she announced to Aruendiel when she arrived in his library that afternoon.

  Craning his neck, Aruendiel stood studying the books lined up across the ceiling, searching for a title. With his head thrown back, his long, dark hair falling away from his face, his lanky form looked more skewed and off-kilter than ever, like a marionette hanging from twisted strings. “Transformations?” he said after a minute. “That’s far too advanced for you. You cannot even work a levitation spell reliably yet.”

  “I’ll have to practice some more today, with that nice light gray feather that you gave me,” Nora said cheerfully. “I wonder where it came from, by the way. We don’t have any chickens that color. But going back to transformations, I’m just interested in the general theory. Why a magician might want to turn himself into—oh—an owl, for instance.

  “Would it be because o
f a curse, or because for some reason he enjoyed being an owl? Could he turn himself into other things, too? What is it like to be an owl? Would he know how to fly? Would he be friendly with real owls? Would he remember being a man? Would he mind eating small animals raw and then throwing up their bones later on? I’m just curious as to how all this might work.”

  Aruendiel turned and looked piercingly at Nora. She cocked an eyebrow at him and waited.

  “Those are excellent questions,” he said finally. His harsh voice was mellowed with amusement. “You have touched on one of the more important concerns for any magician working a transformation—how thorough the change should be. The simple answer is that it depends on the spell. But to answer your particular questions, a magician of any skill whatsoever transforms himself only at his own will, not because of any curse. Yes, he would know that he was really a man, but he would also be an owl for the length of the spell, so yes, he would be able to fly and he would find the owl’s diet and habits, ah, perfectly acceptable.”

  “And why wouldn’t he mention this practice of his to other people?”

  “I doubt he would go to great pains to keep it secret. But he might feel that it was his own business. And he might be aware that some people find such transformations frightening.”

  “Well, disconcerting. All the more reason to give someone fair warning.”

  Aruendiel inclined his head to suggest that she had a point. There was only the suggestion of a smile on his lips, but he had the air of enjoying himself. “And why this sudden interest in owls?”

  “I should have figured it out sooner,” Nora said, with some frustration. “I couldn’t understand how you made it to the village ahead of me that time without leaving tracks in the snow. And I’ve heard owls outside at night I don’t know how often. And the little feather you gave me when I first met you. But I didn’t put it all together until I found an owl pellet inside the house. That’s a little disgusting, you know,” she added severely.